During an interview published Saturday, Tucker Carlson told the New York Times he believes the most important issue impacting young Americans in the long term is access to economic opportunity.
In response to the NYT’s question about how he thinks controversial 27-year-old podcaster Nick Fuentes fits into the future of the American right, Carlson responded it is “so hard to know” adding that most “of the debates about race, ethnicity, religion, to some extent immigration, are less resonant long-term than debates about economics.”
“I think the main frustration among young people is not just that the composition of the country is changing too fast, which it definitely is,” the Daily Caller News Foundation co-founder said. “But the main concerns are about the lack of economic opportunity for American young people, who are totally screwed at a more profound level than people acknowledge. Older people do not acknowledge that.” (RELATED: Generation May Influence Americans’ Politics More Than Race Or Sex, Poll Finds)
Carlson also told the NYT’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro that he had recently had dinner with “a bunch of really smart kids from Stanford.”
“And one of them said that his best friend just graduated with a degree in computer science last year and has not been able to find a job,” he recounted. “So that’s a window into the total destruction of the economic opportunity for young people, and what looks to me as a non-economist like the true hoarding of capital by a tiny group of people.”
Carlson said this makes for “a very lopsided and unfair economic system guaranteed to radicalize young people — and not just young people, but especially young people.”
“And so I think most future conversations politically will be about economics,” he emphasized.
“[T]he future that I imagine is not a future in which we’re yelling at each other about race. It’s a future in which people are legitimately revolutionary, maybe even violent, on the basis of thwarted economic opportunity,” Carlson said later in the interview.
Garcia-Navarro pressed Carlson on if he sees “Fuentes’ power waning.”
“For sure,” he replied, adding that he was not “even aware” of the podcaster, citing his age.
Far-right political figure Nick Fuentes rallies outside Turning Point USA’s The People’s Convention on June 15, 2024 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Dominic Gwinn/Getty Images)
“I’m older, OK? So I’m not an expert on Fuentes’s reach or even what he’s saying day to day. I really don’t know. But he has been caricatured as a race guy, which he may be, by the way,” Carlson told Garcia-Navarro.
Fuentes has made several comments in the past widely deemed to be racist, misogynistic and antisemitic — including calling the Holocaust “exaggerated” in a 2023 livestream. Despite this, he maintains a strong following particularly among Generation Z men. Fuentes did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
“I’m just telling you I think the future, the energy, not just on the right, but I think right and left agree on this, under 30, is that young people have been shafted by older people, particularly by the baby boomers, people born between ’46 and ’64,” said Carlson, who was born in 1969 and part of Generation X.
“And I think they’re right about that. I do think that’s the most selfish generation, most loathsome, mediocre generation this country ever produced,” he added in the NYT interview, referring to Baby Boomers. “Not all of them, but in general, I would say. Their behavior has been shameful and selfish.” (RELATED: Over Three-Quarters Of Voters Say They’re Worse Off Than The Previous Generation, Poll Shows)
“And I hear young people talk not about ‘I’m mad at the Jews,’” Carlson explained. “I hear people say things like ‘Only baby boomers would have a second home in Isle of Palms, S.C., but not help their kids buy homes.’ That’s what I hear. I hear people who understand that their lives will bear no resemblance to the lives of their parents and grandparents and they’re really upset about it.”
He also singled out people “making billions on clearly fraudulent enterprises,” including some related to cryptocurrency, “that are not adding to the sum total of prosperity in this country and not making the country better.”
“So that’s where I think the radicalism is going to start,” he said.
He also alluded to the cult of personality Luigi Mangione — the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 — has developed among many young Americans.
Supporters of Luigi Mangione gather outside of Manhattan Federal Court on January 09, 2026 in New York City. Lawyers for Mangione attorneys are in court for the 27-year-old accused killer to try to avoid the death penalty in the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s top executive in 2024. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“I was surprised but not really shocked by the positive reaction. All these normal-looking people on the internet are like, ‘I am glad they killed him [Thompson],’” Carlson told Garcia-Navarro. “They don’t even know his name. That reflects this revolutionary frustration. And I do think it’s revolutionary.”
When pressed again about Fuentes by the NYT host, Carlson reiterated, “I think the real issues are not about Fuentes or even about race.”
“Immigration has a direct effect on economics, and so the overwhelming majority of newly created jobs in the past five years have gone to the foreign-born,” he explained. “That’s not an attack on the foreign-born, to say that’s not really the job of the U.S. government to provide economic opportunity to the world. The job is to protect its own people.”
Carlson notably interviewed Fuentes on a more than two-hour-long episode of his podcast in October 2025.
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