There’s another fairly long look at what makes Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson, this one from The Washington Post, and it’s well done if you’re into that sort of thing. That said, I can’t help but believe all these efforts to explore whether Tucker—who has been a rancid, insufferable twit for decades now—is really a white nationalist scumbag or is just faking it for the sweet, sweet television fame. Maybe they’re trying to find a depth to the Tucker schtick that isn’t really there.

In the new piece, we learn that a young first-grade Tucker himself says he began his archconservative path when he needed tutoring help to learn phonics, an early setback that he blames on a woman. Specifically, his then-teacher, who he now paints as a crazy hippie sort (the teacher, interviewed by the Post, is gracious as she suggests that she has no idea what the hell her once-charge is going on about). Various biographical hints suggest that little Tucker’s contempt for his womanfolk teacher might have more to do with being abandoned by his mother at around the same time, which might be interesting if Tucker was the sort of person worth such psychoanalysis.

Oh, and we also learn he once toured a memorial to the African slave trade with Black leaders and came away with a seriously inflamed case of rich white asshole grievance, which isn’t remotely surprising and is, in fact, an encapsulation of the professional angryboy’s entire life’s work.

The problem with all these attempts to psychoanalyze Tucker Carlson and determine what makes him tick is that there is no mystery to be solved. Tucker Carlson is quite possibly one of the most boring people alive. He doesn’t do anything that isn’t borrowed directly from past pundit gadflies. He offers no rhetorical schtick or intellectual pseudoheft that is not a dull pantomime of his ideology’s past malcontents. I can tell you the entirety of Tucker’s intellectual journey from all the way over here, and it’s an embarrassingly short trip.

While I was growing up in various working-class neighborhoods of San Diego, places close to the U.S.-Mexican border and in schools where Spanish was spoken by a good chunk of each student body, the Tucker Carlson presented by the Post was growing up as a young boy in nearby La Jolla, in one of the wealthiest and most exclusive towns on the North American continent, an intensely and aggressively racist enclave in which rich white folks owned well-maintained seaside homes with impeccable landscaping and everybody else was The Help. It was the sort of place where driving a too-old car would result in the town police following you for blocks, and where if your gardener died while gardening you were legally allowed to order the next hire to mulch the body in order to plant new daffodils.

T’was in this environment that wee Tucker grew up immensely self-regarding and pompous, as was the style of the time, and based his entire personality around the notion that he and his neighborkin were the deserving ones while whatever problems he faced were because The Help, in the form of an ostensibly too-liberal (in f–king LA JOLLA??) first-grade teacher or the like, were dummies who were failing him.

By the time he was a teen he was convinced that he was an intellectual giant. He learned how to hide his resentment for nonwhite Americans in only the most rote of La Jolla fashions, which primarily means wearing a suit while complaining about how lazy, tricky, money-grubbing or benefits-seeking each group is. Sheltered from even the slightest of travails while still harboring a huge helping of resentment against his now-absent birth mother that had by now blossomed into hostility toward women in general, his family wealth allowed him to become more and more arrogant until it developed into what you see before you today: A man whose personality is based on the presumption that he is smarter than you, he sees farther than you, and that all the folks who go against the sort of egregiously entitled libertarian fuck-the-rest-of-you conservatism that defined his breezy rich kid upbringing are all stupid and/or communists and/or plotting to steal his fruit snacks.

There you go. Mystery solved. You’re welcome. Tucker Carlson as pundit isn’t nearly interesting enough to deserve even half of these probes of his character. His career path was rote. His argumentative style is tedious to the point of near-parody. He got booted off television a good while back for being the sort of dime-a-dozen partisan grievance mime that upper class conservative youth groups produce in cookie-cutter fashion, upon which became so frustrated with his new lack of relevance that he reinvented himself to be (drum roll, please) more explicitly racist than the first time around and, lo and behold, found that the Fox News base absolutely loved that sort of bullshit. So he’s been doing it, and tweaking it according to what works and what doesn’t, ever since.

But none of it is original. Tucker shares a career trajectory with quite a few other youthful white conservative males of the same era, seemingly half of them in bowties because ironic. He follows the agonizingly narrow routine of finding something that some not-white-male or ally to a not-white-male has done on any particular day, furrowing his brows really tightly, and solemnly declaring that all of society is on the verge of collapse because of the audacity of Those Jerks.

It ain’t new. It ain’t different. It ain’t interesting. From Tom Cotton to Ben Shapiro to the latest Spamguy von Gimmecash, this grievance encompasses all of modern conservatism. It’s the only play.

But is Tucker Carlson, personally, a white nationalist? Yes! Yes he is! Why are you even arguing about this? It doesn’t matter what he says in interviews or what Fox News burps out in defensive statements: Tucker regularly and relentlessly promotes white nationalist leaders to parrot white nationalist concepts while “just asking questions” about white nationalist paranoias while white nationalist framing scrolls by in bit letters underneath his paralyzed eyebrows, and even when his false or crooked claims result in violence he only doubles down afterward. Is there still allegedly some question about this? Why?

Our little grown-up manchild is the single-most prominent white nationalist in the nation, and whether he says he is or he isn’t don’t enter into the picture, so stop asking. Maybe he always has been amenable to white nationalist rhetoric. Maybe he hasn’t. Don’t care, and it doesn’t matter.

A far more interesting probe that hasn’t been done yet might be a probe of the Fox News executives and board members that continue to protect Tucker Carlson, the most prominent political advocate of violence-provoking white nationalist groups, even as ol’ Tucker argues that a group breaking into the U.S. Capitol to “hang Mike Pence” doesn’t count as an insurrection and that the gubbermint is spying on his conversations with Russians in an attempt to destroy him. Who are the executives backing Tucker as he crawls down into Glenn Beck’s cleared-out basement? Are those executives white nationalists? Are their entire personalities based on early school trouble that morphed into a weird persecution complexes? Give us something on the psyche of people that look at the violence that this one sniffling ball of two-bit grievances is helping to stoke but who say eh, it sure brings in the cash.

At some point the appeal of trying to make the Fox News nationalist into something more than the one-dimensional pundit-o-matic than he is begins to wane, and that point passed us maybe a year ago or so. Why are his frequent press contacts so absorbed in discovering a hidden secret inside a man who, at best, is a factory-produced conservapundit of the sort the movement is swimming in? Are we supposed to all gawk in puzzlement along with the reporters who have talked to good ol’ Tucker in private and find it odd that his private and public personas are each performative fakeries designed to ingratiate himself to the press and the public? Is there some political figure that doesn’t engage in that sort of self-promotion?

Somebody go interview the Fox News board members and get their stance on the escalating rhetoric of the insurrection apologist who is just asking questions about whether America is intentionally oppressing its white folks in order to elevate immigrants and schoolteachers whose trend-averse clothing habits have forever traumatized wealthy La Jolla children. That’s something I want to hear about. We’re full up on explorations of whether Tucker is just pretending to be a sociopathic monster or really means it; give us an analysis of whether the multimillionaire rat bastards who keep him on the air are just in it for the cash or if they’re full-throated ideologic backers of Tucker’s attempts to wed “proper” conservatism to the white nationalist militia movement and wash his hands of what happens next.