Why does anyone give a shit about Tucker Carlson?

Banned Histories of Race in America

Tucker Carlson got fired. Why does anyone give a shit? Really. Yeah, he was the most popular anchor in history on the country’s most popular news channel—often the most popular cable channel—but that only averages out to be three-million viewers a night. Maybe that seems like a big number, but here’s a list of fifty TikTokers with followers numbering from 36 million to 156 million. And here’s a list of fifty YouTubers each with anywhere from 45 million to 240 million subscribers. If any one of those 100 influencers woke up tomorrow with Tucker numbers they would instantaneously die of a combination of shame and failure. Seriously, as far as raw numbers go, three million isn’t even one percent of the country’s population. So, really, why does anybody give one single shit about Tucker Carlson?

Well, he had a particular kind of influence. It’s not a persuasive influence. No one was ever like, “I hadn’t considered living wholly in grievance, but then this pretentious screeching lump whined just enough to convince me!” No, Tucker had influence because powerful fascists listened to him. He bullied Texas Governor Greg Abbott into sending hundreds of National Guard troops to “protect” the state’s southern border. Ron DeSantis sent migrants to Martha’s Vineyard on a Tucker whim.

But this is all kind of new because no one used to listen to Tucker at all. Before he got his 8:PM Fox timeslot, he was just another in a long line of mediocre, silver spooned, upwardly failing white boys. It was only after he took on the schedule and personality of his predecessor Bill O’Reilly that he began to have any influence at all. Not coincidentally, O’Reilly’s friend of more than 30 years Donald Trump only found electoral success once he started mimicking O’Reilly.