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David Remnick: A couple of decades ago, a modestly talented writer of outsized ego named Tucker Carlson appeared on the scene. He was a bow tie-wearing conservative writing wise-ass profiles of George Bush and Hillary Clinton and the like, but he became over time the voice of the aging, angry white man, the voice of white nationalism and extremist politics. His audience got so large that Tucker Carlson has been talked about as a presidential candidate, a successor to Donald Trump. Then we saw his emails and his text messages disclosed in Fox's legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems. Those messages made it plain that Carlson's cynicism is even larger than his ego or his ratings.

In private, he actually despised Donald Trump, "Hated him passionately," he said. He expressed disdain for his bosses at Fox and talked about women in the most disgusting terms. His behavior hurt Fox's case with Dominion, and we assume that was a big factor in that enormous financial settlement. Last week, it cost Carlson his perch at 08:00 PM on Fox and he was fired on Monday. What does this all mean for Fox News and for the brand of aggrieved right-wing politics that Carlson most effectively championed?

I'm joined now by two colleagues who are staff writers here: Andrew Marantz follows politics in the media very closely, and Kelefa Sanneh wrote about Tucker Carlson in The New Yorker. About six years ago, you profiled Tucker Carlson, and I want to get a sense from you initially how he got to where he is today, the Father Coughlin of the far right and a supporter of conspiracy theories and a great deal else. How did he travel this path? Is it pure cynicism or did he actually change?

Kelefa Sanneh: It's amazing. You're right. He did start off as a magazine journalist. He wrote what I think are some pretty great pieces for the Weekly Standard. He wrote a piece for Talk magazine, an early profile of George W. Bush, a short-lived venture. From what I understand, David, you're here as the editor of The New Yorker magazine to make an announcement, a hiring that's going to shock the media world is that correct?

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Is Tucker returning to long-form journalism?

David Remnick: Yes. Imagine the tragedy and the traffic. [laughs]

Kelefa Sanneh: Yes, he has this career as a writer and then semi accidentally semi on purpose becomes, first, a figure on TV and then a TV host. He's a host on CNN doing Crossfire, and he has this famous confrontation with John Stewart who says, "You're hurting America." He has a short-lived show on PBS. He goes to MSNBC, where he's working for a time with Rachel Maddow before she was well-known, and he starts working with Fox News. At the time I profiled him, his show was known for confrontation. As his show evolved, it became less of a site for confrontation and it became more writerly, really. It became more known for what they call the A block, where he would deliver this long monologue. Funnily enough, it was similar in structure sometimes to Rachel Maddow.

David Remnick: To Rachel Maddow, yes.

Kelefa Sanneh: Doing that, he was able to start to shape this identity. This identity was a little more or a lot more populist. He was going to talk about immigration as a big threat to America. It was also weird, Tucker Carlson's Show, more than anything else on Fox News, it felt like this moment. It felt like the Internet social media age, where weird stuff was percolating through to the mainstream. I think that's really the signature of the Trump era. He was able to express that on TV. Unlike a lot of his colleagues at Fox News, he made news, he set the agenda. People are wondering, what is Tucker Carlson going to be saying tonight?

David Remnick: Now, Andrew Marantz, you've also written quite a lot about Tucker Carlson and a great deal about social media and its intersection with television. What danger did Tucker Carlson, in your view, pose to the Republic? How do you respond to the notion that he was dangerous?

Andrew Marantz: I think he was dangerous. I think one has to hold in one's mind, both, he's a talented broadcaster and also he's a rhetorical demagogue.

David Remnick: Which is exactly the description Dave Chappelle gave of Donald Trump.

Andrew Marantz: One can both revel and laugh at that, but I think it would be irresponsible to lose track of the fact that, clearly, Carlson Tucker was constantly, dog-whistling is almost too soft a term. He would say immigrants make our country poorer and dirtier. One more recent thing is that he didn't refer to transgender people, he referred to transgenderist people, as if this isn't an identity, this is a nefarious ideology, that's Trojan-horsing its way into our culture.

I think that one of the things that a very talented demagogue like Tucker Carlson can do is put you on the back foot if you're critiquing him. Trump is good at this too, in a different way of never quite coming out and saying the thing, but coming as close as possible to saying it, so that if you're then in the position of critiquing them, you sound a bit unhinged. You sound hysterical.

