But as a television theater, the formula works. Mr. Carlson is sure to attract more than three million viewers. When he defended the idea of a demographic “swap” at a various Fox show in April, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, called for his dismissal, noting that the same concept helped fuel a series of terrorist attacks, including mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018. But when Mr Carlson released a video with his comments on his own prime-time show a few days later, according to Nielsen, the segment garnered 14 per cent more viewers in the advertiser’s jam. demo ”from 24 to 54 years old – older than the average for Mr. Carlson for the year.
Every cable network is interested in ratings, but no more than Fox, whose slogan after Ailes emphasizes neither justice nor balance, but pure audience dominance: “Most watched, most trusted.” And at Fox, according to former employees, no presenter looks at his ratings more closely than Mr. Carlson. He learned how to succeed in television, in part by failing there.
An immodest start
The talk show host, who fights against immigrants and technological barons of the new gilded era, is himself a descendant of a German immigrant who became one of the great barons of the farm of the old gilded era. Henry Miller landed in New York in 1850 and built a successful butcher business in San Francisco; together with a partner, he continued to assemble an earthly empire spanning three states. They received some parcels simply by bribing government officials. Others were squeezed by poor, poor Mexican Californians who now lived in the newly expanded United States after the Mexican-American War and could not afford to defend their old Mexican land in court against speculators such as Mr Carlson’s predecessor. In the early 20th century, Mr. Miller’s land and livestock empire “depended entirely on immigrant labor,” said David Igler, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, and author of a history of the Miller Empire.
Over the years, Miller’s wealth has scattered, as large fortunes often do, into an uneven set of family branches. Mr. Carlson’s mother, Lisa McNair Lombardi, was born to Miller’s third-generation heiress, debuted in the San Francisco community, and met Richard Carlson, a successful local television journalist, in the 1960s. They fled to Reno, Nev., In 1967; Tucker McNair Carlson was born two years later, followed by his brother Buckley. The family moved to the Los Angeles area, where Richard Carlson joined the local branch of ABC, but the Carlson family’s marriage became unstable and the station fired him a few years later. In early 1976, he moved to San Diego to take up a new job in television. The boys went with him – according to court records, their parents had agreed it would be temporary – and traveled to Los Angeles on the weekends while he and Lisa tried to resolve their differences.
But a few months later, just days after the boys returned from a Hawaiian vacation with their mother, Richard filed for divorce and sought full custody of the children. In court documents, Lisa Carlson claims that he blinded her and left her with almost no money. The couple separated and began to quarrel over custody and spousal support. Mr Carlson said his wife had “multiple problems with alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines” and that he had grown concerned about both her mental state and her attitude towards boys. At least once, he claims, the boys got off the plane in San Diego without shoes; His mother’s family members, he said, urged him not to allow her to see the children unattended. He won the arrest when Tucker was 8, Lisa was not present at the hearing: According to court records, she left the country. She eventually settled in France and never saw her sons again. A few years later, Richard Carlson married Patricia Swanson, heiress to the frozen food fortune, who adopted both boys.
For many years, Tucker Carlson was silent about the rift. In a profile on the New Yorker in 2017, not after his show debuted, he described his mother’s departure as “a completely strange situation – which I never talk about because it wasn’t really part of my life at all.” But as controversy and criticism engulfed his show, Mr. Carlson began describing his early life in darker tones, portraying California from his youth as a countercultural anti-utopia and his mother as abusive and fickle. In 2019, speaking in a podcast with right-wing comedian Adam Carrola, Mr Carlson said his mother had imposed drugs on her children. “She used to do real drugs around us when we were little, and she made us do it, just like crazy,” Mr Carlson said. According to him, his mother made it clear to her two young sons that she had no affection for them. “When you find out your own mother doesn’t like you when she says that, it’s like, oh my God,” he told Mr Carola, adding that he “felt all kinds of rage about it.”
Mr. Carlson in Washington in 2010. He will eventually leave the capital and leave rural Maine. Credit … Roll Call, via Getty Images
Mr. Carlson was very drunk until he was in his 30s, something he attributed in part to his early childhood. But on his own account, the abandonment of his mother also provided him with a kind of preventive defense against the attacks that rained down on his Fox show. “Criticism from people who hate me doesn’t really mean anything to me,” Mr Carlson told Megin Kelly, a former Fox presenter, in her podcast last autumn. He continued: “I do not give these people emotional control over me. I’ve been through this. I experienced this as a child. ” One lesson from his youth, Mr. Carlson told an interviewer, is that “you should only be interested in the opinions of people who are interested in you.”
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