Tucker Carlson has the highest ratings for any cable television news show in history, is probably the most influential conservative in the world, and has been touted as a potential Republican presidential candidate. He’s known for an acerbic wit, biting sarcasm, this gormless expression, and for being the lead spokesperson for a new brand of populist politics: Trumpism without Trump.
After reading his book and watching endless Tucker Carlson Tonight segments, I found that Tucker has a very specific view on the world – some of which I actually agree with – but under the surface, often bubbling above, explicitly, and especially in the worrying last few pages of his 2018 book, Ship of Fools – is a conspiratorial and paranoid world view, and a scepticism about the merits of democracy itself.
Tucker embodies the Fox News formula as it has developed over its twenty-six years on air.
That the viewer – you – are under siege, night after night, segment after segment, Facebook and Youtube video after Facebook and Youtube video – that the elites – corrupt, lazy, greedy and incompetent – are not just out to get you – but that it’s a concerted effort, an evil plan.
It’s a formula I explored in my last video.
As Nicolas Confessor at the New York Times notes, with Tucker, ‘virtually any piece of news can be steered back to themes of elite corruption, conspiracy, and censorship’.
And there are some alarming themes that emerge around what Tucker thinks should be done about it.
When Trump’s popularity began to fall and the tide started turning against him, producers at the Tucker Carlson show – on air every night from 8 to 9 – decided on a new focus, a new approach – Trumpism without Trump.
It was as a way to distinguish Carlson. For him to be his own person. To avoid being a lapdog for a president known for his gaffes and lack of seriousness, and to avoid having to constantly apologise for or defend him on air.
We’ll look at Tucker’s worldview, what he’s said about topics like immigration and the January 6 capitol riots, how the conspiratorial style he adopts was analysed by a historian sixty years ago, and what, most alarmingly, Tucker seems to believe about the future of democracy.
Carlson started his career as a pro-capitalism, pro-immigration classical libertarian. But along with many on the right, he drifted slowly towards a nationalist populist worldview concerned with the excesses of capitalism, and, most notably, the dangers of unbridled immigration. Along with his friend Neil Patel he started the online publication The Daily Caller in 2010.
Former editor at the Caller, Jim Antle, told the NYT that, ‘When The Caller started, most smart young conservatives were libertarian. Within a few years after that a lot of them were populist, nationalist types’.
One former employee said that, ‘immigration was always the most animating thing – it wasn’t even close’.
Several Daily Caller employees were found to have used pseudonyms to write for white nationalist websites, and almost a dozen were found making racist posts elsewhere online.
One editor also wrote for white nationalist Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal.
Caller employees have been discovered in pictures with white nationalists like Matthew Heimbach, and one was a speaker at the 2017 Charlottesville Rally where white nationalists marched with flags and torches.
Tucker said that the Daily Caller was for ‘People who are distrustful of conventional news organizations’. He had joined Fox the previous year in 2009, began Tucker Carlson Tonight in 2016, and left the Daily Caller entirely in 2020. But what are his politics?
Carlson outlines his theory of American politics in his 2018 book Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class if Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. America, he says in it, has changed.
He points out that there’s been a decline in the size and wealth of the middle class. (From 60% of national income in 1970 to 43% in 2015. The share of wealth going to the rich went from 29% to 50%)
He sees inequality as a big problem. He writes: ‘the rich now reside on the other side of a rope line from everyone else. They stand in their own queues at the airport, sleep on their own restricted floors in hotels. They watch sporting events from skyboxes, while everyone else sits in the stands. They go to different schools. They eat different food. They ski on private mountains, with people very much like themselves. Suddenly America has a new class system’.
He says Republicans ignore this. But in a break from the past Democrats now ignore this too.
He says that now both Republicans and Democrats are parties of the rich.
He told the Atlantic: ‘If you’re starting to suspect the conservative establishment doesn’t really represent your interests, there’s a reason for that. They’re every bit as corrupt as you think they are’.
