Nick Confessore: Tucker and the Most Racist Show in the History of Cable News

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Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We’re back with another episode from our best of twenty twenty two list, and today’s show is with Nick Conversory of The New York Times who interviewed back in May, after he wrote a three part series on Tucker Carlson. As part of his reporting on what may be the most racist show in the history of television, Compessori watched eleven fifty episodes of Tucker Carlson tonight, and I told Nick, I could not have subjected myself to watching that many hours of Tucker. Thanks for doing that, Nick.

Thanks for taking one for the team here. It’s

a service to readers, it’s a service to our audience, to to work with my colleagues to listen to four plus years of Tucker Carlson and really try to understand what the show is about.

Okay. So up for all listeners. Nick is a political and investigative reporter for the New York Times staff writer at the New York Times magazine and a political analyst for MSNBC, and He was part of the team that won the two thousand and nine Pulitzer Prize for its cover to the downfall of Governor, New York Governor Elliot Spitzer, and he wrote, you have not read it you really ought to, that three part series on Tucker Carlson, and his show for The Times, which is probably the deepest dive into the the mind and the culture of tuckerism that been written. So let’s start with kind of the basics, Nick. You know, Tucker Carlson has been around for a while.

It’s not like he has not been covered. Why did you make the decision? To spend so much time devoted so many resources to one show on one cable channel.

It’s a great question and one I’m happy to answer. I think that Tucker Carlson is extraordinarily influential, not just within the world of of viewers of Fox, which is large for cable, small fiber standards. But he’s also influential on the tone and future of conservative politics in this country. And I think that it’s really hard to understand kinda where we ended up in this country, in our politics. If you don’t fully understand the trajectory of somebody like Tucker Carlson, who is a smart, conservative, talented guy who moved from one pole of the right to a very different one in a lot of ways over the course of his career, whose beliefs changed, and whose changing beliefs also reflect a radically changed context in American politics between Reagan and Trump.

And he’s unusually effective. I mean, this is the the point that I think you make and and you document. The fact is that, you know, we we can talk about, you know, how the plural he is, but the fact is that he knows what he is doing. And he he makes a big difference. I mean, he really has turned himself into the either Trumpism, hasn’t he?

You

can call him the Ed, you can call him the high priest. I think in some ways, he’s more Trump than Trump. I think he’s a better exponent of some consistent underlying ideology than the former president himself is, who’s a politician and all politicians equivocate and move around and put fluff He’s the high priest, he is the Ed, and he’s an influence. He is bringing ideas to the forefront. He is taking one strand that has always been in our politics.

Usually, on some version of the right, sometimes on some version of the left, and he is made at the beating heart of the top rated show on cable news. I

wanna stick with this point because you suggested in some respects Carlson has taken Trumpism away from Trump and that in some ways he’s now become the enforcer on the right and even including when Trump might deviate from

what Carlson thinks is the proper line. I think that’s right, and that’s been true for a couple of years. I think that Carlson is more consistent in his criticism of American Adventurism or overseas entanglement. Than Trump is. Trump would go over the place.

He would advocate for for war and regime change on one day. And and advocate America first on a different day. You know, Trump is more emotional and more prone to being stroked by foreign leaders and influenced by them. Carlson is more consistent in his way. But even more recently, Charlie, think about the vaccines the former president has has been in different places on the vaccines.

He both understands that a part of his audience is Antivax. And also wants credit. Right? He wants credit for developing the vaccine, for his government’s work on the vaccine, which by the way he deserves. And so when Trump pivoted last year and said, hey, you know what?

It’s important to get vaccinated. He pivoted because He had a role in getting the vaccine out. He wants him cleared for. He’s a politician. Mhmm.

You know, Carlson is not pivoted. Carlson has continued to make claims like the vaccination program is a Nazi experiment and to elevate the stored information about its risks and what federal authorities know about it and to platform people on his show who were basically conspiracy theorists about the vaccine because that’s where probably where the audience is, I think. It’s where the ratings are. But in that sense, I think he is speaking more truly to that faction on the right and in the mega universe.

One of the more extraordinary episodes was when after Ted Cruz, they had a lapse and called January sixth the violent terrorist attack, cruise was forced to apologize. He didn’t apologize to Trump. He had to apologize to Tucker Carlson. And

it’s That’s right. It is amazing video tape. It is it’s it’s painful to watch. Probably painful because I think senator Cruz was right for the first time. You know?

And I think he was I mean, I mean, I know he was right. I don’t think it. It’s a fact. And he was also correct in trying to draw distinction between the people who were on the ellipse at a lawful protest and the and the people, the smaller group, that sometime later marched to the capital, and committed violence and try to stop an election. And senator Cruz is right to make that distinction.

