The setting helps hide the propaganda in plain sight. The Carlson of daytime is more casually branded: just Carlson and a pal, the whole thing suggests, chatting in his cabin after a day of hunting or fishing-a little bit cable, a little bit Cabela’s. The Carlson of the evening is overt about stoking his audience’s anxieties a recently updated intro reel for Tucker Carlson Tonight features a Border Patrol vehicle and a person holding a sign that reads Freedom over fear!! America. He nodded appreciatively as Murray dismissed Fox News’s latest manufactured threat, critical race theory, as “a repudiation of the American creed.” Carlson did not push back on the assertion. At one point, he stated as fact that white people are more qualified for cognitively challenging professions than Black people are. Murray, who disputes the SPLC’s assessment of him, spent the episode issuing the kinds of claims that have made him infamous. “We are honored to have you,” Carlson told him. O n the June 16 episode of Tucker Carlson Today, Carlson hosted a man the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an extremist-ideology: white nationalism-on the basis of his use of “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the Black and Latino communities, women and the poor.” Carlson spoke with Charles Murray for nearly an hour. Now he is coming for the rest of the day. Tucker Carlson, spewer of marketable mistrust, has conquered prime time. The network’s webward expansion continues that effort. Fox has long reinterpreted manifest destiny as a media product, treating the American mind as a vacant space upon which any dream, or any delusion, might be constructed. Tucker Carlson Today, a homestead on a manufactured frontier, is one of the spoils of Fox’s deep investment in its star, evidence of the trust the network has placed in him to continue its basest and most basic project: insisting that some Americans are more American than others.
Carlson’s version, though, is a show of force. Log cabins, those mainstays of American iconography, typically suggest hardiness, homeyness, humility. Its default image, however, offers a window into the cabin’s imagined environs: a farmhouse and a field, overlaid with the words-rendered in lowercase, because all things are casual in the daytime- tucker carlson today. A screen mounted on the wall sometimes serves as a portal for the guests who do not come to Carlson’s cabin in person. The space is otherwise spare: a shelf with a display of tattered books, a sepia-toned globe, a rug, a large desk (made of thick glass, the set’s one concession to cable). Just behind Carlson’s chair is a backlit American flag. The set is constructed almost entirely of wood, or a wood-like substance. And Carlson hosts it from a gaudy facsimile of a log cabin. It begins, episode after episode, with that reel of images. The show is pretty much what you’d expect it to be, save for one thing: It takes place in a Foxified version of Frontierland.
Tucker Carlson Today features interviews, one-on-one and in-depth, with Carlson’s preferred guests-skeptics of multiculturalism, skeptics of science, skeptics of “the system” as it currently operates. This spring, Carlson began hosting a new show on Fox Nation, the network’s digital streaming service. The pictures whirl, like icons in a Western-themed slot machine, until they land on their final image: the smiling face of Tucker Carlson. Then the fence, the mountain, the trees, the river.
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