The most powerful conservative in America
ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON IN JUNE, FIVE MONTHS AFTER Inauguration Day, I asked Tucker Carlson whether Joe Biden was the legitimately elected President of the United States.
This was halfway through a meandering phone conversation—me in my apartment in New York, he at his home in Maine—in which I spent most of the time trying to get a word in edgewise. Carlson paused. “What do you mean by ‘legitimately elected’?”
Did Biden win the election? I asked again.
“He did win the election,” Carlson said, his voice rising. “Do I think the election was fair? Obviously it wasn’t.” He ticked off a bunch of reasons he believed this: media bias, tech censorship of right-wing outlets, a shortage of voter-ID laws. I asked whether any of this resulted in determinative changes in vote counts, knowing that Donald Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security and Attorney General found no evidence of widespread fraud.
“Oh, I have no idea,” Carlson said, in an aw-shucks kind of way. “I’ve never said that. No one’s ever proved that. I don’t know if it’s provable.” But that was incidental to what seemed to be his larger point: “This weird insistence on pretending the election was fair when everyone knows that it wasn’t, even people who are happy about the outcome, is part of a much larger ritual that makes me very uncomfortable,” he said. “You’re required to say things that everyone knows aren’t true, but you’re punished if you don’t say them. It’s like a religious ritual.”
By this point, my head was spinning. This is Tuckerism in miniature: he sanitizes and legitimizes right-wing conspiratorial thinking, dodges when you try to nail him down on the specifics, then wraps it all in an argument about censorship and free speech. He has a way of talking about culture and politics that is rooted in defiance: defiance of elites, defiance of the federal government, defiance of scientific consensus. And it has won him the loyalty of millions of Americans who are already suspicious of everything he questions.
As of July, is the highest-rated show on cable, averaging about 3 million viewers a night, according to Nielsen, far outstripping his rivals who appear on CNN and MSNBC at the same time. In October of last year, Carlson had the highest monthly on Fox Nation, the network’s digital streaming service. Seth Weathers, founder of , an online retailer that sells right-wing merchandise, reports that demand for Carlson-themed T-shirts and mugs has spiked: he’s already sold five times as much Carlson merchandise in 2021 as he did in 2020. “Our Tucker stuff is actually selling more than our Trump stuff,” he said.
