The Bulwark Podcast - Nick Confessore: Tucker and the Most Racist Show in the History of Cable News

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

Tucker Carlson regularly borrows conspiracy theories from the racist right, and counsels his viewers that immigrants, nonwhites, and non-Christians are trying to destroy them and everything they love. Meanwhile, his show brings in more advertising revenue than any other Fox News program. The New York Times' Nick Confessore joined Charlie Sykes for this encore episode, originally released in May. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We're back with another episode from our Best of 2022 list, and today's show is with Nick Confessori of the New York Times, who I interviewed back in May after he wrote a three-part series on Tucker Carlson. As part of his reporting on what may be the most racist show in the history of television, Cut of a Story watched 1,150 episodes of Tucker Carlson tonight. And I told Nick, I could not have subjected myself to watching that many hours of Tucker. Thanks for doing that, Nick. Thanks for taking one for the team here. It's a service to readers, a service to our audience, to work with my colleagues, to listen to four plus years of Tucker Carlson and really

try to understand what the show is about. Okay, so for our listeners, Nick is a political and investigative reporter for the New York Times, staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, and a political analyst for MSNBC. And he was part of the team that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the downfall of Governor, New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer. And he wrote, if you have not read it, you really ought to, that three-part series on Tucker Carlson and his show for The Times, which is probably the deepest dive into the mind and the culture of Tuckerism that's been written. So let's start with kind of the basics, Nick. You know, Tucker Carlson's been around for a while. It's not like he has not been covered. Why did you make the decision to spend so much time, devote so many resources to

one show on one cable channel? It's a great question and one I'm happy to answer. I think that Tucker Carlson is extraordinarily influential, not just within the world of viewers of Fox, which is large for cable, small by other standards, but he's also influential on the tone and future of conservative politics in this country. And I think that it's really hard to understand kind of where we ended up in this country, in our politics, if you don't fully understand the trajectory of somebody like Tucker Carlson, who is a smart, conservative, talented guy, who moved from one pole of the right to a very different one in a lot of ways over the course of his career, whose beliefs changed and whose changing beliefs also reflect a radically

changed context in American politics between Reagan and Trump. And he's unusually effective. This is the point that I think you make and you document. The fact is that, you know, we can talk about, you know, how deplorable he is, but the fact is that he knows what he is doing and he makes a big difference. I mean, he really has turned himself into the id of Trumpism, hasn't he? You can call him the id, you can call him the high priest. I think in some ways he's more Trump than Trump. I think he's a better exponent of some consistent underlying ideology than the former president himself is, who is a politician, and all politicians equivocate and move around and flip-flop. He's the high priest, he is the id, and he's an influence. He is bringing ideas to the forefront. He is taking one strand that has always been in our politics, usually on some version Trumpism away from Trump and that in some ways,

he's now become the enforcer on the right, and even including when Trump might deviate from what Carlson thinks is the proper line. I think that's right. And that's been true for a couple of years. I think that Carlson is more consistent in his criticism of American adventurism or overseas entanglement than Trump is. Trump would go all over the place. He would advocate for war and regime change on one day and advocate America first on a different day. You know, Trump was more emotional and more prone to being stroked by foreign leaders

and influenced by them. Carlson is more consistent in his way. But even more recently, Charlie, think about the vaccines. The former president has been in different places on the vaccines. He both understands that a part of his audience is anti-vax and also wants credit, right? He wants credit for developing the vaccine, for his government's work on the vaccine, which by the way, he deserves. And so when Trump pivoted last year and said, hey, you know what? It's important to get vaccinated. He pivoted because he had a role

in getting the vaccine out. He wants some credit for it. He's a politician. Carlson has not pivoted. Carlson has continued to make claims like the vaccination program is a Nazi experiment and elevate distorted information about its risks and what federal authorities know about it and to platform people on his show who are basically conspiracy theorists about the vaccine. Because that's where, probably where the audience is, I think. It's where the ratings are. But in that sense, I think he is speaking more truly to that faction on the right and in the MAGA universe. One of the more extraordinary episodes was when, after Ted Cruz had elapsed and called January 6th a violent terrorist attack, Cruz was forced to apologize. He didn't

apologize to Trump. He had to apologize to Tucker Carlson. And it's an amazing videotape. It is. It's painful to watch. Partly painful because I think Senator Cruz was right the first time. And I think he was, I mean, I know he was right. I don't think it's a fact. And he was also correct in trying to draw a distinction between the people who were on the ellipse at a lawful protest and the people, the smaller group that sometime later marched to the Capitol and committed violence and try to stop an election. And Senator Cruz is right to make that distinction. Tucker Carlson and a lot of people like him want you to not make that distinction. And whether they want, judging from the way they talk about it on his show, is to imagine that people being prosecuted are being prosecuted for innocently protesting a legitimate gripe about the content of the elections. He wants to take