David Remnick: We're talking about him in the past tense. Even though I have every inclination to think that there's something ahead for Tucker Carlson. I doubt very much, I think we'd all agree that he's going to disappear somehow. He also had an incredible demagogic penchant for using the word you. Speaking very, very directly. "You are being robbed. You are being replaced. You are being taken over. They're robbing masculinity from the American culture." You you you. Talk about that rhetorical trick and why it appealed and to whom.

Andrew Marantz: Well, I think two older, more conservative, generally white men or white women who wanted to support the patriarchy, I sound like a pearl clutcher making these critiques. I think we should say it plainly, he would use phrases like legacy Americans or he would say that Ilhan Omar is being ungrateful because we saved her from a refugee camp and now she's criticizing our country. Just grammatically, what do those things mean?

David Remnick: Well, the hell with grammatically. Morally, it's disgusting. Am I overreacting here?

Andrew Marantz: I think it is clear what he means and it's clearly disgusting. Yet I don't think that it is entirely reducible to that, which in a way makes it more dangerous because it's not like he just went on air every night and just said, "White men take to the battlements. We must restore our country." That would be a boring show and I don't know if it would get him kicked off the air. I would like to hope that it would, but who knows anymore? He was more sly and subtle than that.

It's not that everything he said was reducible to that, but that was a ringing dog whistle underneath it all that he could have some shred of plausible deniability about. Everyone knew what he meant and the white supremacists clearly knew what he meant.

David Remnick: Now, Tucker Carlson in your view, Kelefa Sanneh, did he ever believe anything or is he purely an entertainer that's looking for the ID of a big listener-ship and viewership?

Kelefa Sanneh: I sometimes wonder if he entirely knew. At the time, at the dawn of the Trump era, I sometimes thought that he thought of himself as a lawyer. In the sense that there was this big community of Trump voters and they didn't have representation on TV, and he was going to represent them. He was going to channel them because just like any defendant is entitled to a good lawyer, maybe in his mind, like any political coalition is entitled to a smart advocate on TV, who is going to advocate for those people.

Andrew Marantz: I am your voice.

Kelefa Sanneh: Then I think over time, most of us don't love living with that kind of cognitive dissonance. Most of us over time find ways to convince ourselves that the things that we're saying we really believe in. I think it became less of him.

David Remnick: Your theory, he becomes "The lawyer" for the great replacement theory and a certain kind of white nationalism, whatever you call it. Then he begins to embody it, represent it, symbolize it, and he is it.

Kelefa Sanneh: I think especially in the social media era, the way it works often is once you start saying something, then all these people who disagree with you come at you and yell at you about it, and it's really tempting to double down and say, yes, those people who disagree are terrible. I'm going to say more of this.

David Remnick: For the last year, Andrew, when he visits the office, he comes in and the first thing he says is, "Tucker Carlson could be President of the United States. He could run and he could possibly win." Andrew, maybe elaborate a little bit on why you do come into my office and start talking about this possibility.

Andrew Marantz: Look, the chair is obviously hugely important. That chair is the most powerful. about him, but he's clearly rhetorically skilled. Again, to K's point, he's clearly weird and in touch with future potential coalitions in a way that Bill O'Reilly is not, and in a way that Megyn Kelly wasn't, in a way that Laura Ingraham isn't. Those people have the old-school conservative DNA, but they don't seem to be willing to cast around for the newer, weirder thing in a way that Tucker did, in a way that frankly Trump does too, in a way that you could say, why shouldn't we nuke a hurricane? Why shouldn't we buy Greenland? Why shouldn't we--

All these weird things that we get used to Trump doing, Tucker was doing that night after night, and so I think that's a big source of his power. I think, arguably, Tucker has been going around giving campaign speech. He spoke in Iowa last year shortly before the midterms at the family leadership summit. You don't just accidentally get on a plane to Iowa, right? He's clearly testing the waters. When he gives those speeches, I think he's incredibly impressive.

Again, impressive in an amoral, mercenary way. I find it scary, but I think it's very impressive. He clearly has a touch that Ron DeSantis doesn't seem to have. K, what do you think the future is for Tucker Carlson?

Kelefa Sanneh: I think one of the things I often think about is the Howard Stern model. Howard Stern proved that you can go from broadcasting on the radio to narrowcasting, in Stern's case, on satellite radio. You can be successful. You can maybe make more money and be less influential, be a smaller figure. I think that that is often the most likely path for people that are very popular and very skilled and they're leaving a big platform.

