“Preach it, Tucker!” someone shouted. Carlson smiles when he’s having fun, but when he’s really cooking he looks deadly serious, like Kobe Bryant in unblinking Mamba mode. “The credentialling system that produces the worst people in the world is not an accident,” he continued. “It’s a way that people who have no useful skills at all—who couldn’t change your tire, or find shelter in a rainstorm, or fix your freakin’ toaster—can still have houses on St. Barts, and then at the same time lecture you about how you’re nonessential and should go die of a fentanyl O.D.” Near where I was sitting, some people cheered and others sat in rapt silence. One woman had her hands raised and her eyes closed, as if in prayer. The seventy-thirty statistic wasn’t exactly right, but the larger point, about inequality and class immobility, certainly was. Carlson wasn’t offering any specific solutions, but at least he sounded angry at the right people. Of course rural workers, whose real wages and life expectancies keep falling, are not mourning the death of the free-market consensus. It’s not surprising that, if you’re desperate enough, you’ll thrill to someone willing to throw furniture on your behalf.
Carlson’s guest that night was Megyn Kelly, one of his erstwhile Fox News colleagues. She didn’t have much to say about neoliberalism. She mostly played the hits: the Trump indictments are bogus; “gender is bullshit.” She ended by protesting too much about the cultural relevance she and Carlson still enjoyed, even though they’re no longer on TV. “Cable news is dead,” she said. “It was a suicide that was assisted by Donald Trump.”
After Carlson was fired, he spent a year in the wilderness. On X, he posted long, loosely structured interviews with a man who claimed to have had sex with Barack Obama and an expert on fossil fuels in space. None of this was setting any national agenda, but it likely turned a profit. Some weeks, his podcast was among the most popular in the country. For a while, this seemed to be his lot: hawking life insurance and bamboo bedsheets on X and iTunes. For a guy who had already lived nine lives in the fickle media business—self-satisfied pugilist on CNN and MSNBC; stiff-backed “Dancing with the Stars” contestant—this iteration didn’t seem half bad. And all along, amid his shock-jock antics, he maintained a steady ideological drumbeat: You are being replaced.
Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. According to Carlson’s Razor, there are no unintended outcomes; that which seems extraordinary is in fact simple, and intentional. Follow your gut. Why is your community falling apart? Because your leaders pledge allegiance to foreign shareholders and cheap labor, not to the American people. Crime, disorder, spiritual decay, deaths of despair: whatever the problem, it’s something that they are doing to you, on purpose, because they hate you. Obviously.
Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan
The writer Matt Yglesias argues that, in the past decade, a “crank realignment” has pushed left-leaning “cranks and know-nothings,” such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., out of the Democratic fringes and into the Republican base. On the Tucker Carlson Live Tour, the only two repeat guests were Kennedy and Russell Brand, disaffected progressives who recently became zealous Trump supporters. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was on the schedule for Greenville, South Carolina, but the event had to be cancelled because of Hurricane Helene. (“Yes they can control the weather,” Greene tweeted.) Another guest was Alex Jones, the keening fabulist whom Carlson once considered beyond the pale and now treats as a prophet. In Maine, Jones sat in Carlson’s barn for a ninety-minute interview, ranting about 5G and bug protein. Whenever Carlson couldn’t think of anything nice to say, he could always make the negative case. “We have a ruling class in the United States defined by its hatreds,” he said, in his introduction. “But no one is hated more by them than a man called Alex Jones.”
Donald Trump is famously vain, but he doesn’t always hold grudges for long. A few months after Carlson’s insulting texts about him became public, Trump attended a U.F.C. fight at Madison Square Garden, with Carlson in his entourage. When Fox News hosted a Republican primary debate, in 2023, Trump skipped it and gave an interview to “Tucker on X.” By the time he won the nomination and needed a new running mate, having sicked a murderous mob on the previous one, he asked an array of people for advice: Wall Street donors, the staff at Mar-a-Lago, and his ever-evolving brain trust. Some of Trump’s more traditional advisers, including Kellyanne Conway and Sean Hannity, were reportedly for Marco Rubio, the polished senator from Florida. But apparently the nationalists in Trump’s circle, led by Carlson, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, Jr., convinced him that Rubio was a swamp creature with divided loyalties. In June, according to the Times, Carlson told Trump that “if he chose a ‘neocon’ . . . the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive” to assassinate him.
On the first night of the Republican National Convention, Carlson talked about having spent “the whole day . . . starting at 5 A.M.,” engaged in a behind-the-scenes fight against a number of “feline and ruthless” adversaries to get Vance selected, a fight that he’d just learned he’d won. “Sometimes I’m not on God’s side, but I definitely know who’s representing the other side,” he said. “And every single one of those people” was lined up “to knife J. D. Vance.” Later that evening, he named one such person: Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator, who had just hailed Vance’s addition to the ticket. “No one lobbied harder against JD Vance than he did,” Carlson tweeted. (Graham did not respond to requests for comment.) “People like Lindsey Graham are happy to lie right to your face, smiling as they plot your destruction.”
It would be simple enough to dismiss Carlson’s whole act as pure cynicism, and clearly there is some cynicism involved. In his private texts, he referred to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election as “absurd” and “insane”; these days, he makes his own groundless claims about election fraud, and downplays January 6th as a vibrant demonstration attended by “diabetic grandmothers.” Still, cynicism can’t explain everything. On his Fox show, Carlson did fawning interviews with four sitting heads of state, all aspiring proto-authoritarian strongmen: Nayib Bukele, of El Salvador; Jair Bolsonaro, of Brazil; Viktor Orbán, of Hungary; and Donald Trump. This past February, Carlson went to the Kremlin to film a long interview with Vladimir Putin; last summer, Carlson was back in Hungary. “Your country is freer than the one I live in,” he told a local reporter. “It reminds me of America in 1985.”
Given his various rhetorical modes, it can be hard to know when to take him at his word. Does he really believe that Lindsey Graham is not just his political enemy but an agent of the Enemy, a.k.a. Satan? Communism “isn’t an ideology. It’s an antihuman impulse that comes from some outside source. Obviously.” The point of COVID was to destroy the nuclear family. Seed oils may sterilize you, but nicotine is a superfood. In Fort Worth, to make a point about humility, Carlson returned to the topic of his bathing habits. “You really do have this image of yourself as a godlike figure,” he mused—“until you step out of the shower and into the harsh glare of the mirror.” His guest that night was Roseanne Barr, who lit up a Parliament onstage. “Fauci gave everybody AIDS!” she shouted. “Google it!”
I have no access to the inside of Carlson’s mind, heart, or shower, and he did not respond to texts and e-mails asking for an interview. But I think I have listened to him long enough to have a sense of what’s truly important to him. He might deny it, but luckily, according to him, that doesn’t matter. “The only way to understand motive is by effect,” he said in Kansas City. “If I keep doing something that has the same result, then that is the intended result.” He added, “Someone can tell you, ‘I’m the best person there is’ . . . but I’ve gotten to the point where that’s totally irrelevant to me.”
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Publish date : 2024-10-31 13:00:00
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