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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.

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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.

Moscow's forces are reportedly planning to evacuate people from parts of the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia region in Eastern Ukraine.

The pleasure of The Diplomat, Netflix’s zippy new geopolitical drama, is how enticingly it ties together tropes and tricks from shows gone by, a TV bouquet that’s undeniably familiar and yet still seems fresh. The premise—an American diplomat is reluctantly conscripted during a crisis into the role of ambassador to the United Kingdom—borrows equally from fish-out-of-water comedies and intense political thrillers. Kate Wyler, played by Keri Russell, is a sharp, diligent, charmingly slobby Foreign Service officer whose career has long come second to that of her charismatic husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell). When a British aircraft carrier is bombed off the coast of Iran and the White House reaches out about a vacant strategic position, she initially assumes it’s Hal they’re after. Kate, who thinks she’s on her way to filling a diplomatic position in Afghanistan, is an unlikely show pony. But Hal senses possibility. “You need to lean into the Cinderella thing,” he tells her as she balks at a photo shoot with British Vogue commemorating her new job. “I’m here for 30 funerals,” Kate replies. “The only tea-length garment I packed is a burka.”

For a show about geopolitical catastrophe, The Diplomat is surprisingly fun; it’s snappily structured to careen its way through kidnappings and catastrophic photo ops and refrigerator raids with bizarrely high stakes. Its creator, Debora Cahn, has worked on Homeland and The West Wing, but also on Grey’s Anatomy, whose DNA seems to inform The Diplomat’s tone—self-aware, smarter than it often seems, sometimes sillier than is strictly necessary. (To be fair, Homeland could be silly too.) When a young woman in a bad wig bundles Hal into a car at the end of the first episode and sticks a hypodermic needle in his neck, the moment is a shock for viewers, but not for Kate, who reels off a list of people who have targeted Hal in the past, including disgruntled Islamic State commanders, Hezbollah generals. Even the secretary of state has it in for him—clearly the man has a history.

But for all its insouciance with regard to plot, The Diplomat is also astute when it comes to relationships: the special ones, the damaging ones, and the ones that manage to be both. In the second half of the show’s eight episodes, the action swerves its way toward an explosive cliff-hanger. I found the momentum less interesting, though, than the thesis the show quietly espouses early on: that maintaining a marriage is more like diplomacy than many of us realize.

[Read: The exquisite pain of monogamous life]

Kate’s relationship with Hal, we can see immediately, is complicated, but in a deeply sympathetic way. Russell—who in her career has played a Mouseketeer, a curly-haired, college ingenue, a Russian assassin role-playing a housewife, and a nurse trying to protect kids from a cocaine-addled bear—is in godlike form. Kate is grumpy (I lost count after the seventh muttered “Jesus Christ”), stubborn, and exacting, yet Russell makes her lovable, too. She also offsets some of the character’s more clichéd personality traits—messiness, a lack of personal graces—by emphasizing her competence, a quality that’s always somehow in short order among TV’s most high-strung heroes. Kate has spent the bulk of her career supporting Hal, a peacocking, intensely ambitious networker whose charm is rivaled only by his egocentrism. Her reluctance to take the job she’s offered, we soon understand, has to do with Hal—not only how he’ll respond to being shoehorned into the role of a diplomatic spouse, but also what kind of trouble he’ll kick up, left to his own devices in London.

[Read: The Americans’ marriage faces its greatest test yet]

The couple’s chemistry, though, is undeniable. Sewell smolders unknowably as Hal; he says over and over again how happy he is to be supporting Kate, while constantly undercutting her, by instinct if not by intention. The revelations of the first episode include that Kate is—without her knowledge—being assessed to potentially replace the vice president, and that she and Hal are likely headed for divorce. The two paths can’t coexist, which leaves Kate in a pickle. (Also, the bull-like, chaotic, Johnsonian British prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge—played genially by Rory Kinnear—keeps pushing the U.S. president to declare war, which Kate would prefer to avert.)

The micro and the macro, enemies foreign and oh so domestic. Watching The Diplomat, you might start to think about how so many of the terms used to describe international relations are intimate in nature: Countries get in bed with each other, they sever ties, they seek rapprochement, they issue ultimatums. Diplomacy is about trying to forge meaningful bonds that help each party thrive, which is also a neat description of marriage. And the thing about Hal is that he’s an invaluable asset until he’s not: No one knows Kate better; no one can enable her success quite so efficiently, or blow it up with such aplomb. “She hates cameras, and microphones,” he tells her anxious chief of staff, Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh), adding as an afterthought, “and people.” His intimacy with Kate is the kind built on years of precedent: knowing when she’s hungry; understanding when her shoes are hurting her; sensing when she needs to, as he euphemistically puts it, “scratch an itch.”

With regard to politics, The Diplomat tends toward lightness, with occasional flashes of insight. There are abundant references to real-world crises, and a sight gag about an employee barely out of college who’s a Russia expert at the embassy because everyone who’s anyone has been sent to Ukraine. There’s a “bad guy” with his own private militia who’s seemingly modeled after the founder of the Wagner Group, and the American president seems like an unholy fusion of presidents 45 and 46: older than he’d like to be, crass, essentially eager to help. David Gyasi is engagingly hamstrung as the British foreign secretary, who’s caught between his scheming, unscrupulous boss and Kate, with whom he has a meaningful connection. And Stuart’s relationship with Kate is combative at first but eventually vital as they earn each other’s trust. The series is thoughtful about power, and why the people who crave it most are the least suited to wield it. But it’s most gratifying when it’s exposing the nuances of our most crucial commitments: how we know whom to trust, and what we do when things turn toxic.

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