Tucker

by Chadwick Moore

For tens of millions of Americans, Tucker Carlson was long the only voice on cable news providing a counternarrative to establishment Washington and the mainstream press on the most important issues of our the Covid-19 vaccine, January 6th, the Ukraine war, even UFOs, just to name a few. His ratings -- the highest in cable news history -- spoke for themselves. But if there remained any doubt as to the esteem in which Carlson is held, not just by conservatives, but by all who feel alienated by our imperious and self-serving ruling class, it was evident in the outpouring of grief and anger that came with his abrupt firing from Fox News. Who is Tucker Carlson off camera? How did his upbringing contribute to who he is today? What motivates the man who has been (and will surely reemerge) as the most influential and, in the establishment’s eyes, the most dangerous voice in American politics and culture? 

Author Chadwick Moore was granted unprecedented access to Carlson’s professional and personal life. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Carlson, his family, colleagues, acquaintances, and enemies, Tucker offers an inside look into one of the most beloved -- and polarizing -- media figures of our time.  

Genres: Biography, Politics, Nonfiction, Audiobook, History, Biography Memoir

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2023

Reviews

[Susan Haught · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Moore has written an insightful, interesting bio of one of the most influential voices in America. With its varied quotes of unquestionable insight, I found this book to be a fascinating dive into an interesting individual.

Tucker Carlson doesn't bow to the norm or what is "expected". He has his own standards and it was interesting to find out how his world view, morals, and family values were influenced from his upbringing and those around him.

Carlson was no saint, and I love that about him. He had to overcome alcoholism and tobacco, even those odd bow ties he wore earlier in his career. He also harbors no ill will on anyone, including those whom he does not share the same views. He believes in love, in seeing people for who they are, and the fact there is good in this world despite the awful things going on around us every single day. He also admits it's not unethical to change your mind or opinion on a matter, to further your education on a subject, or question what is going on and dig deeper to find the truth.

Tucker Carlson is all about truth, regardless of which side of the spectrum it lays.

I enjoyed this book very much. Tucker is one of my favorite personalities and it was a joy to take a peek at the person behind the persona behind the camera.

I received a free copy of this book and am voluntarily leaving my review.

[Jennifer Debisschop · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in one day. It was an insightful look into a man who is regularly vilified and misunderstood. I always enjoyed Chadwick’s appearances on Tucker’s show and he has done a great job here. I wish him and Tucker success. I look forward to what both of them will do next.

[~☆~Autumn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was different and very entertaining. I never watched his show but I learned a lot by reading the book. Tucker is a very interesting person. He is able to think in an independent fashion and be original which is so rare.

Recommended in spite of some bad language to the extreme.

[Donald Peschken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great insight into Tucker Carlson. Moore takes the reader through his childhood up to his firing from Fox News. Well written and informative about Carlson's thought on all sorts of issues. If you were a fan or not, it's a must-read to understand the man, Tucker Carlson.

[Kathleen Pappas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not for everyone. If your news source is the legacy media TV, the NY Times or the Washington Post, which informs your opinion, you may want to pass on this one.

April 24, 2023 was a watershed for Fox News; it was the day "Tucker Carlson Tonight" was taken off the air. The reaction was wide and wild with Democrats and their media surrogates, the Pentagon, administrative state bureaucrats, and Republican leadership thrilled. This was in stark contrast to the anger and disbelief of the millions of "we the fans" who felt Tucker spoke for us, as courageously questioned the prevailing narrative and articulated fact borne truths which many ignored, denied, or feared to voice.

But this event, while sudden and disorienting, was perhaps not the most challenging one in Tucker's life. He experienced upheavals early on when his artsy, socialite mother troubled by addiction deserted him, his brother, and his father. He struggled academically, a dyslexic with "an almost uninterrupted string of Ds from third grande until I got married at the end of college". He was regularly taken out of class for special needs despite his father's never acknowledging the learning disabilities. Yet Tucker managed the situation with minimal angst and some humor, getting his education through reading, finishing War and Peace before he was 10. He sought refuge in the spoken and written word. His glib tongue, while occasionally a source of trouble, earned him leadership status among his peers; his writing skills were and are widely praised for their clarity and style.

