He’s all at sixes and sevens…
Tucker Carlson — who was fired by Fox News last week at the height of his popularity and influence in right-wing punditry — has aspirations of moving into a larger role that doesn’t limit him to a single medium, according to people familiar with his thinking. And he is willing to walk away from some of the millions that Fox is contractually obligated to pay him, if that would give him the flexibility to have a prominent voice in the 2024 election cycle.
Most ambitiously, Carlson wants to moderate his own GOP candidate forum, outside of the usual strictures of the Republican National Committee debate system. The idea, which he has discussed with Donald Trump, the front-runner for the party nomination, would test his vaunted sway over conservative politics. And it would take a jab at his former employer — Fox is hosting the first official primary debate, which Trump has threatened not to attend — if he can manage to make his grandest plan happen.
Ultimately, Carlson is scrambling to try to avoid the fate of other once-towering former Fox News personalities, who in exile from the network have found lucrative gigs but nothing like their former positions of influence.
“If I’m sitting in his seat right now, I’m plotting really my own media company, how I want to build it,” said Joel Cheatwood, a former Fox News and CNN executive who helped found theblaze.com with Glenn Beck after his forced departure from Fox News in 2011. “Whether you like him or not, there are very few individual brands out there that you can almost guarantee an incredibly significant following from day one.”
Carlson’s Fox contract reportedly runs through the end of 2024, which would limit his options, though a source close to Carlson said he might accept less money than he is owed to be able to get back into the media game before then. Hollywood lawyer Bryan Freedman, who is representing Carlson, did not respond to a message asking about his contractual status.
Among the smaller broadcasters that have approached Carlson are the faith-based Trinity Broadcast Network and the far-right One America News Network. OAN’s founder and chief executive, Robert Herring Sr., fulsomely praised Carlson as having “the largest and most passionate audience in cable news,” adding that the company has “made our interest clear.”
A stronger pitch has come from Newsmax, the conservative media company that has seen a prime-time ratings surge this past week at the same time Fox was losing viewers from Carlson’s old time slot.
Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy approached Carlson and his associates with a wide-ranging proposal that, in the words of one person familiar with the pitch, would involve “rebranding Newsmax under Tucker’s name.” Carlson and his advisers are intrigued by the idea of his own media company, and taking over an existing one would be easier than building from the ground up — though any possible deal would boil down to unresolved questions of money and editorial control.
And Cheatwood speculated that Carlson would diminish his own brand by signing on with a smaller media company. “I just don’t think he needs it,” he added. “He’s just so much bigger than they are.”
Many in conservative corners of the digital media world have assumed that Carlson — a polarizing personality whose disparaging comments about immigrants, defense of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and dabbling in paranoid white-nationalist theories during his years on Fox would make him toxic for mainstream media companies — will strike out with his own podcast or streaming show.
“He could do very well and find an audience immediately, and he could earn a good living and never have to leave his home studio,” said Ken LaCorte, a former digital-side executive for Fox News.
In 2020, Carlson’s team explored the idea of launching a podcast as a “joint venture of sorts” with his then-employers at Fox, according to a text message exchange made public in a recent defamation lawsuit against the network. And since his firing, his team has fielded inquiries from potential podcast partners.
But Carlson doesn’t want to just be a podcaster, people in his circle say. He wants to produce documentaries and host live events as well.
Twitter has also emerged as an area of intrigue for Carlson. That’s where he went to issue his first public comments after his dismissal, and his team was impressed by the number of views amassed by the video, according to people familiar with their thinking.
Carlson has not had any recent conversations with Twitter or its political-provocateur new owner, Elon Musk; but shortly before he left Fox, he had a briefing from Twitter tech staff about new features for subscriptions and other ways for content creators to make money from the platform.
Beck praised the Twitter video, in which Carlson claimed that television news shuts off legitimate debate. “You see what he’s setting up here? He’s setting up a different kind of show, a show where he takes big issues and he debates them,” Beck said last week on his own show. “That’s where he’s headed.” (Beck, who pivoted to digital video after being forced out of Fox, has already offered Carlson a job.)
Carlson and his team have discussed the possibility of moderating a candidate forum outside of the traditional protocols surrounding the GOP primary debate system, according to two people familiar with the considerations. These people said the setup — as well as Carlson’s availability to take on that kind of role, given the noncompete constraints of his contract with Fox — remain unclear. But Carlson has personally expressed enthusiasm about the idea, according to people familiar with his comments. At least one major candidate — Trump — has told Carlson he’s interested, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
The former Fox host’s interest in a debate is said to stem in part from its potential to loosen the Republican National Committee’s grip on the process, as well as to challenge the role traditionally played by the major television networks. “He could go straight to the candidates, stream it live, invite the networks but maintain control over the process,” said one person familiar with the discussions.
Carlson has been approached in recent days by candidates as well as Republican fundraisers about appearing on the campaign trail but is interested in maintaining a more independent posture, according to people with knowledge of his views. A role moderating a debate or delivering analysis about the contest is seen as a way to influence the process without becoming an arm of a particular campaign.
But the main holdup in Carlson’s post-Fox future is his contract status, which could limit his options until his deal with the network runs out. “Fame is a depreciating asset, and Tucker in nine months of relative radio silence would not be nearly as powerful as Tucker is now,” LaCorte said.
“Tucker’s too gifted a writer and host not to put those talents to use every day,” said Vince Coglianese, a friend of Carlson who serves as editorial director for the publication he co-founded, the Daily Caller. “I don’t know what format he’ll end up in, but I’m confident he’ll be a massive success — which will be good for the country. Anything that breaks the corporate stranglehold on our debates is a huge win.”
