Tucker Carlson was in a good mood on Friday night. He was giggly. He was giddy. For the final segment of his Fox show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host was joined on set by a newly famous pizza-delivery man: While en route to drop off some pies earlier this month, the man had seen a police chase in action and had tripped the fleeing target with a nonchalant kick, pizzas still in hand. The scene had been captured on a doorbell camera; Carlson had aired it repeatedly on his show. Now the man in question had driven—from Pennsylvania—to deliver pizza to his studio-bound fan. He and Carlson ate the slices together, taking big bites (“It’s actually still hot!”) as they bantered. Carlson, still chewing, offered a merry sign-off to his viewers. “We’ll be back on Monday!” he said.

Except, of course, he wasn’t. Friday’s episode, it turned out, was the last one Carlson would film for Fox. The most-watched host on cable has left the network for reasons that may involve lawsuits, prickly office politics, or the ongoing liabilities of a say-anything star. What seems clear for now is that Carlson’s departure had little to do with the dangerous vitriol he spewed on his show—and that the decision to “part ways,” as Fox’s announcement put it, was as much a surprise to him as it was to everybody else. Carlson is a very good actor—he has spent the past seven years convincingly playing a propagandist—but his final show gave no indication of the new script. Had he known, he probably wouldn’t have ended his run on Fox with a mouth full of interstate pizza. And he probably wouldn’t have chosen, as his swan song, a bizarre and menacing riff about castration.

[Read: Tucker Carlson’s manufactured America]

“Heaven’s Gate! Remember that?” Carlson began the segment, cheerfully. He proceeded to rehash the well-known details of the cult that made so many headlines in the ’90s: the mass suicide; the bowl-cut-sporting co-founder, Marshall Applewhite; the belief that the Hale-Bopp comet was an interplanetary message. “Members of the cult believed they were part of an alien species trapped in human form,” Carlson said. “Applewhite taught them to give up all human attachments: their relationships with their families, their friends, their jobs, their possessions, ultimately their names”—here, he paused for dramatic effect—“their genders, and their own bodies. Sound familiar?”

Applewhite castrated himself, Carlson told viewers, in an effort to achieve “androgynous immortality,” and encouraged his fellow cult members to do the same. “You can go on Wikipedia and read all about it,” Carlson said, “and we recommend that you do. Why? Because, once again, it sounds familiar. Heaven’s Gate is proof that when religious fanatics command you to surrender your gender and become androgynous, castrate yourself and your children—it’s probably not going to end well.”

And then, abruptly, the segment ends.

Carlson’s lawyers have argued that he is not a journalist but instead, effectively, an entertainer—that anyone who might see him as a reliable purveyor of facts is making a foolish category error. His show’s appeal, though, depends on its gaudy adjacency to journalism: Carlson’s segments look like the news and act like the news, even as they regularly distort the news. But his Heaven’s Gate rant defied that logic. The cult’s deaths took place in 1997; as far as I can tell, they have no explicit connection to the current moment. Except, that is, for the cultish commands that Carlson treated as abiding dangers to his viewers: Surrender your gender. Castrate yourself, and your children.

The host shares a skill set with the man he once called “a demonic force” and a “destroyer.” Both Carlson and Donald Trump have a way with words. They wield them not simply as tools of meaning but also, often, as simple punctuation. What Trump does in his writing—the repetition, the ad hoc capitalization—Carlson does in his speech. He turns the core message of every segment he airs—they’re coming for you; be afraid—into a rhythmic proposition. Like a jingle rendered in a minor key, Carlson’s show turns fear into music.

[Read: How Fox News became a language]

And here is the grim refrain of his Heaven’s Gate riff: castrate. The segment may have seemed discordant; it was, on the contrary, all too harmonious with everything else. One of Carlson’s most consequential legacies, my colleague Charlie Warzel writes, will be his mainstreaming of hard-right agendas. This is what Carlson was doing as he offered up his weird little history lesson. He was vilifying transgender people—in particular, transgender women. He chose to mock 39 people who died 26 years ago in order to make an insidious suggestion: that those who identify as transgender are in the thrall of a cult.   

The segment bears one more mark of a typical Carlson screed. For all its insinuations, it retains plausible deniability. In an earlier moment on Friday’s show, Carlson referred to the Nashville school shooter as a “transgenderist terrorist,” the invented adjective suggesting an ideological choice rather than a human truth. But in the Heaven’s Gate segment, Carlson never says transgender. He merely implies, and hints. Were he questioned, he could easily argue that the segment was a throwaway, a callback to the ’90s that filled space in the waning minutes of a Friday-night broadcast. That ambiguity—that willingness to air words that are vetted and violent at the same time—is a core element of Carlson’s rhetoric. The slippery language flatters his audience. They’ll understand its grammar, the implication goes, in a way those woke liberals won’t. The language protects Carlson. It serves everyone involved—save for the people who have to live in the shadow of Carlson’s insinuations.

