When The Demon Comes For You

Tucker Carlson's surprising tale of demonic assault and my, perhaps, surprising reaction to his claim.

People have been making fun of me on Twitter because of a post I made a few days ago, in which I commented on Tucker Carlson’s assertion that he’d been “assaulted” by a demon. If you haven’t seen Tucker’s interview about that subject, here it is:

Here is what I wrote in response:

Tucker’s claim is obviously bizarre. A demon? Really, dude? You sure it wasn’t just one of the four dogs you sleep with scratching you up in the middle of the night? The problem with that theory is, for all of the repugnant things Tucker said and does, he’s still a smart guy. You don’t think he considered the likelihood that he either scratched himself or one of the animals/people in bed with him scratched him?

There’s also the obvious “sleep paralysis” explanation. Sleep paralysis is a well-documented state in which a person becomes unable to move while just falling asleep or just waking. The scratches on his body would make sleep paralysis an unlikely explanation for what happened, although the sense of “being smothered” as he describes certainly sounds symptomatic of the condition. I’m further guessing that, before Tucker started telling people he’d been attacked by a demon, he looked into all the most obvious explanations for what befell him that dark and stormy night (I have no reason to believe it was a “dark and stormy” night but if we’re going to talk demon assaults, let’s do it right.)

I’m certainly not saying that the simplest explanations aren’t correct. What I am saying – as I literally said – is that I don’t doubt Tucker’s sincerity. He believes something happened to him, some kind of experience which he can’t place into his traditional, physicalist worldview. We obviously don’t have the full interview, nor do we have the opportunity to ask follow-up questions, including the most obvious one: “Can we see the scars?” I also would have liked to have asked him far more detailed questions about the “attack itself,” which Carlson does not describe.

What’s interesting to me about Tucker’s story is multifold. First, that it happened at all or, rather, that he believes it happened. As Tucker himself says in the interview, “I’m not from a world in which things like that happen. I’d never heard of things like that happening.”

Well, I have. I’ve heard about this sort of thing a lot because it happens a lot. Not necessarily in the nefarious manner that Tucker experienced, but in all sorts of ways. “Alien abductions” are the first example that come to mind, and which feature many of the same elements that Tucker describes: the event takes place at night, often in bed, often with another person right beside them who sees/hears nothing. That’s an important detail, I think, because it means whatever’s happening is physically inconsequential enough that the person right next to him did not wake. If he were thrashing in his sleep scratching himself, wouldn’t she or the dogs have been aware of it? Also, the sensation of a “physical assault” coincides with a lot of the alien abduction literature. Further, many traditions feature nighttime visits by sprites, faeries, night witches, and, yes, angels and demons.

Tucker uses the word “demon” to describe his own experience, but we don’t know why he chose that word. Aside from the scratches, was there anything nefarious about the encounter? He doesn’t say.

So, if we believe that he’s sincerely recounting an event that happened in his life (and I have no reason not to take him at his word when he knows he’s going to be ruthlessly mocked for making the claim) then what we’re left is an unusual, but not uncommon, experience in which a man falls asleep, believes himself to be “attacked” by some kind of entity and awakens, confused, to discover that he’s scratched and bleeding. Let me be clear: the most likely explanation for this experience is something purely physiological and banal.

I have no explanation for what happened to him and don’t feel the need to try to offer one. Rather, I would just point out the commonality of such human experiences across geography and time. People interested in reading more about them should check out UNC Professor of Religion, Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka’s recent book, Encounters, which shares “the work of experts across a spectrum of fields who are working to connect humanity with unknown life-forms.”

(Are you surprised that there are “experts” in “unknown life-forms”? I was.)

Having said all of that, what’s most interesting to me about the event somehow isn’t his claim, although my ears definitely perk up anytime somebody says they’ve been attacked by a demon. Instead, what captured my attention was his response to the event. Tucker says the event was “transformative.” He says he bought a Bible and started reading it, spending a year and a half at it before then setting it down and rereading it. I don’t know anything about Tucker’s religious life, but it sounds like he’d never read it before. I don’t say that with judgment or anything -I mean, I’ve never read the Bible all the way through - only that his response to this strange event wasn’t necessarily predictable.

It's also unclear to me whether the word “demon” is an appellation he designated to the entity immediately or if that came after studying the Bible. The question only matters because it speaks to how people make sense of these experiences for themselves. Because Tucker’s a conservative Republican, it makes sense to me that he would turn to an explanation that would still fit within his general worldview. The first person he confessed to was his evangelical assistant, for example, instead of a doctor. Interesting.

I also think it’s notable that, even though Tucker has crafted an explanation for himself that helps him “make sense” of the event, he says that he’s open to any other possible explanation, which doesn’t sound like the kind of thing somebody proselytizing would say. In other words, I don’t think this is a Russell Brand conversion play to appeal to the base, although in Brand’s case I believe that has everything to do with staying out of prison and very little to do with any sort of spiritual epiphany.

The event obviously had a profound effect on Tucker. Not enough to keep him from continuing to say horrible shit, of course, but I don’t think that matters in this context. My interest lies in the way inexplicable experiences can, and often do, lead to deep and lasting changes. The near death experience is a good example of this; often when people have had an NDE, they come back “transformed,” less interested in material possessions, more empathetic, more intuitive. Often this causes terrible strains on relationships because the person who “returns” from an NDE may not entirely resemble the person who died.

So yeah, people are calling me an idiot and a fool for what I wrote. That’s fine, but I do find it flummoxing when people can be so dismissive about somebody else’s experience:

“This happened to me.”

“No it didn’t.”

I wonder how Tucker (or any of us) might apply the valuable lesson of feeling disbelieved when somebody tells us their lived experience of, say, being an immigrant or being trans, or of having some sort of life event that doesn’t readily comport with the experiences of a middle-aged, white frozen fish stick heir.

It’s my belief that these events, whatever their ultimate explanations, are tools to help us plug into our seeking selves, the part of us which tries to find answers to questions that supersede our immediate concerns of the day and which, when applied correctly, ought to make us more loving, kind, and gracious. That doesn’t seem to be what happened in Tucker’s case, which is disappointing. But who am I to judge? I’ve never been attacked by a demon.