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Tucker Carlson is, for now, off the air and lying low. But his rapid slide from would-be journalist to venomous demagogue is the story of a generation of political commentators who found that inducing madness in the American public was better than the drudgery of working a job outside the conservative hothouses.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The coming Biden blowout We’ve had a cheaper, more potent Ozempic alternative for decades. John Mulaney’s Baby J takes apart a likable comedian. MAGA is ripping itself apart.

Pushing the Needle

Tucker Carlson has been fired, and you’ve probably already read a bushel of stories about his dismissal, his career, and his influence. Today, I want to share with you a more personal reflection. (Full disclosure: Carlson took a bizarre swipe at me toward the end of his time at Fox.) I always thought of Carlson as one of the worst things to happen to millions of Americans, and particularly to the working class. As Margaret Sullivan recently wrote, “Despite his smarmy demeanor, and aging prep-school appearance,” Carlson became “a twisted kind of working-class hero.”

Not to me. I grew up working-class, and I admit that I never much cared for Carlson, a son of remarkable privilege and wealth, even before he became this creepy version of himself. I am about a decade older than Carlson, and when he began his career in the 1990s, I was a young academic and a Republican who’d worked in a city hall, a state legislature, and the U.S. Senate (as well as a number of other less glamorous jobs). Perhaps I should have liked him more because of his obvious desire to be taken seriously as an intellectual, but maybe that was also the problem: Carlson was too obvious, too effortful. I was already a fan of people such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer, and I didn’t need a young, bow-tied, lightweight imitator.

But still, I read his writing in conservative magazines, and that of others in his cohort. After all, back in those days, they were my tribe. But the early ’90s, I believe, is where things went wrong for this generation of young conservatives. Privileged, highly educated, stung by Bill Clinton’s win—and, soon, bored—they decided that they were all slated for greater things in public life. The dull slog of high-paying professional jobs was not for them, not if it meant living outside the media or political ecosystems of New York and Washington.

A 1995 New York Times Magazine profile of this group, some of them soon to be Carlson’s co-workers, was full of red flags, but it was Laura Ingraham, whose show now packages hot bile in dry ice, who presaged what Fox’s prime-time lineup would look like. After a late dinner party in Washington, she took the Times writer for a drive:

“You think we’re nuts, don’t you?” muttered Laura Ingraham, a former clerk for Clarence Thomas and now an attorney at the Washington offices of the power firm of Skadden, Arps. Ingraham, who is also a frequent guest on CNN, had had it with a particularly long-winded argument over some review in The New Republic. It could have been worse. They could have been the dweebs and nerds that liberals imagine young conservatives to be.

Or, more accurately, they could have been the dweebs and nerds they themselves feared they were. And in time, they realized that the way to dump their day jobs for better gigs in radio and television was to become more and more extreme—and to sell their act to an audience that was nothing like them or the people at D.C. dinner parties. They would have their due, even if they had to poison the brains of ordinary Americans to get it.

Carlson joined this attention-seeking conservative generation and tried on various personas. At one point, he had a show on MSNBC that was canceled after a year. I never saw it. I do remember Carlson as the co-host of Crossfire; I didn’t think he did a very good job representing thoughtful conservatives, and he ended up getting pantsed live on national television by Jon Stewart. He was soon let go from CNN.

When Carlson got his own show on Fox News in 2016, however, I noticed.

This new Tucker Carlson decided to throw off the pretense of intellectualism. (According to The New York Times, he was “determined to avoid his fate at CNN and MSNBC.”) He understood what Fox viewers wanted, and he took the old Tucker—the one who claimed to care about truth and journalistic responsibility—and drove him to a farm upstate where he could run free with the other journalists. The guy who returned alone in his car to the studio in Manhattan was a stone-cold, cynical demagogue. By God, no one was going to fire that guy.

What concerned me was not that Carlson was selling political fentanyl; that’s Fox’s business model. It was that Carlson, unlike many people in his audience, knew better. He jammed the needle right into the arms of the Fox audience, spewing populist nonsense while running away from his own hyper-privileged background. I suppose I found this especially grating because for years I’ve lived in Rhode Island, almost within sight of the spires of Carlson’s pricey prep school, by the Newport beaches. (This area also produced Michael Flynn and Sean Spicer, but please don’t judge us—it’s actually lovely here.)