your focus away, I think, from the fact that the people who went into the Capitol were wrong. They committed crimes. And what they were doing was not responsible or reasonable protest. They were there to wreak havoc, commit violence, and conduct an extra constitutional operation against the country. And one of the things that he does that is extremely, and I will say, you know, skillful in quotes, though, is the way that he has weaponized, you know, the issue of crime and of urban violence, but also the protests. And he's able to push the line that the rest of the media is not telling you this story and saying, well, they were willing

to accept this and all the pictures of burning Kenosha versus this. And in some ways, he is able to exploit maybe the imbalance in the coverage of some of those things. What is your take on that? You know, the truth is, Charlie, that the media, right, is such a vast and diverse ecosystem now that if you're going to talk at 10,000 feet, you can find the media guilty of almost anything. You can attribute any statement to the media. And that's honestly, that's a common practice in politics. It's a common rhetorical device. I get it. You know, I think it's obvious that mainstream journalism covered the full spectrum of what was happening during and around these

protests. They were mostly peaceful. There was violence and property destruction in other circumstances. I think all of it has been written about. The question you have to ask yourself is what stands in for the whole, right? Do the instances of violence and property destruction and arson become the entirety of Black Lives Matter as it does on Carlson's show? Or is that one strand of the events that were happening and maybe not the one that stands for what most people in most cities and towns around the country were out there to do. Black Lives Matter began, and by the way, when it started, it had pretty bipartisan support around the country. And you have to ask yourself how and why that changed.

Was it because of what protesters did or how it was covered in some parts of the media? But the reality is that what got people out to protest was a time and time again, a person, often a black person, ends up dead for a traffic stop or shoplifting or for some other reason, and they did not deserve to die. And something is obviously wrong. That's all the Black Lives Matter really is at its heart, I think. And if you watch the show, it's something very different. Very different. There's so much to talk about here, including the pro-Putin propaganda that Tucker Carlson traffics in that has become a big deal for Russian state TV. We could talk about

his election denialism and the fact that he has pushed the big lie. We could talk about his election denialism and the fact that, you know, he has pushed the big lie. We could talk more about his, you know, vaccine skepticism and the kind of people he has on. But the most extraordinary thing, and feel free to disagree with me here, but the most extraordinary thing about your piece, Nick, was how blunt your assessment of his show when you said that Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news, and by some measures, the most successful. You use the word racist. Talk to me about that, because I mean, that was when you and the Times basically said, we're just going to say it. We're not going to dance around this. We are going to use, we're going to say that Tucker Carlson is a racist and his show is racist. I mean, that was the whoa moment for your story. I think that in any story,

the findings should flow from the facts and the facts should flow from the reporting that you do. I'm not here. I don't work for the Times to write hot takes. I don't write opinion pieces. This is not an opinion and it's not a take. It's a fact, and I'll take you what's behind the fact. Because I know that there are some listeners of this podcast and other shows who will say, that's just the Times talking. And the Times thinks everything is racist. Well, I don't. I'm not in the habit of calling everything I don't like racist as a writer or as a reporter.

What's behind that? Obviously, Tucker Carlson does not use racial slurs on the air. And if you watch his show, you'll see him say, I believe in what Martin Luther King believes. I believe in judging people by the content of their character. But what does the show teach and show? It teaches fear and loathing every single night. He tells you that protesters who would like the police to stop killing Black people are trying to destroy America, that refugees from Afghanistan, people who helped our soldiers during the war, are coming here to destroy America, that immigration of all kinds is what is truly hurting American workers, the main reason that American workers are

struggling and falling behind. And furthermore, that it's all part of a grand conspiracy. That's what the show teaches and what it's about. And when you look at the actual themes of the show in a factual way, what you see is that since he got the 8 p.m. slot at Fox replacing Bill O'Reilly, he has devoted more and more of his show to a set of conspiracy theories that he's borrowed from the far right, from the racist right, and made his own. The most important one is replacement theory, and you've probably heard about that. You probably saw the uproar last April when he said, well, of course there's an elite cabal that wants to import people from Latin America and Africa to crush American citizens. First of all, not true. But that wasn't the first time, not by a long shot. He has repeated versions

of that on more than 400 episodes of the show. That thing, replacement theory, comes from the bowels of the racist fringe in America, from white nationalists and anti-Semites who have been developing that idea for decades. That's where it comes from. You know, if you don't trust me, ask the white nationalists, and they will tell you the exact same thing. Tucker is taking our ideas, and we are psyched about it. Now, he knows that, and he knew that it would generate the blowback. So I'm trying to think how to phrase this, but it worked for him. His audience, he's giving his audience what they like.

