The morning Tucker Carlson’s abrupt departure from Fox was announced, a Twitter account for Tucker Carlson Originals, his “documentary” series, was extremely busy with cattle mutilation.
Originals aired on Fox Nation, the network’s online streaming service, and that morning, the Twitter account was recirculating clips from a 2022 special speculating about whether the cattle mutilators are, you know, aliens. For the program, Carlson and Co. even hired a butcher to attempt to “recreate” a cattle mutilation and concluded—of course—that such butchering simply couldn’t be done by human hands.
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This was, needless to say, very odd. Not for the internet, of course, or for the news-of-the-weird section of a newspaper; after all, cattle mutilation has been a subject of fascination since the 1970s, a reliable hook for people who like to read about the so-called paranormal. (The subject is so well-worn that the FBI even attempted to investigate cattle mutilation in the late ‘70s, but was largely unable to do so, it said, because of a lack of jurisdiction.) But certainly it was pretty offbeat for Fox News, a break from a relentless drumbeat of coverage about stolen elections, “illegal” immigrants, unjust vaccine mandates, lawless BLM rioters, and the other addled preoccupations that make up most of the network’s most attention-grabbing and lucrative coverage.
This was, in the end, arguably Tucker Carlson’s unique appeal for his audience: Across three separate shows, he functionally remade the experience of surfing the more exciting sections of the internet, neatly packaged in a familiar-looking form, for an older, less media-and-tech literate audience. Tucker Carlson Tonight was the host’s most popular, most political, and and most relentlessly-covered show, the place where he spread lies that he didn’t even privately believe about Dominion voting machines, tried to launder the entirety of January 6, relentlessly demonized trans people, pushed core white nationalist beliefs like Great Replacement theory, and spent many long hours obsessing over Hunter Biden’s laptop. He also became obsessed with Hungary, depicting it as a conservative utopia, even going so far as to do a fawning interview with authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orban during a week-long trip to Budapest.
But Carlson had two other programs as well, both of which launched in 2021 and which aired on Fox Nation: Originals and Tucker Carlson Today, a sit-down talk show where the host invited a variety of strange characters for casual conversation inside what looked like a log cabin crossed with an airless panic room.
“It was trying to appeal to a younger crowd,” Andrew Lawrence told Motherboard. He’s the director of rapid response at Media Matters, the liberal-leaning media watchdog organization, which has made analysis and criticism of Fox News a cornerstone of its work. Lawrence monitors right-wing media, with a concentration on Fox News’ primetime shows, and regularly watched and analyzed all three of Carlson’s programs over the last seven years, beginning when Tucker Carlson Tonight launched in 2016.
“They know their viewers are older,” Lawrence said, referring to Fox News’ core audience—ratings data show that Carlson’s dominance was entirely a function of his appeal to the over-50 set—and Originals and Tucker Carlson Today were, he thinks, Carlson’s attempt to appeal to a younger, and highly specific, online audience. “That alt-right, men’s rights activist, incel, very online audience was really important to Tucker.”
The attempt to court internet-addled men led to some extraordinarily weird stuff, like the infamous Originals documentary last year, The End of Men, which, among other things, promoted tanning one’s testicles as a way to increase testosterone. (You should, arguably, not do this, unless your aims are to heat up and possibly burn your balls, which is of course ultimately between you and your scrotum.) The cattle mutilation special was another clear piece of internet bait; so was a documentary about UFOs. Just days before Tucker was sailed off the side of the good ship Fox, a documentary entitled Let Them Eat Bugs aired, which spent a lot of time giving air to the conspiracy theory that global elites want to force us to eat bugs for their own sinister ends, another idea that has been breathed into life on places like Infowars and in the more conspiracy-focused sectors of the online right.
Then there was the daily talk show, where Carlson dressed slightly more casually and looked a hair more relaxed and less furiously constipated than during his nightly hour. (Flannel, Mr. Rogers sweaters, less yelling.) Plenty of the Today interviews pursued his usual fascinations—a guy who came on to talk about Chicago being full of crime, for instance. But some guests seemed, again, like an attempt to get into the eyes of a younger audience: a lady who used to be in the Pussycat Dolls discussing how she gave it all up for Christ, for instance, or a guy who left Mumford and Sons so he could freely praise right-wing self-styled journalist Andy Ngo, or Russell Brand, who appeared in early March, showing the majority of his chest and doing his usual bit.
As time wore on, though, the shows began to bleed into one another, Lawrence says, with Tonight relying more heavily on re-airing segments from Today and Originals. Large parts of a recent interview with Elon Musk, for instance, re-aired on Tonight.
“It was all very much entwined,” Lawrence says.
And with that shift, the traditional Fox News audience—older, white, primed already for some kinds of suspicion—were introduced to a variety of tremendously niche internet content, much earlier in the cycle than when they would have traditionally seen it, when it bled into mainstream Fox programming or onto Facebook. (It’s hard not to wonder what viewers who stumbled into the extended Carlson universe from his prime-time show made of the likes of reactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug or a pre-Senate run Blake Masters, whose concerns would seem illegible to anyone whose brain wasn’t directly hardwired to certain corners of the internet.)
The overarching goal of sharing programming from the online shows to Tonight, Lawrence thinks, was “about priming the Fox News viewer to be more accepting of “the weirdos on the fringe,” as he puts it.
“More so than getting grandpa to go sun his balls,” Lawrence says, “it’s about getting grandpa to start freaking out about low testosterone rates that are probably caused by feminism or soy or whatever they decide to land on there. The point is to get viewers focused more on that larger picture” of a more globalized and arcane sense of distrust, beyond voting machines or the latest Biden gaffe.
But things like cattle mutilation and UFOs were also, quite clearly, meant to be fun, lighter fare that cut into Tucker’s yelps of outrage and showcased a mostly dormant sense of humor. That, too, can keep viewers occupied—feeding them some candy along with the arsenic. And the inclusion of the weirder programming shows the ways that modern Tucker turned into a sort of one-man YouTube, an experience not unlike surfing a slightly earlier internet: aliens and pseudohistory and overheated political takes and long, cheaply-produced interviews. Even some of Carlson’s favorite interview subjects and talking heads—Glenn Greenwald, anyone?—are drawn from a slightly earlier version of online. This was all, of course, a unique and uniquely-attention grabbing combination. Without Carlson, Fox has already seen its ratings plummet and a boost to one of its main competitors, Newsmax.
It’s unclear if Carlson will be able to try again somewhere else without voiding his contract with Fox. Thus far, the one semi-statement he has issued on Twitter—an odd little video posted on Wednesday night, filmed from his home studio, did not directly address his firing, and instead merely made some windy points about how true debates “are not permitted in American political media.” He darkly intimated that the “people in charge” of media are “hysterical and aggressive.”
“As long as you can hear the words,” Carlson signed off, a strained version of a smile on his face, “there is hope.”
The next Tucker Carlson is assuredly coming—on Fox or somewhere else—and it only remains to be seen what kind of new varieties of garbage they have to feed us next. In the meantime, given that Carlson himself has clearly been solidifying his ties with reactionary and far-right internet for years, it’s not hard to imagine that, like so many Substack bloggers before him, he’ll strike out on his own. (It would, at this point, be difficult to find a major news network that hasn’t already fired him.) The question, of course, is whether there’s hope for the uniquely toxic kingdom Carlson built to thrive somewhere else, or whether we have, at last, mercifully seen its end.
