Tucker Carlson s conversion story

Books & the Arts / April 7, 2026
Bad Faith
Tucker Carlson’s conversion story

Chris Lehmann
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Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.
This article appears in the May 2026 issue.
Back in the George W. Bush years, my then-wife and I had dinner in New York City with Tucker Carlson. At the time, he was settling in as cohost of CNN’s Crossfire after a rocky tour through the cable-hosting wars and savoring his re-anointment as a political insider and media gatekeeper. Over drinks, he sounded off on the invasion of Iraq, which he was then souring on (along with much of the rest of the country) after having enthusiastically supported it. He also derided the GOP’s all-in crusade against gay marriage, which would prove by some accounts key to Bush’s subsequent reelection in spite of the Iraq debacle. And he regaled us with media gossip, recounting the tale of a prominent cable talking head whom he’d heard clumsily trying to burnish his standing as a political junkie by announcing his eagerness to cover the “Iowa primary” and the “New Hampshire caucus.”

Books in review
Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind
by Jason Zengerle
Buy this book
Such encounters weren’t all that remarkable for the time, particularly as the Bush White House sank into greater chaos and corruption, and its erstwhile fellow travelers strained to distance themselves from its crimes and imperial folly. Yet as my then-wife and I compared notes afterward, we agreed that Carlson seemed to be verging on a significant revision of his worldview; he appeared to be aligning with the then-trendy-in-DC niche movement of “liberaltarianism.”

Well, that was then. And here we are now. After a few more turns of cable TV’s wheel of fortune, Carlson landed in the heart of Fox News’ prime-time lineup, hymning the MAGA project of national reclamation to his increasingly right-wing audience while peddling ghoulish campfire tales about the plagues of wokeness, critical race theory, open borders, and other damning specimens of anti-American liberal groupthink. Even after his unceremonious dismissal from Fox, Carlson continued his strange trajectory ever more rightward. Setting up permanent shop in the fever swamps of the conspiracy-minded far right, he palled around with Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orb;n and lent his podcasting platform to the Nazi-Groyper influencer Nick Fuentes—a move that inadvertently sparked a still-raging civil war within the Heritage Foundation, the right’s most influential think tank.

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Carlson’s transformation from an ingratiating bow-tied pundit into a plaid-and-khaki-clad Nazi enabler is the subject of Jason Zengerle’s Hated by All the Right People, a chronicle of Carlson’s career that is meant to double, as the book’s subtitle suggests, as a broader account of how the intellectual project of American conservatism has gone off the rails. As a straight media biography, Zengerle’s book is an instructive study in the amoral rounds of ambitious striving in the greenrooms and studio sets of cable TV—a kind of What Makes Sammy Run? for the chattering classes of the new millennium. But as a saga of the right’s intellectual decline, it’s less persuasive—not because Carlson isn’t a representative movement intellectual, but because the American right has long since parted company with political life as a forum of ideas. The watchword for the US conservative movement, at least since the rise of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, has been partisan bloodsport and the promotion of an unappeasable and demagogic politics of cultural grievance. Carlson’s descent, then, isn’t the “unraveling” that Zengerle posits it to be so much as a fulfillment of political destiny: In order to become the maximal Trumpist mouthpiece that he is today—and, indeed, an oft-rumored successor to Trump—Carlson had to relinquish the skeptical and heterodox cast of mind he was trying out during his Crossfire incarnation and become instead a hard-line culture warrior of the MAGA blood-and-soil vintage.