“What’s happened to Tucker?”, Rod Dreher may have asked himself in not so many words. Since Carlson aired an interview with a young troll whose name I’ll not give further mention, and failed to press the boy on his antisemitic and generally racist reviews, Dreher and Carlson have had a falling out.  Dreher cannot understand what he reads as antisemitism from Carlson’s camp:  personally, I don’t equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, but platforming the troll without asking him any hard questions was damned strange, if not outright vile. When Senator Ted Cruz was on, evincing his total support for Israel and antagonism towards Iran, Tucker mercilessly grilled him: that was, in fact, the reason I listened to my first TC show.  I’m not much for TV personalities, but seeing a neocon get put on the spot was a dish too tempting not to try.  “What’s Happened to Tucker?” is also the subject of Hated By all the Right People, which tracks  Carlson’s journalistic career from being a ‘young tyro’ at The New Republic through his TV heights,   broadcasting every night into a president’s ears – and beyond. 

 Hated is also already slightly dated, given that the general “Tucker sold his soul to the Devil to be near Trump” premise is now completely moot. Because of Carlson’s refusal to roll over on the Epstein files or aggressive support for Israel and its Highlander approach towards Iran,  Tucker has been denounced by the Donald as a loser with a “low IQ”.  Of course, the Donald being who he is,  they may be holding hands and skipping through the tulips before  his second term is up.   Hated by all the Right People is an interesting book, a history of a man who saw changes in journalism coming and made leaps of courage accordingly, struggling at first but then making a success of himself after an unexpected breeze blew in from south Florida.  The author has an obvious distaste for his subject, which is never promising, and this manifests itself through a multitude of quotes that are framed to diminish him. One example: the author says Carlson evinced antisemitic views by claiming  that the Jewish Zelensky had attacked Christian churches.  Zelensky’s government  has in fact attacked Orthodox churches within Ukraine,  but for nationalist rather than religious reasons. 

I knew very little about Carlson before reading this:   he was not someone I paid attention to until he announced he was going to interview Vladimir Putin. That struck me as novel and potentially interesting, but I wouldn’t wind up listening to one of Carlson’s interviews in  full until the aforementioned Cruz roast.  I enjoyed learning about his life, even from someone who was sharply critical  of Carlson’s work.  I was interested in journalism in high school, so reading about Carlson’s beginnings as a newspaper and magazine reporter were especially interesting. Tucker thought that televised journalism had a lot of potential and transitioned early,  despite the advice of friends and peers. While he did struggle, eventually he began getting traction – but  Marshall McLuhan’s admonition that the medium is the message started doing its work, and soon  Carlson was engaged in projects where arguments and outrage were more salient than measured discussion. When Carlson launched his own online news project in The Daily Caller, he openly admitted that he was chasing clicks – and while he wanted to create a right-of-center equivalent to The Huffington Post,  his desire for that monster ‘engagement’ led to sloppier, more provocative headlines. Breitbart would run as a rival and eclipse the Caller in clickbait, leading to the Caller trying to outdo it.   

 It was when Tucker returned to the big screen, though, that he really took off.  He landed a show on Fox that rode the wave of the Trump upset, and Carlson rode it well in part because he was not one of the party faithful. He presented himself as someone wary of Trump himself, but outright antagonistic toward Trump’s opponents. While it’s easy to read that as insincere,   speaking from personal experience  it sounds legitimate: I know a lot of Republicans and conservatives who don’t like Trump, will actively disparage him, but they so loathe who he speaks against – the ‘woke’, the DC elite, etc –   that they’ll rally around the flag, anyway. Tucker’s teasing evidently intrigued Trump, tickling his ego but denying him satisfaction just enough: the Donald began calling Tucker to chat about the show, and after Carlson recovered from the oddity of the President watching his show faithfully, he began using it to speak directly to the president: ultimately, however, Carlson’s deeply rooted convictions against foreign wars and resentment of Israel’s influence on foreign policy – combined with whatever leverage Netanyahu has over Trump –  have resulted in a falling out since Carlson spoke out against the Iran strikes of last year that “totally demolished” Iran’s nuclear program.  Ultimately, Tucker continues to ride high: he may have been banished from Fox News, but just as he jumped from magazines to TVs and then took advantage of new online-only papers, so now he is an independent media personality with a podcast that rivals and sometimes outstrips other leading podcasters like Joe Rogan.

This is definitely a mixed bag of a book: the author’s dislike for his subject leads to a lot of misrepresentation, but the man and the currents he’s been involved with are interesting subjects in themselves – especially if you’re a libertarian with strong foreign policy views yourself!   I thought the story was most interesting from the journalistic angle, since we’re watching the field evolve over the course of thirty years. I don’t think that evolution has been a good one, either: one reason Tucker was not on my radar until last year or so is that I don’t ‘watch’ news, either on TV or on my computer; I prefer reading it, in part because Neil Postman made me think critically about information and how its presentation affects how we are able to process it. We have all seen news degenerate from long thinkpieces to clickbait titles with little substance: it entertains without informing, and unfortunately Carlson has been part of that transformation.

Next up: I am closing in on the end of Lincoln, and am still working on my review of Maverick by Jason Riley. The problem with the latter is that it’s an intellectual biography of a man, so it’s not easy to precis.