[Read: American cynicism is winning]

It was an apt coincidence, then, that Carlson spent his final moments on Fox mocking the failures of a cult. Cults and conspiracy theories tend to share similar dynamics: They offer community to their adherents. They rationalize the world’s chaos. They start from their preferred conclusions, and work backwards. “It’s super-simple,” Carlson said in an opening segment on Friday’s show, as he spun a dizzying argument that combined home appraisals, FICO scores, HUD, Kamala Harris, redlining, job training, and marijuana legalization into a claim about Democrats’ electoral machinations. (“If you want total control over the entire country,” Carlson said, “you need demographic change everywhere.”)

Conspiracy theories tend to involve what scholars call epistemic or cognitive closure: Their tales create vacuum-sealed worlds where truth becomes tautological, where everything has an easy answer, and where earwormy refrains—the ruling class, the woke left, the PC police—anchor every melody. Fox may brand itself as a bold teller of truths, fighting against conformity and groupthink; in fact, as so much reporting has suggested, the network is desperate to keep its adherents from doubting their mission or defecting from the cause. So too with Carlson. His show offered opinion; what it really sold, though, was daily reassurance: that his viewers’ fears are justified, that their biases are noble, that the world is precisely as disordered as they claim it—and need it—to be. Carlson gave his audiences the stories they wanted to hear; in return, they gave him fervent loyalty.

And so, now, Carlson is a celebrity with a massive fan base and a minimized platform. (Given that his $20-million-a-year contract will reportedly be paid out, he will also be doing what he has spent years deriding others for: getting paid for not working.) Carlson, in leaving Fox, has attained that most powerful of statuses. He is a free agent with a following. He could become the next Alex Jones. He could become the next Bill O’Reilly. He could become the next president. Carlson might have already hinted—ambiguously, teasingly—at his plans. Yesterday, his personal website transformed to acknowledge his departure from Fox. TuckerCarlson.com, like a ground game in waiting, instructs fans to text Carlson. In exchange for their data, the new language promises, they’ll be among the first to learn the answer to the question so many are waiting to hear: “what Tucker’s up to next.”

His departure leaves a big hole for Fox News to fill. Fox Corp. shares closed almost 3% lower on Monday, a reflection of how much ...

The final moments of Tucker Carlson’s last Fox News broadcast are perfect. His studio desk is strewn with pizza boxes. Across from him is the delivery man who’d traveled from Pennsylvania to bring him his favorite slice: sausage and pineapple. “It is a disgusting order, but I have no shame,” Carlson says with this mouth full, grinning. He then turns to the camera to wrap the broadcast with one final lie—“We’ll be back on Monday”—and a plug for the Fox Nation docuseries Let Them Eat Bugs, which alleges that the environmental movement to eat insects is, somehow, part of a global conspiracy. That’s it: One of America’s most popular and influential cable news shows ends with its host sharing the frame with a massive bug dead on a plate.

It felt like this final, absurd moment was ripped straight from Infowars, the far-right conspiracy website founded by Alex Jones. The Infowars model revolves around constructing a durable, alternative reality based on grievance. It reduces the world to a battle between good and evil (the site’s tagline is “There’s a war on for your mind!”), using lies, conspiracy theories, and theatrics to incite fear in the audience while positioning the host as a noble crusader. And it relies on alternating between righteous indignation and a winking, farcical tone that helps obscure the show’s real political project: taking dangerous, hateful, and reality-defying ideologies from the fringe and projecting them into millions of households every weeknight.

Carlson’s show premiered just a few days after the 2016 elections, and was immediately focused on stoking a culture war. According to The New York Times, when his show was elevated to the 8 p.m. slot in 2017, the host had his producers begin looking for small, local news stories “that were sometimes ‘really weird’ and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture.” The decision to highlight niche stories—about refugees, petty crime, DACA recipients, college-campus activism, and companies going “woke”—night after night made viewers feel as if their way of life was under an unrelenting assault by mainstream media, the left, and big business. Carlson used such examples to construct a case for his audience in favor of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory, much to the delight of the country’s most infamous bigots.