Every night, Carlson encouraged American citizens to join him in his angry nihilism, telling his fans that America and its institutions were hopelessly corrupt, and that they were essentially living in a failed state. He and his fellow Fox hosts, meanwhile, presented themselves as the guardians of the real America, crowing in ostensible solidarity with an audience that, as we would later learn from the Dominion lawsuit, they regarded with both contempt and fear.

An especially hateful aspect of Carlson’s rants is that they often targeted the institutions and norms—colleges, the U.S. military, capitalism itself—that help so many Americans get a chance at a better life. No matter the issue, Carlson was able to find some resentful, angry, us-versus-them angle, tacking effortlessly from sounding like a pompous theocrat one day to a founding member of Code Pink the next. If you were trying to undermine a nation and dissolve its hopes for the future, you could hardly design a better vehicle than Tucker Carlson Tonight.

But give him credit: He was committed to the bit. A man who has never known a day of hard work in his life was soon posing in flannel and work pants in a remarkably pristine “workshop,” and inviting some of the worst people in American life to come to his redoubt to complain about how much America seems to irrationally hate Vladimir Putin, violent seditionists, and, by extension somehow, poor ordinary Joes such as Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson.

Carlson is emblematic of the entire conservative movement now, and especially the media millionaires who serve as its chief propagandists. The conservative world has become a kind of needle skyscraper with a tiny number of wealthy, superbly educated right-wing media and political elites in the penthouses, looking down at an expanse of angry Americans whose rage they themselves helped create. As one Fox staffer said in a text to the former CNN host Brian Stelter shortly after the January 6 insurrection, “What have we done?”

If only Carlson and others were capable of asking themselves the same question.

Related:

Tucker Carlson’s final moments on Fox were as dangerous as they were absurd. Will Tucker Carlson become Alex Jones?

Today’s News

The Walt Disney Company is suing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, alleging that he has weaponized government power against the company. As part of their ongoing debt-ceiling standoff with the Biden administration, House Republicans are pushing for work requirements for some of the millions of Americans receiving food stamps and Medicaid benefits. Volodymyr Zelensky held his first conversation with Xi Jinping since Russia invaded Ukraine. China has declared itself to be neutral in the conflict.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: The singer, actor, and civil-rights hero Harry Belafonte understood persuasion, Conor Friedersdorf writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

How I Got Bamboo-zled by Baby Clothes

By Sarah Zhang

To be pregnant for the first time is to be the world’s most anxious, needy, and ignorant consumer all at once. Good luck buying a pile of stuff whose uses are still hypothetical to you! What, for instance, is the best sleep sack? When I was four months pregnant and still barely aware of the existence of sleep sacks, a mom giving recommendations handed me one made of bamboo. “Feel—soooo soft,” she said. I reached out to caress, and it really was soooo soft. This was my introduction to the cult of bamboo.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The green revolution will not be painless. Why women never stop coming of age The Supreme Court seems poised to decide an imaginary case.

Culture Break

Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty

Read. The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, a new biography of the poet that shows how she used poetry to criticize slavery.

Listen. Harry Belafonte’s legendary album Calypso. The late artist showed how popular songs could be a tool of the struggle for freedom.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I am, strangely, revisiting some childhood memories while redecorating my home office. (I’ve posted some pictures on Twitter.) For many years, I had something of a standard academic’s home office: a lot of books and maps, a bit of conference swag here and there. But I’ve decided in my dotage to bring in some color from the 1960s, including a framed collection of Batman cards (the kind that came with that dusty-pink stick of gum), a Star Trek wall intercom, and an original poster from the Japanese sci-fi classic Destroy All Monsters, starring Godzilla and a cast of his buddies. While I was hanging the movie poster, I wondered: Why do we love those Godzilla movies? They’re terrible. Are we just nostalgic—as I sometimes am—for the old, velvet-draped movie palaces full of kids? I think it’s something more.

