Tucker Carlson, the podcaster and former Fox News host, once told a hostile conservative crowd that rightwing media needed to be more responsible. In a 2009 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he argued that publications on the right should hold themselves to a higher standard.
“This is the hard truth,” Carlson said. “If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail.” Conservatives loved to complain about the New York Times, he added, when what they really needed was their own New York Times. The crowd jeered and booed at him.
Carlson’s evolution – from a clubbable conservative journalist who often criticized the kooks, extremists and blowhards of his own side, to a cautious Maga fellow-traveler, to an “America first” firebrand more radical than Donald Trump himself – is the subject of a new book, Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. The reporter Jason Zengerle tries to answer a question that, he notes, haunts any room where political journalists today gather: “What the hell happened to Tucker?”
Beside Carlson’s own works of memoir-reportage-polemic, the only previous book about him is an admiring 2023 biography by the conservative writer Chadwick Moore, described in a Guardian review as “meld[ing] hagiography to dictation”. Zengerle’s book, written without Carlson’s cooperation, is therefore the first to reckon critically with probably the most interesting, important, compelling and arguably dangerous media personality of the T
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