How Tucker Carlson Became the Prophet of MAGA

0:22Jason Zengerle:David Remnick

0:30Jason Zengerle:was fired from Fox News in 2023, he had the largest program on cable news. By far, Carlson could draw around 3 million viewers on a given night, way, way ahead of MSNBC and CNN. After Fox, Carlson brought a new show to YouTube, and his reach has grown. Some of his shows have as many as 7 million views. Carlson has been a standard bearer for the right. Many of us know about the racist conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement, only because of Tucker Carlson. He's quite sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, too. He also celebrated Trump's threats to seize Greenland by force, not because he cares about Greenland, but because that would have wrecked the NATO alliance.

1:13Jason Zengerle:And yet, Carlson doesn't always stick to the MAGA party line. He called the shooting of Rene Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis a tragedy. And he pointed out that the way people in MAGA were making light of it, that was exactly what they had condemned after the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Few people have thought more about Tucker Carlson in recent years than Jason Zengerle, who recently joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. Zengerle's new book is called Hated by All the Right People. And when Zengerle was first coming up as a political journalist, Tucker Carlson was someone he kind of admired.

1:51Jason Zengerle:Let's start at the beginning. How did you first meet Tucker Carlson? What was your relationship? And what was he like then as opposed to now? Yeah.

1:59David Remnick:So I first met Tucker Carlson when I was an intern at the New Republic, and Tucker was working at the Weekly Standard, which was kind of the conservative analog to the New Republic. These are two small circulation political magazines in Washington that I would say punched above their weight in terms of influence. And Tucker was only a few years older than me, but he was already light years ahead of my own career, extremely well-established. He was the hot young writer in Washington. So this was in the late 1990s, I think 1997. And Tucker would come to have lunch with another hotshot young writer in town who worked at the New Republic named Steve Glass.

2:37David Remnick:And while he waited sometimes for Steve to come out of his office, he would entertain the interns. And he was extremely affable, extremely funny. He would tell great stories, kind of give us a peak of the stuff that was going on that, you know, we suspected was going on in Capitol Hill, but we didn't know ourselves. And he was someone we all looked up to and, you know, admired. I think we respected his work.

3:00Jason Zengerle:Why did you guys admire him?

3:02David Remnick:I admired his journalism. I thought he was a really talented writer and a pretty brave reporter. He was willing to take on sacred cows in the conservative movement. I mean, he wrote a profile of George W. Bush when Bush was still governor of Texas, was the, you know, presumed frontrunner in the presidential race. And Tucker wrote this, you know, subtly kind of devastating profile that showed Bush to be callow and kind of stupid and stubborn and all these things that, you know, if you paid attention would have revealed Bush, all the things that made him kind of a bad president.

3:40Jason Zengerle:Jason, this is a book about Tucker Carlson. It's also about the rise of partisan media, which has become such a powerful presence in our lives. And it seems that in your view, Tucker Carlson predicted some changes in the media before his peers did. Tell me about that a little bit.

4:00David Remnick:Tucker's always been very good about seeing where things are going. He kind of skates, you know, to where the puck is going to be. And I think that, you know, he first did that when he left print journalism. him. You know, I think he recognized maybe before some other people like myself that, you know, if he wanted to, you know, attain the fame and fortune and power that he clearly did, he was not going to be able to do that in print. So, you know, he left his job as a pretty promising young magazine writer and moved into cable news.

4:29Jason Zengerle:And Tucker Carlson cut his teeth, really, as a journalist, at the Weekly Standard, which was a conservative magazine. Where did he stand on that staff? In other words, was he particularly conservative? Were there signs of what he became early on?

4:44David Remnick:Not really. He was actually kind of one of the more non-ideological members of the staff. He was more of a journalist, of a reporter than an ideologue. I mean, it was a real power-ass staff. I mean, you had, you know, Bill Kristol, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, and Tucker was the guy who was kind of more interested in storytelling. So in 2000, he at one point was the youngest

5:08Jason Zengerle:anchor in CNN's history with a program that was then called the Spin Room. From your perspective, does it seem like he thought of himself as part of mainstream media at this time, or was he starting to kind of separate himself out into some other realm?