If you’ve never seen the original Godzilla, it’s actually kind of terrifying. It’s way too intense for young kids; I can’t remember when I first saw it on television, but it scared the pants off me. The stuff that came later, with the cheesy music and the cartoonish overacting by the guys in the rubber kaiju outfits, were versions that kids and adults could watch together. They answered all of your toughest kid questions: What if Godzilla fought aliens? (I am a King Ghidorah fan.) What if Godzilla duked it out with … King Kong? (I thought Godzilla was robbed in that one.) I love scary monster movies, but now and then, you want more monsters and fewer scares. Maybe the analogy here is Heath Ledger and Cesar Romero: Both are great Jokers, but sometimes, you’d like to enjoy the character with a shade fewer homicides. Being able to enjoy both is, perhaps, one of the subtle rewards of growing up.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

"A nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies and partners is unacceptable, and will result in the end of whatever regime were to take such an action," Biden said during an afternoon Rose Garden news conference with South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol.

Biden and Yoon to sign deal to deploy US submarines to deter North Korea for first time in more than 40 years: US officials.

The Republican plan for 2024 is already failing, and the party leadership can see it and knows it.

There was no secret to a more intelligent and intentional Republican plan for 2024. It would have gone like this:

1). Replace Donald Trump at the head of the ticket with somebody less obnoxious and impulsive.

2). Capitalize on inflation and other economic troubles.

3). Offer plausible ideas on drugs, crime, and border enforcement.

4). Reassure women worried about the post-Roe future.

5). Don’t be too obvious about suppressing Democratic votes, because really blatant voter suppression will provoke and mobilize Democrats to vote, not discourage them.

Unfortunately for them, Republicans have turned every element of the plan upside down and inside out. Despite lavish anti-Trump donations by big-money Republicans, Trump is cruising to easy renomination. Rather than capitalize on existing economic troubles, Republicans have started a debt-ceiling fight that will cast them as the cause of America’s economic troubles. Worse for them, the troubles are fast receding. Inflation is vexing, but the recession that Republicans hoped for did not materialize: Instead, Joe Biden has presided over the fastest and steepest unemployment reduction in U.S. economic history since he took office in January 2021.

[David Frum: Biden laid the trap. Trump walked into it.]

The big new Republican idea to halt the flow of drugs is to bomb or invade Mexico. Instead of reassuring women, Republican state legislators and Republican judges are signaling that they will support a national abortion ban if their party wins in 2024—and are already building the apparatus of surveillance and control of women necessary to make such a ban effective. Republican state-level voter-suppression schemes have been noisy and alarming when the GOP plan called for them to be subtle and technical.

It’s early in the election cycle, of course, but not too early to wonder: Are we watching a Republican electoral disaster in the making?

Biden’s poll numbers are only so-so. But a presidential election offers a stark and binary choice: this or that? Biden may fall short of some voters’ imagined ideal of a president, but in 2024, voters won’t be comparing the Democrat with that ideal. They will be comparing him with the Republican alternative.

An American must be at least 36 years old to have participated in an election in which the Republican candidate for president won the most votes. An American must be at least 52 years old to have participated in two presidential elections in which the Republican nominee got the most votes.

Despite this, over the past 30 years, the GOP has succeeded in leveraging its smaller share of the vote into a larger share of national power. That same 36-year-old American has lived half of his or her adult life under a Republican-controlled Senate, and even more of it under a Republican-majority House of Representatives. Through almost all of that American’s adult life, Republicans have held more than half of all state legislatures. Conservative dominance of the federal courts has become ever more total in the past two decades, culminating in the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

[Tom Nichols: Trump did it again]

Some of the Republicans’ leverage can be explained by the American electoral system’s tilt against metropolitan areas. Some of their success is due to luck. The GOP’s big year of 2010 also happened to be a redistricting year, so one successful election translated into a decade of more comprehensively gerrymandered state legislatures. (Democrats have not had a big win in a redistricting year since 1930.)