Mhmm. Tucker Carlson and a lot of people like him want you to not make that distinction. And whether they want judging from the way they talk about it on his show, is to imagine that People being prosecuted are being prosecuted for innocently protesting a legitimate gripe about the hunt of the elections. He wants to take her focus away, I think, from the fact that the people who went into the capital were wrong. They committed crimes.

And what they were doing was not responsible or reasonable protest. They were there to wreak havoc, commit violence, and conduct an extra constitutional operation against the country.

And one of the things that he does, that it is extremely and I will say, you know, skillful in quotes though, is the way that he has weaponized you know, the issue of crime and of urban violence, but also the protest. And he’s able to push the line that the rest of the media is not telling you this story and saying, well, they were willing to accept this in all of pictures of Burning Kenosha. Versus this. And in some ways, he is able to exploit maybe the imbalance in the coverage of some of those things? What does your take on that?

You

know, the truth is, Charlie, that the media Right? Is such a vast and diverse ecosystem now? That if you’re gonna talk at ten thousand feet, you can find the media guilty of almost anything. Right. I can give you any any statement to the media.

That’s honestly, that’s that’s a common practice in politics. It’s a common rhetorical device. I get it. You know, I think it’s obvious that mainstream journalism covered the full spectrum of what was happening during and around these protests. They were mostly peaceful.

There was violence and property destruction in other circumstances. I think all that has been written about. The question you have to ask yourself is, what stands in for the whole? Right? Do the instances of of violence and and property destruction and arson become the entirety of Black Lives Matter as it does on a Carlson show.

Mhmm. Or is that one strand of the events that were happening and maybe not the one that stands for what most people and most cities and towns around the country were out there to do. Black Lives Matter began, and by the way, when it started, It had pretty bipartisan support around the country. And you have to ask yourself how and why that changed? Was it because of what protesters did or how it was covered in some parts of the media?

But the reality is that what got people out to protest was a time and time again, a person, often a black person, ends up dead for a traffic stop or for shoplifting or for some other reason and they did not deserve to die and something is obviously wrong. That’s all the black lives matter really

is and it’s hard. I think And if you watch the show, it’s something very different. Very different. There’s so much to talk about here including the pro Putin propaganda that the the Tucker Carlson Traffic’s in that has become, you know, a big deal for Russian state TV. We could talk about his election denialism and the fact that, you know, he has pushed the big lie.

We could talk more about his, you know, vaccine skepticism and the kind of people he has on. But the most extraordinary thing and feel free to disagree with me here. But the most extraordinary thing about your piece, Nick, was how blunt your assessment of his show when you said that Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news and by some measures, the most successful. You use the word racist talk to me about that because, I mean, that was that was when you and and and and the time is basically said, we’re just gonna say it. We’re we’re not gonna dance around this.

We are gonna use we’re going to say that Tucker Carlson is a racist and his show is racist. I mean, that was the woe moment for your story.

I think that in any story, the findings should flow from the facts, and the facts should flow from the reporting that you do. I’m not here. I’ll work for the times to write hotcakes. Not right opinion pieces. This is not an opinion.

Yeah. It’s not a take. It’s a fact. And I’ll take you what’s behind the fact. Mhmm.

Because I know that there are some listeners of of this podcast and other shows who will say, that’s the time stocking. And the times things everything is racist. Well, I don’t. I’m not in the habit of calling everything. I don’t like racist.

As a writer or as a reporter. What’s behind that? Obviously, doctor Carlson does not use racial slurs on the air. And if you watch his show, you’ll see him say, I believe in what Martin, what their king believes. I believe in judging people by the signs of their character.

But what does the show teach and show? It teaches fear and loathing every single night. He tells you that protesters who would like the police to stop killing black people are trying to destroy America. That refugees from Afghanistan, people who helped our soldiers during the war, are coming here to destroy America. Immigration of all kinds is what is truly hurting American workers.

The main reason that American workers are struggling and falling behind. And furthermore, that it’s all part of a grand conspiracy. That’s what the show teaches on what it’s about. And when you look at the actual themes of the show in a factual way, what you see is that since he got the eight PM slot at Fox, replacing Bill O’Reilly, he has devoted more and more of a show to a set of conspiracy theories that he has borrowed from the far right from the racist right and and made his own. The most important one is replacement theory, and you’ve probably heard about that.

Yeah. You probably saw the uproar last April. When he said, well, of course, there is an illegal ball that wants to import people from Latin America and Africa to crush Americans citizens. First of all, not true. But that wasn’t the first time, not by a long shot.

He has repeated versions of that on more than four hundred episodes of the show. That thing, replacement theory comes from the bowels of the racist fringe in America from white nationalists and anti Semites. Who have been developing that idea for decades. That’s where it comes from. You know, if you don’t trust me, ask the white nationalists.

And they will tell you the exact same thing. Tucker is taking our ideas and we are psyched about it.