What’s new is that liberals defend crony capitalism. He points to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos actually supporting Hillary Clinton, as did eight out of ten of the most affluent counties in America, and most of the wealthy employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, who donated to Hillary over Trump by 60 to 1. He says that now Democrats like talking about identity politics, climate change, and abortion, rather than inequality.
Both parties preside over an unequal society, and unequal societies, he writes, tend to collapse. He’s called it ‘vulture capitalism’.
Now, there’s a lot in this diagnosis to agree with. The next question to ask, though, is why this has happened. Instead, Tucker begins his descent into paranoia and conspiracy…
Carlson says that one of the problems with this left-right convergence is that the elites broadly accept mass immigration. Why? Because an influx of cheap labour keeps wages low and boosts profits.
He writes, ‘For decades, ever-increasing immigration has been the rule in the United States, endorsed by both political parties. In 1970, less than 5 percent of America’s population were immigrants. By 2018, that number had risen to nearly 14 percent’.
Immigration for politicians and businesspeople is a win-win. Democrats know that immigrants will vote for them, and Republicans and business owners know that immigrants will work for less money that he describes as ‘legacy’ Americans.
He writes, ‘Both parties, looking for votes, are for it. Big business, which is always looking for cheaper labor, is for it. But it turns out the average person isn’t for it’.
Immigration, he says, has two problems: economic and cultural.
The economic argument is that an influx of immigrants, willing to work for less, pushes down the wages of working-class Americans. Even progressives, he argues, used to be more critical of immigration for this reason.
He writes, ‘In 1885, Congress passed a measure that forbade companies from hiring foreign contract workers. Two years later, the government tightened vetting of immigrants at ports of entry. In 1888, Congress mandated fines for companies that hired illegals’.
Bill Clinton – a Democrat – had argued for a stricter immigration policy, border patrols, cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants.
Tucker says, ‘As late as 2006, there were still New York Times columnists willing to concede that immigration came with a downside. “Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants,” economist Paul Krugman wrote that year in the paper. “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.”
Okay, so immigration depresses wages for ordinary Americans and the elites like it because it boosts profits – that’s the economic case, and we’ll return to it. But he also argues immigration also has its cultural problems.
Immigration at this scale, he says, ‘destabilizes our society’. Nothing looks the same, neighbourhoods are different, customs and language. He says: ‘Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace. It disorients them. Over time it makes even the most open-minded people jumpy and hostile and suspicious of one another. It encourages tribalism’.
He continues, ‘why should a country with no shared language, ethnicity, religion, culture, or history remain a country? Countries don’t hang together simply because. They need a reason. What’s ours?’.
Now, there are perfectly honest debates that can be had around the merits and issues immigration presents in an increasingly globalised world. And there’s plenty of evidence that can be called upon in those debates. So before we ask why Carlson has the view of the world he does – what motivates it – we need to look at his very selective reasoning, his conformation bias – how his argument that immigration is a central problem is based on a very narrow – to say the least – understanding of the studies.
In the book, Tucker cites two pieces of evidence that immigration drives down wages, neither of which are actually footnoted or cited, but, fine, it’s not that kind of book. One reference is from a NYT story about Storm Lake, Iowa.
He writes, ‘In the spring of 2017, the New York Times ran a story about a town in northwest Iowa called Storm Lake. Tyson Foods operates slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants in Storm Lake, and over the years thousands of workers from Asia and Latin America have moved there to work in them. Not surprisingly, the flood of cheap labor destroyed the local labor union and depressed wages’.
First, I can find no studies or evidence for the claim that immigration depressed wages in Storm Lake. The original article does acknowledge that wages are stagnant, but the claim it actually makes is that, ‘Mr. Smith remembers that it wasn’t the arrival of foreign workers that initially drove down wages, but the plant owners’.
Or take this quote: ‘Faced with competition from new companies that had developed a faster, more efficient method of boxing beef and selling it to supermarket chains and fast-food outlets, Hygrade (a food products company) in 1981 asked its workers to take a pay cut of $3 an hour. When they refused, the plant closed’.
This was before immigrants from South East Asia and South America began arriving in Storm Lake in the mid-1980s.
Carlson also ignores the evidence that immigration is keeping the town alive, and even growing.
He also says, ‘In Storm Lake, mass immigration had a dramatic effect on violent crime rates, which are 56 percent higher than in the rest of the state’.
He cites no evidence for this and I can’t find any with a Google search, but it might be true.
But, this is beside the point and precisely the point at the same time; it’s odd that, for someone who is so animated by the topic of immigration, he relies so much on a single town and cites no real evidence. There are thousands of academic studies on immigration, wages, and crime. For example, a meta analysis of 51 studies between 1994-2014 found that immigration reduces crime.
In fact, the literature seems quite clear on this. As many papers on Google Scholar show, like this study from 2009, immigration reduces crime (which is an emerging scholarly consensus). It concludes: ‘Contrary to the predictions of classic criminological theories and popular stereotypes, immigration generally does not increase crime and often suppresses it’.
So, yes, studies are better than anecdotes from a single town. Let’s look at wages. Again, Carlson cites one study, from 1980.
He says that in the past, ‘Nobody doubted that an influx of refugees would harm American workers. One study, conducted after the Mariel boatlift of 1980, found that Americans with lower education levels in Miami saw their wages fall by 37 percent after the Cuban refugees arrived’.
Wow, 37%! That’s a lot right? I wonder if this is normal and not a selective reading of the evidence and cherry picking the single piece of data that backs up a preselected worldview?
The first studies on the Mariel boatlift – a mass migration of around 125,000 Cubans to Florida in 1980 – concluded that the effect on wages was negligible or nothing at all. One 1990 study, for example, concluded that, ‘an analysis of wages of non-Cuban workers in Miami over the 1979-85 period reveals virtually no effect of the Mariel influx’.
But there was an influential paper in 2017 that ‘reappraised’ the boatlift. It argued that, ‘This analysis overturns the prior finding that the Mariel boatlift did not affect Miami’s wage structure. The wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, by 10 to 30%’.
So, first of all, not 37%, as Tucker suggests, but 10-30%. And this too has been called into question. This study concludes that, ‘As a whole, the evidence from refugee waves reinforces the existing consensus that the impact of immigration on average native-born workers is small, and fails to substantiate claims of large detrimental impacts on workers with less than high school’.
Okay, but, again this is one single event, and it’s a bit of a unique case. So this is the worst case Carlson could find – the only one that backs up his wider world view – what do other studies show? Does immigration depress wages?
I’ve spent some time looking into this – and if you’re interested in a more in-depth video on this let me know in the comments. It seems like the consensus in the literature is that yes immigration can depress wages, but by an almost insignificant amount. It also ignores the positive effect immigration tends to have on economic growth in an area.
For example, this paper finds that in the UK an inflow of immigrants the size of 1% of the population (that’s 670,000 immigrants – a lot) can lead to a 0.6% decline in the wages of lowest paid but an increase in the wages of higher paid workers.
This 2016 report – Migrant Intake Into Australia – found that, ‘the evidence generally indicates that Australians’ wages are not adversely affected by immigration on average’.
Or this analysis of 12 other studies found ‘none to small impact on earnings and unemployment level of lower wage earners’.
One review of the literature concludes that, ‘decades of research have provided little support for the claim that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers’.
So that’s seven studies I’ve cited, one a study of 12 other studies, in a few minutes while Carlson cites one study in an entire book. Choosing this one study because it has the most dramatic figure is more than just motivated reasoning, it’s dishonest, misleading, and manipulative. Of course, blaming immigration for low wages is easier for a conservative than maybe suggesting that union busting and anti-labour laws and low minimum wages and poor education are to blame.
He also selects and exaggerates stories about the cultural implications of immigration.
He writes, ‘Go to Lowell, Mass., or Lewiston, Maine [which is about an hour from where he lives by the way] or any place where large numbers of immigrants have been moved into a poor community, and it hasn’t become richer. It’s become poorer. That’s real’.
