Politics > Tucker Carlson

No one really knows what triggers obsessions. Tucker Carlson’s obsession with Jews and Israel is no exception.

Joan Swirsky | March 22, 2026

When I was about 12 or 13, I had a friend who was fun to be with.  When we were in my house or hers, we’d talk endlessly about our schoolmates, our teachers, her mother’s illness, and boys, boys, boys.  But whenever we went outside, she would start counting.

“What are you doing?” I would ask.

“Counting my steps,” she responded.

She stopped walking to answer me, so she wouldn’t lose count.

“I just have to count them,” she said.  “I can’t stop counting them.”

At that age, I had never even heard the word obsession, much less understood that my friend was in the grip of an irresistible compulsion to count every step she took.

One time I asked her, “What if you stopped counting?  What would happen?”

“No, no, no, no, no,” she said.  “You just don’t understand.”

And I didn’t, until decades later, when I became a psychotherapist and studied this vicious, life-altering malady.  Before that, I had no idea that there were at least 12 types of obsessions, ranging from uncontrollable thoughts about contamination, sex, religion, illness, hoarding, on and on and on.

Some obsessions come on with no warning — for instance, the woman who is accustomed to getting things in her home in tip-top shape when spring cleaning rolls around, but who one year finds herself unable to dispose of anything, including old tattered magazines, leftover paper plates from entertaining her grandchildren, a frayed sweater...and then it escalates until she — and the few people who continue to visit her — has to push open her front door and step over piles of junk and debris just to get into her own home.

Or the highly-skilled ICU nurse who, like her colleagues, sported an Apple watch but all of a sudden found herself checking her pulse and EKG readouts and oxygen levels so often — and calling her doctor with anything she thought was suspicious — that she had to quit her job and consult a psychotherapist three times a week.

Or the successful hedge fund manager who read an article about artificial intelligence that scared him so much that he became paranoid, thinking every article he read and every graphic he saw and every song lyric he heard were “created” by A.I. and that every streetlight or iPhone or uniformed officer he saw was tracking him, which forced him to stop commuting to his job and sequester himself in his basement to do business, which ultimately forced his employer to terminate........

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