No. He knows that. And he knew that that would generate the blowback So I’m trying to think how to phrase this, but it worked for him. His audience he’s giving his audience what they like. And the Murdochs who were called out on or by groups like the any defamation league decided to stand by him.

Talk to me about that because I mean, I agree with you and I thought it was breathtaking that you would take something that was really confined to the far edges of the white nationalist fever swam And there it is on prime time Fox and he he not only didn’t back away from it. I mean, as you pointed out, he has really accelerated all of that. So what is the thinking behind Fox in going, yeah, you go, Tucker, you you go with something that is objectively racist rhetoric.

Carlson Show is the profit center of the profit center. Of the Murdoch Empire in the US. You know, since they sold the kind of movie and television assets, in our twenty eighteen deal. Fox is is the heart of the Fox Corporation. Fox News is the heart of the Fox Corporation.

And according to our reporting, we used estimates from a company called iSPOT despite all the boycotts in the controversy or perhaps because of the boycotts in the controversy and we’ll talk about that. Tun Carlson tonight has brought in more annual advertising revenue since twenty eighteen than any other show. So why is that? Yeah. Why is that?

Yeah.

Okay. Because I’ve read about all of the boy cuts. I’ve read about all the people who said we’re not going to advertise anymore. And you’re saying that not only his

audience up, but the revenue is up as well. How does that work? I think he has found the buttons to push. He has found the source material to light up the audience. And I’ll put it to you the way a former Fox colleague of Carlson’s put it.

What makes people tune in to fox and keep watching it? Anger. But what’s better than anger? Fear. And that is the big difference, I think, between the Bill O’Reilly show and the Doctor Carlson show.

Bill O’Reilly show was These people are screwing you. You should be angry about it. Carlson show is these people are trying to destroy you and your children and everything you love. And they know they’re doing it and they hate you. I’m not it’s not hyperbole, Shirley.

These are the kinds of things he says on the show. They hate you. They wanna destroy you. Also, they’re stupid and incompetent, but also they hate you and wanna destroy you. And I think that that has been extremely powerful as television.

And you have to add to the fact that

Trevor Carlson is a really good television host. He’s very good at his job. I wanna emphasize how powerful this is. And as you wrote Carlson’s on air technique gleefully courting blowback then fashioning himself as his agreed viewers partner in victimhood has helped position him as much as anyone to inherit populous movement that grew up around Trump. So he plays this this very, very I I think he knows exactly what he is doing.

That it’s like, okay, I’m a victim, but the real story here is they hate you, you are the victims. And in a sort of lizard brain Trump does that as well, but the convincing people that they are under siege that that your opponents don’t just disagree with you. They want to destroy

you. That is really at the heart of a lot of this, isn’t it? It is. And it’s the playbook. It’s a carefully developed playbook that they developed with ratings data, and they know that it works is why they play it all the time.

And once you understand this, she’ll never stop singing it shortly. You’ll never stop singing it on fox. You’ll also never stop seeing it on Twitter. It’s the playbook for a half of the conservative Twitter personalities out there. Attack and then play victim.

Attack. And then play victim over and over. And what they found at Fox was that they could court controversy which is to say they could say something that they borrowed from a white nationalist website. And then people on the left in the middle would say, oh my god. You that that came from stormfront.

And then Carlson goes back the next night with more content, and he says, why are they trying to stop me from telling you that mhmm. Mhmm. What are they trying to hide? Well, they can’t stop me and I work for a fox and fox stands behind me. So what happens in that transaction?

You, the viewer, feel loyalty to Fox for backing up Tucker. Mhmm. And you feel connected to Tucker’s victimhood because as he will explain that they’re also trying to shut you up. You can’t just say what you want anymore. You can’t speak the truth anymore.

And they’re wrong and they know it. So all they can do is stop you from talking. They run that playbook all the time. Well,

and as as you point out, I mean, he’s, you know, constantly telling his his viewers are living under siege from, you know, the the protesters diseased migrants from south of the border, refugees importing alien cultures and biotech companies and cultural elites who will silence them or label them racist if they complain. Okay. So you saw, I’m sure, the tweet that he put out where you have the front page of The New York Times, Your Article, which labels him and documents the way in which he is a racist. And he’s holding it with the biggest shitting grin on his face like isn’t this great? Isn’t this sort of part of it?

Is that I mean, I look I I guess maybe I I am old enough to remember when being called a racist was something that was was upsetting. It hey. It had stigma to it. And I looked at that picture and I thought the point there is the illustration. Of the way in which that stigma has been wiped away, and he revels in it.

He was reveling in being exposed as a racist, or at least that’s where it looked.

Well, I think you were right in your column, which I did read, Gerald. Okay. That the currency of what’s racism has become a little dilutive. In American life. You can look at it two ways.

