For several years, Tucker Carlson was the number one personality on Fox News, riling up the Left and notching humongous ratings. All that came to a head in 2023 when Fox shockingly fired their host.
Since then, Carlson has tried to get back on his feet with one of his latest stunts being traveling to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin. While his audience is much smaller these days, he still has many fans on the hard core Right.
Alt-Right figure Christopher Rufo gushed over Carlson on X, "When Tucker had his primetime slot on Fox, he served as a successful coordinating mechanism for the Right. He set the agenda with his monologue, shaped the bounds of discourse, and brought in new voices to illustrate specific lines of argument. It will be interesting to see if Tucker, or Fox, can reprise this role, or if it has fragmented online in a more fundamental way."
Marc Thiessen, a Washington Post writer and contributor to Fox News responded, "Tucker wasn’t the William F Buckley Jr of the modern conservative movement, who provided the successful coordinating mechanism of the right. He was the Robert Welch who Buckley excommunicated from the respectable right."
Thiessen continued, "And I say that at risk of offending the memory of Robert Welch who, for all his many irredeemable flaws, at least hated the KGB thugs in the Kremlin rather than fawning over them."