Tucker Carlson’s Nationalist Crusade

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In October, a few days before Halloween, Tucker Carlson invited Nick Fuentes to his home in rural Maine. For months, the two right-wing media stars had been savaging each other on their respective platforms. On “The Tucker Carlson Show,” one of the top-ranked conservative political podcasts in the country, Carlson had called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid in his basement” and suggested that he was being used as a pawn by sinister, possibly government-controlled forces. “I have noticed that his targets are all people who are sincere, non-crazy, non-hateful opponents of neocon politics,” Carlson said. “He is clearly part of a campaign to discredit non-crazy right voices.”

Fuentes, on his late-night streaming show, “America First,” which averages about five hundred thousand viewers on Rumble, had alleged that it was Carlson, in fact, who was the deep-state agent, unspooling a baroque conspiracy theory in which Carlson has worked as a C.I.A. asset since college. “Everybody’s calling everybody else a Fed, but I think this one’s pretty cut-and-dry,” Fuentes said. “Who’s the C.I.A. cutout? Who’s the poseur? Who is America? I am America!” Addressing Carlson, he added, “You disgust me. But, seriously, you are filth.”

The reasons for the mutual animus weren’t entirely clear. At twenty-seven, Fuentes was arguably America’s most prominent white nationalist—someone who was forthright about, and seemingly proud of, his bigotry. Summing up his core political beliefs last year, he said, “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the fuck up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part. And we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.” On another occasion, he said, “We have to go a little bit further than to say something’s up with the Zionists or Israel. It’s not Israel. It is the Jews.” These and other similarly odious utterances—questioning the Holocaust, celebrating Hitler, frequently using the N-word—meant that Fuentes was no stranger to criticism from fellow right-wingers. During the 2024 election, the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, was asked about Fuentes, who had recently attacked Vance for having an Indian American wife and therefore being an insufficient “defender of white identity.” “Look, I think the guy’s a total loser,” Vance said. “Certainly, I disavow him.”

But Carlson was a conservative who didn’t feel the need to put much distance between himself and Fuentes. In 2019, when Carlson still had a prime-time show on Fox News, he interviewed an extreme anti-immigration North Carolina congressional candidate named Pete D’Abrosca. After the show, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, who disagreed with Carlson’s anti-immigration stance but still considered him a friend, sent Carlson a text message alerting him to the fact that D’Abrosca was being strongly supported by Fuentes. In response, Carlson sent Goldberg a series of hostile texts professing ignorance and warning Goldberg not to make his criticism public.

After Carlson was fired from Fox News, in 2023, he often gave voice to incendiary views that were not substantively different from Fuentes’s own—especially as they pertained to Israel and certain prominent Jewish figures. Carlson employed classic antisemitic tropes in attacking Ukraine’s Jewish President, Volodymyr Zelensky, describing him as “ratlike” and a “persecutor of Christians.” In the middle of the war in Gaza, Carlson accused Israel of “blowing up churches and killing Christians” and criticized the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, and other pro-Israel Americans for being “focussed on a conflict in a foreign country as their own country becomes dangerously unstable.” “I’m from here,” Carlson said. “My family’s been here hundreds of years. I plan to stay here. I’m shocked by how little they care about the country.”

On his podcast, Carlson has twice interviewed Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist who has argued that concentration camps were a “humane” solution to widespread hunger during the Second World War—and whom Carlson introduced to his audience as “the best, most important popular historian working in the United States today.” After Charlie Kirk’s death, in September, far-right influencers promoted a conspiracy theory that, because Kirk’s long-standing support for Israel was waning, the country had orchestrated Kirk’s assassination. Carlson gave a eulogy at Kirk’s memorial service in which he likened Kirk to Jesus and then implied that Jews had killed Jesus. “I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamplit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus thinking about, What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us?” Carlson said. “We must make him stop talking!”

Perhaps the feud between Carlson and Fuentes could be attributed to the narcissism of small differences. In any case, Carlson was losing. On social media, he was getting pilloried by Fuentes’s legions of fans, many of them alienated young conservatives who call themselves Groypers, in honor of an obese version of the Pepe the Frog meme. “Tucker’s mask slipped,” Fuentes gloated on his show, “and he forgot for a minute that for eight years he’s been pretending to care about the plight of weird kids in their parents’ basement who are broke.”