You could say that we should reserve that word for only things that are truly racist. And those things should be terribly opposed. We could also say that racism is a force that operates in ways that are obvious and not obvious. And prejudice does live within all of us, including me. And let’s lower the stakes around accusations of racism.

We’re lower the stakes around a discussion of of how racism works in our society so that we can actually talk about it and fix it. And I think we have now in in our culture as a little bit of the worst of both worlds. We have very high stakes because and our common culture being called a racist is the worst thing you can be called in some in some parts of the country and some milieu. And on the other hand, we’re identifying more and more things as racist. And some of that, I think, is healthy.

Right? It’s important to understand — Mhmm. How the black white wealth gap is rooted in something like redlining, an actual racist policy that was in place for a very long time. That made it really hard for black families to build wealth in this country while everybody else including my ancestors we’re building well. So I think we have to have those discussions, but you’re right that it is very easy in our spread out and fragmented and no gatekeeper’s media ecosystem these days.

You

can always find some outrage monger who will call, you know, white bread racist. And even if that person has five Twitter followers, someone on Carlson side of things can say, you see, that’s what they all think. Yeah. And there and there are no rules for that. And that’s just the way it is, unfortunately.

No.

I mean, they we’re at the point now where if a commentator or politician is accused of being racist. The first thing they do is put out a fundraising letter saying, see what they’re doing. They’re calling me this rally around. Here’s I think one of the questions that that haunts me about all this. You said before, I think quite accurately that Tucker Carlson has found this button to push of fear and anger.

So the question is when he pressed the button, does the button expose something that was there? Or does he create it? Were people preloaded? Were the American people sitting out there? With these fears and these grievances, and obviously some of that is a preexisting condition.

So to what extent was he exploiting something that was there as opposed to that he is fomenting it, that he is, you know, that voice in their heads telling them something that might not have been at the forefront of politics. You understand what

I’m I mean, getting at it’s like, what was there? And what does he create? It’s a subtle thing, and it’s a hard thing to document and report we kind of move into the realm of speculation. But I think that’s a really interesting question. Certainly as a writer, I wanna believe in the the power of words to affect how people think and the power of words to change people’s view of the world.

And I also think that the power of leadership in its different forms really matters. Who steps out and gets the room going? Who provides the explanation that makes things click for people that comes in different forms. Right? And I think it’s it’s probably that that Carlson is one is one version of that.

You know, I think most people in this country probably support legal immigration. Mhmm. And they don’t like the idea of people coming here without permission. People are also human and generous, and they understand that, like, not everybody who comes across the border without permission is some kind of innovator. And maybe some of them do, you know, I should stay here.

I should get asylum. These are complex things, and I think people have complex opinions on immigration, and their opinions change. And you can ask any reporter who’s done man in the street interviews on the campaign trail about how consistent people are in the way they stack up their viewpoints on stuff. And and they aren’t consistent. Actually not.

Yeah. They’re interesting. People are very interesting. And so and I say all that as background to say that I think Carlson said that we think he’s racist because because he believes in borders. We we didn’t write that.

We didn’t say it. I don’t believe it or not. Every country has borders pretty much, I think. And what we’re calling racist here is the importation of obviously and self declare racist ideas. Oh, yeah.

I did the show. Right? But I think he has taken a viewpoint or he has taken an audience that is uncomfortable with immigration that feel discomfort and he talks about on the show. There are some people in in my neighborhood who I don’t know, who don’t look like me, who’ll speak my my language. I have some sense that there’s a lot of them in the getting healthcare I may have read some websites that says they’re getting all, you know, kind of all getting free Obama phones.

And he gives them a theory of the case. And like with all conspiracy theories, it has power. History of the cases, this problem exists because the people in power want it to exist. Now

and

they have a plan. Their plan is to replace you because they hate you. That’s That’s and that’s a verb verb verb. Verb verb. As it over and over, Charlie, over and over every night, sometimes the very same sentence is very same words.

Now, if you went out and said, well, integration is a complex problem. And actually, Obama had a pretty tough border policy so much that immigration activists hated his policy. And Biden has a mix of policies that have also not satisfied the immigration does in his in his party and even in his own administration. People have left. You can say that immigration is a hard problem to solve.

People immigration is a hard problem to solve. But that won’t get you ratings. What gets you ratings is this problem exists because the people in power wanted to and they hate you.

Yeah. And it’s your problems can be blamed on those people. Will you point out that Carlson, you know, does stand in this long nativeist tradition. It runs deep in American history, you know, father Coughlin, you know, from the nineteen thirties, Pat Buchanan, none of whom had the kind of influence. But also there are other traditions as well.

So I’m sitting here in Wisconsin. Know a lot of conservatives in Wisconsin. And five or six years ago, The dominant Republican around here was Paul Ryan, who had a very, very different vision of of where the Republican Party should go, the kind of appeals that it would go. Headings previous is from Kenosha, Wisconsin who, you know, presided over the autopsy after twenty twelve saying that the republican party needed to change its stance toward, you know, Hispanic Americans, and African Americans. It’d be more in inclusive.

