There have been oceans of ink spilled trying to figure out what makes Tucker Carlson tick. It turns out that it’s the same thing that makes Lindsey Graham tick and Marco Rubio tick and all the rest of the right wing rank opportunists who simply have no morals or principles: fame, money, influence. This piece in the New Republic gets to the nub of it:
In February 2009, when he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Tucker Carlson was in the midst of an identity crisis. Five years earlier, he had been a victim of what was arguably the first viral takedown of the internet era. Jon Stewart, then at the height of his Daily Show fame, appeared on CNN’s Crossfire, told the hosts they were ruining the country, and singled out Carlson in particular as a “dick.” Crossfire limped along for three more months before being canceled. Carlson then spent the next four years in the wilderness, appearing on Dancing With the Stars and hosting Tucker, which was canceled for low ratings in early 2008, on MSNBC, still a year or two away from deciding it would be the liberal cable news network. In 2003, a fresh-faced 34-year-old Carlson had released a memoir, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites, which cataloged and celebrated his meteoric rise through the burgeoning world of cable news. Now, however, Carlson was on the verge of flaming out.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but I lived here in the 1990s and I saw conservatives create many of their own media organizations,” Carlson said in 2009, at Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel. “I saw many of those organizations prosper, and I saw some of them fail. And here’s the difference: The ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth that conservatives need to deal with. I’m as conservative as any person in this room—I’m literally in the process of stockpiling weapons and food and moving to Idaho, so I am not in any way going to take a second seat to anyone in this room ideologically.” Watching the clip today, one can feel Carlson’s agitation; trained in the measured pace of TV speak—speaking too slowly makes you seem dumb, while speaking too quickly makes you seem nervous—he is talking at a speed somewhere between Lionel Messi and Usain Bolt.
“If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail,” Carlson said, his voice building to crescendo. “The New York Times is a liberal paper … but it’s also a paper that cares about whether they spell people’s names right; it’s a paper that cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions.”
The audience booed. Then the heckling started. Carlson attempted to defend himself. “I’m merely saying that at the core of their news gathering is gathering news!” he yelped at one inaudible audience member. “Why aren’t there outlets that don’t just comment on the news, but dig it up and make it?”
Today, Carlson is the most important right-wing voice in the country. He has leapfrogged over Sean Hannity and Fox News’s other stars. Rising voices on the right, many mirroring Carlson’s faux-populist shtick, remain in his shadow. In July, Carlson drew more than three million viewers per night in his 8 p.m. Eastern slot, crushing competitors Chris Hayes (1.4 million) and Anderson Cooper (947,000).
On Fox, CNN’s Brian Stelter told me, Carlson “is the heir to Bill O’Reilly,” but without a boss at the network like Roger Ailes, Carlson “has even more power than O’Reilly ever did.” Carlson, in many ways, now occupies the space Donald Trump did only a few months ago. The outrageous things he says during his show quickly spread on Twitter. They’re blogged about as proof of just how deranged the right has become on any number of issues—crime, immigration, race, vaccines, education, health care. Often, Carlson turns that outrage into fodder for the next night’s program—a cycle resembling the one Trump rode to the White House with his rallies in 2016.
The transformation of The Daily Caller is the Rosetta Stone moment of Carlson’s career, a period during which he learned his lesson. He never sought respectability again.
But his journey to the top of conservative media began with that CPAC speech. There has always been a nastiness and racial grievance at the core of Carlson, but, for much of his early career, he also sought a degree of respectability. At the time, there was still a somewhat respectable conservative media in existence. Carlson’s wobbly ascent in right-wing media eerily reflects the gradual stripping away of that respectability, as well as its increasing radicalization.
Carlson has always gone with the flow. Now he is riding the crest of the wave as the nation’s premiere, right wing propagandist. His unique contribution is that he’s providing an intellectual rationale for the GOP’s neo-fascism by pushing The Great Replacement theory among other things.
But none of it is sincere. He is a complete phony doing it because it’s a good career move to feed the racist Republican beast lies and propaganda. I would say that he’s a lot like Donald Trump except Carlson is a lot smarter than Trump and knows exactly what he’s doing. Trump is a narcissistic,con man but in his heart he is also a true MAGA.
That’s all there is to it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t powerful. Telling the rubes the nightmarish fairy tales that stimulate their lizard brain is extremely potent. And very, very dangerous.