* The newer (and especially, younger) right is defined by a politics of suspicion — a deep distrust of all institutions; a comfort with outsider forms of knowledge and conspiratorial theories; a hostility toward official mouthpieces and corporate-governmental alliances; a skepticism about American empire and a pessimism about the American future — that used to be much more the province of the left.
And for six years, up until his sudden firing this week, Tucker Carlson’s prime-time hour at Fox was the place to watch this transformation happening.
The master key to understanding Tucker Carlson’s programming wasn’t ideology; it was suspicion.
* Which is why his show was the farthest right on cable news but also sometimes the farthest left. You could assemble a set of Carlson clips — encompassing everything from his frequent interviews with Glenn Greenwald to his successful opposition to a U.S. conflict with Iran in 2019 and 2020 — that made him seem like a George W. Bush-era antiwar activist given a prime-time show on Fox by some mischievous genie. You could assemble a similar array in which he sounded left-wing notes on economics.
These forays were not in tension with his willingness to entertain the far right’s “Great Replacement” paranoia about immigration or fixate on a possible F.B.I. role in instigating the Jan. 6 riot. They were all part of the same hermeneutic: For any idea with an establishment imprimatur, absolute suspicion; for any outsider or skeptic, sympathy and trust. It didn’t have to be political or contemporary, either. The U.F.O. mystery? He was there for it. The Kennedy assassination and the C.I.A.? He had questions.
His Covid coverage was a notable example: At a time when the public health and political establishments weren’t taking the coronavirus as seriously as internet alarmists, Carlson was willing to issue dire warnings, to break with the partisan optimism of the other Fox hosts, even to make a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to force Donald Trump out of his denial. But once the establishment went all-in on Covid restrictions, he swung all the way the other way, elevating not just criticism of shutdowns and vaccine mandates but the full anti-vaccine case.
