How Jon Stewart created Tucker Carlson

For those of us who were adults during the second Iraq War, one of the legendary victories for basic sense and decency in politics was the day Jon Stewart nuked Tucker Carlson on “Crossfire” in 2004. Stewart was riding high as the popular host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, and he reluctantly agreed to appear on the popular debate show that had aired on CNN since 1982. “Crossfire” was artificial, he felt, closer to a scripted wrestling match between partisans than a real political discussion.

Stewart did not refrain from expressing this opinion in the saltiest terms on-air, especially to Carlson, the show’s co-host who was cast as the overgrown college Republican with odious views and a polka dot bowtie. Carlson, he said, was a “d**k.” Stewart accused all the show’s hosts of being “hacks” who were “hurting America” by treating politics like an entertainment product instead of a serious business.

At the time, Stewart’s criticism struck deep. “Crossfire” was canceled shortly thereafter. But the moral clarity Stewart championed didn’t last long. On the contrary, Carlson eventually came to realize that the pathway to professional success was to double, triple and even quadruple down on being the hack Stewart accused him of being.

Carlson’s unmatched skill at shameless pandering to the worst instincts of the right have served him well. Every time the political world thinks his career has ended, he manages to rise again, rebuilding his audience and fattening his bank accounts. Like a roach infestation that won’t go away, Carlson has been slowly chewing away at the GOP, which has been his political home for his entire life, turning it into a nest only suitable for the most reactionary. Even more so than Donald Trump in many ways, Carlson has remade the party into a fascist project.

Carlson’s career has been getting a fresh public re-examination due to “Hated by All the Right People,” a recently published biography by Jason Zengerle that traces Carlson’s journey from respectable journalist to elite conservative pundit to what he is now: a fascist hack. The “Crossfire” confrontation is a linchpin in this story, but as Zengerle reminds readers, it’s not as cut-and-dry as a comic book villain origin story would be. 

For years, Carlson really did appear to take Stewart’s criticisms to heart, especially as he knew he was defending the Iraq War on-air while privately having his own doubts. He tried to be an honest, if still right-leaning, journalist. He worked at MSNBC. He attempted to found the Daily Caller as a real news outlet. But it wasn’t too long before Carlson started to see the Stewart conflict in a completely different light: as an idiotic scolding by a self-righteous liberal who didn’t understand how the real world worked. And he had a point: In his world — the one of Republican politics — there really wasn’t a market for honest journalism.

Yes, this rejection of truth is standard in right-wing media. But what makes Carlson so special is that he understands something the right-wing audience craves above all else: moral absolution. On some level, most of them know it’s wrong to embrace the racist and sexist views fueling the MAGA movement. Carlson, though, is a genuine genius at weaving an intoxicating tale about how it’s actually the liberals who are the bad guys and the only reason this isn’t self-evident is a seemingly infinite conspiracy by shadowy elites to lie to the public about every topic imaginable.

An examination of Carlson’s career shows that he concluded the problem with “Crossfire” was that it didn’t go far enough. Just as he did in his Fox News primetime show, in his solo career Carlson doesn’t just treat progressives as a foe in a wrestling match. They are presented as an all-powerful force of bottomless evil that exists only to destroy American values — and only he and his wise audience are strong enough to resist the brainwashing powers of the almighty left. He went from feeling guilt-tripped by Stewart to a career insisting that people who look and think like Stewart are secret masterminds controlling public discourse.

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“They want you to believe” is Carlson’s mantra, along with the catchphrase “it doesn’t fit their narrative.” “They” is always defined — poorly —  as a group of conspirators with implausible motives, but that’s why it’s such an effective tactic. “They” — liberals — are pure evil and “you,” the right-wing audience at home, are endlessly bedeviled victims. “They” want you to believe “gender roles are a construct” and “none of this is inborn.” When “they” tell you that Nazis started World War II, that’s “a level of manipulation that’s like that’s just mind control.” “They” don’t want you to know that “whites around the world are being eliminated.”

With this strategy in mind, it should not come as a surprise that Carlson is saying “they” are lying about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement assault on Minneapolis, because “they want riots” and “they wanted the chaos” to justify what he claims is a “color revolution.” 

These narratives are intoxicating for right-wing audiences because it absolves them of moral responsibility for actions like voting for Trump and unleashing this disaster. But it also shows why Carlson keeps pushing his audience further to the right. His overarching narrative is that all information coming from mainstream sources is part of this larger conspiracy to mind-control the public. To keep the grift going, Carlson has to expand the circle of “official narratives” that are now being questioned — including established truths such as that Nazis caused World War II and that white people aren’t the victims of an ongoing genocide.

This is why Carlson, in recent months, has reliably sided with the biggest cranks in the MAGA media sphere against people like conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who denounced Carlson for hosting Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his podcast. At this point, any concession to reality is a threat to the larger MAGA project. After all, if you start agreeing with liberals that Holocaust denialism is bad, you might start to ask if there could be other things they’re right about. You might start to wonder if they don’t also have a point when they say other kinds of racism are bad or that feminists aren’t actually delusional witches.

Looking back over the past two decades, it’s clear that Carlson has survived and even thrived for so long not simply by rejecting Jon Stewart’s view that a journalist’s duty is to facts and rationality. It’s that he understood what Stewart didn’t: that partisan hacks aren’t being foisted on audiences. Instead, they are meeting consumer demand.

What a right-wing audience craves is endless reassurances that they’re the good guys, even if doing so means spinning out ever more ridiculous conspiracy theories to explain away all the evidence that they are, in fact, the baddies. Carlson’s conspiracies provide a giant permission slip to his audience to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and ears, and bury themselves in lies. He and his fans love to talk about mind control, but they are living proof there is no such thing. Instead, the fantasyland they live in is one they made of their own free will.

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