That’s, uh, not real at all, actually Tucker. As one study from a bipartisan think tank – New American Economy – concluded, ‘When nearly 1,000 Somali refugees began relocating to Lewiston in 2001, many people worried that the new immigrant population would be an undue burden on the city services and finances’. And then, ‘Fifteen years later, the opposite has proven true. New businesses, a growing local economy, a declining crime rate, and a younger, more diverse population are all playing a significant role in Lewiston’s economic and cultural renaissance’.
And one study on Lowell found that immigrants in the city had more spending power than the average household, took less in social security, benefits, and Medicaid and Medicare than the average, contributed $119 million in federal taxes, and accounted for a whopping 90% of the city’s population growth.
He also writes that, ‘Honor killings, too, are now a feature of American life. In July 2008, a Pakistani man living in the suburbs of Atlanta strangled his twenty-five-year-old daughter’.
Troubling, of course, but citing a single murder in a population of 3.5 million American Muslims is again intellectually dishonest, stupid in fact, and probably not a wise tactic when what he calls ‘native Americans’ – sorry natives – have been responsible for at least 300 mass shootings already this year.
He’s also suggested immigrants are dirty – claiming that one street was covered with human faeces, which turned out to be false (it was one child who couldn’t get to the toilet in time).
So again, the cultural critique he makes is full of omissions, conformation bias, selective reasoning, and stereotyping, that added up amounts to intellectual dishonesty and warped world view, that, if not adopted from a careful study of the evidence, must come from somewhere else. And this somewhere else, is where we start to see a very paranoid mind.
Before we move on to some of the talking points Carlson has promoted on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, I want to talk about the historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. We’ll then return to see how it says a lot about Tucker’s repeated suggestions of shady plans and corruption, and his hyperbole, exaggeration, hysteria, and paranoia. His book also has a troubling conclusion.
Hofstadter argued there was a history of paranoia at the heart of American politics. He wrote in the influential essay: ‘The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life’.
Hofstadter calls it the paranoid style because ‘no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind’.
As we’ll see, Carlson is paranoid about the FBI, black South Africans, an elite or immigrant plan called the great replacement, and climate change. And as Hofstadter points out paranoia is a mental disorder characterised by ‘systemized delusions of persecution’, and a fear of a widespread conspiracy.
Sometimes Carlson only hints at it. For example, in the book he says elites support immigration not out of a moral concern for welfare, and not even to keep wages low for national economic purposes, but because they want to keep nannies affordable.
He writes, ‘for the affluent, immigration has few costs and many upsides. Low-skilled immigrants don’t compete in upscale job markets. Not many recent arrivals from El Salvador are becoming lawyers or green energy lobbyists. An awful lot of them are becoming housekeepers. Mass immigration makes household help affordable. That’s one of the main reasons elites support it’.
Really? That’s one the main reasons? Well, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Hofstadter argues that throughout America’s modern history, commentators have been paranoid about ‘Jesuits or Freemasons, international capitalists, international Jews, or Communists’.
The essay highlights a few of these conspiracy theories. For example, panic about the Illuminati was common in the late 18th century. One 1797 book was called, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies‘. Another conspiracy theory was the fear that the Catholic Church was planning to infiltrate, control, or overthrow the US government.
In 1855 a Texas newspaper said that, ‘It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction’.
Another 1773 book warned of the dangers of a ‘“triple conspiracy” of anti-Christians, Freemasons, and Illuminati to destroy religion and order’.
In the early 19th century there was a trend of fears of a conspiracy of the Catholic Church and Jesuits trying to take over America. One book warned, ‘Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery’.
There was a theory that the market crash of 1893 was intentionally started by a Catholic run on the banks.
In the 20th century, the paranoid style became about the government being infiltrated by communists, and the whole country infiltrated with, ‘a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans’.
During the Red Scare, for example, Senator McCarthy said that communists in high government were ‘a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men’.
The influential businessman and anti-communist Robert Welch Jr. of the John Birch Society claimed in the fifties that communists had taken over the supreme court and were winning the struggle to control, ‘the press, the pulpit, the radio and television media, the labor unions, the schools, the courts, and the legislative halls of America’.