And the Murdochs who were called out on it by groups like the Any Defamation League decided to stand by him. So talk to me about that, because I mean, I agree with you. And I thought it was breathtaking that you would take something that was really confined to the far edges of the white nationalist fever swamps. And there it is on primetime Fox. And he not only didn't back away from it, I mean, as you point out, he has really accelerated all of that. So what is the thinking behind Fox in going, yeah, you go, Tucker, you go with something that is objectively racist rhetoric. Carlson's show is the profit center of the profit center of the Murdoch empire in the

U.S. Since they sold the kind of movie and television assets in their 2018 deal, Fox is the heart of the Fox Corporation. Fox News is the heart of the Fox Corporation. Fox News is the heart of the Fox Corporation. And according to our reporting, we used estimates from a company called iSpot. Despite all the boycotts and the controversy, or perhaps because of the boycotts and the controversy, and we'll talk about that, Tucker Carlson Tonight has brought in more annual advertising revenue since 2018 than any other show. So why is that?

Yeah, why is that? Okay, because I've read about all of the boycotts. I've read about all the people who said we're not going to advertise anymore. And you're saying that not only is his audience up, but the revenue is up as well. How does that work? I think he has found the buttons to push. He has found the source material to light up the audience. And I'll put it to you the way a former Fox colleague of Carlson's put it. What makes people tune into Fox and keep watching it? Anger. But what's better than anger? Fear. And that is the big difference, I think, between the Bill O'Reilly show and the Tucker Carlson show. Bill O'Reilly's show was, these people are screwing you. You should be angry about it. Carlson's show is, these people are trying to

destroy you and your children and everything you love. And they know they're doing it and they hate you. I'm not, this is not hyperbole, Charlie. These are the kinds of things he says on the show. They hate you. They want to destroy you. Also, they're stupid and incompetent, but also they hate you and want to destroy you. And I think that that has been extremely powerful as television. And you have to add to the fact that Carlson is a really good television host. He's very good at his job. I want to emphasize how powerful this is. And as you wrote, Carlson's on-air technique, gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewer's partner in victimhood, has helped position him as much as anyone to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Trump. So he plays this very, very—I think he knows exactly what he is doing.

It's like, okay, I'm a victim, but the real story here is they hate you. You are the victims. And in a sort of lizard brain, Trump does that as well. But the convincing people that they are under siege, that your opponents don't just disagree with you, they want to destroy you, that is really at the heart of a lot of this, isn't it? It is, and it's the playbook. It's a carefully developed playbook that they developed with ratings data, and they know that it works, which is why they play it all the time. And once you understand that, you'll never stop seeing it, Charlie. You'll never stop seeing it on Fox. You'll also never stop seeing it on Twitter.

It's the playbook for half of the conservative Twitter personalities, the MAGA type Twitter personalities out there. Attack and then play victim. Attack and then play victim over and over. And what they found at Fox was that they could court controversy, which is to say they could say something that they borrowed from a white nationalist website. And then people on the left in the middle would say, oh god you that that came from stormfront and then carlson comes back the next night with more content and he says why are they trying to stop me from telling you the truth what are they trying to hide well they can't stop me and i work for fox and fox stands behind me so what happens in that transaction you the viewer feel loyalty to fox for backing up tucker and you feel connected to tucker's victimhood because as he will explain

that they are also trying to shut you up you can't just say what you want anymore you can't speak the truth anymore and they're wrong and they know it's all they can do is stop you from talking they run that playbook all the time. Well, and as you point out, I mean, he's constantly telling his viewers they're living under siege from the protesters, diseased migrants from south of the border, refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them or label them racist if they complain. Okay, so you saw, I'm sure, the tweet that he put out where you have the front page of the New York Times,

your article, which labels him and documents the way in which he is a racist. And he's holding it with the biggest shit-eating grin on his face, like, isn't this great? Isn't this sort of part of it? Is that? I mean, look, I guess maybe I am old enough to remember when being called a racist was something that was upsetting. It had stigma to it. And I looked at that picture and I thought, boy, there is the illustration of the way in which that stigma has been wiped away. And he revels in it. He was reveling

