🥇 What Possessed Tucker Carlson?

A week into my visit to Portugal, I’ve been walking daily along winding cobblestone streets where history feels colorful, layered, and full of secrets, yet heavy. Strolling through Lisbon makes me think of life in those alleys, of the Inquisition that forced Jews to burn their own books, bury their identities, and perform a survivalist theater of devotion. And I can’t stop thinking that despite our iPhones and space travel, humanity hasn’t changed. We are still drowning in the darkness of hatred, and we are still very easy to manipulate.

Those beautiful alleys were home to Baruch Spinoza. A 17th-century philosopher born in Amsterdam to Jewish parents who had fled Portugal to escape religious persecution, Spinoza grew up in the shadow of people living double lives, which made him the ultimate cynic. He looked at the grand, sweeping narratives of the Bible and didn’t see divine prophets or revelations; he saw a brilliant, calculated psychological thriller.

To Spinoza, prophets weren't holy men receiving cosmic faxes from heaven. They were men with hyperactive imaginations who instinctively knew how to weaponize fear and hope. Moses was his favorite case study: not a mystic but a political mastermind who inherited a mob of ex-slaves too traumatized and too fractured to govern themselves. So, to lead them, he turned civil law into a divine commandment. Moses didn't discover religion; he manufactured it, understanding that nothing enforces obedience as much as the fear of an invisible and furious force, nothing more than a successful marketing campaign for power and control.

In this article, I’m going to show you how two men, fourteen centuries apart, implemented the same marketing strategy. Each claimed to survive an encounter with a spiritual creature, in their own words, a demon. One used that encounter to advance a political force that would eventually claim the allegiance of a quarter of the planet. The other is building his political force as we speak. Their stories line up with a precision that should make you deeply uncomfortable.

This piece won't hand you a tidy conclusion. If anything, it's designed to leave you with more questions than you walked in with and fewer places to hide from them. What it will do is drag two extraordinary stories into the same room, side by side, and let you watch them recognize each other and see how the ancient theater of fear and the modern arena of political survival are running the exact same script.

Let us step into the dark, to the very place where these two men confronted their demons. These are the stories of Prophet Muhammad and Tucker Carlson — and by the end, you may struggle to tell them apart.

The Cave, the Choke, and the Djinn

To understand how an encounter with a spiritual power becomes a political empire, we have to go back to 610 CE, when a forty-year-old merchant named Muhammad retreated to Cave Hira. He was deeply frustrated by his social standing, mocked and dismissed by the wealthy, pagan elites of Mecca — the ruling Quraysh tribe. They laughed at his spiritual pretensions, treated him as an illiterate outsider, and made sure he knew his place at the bottom of the social ladder. Bruised, humiliated, and drowning in a toxic mix of ambition and anxiety, Muhammad fled the mocking eyes of his peers and crawled into a cramped, dark cave on Jabal al-Nour.

Inside, the darkness attacks, and something closes around his chest and presses down, crushing, cutting off his air. It happens three times. Each time he thinks he's going to die alone in that cave with no one ever knowing how. When it finally lets go, Muhammad doesn't feel blessed. He feels utterly broken, certain of one thing: he's gone mad, and he's just been possessed by a Djinn

In pre-Islamic Arabia, the Djinn was a demon made of “smokeless fire,” invisible and shapeshifting, capable of entering a human body. It could possess a person outright, seize control of their tongue, limbs, and mind, and compel them to do, say, and believe what the Djinn wanted. A Djinn is an entity with the power to hijack a person from the inside and bend their will to its own.

Muhammad stumbles into his home, collapses onto the floor, and screams to his wife, Khadija: ‘Cover me! Cover me!’ (Zammiluni). He tells her he thinks he has become "Majnun” a word that means something very specific: a person taken over by a Djinn, someone whose body now answers to a will that isn’t his own.

Khadija takes him to her cousin, Waraqa ibn Nawfal — an old man, a Christian, one of the very few in pagan Mecca. Muhammad describes the Djinn in the cave. And Waraqa, who never witnessed the event, delivers his verdict on the spot: ‘This is the Namus — the same one who came to Moses.’ Namus means something closer to ‘the Law,’ or ‘the keeper of secrets,’ or simply ‘the one who delivers a divine message.’ From that moment on, Muhammad learns exactly how to use what Waraqa handed him. He stops talking about demons and starts talking about revelations and prophecies — the vocabulary shifts overnight, and it never shifts back.

Here’s the actual sequence, stripped of the incense: Muhammad saw a Djinn. Waraqa relabeled it as Namus. Muhammad ran with the relabel and built himself a prophecy out of it. That should have been embarrassing enough to bury quietly. Instead, generations of Islamic scholars did what Islam does best with an inconvenient origin story — they rewrote it. Out went the choking, the crushed ribs, the man screaming to be covered in blankets, certain he’d been possessed.

Instead, a straight theft from Jewish scripture, the Angel Gabriel, stolen from a religion Islam had every intention of one day claiming to replace. And the theft worked. Ask Sheikh GPT, Google, or Wikipedia what happened in that cave, and not one of them will say ‘Djinn.’ They’ll say Gabriel — a stolen name, laundering a terrified, half-mad man into something ‘blessed,’ when by his own testimony he was exactly what his own religion would later call majnun: possessed.

From Possession to Possession

Muhammad experienced recurring encounters, but this time he knows better, as the “demonic attacks” have turned into “revelations.” He begins preaching openly in Mecca, proclaiming to anyone who'll listen that the gods they'd worshipped are worthless stone, that judgment is coming, and that they need to abandon their ancestors' religion and submit to one God they can't see.

If any of that sounds familiar, it's because Muhammad wanted the Jews and Christians around him to accept him. He preached the Torah and the Gospel back to them, hoping they'd hear themselves in them. They didn't take the bait. So he left Mecca for Medina, launched the Hijra, and built political Islam the hard way: killing and expelling the Jewish tribes, taking their women and children as spoils, and crowning himself the sole man at the top — prophet, general, and lawgiver.

Two things are worth sitting with here. First, everything he preached about destroying idolatry was a calculated invention. When he finally conquered Mecca, he didn’t tear down the Kaaba — the very idol shrine he’d spent over a decade condemning. He kept it and simply rewrote its history to claim it was originally Abrahamic. Second, whenever “revelation” conflicted with his convenience, it was canceled or changed. He set a limit of four wives for every Muslim man, and when he wanted more than four for himself, a new “revelation” arrived on schedule, granting him, and only him, an exception. He ended up with 13 women, and at least one was a minor, aged 6.

The Prime-Time Prophet

If you assumed stories like this belong safely in the past — dusty relics from an unenlightened century, the kind of thing that could never happen to a modern man with a camera crew, a fact-checking team, and forty years of skepticism baked into his brand — you’re about to be disappointed. Because fourteen centuries later, another demon paid another visit. And just like Muhammad, the man it visited didn’t stay quiet about it — he turned it into the opening chapter of his very own hijra, his own migration from one identity, one set of allegiances, one version of the truth, toward another.

When it happened, Tucker Carlson was asleep — his wife beside him, four dogs sprawled across the mattress. The most mundane setting imaginable. Then, he says, something sat on his chest, an actual weight pressing on his ribs, pinning him down so hard he couldn’t move or breathe. He woke up gasping, certain something physical had just been on top of him, crushing the air out of his lungs exactly as Muhammad described being crushed in the cave fourteen centuries earlier. When he checked himself, he had the marks to prove it: claw gashes cut into his ribs and shoulder, bleeding. In his own words, Tucker Carlson was certain he had been attacked by a demon.