But the tilt is not infinite, and the party’s luck is running out. Republicans have suffered a series of heavy defeats since the rise of Trump: loss of the House in 2018, loss of the presidency in 2020, loss of the Senate in 2021, losses at the state level in 2022 (Democrats won net two governorships and net four legislative chambers).

Trump-era Republicans have difficulty absorbing and reacting to negative news. Led by Trump himself, they misrepresented 2016 as—in the words of his former adviser Kellyanne Conway—a blowout, historic landslide. They misrepresented 2020 as an election that they deservedly won, but that was stolen from them by fraud and chicanery. Out-of-office Republicans like Paul Ryan will acknowledge on CNN that Trump lost. But they won’t say it on Fox News. Trump’s own leading party rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, won’t say it. And if Trump is indeed the primary winner that he insists he is, what on Earth is the case for denying this political superstar the third nomination he wants?

[David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?]

The Democrats, by contrast, are a party that has trouble absorbing and reacting to good news. Few Democrats predicted that the party would do as well as it did in 2022. Most feel deep dread and anxiety about 2024.

Maybe it’s good to guard against complacency. The American electoral system’s tilt against Democratic-voting regions remains as pronounced as ever. The Senate map is especially unpromising for Democrats. Yet it’s also important to understand that although America is intensely and bitterly polarized, it is not evenly polarized.

The potential strength of the Democratic coalition is greater than that of the Trump coalition. The Democratic disadvantage is that their coalition spans a lot of groups that face extra difficulties casting a ballot: renters, college students, hourly workers, single parents, people who don’t own cars. The American voting system has been engineered to deter and discourage them.

If motivated to turn out, however, those deterred and discouraged blocs can swing elections. In 2018, 36 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds turned out, the highest level recorded. Their votes helped change control of the House. Turnout of this cohort in 2022 finished second only to what it had been in 2018, and those votes altered the political complexion of many state legislatures. The state that had the highest youth turnout in 2022 was Michigan—not so coincidentally, the state where Democrats scored some of their biggest gains, flipping both chambers of the state legislature from red to blue.

Chief among what motivates voters who face obstacles is hope. People will endure and overcome barriers when they feel that their vote can make a difference. If Democrats succeed in communicating hope in 2024 that young people can contribute to a decisive defeat of Trump and MAGA extremism, then that is what they will do.

[Peter Wehner: The institutional arsonist turns on his own party]

This cycle, that hope is well founded. Republicans are doing everything wrong. They are talking to their voters about Trump’s personal grievances and about boutique culture-war issues that their own base does not much care about, such as the state of Florida’s “war on Disney.” At the same time, Republican leaders are confronting Democratic voters with extremist threats on issues they care intensely about: bans on abortion medication by mail, restrictions on the freedom of young women to travel across state lines, attacks on student voting rights, proposed big cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the GOP debt-ceiling ransom demand. Republicans offer no economic message and no affirming vision, even as they make new moves to police women’s bodies and start a land war in Mexico. They are well on their way to earning a deep, nasty defeat—and the smell of that defeat may be an additional draw to the polls for the Democratic-leaning constituencies that will inflict it.

Of all the major-party candidates to run for president since 2000, only one scored worse than Trump in the popular vote: John McCain in 2008. That was not a personal verdict on McCain. He was running for a third Republican term in the throes of the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression and against the backdrop of the most grinding military frustration since Vietnam.

Biden’s reelection-announcement video, released yesterday, defines the principal issue at stake in 2024 as “freedom.” From the New Deal to Trump, “freedom” was a Republican slogan; “security” was its Democratic counterpart. But Trump, together with DeSantis, has completely rebranded the GOP as the party of bossing around women, minorities, and young people.

If Trump secures the GOP nomination to run for a second term in 2024, the conditions are all in place to transfer the title of “worst popular-vote loser of the century” from the great Arizona senator to the putsch-plotting ex-president. Trump’s own party is doing its part to deliver this debacle. Soon enough, all Americans will have the opportunity to do theirs.