5:21David Remnick:No, he was absolutely part of mainstream media and absolutely a member of the, you know, Washington political and media establishment, you know, one of his youngest members, but certainly a member. He was friends with all of the various anchors and swells. He was good buddies with the people on the Hill. He was, you know, he considered himself kind of a key cog in that ecosystem. I mean, Tucker actually had a show on PBS for two years, Tucker Carlson unfiltered. So he was not at all like the person he is today.

5:54Jason Zengerle:So a really formative event in the reputation of Tucker Carlson and probably in his own psyche, although God knows I'm no shrink and even as a biographer, you aren't either. But in 2004 on Crossfire, Jon Stewart joined the show as a guest, creating one of the first really viral video moments ever. Let's take a listen.

6:19David Remnick:I think you're a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring. Let me ask you a question on the news.

6:25Jason Zengerle:Now, this is theater. I mean, it's obvious.

6:27David Remnick:How old are you? 35. And you wear a bow tie. Yeah, I do.

6:31Jason Zengerle:I do. So this is... No, no, I know, I know. You're in the right hand. Let me just go. Now, come on. And listen, I'm not suggesting that you're not a smart guy because those are not easy to tie. But the thing is that you're doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. What impact did that have on Tucker Carlson in that moment? Because I remember it pretty well.

7:00David Remnick:Yeah, I don't know if Tucker Carlson is the person he is today without that moment. I mean, that was such a humiliating experience for him. He was completely blindsided by it. You know, he thought he was friendly with Stewart because I think Jon Stewart used to go on Larry King at the CNN studios when Tucker was waiting around to do the spin room. and he would take smoke breaks outside and Tucker would join him and he thought they were buddies. And I think everybody at Crossfire thought that it was going to be a fun episode. They thought Stewart was in on the joke, basically, that it was all going to be kind of pretend, you know, theater and it wasn't serious.

7:33David Remnick:And, you know, it's really funny when you watch that episode, Paul Vagala, who was the chair on the left, he just kind of shuts up and just lets Stewart go. And Tucker's the only one kind of engaging him. And that's why Stewart went after him that way.

7:47Jason Zengerle:So what was the impact on Carlson?

7:51David Remnick:Well, a few months later, a new president of CNN took over and canceled Crossfire altogether and let Tucker's contract expire. And, you know, basically explained to the New York Times at the time that I agree with Jon Stewart. I think he was right. And it just it was it was just a it was a humiliation for Tucker. And I think that it created in him kind of a bitterness and a resentment because I think a lot of the people that he considered his friends and supporters, you know, people in that kind of D.C.A. political media establishment, they didn't come to his defense. I mean, maybe privately they did, but publicly they didn't.

8:29David Remnick:And I think the resentment that he feels today towards, you know, what he calls legacy media or corporate media, I think a lot of it starts right there.

8:37Jason Zengerle:Something else happened really interesting that seems formative to me in 2009. He went to CPAC, which is the big conservative gathering of the year, and he rebuked them. Let's listen to that.

8:50David Remnick:If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail. You will fail. The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it's also, and it is to its core a liberal paper, it's also a paper that cares about whether they spell people's names right, by and large. It's a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions. That are, that's the truth. You don't believe me? the new york times you don't think why isn't there a pub is what well but i'm not saying they're not i'm merely saying that at the core of their news gathering operation is gathering news and conser no no and conservatives need to do the same yes so what is what is he foretelling there so at the time he gave that speech he was already he had just been fired from MSNBC, and he was plotting to launch a website that eventually was called The Daily Caller.