And if you would have talked to Republicans back then, I mean, there was this sense that the the party needed to move into that direction. You talk to some of those same people now and it does feel like invasion of the body’s natures. And I mean, I’m mentioning Paul Ryan as an alternative tradition, it strikes me as just one of those strange ironies of time that Paul Ryan, who is sort of the anti Trump in many ways, is on the board of Fox News and has remained silent while that network has embraced the most sort of vicious racism. I mean, what do you think is going on there? I mean, you know, his entire question

is about publicly silent. Which is which is no I’m not I’m not I’m not passing Desjardins your other way. I would love to know what if anything he’s saying behind closed doors, but you’re right. He has not come out publicly. Is not quit the board.

Look, part of this is how power works. Think of all the people who are Republicans, you knew who had more conventional conservative politics, Reaganized politics, who after four years of Trump are are suddenly America fristers. Because that’s where the energy is. That’s where the money is. That’s where the power is.

Okay. Politics works. And people move towards power and they adjust themselves in their own ideas. Towards power. When

it comes to fitness, what’s real? How about when it really truly fits your life? That’s how anytime fitness sees because our coaches see you. It’s how they build personal plans that work wherever you are and focus on everything that matters. From of fitness, to nutrition, to recovery.

Also, you could push yourself further than ever, or just through the next rep. It’s total three sixty support for real difference. That’s anytime fitness. That’s really fun. Visit anytime fitness dot com.

You point out that that Fox News right now is trying to ring more of a return out of a slowly declining audience, which is interesting because they become more influential. But in fact, the audience is kind of shrinking and dying off. You they’re the older white conservatives who make up Trump’s base and much of Fox core viewership. So give me some sense of of how they are doing this, how they are trying to keep viewers loyal, especially in in an age in which there are even crazier networks out there, you know, o a n and news max, and there were some anxiety for the election that they might lose some of that. So What is the Fox formula at

the moment? Well, look, one thing that’s important to keep in mind is that Fox is just better at cable, T. Than anybody else. And they have it for a very long time. They’re just better at it.

They’re a ratings machine. They attract an audience that’s so big at sometimes twice the combined audience of of MSNBC where you and I appear from time to time and CNN combined. They’re good at what they do. But as somebody pointed out to me and or or made a comment to me when I was reporting this, if Tucker Carlson had discovered that being a Jeb Bush stand would mid ratings, and did that. Fox would be fine with that.

Yeah. Sure. It’s just that this is what worked. So what’s changed? Well, Although, I know a lot of people on the left don’t believe this.

For a long time, Fox under Roger Ailes tried to build a really robust news operation, didn’t report News the same way that New York Times does every day. But Pales believed in having a news division. He protected it in the eyes of people who work there. Even some people who at the time say they didn’t realize he was protecting it. And then thoughts had their opinion programming.

What happened during the Trump era after l was left and then passed away was that ratings, which are always the most important currency in cable news, anywhere you go. Suddenly became the only currency at Fox. It was the only thing anybody could agree on was important. And over time, the people who ran the daytime shows, the New Year shows, usually on the day side of Fox outside of primetime. We’re more and more people with prime time roots and prime time sensibilities.

And Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox would say, we have to do more of what we do best. And what does Fox do best? What does best is opinion programming, conservative opinion programming. And so Fox day side and the news side began to feel more and more like the opinion side, and the reporters there didn’t always like it. And some of them would protest it at the time like sheppard Smith.

Calling with television viewers in twenty eighteen during the midterms about the caravan, the migrant caravan. No one is coming to get you. But every night and prime time where the highest ratings were, the hosts were saying, oh, yes, they’re coming to get you. And then a second piece of this is is, again, the ratings. In TV, the ratings are called quarter hour ratings are really common.

Everyone has access to them. Right? That shows you how each fifteen minute block of the show would work. If you’re a higher ranking, you can order up the minute by minute data, as they call it the minute by minutes. And you can see the minute by minute eb and flow of the audience, you can see what topics and guests make them leave.

Now Fox Inn, invent them in it by minutes, and they’re not the only ones who use them. But my understanding is that Fox institutionalized them across every hour of every day. It became like moneyball. And in fact, that’s exactly how Fox executives pitched it internally. The guy who runs the news, parts of Fox got an informal, all who’s a former cruiser for Megyn Kelly and the former O’Reilly producer named Ron Mitchell, who pitched this to the new side people as Money Ball for TV audience first.