The Times described this tactic as creating “an apocalyptic worldview”—a strategy that few have perfected better than Jones. On his marathon daily broadcasts, Jones is famous for shuffling through mountains of printed-out news articles, cherry-picking random facts from local news stories—he was, for example, among the first media figures to campaign against drag-queen story hours—and either embellishing them or twisting them to fit into one of his long-running conspiracy theories. Similarly, the Infowars website is a hodgepodge of racist aggregated stories misrepresenting local reporting to trigger outrage. When the local news stories dried up, Jones sent his staffers out to manufacture controversies to stoke the apocalyptic flames for a hungry audience. In a tell-all essay, Joshua Owens, a former Infowars staffer who grew disillusioned with Jones’s lies, detailed the process of having to scramble to find controversies to report on and making news up when that failed.

I spoke with Owens last summer, and he recalled the first time Carlson came to Infowars’ offices. Carlson and Jones spent time watching old Infowars clips about 9/11, which Owens thought might have inspired Tucker Carlson Tonight: “If you ever watch clips of Tucker—which I try to avoid at all costs—you can see some of the mannerisms,” Owens said. “Like Jones, he is enough of a showman that he can be compelling to an audience that doesn’t have the information to rebut him.”

Carlson’s most vile conspiracy theorizing—around COVID vaccines, white replacement, and the notion that January 6 was a peaceful protest—are the most indelible examples of his Jones-ification. But just as important and insidious is the way that Carlson packaged his propaganda. Like Infowars, Carlson was frequently absurdist in a way that delighted his fans and trolled critics. He branched out from the one-hour cable-news format with a series of original programming on the streaming platform Fox Nation. With titles such as Blown Away: The People vs. Wind Power, The UFO Files, and Cattle Mutilations, these subscriber-only offerings appear nearly indistinguishable from the direct-to-video Infowars documentaries that Jones became famous for in his early-internet days. The most viral of Carlson’s originals was an episode called The End of Men, whose promo featured a nude man bathing his testicles in ultraviolet light while Also Sprach Zarathustra plays. (You might remember the song from the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

[Read: Alex Jones can’t pretend his way out of this reality]

The promo, like some of Carlson’s original-series concepts, is ridiculous to the point of being funny—which is the point. As with Jones, who has screamed until his face turned red about chemicals that “turn the friggin’ frogs gay,” Carlson and his staff understood how to use absurdity to entertain while introducing extreme ideas to mainstream audiences. His team, which at one time included a head writer who resigned after being accused of posting racist and sexists messages online, seemed acutely aware that the nightly audience also included a handful of liberal media monitors who would aggregate and screenshot the worst bits of each show to share over social media. Carlson’s lower-third chyrons eventually seemed to acknowledge and troll this group directly:

I’ll always remember this classic…. #TuckerCarlsonOut #SexCrazedPandas #AllTuckeredOut pic.twitter.com/340dtKFUVL

— Wayne Harrison (@waynomac39) April 24, 2023

With this graphic and chyron on-screen, Tucker Carlson literally said: "How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?" pic.twitter.com/SlFDmAyOn0

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) June 25, 2021

For the past few years, it’s been common to log on to Twitter in the evenings and see my timeline full of outraged screenshots and clips from the show, which amplified Carlson’s dangerous rhetoric even in seeking to decry it. As with Infowars, this brand of “earned media” only increased Carlson’s profile as a hero for the far right. (Jones, too, was a fan, and texted Carlson regularly, leaked court documents show). It also cast Carlson as a formidable political villain and one of the most dangerous influences in right-wing media. By 2020, Carlson was enough of a polarizing figure to generate buzz as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, in no small part because of his ability to outrage the left.

The details of Carlson’s Fox departure are still murky—the company released a terse, vague statement—and it’s unclear whether a spate of lawsuits, including the recently settled proceedings with Dominion Voting Systems, played an outsize role in the abrupt split. Even less clear is what Carlson might do next: Although Carlson 2024 would add even more chaos and extreme rhetoric to an already nightmarish campaign season, it’s easy enough to imagine him starting yet another mask-off independent media organization and becoming even more brazen and radical with his content.

[Read: The far right is getting what it asked for]

I messaged Owens this morning after the Carlson news broke to ask if he could see Carlson going full Infowars. “The show was essentially a duplicate of Jones’s already, at least in content,” he said. “I definitely agree that he brought that model to prime time.” Still, it seems unlikely that Carlson, who has spent his entire career palling around corporate media and among Beltway elite, would want to work on the fringes. Ultimately, he is most effective laundering extreme talking points in a suit and tie. “He’s always seemed to want to be an insider, masquerading as an outsider,” Owens argued. “Which I think is something he and Jones have in common.”