in being exposed as a racist, or at least that's the way it looked. Well, I think you were right in your column, which I did read, Charlie, that the currency of what's racism has become a little diluted in American life. You can look at it two ways. You could say that we should reserve that word for only things that are truly racist, and those things should be terribly opposed. We could also say that racism is a force that operates in ways that are obvious and not obvious, and prejudice does live within accusations of racism, or lower the stakes around a discussion of how racism works in our society so that we can actually talk about it and fix it. And I think what we have now in our culture is a little bit of the worst of both worlds. We have very high stakes because in our common culture, being called a racist is the worst thing you can be called in some ways, in some parts of the country, in some milieus. And on the other hand, we're identifying more and more things as racist. And some of that I think is healthy, right? It's important to

understand how the black-white wealth gap is rooted in something like redlining, an actual racist policy that was in place for a very long time that made it really hard for black families to build wealth in this country while everybody else, including my ancestors, were building wealth. So I think we have to have those discussions, but you're right that it is very easy in our spread out and fragmented and no gatekeepers media ecosystem these days. You can always find some outrage monger who will call white bread racist. And even if that person has five Twitter followers, someone on Carlson's side of things can say, you see, that's what they all think. Yeah.

And there are no rules for that. And that's just the way it is, unfortunately. No, I mean, we're at the point now where if a commentator or a politician is accused of being racist, the first thing they do is put out a fundraising letter saying, see what they're doing. They're calling me this, rally around. Here's, I think, one of the questions that haunts me about all this. You said before, I think quite accurately, that Tucker Carlson has found this button to push of fear and anger. So the question is, when he pressed the button, does the button expose something that was there or does he create it? created? Were people pre-loaded? Were the American people sitting out there with these fears and these grievances? And obviously some of that is a pre-existing condition. So to what extent was he exploiting somebody that was there as opposed to that he is fomenting it, that he is, you know, that voice in their heads telling them something that might not have been at the forefront of

politics? You understand what I mean? Getting at it's like, what was there and what does he create? It's a subtle thing and it's a hard thing to document and report. So we kind of move into the realm of speculation. But I think that's a really interesting question. Certainly as a writer, I want to believe in the power of words to affect how people think. And the power of words to change people's view of the world. And I also think that the power of leadership in its different forms really matters. Who steps out and gets the room going? Who provides the explanation that makes things click for people?

That comes in different forms, right? And I think it's probable that carlson is one is one version of that you know i think most people in this country probably support legal immigration and they don't like the idea of people coming here without permission people are also human and generous and they understand that like not everybody who comes across the border without permission is some kind of an invader. And maybe some of them should stay here, should get asylum. These are complex things. And I think people have complex opinions on immigration.

And their opinions change. And you can ask any reporter who's done man-in-the-street interviews on the campaign trail about how consistent people are in the way they stack up their viewpoints on stuff. And they aren't consistent. And they actually not yeah and they're interesting people are very interesting and so and i say all that as background to say that i think carlson said that we think he's racist because because he believes in borders we didn't write that we didn't say i don't believe it no every country has borders pretty much i. And what we're calling racist here is the importation of obviously and self-declared racist ideas on each of the show, right? But I think he has taken a viewpoint or he's taken an audience that is uncomfortable with

immigration, that feel discomfort. He talks about it on the show. There are some people in my neighborhood who I don't know, who don't look like me i don't speak my language i have some sense that there's a lot of them in the er getting health care i may have read some websites that says they're getting all you know kind of all getting free obama phones and he gives them a theory of the case and like with all conspiracy theories it it has power. His theory of the case is this problem exists because the people in power want it to exist. Now, and they have a plan. Their plan is to replace you because they hate you.

That's, and that's a powerful statement. And he says it over and over, Charlie, over and over every night. Sometimes the very same sentences, very same words. Now, if you went out and said, well, immigration is a complex problem. And actually, Obama had a pretty tough border policy, so much so that immigration activists hated his policy. And Biden has a mix of policies that have also not satisfied the immigration doves in his party party and even in his own administration, people who have left. You can say that immigration is a hard problem to solve. Legal immigration is a hard problem to solve. But that won't get you ratings.