What’s the audience want? Now as I said, ratings are always the most important thing in cable news. Everyone uses them, but these guys started to vet every decision, every single booking decision, coverage decision around ratings. So

they’re looking at that dial I’m just reading between the lines that they discovered basically that the brown menace is what people want that that does WiFi’s lean harder. Into stories of illegal immigrants, non white Americans, committing acts of crime or violence, plucked from local news sites. I mean, that’s Is that a dopamine hit for those ratings?

It is. It’s not the only dopamine hit during the pandemic. They got good ratings on stories about houses of worship being shut down by health authorities. But immigration is just a live wire. What didn’t get good ratings or Fox’s news reporters unless they were covering the caravan or covering brown menace.

And and he mentioned the the the the term brown menace. Putting quotes. That’s the nickname that people on the news side of Fox started giving to these stories because they were ordered up so relentlessly by new executives. And then I’d say, oh, more brown menace. That’s how fox people talked about it.

You also point out, you know, how, you know, Carlson is binding viewers of the show. He’s the face and the future of the network. And this whole Fox Nation, which is the boycott proof of scriber only version of Fox News, doesn’t have any really news in it. And and that’s where, you know, Tucker pushes these, you know, sort of, FO documentary like features like his Patriot purge, the one that was pushing the Big Live. It was so bad that it caused My good friends, Jonah Goldberg, and Steve Hays to actually quit as contributors to Fox News.

Okay. I have a really naive question to ask you. And I’m wincing as I’m as I’m doing this because they push the buttons about the brown menace. They’ve pushed the big lie. They’ve pushed vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories, which probably have caused millions of people not to be vaccinated.

He has been a if if not pro Putin, then at least anti anti Putin. At the highest reaches of Fox, Do they wrestle with their conscience about this? Or or is it just about the the radio? I mean I mean, that’s at some point you go, okay. We’re making lots of money.

We have lots of ratings. But, yeah, guys, we might be carrying the country apart. We might be destroying democracy, killing Americans, you know, dividing us by by race, supporting the worst thugs in the world. You know, maybe this is wrong. Does that kind of conversation ever take place?

I mean, I understand Shepard Smith leaves, Chris Wallace leaves. But, you know, in the executive suites, do you think they have those moments or not anymore?

They sometimes do it. I’ll tell you about one that’s in the story, believe it or not. In twenty eighteen, Tucker Carlson, almost out of the blue or so it would seem, started covering so called farm murders in South Africa. Now I’m outside of a major war or a border disputes named a major overseas story that Fox prime time would normally cover if it doesn’t involve immigration, right, or war. Mhmm.

So people have Fox for, like, is this about? And what’s he saying? Well, what what what Carlson was doing was is talking about this this thorny question in South Africa. Where most of the farmland is owned by white people and some large portion of it was was dispossessed from Black South Africans. And there was a lot of violence in South Africa, a lot, and auto violence and crime, and there’s a lot of it on farms.

There are dozens of people every year who were murdered on white owned farms off in the white field pool themselves, sometimes their farm hands. And he started covering this. And by the way, so did Murdoch tabloids in Australia where it became a local local wedge issue in sort of a classic lived up tabloid fashion. And Carlson was making major mistakes on the facts about this stuff and kind of lumping it all together in a way that is actually fairly common once again, on the far right, where they talk about farm ritters in South Africa as part of a white genocide, a term that that Carlson does not use. But which seems to me is is sort of communicated in the way he talks about this.

And so at the highest reaches of Fox, there is a meeting they have every day called the News Group. This is a super secretive, super senior meeting. It’s the leaders of all the major business units. Fox Fox Business Channel, the morning shows, primetime, on Fox News, and the highest ranking black executive at the time. At Fox News, the head of the Fox Business Network, told his fellow executives that this stuff was wrong, that that Carlson was getting it wrong.

And that he was getting this narrative from StormFront, which is a neo Nazi site, and they ever ruled him. Now Fox disputed our reporting here too at once surprise you. They said that the that the news executive is a guy named Tom Lowell, who overwold the Fox Business guy, Brian Jones, was only asking if the story be reported out to see if it was true. Okay. Well, you know, it wasn’t true.

And Carlson kept covering it. On the prime time side until he finally got the president of the United States to Tweet about land expropriation in farmers in South Africa. A stunning propaganda coup that actual white nationalists and I meantitarians, as they call themselves, started celebrating. They were like, finally, red pill people on white genocide. And and so so they knew.

They were told, that’s where he’s getting this stuff. And not only is it coming from an obxious source, he’s getting his facts wrong, but it did not matter that and there was no apparent trimming of the sales or changing course certainly on Carlson’s program?

Your history of Tucker Carlson, I thought was fascinating. I knew a lot of it, you know, going back to the daily caller, when he was really considered to be a member of the public intellectual class and conservatives, but also, I mean, that you don’t Some of the personal stuff. I mean, the fact that he was abandoned by his mother, rocky marriage, mother accused of drug abuse, father seeks custody. She doesn’t even show up for the hearing. She pleases the country.