Carlson’s legacy will live on in a legion of angry and paranoid former viewers. But his centrality in our current politics—and all of the danger that represented—came from his platform. Up until this morning Carlson was a man who sat at the very top of a toxic information ecosystem, one that cycles fever-swamp, message-board garbage upward and outward. At least for a moment, the cycle is broken. Carlson’s megaphone is gone, along with a captive audience. Stripped of his time slot, Carlson has lost the last, thin veneer of credibility separating him from the conspiracy theorist he’s been aping. Tonight, the only difference between Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson is that one of them has a show.  

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Most Americans do not want President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in another head-to-head match for the White House. But barring a dramatic change in circumstances, that’s the contest we’ll see in 2024.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Tucker Carlson’s successor will be worse. A refuge from internet algorithms is hiding in plain sight. Dear Therapist: I won’t marry someone with a mountain of debt. Chris Christie doesn’t want to hear the name Trump.

Existential and Inevitable

Polls for the past six months or so have consistently shown that a majority of Americans do not want to see a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And yet, unless health issues sideline one or the other (or unless a newly unemployed Tucker Carlson decides to take his angry-racist-preppie shtick into politics), the Trump-Biden showdown feels inevitable.

But Trump and Biden are likely to be renominated for very different reasons. Obviously, Biden is the incumbent—and, as I have argued, has been a remarkably successful president under difficult circumstances. Whatever the grousing from Democratic faithful, parties do not torpedo their own president: The only sitting chief executive who was elected in his own right and then denied renomination for another term was Franklin Pierce, in 1856. (Four others were denied nomination after becoming president upon the death of the incumbent.)

My colleague Mark Leibovich, however, has suggested that Biden’s age is too big a problem to ignore, and that the Democrats would benefit from a contested primary:

The public silence around the president’s predicament has become tiresome and potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Somebody should make a refreshing nuisance of themselves and involve the voters in this decision.

I don’t quite agree. Biden, as the expression goes, has lost a step, but I kind of like the new Joe Biden. As a senator and a vice president, Biden was often a great source of Kinsley gaffes, the accidental truth-telling that made him a must-watch on the Sunday shows. Biden as president is different, and not just older. There’s a greater seriousness to him, a somberness, and an obvious weight on his shoulders. To me, that’s a better Biden.

But the president is older. He’s still liable to blurt out a gaffe or scramble his sentences, and it sounds less charming or amusing now than it did a decade ago. And sometimes, his rambles go off into mystifying detours, some of which are untrue. But on the man’s record alone, it’s going to be hard to argue to Democrats and independents that he somehow doesn’t deserve another term. Republicans, for their part, seem to know this, which is why they’ve rarely bothered attacking Biden on policy, resorting to debt-ceiling chicanery and invocations of Hunter Biden rather than more substantive (and legitimate) criticism.

Let’s put it this way: If Ted Kennedy could not take out Jimmy Carter, no one in today’s Democratic Party is going to defeat Joe Biden.

But let’s also admit an uncomfortable truth that the Democrats dare not say out loud: At least some of the concerns about Joe Biden’s age are in reality barely veiled worries about Kamala Harris. Biden’s approval ratings are struggling, but the vice president’s numbers are worse—in fact, among the worst of any modern vice president at this point in an administration. (Mike Pence is a strong competitor in this category.) I think Harris ran a lousy campaign and has been, at best, a lackluster VP. Yes, Joe Biden rambles, but Harris, when off script, often sounds like a compilation of disjointed clichés, delivered with a kind of corporate-trainer earnestness. (Some of this is likely related to her reported staffing problems.) Her few forays into policy have been unimpressive, and even her intensely dedicated online supporters seem to have become a bit quieter.

Personally, I have no doubt that if something happened to President Biden, Vice President Harris—along with an able and well-staffed administration—would be a reasonable steward of the White House for the remainder of Biden’s term. Nevertheless, when health and age are prominent issues (as they were with Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower), voters are going to look more closely at the vice president. Harris no doubt still has dedicated supporters in the party, but that might not be enough to overcome how much of America just doesn’t like her.

Concerns about Joe Biden’s renomination, however, are trivial compared with the problem facing those Republicans—roughly four in 10—who do not want Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.

The GOP as a political institution has functionally ceased to exist at the presidential level. The nomination process is controlled, at this point, by a cult of personality; Trump bitter-enders are now the backbone of the party, and their fanaticism gives Trump a stable plurality of votes that no other candidate can match. To defeat Trump for the nomination, a conventional candidate would not only have to attack Trump hammer and tongs; they would also have to demand that the national Republican Party buck millions of its own base voters. This is even more unlikely than Biden getting primaried by some youthful Democrat, because it would require the Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel and other GOP leaders to replace the tapioca in their spines with something like principle, and declare that the Party of Lincoln will not lend its money and support to a sociopath who has incited violent sedition against the government of the United States.

