Speaking of crazy people, this clip below got my attention today because it's probably one of the wildest things I've seen a public figure say in recent years. Tucker Carlson has apparently long believed that the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan was the turning point in human history.
That in itself seems somewhat defensible. I mean, it did end World War II which is still the deadliest conflict in world history. It was a world changing event which ushered in the era of mutually assured destruction that gave us the Cold War and eventually the collapse of the USSR and more. It was inarguably a big deal.
But Carlson's take goes way, way beyond that. He's not saying it mattered because it changed warfare. He's saying it mattered because mankind crossed some kind of spiritual Rubicon, after which point they thought themselves to be gods. And, in his view, it was all downhill from there.
But even that's not the end of it. It's not just that he thinks the bomb was a rejection of god. He apparently believes the bomb itself wasn't created by man. Like the fruit in the Garden of Eden, it was taken but not made by human hands.
Tucker Carlson does not believe human beings built the atomic bomb.
— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) August 18, 2026
Asked if he saw Oppenheimer: "I wouldn't watch that crap. I wouldn't let that into my head for one second."
"Because it's all lies."
He then explains that he knows he sounds insane, and that this proves he's… pic.twitter.com/bH8Zan21F7
Here's a transcript:
Carlson: I think nuclear weapons, which I don't think were created by people. Sorry. I don't care how many movies they make about it. I don't believe that.
Rev. Billy Cerveny: You didn't see Oppenheimer?
Carlson: Yeah. Okay. I wouldn't watch that crap. I wouldn't let that into my head for one second. But anyway, because it's all lies. But anyway, sorry now I'm getting really crazy, but it's all true. What I'm saying is true. I think once man possessed the power or believed he possessed the power to destroy everything that's alive. I think that he rejected God. Like that is kind of like reject that's rejection of God. And like everything changed after that. People became convinced they were gods and that's when the true craziness started. It's not the ' 60s, the 60s or the, you know, Obama years or whatever you want era. It's like post-nuclear weapons.
This seems pretty lame to me. The Bible obviously does have a strong injunction about not committing murder. But people have been murdering one another for thousands of years and people have been shooting and bombing other people for hundreds of years. The atomic bomb is certainly a big escalation but if you want to be accurate, we really did not have the power to wipe out all life in 1945 when we dropped the bombs. After dropping the Nagasaki bomb the US was still working on a third bomb and maybe had one more by the end of the year. It took years and the development of the hydrogen bomb (first tested in 1952) to build up the stockpile which could in theory blow up the world.
Also, while the two atomic bombs the US dropped probably killed around 200,000 people or a bit more, which is a huge number obviously, that was still only a tiny fraction of the total number of people killed in World War II. That figure is estimated to be 70 to 80 million worldwide, with about a third of those direct combatants and the rest civilians. So the idea that the bomb was somehow the worst or most significant bombing during the war doesn't really add up. The overwhelming majority of people died from more conventional weapons (plus starvation, the Holocaust, etc.)
Carlson has apparently been pushing this theory for a while now.
Tucker Carlson not only believes that demons, rather than humans, invented nuclear weapons, but also that people within the U.S. government are still in cahoots with those demons.
— Nathan Livingstone (MilkBarTV) (@TheMilkBarTV) August 18, 2026
In particular, he has pushed the idea that Trump is working on behalf of those demons and that… https://t.co/S0YvQsEvEd pic.twitter.com/13zXkKaKLd
Anyway, it's really nutty to me to deny that people made the bomb. Oppenheimer is just a historical film but the evidence that we really did do this is overwhelming and the details of how and why we did it are, at this point, widely available to anyone who wants to know them.
Steven Crowder had a pretty good clip reacting to this where he walks through some of the history and points out that this is really a dumb idea both practically and theologically. I'm not sure what happened to Tucker Carlson but he really has gone off the rails on the crazy train.
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