The dizzying pace of history these days is a hazard for authors. Books on politics, media or technology risk being overtaken by events from the time they’re conceived to the time they’re finished — or even in the months between completion and publication. But sometimes history’s accelerating twists and turns work in a book’s favor.
That’s the case for “Hated by All the Right People,” the new biography of Tucker Carlson by journalist Jason Zengerle. Zengerle decided to write a book about Carlson in 2021, when he was Fox News’s fire-breathing, prime-time populist star. In 2023, Carlson was defenestrated by Fox News and, without direct access to millions in the Republican base, looked like he might be headed to irrelevance. But he reinvented himself as an independent-media force with the ear of the president and vice president and an increasingly dark fixation on Israel and Jews.
Zengerle, now a staff writer at the New Yorker, has known Carlson since they were both 20-something journalists in Washington in the late 1990s — Zengerle at the liberal New Republic and Carlson at the conservative Weekly Standard. Carlson has been “the subject of — and, more frequently, a source for — a decent amount of my reporting over the last twenty-five years,” Zengerle writes.
His story doesn’t reach Carlson’s latest provocation — his friendly podcast discussion with the Nazi-sympathizing influencer Nick Fuentes, which (presumably to Carlson’s amusement) has divided and preoccupied conservative institutions and the press for months. But the book’s methodical retelling of Carlson’s career gives context, if not answers, for the pull he exerts on important parts of the political right.
The now-defunct Weekly Standard, the Washington publication that made Carlson a star, and its former staff play a central role in the story. Zengerle is clearly dismayed at Carlson’s recent trajectory. But nor does he idealize the conservative intellectual elite that came before Donald Trump’s rise, writing unsparingly about the Weekly Standard’s role stridently promoting President George W. Bush’s ill-fated war in Iraq. Soon after the invasion, an article in the Standard exulted: “No day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, ‘We were wrong. Bush was right.’”
Carlson went along, but soon became “one of the first — and, for many years, only — conservative pundits to recant his support for the Iraq War,” Zengerle writes. Referring to the isolationist, anti-immigration ideology known as paleoconservatism, Carlson said in 2004 that he was “getting more paleo every day.” Years later, the author notes, Carlson started to recount “how, as a young journalist, he’d been used as a cat’s-paw” by “the neocons to promote disastrous foreign wars.”
That spin was opportunistic, of course, but the Bush administration’s armed democracy-promotion mission in Iraq was not just a hiccup emitted by an otherwise healthy Republican establishment. It was a devastating failure of foreign policy that spoke to basic misjudgments about the world and sent larger parts of the right, understandably, looking for new sources of leadership and ideas.
“Hated by All the Right People” is a media history as much as a biography, and it describes how Carlson drifted toward the more visceral medium of television as print journalism declined. Carlson “discovered that the tossed-off asides he was offering on TV oftentimes drew as much of a response, sometimes even a greater response, than the magazine stories he was sweating and stressing over.” He knew that TV tended to collapse the nuance that he could convey through written words, but embraced his role as a conservative brawler on CNN and MSNBC.
After MSNBC pushed out Carlson in 2008, he was back to written journalism, but now the internet was in full flower. Carlson co-founded the Daily Caller in 2010 as a site for reliable conservative reporting. But the Caller leaned, over time, toward white identity politics and provocation. Its traffic numbers, Zengerle says, “served as an early-warning system for Carlson about where the conservative base was headed.” Steve Bannon’s further-right Breitbart News ultimately ate the Caller’s lunch.
It was Trump’s 2016 election that thrust Carlson to the height of his powers as a Fox News evening host, where he became famous, Zengerle says, for his “look of incredulity or bewilderment” as he humiliated liberal guests. As the progressive “Great Awokening” tore through America’s elite institutions, Carlson’s commentary on race and immigration became increasingly incendiary, conveying ideas that had percolated on right-wing corners of the internet — such as “replacement theory” — for an audience of ordinary Republicans.
While he was still part of Fox News, however, there were limits to how far Carlson could push. Perhaps perceiving that he was becoming too demagogic or simply too big, the company abruptly fired him in 2023. The guardrails were gone. Carlson’s independent podcast increasingly yukked it up with cranks and extremists, posing with bafflement that anyone could find their perspective objectionable. Zengerle argues that a “through-line in many of Carlson’s most unhinged and conspiratorial musings” was “a deep antipathy toward Jews and a visceral loathing of Israel.”
Since the conclusion of Zengerle’s narrative sometime in 2025, Carlson has generated an intense debate about Israel and Judaism on the right by chummily interviewing Fuentes. Of course, he vehemently and articulately denies harboring any bigotry, insisting that the New Testament prohibits it — unlike the Jewish Bible, with its embrace of what Carlson calls “blood guilt.” Clever.
One lesson of the past 10 years of Carlson’s career is that the political establishment’s ability to erect a firewall against certain ideas has collapsed. Advertisers boycotted Carlson’s Fox News show over his abrasive racial commentary; now that same kind of communication is the lingua franca of a presidential administration that won the popular vote. Carlson is a force to be reckoned with in the GOP, and curbing the influence of his most toxic ideas will require more than declaring them beyond the pale. It will require a politically successful Republican presidency, which, Carlson’s trajectory reminds us, the country hasn’t experienced for decades.
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