The Paranoid Style in Tucker Carlson’s Home Office
Fox has ideology, of course (which has cycled through different flavors of conservatism over the decades), but it also has an aesthetic. Its shows are produced to be glossy and urgent, to convey a sense of slick confidence. Fox News is designed to look like it is broadcasting from the top of the world; “Tucker on Twitter” looks not unlike something livestreamed after the apocalypse.
Others — Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck — have failed to reclaim their peak influence after losing their Fox perches. Carlson could be different; Fox News has yet to recover in the prime-time ratings from his sudden departure.
But Carlson, for all his anti-elite posturing, is wholly a creature of legacy TV, having hosted shows on Fox, CNN and MSNBC. He is a houseplant grown under corporate studio lights, even when they were installed in his rural Maine town for him to broadcast remotely to Fox.
On the other hand, it’s possible that the pivot to lo-fi Twitter is more of a match for the current incarnation of Carlson. Whether he is holding forth on Russia or immigrants or the Jan. 6 riot, he has one persistent meta-theme: The elites are controlling your information and telling you what you’re allowed to say. “Go ahead and talk about something that really matters and see what happens,” he says at one point, seeming to allude to his firing by Fox while casting himself as a free-speech martyr. “If you keep it up, they’ll make you be quiet. Trust us.”
Within this rhetorical framework, it is not necessary to prove that aliens have been discovered on Earth or that Ukrainians blew up a Ukrainian dam. It is enough for Carlson to say They don’t want you to believe it, and the viewer can accept the idea for the sake of sticking it to them. They say you’re wrong, you’re crazy, you’re a racist. Well, what do they know?
It is a premise made for social media, as many a red-pilled YouTuber and Facebook proselytizer has found. The premise of his appeal — that he is the one teller of truth, and you the one critical thinker, in a world of shepherds and sheep — dovetails with the idea of booting up your computer to seek out a man giving speeches from his den.
Source: The New York Times