Carlson has long possessed a finely tuned professional and political radar. In the early two-thousands, when he was a gifted young magazine writer, frequently contributing stories to publications like New York and Esquire, he realized that print journalism would no longer offer the same fame and power that it had once afforded his literary heroes, such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. He abandoned print to work as a pundit on CNN. During the 2016 campaign, he revived his flagging cable-news career by being an early defender of Donald Trump’s Presidential bid, recognizing that a populist candidate who campaigned on nativism, white grievance, and sexism might have a lane in the Republican primary; he was ultimately rewarded with his own prime-time show on Fox News. And in the two and a half years since he’d been fired from Fox he’d masterfully navigated the attention economy, starting his own media company and routinely drawing enough outrage (and eyeballs) that he reëstablished himself as the most significant media figure on the American right. Now he had concluded that if he wanted to maintain that perch he could not afford to alienate the Groypers—and so he extended an olive branch to Fuentes, in the form of a podcast-interview request.

Fuentes was wary. Carlson can be a tough interviewer. In June, he hosted Senator Ted Cruz on his podcast and ridiculed him for not knowing the population of Iran, despite favoring regime change in that country, and for not being able to provide a specific citation for a Bible verse that Cruz invoked to justify his support of Israel. Fuentes feared a similar ambush. But the night before their interview, during dinner at Carlson’s house in Maine, Carlson went over the topics that he wanted to discuss with Fuentes. The next day, their two-hour-plus conversation could not have been chummier. The pair revelled in their mutual contempt for Cruz, Shapiro, and the Fox News host Mark Levin; celebrated their shared identity as “American nationalists”; and commiserated about being deemed racist and antisemitic. Carlson apologized to Fuentes for calling him gay, and they both acknowledged that neither of them was a Fed. Their biggest point of disagreement was whether all Jews were to blame for the U.S.’s misguided support for Israel, as Fuentes believed, or just some of them, as Carlson maintained. “It’s not cucking to say that you’re not talking about all Jews when you oppose a foreign-policy position,” Carlson said, noting that many “self-described Christians” have been “seized by this brain virus” of Zionism. Eventually, they appeared to reach a sort of consensus that “organized Jewry,” as Fuentes called it, was the problem.

Carlson’s sit-down with Fuentes fractured the conservative movement. In the days and weeks after the interview aired, prominent Republican politicians and conservative commentators lined up to denounce Carlson for giving Fuentes a platform. Shapiro called it an “act of moral imbecility.” Cruz, in a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, said, “If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.” When Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation—which had advertised on Carlson’s podcast—released a video message attacking Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and “the globalist class,” Heritage staffers rose up in protest; five board members resigned. (Carlson, who did not participate in the reporting for this piece, said in an interview with Megyn Kelly that his critics can “buzz off.”)

Father wearing a Misfits shirt and mother wearing a Minor Threat shirt each holding one of their young sons hands.

Carlson was not the first prominent conservative to have a close encounter with Fuentes. In 2022, two Republican House members, Paul Gosar, of Arizona, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, delivered speeches at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference, in Florida. More significantly, that same year, Trump dined with Fuentes after Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, brought him as his guest to Mar-a-Lago. At the time, the outcry came mostly from liberals. Perhaps the conservatives who stayed silent when Trump met with Fuentes but lambasted Carlson for doing the same were simply picking an easier, more convenient target for their virtue signalling. But it’s also possible that the people who were more alarmed by Carlson’s dalliance with Fuentes concluded that Carlson was a bigger threat to the conservative movement than even Trump himself.

Carlson’s evolution from cable-news journeyman to conservative-movement leader began in the winter of 2009, when he received an unexpected phone call from the head of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Carlson, who had recently been fired from his job as a prime-time anchor on MSNBC, would later confess that, at the time, he was at a professional and personal nadir. Four years earlier, when he was hired at MSNBC, he had moved his wife and their four kids from Washington, D.C., to the ritzy town of Madison, New Jersey, where he paid $3.3 million for a nine-thousand-square-foot mansion and drove a Hummer. So, when MSNBC canned him, he didn’t just lose his job; he lost his life style and his identity. “I looked around and I was, like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m living this totally unsustainable life, and I’m not making any money,’ ” Carlson later recalled. “It was a pretty low-grade disaster. I didn’t lose a limb in war or get paralyzed in a car accident. But for me, who’d grown up in a pretty privileged world, it was distressing and a shock.”

Carlson sold the New Jersey mansion and returned with his family to Washington. Pulling into his driveway at night, he thought that he saw his neighbors averting their gaze. He couldn’t shake the feeling, he said, that “everybody hated me.” But the reality was actually worse: people didn’t hate Carlson; they didn’t think about him at all.

