A new critical biography, Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind, seeks to answer a question that haunts political journalists: “What the hell happened to Tucker?” The book, by reporter Jason Zengerle, is the first to critically examine the career of the former Fox News host and podcaster, whom Zengerle describes as arguably the most dangerous media personality of the Trump era.
Carlson’s evolution has been dramatic. In a 2009 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, he argued that right-wing media should prioritise accurate news, telling a hostile crowd: “If you create a news organisation whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail.” The audience jeered. By contrast, as a Fox News host, he largely endorsed Donald Trump’s agenda, despite having called Trump “the single most repulsive person on the planet” in 1999 and privately disparaging him, as revealed by the 2021 Dominion lawsuit.
Since leaving Fox in 2023, Carlson has moved further to the nativist, isolationist far right. He has praised the authoritarian Russian regime, given airtime to guests accused of white nationalism and antisemitism, and described Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as “sweaty and ratlike” and “a persecutor of Christians”. Zengerle, who knew Carlson as a “gifted young writer” in the late 1990s, sees in his transformation a metaphor for the broader shift in conservative politics and media over the past 30 years.
The book also delves into Carlson’s early life. His father, Dick Carlson, was an orphan who became a newsman, diplomat and director of Voice of America. His mother, a bohemian heiress, abandoned the family when Tucker was young; she later left him and his brother $1 each in her will. Carlson was nannied by a former Korean intelligence officer and, according to journalist Michael Wolff, lost his virginity at 14 in a Nevada brothel arranged by his father. Zengerle’s book, written without Carlson’s cooperation, is published by Crooked Media Reads, a new imprint founded by former Barack Obama staffers.