In 2006, James Feldermann got hired as a trainee at a refinery in Martinez, California, in the Bay Area. It was hard work, with 12-hour-minimum shifts, but Feldermann came to excel at it. He learned how to isolate pipes and vessels, load railcars with molten sulfur and ammonia, and helm an industrial control panel. In time, he rose to the position of head operator at the Marathon Petroleum site. The job paid well, and he enjoyed it. He expected to stay until retirement.

On a Friday afternoon in July 2020, Feldermann was abruptly summoned to an all-hands Zoom meeting. While some of his colleagues struggled to get the audio to work, Feldermann received a phone call from his union representative. “I didn’t actually hear management tell us that they were laying us off,” he told me. The plant was being shut down, as the rise of work-from-home and the spread of electric vehicles depressed Californians’ demand for gasoline. Feldermann and his co-workers would be out of a job in 90 days.

The United States is embarking on an epochal transition from fossil fuels to green energy. That shift is necessary to avert the worst outcomes of climate change. It also stands to put hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people like Feldermann out of work. The result could be not only economic pain for individual families, but also the devastation of communities that rely on fossil-fuel extraction and a powerful political backlash against green-energy policies.

[Read: Why the Energy Transition Will Be So Complicated]

A pathbreaking new study shows just how real the damage could be, absent policies to soften the economic blow. Virginia Parks, a professor at UC Irvine, and Ian Baran, a doctoral student, tracked the consequences of the Marathon shutdown in near-real time, getting more than 40 percent of the workers to return surveys and a smaller group to sit for interviews. They found that, more than a year after the shutdown, one in five Marathon workers was unemployed. Their earnings had declined sharply, with the median hourly wage of employed workers plunging from $50 to $38. Some workers were earning as little as $14 an hour. And those new gigs came with more dangerous working conditions.

To prevent other workers from experiencing the same, the Biden White House has promised to pursue a “just transition,” employing policies to ensure “new, good-paying jobs for American workers and health and economic benefits for communities.” But the green-energy transition is already underway. And it is not clear that it will be just.

The legendary American union leader Tony Mazzocchi pioneered the concept of a just transition a half century ago. Some industries are too toxic for society, he argued. But to shut them down in a way that punishes the workers in those industries, or the places where those industries are concentrated, would be unjust.

Just-transition policies are not merely about bailing out blue-collar folks. They are meant to defray the cost of having whole communities fall into persistent economic distress: a loss of social cohesion, people living shorter and sicker lives, the rise of “deaths of despair,” the growth of right-wing populism. They are also meant to generate political support for green policies, or at least dampen any backlash. Without them, “you risk dissuading future efforts that are for the societal good,” J. Mijin Cha, an environmental-studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, told me. “If we’re doing things that are for the benefit of society but screw over a bunch of people, that’s not a societal good.”

These policies have worked. The Ruhr region in western Germany, for example, once produced coal, iron, and steel, with extractive and heavy industry employing a majority of the region’s workers. The German government, labor unions, and industrial leaders came to a series of agreements to diversify its economy, providing payments for displaced workers and making investments in service-and-knowledge businesses. Employment in coal mining in the region went from 473,000 in 1957 to zero by the end of 2018. The area lost nearly 1 million production jobs but gained nearly 1 million service jobs.  

Yet it is hard to identify many, if any, just transitions in the United States. Appalachia lost its coal jobs and gained an opioid epidemic. Detroit deindustrialized and fell into poverty and disrepair. The decision to open up trade with China sent millions of American manufacturing jobs overseas, and policy makers did little to create any in their place. Now the planned obsolescence of the fossil-fuel industry threatens to create new Rust Belts in regions economically dependent on extraction, such as the Permian Basin, in Texas, or the Bakken Formation, in Montana and North Dakota.

The problem is threefold. First, the United States does not invest heavily in industrial policy or place-based policy compared with some of its rich-country peers, though the Biden administration has started to push billions of dollars into both. If coal is leaving a region, Washington historically is not sending anything else in. Second, the country has lower rates of unionization and a much thinner safety net than other wealthy nations, making workers more vulnerable to the effects of mine closures and plant shutdowns. Third, the Republican Party tends to reject the premise that the country needs to move away from fossil-fuel production at all, making them a weak partner in setting up just-transition plans.