Ailes had never much cared for Carlson’s preppy, fraternity-rush-chair shtick. His taste in cable-news hosts (male ones, that is) ran toward confrontational populists like Bill O’Reilly, who was then Fox’s biggest star. Ailes also wasn’t one to forget a slight. “I don’t ignore anything,” he once said. “Somebody gets in my face, I get in their face.” He no doubt remembered all the nasty things that Carlson had said over the years, when he worked at CNN and MSNBC, about Fox (“a mean, sick group of people”), O’Reilly (“a humorless phony”), and Ailes himself (“sucking up to power”). According to an account of the phone call with Ailes, which Carlson later related to his former college roommate Neil Patel, Ailes began their conversation with a gratuitous insult. “You’re a loser, and you screwed up your whole life,” he said. It seemed as if Ailes just wanted to get in Carlson’s face. But then, before Carlson could hang up, Ailes got to the point. “The only thing you have going for you is that I like hiring talented people who have screwed things up,” he told Carlson, “because once I do you’re going to work your ass off for me.”

Ailes especially relished hiring broadcasters who had flamed out at other networks. (O’Reilly, who’d anchored the syndicated tabloid show “Inside Edition,” had left television entirely and was studying for a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard when Ailes brought him to Fox.) “I look for people who haven’t reached their potential,” he said. “I think I’m pretty good at developing talent.” By resurrecting careers, Ailes was able to prove his own genius—that the audience he convened was so large and so loyal that Fox was capable of making almost anyone a star. “I could have put a dead raccoon on the air this year and got a better rating than last year,” he once boasted.

Ailes grew up in the blue-collar town of Warren, Ohio, where his father worked in a Packard Electric factory. Memories from his youth of seeing “college boys give my dad orders in the shop in an inappropriate manner,” he later said, were seared into his brain. No matter how much wealth and power Ailes accrued, he never lost the sense that he was an outsider in New York’s media élite. “They think I’m this rube from Ohio,” he complained of his peers in the city’s executive class. “They all look down their noses at me.” Counterintuitively, hiring Carlson—the son of a former U.S. Ambassador, whose stepmother was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune—presented an opportunity to exact some revenge. “Roger liked the idea of Tucker coming to him on his hands and knees,” one former Fox executive said. “Roger took no small amount of pleasure in being able to tell Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, ‘You’re a loser.’ ”

Ailes offered Carlson a contributor contract at Fox. It was the same type of deal that Carlson had received from CNN a decade earlier, when he was still a magazine writer and was just breaking into the cable-news business—five figures a year to appear on the network’s various programs when they needed to fill airtime with a talking head. It was quite a comedown, in both compensation and prestige, from having his own prime-time show. But, for Carlson, it was a lifeline. He was grateful for the money, even if it was a pittance compared with the salary that he’d earned as an anchor. And he was glad to still have a place, even a tenuous one, in television. “I’m doing whatever they want me to do,” he told the Times when his Fox deal was announced.

Carlson knew that he was low in the pecking order at Fox. Still, he had ambitions. His biggest was to become a regular on the so-called All-Star Panel on “Special Report,” Fox’s 6 P.M. political-news show, which was broadcast out of the network’s Washington studio and was considered Fox’s most highbrow, cerebral program. But Ailes had other plans. “Roger loved kicking Tucker down the stairs and beating him up,” the former Fox executive said. That meant not just denying Carlson the opportunities he craved but saddling him with obligations he hoped to avoid—like co-anchoring the weekend version of “Fox & Friends,” which was less political and even more aggressively stupid than its weekday counterpart. “Roger’s idea was to throw Tucker onto the worst thing: the weekend morning show,” the former Fox executive said. “It’s early. He has to go to New York. He has to drive go-karts. It was inconvenient and humiliating.”

Outwardly, Carlson appeared to embrace the assignment, eventually becoming a full-time weekend anchor. He not only careened around the set in a go-kart; he participated in cooking segments with guests like Billy Ray Cyrus, played the cowbell with the seventies rock band Blue Öyster Cult, competed against (and lost to) his female co-anchor in a Spartan Race, and subjected himself to a dunk tank. Just as Ailes had predicted, he worked his ass off—and he did it with a smile. “He never acted too good for it,” the former Fox executive said. “A lesser person would have said, ‘I had two prime-time shows!’ ”

And yet, although Carlson might not have said it, he certainly thought it. He struggled with the “Fox & Friends” predawn call time, at one point dozing off while on air, and he hated being away from his family and his social circle in D.C. He tended to spend his weekends in New York alone, hunkered down in his hotel room tying flies and then walking a dozen blocks to Central Park to fish in one of its ponds.

One afternoon, while fly casting in Central Park, Carlson noticed a man with a video camera standing in some nearby bushes. Seeming to assume that he was a paparazzo or a liberal stalker, Carlson confronted him. “Are you videotaping me?” he demanded. The man confessed that he was—because he’d never seen anyone fishing in Central Park before. He explained that he recorded things that he found “interesting and unique about the city of New York” and then uploaded them to his YouTube channel.