An influential figure, Welch described Eisenhower as ‘a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy’.
He said he knew this ‘based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt’.
Hofstadter describes how the paranoid style went from a focus to foreign plots to overthrow America to an obsession with domestic threats.
Tobin Smith, who worked at Fox News and wrote a book about his time there, wrote that an executive at Fox told him, ‘Look—have you read Richard Hofstadter’s book, The Paranoid Style of American Politics? If you haven’t, I’ll lend you my copy. Everyone in the opinion broadcast team at Fox News has read it’.
Historian Robert Toplin has written that, ‘Hofstadter associated that mentality with a “Manichean and apocalyptic” mode of thought. He noticed that right-wing spokesmen applied the methods and messages of evangelical revivalists to U.S. politics. Agitated partisans on the right talked about epic clashes between good and evil, and they recommended extraordinary measures to resist liberalism. The American way of life was at stake, they argued. Compromise was unsatisfactory; the situation required militancy. Nothing but complete victory would do’.
It’s almost like Fox News picked up Hofstadter’s essays and mistook it for an instruction manual on how to run a political television network. Carlson’s paranoid style manifests this in many ways. We’ll look at a handful.
Changing demographics, and, as we’ve seen, the threat of immigration to ‘legacy’ America, is a favourite topic of Tucker, but his references to the great replacement theory adds a conspiratorial spin.
The theory came from the French novelist Renault Camus in 2011 – le grand replacement. Camus believed that non-whites – Muslims in particular – immigrating to Europe were colonisers who were part of a slowly-acting grand plan to replace the indigenous population.
The great replacement has been adopted by anti-immigration politicians across Europe. Marine Le Pen in France has cited it and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands has tweeted about it.
The New York Times found that Carlson raised the idea that Democrats wanted to use immigration to change the demographics of the United States in over 400 episodes of his show.
The key is the conspiracy – that the politicians are in concert, with goals that are secretive, with the specific intention of furthering their own power. Using language like invasion also suggests that the country is under attack.
Carlson has defended billboards in California that read, ‘Stop the Invasion, Secure Our Borders’.
He has said: ‘It’s an invasion. I don’t know what’s wrong with saying so’.
The great replacement theory has been cited by the New Zealand Christchurch terrorist who killed 51 people in a mosque in 2019, and by a shooter in El Paso Texas who targeted Latinos and killed 23 people in the same year. And by the Buffalo attackers in May 2022 who killed ten. All the killers cited their motivation being a defence of the native population, which they saw as being replaced.
Demographic changes are of course real, but the emphasis here is on conspiracy – that demographic changes are part of an elite plan to keep wages down, nannies cheaper, to increase the numbers of votes for your political party, and for Muslims to turn Europe into a colony governed by sharia law. This is what makes this a particularly dangerous talking point.
While defending the great replacement theory Carlson pushes the idea that white supremacy is exaggerated by the mainstream media – he’s gone as far as to call it a hoax. He writes in his book that, ‘If you can convince voters that white supremacy in the heartland is the real problem, it’s possible they may ignore that you and your family live in a rarified white enclave and are far richer now than you were ten years ago’.
Carlson has also stoked fears of minority white farmers in South Africa being targeted to be wiped out by the black majority. In 2018, Carlson told viewers that the South African government had ‘just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity’.
He said that it is ‘in some sense an intentional campaign’, to ‘crush a racial minority within your country’.
Brian Jones – the most senior black presenter at Fox – told Fox News viewers on his own show that Carlson was wrong about every detail. Yes, the ANC in South Africa was debating a bill that meant land could be hypothetically expropriated, but it wasn’t based on ethnicity, and it hadn’t even been passed. It based on many factors – like whether land was sitting empty, whether it was held purely for speculative use, or whether the owner had left the country. Most media organisations would not let this simple factual error get on air.