[Read: Fighting Climate Change Was Costly. Now It’s Profitable.]

No wonder the Marathon shutdown went the way it did. John Bayer, a safety specialist, lost his job at the site, as did his two brothers. He told me that he was not offered any form of government help, aside from unemployment insurance. Bayer, who has two kids, sent out about 50 applications and received just two callbacks. He ended up at an agriscience firm that nearly matched his Marathon wage but provided fewer opportunities for overtime. “I ended up with a $60,000-a-year pay cut,” he told me.

James Feldermann wound up taking a job based in Reno, Nevada, for $17 an hour less than he was making at Marathon. He rented a small studio apartment there and spent months driving 200 miles back to the Bay Area every weekend to see his wife and son.

Both the state of California and the Biden administration are in the process of developing plans for a just transition to green energy. Those plans were too late for the Marathon employees. Many labor leaders, academics, and politicians think those plans are almost certain to be too little for fossil-fuel workers losing their jobs in the near future.

On paper, the challenge seems straightforward. The United States has roughly 120,000 oil-and-gas workers and 40,000 coal miners. The green-energy sector is adding at least that many jobs every year. Supply, meet demand. Why not create a job-matching service for those laid off; provide them with wage subsidies, transition assistance, and relocation funds; and watch the country’s emissions turn from smoke-gray to vapor-white?

A few reasons. For one, fossil-fuel companies employ about 1.7 million workers in the U.S., not 160,000, once you factor in all the labor not directly involved in extraction and refining. It takes a lot of workers to transport fuel, manufacture secondary products from it, and power communities with it. And it makes little sense to transition many of those workers directly into green-energy jobs. Oil-and-gas gigs tend to pay far more than solar and wind do. And workers in extractive industries tend to develop valuable, specialized skill sets, as Feldermann did. Their technical chops would be wasted selling rooftop solar systems, and their salaries would get cut in half.

The government also faces the challenge of supporting whole communities dependent on fossil-fuel extraction, not just individual workers. “Fossil-fuel companies tend to be dominant employers where they are located,” Michaël Aklin, a professor of economics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, told me. “When they shut down, the central node in that local economy disappears.” The consequences ripple out to the businesses and institutions that rely on the money those workers used to spend and the taxes they used to pay.

The crux of the Biden administration’s plan for a just transition thus far is a policy granting tax incentives to businesses investing in “energy communities.” In the long term, that might encourage companies to locate warehouses and jobs in the places where oil, gas, and coal facilities are closing. But incentives are, well, just incentives. What if private businesses choose not to locate in certain parts of Louisiana or North Dakota, despite the tax breaks on the table? What if they create jobs years after a shutdown has done its damage? What happens to places where no business wants to invest?

At this point, neither Sacramento nor Washington has developed a robust plan to reach out and help oil-and-gas workers one by one. That’s a necessary component, UC Irvine’s Virginia Parks told me. The government, she argued, should provide financial support to cover the gap between workers’ pre- and post-layoff wages, as well as aiding workers close to retirement. Legislators should set up programs to certify the workers’ skills so that outside employers can see just how qualified they are. Finally, the government should provide retraining and job-match services.

Last week, Tracy Scott, the president of the United Steelworkers Local 5, the union representing the Marathon employees, drove me around the closed refinery complex. It sits on emerald-green marshland near where the Carquinez Strait empties into San Pablo Bay. When we visited, the heavy machinery once used to turn sour crude into gas and petrochemicals was surrounded by a superbloom of California poppies and wild mustard. We both remarked on how beautiful it was. A little later, Scott told me that refinery workers tend to die young, and rarely get to take advantage of the retirement packages the union negotiates for them.

This place does not deserve to be burdened with this refinery, I thought. And these people do not deserve to suffer for its closure.

Voters have understandable hesitation about the Joe Biden’s age, but they ought to feel good about his accomplishments.

The pledge will be part of a new agreement — the Washington Declaration — that also creates a fresh bilateral nuclear consultation mechanism based on ...

She is seen as the administration’s most visible advocate on issues including voting rights, access to abortion and combating climate change.