As the man peppered Carlson with questions—“Where did you grow up?” “Do you live in New York now?”—it became clear that he wasn’t a paparazzo or a stalker. Indeed, the man had no idea who Carlson was. Charmed, Carlson proceeded to rhapsodize about fly-fishing.

They continued to talk, and the man told Carlson about his other pastime—pranking journalists. Now Carlson no longer seemed so happy about his anonymity.

“What’s your favorite cable channel?” he asked.

CNN, the man told him.

“Do you watch Fox?” Carlson pressed, perhaps hoping to kindle a spark of recognition.

“I watch Fox,” the man replied. But no, still not so much as a glimmer. Even to a self-professed cable-news junkie, Carlson was now just some random weirdo fishing in Central Park.

For most of his time at Fox News, Carlson was far removed from the decisions that were made—and the dramas that played out—on the second floor of the news channel’s Manhattan headquarters, where Ailes and his top lieutenants had their offices. On his trips to New York, he’d sometimes stop by to schmooze with Fox executives and remind them of his existence. “He seemed a little lost,” someone who encountered Carlson on one such visit remembered. And he was always seeking opportunities to demonstrate that he was aligned with the network’s biggest and most important projects. As Carlson half jokingly told a shock-jock radio host about Rupert Murdoch, “I’m a hundred per cent his bitch. Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.” But these displays of loyalty didn’t seem to boost his standing inside the organization. Relegated to the frivolous afterthought of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Carlson was on the outside looking in.

Until, that is, Trump’s first Presidential campaign. Carlson was by no means a fan of Trump’s. In 1999, when Carlson was still a magazine writer, he branded Trump “the single most repulsive person on the planet.” A few years later, after Carlson had become a cable-news host, he made a throwaway joke about Trump’s hair on CNN—and Trump responded with a short voice mail. “It’s true you have better hair than I do,” he said in the message. “But I get more pussy than you do.” Carlson thought that the episode was funny; it maybe even made him like Trump a little bit. It didn’t, however, make Carlson think that Trump was suited to be President.

But by 2016 Carlson’s thinking had begun to evolve. Part of the change was a result of his usual contrarianism. “On my street in Northwest Washington, D.C., there’s never been anyone as unpopular as Trump,” he wrote in Politico during the campaign. “Idi Amin would get a warmer reception in our dog park.” Carlson believed it was his long-established role in the city’s political and media ecosystem to defy that consensus. But there was a deeper, more substantive reason for the shift in his attitude. Six years earlier, Carlson and Patel, who’d served as a chief policy adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney, had launched the Daily Caller, a news website that they vowed would be the conservative answer to the Huffington Post; instead, in pursuit of clicks, the site found itself competing with Breitbart News to produce increasingly inflammatory takes on immigration, race, and gender. Carlson had immersed himself in the site’s web-traffic metrics, which served as an early-warning system of where the conservative base was headed.

Salesman showing glasses to woman in glasses store.

This insight made Carlson unusual at Fox. In 2014, Ivanka Trump had arranged a lunch with her father and Murdoch, according to the journalist Joshua Green’s book “Devil’s Bargain.” “My father has something big to tell you,” she announced at the lunch. “What’s that?” Murdoch asked. “He’s going to run for president,” she replied. Murdoch did not even bother to look up from his soup. “He’s not running for president,” he said. Murdoch and Trump had been friendly for decades, and they travelled in some of the same New York social circles, but Murdoch did not take Trump seriously—not as a person, not as a businessman, and certainly not as a Presidential candidate.

Neither did the pundits at Murdoch’s cable-news channel. “Even among conservatives at Fox, there was the view that Trump’s an idiot, he’s not a serious person, that there wasn’t a chance of him winning,” Ken LaCorte, a former Fox News executive, recalled. This posed a problem for Fox, especially since Ailes knew that covering Trump was good for ratings; to make for compelling television, the channel needed to put people on air who wouldn’t simply dismiss Trump out of hand. “The project at Fox of trying to find normal-seeming, television-camera-ready human beings who would make a sensible case for Donald Trump was no small lift,” a former Fox producer said.

Enter Carlson. Fox producers had taken notice of the heterodox views about Trump that he was offering on “Fox & Friends Weekend.” Soon, he was appearing with increasing regularity on “Special Report,” whose All-Star Panel had become something of a Never Trump redoubt. A few days after Trump officially announced his candidacy, Charles Krauthammer, the panel’s most esteemed member, hailed Jeb Bush’s official campaign announcement as “the biggest news” of the race. Carlson countered that Trump’s entry would significantly complicate Bush’s bid for the Republican nomination. Trump was “filling the role” of the candidate who “has his opinions,” Carlson said. “Some of them are kind of interesting. Some of them are right, by the way. He can say exactly what he wants. I think it could potentially be a problem.”

