Tucker Carlson Is a Pendulum

On the ancient Russian science of attention, the architecture of hate, and why the most powerful thing we can do right now is look away

There’s a child in every kindergarten class who pulls hair, not because he’s cruel. Not because he’s broken. Because he’s hungry, hungry for the thing that makes him feel real: your reaction. Your gasp. You're turning around. The moment you look at him, even in anger, especially in anger, he has won. He exists. He matters. The hair-pulling was never about the hair. I think about that child every time I see another thread dissecting Tucker Carlson’s latest monologue. Every time a Jewish organization issues an emergency statement about Candace Owens. Every time someone I respect spends three thousand words explaining, with citations, why Nick Fuentes is wrong.

We are the kindergarten class. And we keep turning around.

There’s a Russian book that explains exactly what’s happening.

Reality Transurfing by Vadim Zeland became one of the biggest spiritual bestsellers in the Russian-speaking world, a book so widely read in certain circles that it quietly became a reference point for how reality itself operates. Zeland, a former quantum physicist, introduced a concept so simple and so devastating that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. He called it the pendulum.

A pendulum, in Zeland’s framework, is not a person. It’s not even an ideology. It’s an energy structure, one that comes into existence when enough people focus their attention in the same direction. It doesn’t matter whether they agree or disagree with it. It doesn’t care about your opinion. It feeds on one thing only: engagement. The more people swing toward it, in rage, in refutation, in righteous outrage, the stronger it becomes. The more it swings. The more it pulls.

Tucker Carlson is a pendulum. Candace Owens is a pendulum. Nick Fuentes is a pendulum. They are not thinkers whose ideas demand our engagement. They are structures that require our energy to survive. And we have been extraordinarily generous donors.

Photo credit: Jewish Journal

Every article we write about Tucker’s latest antisemitic dog-whistle is a push. Every podcast episode dedicated to dismantling Candace’s latest provocation is a push. Every quote-tweet, every emergency press release, every panel discussion, push, push, push. And the pendulum swings wider.

Here is the thing about pendulums that Zeland understood and that we keep forgetting: the pendulum does not distinguish between love and hate. It does not distinguish between a follower and an enemy. It registers only amplitude, how far you swung, how hard you pushed, how much of yourself you gave to keep it moving. Our outrage and their applause are the same fuel.

This is not a metaphor. Watch what happens in real time: Tucker interview Nick Fuentes. We spend seventy-two hours producing content about Tucker interviewing Fuentes. That content reaches millions of people who had never heard of the interview. The pendulum thanks us. It always does.

The interview itself, Tucker sitting with Fuentes for two hours of friendly conversation about “these Zionist Jews,” racked up 5.1 million views on YouTube and 17.3 million views on X. Those are the numbers from the original post alone. Then the pendulum found its real fuel. The interview was seen over 20 million times across platforms, and that’s before you count what we gave it. Ben Shapiro condemned it. The Daily Wire condemned it. PBS ran a segment. Slate ran a piece. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote three separate articles. The Heritage Foundation weighed in and then had to apologize. Piers Morgan decided he needed to interview Fuentes too, to “hold him to account”, generating millions more views for a man who, left alone in his corner of the internet, reaches a fraction of that audience.

Every condemnation was a push. Every refutation was fuel. Every emergency press release was a hand on the pendulum. By the time the outrage cycle was over, Nick Fuentes, a man who streams to his faithful on Gab and Telegram, had been introduced to tens of millions of people who had never searched his name. We did that. Not Tucker. Us.

Photo Credit:thejewishindependent

Now consider a different case, one in which the pendulum was largely ignored. Guy Christensen, known to his millions of TikTok followers as “Your Favorite Guy,” built one of the most influential anti-Israel platforms online. At his peak, he had 3.3 million followers. Jewish organizations wrote about him. Some responded. Most didn’t. There was no Tucker-style outrage cycle, no wall-to-wall coverage, no emergency statements from every major Jewish institution demanding a response.

And then TikTok changed its moderation policies. His account still exists. He still posts. But the algorithm stopped amplifying his content, and we, largely, stopped responding to it. No emergency statements. No viral threads dismantling his latest video. No Jewish organizations issued urgent alerts every time he uploaded. The outrage machine went quiet.

Without TikTok’s algorithm pushing his content into the feeds of millions of young Americans who hadn’t asked for it, and without our reactions giving it a second life, the pendulum slowed. He still had his followers, but followers alone don’t make a pendulum swing. A pendulum needs friction. It needs an opposing force. It needs us.

So he did what pendulums do when they lose their energy source: he went looking for a new one. He pointed his audience to UpScrolled, an app founded by a Palestinian tech entrepreneur, built as a refuge for voices claiming mainstream platforms were silencing them.

Today, he has 321,000 followers. Not because he was silenced. Not because he was defeated in a debate. Because the pendulum lost most of its energy source. He still posts. He still calls Israel a torture camp. He still performs his outrage for whoever is left. But he went from shaping the political consciousness of millions of young Americans to speaking into a room that keeps getting smaller. Nobody handed him that decline. We just stopped handing him the opposite.

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I don’t follow any of our haters on social media, and I never watch their full content, but I am very well aware of everything that they are saying, thanks to the pendulum. What I pray for is that somehow the idea of the pendulum will find its way to big voices like Noa Tishby, Ben Shapiro, Lizzy Savetsky, Hen Mazzig, Rudy Rochman, and Shai Albrecht. I hope they read it. Not because I have anything to teach them. But because they have what I don’t have: reach. And this idea needs to reach more than it needs another article, and we must stop feeding the pendulum.

To everyone else reading this, please be the voice that moves our community. Please share it. Forward, Tag. Engage. Do whatever you do. Because if even one big voice picks this up and says stop pushing the pendulum to their millions of followers, something might actually shift. And if you’re reading this with ten followers or ten thousand, you matter. You are, too, holding the pendulum in your hands right now.

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If I've convinced you about the physics of pendulums, and you're ready to trade your Tucker Carlson habit for something considerably more friendly and cute, may I suggest subscribing to my Substack, Behind the Narrative, considerably better for your blood pressure than whatever Candace just posted. And if you're feeling truly radical, pick up one of my books: The Palestinian Myth, The Enemy Within, or Six Million and a Day, all on Amazon. Trade the pendulum. You won't regret it.

Much Love

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