What gets you ratings is this problem exists because the people in power wanted to and they hate you. Yeah. And your problems can be blamed on those people. Well, you point out that Carlson, you know, does stand in this long nativist tradition. It runs deep in American history, you know, father Coughlin, you know, from the 1930s, Pat Buchanan, um, none of whom had the kind of influence, but also there are other traditions as well. So I'm sitting here in Wisconsin, know a lot of conservatives in Wisconsin and five or six years ago, the dominant Republican around here was Paul Ryan, who had a very, very different vision of where the Republican Party should go, the kind of appeals that it would go. Reince Priebus is from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who, you know, presided

over the autopsy after 2012, saying that the Republican Party needed to change its stance toward, you know, Hispanic Americans and African Americans to be more inclusive. And if you would have talked to Republicans back then, I mean, there was this sense that the party needed to move in that direction. You talk to some of those same people now, and it does feel like invasion of the body snatchers. And I'm mentioning Paul Ryan as an alternative tradition. It strikes me as just one of those strange ironies of time that Paul Ryan, who is sort of the anti-Trump in many ways, is on the board of Fox News and has remained silent while that network has embraced the most sort of vicious racism. I mean, what do you think is going on there? I mean, you know,

his entire, he's still a young man. Well, he's remained publicly silent, which is, which is no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not passing judgment here either way. I would love to know what, if anything, he's saying behind closed doors, but you're right. He has not come out publicly. He has not quit the board. Look, part of this is how power works. Think of all the people who are Republicans you knew who had more conventional conservative politics, Reagan-esque politics, who after four years of Trump are suddenly America firsters. Because that's where the energy is. That's where the money is. That's where the power is.

That's how politics works. And people move towards power and they adjust themselves and their own ideas towards power. You point out that Fox News right now is trying to wring more of a return out of a slowly declining audience, which is interesting because they become more influential. But in fact, the audience is kind of shrinking and dying off. They're the older white conservatives who make up Trump's base in much of Fox core viewership. So give me some sense of of how they are doing this, how they are trying to keep viewers loyal, especially in an age in which there are even crazier networks out there. You know, OAN and Newsmax. And there was some anxiety

before the election that they might lose some of that. So what is the Fox formula at the moment? Well, look, one thing that's important to keep in mind is that Fox is just better at cable TV than anybody else. And they have been for a very long time. They're just better at it. They're a ratings machine. They attract an audience that's so big, it's sometimes twice the combined audience of MSNBC, where you and I appear from time to time, and CNN combined. They're good at what they do. But as somebody pointed out to me, or made the comment to me when I was reporting this, if Tucker Carlson had discovered that being a Jeb Bush stan would mint ratings and did that.

Fox would be fine with that, right? Yeah, sure. It's just that this is what worked. So what's changed? Well, although I know a lot of people on the left don't believe this, for a long time, Fox under Roger Ailes tried to build a really robust news operation. He didn't report news the same way that maybe the New York Times does every day. But Ailes believed in having a news division. He protected it in the eyes of people who worked there. Even some people at the time say they didn't realize he was protecting it.

And then Fox had their opinion programming. What happened during the Trump era after Ailes left and then passed away was that ratings which are always the most important currency in cable news anywhere you go suddenly became the only currency at fox it was the only thing anybody could agree on was important and over time the people who ran the daytime shows the newsier shows usually on the day side of Fox, outside of primetime, were more and more people with primetime roots and primetime sensibilities. And Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox, would say, we have to do more of what we do best. And what does Fox do best? What it does best is opinion programming, conservative opinion programming. And so

Fox day side and the news side began to feel more and more like the opinion side. And the reporters there didn't always like it. And some of them would protest it at the time, like Shepard Smith. He would tell his viewers in 2018 during the midterms about the caravan, the migrant caravan. No one is coming to get you. But every night in primetime, where the highest ratings were, the hosts were saying, oh, yes, they're coming to get you. And then a second piece of this is, again, the ratings. In TV, the ratings that are called quarter hour ratings are really common. Everyone has access to them, right? That shows you how each 15 minute block of the show would work. If you're a higher

ranking, you can order up the minute by minute data, as they call it, the minute by minutes. And you can see the minute by minute ebb and flow of the audience. You can see up the minute-by-minute data, as they call it, the minute-by-minutes. And you can see the minute-by-minute ebb and flow of the audience. You can see what topics and guests make them leave. Now, Fox didn't invent the minute-by-minutes, and they're not the only ones who use them. But my understanding is that Fox institutionalized them across every hour of every day. It became like Moneyball. And in fact, that's exactly how Fox executives pitched it internally. The guy who runs the news parts of Fox, a guy named Tom Lowell,

who's a former producer for Megyn Kelly, and a former O'Reilly producer named Ron Mitchell, would pitch this to the news side people as Moneyball for TV. Audience first. What does the audience want? Now, as I said, ratings are always the most important thing in cable news. Everyone uses them. But these guys started to vet every decision, every single booking decision, coverage decision around ratings. So then looking at that dial, I'm just reading between the lines. They discovered basically that the brown menace is what people want, that this is why Fox leaned harder into stories of illegal immigrants, non-white Americans committing acts of crime or