Tucker's upbringing was unconventional: living in LA next door to the rock band The Eagles; left with his brother largely unsupervised during non-school days; accompanying his father on reporting assignments: "beyond crime scene tapes to get a closer inspection of the murder victim", getting up close to a raging wildfire in Santa Barbara, a dinner with mobster Eddie Cannizzaro who smacked his mouthy kid in the nose making it bleed which Tucker enjoyed; playing with M-80s and lawn darts supplied by Dad; dinners with assorted characters from politicians to newsmakers, an eventual string of Asian housemen, one of whom remains a close family friend to this day. But it was the "car surfing" episode about which I had read in one of Tucker's 2015 essays that never ceases to amaze me. In violation of every tenet of Child Protective Services, this "sport" involved Tucker and his brother Buckley's "lying face down on the family's 1976 Ford Country Squire, a wood paneled land yacht almost 19 feet long." They would hold on the luggage rack while Pall Mall smoking dad drove at a high speed over the dirt road's culvert, potholes, and rocks.

Believing "that journalists were proud to be open minded" and wanting to "belong to a class specifically protected by the Bill of Rights," Tucker launched his career into journalism. It was met with both challenges and the unexpected. Without experience or academic credentials to validate his professional fitness, Tucker was hired on the basis of his impeccable manners during an interview. Initially writing for magazines both liberal and conservative, Tucker's skills as an interviewer and as a debater became part of network programming: CNN, PBS, MSNBC each of which fired him for various reasons. Using Tucker's words and those of his colleagues, the author references the pre and post Fox News era of Tucker's career, one in which he developed relationships with those on every side of the political and cultural worlds. He had a respect for his rival on the left, Rachel Maddow, who eschewed the Times and the Post in selecting the lead story of her broadcasts. She, like Tucker, trusted her own instincts to define each evening's commentary and reporting, while he looked to alternate sources for his stories giving his phone number out to those he met during his travels or inviting locals to sit in studio for his program. While insanely curious, Tucker was and is intuitively compassionate despite barbs usually delivered with a bit of humor.

Described by critics as a "bow tie wearing twit,” this preppy looking journalist defied the trappings of his privileged heritage in choosing a minimalist, almost spartan lifestyle. As the host of the most watched evening program on Fox News, Tucker does not have a tv in either of his homes. He and his wife choose to live in the pool house of the FL home, leaving the main house for family and guests. Called a racist, homophobe, and other epithets, Tucker's "collection" of friends and associates includes Democrat strategist James Carville, Dennis Hof owner of the legal brothel Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Carson City, NV; Al Sharpton and two men named James Muhammad Nation of Islam members, with whom he traveled to West Africa on a "peace brokering mission" for Liberia. If you only choose to read two chapters in the book, it would be about this trip and the one where the campaign of Congressman Ron Paul (Sen. Rand Paul's father), encounters the ladies of the Bunny Ranch. Regarding the homophobic charge, Tucker’s producer, Jason Wells and his husband are close family friends as is the author of this book, who was also a frequent guest on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”. Research has indicated that Tucker's independent, free thinking positions on politics and beyond appeals to a younger, male audience.

Tucker's teen years and early adulthood were influenced by Hunter S. Thompson, whose impeccable writing, travels with Hell's Angels, and drug fueled lifestyle tempted him. While he shed the drugs and alcohol, Tucker continues to struggle with nicotine. He met Thompson days before the writer died and was moved by the deterioration of his writing idol. In similar fashion, Tucker regretted the loss of his friendship with PJ O’Rourke over his (Tucker's) support of President Trump. Fortunately, the two mended their differences before O’Rourke’s passing. Tucker realized that they cared about the “right things”: their families, northern New England, dogs (spaniels in Tucker’s case), bird hunting, and having meals (lunch) with friends and tobacco.

Some of the anecdotes in this book may be familiar to those of you who read The Long Slide, one of Tucker’s recent books. For those of you who have a negative opinion of him, I would hope that if you choose to read this book, Tucker’s humor and humanity may soften it.

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tucker is my favorite personality of all time and this book gave us more insight into his thoughts and his upbringing. It was very well written, with many quotes from Tucker. I have often wished I could share news and ideas with Tucker, like I do with friends. This book informed me that Tucker often hands out his cell phone number to ordinary people he meets! That is so cool!

[Griff Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you think you hate him, I dare you to read this. You’ll be surprised with how much you agree with him.

What a remarkable story. Tucker is one of the most interesting people on TV (now X) news. A guy who doesn’t watch TV, gives his phone number out to just about anyone he meets, and is genuinely working to save the culture of our country. He doesn’t care about political parties, but values family, faith, the truth, and the environment above all.

[Patrick Duran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining look into Tucker Carlson's life. He is pretty much like his onscreen persona. I was surprised to read he doesn't use deodorant. Really? The biggest shock of all is that he hands out his personal cell phone number to fans, and when they text story ideas or quotes, he will even reply. He seems like a genuinely happy and fulfilled man.

[Carolyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tucker Carlson was/is a fresh voice on news and cable media, who attracted many viewers from the younger demographic for FOX. His program was recently taken off the air, but as you will find out in the book, he was not fired.

The book is not particularly well written. What the reader learns is limited background on the man, his childhood, the development of his rogue spirit, his moral code, and goals for the future. The information presented here merely skims the surface, there's not much depth. But that's OK, because Tucker has many more years to add to his story.

I'm convinced that the book was rushed into print to take advantage of the stunning news when Fox took his program off the air and to keep Tucker's name viable. It will be interesting to see where Tucker lands. Bottom line: He's a happy man, with a happy life, and while opinionated, he truly doesn't care what anyone thinks of him outside of those in his personal orbit.

I'll look forward to reading the ultimate biography whenever it is published.

[Thomas George Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I started tuning in to watch Tucker on his FOX Program I was not impressed. His laugh, for one thing, irritated me. I thought he was more of a light weight. But it was my older brother, who was impressed with Tucker and his views on politics and other matters, altered my opinion. I wasn't sure which side Tucker was on. I am a life long Republican, but it seemed that Tucker was somewhere in between.

But fortunately I listened more to my brother's opinions on Tucker Carlson. And, eventually, I became an avid fan of his.

Mr. Moore's life story of Tucker Carlson is precise and to the point. Mr. Moore has written a fair and balanced account of the controversial Tucker Carlson.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have never been a big fan of Tucker Carlson nor have I particularly disliked him. I read this book to get a better insight into who he really is. He always seemed rather quirky to me. I wanted to get a better understanding of why he was abruptly fired by FoxNews when his show had among the highest if not THE highest ratings on the FoxNews network and his show routinely won the ratings in its time slot.

Well, Tucker Carlson is definitely an interesting character to say the least. He had a difficult childhood in which his wealthy mother (a hippie, free spirited, drug loving, artsy woman) left him and his brother with his father when they were both very young boys. Tucker was raised by his father (who was an orphan) along with his stepmother. Carlson’s father was rather eccentric. Perhaps, as a consequence of his somewhat unusual upbringing, family is VERY important to him. He and his wife Susie have a decades long marriage they have four children.

Although there were some interesting and disturbing parts, such as the Antifa attack on his Washington DC home in 2018 while his wife was home, I was bored after a while. In my view, the writing is not particularly good, and it was obvious (at least to me) that the only reason that the book was written (seemingly hastily I might add) was to capitalize on FoxNews firing Tucker Carlson without really answering WHY it happened.

After reading this quick 250 page read, I still don’t know the REAL story behind Tucker Carlson’s abrupt firing, but as I read about who Tucker Carlson really is, I didn’t end up liking him anymore than I did before. Glad this was a library book, and I didn’t buy it.

[Terry Cornell · Rating 3 out of 5]

My wife read this, thought it insightful and recommended I read it in the current political 'season'. We watched Tucker on occasion. Sometimes we thought his show was interesting, other times he would get on our nerves. The book is a bit biography, and more of Chadwick Moore's interpretation through spending time with Tucker. I like that Tucker admires the work of both Hunter S. Thompson, and P.J. O'Rourke, and tries not to be influenced by others. If I had to use one word to describe Tucker it would be quirky. Chadwick Moore does a decent job of presenting Tucker warts and all. At times it can be hard to tell if it is Moore writing the material or Tucker. A quick read. If you're interested in Tucker at all I recommend this book.

[Randee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent information and discourse by one of America’s true heroes.

[LD · Rating 3 out of 5]

The personal information and Tucker's father are fascinating (Dick Carlson certainly deserves his own book), but this was a safe authorized biography. He didn't discuss Tucker's appearances on "bubba the love sponge," for instance.

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just okay. I’m a Tucker fan but this book didn’t do it for me. The writing was very disjointed and sometimes hard to follow.

[SM Surber · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Enjoyed learning more about Tucker. He is guided by his values: truth, love of family, friends and the natural environs of earth. His outlook is uplifting.

“The best that you can hope for in the news business at this point is to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits. And you know that if you keep bumping up against those limits often enough you will be fired for it. That’s not a guess — it’s a guarantee. Every person who works in English-language media understands that. The rule of what you “can’t” say defines everything. … You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true.”
P.248

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early in the book Tucker is quoted as saying his hope is to lead an interesting life. Well he has succeeded in doing that! From his unconventional childhood to his life experiences, I found the book not only extremely interesting but parts of it laugh-out-loud funny. I normally don't read books about celebrities or other famous people but I really enjoyed this one.