Going into 2016, Murdoch and Ailes believed that Fox had the power to pick the G.O.P.’s nominee. But as the campaign went on and Trump’s hold on the Republican primary electorate became clear, Murdoch and Ailes recognized that Trump had the power to topple Fox. Before long, O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and even Megyn Kelly—who had famously clashed with Trump during the first G.O.P. debate—were boosting him on their shows. In September, two months before the general election, Hannity filmed a testimonial for Trump that was featured in a campaign video. Carlson never went that far, but Murdoch didn’t forget his prescience. In the summer of 2016, after more than twenty women at Fox News alleged that Ailes had sexually harassed them, Murdoch forced Ailes to resign and took control of the news channel, appointing himself as its interim C.E.O. Murdoch sought to stabilize Fox but also to plot a course for its future—a future that, no matter what happened on Election Day, would have to take into account a viewing audience that had been deeply affected by, and was now extremely loyal to, Donald Trump. In November, five days before the election, Murdoch made his first big move: Fox News announced that its new 7 P.M. show was “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, a small group of conservative intellectuals tried to reconcile their ideological movement with the man who now, improbably, sat atop it. They identified themselves as “national conservatives,” or NatCons. At think tanks like the Claremont Institute and in journals and on websites such as American Greatness and The Federalist, the NatCons tacked hard to the right on culture-war issues, denouncing critical race theory and drag-queen story hours while voicing a set of economic concerns more typically associated with the left, supporting child subsidies and industrial policy.

Depending on your point of view, NatCons were either attempting to add intellectual heft to Trumpism or trying to reverse engineer an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s lizard-brain populism. Either way, it was a difficult, frequently humiliating task. Trump proved to be a vexing ideological lodestar—aggressively anti-intellectual in his attitudes and consistently inconsistent in his views. Which is where Carlson came in. Each night on Fox, he articulated a populist-nationalist ideology that was far more coherent than anything being offered by Trump himself.

Carlson’s world view, which was eventually described in much of the press as Trumpism without Trump, mixed anti-immigrant and oftentimes outright racist tropes with a clinical dissection of consumer capitalism and its deleterious effects on American families, the working class, and civic society in general. It was a highbrow version of white grievance which painted the country as imperilled by a callous ruling élite and the violent migrant hordes infiltrating its borders. Carlson, with his staple rep ties and Rolex, assumed the role of class traitor. The entire package was irresistible to NatCons, who began to view him, as much as Trump, as their standard-bearer.

Carlson’s show specialized in finding relatively unknown liberals for him to slap down; it also excelled at taking stories, arguments, and conspiracy theories from the far-right corners of the internet and putting them in prime time. On one episode, Carlson would run a segment about Romanian immigrants (he referred to them less kindly) who had settled in a Pennsylvania town and who “defecate in public, chop the heads off chickens, leave trash everywhere, and more.” On another night, he’d complain in his monologue that America’s leaders insist that “we’ve got a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor . . . even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided.” Just days after a racist white gunman killed twenty-three people in an attack on Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in Texas, Carlson insisted that “white supremacy” was “actually not a real problem in America” and that it was, in fact, “a hoax.” In the summer of 2018, Carlson devoted multiple segments to South African land-reform policy, falsely claiming that the country’s Black-led government was seizing the farms of white South Africans because, according to him, “they are the wrong skin color.” He went on, “That is literally the definition of racism. Racism is what our élites say they dislike most.” (Seven years later, the plight of white South Africans became the core of the second Trump Administration’s refugee-resettlement policy.)

In 2019, Carlson devoted an eleven-minute monologue to the woes of Sidney, Nebraska, which had once thrived as the headquarters of the sporting-goods chain Cabela’s. After Cabela’s merged with Bass Pro Shops, the headquarters was closed, costing a town of six thousand people more than two thousand jobs. The merger, Carlson explained, was done at the behest of a hedge fund run by the billionaire Republican megadonor and Jewish philanthropist Paul Singer, which had taken an ownership stake in Cabela’s and netted nearly ninety million dollars after the merger drove up the retailer’s short-term share prices. This sort of “vulture capitalism,” Carlson told his viewers, “bears no resemblance whatsoever to the capitalism we were promised in school. It creates nothing. It destroys entire cities. It couldn’t be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United States? The short answer: because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our political process.”

Mike Enoch, a prominent white supremacist, shouted out Carlson’s remarks about Singer on his podcast, “The Daily Shoah,” noting that Carlson had begun the segment by describing how the notoriously antisemitic Henry Ford once raised the wages of his workers. “If you didn’t catch the German-shepherd whistles where he praised Henry Ford and then went into a diatribe of a Jewish financier,” Enoch said approvingly, “I don’t know what universe you’re existing in.”

