Book Review: Hated By All The Right People

Jason Zengerle’s biography of Tucker Carlson, Hated By All The Right People, is a lucid account of the shifts in conservatism from intellectual debate in print to chasing engagement on social media. Zengerle’s goal is to answer the question that his old friends in more mainstream media are also asking: why did Carlson change as he dragged the movement into his own fiefdom.

This book does not arrive at a simple answer. Carlson is not a media figure whose talent was captured by a cohort of bad actors who leveraged their beliefs for his own self-interest. He uses his charm and intelligence, enhanced by his journalistic credibility, to present certain ideas like nationalism, protectionism, and populism with high palatability. At the same time, he sanitizes some of its noxious elements, like being a useful idiot to authoritarian regimes such as the Russian and the Iranian governments.

Now a staff writer for The New Yorker, Zengerle takes a critical approach to Carlson’s descent while being measured of his role within the American conservative movement.

Carlson’s old friends have now turned into his enemies. John Podhoretz, who was happy to bring him along as a junior writer since expressed deep regret in hiring him, after he interviewed a Palestinian priest with large sympathies towards Hamas in 2024. Matt Labash, who also once worked with Carlson, has told me that he prays for “his old friend to return”.

Likewise, Carlson has turned old enemies into new friends. The most prominent of which, according to Zengerle, is Pat Buchanan, the former White House Communications Director, who primaried George HW Bush in 1992, and whom Carlson once berated as an antisemite in a C-SPAN interview, and now shaped the nationalist public persona we know today.

Zengerle praises Carlson’s magazine writing, and rightly so. Having been reading magazines since he was a child (his father, Buckley Carlson Sr, a former anchorman, has stated that he usually reads magazines more than he reads books) and is influenced by PJ O’Rourke and Hunter S Thompson, his writings are often quirky, but also reveal a very contrarian streak, which he carried across his career. He once covered a bizarre peace mission that Al Sharpton and Cornel West initiated in Liberia so that a ceasefire could exist between the government led by Charles Taylor and rebel forces. The piece was published in Esquire in 2003 and earned Carlson a National Magazine Award. But he was more interested in presenting television, a move that Christopher Hitchens, who included an article he wrote for The Weekly Standard in a compilation of great bipartisan writing called Left Hooks and Right Crosses, opposed. Nevertheless, it paid more than his job at the Standard, and it made him more direct towards his audience.

Carlson’s heterodox attitude is his biggest asset and sets him apart from most people in the conservative movement. This is why he regretted some of the choices he expressed, like supporting the Iraq War while hosting Crossfire, before having disdain for it, which seemed genuine. It also informs his opinion on Donald Trump, when he was elected as President in 2016. Carlson didn’t set out to be the President’s biggest supporter, but he explained the situation as an effort to make sense of Trump’s popularity. With his primetime show on Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, he leveraged nationalist populism into an ideology that seems coherent in the Trump era, away from the old-fashioned three-legged stool of fusionism, which melds traditionalism, free markets, trade, and interventionist foreign policy together.

Carlson’s first “low moment” in his career was when he hosted CNN’s debate show Crossfire, presenting the conservative worldview against the progressive ideas from his co-host Paul Begala. A famous moment during his reign was when Jon Stewart, the host of the political comedy The Daily Show, told them that Crossfire is “hurting America”. John Klein, then President of CNN, cancelled the show and told The New York Times that Stewart’s criticism had shaped their decision. Zengerle contests that Stewart’s tirade was shaped by liberal smugness, by saying that had the show not been cancelled, it would still have managed to put two political sides together in a landscape saturated with media that inevitably become vessels for echo chambers. This could not have stopped Carlson from becoming more demagogic, and the mainstream media has lost something that was otherwise valuable to the discourse.

Carlson briefly repeated the debate format when he premiered his primetime show Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, debating many guests, who were both liberal and conservative. In his eyes, those guests are part of an established order that seeks to oppress the forgotten man through endless immigration and forever wars. Because Trump watches much TV, Carlson felt that he had a more direct way to communicate with the President. When COVID-19 emerged, he convinced Trump to combat the virus. Months later, Carlson claimed that the virus was not as deadly as first seemed, and invited anti-vaccine figures such as Bret Weinstein, Naomi Wolf, Robert Malone, and Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Eventually, the show set out to target anyone who would have critiqued that ideology, and one of those people is Kay Cole James, then President of the Heritage Foundation.

James’ name isn’t mentioned in Hated By All The Right People, and the book would have benefitted in exploring more detail with Carlson’s relationship with the Heritage Foundation; the right-wing think tank instrumental in shaping Republican policy. Carlson first started his career as a fact checker for the magazine Policy Review. In 2018, he was given Heritage’s Salvatori Prize in American Citizenship by James, which is awarded to someone who “upholds and advances the principles of the American Founding”.

Carlson aimed at James, who is a Reaganite, on his show in May 2020 over an editorial she wrote for the Fox News website during the summer riots in response to the killing of George Floyd. Carlson misframes her op-ed by saying she thinks America is “irredeemably racist” when she said nothing of the sort. What she wrote instead was a condemnation of the violence, not America. James resigned in 2021 and was replaced by Kevin Roberts, who melded the Heritage Foundation towards flattering Trump and Carlson. When Carlson interviewed the white nationalist Nick Fuentes in October 2025, it led to an internal revolt against the think tank, after Robert defended Carlson’s interview as an act of “free speech”.

The reason for Carlson’s departure from Fox News remains a mystery. The book ends with Carlson becoming more significant on his own independent show. As his beliefs have changed so has his media diet. According to Tina Nguyen, who previously worked for Carlson, he told her that his new main source of news is The Greyzone, a far-left conspiracy theory website run by Max Blumenthal that has produced sympathetic coverage of Putin, the CCP regime, and Hamas. And yet, despite his lack of convictions, he was able to convince Trump to nominate J.D. Vance as his Vice President and to connect him with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., eventually becoming his Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Carlson isn’t the only person who has to seek audience validation to avoid irrelevancy. When The Weekly Standard closed in 2018, remaining staffers there, such as Kristol, founded The Bulwark, an anti-Trump publication that is more interested in attacking conservatives than promoting any sort of conservatism. Open debate is rarer in both mainstream and alternative media, because prioritising who is more likely to watch your content often comes first through prioritising cynicism and outrage.

In another world, Carlson would have been celebrated as one of the greatest journalists of his generation, with a unique prose that’s appreciated, even by people whose opinions do not align with his. But now, he is celebrated by telling a crowd what they want to hear while influencing government policy and handpicking politicians to achieve what he wants, regardless of their extremity. Carlson wants to say that he has an interesting life, as he travelled the world writing about other people, presented for numerous news channels, and appeared on a reality show. Unfortunately, it becomes boring when you have no principles to stand on, and that is hurting America.