I don’t believe this. Tucker Carlson is motivated by money. I doubt very seriously he will give up millions just so he can host a 2024 primary debate. (You can bet that Joe Biden won’t agree to any debate with him so the general election is out of the question.) This is just silly.
I can imagine him trying to build his own online media company — and I would guess it could make big bucks. The right is full of suckers. But his influence was dependent on that older TV viewing audience and I can’t imagine that Newsmax will offer him the kind of money and profile that he believes he is worthy of.
I suspect he will go the way of Glenn Beck, the last wingnut who achieved Tucker’s level of influence. He’ll have a podcast and some kind of video presence and he’ll be rich. But nobody will pay attention to him anymore.
This literary analysis by A.O. Scott of Carlson’s notorious “white men don’t fight like that” text is very interesting:
Gertrude Stein warned that remarks are not literature. Neither are hateful messages sent to a television producer’s smartphone and hidden away in redacted legal documents.
In the case of Tucker Carlson’s now notorious post-Jan. 6 remarks on an earlier episode of political violence — recently uncovered by New York Times reporters — literary criticism seems to be beside the point. But given that the text is both unusually long (almost 200 words) and contributed to Carlson’s firing from Fox News, some textual analysis might illuminate the author’s state of mind and the political context in which he operates.
What Carlson wrote is a complicated and troubling piece of prose. That it can even be called prose is somewhat remarkable. Not many of us, thumbing away on our phones, would compose such a grammatically coherent, cleanly punctuated missive, without an abbreviation, emoji or autocorrect snafu in sight.
Before he was a cable-news demagogue, Carlson was a magazine journalist, and some of the old print discipline clings to these 15 sentences. They quickly set a scene, place the author within it and tell a compact story, complete with a moral at the end.
That story — about Carlson’s conflicted response to the sight of “a group of Trump guys” dogpiling an “Antifa kid” — appears to involve a crisis of conscience, an unexpected, chastening eruption of empathy. The narrator’s bloodlust seems to waver as he moves from solidarity with the perpetrators of the attack to a grudging acknowledgment of their victim’s humanity. This looks like the kind of wishy-washyness Carlson often mocked on the air, a departure from the demonization of political and cultural enemies that was his nightly bread and butter. You might wonder if Fox fired him for going offbrand. But a closer reading elucidates what that brand always was.
At first, Carlson is right where you’d expect him to be: on the side of the attackers, rooting them on toward homicide, even as he finds their behavior “dishonorable.” “It’s not how white men fight,” he says.
That is a jaw-dropping sentence — as empirically ludicrous as it is ideologically loaded. A glance at American history — taking in night riders, lynch mobs, the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 and the killings of Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins in New York in the 1980s, to say nothing of Jan. 6 itself — suggests that this is exactly how white men fight. Not all white men, of course, and not only white men, but white men precisely when they perceive the symbolic and material prerogatives of their whiteness to be under attack.
Thinking otherwise is more than just a fantasy of Anglo-Saxon righteousness, redolent of Rudyard Kipling and The Marquess of Queensberry. The old imperial myth undergirding that fantasy — the belief that a program of plunder and subjugation was, in spite of everything, a noble crusade — survives in the curious amalgam of genteel preening and pseudo-proletarian rage that Carlson manifested in his nightly broadcast.
His most successful on-air persona, perfected on Fox after the departure of Bill O’Reilly, has been a volatile mixture of upper crust and salt of the earth. Whiteness was the glue that held the package together, and in this text you can see it coming unstuck, even as Carlson tries to work through some inherent contradictions.
At stake is not the life or safety of the anonymous “Antifa kid,” but rather Carlson’s own perception of himself. “This isn’t good for me,” he finds himself thinking. That phrase, a syntactic echo of “it’s not how white men fight,” establishes the stakes, which are not so much Carlson’s ethical probity as his racial superiority. Watching the beating, he becomes aware of what Kipling called “the white man’s burden” — the duty to subjugate the supposedly lesser races without sinking to their level.
The race of the man being beaten isn’t specified in the text, but his otherness — his debased status relative to both his attackers and Carlson — is repeatedly emphasized. “The Antifa creep is a human being,” he writes. This is not exactly an upwelling of compassion, and even so Carlson rushes to qualify it. “Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him, personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it.” The “shoulds” indicate that Carlson isn’t really bothered — is still actually gloating — but is aware that this reaction poses a problem.
It’s a problem because he imagines that the glee he feels at the man’s suffering aligns him not with those inflicting the suffering, but with the man himself. If he takes pleasure in watching an Antifa creep get pounded, that makes him as bad as the Antifa creep. Because that guy reduces “people to their politics.”
How can Carlson be sure of this? Isn’t this just projection? Yes, but it’s also another way of insisting that this isn’t how your side behaves, even as you prove the opposite. Reducing people to their politics is what the enemies — the others, the savages, those without honor — do. Making a point of not doing that, even when it’s clearly what you’re doing, is what sets you above them.
“How am I better than he is?” That question isn’t rhetorical, it’s existential, and it presents Carlson as both the hero and the victim in this story. To borrow a phrase from Elvis Costello, this is someone who “wants to know the names of all those he’s better than.” Not because of personal insecurity, but as a matter of racial and ideological principle. That’s how white men fight.
Interesting but I think sort of misses the point. His hatred for some anonymous alleged Antifa guy is sociopathic as are his feelings of joy at watching him be beaten by a mob. That he has a burst of conscience about his literally insane hatred of something that barely exists in this world and presents no real threat to him doesn’t change the fact that this level of hatred denotes a very serious psychological disorder. And he wrote it on the day after January 6th which indicates to me that it represents an attempt to distance himself emotionally from the violence that took place at the Capitol. He’s got problems.