Blake Neff, the head writer at “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was responsible for many of the words that came out of Carlson’s mouth. As he once boasted to Dartmouth’s alumni magazine, “Anything he’s reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me.” The anti-immigrant and racist sentiments that dominated the show came naturally to Neff. At the same time that Neff was writing for Carlson—first as a reporter at the Daily Caller and then as a staffer on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”—he was also writing posts on a racist and sexist message board called AutoAdmit. Posting under the username CharlesXII, the eighteenth-century Swedish warrior king who later became an icon for Swedish neo-Nazis, Neff joked about “foodie faggots” and proposed an “Urban business idea: He Didn’t Do Muffin!,” which would sell “Sandra Bland’s Sugar-free Shortbreads!”—a reference to the twenty-eight-year-old Black woman who, in 2015, was taken into custody by a Texas state trooper after a traffic stop and was later found dead in her jail cell, becoming an early symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Neff agreed with other AutoAdmit commenters who argued that Michael Brown deserved to be killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, complaining that “the violent criminals are even MORE heroic to Black people.” He claimed that the four liberal congresswomen known as the Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—want to “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES.” In another post, Neff warned that “once Democrats have the majorities to go full F**K WHITEY, things are going to get really wacky really quickly” and lamented that “there’s a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin.”

In July, 2020, after a CNN reporter discovered Neff’s AutoAdmit posts, Neff resigned from Fox News. (Years later, Neff, who went on to work as a producer on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, would maintain that he was “the least racist person on AutoAdmit,” noting that, unlike many of the site’s users, “I never posted the N-word.”) Carlson, for his part, said that he was unaware of the posts. “We don’t endorse those words,” he said. “They have no connection to this show.” But Neff’s AutoAdmit habit was not a secret to some people he worked with. At the Daily Caller, Neff bragged about his posts to at least one colleague. “He was really proud of his AutoAdmit persona,” a former Caller staffer remembered. And Neff’s connection to Carlson was not a secret on AutoAdmit, either. In 2017, when Scott Greer, who had been a colleague of Carlson’s and Neff’s at the Daily Caller, appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to promote his book “No Campus for White Men,” Neff dropped a favorite AutoAdmit catchphrase—“the sweet treats of scholarship”—into Carlson’s script introducing Greer. Neff’s fellow AutoAdmit members didn’t miss the Easter egg. “We maed [sic] it,” one wrote.

An analysis of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer found that, between November, 2016, and November, 2018, Carlson was mentioned in two hundred and sixty-five of its articles, most of them featuring clips of his show, with titles like “Tucker FILLS Liberal Kike with LEAD for Demanding Gun Control” and “Tucker Carlson FORCES Fat Beaner Whore to CHOKE to DEATH on GREASY TACOS.” (Hannity, by comparison, was the subject of twenty-seven Daily Stormer articles during that period; Laura Ingraham, another of the network’s prime-time hosts, was the subject of four.) As one blog post on the site celebrated, “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Other than the language used, he is covering all our talking points.”

On a Monday morning in April, 2023, Carlson was at his winter home in Florida, having just sent his producers the first draft of his monologue for that evening’s show—a lengthy attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom Carlson liked to refer to as Sandy Cortez, invoking her high-school nickname—when he got a call from Fox News’ chief executive, Suzanne Scott. “We’re taking you off the air,” Scott told him. He was being fired. Scott offered him the opportunity to include his own statement in a press release that Fox would send out in fifteen minutes announcing his departure, a face-saving gesture that would make it seem like the decision was a mutual parting of ways. Carlson refused. If Fox was firing him, he wanted the world to know. When the phone call was over, he sent an e-mail to his staff—known inside Fox as the Tuckertroop—telling them the news.

In the days after Carlson’s firing, there was much speculation, both inside and outside of Fox, about the reasons behind it. Six days earlier, the network had settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, which alleged that Fox News hosts, including Carlson, had knowingly aired false accusations that the company’s voting machines were used to change vote totals in the 2020 Presidential election. Some thought that Carlson’s dismissal had to do with offensive comments that were revealed during discovery, including a text message in which Carlson reportedly called Irena Briganti, the head of Fox News’ media-relations department, a “cunt.” Others wondered whether it could have been because of another lawsuit, brought by Abby Grossberg, a former head of booking on Carlson’s show, who accused him and the network of creating a hostile work environment. (Fox settled the suit for twelve million dollars.) Still others speculated that it had something to do with a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, a January 6th protester from Arizona who was at the center of a conspiracy theory—amplified by Carlson—that Epps was a government provocateur placed in the crowd to spur an insurrection. In fact, a sympathetic profile of Epps had appeared on “60 Minutes” the night before Carlson’s firing. Perhaps Murdoch, who, at ninety-two, fit squarely in the CBS show’s viewer demographic, had seen it and got spooked. (Epps’s suit was eventually dismissed.)

