Blake Neff credits Tucker Carlson with launching his career.
Now, however, he says he struggles to understand what his former boss appears to have become.
“What I think has driven a lot of what Tucker has done in the last year or so is he’s indulged negative traits within him more and more,” Neff, a co-host of The Charlie Kirk Show and former lead writer for Carlson, told Jeremy Boreing.
Excerpts from Boreing’s interview with Neff were shared exclusively with the Daily Mail. The full conversation will air on The Jeremy Boreing Show today at 3pm central/4pm eastern time.
Neff has known Carlson for years. At 26, he was working as a reporter for Carlson’s website, The Daily Caller, when Carlson launched his primetime Fox News program, Tucker Carlson Tonight.
In 2016, Carlson recruited Neff from the newsroom to help write his Fox News monologues, which helped define the show’s tone and influenced the broader conservative movement at the time. Neff resigned from Fox News in 2022 after several apparently racist blog posts surfaced. He has said the posts were jokes that critics took out of context.
Neff later joined The Charlie Kirk Show as a writer and producer. Only a few years afterward, he was standing about 20 feet from Kirk when the conservative activist was killed by an assassin on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
That history gives Neff a distinctive perspective on a turbulent period in conservative media, as former allies clash over the Trump administration, the war in Iran and the circumstances surrounding Kirk’s death.
“What I think has driven a lot of what Tucker has done in the last year or so is he’s indulged negative traits within him more and more,” said Neff, co-host of The Charlie Kirk Show
Podcasters including Candace Owens and Carlson’s younger brother, Buckley, have promoted various conspiracy theories about Kirk’s killing.
In March, Buckley Carlson retweeted a message claiming that Kirk’s killing was a “black magic ritual.”
Neff told Boreing that the last time he communicated with Carlson, he asked him to urge his brother to stop spreading conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death.
Neff said Carlson, who frequently discusses his close personal and professional relationship with Kirk, refused to intervene.
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“The last communication I had with Tucker was: Tucker, just privately, can you ask your brother to just stop pushing this Candace stuff? And he wouldn’t… He refused to ask,” Neff said.
“I don’t think Tucker in 2018 would have had that response to someone he has a close relationship with spreading incredibly hateful lies about innocent people,” he added.
The Daily Mail contacted representatives for Carlson for comment.
Neff also alleged that Carlson now appears willing to accept almost any damaging claim about people he regards as opponents without questioning it.
“He’ll believe anything negative,” Neff said. “Israel did this war that I powerfully hate, so why wouldn’t they have murdered Charlie? Why wouldn’t they have murdered President Kennedy, which he’s also suggested is something they did. And then that transitions into, let’s be frank, carrying water for people who are pushing the most hateful and deranged conspiracy theory. I would say it’s at least on par with people who say Sandy Hook was faked.”
“I don’t think Tucker in 2018 would have had that response to someone he has a close relationship with spreading incredibly hateful lies about innocent people,” Neff said
Neff stood just 20 feet from his boss when the conservative activist was killed by an assassin on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah
Indeed, Neff seems to be pained to criticize a man for whom he once worked.
‘I owe my entire career to the fact that Tucker plucked me out [of the Daily Caller] and said, would you like to be the writer for my show at Fox? The bottom level of hell in Dante’s Inferno is for people who have betrayed masters. Tucker was a benefactor to me, but Charlie was a benefactor to me too.’
As to why Carlson has made this alarming transformation, Neff – who has not worked with Carlson for six years – has a theory:
‘He has some grievances that he has fixed upon. He has always been passionately against [America] going to war with Iran. He was paranoid that we would go to war with Iran way back when I was at the Daily Caller.
‘I think the fact that it finally happened was just profoundly upsetting to him. Also, I think he’s spoken about it himself, that he felt a little powerless to stop it. And this has made him so angry.
‘Tucker’s so fixated on his personal beef with Israel that he’s going to enable people who are going to lie about [Turning Point USA], lie about the good people at it and try to rip it to smithereens.
‘He’s let this real grievance of his take over everything. It’s consumed everything. He just refuses to see the huge damage that he’s doing to individual people as a result of this,’ Neff concluded.