“I don’t agree with everything Ron Paul thinks,” Tucker Carlson said in an interview at the 2008 Republican National Convention. “I don’t agree with everything I think!”
Over the past three decades, Carlson has been saying whatever he thinks, even the things he doesn’t think, also the stuff he apparently does think but doesn’t agree with, even though he thought of it himself. Somehow, this has placed him at the very top of the right-wing media heap. It’s a godforsaken story of constant evolution, always optimizing his positions to retain and grow his audience. His latest act playing a Trump traitor and anti-war commentator is his most explosive chapter yet.
I’ve been covering Carlson on and off for most of the last decade. For two years I watched Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight live as a researcher for Media Matters for America every night. I covered his efforts to mainstream the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. So watching some credulous liberals embrace his recent reinvention as some kind of principled intellectual has been frustrating, to say the least.
The son of journalist and diplomat Dick Carlson, Tucker became a pundit straight out of undergrad, and has since sold himself to the public as a libertarian intellectual, a digital news entrepreneur, a boundary-pushing cable news racist, and now a woodsy podcaster on a never-ending fishing retreat, dispensing his hard-earned wisdom from his cabin in Maine after taking an honest accounting of his wild and wonderful life.
The question is not, What does Tucker Carlson believe? The question is, What does Tucker Carlson do? Without fail, Tucker Carlson does what is best for Tucker Carlson.
Carlson the Serious Magazine Writer
There are two main throughlines going back to the ‘90s: One, Carlson possesses a particular type of gleeful snobbishness only available to people of his elite social class. Two, Carlson is a racist. A misogynist too, and of course he’s homophobic, but when the time comes to describe his life’s work, historians will find that he chose to pluck white supremacist conspiracy theories out of obscurity and elevate them onto the global stage every chance he got.
Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson first made a name for himself as a “high-browed” conservative intellectual. He was well positioned to do it. His father was Richard Carlson, an anchor for ABC News, U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, then CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As Carlson wrote in his father’s obituary, “He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time.” Money was never an issue either: A product of private boarding school, Carlson’s stepmother is the heir to the Swanson frozen food empire.
Carlson started as a fact-checker at the Heritage Foundation, a gig reportedly arranged by his father-in-law. That turned into a writing career at the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard and other publications across the ideological spectrum. His profile subjects were a who’s who of the era: then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, billionaire and then-presidential candidate Steve Forbes, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.
The most famous of these longform pieces was for Esquire, an award-winning profile of Al Sharpton written on a trip they took to Liberia with a group that included Cornell West and what Carlson describes as a “busload of black nationalists.” His writing is sharp, with a lot of colorful details.
Throughout the piece, you can sense his underlying sense of superiority and disdain for his fellow travelers. He expresses surprise and amusement when he discovers the intellectual depth of some of the Nation of Islam activists he speaks with. He writes that “presumably” these activists hate him and all white people, while also describing how “gentle” and kind both Sharpton and West were to him. Toward the end he outlines his objections to race-based civil rights activism, a preview of the Fox News show he’d eventually become so famous for.
“His politics were undisguised, but his work was honest, and sometimes pretty funny,” Alex Pareene wrote in 2012.
“But what really destroyed Tucker Carlson,” according to Pareene, was “TV. TV exposed him as glib, smug and not nearly as clever as he thought he was.” In 1994, Carlson began appearing on CNN regularly to opine on the OJ Simpson trial and Monica Lewinsky affair. Eventually, he parlayed this into a full-time position at the network.
Carlson the Bowtied Libertarian Cable Pundit
Carlson joined CNN in 2000. In 2003, he wrote his first book, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News. The book is mostly a run-down of famous people he’s interacted with plus brief explanations of whether he liked them or not.
If you spent too much time in the cable news business, he wrote, “you could become a caricature of yourself.”
A year after the book was published, Carlson was exposed as exactly that. In 2005, Jon Stewart appeared as a guest on Crossfire, the debate show Carlson co-hosted with Paul Begala on CNN. What resulted was a quintessential artifact of the cable news era.
“You’re partisan … what do you call it … hacks,” Stewart said.
“I thought you were going to be funny. Come on, be funny,” Carlson pleaded.
“No, I’m not going to be your monkey.”
A few months after Stewart’s appearance, Crossfire was canceled. He tried to wash the shtick off. He stopped wearing the bowtie. He joined the cast of Dancing with the Stars but was the first contestant eliminated. Then he got a show at MSNBC.
For the first half of his cable career, Carlson sold himself as a libertarian. But that was never really quite true. Carlson voted for Bush in 2000, and repeated the administration’s lies in the aftermath of 9/11.
“We know today for certain that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” he said on Crossfire in 2003. “They have chemical and biological weapons. And the question remains, what do we do about it?”
Between 2006 and 2011, Carlson was a regular guest on the shock jock radio program Bubba the Love Sponge. It was there that he famously said Iraq is a “crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys – that’s why it wasn’t worth invading.”
“They can just shut the fuck up and obey,” he demanded. “The second we leave they’re going to be calling for us to return because they can’t govern themselves.”
“What would be wrong with having a war over oil?” he asked on MSNBC in 2007. “That’s in our strategic interest.” As recently as 2012, he was saying, “Iran deserves to be annihilated.”
Regardless, he had a brand to sell. In 2008, Carlson emceed Ron Paul’s “Campaign for Liberty” rally, counterprogramming to the Republican National Convention after Paul was denied a speaking slot.
He joined the right-leaning libertarian think tank Cato Institute as a senior fellow in 2009, and stayed there until 2015.
Carlson the Serious Digital News Man
In a 2009 speech at CPAC, Carlson described the need for a conservative news website focused on accuracy and exclusive scoops to rival the New York Times. He was vociferously booed.
