At the turn of the century, Tucker Carlson was a highly respected political journalist, the type he idolized ever since plucking a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from a family friend’s nightstand when he was 12. He published a defining profile of George W. Bush in 1999 and wrote a scathing piece on the powerful anti-tax activist advocate Grover Norquist. Today, Carlson has come to embody fear and loathing: His YouTube video podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show, routinely platforms conspiracy theorists, far-right activists, and straight-up nutjobs going on about demonology. He is also more powerful than ever, his ideas arguably influencing government policy on a federal level.
New Yorker staff writer and former GQ correspondent Jason Zengerle documents Carlson’s baffling swerve in his first book, Hated by All the Right People, out this week on Crooked Media Reads. The book begins in the days when Carlson had a former Korean intelligence officer as a nanny—a man who taught him how to disembowel people—and continues through his teen years, when he and his friends made improvised hand grenades, huffed ether, and obsessed over the Grateful Dead. Carlson goes to boarding school, makes it big in journalism, and breaks into TV after being asked to do a daytime spot about the O.J. Simpson trial (he had no idea what the case was about).
There are a series of events that could have set off his Joker arc, starting with his primetime humiliation at the hands of Jon Stewart in 2004. But every time he falls from grace, he returns bigger, brasher, and less and less recognizable. After hosting thoughtful debates on Crossfire, he sinks into peddling hateful slop on his publication The Daily Caller. After being fired from Fox in 2023, he strikes out with his own YouTube page, hosting global authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and homegrown kooks like Florida governor candidate James Fishback.
Zengerle tore through thousands of pages of transcripts and spoke with over 100 people, and though Carlson himself refused to be interviewed, the results are thrillingly revealing, at times shocking. There are details about his father arranging for Carlson to visit a brothel visit at age 14 and sources who say Carlson drew in Donald Trump essentially by negging him—being “the hot girl that didn’t want to fuck him.”
The book is about more than Carlson; it tracks the conservative establishment’s descent into delirium, and the politics mediascape shifting from cable news to podcasts and influencers. For the author—who met Carlson when he was an intern at The New Republic, in Carlson’s magazine journalist era—the story is also a puzzle he wants to solve. He uses Tucker as a way to grasp how seemingly everything in the US has gone so wildly off the rails.
Jason Zengerle: And I talked to him, not infrequently, in the course of my job. We were not friends, but he was definitely someone who you would talk to because he knows stuff. I actually enjoyed talking with him. Because even though he’s been in TV world for so long, he still has the muscle memory of a really good magazine writer. Beyond just providing info, he would help me think about stories differently. I think he probably missed magazine writing.
But he was not someone I’d thought of as a book-length subject. Then having that conversation with Chris, my agent, mentioning to him that Tucker was the one guy who had the charisma and the entertainment chops that Trump has, in addition to having the ideology, that sort of rang a bell. Because at that point in time [in 2021], we all assumed Trump was done, he could never come back from January 6th. It was like, alright, who’s gonna inherit the Trump voters? All the people positioning themselves to inherit those voters, whether it was Ron DeSantis or Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley—they don’t have what Trump has.
Some of Trump’s appeal is ideological, but some of it’s just from a pure entertainment-value perspective. You think about who could hold the attention of a rally for an hour and a half? Not many people besides Trump—but I do think Tucker is someone who could.
Well, the arc definitely changed ’cause he got fired from Fox in the middle of it. There was a time where people thought he was gonna just fade away into irrelevance, which is what traditionally happens with people who leave Fox. Even people who were as big as he was at the time. I mean, when was the last time you thought about Bill O’Reilly?
I’m sure his firing from Fox was not something he particularly wanted or enjoyed, but I think in some weird way it was a blessing in disguise, because he got a head start in operating in this new streaming, podcasting, influencer world, when Fox and all cable news is a dying industry.
I figured the book would end with him sitting at Fox and being powerful and Donald Trump not being there. Even when he got fired from Fox, I don’t know—maybe it was motivated reasoning on my part—but I really didn’t think he was gonna disappear. When people were predicting his demise, I was like, no, this guy’s too savvy of an operator. He’s too talented.
That’s a really smart point, because everybody always talks about how the second Trump presidency has no guardrails. And I think it’s the same thing with Tucker. I mean, he wasn’t reined in that much at Fox—he got away with things at Fox that other people didn’t.
It was interesting talking to people at Fox, when I was starting this book and Tucker was still there. The Tucker critics inside the network, who were unhappy with how far he was going with some of the race and the January 6th stuff, they were pining for the days of Roger Ailes. You know, “Roger never would’ve let this happen.” Which, coming on the heels of the whole sexual harassment scandal [that he resigned over], was interesting to hear people say. They would always caveat it: “He did really bad things, but he would’ve controlled Tucker.”