There's a lot of opportunities for Tucker Carlson to go to a smaller platform and make a lot of money and be really successful, be somewhat influential, but it's still a little bit different than being part of the Fox News, being blasted into all these homes every night. I think the other interesting question is what happens to Fox News? On the day that it was announced that Tucker was fired, there was precisely one person at Fox News who was willing to joke about it, and that was Greg Gutfeld, who's a co-host of The Five, which is on some days their most popular show at 05:00 PM.

Also has his own late-night show at 11:00 PM, which often beats the network late-night shows in the ratings. There's an argument to be made that now Greg Gutfeld is one of the defining voices of Fox News and it's very different sensibility from Tucker's sensibility. It's snarkier, it's sillier. It would be interesting to see if Fox News is going more in the Gutfeld direction in the post-Carlson era.

Andrew Marantz: Just, K, I have to say, you and I can civilly disagree about whether Tucker is a dangerous authoritarian or whatever, but I will never go with you into thinking Greg Gutfeld is funny. I'm sorry. I can't go that far.

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Kelefa Sanneh: This is the real question [crosstalk] now.

David Remnick: That's where we set the limits. That's where we set the limits here. That leads me to this question. Yes, he's fired. He's gone. Other people have been fired from Fox News, but we're also in the midst of a media revolution that continues to evolve. Cable television is declining. The average age of the Fox News viewer it's 70 or around there. Clearly, this constellation, this world is changing. We have on the New Yorker Radio Hour today another piece that Clare Malone is providing about Candace Owens, and she suggests a new world, a new generation younger than Tucker Carlson.

Not white, not male. Now, the economics of this universe is changing, but it all has to do with audience as well. Could Candace Owens, a young black woman, a conservative, succeed on Fox at eight o'clock in the same way? What do you think, K?

Kelefa Sanneh: I think Candace Owens would have trouble at this moment in Fox News not because she's Black, but because she's unpredictable. She's known partly for her broadcasting, but also for her feuds. I would guess that one thing that Fox News would want in that Tucker Carlson chair is someone who's a little more predictable, a little more loyal, a little less of a loose cannon. I would think that would be the issue for someone like Candace Owen.

David Remnick: Andrew.

Andrew Marantz: Look, Tucker Carlson was doing almost explicitly a white male identity politics on his show. If that chair were to be filled by Candace Owens, she would be doing a different kind of show, but that's not to say that they wouldn't be able to make it work. These movements, these concepts, these ideologies, they can be pretty flexible. It's not like when you had female anchors on Fox News, the patriarchy was over at Fox News or otherwise.

If a person of color or a woman or both were to fill Tucker Carlson's chair, they would do it in a different way, but there would be a way to integrate that person's individual identity with the larger project. The whole time we're having a conversation like this, we're trying to guess what's in Tucker's mind or heart or whatever. Ultimately, that's not what matters. What matters is what he shows on the screen.

These words tend to lose meaning. Words like facist tend to lose meaning because people throw them around at whoever they don't like, but if you watch The End of Men, the Tucker Carlson original series about how sperm counts in the "West," in air quotes, are declining. What we need to do is get birth rates up so that well-ordered regiments of men can take back order and control. The visual montage is on the screen. I say in the piece, "Look like an Abercrombie ad directed by Leni Riefenstahl."

The aesthetics of it are facist. I don't think he's got militias that he controls. I haven't lost the scale of this here, but if the most powerful seat in conservative media is controlled by someone who is willing to put out aesthetics into the world, that strike me as facist aesthetics with a capital F, like the clinical academic definition. That's not a good thing. I don't think we need to jump to the conclusion that the country's doomed immediately, but it can't be good.

Kelefa Sanneh: Again, part of what was so significant about this is that it was happening in the mainstream. This is one of the defining qualities of politics over the last 10 years. Is it all the stuff that you think would be fringy on the right, and I will say on the left, shows up in the mainstream? You have someone like Tucker Carlson, you watch his show, especially as the major advertisers kind of fled. He's doing these slightly weird monologues, then you've got a bunch of ads for Mike Lindell My Pillow, and then you're back on the show.

It doesn't feel like you're watching normal mainstream American TV. It feels like you've stumbled down a rabbit hole.

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David Remnick: Andrew Marantz, Kelefa Sanneh, thank you so much.

Andrew Marantz: Thank you.

Kelefa Sanneh: Thank you.

David Remnick: Andrew Marantz and Kelefa Sanneh are both staff writers at The New Yorker.

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