violence plucked from local news sites. I mean, is that a dopamine hit for those ratings? It is. It's not the only dopamine hit. During the pandemic, they got good ratings on stories about houses of worship being shut down by health authorities. But immigration is just a live wire. What didn't get good ratings are Fox's news reporters, unless they were covering the caravan or covering Brown Menace. And you mentioned the term Brown Menace, put it in quotes. That's the nickname that people on the news side of Fox started giving to these stories because they were ordered up so relentlessly by news executives. And they'd say,

oh, more Brown Menace. That's how Fox people talked about it. You also point out how Carlson is binding viewers of the show. He's the face and the future of the network. And this whole Fox Nation, which is the boycott proof subscriber only version of Fox news doesn't have any really news in it. And that's where, you know, Tucker pushes these, you know,

sort of faux documentary like features, like his Patriot purge, the one that was pushing the big lie that was so bad that it caused my good friends, Jonah Goldberg and Steve haste actually quit as contributors to Fox News. I have a really naive question to ask you. And I'm wincing as I'm doing this because they push the buttons about the Brown menace. They've pushed the big lie.

They've pushed vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories, which probably have caused millions of people not to be vaccinated. He has been a, if not pro-Putin, then at least anti-anti-Putin. At the highest reaches of Fox, do they wrestle with their conscience about this, or is it just about the rating? I mean, at some point you go, okay, we're making lots of money. We have lots of ratings. But, hell, guys, we might be tearing the country apart. We might be destroying democracy, killing Americans, dividing us by race, supporting the worst thugs in the world. Maybe this is wrong. Does that kind of conversation ever take place?

I mean, I understand Shepard Smith leaves, Chris Wallace leaves. But, you know, in the executive suites, do you think they have those moments or not anymore? They sometimes do. And I'll tell you about one that's in the story, believe it or not. In 2018, Tucker Carlson, almost out of the blue or so it would seem, started covering so-called farm murders in South Africa. Now, outside of a major war or border disputes, name a major overseas story that Fox Primetime would normally cover if it doesn't involve immigration or a war. So people at Fox were like, what is this about?

What's he saying? Well, what Carlson was doing was talking about this thorny question in South Africa where most of the farmland is owned by white people and some large portion of it was dispossessed by black South Africans. And there was a lot of violence in South Africa, a lot, and a lot of violent crime. And there's a lot of it on farms. There are dozens of people every year who were murdered on white-owned farms, often the white people themselves, sometimes their farmhands. And he started covering this. And by the way, so did Murdoch tabloids in Australia, where it became a local wedge issue in sort of a classic whipped-up tabloid fashion. And Carlson was making major

mistakes on the facts about this stuff and kind of lumping it all together in a way that is actually fairly common, once again, on the far right, where they talk about farm ridders in South Africa as part of a white genocide, a term that Carlson does not use, but which seems to me is sort of communicated in the way he talks about this. And so at the highest reaches of Fox, there is a meeting they have every day called the News Group. This is a super secretive, super senior meeting. It's the leaders of all the major business units, Fox, Fox Business Channel, the morning shows, primetime on Fox News. And the highest ranking black executive at the time at Fox News, the head of the Fox Business

Network, told his fellow executives that this stuff was wrong, that Carlson was getting it wrong, and that he was getting this narrative from Stormfront, which is a neo-Nazi site, and they overruled him. Now, Fox disputed our reporting here too. It won't surprise you. They said that the news executive, this guy named Tom Lowell, who overruled the Fox business guy, Brian Jones, was only asking that the story be reported out to see if it was true. got the president of the United States to tweet about land expropriation and farm arisins of Africa, a stunning propaganda coup that actual white nationalists and identitarians, as they call themselves, started celebrating. They were like, we finally red-pilled people on white genocide. And so they knew.

