Tucker Carlson may be gone from Fox News but he's very much a part of the Trump/Vance presidential campaign.
It’s hard to imagine how it could be possible, but Tucker Carlson has become more extreme than ever. Even worse, he now channels his poison directly to his fans, rather than going through the Fox News filter.
Jason Zengerle, a New York Times Magazine contributor who is writing a book about Carlson, has a guest essay about the dishonest, violence-promoting hate monger in today’s Times:
The people who are still paying attention to Mr. Carlson are getting an even more extreme version of him than the one they saw on Fox News. No longer subject to the guardrails of a publicly traded media company or even nominal corporate supervision, Mr. Carlson has further descended into the fever swamps. He’s described Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky as “ratlike” and a “persecutor of Christians,” accused Harvard of advocating “white genocide” and alleged that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered and former Attorney General Bill Barr covered it up.
Unlike Alex Jones and other prominent promulgators of conspiracy theories and unhinged rhetoric, who began their careers on, and still present themselves as, the fringe, Mr. Carlson, who looks and sounds exactly as he did when he was on Fox News, possesses a certain trustworthiness, even gravitas. That makes him much more persuasive — and dangerous. In the days after Mr. Carlson interviewed Darryl Cooper, the Nazi apologist whom he praised as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Mr. Cooper’s own podcast surpassed Mr. Carlson’s as the top-ranked show on the Apple podcast chart.
Two of the people still paying attention to Carlson are Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Zengerle explains how Carlson badgered Trump to pick Vance as a running mate and how a Carlson group chat facilitated Trump’s alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Tomorrow night, Carlson will interview Vance in a hockey arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Some will have paid as much as $1,600 for a ticket, Zengerle notes. But the money will go to Carlson’s new media company, not the Trump campaign.
Zengerle also notes that Vance’s last visit to swing state Pennsylvania drew only a few hundred people. Carlson will draw thousands.
(Image via Crooks and Liars screenshot)