Most recently, Carlson has been pushing the narrative that the storming of the capitol on January 6th by Trump supporters was an FBI false flag operation – instigated by undercover FBI agents – to discredit the Trump movement and ‘purge’ Trump voters. He’s called it the Fedsurrection and it’s the subject of an outlandish three part documentary called Patriot Purge that’s based on hearsay, wild speculation, and hysterics.
The documentary claims that left wing instigators were changing into Trump clothes and ‘goading members of the crowd’ to go into the capital. He’s said on his show that two ‘unindicted co-conspirators’ were ‘almost certainly working for the FBI’.
Why? Because they hadn’t been charged. As the Washington Post points out, there are several reasons someone might not be charged. They might have cooperated with the FBI, been treated with leniency, or the charges based on the evidence not worth pursuing. To jump to conspiracy is, of course, a wildly preposterous and irrational leap of the paranoid imagination. And along with ‘some people were getting changed’, that’s about the extent of the evidence that a three part documentary is based on.
Hofstadter wrote, ‘What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true that in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events’.
Politifact looked at court documents and found clear evidence that the defendants were ‘overwhelmingly Trump supporters’.
Of course, the idea that a storming of a government building is something that’s orchestrated by the state itself is a serious claim for a mainstream news anchor to make and would require some serious evidence – or at least, that used to be the case.
Carlson has also pushed the idea that elites have used fear and panic of climate change to get what they want. And it’s no surprise that Carlson has promoted 4chan on air, a website known for being a hotbed for conspiracies like Pizzagate and Qanon.
Shutting down free speech is also part of the conspiracy. He wrote in his book, ‘If you’re going to run a country for the benefit of a few, it’s dangerous to let people complain about it. The only way to impose unpopular policies on a population is through fear and silence. Free speech is the enemy of authoritarian rule. That’s why the Framers put it at the top of the Bill of Rights. That’s also why our ruling class seeks to crush it’.
So let’s look a little bit more into the mechanics of Tucker’s paranoid mind and ask: why is he like this?
Throughout his book there’s a constant tension – one that veers from attributing the reason for the elite’s misguided politics on them being simply wrong, and the reason being a malicious organised conspiracy to limit speech, increase their power, bring in cheap labour that they’ll benefit from, discredit Trump voters, replace the native population, and to divert attention with identity politics.
Why does he do this? Of course, you can make many of these arguments – although not all – without appealing to conspiracy. I can get on board when Tucker says: ‘the main reason the press lost interest in holding the permanent government accountable is that they had more in common with its members than with the rest of the country. They share the same life experiences and cultural assumptions as the people they cover. The people in power are the neighbors and former classmates of the members of the press. On the most basic level the two groups have become indistinguishable’.
But he takes things even further – not only do they share interests, but they’re all colluding, organising against your interests – a cabal, in cahoots, sinister, shadowy, evil, pulling the strings. And when it comes to crafting a powerful message, the paranoid style has its benefits.
Hofstadter wrote that for the paranoid, ‘Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through “managed news”; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system’.
Why has conspiracy been such a recurring theme in history? Why does Carlson jump to it so quickly? Does he really believe it? Well, the simplest answer is that it sells, it attracts attention, it mobilises, and it works as a political tactic.
Fox is known for its assiduous study of its own ratings. While traditional television ratings data looked at viewer numbers hour by hour, then fifteen minute by fifteen minute periods, Fox started using ratings data that looked at viewing figures minute by minute. One Fox news employee said that Carlson studied them intensely.
They said, ‘He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up’.
Another employee told the New York Times that Fox wanted to focus on the ‘grievance, the stuff that would get people boiled up… They’re coming for you, the Blacks are coming for you, the Mexicans are coming for you’.
The emotional core, as the New York Times puts it, is ‘white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition’.
And being one of the most successful media publishers on Facebook, Fox has access to even more detailed analytics than ever.
Another former Fox political editor said: ‘Cable hosts looking for ratings and politicians in search of small-dollar donations can see which stories and narratives are drawing the most intense reactions among addicted users online’.
They continued that using social media is ‘like a focus group for pure outrage’.