She never saw Tucker and his brother again. And his father Richard Carlson No. Mary’s in air to the swanson, no, frozen dinner fortune, and she adopted them. I mean, he grew up in tremendous privilege. And he has a long history, you know, writing, you know, becomes a regular on conservative publications on CNN and see Spanish.

Actually, he’s a host on MSNBC.

For BBS, briefly.

Yeah. You know, and then, of course, the daily caller, which was anti PC. But as you point out here, he always had that that is, you know, kind of, you know, within his his orbit, there were always some anti immigration types, one of his deputy editors mingled with members of the wolves of Finland, youth for western civilization, one of his interns appeared in a photo with a white nationalist who turned out to be one of the speakers at the Charlottesville rally. And, you know, very early on, he was seeing, you know, immigration is sort of as a threat to civilization. But the Tucker Carlson of pre two thousand sixteen is is, in many ways, hard to reconcile with what he has become.

In many ways, sort of like anyone that knew JD Vance pre two thousand and sixty. And I guess, how much of this And, of course, we can never know. And I’m not trying to put you on the spotty or play psychiatrist. I mean, how how much of this genuine conviction on this and how much of it is is just the pure opportunism seeing that this is where the power of the influence goes and I’m I’m going to go there and how much of it is what he actually believes, Dave. Is there any way to sort that out?

I can only make my educated guess based on my reporting. And you’re right, it’s a little bit unknowable. But we can pick up clues from things he has said about his his own journey and things he has said about his life and his views. I don’t I don’t think he’s an opportunist. And I think that’s the wrong word.

Mhmm. I do think that if you start with a position of skepticism of immigration. And you’re learning and and vibing views from colleagues that make you more and more skeptical than you get on TV. And you find out that turning up the dial on your rhetoric and darkening it gets you more ratings. It becomes really hard to distinguish like you know, factually, what do I really believe, quote unquote, really believe?

And what am I saying because it gets ratings? I’m not sure it’s an answerable question. I do think it all begins with a genuine set of personal convictions. And what I think is kind of funny, Charlie, is is what you said actually about how the pre-twenty sixteen Carlson is hard to reconcile. I don’t think it’s hard to reconcile at all.

Okay. I think the I think the pre two thousand, Carlson, is hard to reconcile. Okay.

Fair enough.

That’s where the big the big shift comes. And one of the things that surprised me in my reporting was really how far back this goes for him. The nine eleven here, the Warren Terra, or and the Iraq War were really big turning points and is thinking about politics. I don’t expect a person in their late twenties to have the same use. Twenty years later and now that we’re due.

So it’s not a market against them necessarily. They’ve changed his views on this, but the evolution is really striking, you know, and he didn’t begin as an ideologue. He was a funny writer. He was — Yeah. He was.

— was more of a portraitist, more of an observational Right? Or sort of like a t g or work type. Mhmm. And he really soured on on the, quote unquote, the yokans. And the Bush era establishment in Washington because of the Iraq War.

And I think you’ll often find in politics that people who become anti foreign invention, who become Peleocons on foreign policy. That can be a gateway to increasingly native as tinged and openly native as viewpoints. It’s often kinda connected. And the the scaffolding is already there in the intellectual institutions on the right and the politics of their So that doesn’t surprise me, but but I do find it funny that people in twenty eighteen were like, well, who is this guy? Why is he so different?

I you know, he was this nice man about town that I knew. And I kinda understand why Carlson would roll his eyes at that because it actually wasn’t that for him. You know, Well, he had been there for a while. He was partying with Alex Jones at the convention in Cleveland in two thousand sixteen. You know, he was going on Infra Wars.

He was going above the left sponge. Jesus, you know, to to get some some airtime, and he was down enough in cable. So, like, he was kinda heading there for a while. He he was

heading there, but he he wasn’t maybe quite so overt. No. I mean, I’ll take my last encounter with him, which which was extremely awkward. I think I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast for about fifteen years. I was always the master of ceremonies for the Wisconsin right to life dinner, you know, up until twenty sixteen.

And that wasn’t invited to come back in twenty sixteen, even though Obviously, there were some tensions there because of, you know, Trump and, you know, pro Trump, anti Trump, etcetera. But they called up and said, would you do it one more time in twenty sixteen? Our speaker is George Will. And of course, I love George Will, close to George Will. And so I said, sure.

So I will I will definitely do this. So a week before, the dinner they said, okay, we actually dropped George Will. We’ve uninvited him. And in his place, we’ve invited Tucker Carlson. And I I won’t say all the words that I said at the time.

I said, okay. You fucking kidding me. Actually, it’s what I said.