They were told that's where he's getting this stuff. And not only is it coming from a noxious source, he's getting his facts wrong. But it did not matter. And there was no apparent trimming of the sails or a change in course, certainly on Carlson's program. Your history of Tucker Carlson, I thought, was fascinating. I knew a lot of it, going back to the Daily Caller, when he was really considered to be a member of the public intellectual class and conservatives. But also, I mean, you know, some of the personal stuff. I mean, the fact that he was abandoned by his mother, you know, rocky marriage, mother accused of drug abuse, father

seeks custody. She doesn't even show up for the hearing. She flees the country. She never saw Tucker and his brother again. And his father, Richard Carlson, you know, marries an heir to the Swanson, you know, frozen dinner fortune. And she adopted them. I mean, Richard Carlson, marries an heir to the Swanson frozen dinner fortune, and she adopted them. I mean, he grew up in tremendous privilege. And he has a long history. Writing becomes a regular on conservative publications, on CNN and C-SPAN. He actually was a host on MSNBC. And DBS, briefly. Yeah. And then, of course course the Daily Caller, which was anti-PC. But as you point out here, he always had that, that, you know, kind of, you know, within his, his orbit, there were always some anti-immigration types, you know, one of his deputy editors mingled with members of the

Wolves of Vinland, Youth for Western Civilization. One of his interns appeared in a photo with a white nationalist who turned out to be one of the speakers at the Charlottesville rally. And, you know, very early on, he was seeing, you know, immigration as sort of a threat to civilization. But the Tucker Carlson of pre-2016 is in many ways hard to reconcile with what he has become. In many ways, sort of like anyone that knew jd vance pre-2060 and i guess how much of this and of course we can never know and i'm not trying to put you on the spot here or play psychiatrist i mean how much of this is genuine uh conviction on his part and how much of it is uh is just the pure opportunism seeing that this is where the power the influence goes and i'm going to go there, and how much of it is

what he actually believes? Is there any way to sort that out? I can only make my educated guess based on my reporting. And you're right, it's a little bit unknowable. But we can pick up clues from things he has said about his own journey and things he has said about his life and his views. I don't think he's an opportunist. I think that's the wrong word. I do think that if you start with a position of skepticism of immigration, and you're learning and imbibing views from colleagues that make you more and more skeptical, and you get on TV, and you find out that turning up the dial on your rhetoric and darkening it gets you more ratings, it becomes really hard to distinguish factually, what do I really believe, quote unquote, really believe? And what am I saying?

Because it gets ratings. I'm not sure it's an answerable question. I do think it all begins with a genuine set of personal convictions. And what I think is kind of funny, Charlie, is what you said actually about how the pre-2016 Carlson is hard to reconcile. I don't think it's kind of funny, Charlie, is what you said actually about how the pre-2016 Carlson is hard to reconcile. I don't think it's hard to reconcile at all. I think the pre-2000 Carlson is hard to reconcile. Okay, fair enough. That's where the big shift comes. And one of the things that surprised me in my reporting was really how far back this goes for him.

The 9-11 era, the war on terror era, and the Iraq war were really big turning points in his thinking about politics. I don't expect a person in their late 20s to have the same views 20 years later, and neither would you. So it's not a mark against him necessarily that he changed his views on this, but the evolution is really striking. And he didn't begin as an ideologue. He was a funny writer. Yeah was, he was more of a portraitist, more of an observational writer, sort of like a PGR work type. And he really soured on,

on the quote unquote neocons and the Bush era establishment in Washington because of the Iraq war. And I think you'll often find in politics that people who become anti-foreign invention, who become paleocons on foreign policy, that can be a gateway to increasingly nativist-tinged and openly nativist viewpoints. It's often kind of connected. And the scaffolding is already there in the intellectual institutions on the right and in the politics of the right. So that doesn't surprise me. But I do find it funny that people in 2018 were like, well, who is this guy?

Why is he so different? I, you know, he was this nice man about town that I knew. And I kind of understand why Carlson would roll his eyes at that because it actually wasn't that new for him. No. Well, he had been there for a while. He was partying with alex jones at the convention in cleveland and in 2016 you know he was going on info wars he was going

above the love sponge he was you know to get some some air time when he was down and out from cable so like he was kind of heading there for a while he was heading there but it wasn't maybe quite so overt no i mean i'll tell you my last encounter with him, which was extremely awkward. I think I've mentioned this before on the podcast. For about 15 years, I was always the master of ceremonies for the Wisconsin Right to Life dinner up until 2016. And I wasn't invited to come back in 2016, even though obviously there were some tensions there because of Trump and pro-Trump,

anti-Trump, et cetera. But they called up and said, would you do it one more time in 2016? Our speaker is George Will. And of course, I love George Will, close to George Will. And so I said, sure, sure, I will definitely do this. So a week before the dinner, they said, okay, we've actually dropped George Will. We've uninvited him. And in his place, we've invited Tucker Carlson. And I won't say all the words that I said at the time. I said, okay, are you fucking kidding me? Actually, this is what I said. So I show up and I say, I'll do it, but I'm not going to introduce Tucker Carlson.