When he launched The Daily Caller the next year, he promised it would be the “Huffington Post for the right,” with “lots of original and, I hope, hard-nosed reporting.” Foster Friess, a Wyoming megadonor whose money also helped launch Turning Point USA, made an initial investment of $3 million.
That’s not quite how it panned out. In 2011, the Columbia Journalism Review published a history of The Daily Caller’s pattern of overpromising and underdelivering. The site ran “headline-grabble exclusives” that then “fizzl[ed] under scrutiny.”
The Daily Caller is most famous not for investigative reporting but for listicles such as “Top 10: Hottest bikini skiers [SLIDESHOW],” “Kate Upton Shows Off her Flexibility In Outtakes From her SI Swimsuit Shoot,” and “This Gorgeous Deep Sea Fisher Has An Incredible Instagram Full of Big Fish, Bikinis.” It is also known for an auspicious history of sensationalizing child sexual abuse. The site had the content tag “teacher sex,” which included a raft of articles celebrating female teachers who sexually preyed on younger male students. One article described a “9-HOUR THREESOME” between “two blonde English teachers” and a 16 year old, which they longingly described as an “epic event” that “impressively lasted” until 6 in the morning.
Carlson the Great Replacement Guy
Carlson joined Fox News in 2009. In 2016, he became the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight during coveted prime time hours and leaned full bore into white supremacist talking points. In this role he developed his signature style: the uproarious giggling when someone said something he disagreed with, the blank dumbfounded stare, mouth hanging open, as he listened to his guests. His monologues were must-watch viewing among Washington power brokers and the MAGA masses alike.
The crown jewel of Carlson’s career was his singularly influential work mainstreaming the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. It is the most irreversibly damaging thing he has ever done. The “great replacement” is the false idea that there is an international conspiracy to encourage non-white migration to the United States and displace the white American majority.
Carlson started obsessing about racial demographics, immigration, and diversity in prime time. He zeroed in on the Salvadoran gang MS-13, distorting the relative threat the group posed to public safety as a way to smear all immigrants. Carlson was at the cutting edge of fearmongering about “migrant caravans,” particularly around the 2018 midterms. He called it an “invasion.”
“If you’re wondering why America is not anything like the country you grew up in, this is why,” he declared.
Starting in 2019, the world has witnessed a raft of mass shootings motivated by the “great replacement,” including at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand; a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas; a supermarket in Buffalo, New York; and, most recently, a mosque in San Diego. But Carlson only ever pushed forward. In 2020, he had the highest ratings in the history of cable news.
Carlson the January 6 Conspiracy Theorist
In the last few years of his tenure at Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight went full Infowars. He leaned heavily on increasingly extreme conspiracy theories about the Capitol riot on January 6 to drive ratings.
A lot of his work centered around developing a revisionist history of the insurrection. He falsely claimed that a January 6 participant named Ray Epps was a federal agent and pushed conspiracy theories about officer Brian Sicknick, whose injuries he sustained that day contributed to his death. In 2023, then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy gave Carlson access to more than 44,000 hours of security footage from the day. Carlson used the footage to downplay protesters’ violence and destruction.
“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” he said on Tucker Carlson Tonight. “Instead it shows police escorting people through the building.”
In March 2021, Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for spreading conspiracy theories about the company’s purported role in election fraud. The case settled for an eye-popping $787 million in 2023.
Through the litigation, a cache of private messages among Fox News talent and executives, including Carlson, became public. Behind the scenes, Carlson was speaking a very different language about election fraud narratives that led to the violence.
“Do the executives understand how much trust and credibility we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real.”
He also trashed Trump. He called the president “a demonic force” and “a destroyer.”
“I hate him passionately,” he wrote.
Though he was still the network’s most popular host, Fox fired Carlson shortly after the Dominion settlement.
Carlson the Israel Critic
Carlson campaigned for Trump in 2024. He spoke at the Republican National Convention and called Trump a “wonderful person” who was spared from death during the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania by “divine intervention.” During a campaign rally, he compared Trump to a father figure who is going to give America a “spanking.”
But his attitude towards the president began to shift as he leaned into his new program on The Tucker Carlson Network. Carlson’s podcast studio is made to look like a wooden barn outfitted with leather-bound books and a chandelier made out of antlers. Carlson plays the rugged self-sufficient fisherman who thinks big thoughts during quiet stretches in the wilderness. Through profound self-reflection, he’s now deeply offended by war in the Middle East and bigotry against Muslims.
“Who do you think you are?” he asked of Trump. “No decent person mocks other people’s religions.”
He even went so far as to apologize for endorsing Trump during a conversation with his brother Buckley.
“I’ll be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected.”
What trips a lot of people up is that many of Carlson’s criticisms of Israel and western imperialism are legitimate critiques. Isn’t it a good thing that he’s saying this, even if we disagree with him on other things?
Carlson may claim to be anti-Zionist, and the world may recognize him as such. He may speak truths that American audiences are hungry to hear after years of being gaslit about Israel and Gaza by both parties and the mainstream media. But we should not forget that though Carlson has legitimate arguments, he also has a long track record of antisemitism. At Fox, he was a leading voice pushing conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropist George Soros. He’s given softball interviews to crackpot haters like Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, World War Two revisionist historian Darryl Cooper, and antisemite Owen Benjamin. And he’s still all in on the white genocide thing. This has made him a hero among young conservatives. And if you haven’t heard, the ones most motivated to follow in his footsteps are in group chats with each other talking about how much they love Hitler.
Carlson’s latest anti-Israel pivot is born out of a three-decades-long track record of shapeshifting and lying in accordance with one highest purpose: doing what is best for Tucker Carlson, at all costs.
