Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Tucker Carlson’s conversion story

What Happened to Tucker Carlson?

The transformation of a once promising, if conservative, magazine journalist into a conspiracy-minded talking head.

Back in the George W. Bush years, my then-wife and I had dinner in New York City with Tucker Carlson. At the time, he was settling in as cohost of CNN’s Crossfire after a rocky tour through the cable-hosting wars and savoring his re-anointment as a political insider and media gatekeeper. Over drinks, he sounded off on the invasion of Iraq, which he was then souring on (along with much of the rest of the country) after having enthusiastically supported it. He also derided the GOP’s all-in crusade against gay marriage, which would prove by some accounts key to Bush’s subsequent reelection in spite of the Iraq debacle. And he regaled us with media gossip, recounting the tale of a prominent cable talking head whom he’d heard clumsily trying to burnish his standing as a political junkie by announcing his eagerness to cover the “Iowa primary” and the “New Hampshire caucus.”

Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind

Such encounters weren’t all that remarkable for the time, particularly as the Bush White House sank into greater chaos and corruption, and its erstwhile fellow travelers strained to distance themselves from its crimes and imperial folly. Yet as my then-wife and I compared notes afterward, we agreed that Carlson seemed to be verging on a significant revision of his worldview; he appeared to be aligning with the then-trendy-in-DC niche movement of “liberaltarianism.”

Well, that was then. And here we are now. After a few more turns of cable TV’s wheel of fortune, Carlson landed in the heart of Fox News’ prime-time lineup, hymning the MAGA project of national reclamation to his increasingly right-wing audience while peddling ghoulish campfire tales about the plagues of wokeness, critical race theory, open borders, and other damning specimens of anti-American liberal groupthink. Even after his unceremonious dismissal from Fox, Carlson continued his strange trajectory ever more rightward. Setting up permanent shop in the fever swamps of the conspiracy-minded far right, he palled around with Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán and lent his podcasting platform to the Nazi-Groyper influencer Nick Fuentes—a move that inadvertently sparked a still-raging civil war within the Heritage Foundation, the right’s most influential think tank.

Carlson’s transformation from an ingratiating bow-tied pundit into a plaid-and-khaki-clad Nazi enabler is the subject of Jason Zengerle’s Hated by All the Right People, a chronicle of Carlson’s career that is meant to double, as the book’s subtitle suggests, as a broader account of how the intellectual project of American conservatism has gone off the rails. As a straight media biography, Zengerle’s book is an instructive study in the amoral rounds of ambitious striving in the greenrooms and studio sets of cable TV—a kind of What Makes Sammy Run? for the chattering classes of the new millennium. But as a saga of the right’s intellectual decline, it’s less persuasive—not because Carlson isn’t a representative movement intellectual, but because the American right has long since parted company with political life as a forum of ideas. The watchword for the US conservative movement, at least since the rise of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, has been partisan bloodsport and the promotion of an unappeasable and demagogic politics of cultural grievance. Carlson’s descent, then, isn’t the “unraveling” that Zengerle posits it to be so much as a fulfillment of political destiny: In order to become the maximal Trumpist mouthpiece that he is today—and, indeed, an oft-rumored successor to Trump—Carlson had to relinquish the skeptical and heterodox cast of mind he was trying out during his Crossfire incarnation and become instead a hard-line culture warrior of the MAGA blood-and-soil vintage.

What’s striking about this shift is that it was not accompanied by any notable bouts of introspection and self-doubt or by a conventional political conversion narrative; it simply involved his reading from a different set of teleprompters. In the end, Carlson is not someone who relishes the hatred of others but rather is an inveterate people pleaser. Even in his most hate-filled diatribes, he tends to convulse with giggles and revert to his natural preppy, back-slapping mien. That he does so while indulging Nazis, white nationalists, dictators, and assorted edgelord authoritarians is an indictment of our mediasphere, our collective moral compass, and our political imaginations, but it’s largely the same Tucker Carlson at the center of the squalor.

All that said, Carlson’s public career, as Zengerle recounts it, is a compelling story. He grew up in Southern California as the eldest son of the TV journalist Dick Carlson, who would go on to head the Voice of America under Ronald Reagan. Carlson’s parents divorced after his father left Los Angeles for a job in San Diego and his mother, Lisa, stayed behind to savor the 1970s bohemian scene in Laurel Canyon. Dick would soon get custody of Tucker and his brother, Buckley (named for the conservative media icon William F. Buckley Jr.), after Lisa failed to show up for the hearing.

Carlson remained estranged from his birth mother for the remainder of her life, but his father loomed large in his upbringing, schooling his sons in the aristocratic comportment while also ensuring they were well versed in alpha-male exploits. Zengerle writes that Dick would put his sons atop the roof of his station wagon “as he gunned the land yacht’s V-8 engine and careened down a dirt road.” In addition, “the nannies he hired were usually men—including a former Korean intelligence officer whom Tucker and Buckley addressed as Colonel Kwon and who instructed the boys on how to disembowel someone. Dick’s etiquette advice wasn’t just about the proper way to write thank-you notes, but also included tips like how, in prison, ‘the cigarette pack is your friend.’”

Carlson’s upbringing, in short, was quirky but privileged. After his parents’ divorce, his father married Patricia Swanson, heir to the eponymous TV-dinner fortune, and the couple packed the high-school-age Tucker off, first to an abortive stint at a Swiss boarding school and then to St. George’s School in Rhode Island. At St. George’s, Carlson acquired a “reputation as both a conservative and a contrarian” while also cultivating a hybrid prepster-hippie lifestyle, getting high and listening to the Grateful Dead as he dated the headmaster’s daughter, Susie Andrews, whom he would go on to marry.

Picking up the first whiff of potential inner conflict in Carlson’s biography, Zengerle pounces. Carlson’s alliance with Andrews, and his dutiful attendance at the Episcopalian services led by her dad, who was also a priest in the faith, seemed to signal Carlson’s search for a “stability sorely lacking in his own family”—but “when that stability became stifling, he returned to his group of male friends to play Hacky Sack, listen to the Dead, and smoke pot and drink Kool-Aid mixed with vodka. Indeed, Carlson seemed almost to suffer from a double consciousness.”

Nor was that all, Zengerle theorizes. Carlson’s lackluster academic performance at St. George’s—already a “second-tier” New England prep school—foreclosed admission to an Ivy League college, and so he landed instead at another second-
tier institution of the WASP aristocracy: Trinity College in Connecticut. Another proto-MAGA marker was thus laid down: “His failure to gain entrée to the Ivy League gnawed at him,” Zengerle writes, “and would, decades later, serve as a touchstone for his populist ideology.” These labored forays into psychological portent are a sign not only that Zengerle wasn’t able to........

© The Nation