I'm just not going to do that in 2016 because it was very clear where he was going, what he was going to say. And he came over and chatted before the dinner, and I would say it was cordial but cool. But that was the last time that I spoke to him, and it was that weird thing. And maybe when I think back on it, what a sort of a moment of transition for the conservative movement that they dropped George Will,

that George Will was unceremoniously uninvited and replaced with Tucker Carlson. Kind of an indication of what was happening to the conservative movement. I'll tell you another story. When the Weekly Standard was shut down, the magazine where he kind of cut his teeth, they had kind of a wake party. And I talked to somebody who went to it, and Carlson showed up. And I think it was all kind of very sweet and nostalgic and i don't think there were harsh words obviously he and bill crystal are not in good terms anymore and he's

very critical of crystal but i find that so poignant because in a way you know it could have been a victory lap for him right that like uh the conservatism that he now represents has utterly vanquished in the electoral sense the conservatism that he now represents has utterly vanquished, in the electoral sense, the conservatism that the Weekly Standard at different points tried to promote national greatness, conservatism and interventionism. And I don't get any sense that he went there and said, ha ha, suckers. As a moment, think about it. Think about his journey and how he arrived at at that at that party that little wake he was the guy who who replaced those guys in the conservative movement very very much so okay just one one last point here because it's sort of you know in the last a couple of days as you point out in in

your article though that you know he has recurring characters on his show and very much like trump who i think is quite tactical about this, you know, he picks who his enemies are going to be. This is my foil. And very frequently, they turn out to be black women, like Maxine Waters or Elon Omar or Kamala Harris. I mean, there's sometimes when these shots are justifiable, but the pattern is very, very clear. And it's kind of interesting how he's railing against the new White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who I have met, now I think is a lovely person, very, very smart, very, very reasonable every time that I've heard her speak. And he has made a cottage industry out of demonizing her. And doesn't that strike you as

very much on brand for the show and the style of his show absolutely i mean i couldn't tell you mathematically how many times he's done that but i will say it's a it's a leitmotif of the show that black women in positions of power are not only wrong uh and their idea is not only bad uh but they're stupid and unqualified yeah the implication is that they're picked for the race or in the case of Kamala Harris, they got ahead because of who they dated. That's something he said a bunch of times on the show. Sometimes it's hard to know whether he thinks that Kamala Harris is a shadow president who's

secretly pulling the strings or an incompetent or both. But you get both varieties on the show. And yeah, Katonji Brown Jackson, when she was nominated. I know. Very subtle. Very subtle. he asked for else at school a lot of folks at fox who defended a lot of things that come in for criticism in the story that tucker has said but even they admit that one is a it's just a clear dog whistle yeah and you know on the cover of his 2018 book uh ship of fools you know it's a it's a it's a classic kind of conservative imprint world book cover of a cartoon of a bunch of liberals and Democrats and others, and not that many, maybe like seven. And Maxine Waters is one of them. And I just always find that really striking. And I mean, no,

not criticizing Maxine Waters at all. She's a senior congresswoman. She's a committee chair. You know, I don't think anybody, if you watch TV, she's not on TV an awful lot, right? She's not the voice of the Democrats on a lot of things on policy. She's a senior member of Congress from the Democratic Party. It's notable that she ends up in the pantheon of six or seven people on Carlson's book cover. I don't think it's an accident. Okay. So I just called up the book cover. I don't think it's an accident. Okay, so I just called up the book cover, and this sort of like wraps everything up.

So there's, you know, the Tucker Carlson's Ship of Fools, how a selfish ruling class is bringing America to the brink of revolution. And there is Maxine Waters shouting, and there's Nancy Pelosi, there's Hillary Clinton, there is Zuckerberg, I think that's Jeff Bezos. And as the boat goes over the waterfall, the Ship of fools is about to go over the waterfall. The person at the very front of the ship with the spyglass is Bill Kristol, former editor of the Weekly Standard, who probably commissioned many pieces by Tucker Carlson and at whose wake he showed up. But so when did that book come out? That was 2018, fall of 2018.

So apparently he got over his grief about the Weekly Standard pretty quickly. Nick Confessori, thank you so much for joining me. If you have not read this three-part series, it is incredibly well done. It's detailed, but the way in which you and your colleagues really bring the receipts and for people who need to understand how this alternative reality is formed. I think I mentioned you before. I think that people are aware there's an alternative reality, but I don't think they understand why it is so effective and how it works. So I would strongly urge people to read this series. Nick, thanks for joining me today. Thanks, Charlie. Thank you for listening

to the Bulwark Podcast. We've got some more best of shows coming your way as we close out the year. So we'll be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again.