Among Fox hosts and executives, stories circulated about a recent dinner Carlson had attended at Murdoch’s California vineyard, with Murdoch and his then fiancée, Ann Lesley Smith, during which Smith, who believed that Carlson was “a messenger from God,” treated him as such. A few days later, Murdoch cancelled his engagement to Smith. Now, the theory went, he was cancelling Carlson. For his part, Carlson later claimed that his firing was part of Fox’s settlement with Dominion; as he told his biographer, Chadwick Moore, he believed that Murdoch had refused Dominion’s demand to fork over a billion dollars, and got the plaintiffs to accept seven hundred and eighty-seven million dollars and his scalp instead. None of the explanations were especially satisfying.

In any case, Carlson did not have the luxury of perseverating on what befell him. The 2024 Presidential election was just eighteen months away. Carlson had assumed, with good reason, that “Tucker Carlson Tonight” would be a major player in that race. But now that he’d lost his Fox megaphone he’d have to come up with a new vehicle. Complicating matters, Fox was keeping him under contract through 2024, with the express intent of preventing him from hosting a show on another network. That meant he’d still be making the nearly twenty million dollars a year that Fox owed him, but he wouldn’t be able to take his act to Newsmax or OANN.

Fortunately for Carlson, he had no shortage of other offers that didn’t run afoul of Fox’s noncompete clause. Just hours after his firing, Elon Musk—who, six months earlier, had bought Twitter and was reshaping the social-media platform into a Republican hub, rebranding it as X—called him to talk about a deal. So did Carlson’s friend Omeed Malik, who runs 1789 Capital, a venture-capital firm that invests in conservative companies. “The world is his oyster,” one person who was talking to Carlson as the offers came in said. “Many billionaires and others with deep pockets would be eager to fund a new venture.” Carlson immediately began laying the groundwork for a digital-media company, the Tucker Carlson Network, securing Musk’s help to boost Carlson’s content on X and fifteen million dollars in seed money from Malik’s firm and other investors. He became a frequent visitor to Doha, Dubai, and Riyadh—cities that he once derided as “chintzy” and “prefab”—where he developed relationships with other ultra-wealthy individuals. (Carlson has said that his network has not received any Gulf money.)

Without Fox’s built-in audience—not to mention the guardrails of a publicly traded media company—Carlson’s new show plunged further into the fever swamps. On one episode, he hosted the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who had been successfully sued by the families of Sandy Hook victims for claiming that the shooting was a hoax; Carlson told his viewers that Jones “is not a crazy person.” On another, he interviewed Larry Sinclair, an ex-con who, during the 2008 Presidential campaign, made a long since discredited claim that he had smoked crack and had sex with Barack Obama when Obama was a little-known state senator. For another episode, Carlson travelled to Romania to conduct a friendly two-and-a-half-hour interview with the misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate, who was under house arrest while awaiting trial for allegations of human trafficking and rape. Carlson had argued that Tate’s arrest was “obviously a setup” and the “definition of a human-rights violation” while repeatedly hailing him as a role model for young men. (Prosecutors in Britain eventually charged Tate with human trafficking, rape, and assault. He is also under investigation in the U.S. Tate has denied all wrongdoing.)

Hatless man talking to salesman in hat shop.

But Carlson’s continued prominence was largely tied to his proximity to Trump. At Fox, he had been one of the network’s only stars who maintained a personal and professional distance from the President. Although he frequently parroted Trumpian talking points, Carlson tended to praise Trump’s policies rather than the man himself. He didn’t socialize with the President, and he sometimes even let Trump’s phone calls go to voice mail. (“Tucker was the hot girl that didn’t want to fuck him,” one former White House official said.) Toward the end of Trump’s first term, Carlson actually turned against the President. He criticized Trump on air for his handling of COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests; after January 6th, he described Trump in a text message to a Fox colleague as “a demonic force, a destroyer.”

