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.  

What’s happened in Tennessee in recent weeks should be no surprise, coming from a party whose sensibilities and racial attitudes are embodied by Donald Trump.

Earlier this month, House Republicans in Tennessee, the state in which the Ku Klux Klan was founded, overwhelmingly voted to expel two young Black lawmakers, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. Their offense? A breach of decorum and procedural rules. They led protest chants on the House floor following the mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville. Representative Gloria Johnson joined Jones and Pearson in the protests, but the vote to expel her fell short.

When she was asked why she had avoided expulsion when her two Black colleagues had not, Johnson, who is white, said, “It might have to do with the color of our skin.” Republican lawmakers denied the charge, calling it “disgusting, untrue, and highly offensive.”

[Read: The Tennessee expulsions are just the beginning]

That statement might be more credible if Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, who has a very troubled history when it comes to race, hadn’t had as his dinner guest a few months ago an outspoken anti-Semite and racist. Nor does it help the GOP case that in 2016, the then–chief of staff to former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada sent explicitly racist texts.

What we do know is that expulsion is extremely rare, with only two lawmakers previously ousted from the House of Representatives in Tennessee in the past 157 years. One lawmaker had been convicted of accepting a bribe; the other faced allegations of sexual misconduct. No House member has ever been removed from elected office for simply violating the rules of decorum. So these expulsions were extraordinarily punitive, especially because lesser penalties could have been invoked.

Tennessee Republicans engaged in an act of political vengeance, but did so with comical ineptness. Both of the Democratic lawmakers have already been reappointed, but now they are prominent figures with a national following.

On Monday, after being sworn in, Jones returned to the legislature accompanied by Johnson. Pearson—whose reappointment came two days later—looked on from the balcony.

“No expulsion, no attempt to silence us will stop us, but it will only galvanize and strengthen our movement,” Jones said. “Power to the people!” he shouted, bringing cheers from the gallery.

But perhaps the most revealing statement during this manufactured crisis came from Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who compared the incident to the insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

“What they did today was equivalent, at least equivalent, maybe worse depending on how you look at it, to doing an insurrection in the state capitol,” Sexton said. When he was pressed about his statement, he said, “That quote did not say absolutely it was worse. It said it could be.”

No one, not even Republicans in the Tennessee state legislature, can watch what happened last week on the floor of the House and the January 6 attack on the Capitol and consider them remotely comparable.

[Tom Nichols: The January 6 attack is not over]

What happened in Tennessee wasn’t an “insurrection.” It was indecorous, a breaking of procedural rules, but it was also an event without violence or destruction, without assaults or deaths, without heavily armed mobs or nooses hanging from gallows. No one in Tennessee will be charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States. And what happened in Tennessee didn’t include peddling lies and embracing crazed conspiracy theories in order to overturn a free and fair election. So what’s going on here?

We’re watching Trump-induced idiocy. For more than seven years, Republicans have defended Trump’s cruel, unethical, and deranged behavior. They are constantly having to deny what they have become in service to him. It’s created cognitive dissonance. How can the party of “family values” defend a moral degenerate like Trump? How can law-and-order Republicans defend a violent insurrection and threats against judges and prosecutors? How can “constitutional conservatives” rally around a man who attempted to subvert the Constitution by overthrowing an election?

The human mind’s capacity to rationalize such things is extraordinary, but not limitless. Some Republicans have the sense, even if it’s only in their quiet moments, that they have acted not only hypocritically but dishonorably. And it gnaws at them. They know they would eviscerate any Democrat who did a fraction of what Trump did. They therefore have to expend enormous psychological energy to keep from becoming sick with themselves for what they have become. Shame is a toxic emotion, and it often causes people to direct hostility outward rather than inward.

Tired from choosing to defend the indefensible, enraged at being called out, Trump’s supporters lash out. They desperately want to make critics of Trump the focus, forcing them to answer for their sins. Pointing to the misdeeds of their political foes allows Republicans to tell themselves, one another, and the rest of the world, See, we’re not so bad after all. They also catastrophize the threats posed by Democrats, because people will tolerate an awful lot of misconduct from their leaders if they’ve convinced themselves that the threat posed by the other side is existential.

As we’ve seen in Tennessee, this frantic state of mind leads Republicans to preposterous places and to act in politically self-destructive ways. One of the two most important political parties in the world is dominated by people who are enraged, embittered, and anarchic.

I understand the temptation to look away and to move on, to become inured to what’s happening, to consider the MAGA takeover of the GOP “old news.” But unless that mania subsides, until there’s a clean break with Trumpism, our political and civic culture will become even more deformed, even more monstrous, even more violent. This is no time to grow weary in doing good, “for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”

Huw Jones is desperate to play at this year's World Cup after missing out on selection for Japan 2019.

Tennessee Rep. Gloria Johnson joins "CNN This Morning" to discuss the recent expulsion of Democrat lawmakers Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. Jones was reinstated into the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Francesca Jones beats Laura Pigossi in Colombia to reach her first WTA semi-final and fellow Briton Dan Evans makes the last four in Morocco.

Tony Jones says it is "a farce" that the man who killed his son was spared jail.