That said, there were still some guardrails. It’s a publicly traded company, he did have nominal bosses. Now he can do whatever he wants, and he’s incentivized to do increasingly outrageous stuff to maintain the attention. At Fox he had a built-in audience, but he doesn’t have that anymore. So he has to keep on either having more and more outrageous guests, whether it’s Putin or Fuentes or Andrew Tate, or say more and more outrageous things because you’re on this hamster wheel of trying to stay relevant in the world of the Claviculars.
I think he believes what he’s saying, but I also think he’s trying to navigate this media space and this political space where the more extreme you are, the more successful you are.
I hope he’d think it’s fair. I really did try to make this a fairly nuanced, objective portrait. I didn’t want to write a hate read. This is not like, “Tucker Carlson is a big fat idiot.” Although he’s not so fat anymore.
I wonder…it would be quite something if he’s getting injections for that but not taking the COVID vaccine.
I wanted this to be a critical look at him and to take him seriously. That’s what I told him when I first approached him, and he seemed receptive. He said, “I wanna talk to you for it, I wanna cooperate, but I don’t know if Fox will let me.” We went back and forth on that for a long time and it became clear that he was gonna use Fox as the excuse for not talking to me. And then after he was fired, I reached out to him again and he just ignored me.
Fortunately, I had this history with him and I talked to so many other reporters over the years. I talked to him a lot—I mean, we were not friends by any stretch of the imagination, he had much better friends who were more mainstream news reporters. But I understood his thinking at various points in his career. And then also…. He’s discussing his own interior thoughts on [like] Joe Rogan and Megan Kelly and Theo Von. There were questions I wanted to ask him that I would oftentimes find someone else [already] did.
I don’t know this for sure, but in the course of me doing this book, it seemed that he tried to preempt it by getting a conservative writer to do a quickie biography of him, which is called Tucker by Chadwick Moore. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it did have basic biographical details that no one had. They were in there ’cause he told Chadwick Moore.
Yeah. It’s obviously not a fiction book or anything, but I wanted there to be characters whose arcs you could trace along with Tucker’s. One of the things that interested me is how he’s wound up in a completely different place than when he started, but so have all these other people he worked with at the Weekly Standard, like Bill Kristol. The book’s about Tucker, but it was also about all these institutions and this cohort, and how they’ve processed these developments and respond oftentimes differently to the incentive structures.
Part of the appeal of the book was, for folks who only know Tucker Carlson post-2017, introducing them to this guy who you probably would’ve liked a lot if you had read him back in the Weekly Standard days, or knew he was the person who made Rachel Maddow’s television career. I liked presenting a fuller picture of him that is not a caricature.
Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, Kristol’s not a conservative anymore.
Yeah, and there’s something about that.… I don’t necessarily think that’s a positive, to change your whole worldview that dramatically just because of Donald Trump. The Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg project to me is pretty interesting because they’re still conservative, but they’re not Trumpy, and maybe there’s no such thing anymore as being a conservative without Trump. And maybe the thing they’re trying to do is completely impossible and kind of a fiction. But I think it’s noteworthy that they haven’t abandoned all of their conservative views and principles just because they don’t like Donald Trump.
I really think if he was born like 20 or 30 years earlier, he would’ve been a George Plimpton type. He was a really good writer and reporter and he’s very curious and extremely charming. I think he had the talent to be one of those writers he idolized, whether it was Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson.
I think he just came along too late because the status that those people had and the influence and power and money they had, it wasn’t achievable anymore through writing. He recognized a lot earlier than others, including people like me, that writing was not the way to go, print was a dying industry, and he had to move out of it.
I don’t know about his politics. He was a contrarian, that’s sort of the throughline in his career. I don’t know where that takes you politically. I mean, god—he could be like Walter Kirn now, right, like still writing. I would hope that’s not where he would’ve ended up.
I wouldn’t see him starting to support DEI and stuff, he’s not gonna swing back to the left for the sake of contrarianism. I mean, his contrarian takes have become federal policy basically, and [that] makes his contrarianism a lot less attractive and charming. It’s one thing to muse about closing the borders and deporting people, and now you have ICE arresting people.
At the same time, he does show interesting flashes of humanity. I thought the way he responded to the Renee Good shooting was admirable, honestly. Talking about this as a person who was killed, like that’s not something you should celebrate. It’s a really low bar that I’m setting here. But he’s not as bloodthirsty as some of the people on the right these days.
I think the Joker arc is legit when it comes to the Jon Stewart thing. That is a real formative moment of him being humiliated. Going back and talking to some of the people in the elite political media circles who he was all very friendly with, I didn’t get the sense that people backed away or disowned him after the Jon Stewart thing, but I think he felt they did. And that started to breed some resentment that, mixed with his contrarianism, curdled into this thing we see today.
The journalist thing—that’s interesting, I hadn’t thought about that being a genuine moment of resentment. I think he [mostly] saw it as an opportunity to play a prank that would get eyeballs. At that point he was recognizing the value of trolling, and how creating enemies and outrage would be a boon to him. That’s the whole idea of “Hated by All the Right People”…like the fact that you pissed off liberals will make you appealing to conservatives.
