Tucker Carlson Roadshow

– Preach it, Tucker! – someone shouted. Carlson smiles when he’s having fun, but when he’s actually cooking, he looks deadly serious, like Kobe Bryant in unblinking Mamba mode. “A performance appraisal system that produces the worst people in the world is no 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 damn toaster – can still have homes in St. Barts, and still at the same time lecture on time You about how you are unimportant and should die from a fentanyl overdose.” Near where I sat, some people applauded while others sat in rapt silence. One woman raised her hands and closed her eyes as if praying. The “seventy-thirty” statistic wasn’t entirely true, but the larger point about inequality and class immobility certainly was. Carlson didn’t offer any specific solutions, but at least he sounded angry at the right people. Of course, rural workers, whose real wages and life expectancy continue to fall, are not mourning the death of the free market consensus. It’s no surprise that if you’re desperate enough, you’ll be thrilled that someone is willing to ditch the furniture for you.

Carlson’s guest that evening was Megyn Kelly, one of his former Fox News colleagues. She didn’t have much to say about neoliberalism. She mostly played hits: Trump’s accusations are fake; “Gender is nonsense.” In the end, she protested too much about the cultural relevance that she and Carlson still enjoy even though they are no longer on television. “Cable news is dead,” she said. “It was a suicide facilitated 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 set any national agenda, but it was likely profitable. For several weeks, his podcast was one of the most popular in the country. For a while, it seemed like this was his destiny: selling life insurance and bamboo sheets on X and iTunes. For a guy who’s already spent nine lives in the fickle media business – a smug boxer on CNN and MSNBC; Dancing with the Stars contestant with a stiff back—this option didn’t seem half bad. And all the while, despite his shocking 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 unexpected results; what seems unusual is actually simple and intentional. Follow your intuition. 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, death of despair: whatever the problem, they do it to you on purpose because they hate you. Obviously.

Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan

Writer Matt Yglesias argues that over the past decade, a “weirdo perestroika” has pushed leftist “weirdos and know-nothings” like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out of the Democratic fringes and into the Republican base. . During the Tucker Carlson Live Tour, the only two regular guests were Kennedy and Russell Brand, disaffected progressives who had recently become ardent Trump supporters. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was scheduled in Greenville, South Carolina, but the event had to be canceled due to Hurricane Helen. (“Yes, they can control the weather,” Greene tweeted.) Another guest was Alex Jones, an avid fabulist whom Carlson once considered beyond the pale and now considers a prophet. In Maine, Jones sat in Carlson’s barn during the 90-minute interview, ranting about 5G and insect protein. Whenever it didn’t occur to Carlson to say something nice, he could always make negative arguments. “We have a ruling class in the United States that is defined by its hatred,” he said in his opening remarks. “But there’s no one they hate more than a man named Alex Jones.”

Donald Trump is known for his vanity, but he doesn’t always hold a grudge for long. Months after Carlson’s offensive messages about him became public, Trump attended a UFC fight at Madison Square Garden with Carlson in his entourage. When Fox News held the 2023 Republican primary debate, Trump skipped it and was interviewed by “Tucker on X.” By the time he won the nomination and needed a new running mate, having angered the murder mob on the previous candidate, he sought advice from a variety of people: Wall Street donors, Mar-a-Lago employees and his eternal president . developing brain trust. Some of Trump’s more traditional advisers, including Kellyanne Conway and Sean Hannity, have reportedly been supporters of Marco Rubio, the brilliant Florida senator. 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 TimeCarlson told Trump that “if he chooses neocon…. . US intelligence agencies will have every incentive to “kill him.”

On the first night of the Republican National Convention, Carlson said he spent “the whole day . . starting from 5 AM” engaged in a behind-the-scenes fight with a series of “catty and ruthless” opponents to get Vance elected, a battle he just learned he won. “Sometimes I’m not on God’s side, but I know exactly who is on the other side,” he said. “And every one of these people” was lined up to “slaughter J.D. Vance.” Later that evening, he named one such person: Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who had just welcomed Vance’s addition to the list. “No one lobbied harder against J.D. Vance than he did,” Carlson tweeted. (Graham did not respond to requests for comment.) “People like Lindsey Graham are happy to lie to your face and smile while plotting your destruction.”

It would be easy enough to dismiss Carlson’s entire act as pure cynicism, and it is obvious that there is some cynicism in this. In his private messages, he called conspiracy theories about the 2020 election “absurd” and “crazy”; These days, he’s making his own baseless claims of election fraud and downplaying Jan. 6 as a colorful demonstration attended by “diabetic grannies.” However, cynicism cannot explain everything. On his Fox show, Carlson gave flattering interviews to four sitting heads of state with proto-authoritarian aspirations: El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele; Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil); Viktor Orban from Hungary; and Donald Trump. In February of this year, Carlson went to the Kremlin to film a long interview with Vladimir Putin; Carlson returned to Hungary last summer. “Your country is freer than the one I live in,” he told a local reporter. “It reminds me of America in 1985.”

Given his varied rhetorical styles, it can be difficult to know when to take his word for it. Does he really believe that Lindsey Graham is not just his political enemy, but an agent of the Enemy, aka Satan? Communism “is not an ideology. This is an anti-human impulse emanating from some external source. Obviously.” The point COVID-19 was to destroy the nuclear family. Seed oils may sterilize you, but nicotine is a superfood. In Fort Worth, to emphasize the importance of humility, Carlson returned to the topic of his bathing habits. “You really have this idea of ​​yourself as a god-like figure,” he mused, “until you step out of the shower and walk into the harsh light of a mirror.” His guest that evening was Roseanne Barr, who lit up Parliament on stage. “Fauci gave everyone AIDS!” – she shouted. “Google it!”

I do not have access to Carlson’s mind, heart or soul, and he has not responded to text messages and emails requesting an interview. But I think I listened to him long enough to understand what was really important to him. He could deny it, but fortunately, he says, it doesn’t matter. “The only way to understand the motive is the effect,” he said in Kansas City. “If I keep doing something that produces the same result, then that is the intended result.” He added: “Someone might tell you, ‘I’m the best person in the world.’ . . but I’ve gotten to the point where it doesn’t matter to me at all.”