As we saw on my in-depth exploration of how Fox News grew into the powerhouse that it is, the network presents the story in the most emotional language, supported by melodramatic attention grabbing graphics, relying on the most destructive tendencies of our evolutionary inherence – our defence mechanisms, fear, survival, fight-or-flight, our tendency to focus on threats and dangers.
People become mobilised when a threat is powerful, organised, elitist, the other.
Hofstadter writes that for the paranoid, ‘Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention’.
He continues, ‘this enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving’.
The enemy ‘makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced’.
I think the most disturbing part of Carlson’s book is the short two page epilogue. It’s where he talks briefly about what he sees as solutions. Even here, it’s difficult to discover exactly what policies he believes in though.
He’d clearly close the borders. But his critique of crony capitalism leads him to admire the ‘pure, old-fashioned economics’ of Elizabeth Warren, who supports increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
But the most worrying part – especially from a man who has been touted as a potential republican presidential candidate – is his scepticism about democracy itself.
Carlson has cosied up to and taken inspiration from so called illiberal liberal authoritarians like Hungary’s Victor Orban and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, both critical of liberal positions on immigration, sexuality, gender rights, and both, shall we say, fast and loose with the rule of democratic law. Willing to subvert democratic norms to get their way.
In that two page epilogue to Ship of Fools, Carlson talks about two paths out of the crisis he’s diagnosed.
One is to ‘attend to the population’, ‘care about them’. He says this solution is the simplest. But this is it, no suggestions as to what to do, what policies to implement. Other than saying that massive inequality is bad.
The other? To suspend democracy. He says this solution is the quickest. He says democracy is new and that hierarchy is the older system, more normal and natural.
He writes hierarchy is ‘the story of all human history. Very few civilizations have operated in any other way. People naturally sort themselves into hierarchies. Those who have power defend it from those who don’t. Rulers rule, serfs obey. It’s a familiar system. We know it works, because it has for thousands of years. The new ingredient, what makes our current moment so unstable, is democracy’.
He continues that there are justifications for suspending democracy.
‘If your voters can’t reach responsible conclusions, you can’t let them vote. You don’t give suffrage to irrational populations, for the same reason you wouldn’t give firearms to toddlers: they’re not ready for the responsibility’.
So really Tucker’s views are there in black and white. Certain people shouldn’t be able to vote. They’re irresponsible. And the elites are conspiratorial, need purging from the system, the swamp needs draining. And democracy can be suspended if need be. It’s part of the reactionary idea that America isn’t necessarily a democratic country, just a republican one. If American is the most powerful country in the world, Carlson is the most influential conservative, and he has views like this, does this make him one of the most dangerous men in the world? Or does that make me a sufferer from the paranoid mind?
The last sentence of Tucker’s book is, ‘We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well’.
Sources
Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room
Tobin Smith, Foxocracy
Charles L. Ponce de Leon, That’s the Way it is: A History of Television News in America
David Brock & Ari Rabin-Havt, The Fox Effect
Bruce Bartlett, How Fox News Changed American Media & Political Dynamics
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/opinion/roger-ailes-richard-nixon-fox-news.html
https://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/roger-ailes-tvn-2014-2/
Julia R. Fox, Annie lang, Yongkuk Chung, Seungwhan lee, Nancy Schwartz, and Deborah Potter, Picture This: Effects of Graphics on the Processing of Television News
https://pos.org/whos-watching-a-look-at-the-demographics-of-cable-news-channel-watchers/
Sally Bendell Smith, In all his glory: the life of William S. Pale
Craig Fehrman, When Roger Ailes Was Honest About What He Does
Nicholas Confessore, How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable
Nicholas Confessore, How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News – and Became Trump’s Heir
Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How A Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution
Andreas Onnerfors and Andre Krouwel, Europe: Continent of Conspiracies
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/tucker-carlson-fox-news/603595/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/business/economy/storm-lake-iowa-immigrant-workers.html
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-criminol-032317-092026
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-tonight.html?chapter=3
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/15/us/replacement-theory-shooting-tucker-carlson.html
https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/nov/05/tucker-carlsons-patriot-purge-film-jan-6-full-fals/
