HATED BY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind
by Jason Zengerle
A straightforward account of a crooked path to prominence.
In this thoroughly documented account of Tucker Carlson’s career, journalist Zengerle tracks his subject’s jagged course through a gauntlet of media outlets and platforms. The son of a journalist and diplomat, Carlson was a private-school slacker who admired Jerry Garcia and Hunter S. Thompson. Following his father into journalism, he excelled at the Weekly Standard but realized that cable television was eclipsing magazines as a career option and political force. He was soon hosting programs on CNN, PBS, and MSNBC, where he clicked with Rachel Maddow. Fired by that cable channel in 2008, Carlson landed a low-level position at Fox News and co-founded the Daily Caller. He cast that outlet as a conservative version of the New Republic, but when the bombastic Breitbart News outmaneuvered it, Carlson responded by hiring hardcore culture warriors, including white supremacists. Meanwhile, he rose through the ranks at Fox News by skewering liberals and avoiding nuance, which he considered the enemy of clear debate. Carlson harbored grave doubts about Donald Trump, but when he learned that the president watched his program avidly, he began to pitch his stories to an audience of one. Fired by Fox News without explanation in 2023, he launched the Tucker Carlson Network with the help of Elon Musk. There he interviewed Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orbán, whose authoritarian style he openly admired. After Trump's victory in 2024, Carlson was deeply involved in cabinet and staff appointments, and Zengerle notes that Carlson's favorite themes have shaped Trump's priorities. Although Zengerle steers clear of polemic, what emerges from his portrait is a kind of morality tale about the decline of political journalism and the rise of for-profit agitprop. Carlson, Zengerle concludes, “has descended into madness, but he is speaking to millions.”
A richly detailed portrait of Tucker Carlson and the media trends that have shaped political commentary.