How low will he go?
Tucker Carlson: "Bill Ackman is Dumb, Bari Weiss is an Idiot" | WATCH
Slamming allies like Ackman (a Trump donor) and Weiss (a vocal Israel defender) risks alienating the pro-Israel, finance-heavy wing of conservatism. It also revives debates about Carlson's post-Fox "evolution" (if you can call it that).
On the latest episode of This Past Weekend (dropped yesterday and already north of 4 million views across platforms), Tucker Carslon went full scorched-earth on billionaire hedge-fund titan Bill Ackman and freshly minted CBS News empress Bari Weiss.
His verdict on Ackman, the man who turned $27,000 into roughly $8 billion and helped bring down the president of Harvard with a single X campaign:
“Bill Ackman is worth eight billion dollars… but I actually know Bill Ackman. He is kinda dumb. Like, actually. He has never created anything in his entire life. He’s totally non-creative. The fact that he’s rich is almost a humiliation exercise, like ‘look, we can make anyone rich.’”
Theo, mouth full of dip, can only wheeze-laugh and mutter “Jesus, dude.”
Then Tucker pivoted to Weiss, the former New York Times provocateur who built The Free Press into a juggernaut and was just handed the keys to one of the big-three legacy newsrooms:
“It’s not just that I disagree with Bari Weiss - that’s fine. In no meritocracy, in no fair system, does Bari Weiss ever rise above secretary. I’m not kidding - secretary. I’ve been in this business since Bari Weiss was literally breastfeeding. There is no world in which she runs a news division except a completely rigged one.”
He paused, leaned into the mic, and added the kicker:
“She’s an idiot. And they put her in charge to prove the system is fake.”
The studio went dead quiet for half a second, the kind of silence that happens right before a bar fight starts, and then Theo howled so hard he almost fell off his stool.
Within hours the clip was everywhere. Ackman’s name started trending above Taylor Swift. Bari Weiss’s mentions turned into a war zone. And the phrase “since Bari Weiss was breastfeeding” became the most savage ratio of 2025 before breakfast.
The backlash was immediate and bipartisan in its fury.
Progressive outlets dusted off the usual “Tucker’s gone mask-off antisemitic” headlines. Pro-Israel accounts pointed out the obvious: the only two people Tucker chose to personally eviscerate as “uncreative,” “dumb,” and products of a “rigged system” just happen to be two of the most prominent Jewish Zionists in public life. Jewish X was not amused. One viral post from @StopAntisemites simply read: “Replace the names with ‘Goldman’ and ‘Steinberg’ and tell me this wouldn’t get you banned in 2018.”
Meanwhile, the irony police worked overtime. Carlson, stepson of a Swanson frozen-food heiress (the TV-dinner fortune), son of the former director of Voice of America, Trinity College lacrosse bro turned cable-news prince, is out here lecturing a self-made billionaire and a woman who built a media empire from scratch about “meritocracy.” The replies wrote themselves.
Ackman, as of Thursday morning, has stayed radio-silent on X, unusual for a man who once live-tweets his breakfast. Weiss posted a single emoji (a popcorn box) and nothing else, which is the internet equivalent of strapping on brass knuckles.
Behind the venom, though, there’s a bigger fracture on display. This isn’t just gossip; it’s the sound of the post-2016 conservative coalition cracking in real time. Tucker has spent two years repositioning himself as the anti-elite populist samurai, the guy who’ll say what the country-club Republicans won’t. Ackman and Weiss, for all their outsider branding, are still very much creatures of the coastal meritocratic machine Tucker now claims to despise. When your revolution starts eating its own billionaires and editors-in-chief, you’re either purifying the movement or lighting the whole thing on fire.
Either way, it’s the best television nobody on television is allowed to broadcast.
So pop the corn, kids. The civil war on the right just went from sub-tweet to flamethrower to orbital strike, and Tucker Carlson is holding the phone.