Posted by Sia on February 13, 2026, 11:34 am ADMIN
Sia: Interesting look at Tucker Carlson. We all know what a scumbag he is along with his pretend outrage that too many MAGAts buy into. This looks at how he became who he currently is and his resemblance to a fictional literary character.
Intel and Observations: The Talented Mr. Carlson
by Rick Wilson Feb. 13, 2026
What’s most chilling about Tucker Carlson isn’t just the venom, the demagoguery, the whackadoo white replacement conspiracy theories or the way he has bent much of American conspiracy-conservatism to his will; it’s how perfectly he resembles The Talented Mr. Ripley. Like Patricia Highsmith’s sociopathic con man, Carlson is not born from principle; he’s born from performance, mimicry, and sheer narcissistic hunger for fame and power.
Jason Zengerle’s Hated by All the Right People peels back the layers of this transformation: a once-gifted writer and conventional conservative journo who had nothing…and I mean nothing…resembling coherent ideology before media markets cooked up and rewarded outrage.
Carlson didn’t find conviction. He found an audience. He chased it. Like Ripley assuming identities to climb social ladders and impress strangers, Carlson adapted the hottest brand of conservatism of the moment, first Bushy establishmentarianism, then contrarian, then Trumpism, now conspiratorial Putinism, not because he believed in any of it, but because it was the currency of attention.
Ripley steals identities; Carlson steals legitimacy. Ripley kills to preserve his lies; Carlson kills nuance, truth, and any lingering tether to conservative intellectual tradition. Highsmith’s antihero seeks comfortable wealth and acceptance among elites; Carlson sought not just influence (he had that in spades at Fox) but irreplaceability in the media ecosystem. And like Ripley’s mimicry, it’s all a performance: the gravitas of conviction without the substance, the polished veneer hiding the hollow core.
Zengerle underscores how the changes in what media mattered in the moment, first print, then cable television, then digital virality, changed and shaped him. Professional ambition met a market addicted to outrage; a contrarian flirt became a full-blown lunatic fringe firebrand. The result is not just a pundit, but a personality that feigns belief while reflecting back to his audience whatever enraging image will keep ratings and relevance curves going up and to the right.
In the end, Carlson’s story isn’t just about one man’s moral collapse. It’s about a culture that rewards the Ripley in all of us, that tempting version of ourselves that wants spectacle, not truth, and will follow the performance into the abyss.
This commentary is based on a read of the piece enclosed inside here
The truth about Tucker Carlson – and it isn’t pretty
The controversial US pundit is a fascinating and unpredictable figure. But he emerges from a new book as a slick opportunist above all.
Jessa Crispin 12 February 2026 9:42am GMT
Who is Tucker Carlson? Even among the modern breed of American far-Right pundits, competing to be the loudest and most extreme voice on an oversaturated digital scene, he stands out as an oddity.
Whatever you think of him, he isn’t predictable. He opposes abortion and immigration; his views on race have included describing Iraqis as “primitive monkeys”. Yet he has repeatedly given airtime to anti-Semitic guests, and seemed to implicate Israel in the murder of Charlie Kirk – hardly normal for even hardline conservatives. Nor is his decrying of the destruction of Gaza.
Watching Carlson, or listening to his ultra-popular podcast The Tucker Carlson Show, you become baffled. He’s clearly capable of independent thought, and has greater room for intellectual manoeuvre than the “yes men” who pop up nightly on Fox News. He is, or was, a capable writer, as proven by his pre-cable-television career in print; and he still has journalistic chops, as you can see from, say, his vigorous interrogations of the likes of Ted Cruz.
And yet, you think, as well as giving succour to racists and anti-Semites, he also seems perfectly willing to fly to Russia and interview Vladimir Putin, or to spout nonsense about the “stolen election” of 2020 and the insurrection of January 6. If this is just good business, the cost of getting clicks and subscribers and listeners, doesn’t the total lack of authenticity keep him up at night?
The answer, at least the one provided by political reporter Jason Zengerle in his new book Hated by All the Right People, is: not really. Little seems to keep Carlson awake, except for the demon that lives in his home and, according to Carlson, has physically attacked him on several occasions in the wee small hours. Or perhaps that’s just another performance, as he tries to stay at the front of the political Right by appealing to the Christian nationalist crowd.
Carlson isn’t really a conservative. In internet parlance, he’s a troll. The earliest accounts of his political affiliations, including grand pronouncements in his sixth-grade (Year 7) class, were geared toward provocation rather than ideology. When his college class was asked, presumably near-rhetorically, whether anyone believed that an unarmed black woman who’d been killed by the police had deserved to die, Carlson raised his hand. The gesture wasn’t made to reveal some deeply-held belief: it was to rile any classmate who was a bleeding-heart liberal or sympathetic to the Left.
Don’t take it from me, or Zengerle. In the early 2000s, when Carlson was cast to argue for the Right-wing position on the debate-style CNN show Crossfire, conservatives themselves protested. The congressman Tom DeLay complained to the New York Post that Carlson was “not a real Republican”. Before that, in 1997, Carlson had written a hit piece on conservative powerbroker Grover Norquist for The New Republic, and had been widely accused of disloyalty not just to the Republicans but to the entire conservative movement.
So how did someone so inconsistent and opportunistic become a thought leader of the Republican party under Donald Trump? Well, by being inconsistent and opportunistic. Carlson was a harsh critic of Trump in 2016, but by 2024 was hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. Actual conservative intellectuals such as William Buckley and Russell Kirk were replaced by young guns such as David Frum and Bill Kristol – who hired Carlson for The Weekly Standard – and they, in turn, have been replaced by streamers and podcasters who think it’s funny to make jokes about the Holocaust.
The political Right used to reward an educated class of writers and thinkers. Even Carlson, wearing his little CNN bow tie, could once quote philosophers while making extreme positions on culture-war issues such as abortion seem half-reasonable. Now you get power in the movement by being as provocative and prolific as you can. Hence Carlson can turn up at a Kirk memorial rally to make comments that seem, to many observers, to accuse the Jews of killing Christ.
Carlson, in truth, has less an ideology than a sense of resentment. Though it’s hard to tell which of his statements are heartfelt and which are exploiting the moment, the most obviously sincere lines have always been those that rail against the “elites”. And that group, it should be pointed out, includes Zengerle. He has the breeding and grooming that Carlson missed out on: he had a top-tier education, then was scooped up by that most elite of journalistic venues, The New Yorker.
Carlson, by this logic, and by comparison, kept missing out. Instead of Andover, the boarding school of future presidents and business leaders, he went to St George, the school of has-beens and almost-wases. He didn’t get into Harvard, he got into Trinity. He didn’t intern at Rolling Stone, he worked at a newspaper in Arkansas. He grew up more than comfortable – his absent mother was the heiress of a cattle baron’s fortune – but he lacked the connections that move a person from “accomplished” to “powerful”. As a result, he has had it in for the “elites” who did.
Zengerle relates all of this history, following Carlson’s ascent to ultraconservative power. Despite not having Carlson’s co-operation during his research, he’s highly adept, even convincing, at painting a detailed portrait of a man fuelled by grievance. The problem, however, comes with the second half of his subtitle: the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind.
on February 13, 2026, 11:34 am