So

I show up and I say, I’ll do it, but I’m not gonna introduce Tucker Carlson. I’m just not gonna do that in twenty sixteen because it was very clear where he was going, what he was going to say. And, you know, we he came over and chatted before the the dinner and it was I would say it was, you know, angel, but cool. But that was the last time that I spoke to him and it was that weird thing that and maybe even you I think back on it, you know, what sort of a moment of transition for the conservative movement that they dropped George Will. The George Will was unserminously uninvited and replaced with Tucker Carlson.

Kind of an indication of what was happening to the conservative movement.

I’ll tell you the story. When the weekly standard was shut down, the magazine where he — Yeah. — kind of cut his teeth. They had kind of a wake party I talked to somebody who went to it and and and Carlson showed up. And I think it was all kind of very sweet and nostalgic, and I don’t think there were harsh words obviously, he and though Crystal are not in good terms anymore.

He’s very critical of Crystal, but I find that so poignant because in a way, you know, could have been a victory lap for him. Right? Without, like, the conservatism that he now represents has utterly vanquished in the electoral sense that the conservatism at the weekly standard at different points tried to promote you know, national greatness conservativism and and interventionism. And, you know, I don’t get any sense that that you went there inside of HawkeyeZuckers. As a moment, think about it.

Think about his journey on how and he arrived at that at that party that whole week. He was the guy who who replaced those guys

in the conservative movement. Very, very much though. Okay. There’s one one last point here because it’s sort of, you know, in the last couple of days. As you point out in your article though, that, you know, he has recurring characters on his show.

And very much like Trump, who I think is quite tactical about this, No. He picks who his enemies are going to be. This is my foil. And very frequently, they turn out to be black women. Like Maxim Waters or Elon Omar or Kamala Harris.

I mean, there are sometimes when these shots are are justifiable. But the pattern is very very clear and it’s kind of interesting how he’s railing against the new White House press secretary, Corrine Jean Pierre, who who I have met and I think is a lovely person, very, very smart, very, very reasonable every time that I’ve heard her speak. And he has made a cottage industry at redeeming her And doesn’t that strike you as very much on brand for the show and the style of this show?

Absolutely. I mean, I I couldn’t tell you mathematically how many times he’s done that. But I will say it’s a it’s a light motif of the show that black women in positions of power and only wrong and their idea is not only bad, but there’s two bit unqualified. Yeah. The implication is that they’re picked for the race or in the case of Kamala Harris, they got ahead because who they dated.

That’s something he said a bunch of times on the show. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether he thinks that Kamala Harris is is a shadow president who’s secretly pulling the strings. Or an incompetent or both. But you get both varieties on the show. And, yeah, Catanji Brown Jackson.

She was nominated I know. Very subtle. Very subtle. Yes. Very else at school.

Right? I love the folks at Fox who defended a lot of things that come in for criticism and the story. A tucker. It’s sad, but even they admit of that one is a is just a clear dog whistle. Yeah.

And, you know, in the cover of his twenty eighteen book, Shipboat Fools, you know, it’s a it’s a it’s a classic kind of conservative imprint world book cover of a a cartoon of a bunch of liberals and Democrats and others and Not that many. Maybe, like, seven. And Maxine Waters is one of them. And I just always find that really striking. And I mean, no not criticizing Maxine Waters at all.

She’s a senior congresswoman. She’s a a committee chair. You know, I don’t think anybody, if if if you watch TV, she’s not on TV an awful lot. Right? She’s not the voice of the Democrats.

On a lot of things on policy. She’s a senior member of Congress from the Democratic Party. It’s notable that She ends up in the pantheon of six or seven people in Carlson’s book cover. I don’t think it’s an accident. Okay.

So I just called up the book cover, and this this sort of, like, wraps everything up. So so there’s, you know, the Tucker Carlson Ship of Fools, how a selfish ruling class is bringing America to the brink of revolution and there is Maxine Waters shouting, and there is Nancy Pelosi, there’s Hillary Clinton, there is Zuckerberg, I think that’s Jeff Bezos, And as the boat goes over the waterfall, the ship of Fools is about to go over the waterfall. The person at the very front of the ship with the spy glass is Bill Crystal, former editor of a weekly standard. It’s probably commissioned many pieces by Tucker Carlson and at whose wake he showed up. But so when did that book come out?

That was two thousand eighteen, fall of twenty eighteen. So

apparently, he got over his his grief about the weekly standard pretty quickly. Nick, compensatory. Thank you so much for joining me. If you have not read this three part series, it is incredibly well done in his detail, but the way in which you and your colleagues really bring the receipts in for people who need to understand how this alternative reality is formed. I I think I mentioned you before, I think that people are aware there’s an alternative reality, but I don’t think they understand why it is so effective and how it works.

So I would strongly urge people to read this series. Nick, thanks for joining me today. Thanks, Charlie. Thank you for listening to the Bulwark podcast. We’ve got some more best up shows coming your way as we close out the year.

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