For years now, Tucker Carlson has groomed himself into the perfect far-right propaganda machine. For that, he was rewarded handsomely. Fox News’ audience flocked to his show, eager to soak up his curated paranoias, far-right hoaxes, and talking points lifted brazenly from white nationalist and neo-Nazi communities so Carlson could pump them into the heads of viewers already primed to believe anything any televised lout was willing to shout at them.
If Tucker Carlson isn’t the most destructive political propagandist in cable news history, it’s difficult to imagine who would take the prize instead. And Tucker fell into the role entirely of his own accord, and by his own plan. His previous persona, a sneering pseudo-geek devoted to defending the corporate conservative status quo on shows like CNN’s “Crossfire,” became a stale trope long before CNN gave up on the format.
He then reinvented himself as a more openly racist, sexist, paranoid far-right misanthrope, was granted new pundit life on Fox News, and experimentally slid further and further to the right as he explored what the Fox audience would reward and what it would not. By the late Trump era, he was borrowing more from Alex Jones’ conspiracy shows than from the Republican Party’s thinning policy stances.
And Fox News stuck with him. The whole way.
A very partial list of the things Fox News was absolutely fine with, apparently up until the point where it cost them $787 million: