Not long ago, at Charlie Kirk's memorial service, I sat listening as speaker after speaker talked openly about faith.
Not performative faith. Not “spirituality.” Not vague moral language carefully engineered to avoid offending modern sensibilities.
Christian faith. Real faith.
The kind that acknowledges man’s depravity, Christ’s sufficiency, and the utter miracle that grace exists at all.
And among those voices was Tucker Carlson.
That’s part of what makes the current version of Tucker Carlson so profoundly disorienting. Because where did that guy go?
This isn’t about disagreement. Lord knows conservatives disagree all the time. I’ve disagreed publicly and privately with friends I deeply respect for decades. That’s healthy. It sharpens people.
This is something different.
Carlson has increasingly drifted from provocative commentary into something far darker and far less tethered to reality. He now openly traffics in distortions about Christianity, treats competing religious systems as morally equivalent while strangely parroting apologetics for strands of Islam fundamentally at odds with the Christian worldview he once confessed, and routinely condemns Israel in ways that edge dangerously close to repudiating the Biblical understanding of God’s covenantal relationship with the Jewish people.
And yes, I understand that criticizing the Israeli government is not anti-Semitism.
Of course it isn’t.
But platforming open anti-Semites, giving them soft interviews, allowing absurd claims to pass virtually unchallenged, and then pretending this is merely “asking questions” is intellectually dishonest.
Worse, it’s reckless. Especially from someone smart enough to know exactly what he’s doing.
Then came the insanity of labeling President Trump “the anti-Christ.”
Not misguided. Not flawed. Not politically dangerous. The anti-Christ.
Words matter. Especially from people with audiences large enough to shape millions of minds.
And Tucker knows that better than almost anyone alive in media today. Which makes his current posture all the more baffling.
Because this is not the Tucker Carlson many of us knew professionally for years.
My interactions with him were always limited, but consistently pleasant. At Fox News events, CPAC gatherings, backstage conversations over the years—he was polite, thoughtful, engaging, often surprisingly funny in person. Long before his Fox prime-time dominance, I remembered his early CNN debate show as essentially an earlier version of what cable political television would later become in the Hannity & Colmes era.
He understood media. He understood argument. He understood persuasion.
And he absolutely understood facts.
Which is why watching him now deny things he has literally said on video—while the footage is played back for him—is surreal.
Not exaggerated. Surreal.
Reality itself seems disturbingly negotiable to him now.
And here’s the truly uncomfortable part.
I have dozens of mutual friends and acquaintances who know both Tucker and me. To a person—literally every single one except one—they say some variation of the same thing privately: “That’s not the Tucker I knew.”
More than one has gone even further, wondering aloud whether something deeper is wrong emotionally or psychologically. I’m not qualified to diagnose anybody, nor would I try. But I would be lying if I said the change hasn’t alarmed people who once admired him deeply.
And strangely, Megyn Kelly now seems caught somewhere in the same gravitational pull.
Which pains me to say because I genuinely admired Megyn’s rise more than most people realize.
She earned every inch of her success.
She went from anchoring daytime at Fox News to dominating prime time, often outperforming even Bill O’Reilly himself. Her NBC move never made sense culturally because NBC never truly understood what made Megyn compelling in the first place: she was fearless about speaking uncomfortable truths regardless of whose political tribe disliked hearing them.
That authenticity was refreshing. Still is, in many ways.
I enjoy her takes on culture, relationships, the absurdity of modern politics, even the occasional sailor-mouth tirade when she feels strongly about something.
Which is exactly why her defense of Tucker has become so cognitively dissonant.
These two know better. They know experts who know better. They know the facts. They have access to intelligent, decent, informed people of genuine integrity who understand these issues deeply.
And yet they continue saying things so clownishly indefensible that you honestly start wondering what flipped the switch.
Money from foreign interests? A cult? Ego? Audience capture? Midlife collapse? Early-onset cognitive damage? Who knows.
At some point, speculation becomes pointless.
What matters is observable reality. And the observable reality is this: Both Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have hemorrhaged credibility among many of the very people who once defended them most passionately.
Not because conservatives suddenly became fragile. Because truth still matters. Reality still matters. Consistency still matters.
And if you spend years building trust with an audience only to later begin treating facts like optional props in service of increasingly bizarre narratives, eventually people notice. They should notice.
Now, let me be careful here.
Their sins are no more damning before God than mine. Or yours.
Human beings are broken. Pride deceives all of us. Every single one of us needs Christ’s mercy constantly. Tucker needs Jesus no less than I do. Megyn needs grace no less than any person reading this column.
They deserve prayer. Sincere prayer. Not performative condemnation.
But they also need something else right now: They need to be disowned intellectually and morally by people who know better.
Not hated. Not demonized. Disowned.
For the sake of what’s good, true, and healthy.
Because when influential people begin normalizing deception, excusing anti-Semitism, distorting Christianity, and untethering themselves from reality itself, silence becomes its own form of surrender.
And no one is sadder to say any of this than those of us who admired them for years longer than they probably realize.
That’s what makes this painful.
Not anger.
Grief.