It was a really huge “scoop” for The Daily Caller and they milked it for everything it was worth. It led to a surge in traffic and got him on the Drudge Report. It made him think differently about trolling, and I think you saw him carry that forward throughout the rest of his career.
Exactly, yeah. This was an early instance of it.
Crossfire was a rough show in some ways, but it was also cordial, everybody was friends at the end. Crossfire was also a little bit more of a contest of equals. The palookas that he was finding to have on his Fox News primetime show at the very beginning were so overmatched, like some obscure academic or low-level activist. He would have them on just to humiliate them.
The thing about Tucker, he’s always been a really charming, friendly guy who I think did genuinely value conversation and who could get along with anyone. But the premise of his Fox show was holding power to account, and the difficulty for him was that Republicans controlled the government. He didn’t wanna hold their feet to the fire, so he would pretend power existed in academia or in activist circles, and he would get these people who were not powerful themselves and not really an intellectual or performative match for him.
Even the way he did it—on Crossfire, it was a wide shot of the desk and close-in shots of people talking, but you couldn’t really see the reactions of people unless they’re in the wide shot. The way they set it up on Tucker’s primetime show, where you have frame by frame, you would constantly see Tucker’s reaction as this person was talking and making an idiot of themselves. That was half the appeal, the facial trolling he was doing. It stopped working because no one would go on his show. They’re like, “I’m not gonna go get humiliated.”
The Fishback thing will be really fascinating to see. If there’s ever anybody running a pure Tucker campaign, it’s him. I mean, some people tried it, like this guy named Blake Masters who ran for Senate in 2022, and JD Vance did to a certain degree too, and I think is still doing it today. But Fishback just takes it to a whole other level.
The Cruz thing was so interesting because he hadn’t done a confrontational interview like that in a long time. I got so many texts and emails from lefty friends who were celebrating, like, “Tucker’s back!” I had one friend who was like, “I’ll forgive all the racism and sexism if he stops the attack on Iran.”
I had the same take as you, that it was Tucker bending the knee to Fuentes; they were having this fight, with Tucker saying he was a gay fed and Fuentes saying that Tucker was a fed. Tucker was losing, basically. The way it was playing out online and social media, the Groypers were not taking Tucker’s side. Tucker, over the course of his career, has demonstrated a pretty acute political, professional radar about where he needs to be to position himself for success.
I think his calculus is that he can’t afford to lose the Groypers, that you can’t be successful in conservative media and conservative politics without the support of neo-Nazis, for all intents and purposes.
I think he is popular with the MAGA movement. One of the things that makes him popular is his seeming authenticity. Even though he’s a populist, and even though he’s MAGA, he doesn’t pretend to be some everyman. He’s actually in some ways amped up his WASPishness, whether it’s the repp ties and the blazer and the Rolex and Perrier bottles. His shtick is that he’s a class traitor, and it’s actually not that dissimilar from what Trump does. That gives him a lot of credibility and authenticity in the eyes of non-elites because Tucker can say, “I know these people, I was in the room with them, and this is how they’re trying to screw you over.”
The question about whether he would get into politics—I don’t think he just wants to be a podcaster. I think he really wants to change the country. The question for him is, can he achieve that without running for office? Right now, JD Vance says and does everything that Tucker says and does.
The two things that I could see spurring him to run for office, considering how closely aligned he is with Vance, would be, one, Vance creating some distance from Tucker and doing things that Tucker disagrees with. Or two, Tucker coming to the conclusion that no matter how much JD Vance agrees with him, [Vance] is not capable of getting elected, he’s just not a good enough politician. Then I could see Tucker stepping into that space.
Doing it in 2028 doesn’t seem totally likely, because I don’t know if he would come to the conclusion that Vance can’t win before Vance actually ran and tried. But I could see it down the road. I don’t think [Tucker’s] the sort of guy who’s counting his YouTube numbers. I think he has bigger goals and ambitions; to think of him as just a media figure is a mistake. He’s a very sophisticated political operator and a movement leader.
I keep on struggling to answer this question. I wanna say white ethnostate, but I feel like that’s maybe a little too harsh. But I think he has a vision of the United States being a place for legacy or heritage Americans and America-first isolationist foreign policy and a return to manufacturing and a return to a masculine society. One that doesn’t work against white men, a country that’s “safe” for white men. There are all sorts of downstream effects of that when it comes to policy.
In some ways it’s disappointing. Even doing this book, going back and reading his stuff from those days, it held up—I really liked it a lot back then and I hadn’t returned to it for a long time.
There are journalists in our world who were far, far closer to him than I certainly ever was, and I think their disappointment and befuddlement is really profound. I think it occupies a lot of their thoughts. I think he was really close to some of these people and it’s not that different than people who lose a relative to this stuff, whose families are split apart by Trump. There are people who feel like they lost this person they once respected and were extremely close to.