9:54David Remnick:And his original vision for The Daily Caller was kind of a conservative analog to The Huffington Post. I mean, maybe The Huffington Post more than The New York Times, but if you remember at the time, The Huffington Post was the hot website, and Tucker thought that there was a space for this on the right. And he was working at that time to sort of gin up money for it, but also interest. And I think he was looking for sort of young conservative writers and reporters who were not just kind of pundits or talking heads or ideologues, but who had a dedication to finding out facts. And that was like, he went to give that speech at CPAC.

10:32David Remnick:I mean, he knew what he was going to get there. He knew he was going to get booed, But he thought that the negative reaction would appeal to these serious young conservatives and young conservative journalists and also appeal to sort of the D.C., you know, media elite who he was still a member in good standing in that group. But, you know, I think he was trying to almost sort of say, look, I went into the wilderness on TV for a little while. I'm coming back as a prodigal son. I'm rededicating myself to, you know, serious journalism, facts, things like that. And here I am. And he got a fantastic reception.

11:05I mean, that's, you know, I think it's hard to imagine now, but the people in Washington, the people he now attacks, I mean, they embraced him and they supported him.

11:16David Remnick:And he got all sorts of help and advice from, you know, people at Politico and people at CNN and all these other institutions that wanted him to succeed.

11:27Jason Zengerle:I'm speaking with Jason Zengerle, author of Hated by All the Right People, Tucker Carlson, and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

11:50Jason Zengerle:Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times. our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne Tha God, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

12:21Jason Zengerle:This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Few people have played a bigger role in America's turn to the far right than Tucker Carlson. He was and remains a chief proponent of the so-called Great Replacement idea, the notion that evil forces are conspiring to replace white Christians with racial and religious minorities, thus transforming the United States. I've been speaking today with Jason Zengerle, whose new book about Tucker Carlson is called Hated by All the Right People. Zengerly traces Carlson's path from being a puckish, right-leaning contrarian. He spent time hosting on CNN and even MSNBC and then moved toward the far right.

13:02Jason Zengerle:After he lost his show on MSNBC, Carlson saw an opportunity to start something online where he could do a brand of journalism that was unconstrained by editors and bosses. It was a news and opinion website called The Daily Caller. so he goes and co-founds the daily caller but that begins to take an extremist drift at least to my ear there were pieces that you refer to in your in your book that were published in the wake of Trayvon Martin's murder what happened there well Tucker I think very quickly realized that

13:39David Remnick:this vision he had for this you know fact-based conservative publication was not going to get any traffic. And there was just no, there was no audience for it. So he very quickly pivoted and he, um, all the, most of the original reporters he hired left and he brought in a new crop of reporters. And these men and women were really pretty far out there ideologically. And, um, you know, at the same time that this is going on, Breitbart is, uh, kind of coming onto the scene and Breitbart's having a lot of success with this really kind of inflammatory, you know, pretty much racist coverage of black-on-white crime.

14:17David Remnick:That was kind of this obsession that Breitbart had. And the Daily Caller mimicked that. And the Trayvon Martin shooting, the Daily Caller really went all in on trying to besmirch Martin's reputation, basically, and portray him as a thug or a hothead or violent.

14:34Jason Zengerle:So the discovery is that extremism sells. Yes.

14:38David Remnick:He is looking at the web traffic. He's looking at the metrics, And he's recognizing that what the conservative base wants is racism, sexism, nativism, all these things that, you know, the Republican establishment hasn't really figured out yet. But Tucker's figuring it out while he's running the caller.

14:56Jason Zengerle:In November 2016, the program Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox premieres. Here's a promo clip for the show.

15:05David Remnick:What's the show going to be about? You can judge for yourself. But here's the basic theme of it. people in power tend to lie, not because they want to, but because they can't help themselves. That's human nature. The more power people have, the bigger the temptation to misuse it. The press is supposed to be the watchdog against all of this, and it worked fine for a couple of centuries. Then the press decided they had more in common with certain politicians than with readers or viewers, and that's when it fell apart. We're going to get back to basics here. We're going to hold the powerful accountable, pierce pomposity, translate doublespeak, mock smugness, and barbecue nonsense every night.