There’s a motherhood story that when Donald Trump first announced that he was running for president in 2015, Tucker Carlson, the then host of Fox & Friends Weekend, was one of the few pundits who took his candidacy seriously. “He realised that a nativity candidate running on white grievances might actually do pretty well in a Republican primary.
New Yorker writer Jason Zengerle says, “His star rose at Fox because he kind of had the foresight to see Trump coming.” In his current book, HATED BY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE : Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind, the author traces his ascendancy explaining how he became one of the most influential people on the far right. ” He’s someone that Donald Trump definitely listens to, definitely wants to hear from and Carlson is more than happy to provide his thoughts and his advice,” Zengerle says. ” That doesn’t mean that Trump always heeds his advice, disappointing Carlson on many occasions but he has anchored his seat to Trump’s table.
The book presents a revelatory, jaw-dropping portrait of Tucker Carlson’s career and his history of reinvention, while the right-wing media lost its shit. Zengerle narrates how Carlson’s infamous journey from gifted intern at the New Yorker to become a noxious talking head on Fox News and then his dethroning and defenestration. He examines how Tucker Carlson’s zelig-like career offers a unique lens into the confusing, myopic and utterly shameless evolution of American conservatism, its media presence and punditry, from 1990s to the present. Its insightful, vigorously reported and, yes, deliciously entertaining. HATED BY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE is as much a work of media criticism as it is a professional biography of Carlson, and Zengerle chronicles how first television, then the internet started to reward extremes, privileging provocation and punditry over sombre fact-finding.
This is a rabbit-hole of considerable proportions tracking the concurrent shifts in the political and media landscapes that have both influenced and succumbed to the hyper-partisan politics of today. To many Tucker Carlson is ubiquitous with modern conservative politics present on US screens for almost 30 years known for his strident extreme right-wing views. Quite a contrast to those who knew him in his early days in political journalism, as a serious and gifted writer and commentator who enjoyed debating liberals and calling out conservative failures in equal measure. Now watching Carlson gain sonic altitude in Donald Trump’s Republican Party, most are asking what the hell happened to Tucker? Zengerle’s rich character study tell of his rise in conservative media ranks to his current ascendency as one of the most powerful voices in right-wing politics. His unblinking lense into the the transformation of American conservative media is a sharp report that’s frightening.
If you are looking for an answer to the question “How did we get here?” – from 1990s multiculturalism and free market globalisation to ICE raids and Venezuela– you would do no better then to follow the arc of Tucker Carlson’s career as your lense. What emerges is a portrait, a kind of morality tale on the rise of for-profit agitprop and the decline of political journalism. Zengerle dissects Carlson’s media career with a shrewd scalpel. In many respects the strength of his effort… is his restraint, in chronicling Carlson’s rise as a radical but influential voice, whose persuasive power comes in part from his mastery of demagogic oversimplification. He resists the temptation to offer easy answers where reality is complicated. The Tucker Carlson who emerges from Zengerle’s narrative is by turns charming, funny, and repulsive– a twisted soul in a world of elite magazine journalism and lowbrow television where the conservative movement’s intellectual debasement rules. The book’s subject is a transformation from the Washington establishment’s enfant terrible into Donald Trump’s far-right Rasputin, profoundly effecting the nation’s guardrails and de-culturalisation that we are only beginning to grasp.
Zengerle is a seasoned political journalist and as such focuses on Carlson’s adult career in TV news but he leaves unanswered the three most burning questions: Why exactly was he fired from Fox in 2023, at the peak of his power? Will he run for president? And how earnestly does he hold his increasingly out-there view? Critically, The Heritage Foundation doesn’t get a large serving, maybe the making of his next book. In closing, the narrative ends with Carlson becoming more significant on his own independent show
As his beliefs have changed so has his media appetite for platforms like The GreyZone, a far-left conspiracy theory website run by Max Blumenthal. Open debate is rarer in both mainstream and alternative media because prioritising who is more likely to watch your content often comes first through prioritising cynicism and outrage. Nowadays Carlson is celebrated by telling a crowd what they want to hear while influencing government policy and hand-picking politicians to achieve what he wants, regardless of their extremity which ultimately reduces him to a bore with no principles to stand on and this is hurting America. In the end it doesn’t matter what his views are because millions of listeners, including Trump, take cues from him, inpart thanks to his long and successful pursuit of influence, he has become disastrously entertaining.