That’s not going to happen. It is possible, I suppose, that if Trump is facing multiple state and federal indictments by late summer, Republicans will finally throw their support to someone else, perhaps even Ron DeSantis, out of desperation. But for now, the nomination belongs to Donald Trump.

I would be relieved to be wrong about this, but if nothing changes, 2024 will again be a stark and existential choice. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has grumbled that if the election is Biden versus Trump again, he probably won’t vote. The rest of us, however, cannot afford this kind of petty tantrum. The Republican Party has mutated from a political organization into an authoritarian movement. Democracy itself will be on the line for the third time since 2020, and staying home—or taking the dodge of voting for some no-hope third-party candidate—is not a responsible option.

Related:

The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden Leave Joe Biden alone.

In Remembrance

Courtesy of Michael Kelly’s family

Michael Kelly, who was the editor in chief of The Atlantic from 1999 to 2002, worked at many publications in a career that was tragically cut short 20 years ago this month. He wrote for small newspapers and big ones, for political magazines and general-interest ones. He was a beat reporter and a writer of profiles and feature stories, a war correspondent and a columnist. He led a number of publications—The New Republic, National Journal, The Atlantic. His acclaimed reporting on the Gulf War, in 1991, was eventually turned into the book Martyrs’ Day. Mike was covering the Iraq War for The Atlantic in 2003 when he was killed on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Michael Kelly is remembered the same way by everyone who worked with him. He was disorganized—his desk drawers held manuscripts but also laundry and dishes—and his handwriting was illegible. He was disarmingly funny, raised by journalist parents in a boisterous Irish family. He was passionate about his principles—a collection of his writing, Things Worth Fighting For, was aptly titled. Perhaps counterintuitively, given his own strong convictions, one thing he believed in was the value of publishing diverse points of view: Ideas need vigorous testing. Another was the central importance of character in public life.

Mike’s family—including his wife, Madelyn, and his children, Tamzin and Jack—and many friends and colleagues gathered this past weekend in Washington, D.C., to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. Tamzin and Jack were 6 and 4 when Mike was killed. “One lesson my father taught me,” Tamzin Kelly said in her remarks, “is the importance of standing up for what you believe in. More than that, the importance of believing what you believe in.” Jack Kelly spoke about the experience of encountering his father through the pages of Things Worth Fighting For—discovering the opinions they shared and, more important, the ones they did not:

It’s both useful and comforting to think about our similarities with those we’ve lost. But there’s a flatness to it—it takes a static image of the dead and asks us to find a portion of ourselves in it. Thinking of our differences with those who are gone is at once more difficult and more rewarding: It asks us how we might have co-evolved with them, how we may have changed each other, and how we would have loved each other as humans who—like all humans—argue and disagree.

A year after Mike’s death, Robert Vare, the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, wrote about his colleague and friend in an article for The Atlantic. You can find Vare’s article here.

— Cullen Murphy, editor at large at The Atlantic

Today’s News

CNN released a statement declaring an end to its relationship with the anchor Don Lemon. Myles Cosgrove, the former Louisville officer who fired the fatal shot that killed Breonna Taylor, has been hired by a police force in a nearby county. Countries are hurrying to extract their citizens from Sudan as violence continues between the military and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group.

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn head to Queens for a day at the racetrack.

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Read. “AAAAdam,” a new poem by Adam Giannelli.

“my mother liked // the name because it couldn’t be undone / by a nickname and my father loved my mother.”

Watch. The Canadian comedy Letterkenny (available on Hulu), which delights in wordplay and linguistic silliness.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Tucker Carlson was reportedly fired from Fox News today. I will not deny the schadenfreude of seeing Fox boot one of the most cynical and destructive figures in American public life off the air. (And one who took a weird shot at me in his program some weeks ago.) If the reports of his firing are true, this would be Carlson’s third dismissal from a media network; he’s only 53, so maybe he can take a bit of time to consider why this keeps happening to him. Unless his replacement is someone worse—and my colleague David Graham thinks that’s a distinct possibility—Fox has made at least one decision that will improve our public discourse.

Today’s news reminded me how much it seems as though the writers of the HBO series Succession have a crystal ball somewhere. Last night’s episode (covered here by The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber) had Lukas Matsson, the internet tycoon trying to buy out the Roy family businesses, talking about how it’s time for ATN—the series’ obvious Fox News stand-in—to dump its “news for angry old people” format. As I’ve told you, I have a bit part in some upcoming Succession episodes as an ATN pundit, and although I cannot tell you what happens next, I think it’s fair to say that art and life will remain intertwined in the coming weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.