But, after leaving Fox, Carlson could no longer afford to keep Trump at bay. He needed Trump—and, as it turned out, Trump needed him. Their interests were especially aligned in their mutual disdain for Fox News. Trump had not forgiven Murdoch for trying to disappear him after January 6th—“We want to make Trump a non person,” Murdoch wrote to a former Fox executive—and for using his network to try to boost Ron DeSantis’s 2024 Presidential prospects. Trump accused Fox of having gone to the “dark side.” And so when Fox executives began lobbying for Trump to appear at the first G.O.P. Presidential-primary debate, which the network was hosting, in August, 2023—knowing that, without Trump, ratings would suffer—Trump strung them along for months. All the while, he was talking to Carlson about some sort of counterprogramming. Eventually, Carlson and Trump settled on a pretaped interview that was posted on X at the same time that Fox News carried the debate.

Their collaboration continued for the rest of the campaign. Carlson helped persuade Trump to pick Vance as his running mate. At the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, Trump invited Carlson to sit in his private box on the first night and gave him a prime-time speaking slot on its final, most watched night. A week before the election, Carlson spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. And when Carlson launched his own sixteen-city tour, that fall, Trump made an appearance as the evening’s “special guest” in Arizona.

After the 2024 election, Carlson wielded a shocking amount of power in Trump’s Washington. He subscribed to the old Beltway dictum that “personnel is policy.” In multiple postelection visits to Mar-a-Lago, and countless phone calls and texts, he vigorously weighed in on how he believed Trump should fill out his Cabinet and staff, pushing in particular for the appointments of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services and Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National Intelligence. One adviser to the President said, “Trump wanted Tucker’s opinion, and Tucker didn’t ever hesitate to offer it.”

But there have been limits to Carlson’s influence. Last summer, as Trump contemplated assisting Israel in its war against Iran, Carlson pleaded with him to keep the U.S. out of the conflict. An attack on Iran, he predicted in a lengthy post on X, would lead to thousands of American deaths, thirty-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, and the collapse of the U.S. economy; it would also, he said, be a “profound betrayal” of Trump’s supporters, who voted for him in part because they viewed him as “a peace candidate.” In the end, Carlson’s protests were for naught. Trump authorized U.S. air strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, and dismissed Carlson as “kooky.” “I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying,” Trump told reporters at one point. “Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.”

Months later, when Carlson interviewed Fuentes, they both decided not to dwell on Trump’s apostasy—instead choosing to praise him for creating what Fuentes called “this new dialectic” that allowed them and others to see the perfidy of Israel more clearly.

“Trump planted the seed,” Fuentes said.

“And the seed was America First,” Carlson replied. “So, once you accept that, a lot of the way we’re doing things becomes impossible to support or justify.”

“Right, the contradiction becomes apparent,” Fuentes said. “It gets moved to the center, and it becomes unignorable if you’re consistent.”

Trump, for his part, appeared to appreciate their discretion. As Carlson was being denounced by various conservatives for sitting down with Fuentes, the President defended him. “I think he’s good,” Trump said of Carlson while speaking to reporters on Air Force One. “You can’t tell him who to interview. I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes—I don’t know much about him. But if he wants to do it, get the word out, let him. People have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.”

Around the same time, as Trump threatened regime change against Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, Carlson again had critical words for the President’s foreign policy, but his focus was not on the risks of overseas entanglements or concerns about unchecked executive power. Removing Maduro, Carlson theorized, was a means for what he called “globo-homo” forces to reverse Venezuela’s ban on gay marriage, noting that “the U.S.-backed opposition leader”—María Corina Machado—“who would take Maduro’s place if he were taken out, is, of course, pretty eager to get gay marriage in Venezuela.”

But in January, after Trump sent in a team of Special Forces to seize Maduro and bring him to the U.S. to face drug-trafficking and other charges, Carlson offered qualified support for the military action. He hailed the Trump Administration’s decision to turn Venezuela over to Maduro’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez—“not because they love her,” Carlson explained, “but because they’re in favor of stability over chaos.” And he praised Trump for his candor in claiming U.S. control of Venezuela’s oil reserves, saying that “there’s something kind of thrilling about that.” Left unspoken was Carlson’s presumable relief that, even in Maduro’s absence, globo-homo forces do not appear to have established a beachhead in Caracas.

Thirty years ago, as a young magazine reporter, Carlson liked to make sport of Joseph Sobran, the conservative writer who’d been William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s protégé at National Review but, in the early nineteen-nineties, was fired from the magazine for his anti-Israel and antisemitic views. Carlson would joke that he’d run into a rambling, dishevelled Sobran at a suburban Denny’s, where he sat by himself in a booth, holding court before an audience of no one. It is tempting to think that Carlson has followed in Sobran’s ignominious footsteps, that he has suffered the same fate as the man he once ridiculed. Except Carlson is not sitting in an empty restaurant booth. He has the ears of billionaires and heads of state. He is selling out basketball arenas and constantly streaming onto our phones. He has descended into madness, but he is speaking to millions. ♦

This is drawn from “Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.”