But mainstream advertisers largely avoided the show commercial breaks involved a heavy dose of. How many people are there, really, who see the world the way Carlson does? His audience-about three million viewers-was formidable by the standards of cable news. during the Biden era is whether all this adds up to a viable platform for a major political party. Conservative politicians across the country adopted them in arguing against public-health authorities, rights for trans people, teaching about race and gender in schools, and “woke capitalism.” DeSantis, Trump’s main opponent as the conservative standard-bearer, has spent much of the past year attacking Disney, one of the largest private employers in Florida, which, under pressure from its employees, had protested the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law the anti-Disney campaign escalated when Carlson said that the corporation was acting like a “sex offender.”
What these initiatives shared was not just a political orientation but an apocalyptic sensibility-Carlson once called abortion “human sacrifice”-and a foxhole atmosphere in which the future of conservative politics depended on relentless resistance. Not long afterward, Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, took him up on it.
The host also suggested that, if people who live in places like Martha’s Vineyard were so keen on diversity, someone should send undocumented immigrants there. Carlson grilled Governor Greg Abbott, of Texas, about why he hadn’t called up more National Guard soldiers to the border, and Abbott did so. After Senator Ted Cruz called the January 6th insurrection a “violent terrorist attack,” Carlson forced him to walk back that comment. Vance rode regular appearances on it to a seat in the U.S. But Carlson was smart enough to identify ideas that could travel.īoth the movement against the teaching of critical race theory and the right-wing interest in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary blossomed on Carlson’s show. They could be racist (stoking fears about the “great replacement”), bizarre (proposing that men tan their testicles as a solution for apparently declining levels of testosterone), and fixated on liberal power in a way that could be hard for an unindoctrinated viewer to follow. Michael Brendan Dougherty, of National Review Online, wrote, “Since January 2016, Tucker Carlson has consistently and relentlessly advanced one thesis about American politics: ‘This isn’t about Donald Trump, but our corrupt liberal elite.’ ”Įver since Trump lost first the political initiative, in the twists of a COVID crisis that he could never get ahead of, and then the Presidency, to Joe Biden, Carlson’s programs have been where the right’s future was incubated. “The Tucker Realignment,” Ross Douthat called that experiment, in the Times, adding that young conservatives “increasingly start out where Carlson ended up-in a posture of reflexive distrust, where if an important American institution takes a position, the place to be is probably on the other side.” Part of what was appealing about Carlson’s point of view to thinkers on the right was that, in his curiosity about fringe ideas and his occasional highlighting of antiwar ( Ukraine) and anti-corporate ( Silicon Valley) themes, he was testing out a form of conservative populism that did not hinge on Donald Trump personally.
When Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News last week-so suddenly that he reportedly learned about it only ten minutes before the world did-the most acute notes of regret came from young conservative intellectuals who had seen his nightly hour of programming as an interesting, and perhaps essential, experiment in what right-wing populism could be.
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