[Jim Dowdell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads like a prospective reporter's notebook. I had expected much more.

[Sarah Cupitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps if I were American, I would know who this guy was before reading the book. The FOX part and the boarding school and how his dad secured him a job before his professional career weren't surprising. I did appreciate his early interest in long-form journalism as I did during my degree, but not much use these days, unfortunately.

Takeaways:
- That distinct voice has reverberated through the households of Fox News viewers for years now, becoming so iconic that both ends of the political spectrum could recognize it without even glancing at the TV screen. That’s how meteoric Tucker Carlson’s rise has been.
- Carlson is renowned for his unapologetic stances on a plethora of political and societal matters, many of which he tackled on his recently concluded signature Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight.
- The long-form journalism I mentioned earlier example: a 9,000-word article titled “How to Close Down a Crack House in Your Neighborhood”
- After establishing himself in the print medium, Carlson conquered TV broadcasting. From 2017 onwards, Carlson truly began to make his mark in the TV industry.
- What viewers loved about Tucker Carlson was that he often addressed issues that not many mainstream TV hosts dared to talk about on air. (iffy on this takeaway since I don't agree with his POV on the whole COVID-19 narrative, vaccines, lockdown etc)
- A (single) notable controversy Carlson talked about on his show was diversity and the relocation of immigrants. He argued that while politicians champion the idea of diversifying America, they only ever bring immigrants to already diverse cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Washington.
- In short - Tucker Carlson has become synonymous with bold conservative beliefs.

[Bill Pence · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, written by a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight, is the story of how Tucker Carlson came to be who he is, hold the views he does, and otherwise become the spokesman for the tens of millions of Americans. It is also the story of Carlson holding firm to beliefs and values in the roughest of times. The author describes Carlson as a person who hates hypocrisy and admires bravery.
The book takes you through Carlson’s life from his birth in San Francisco in 1969 to his removal from Fox News in April, 2023 and beyond. Tucker’s mother Lisa abandoned her husband Dick of seven years and their two young children, Tucker and his brother Buckley. Tucker was six years old the last time he saw his mother. Dick raised the boys, and Tucker, who talks to him daily, calls his father his greatest mentor.
In 1983, Tucker went to St. George’s School, a private, co-ed, Episcopalian boarding school in Middleton, Rhode Island. The author describes Carlson, an Episcopalian, as a person of deep faith. It was at St. George’s that Tucker met his future wife, Susie Andrews, the daughter of the school’s headmaster. The couple has four children, now all in their twenties.
The well-written and informative book takes the reader through Tucker’s various jobs from Assistant Editor at Policy Review, a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and at The Weekly Standard. He co-hosted The Spin Room with liberal Bill Press on CNN. When that was cancelled, the two were moved over to CNN’s Crossfire. He briefly hosted a program on PBS called Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered. The Situation with Tucker Carlson premiered on MSNBC in 2005, later changing its name to Tucker. Tucker and his former college roommate Neil Patel founded the Daily Caller. Tucker’s first appearance on Fox News was on Fox & Friends Weekend in 2009. Fox News saw Carlson’s involvement with the Daily Caller as a conflict of interest, and as a result, Patel bought out Carlson’s one-third interest in the company. Tucker Carlson Tonight premiered on November 14, 2016. He was removed from the air on April 24, 2023, and now there is Tucker on Twitter.
Carlson states that Fox told The New York Times they pulled him off the air because he was a racist. But Carlson believes that he was taken off the air as a condition of the Dominion lawsuit settlement.
Tucker was thirty-three years old when he got sober. He states “It was almost like the pure word from God: If you keep doing that, you will destroy yourself and everything you love.”
Surprisingly, Hunter Biden and his wife, were neighbors and good friends of the Carlsons when the Carlsons lived in Washington D.C. Tucker and Hunter talked many times about sobriety. The author writes that Carlson places a serious premium on friendship — almost as great as he places on family.
The book addresses Carlson’s relationship with Donald Trump, Carlson’s opinions on COVID (lockdowns and vaccinations), the Ukraine War, the fact that Carlson does not own a television, that he is not on social media, and that his wife never watched his television show (but she did read his monologues every day just before they were sent off to the producers). Carlson gives his phone number to many people he meets, and estimates he’s in regular communication with roughly four hundred everyday people who text him links, one-liners, local news items. The book addresses the problems with young men in America, and that Tucker would record his program from Maine in the summer and Florida in the winter.
I enjoyed this informative and entertaining book, and found out a lot about Carlson that I didn’t know before. Note: the book does contain a significant amount of adult language, most of it coming from Carlson himself.
Here are a few quotes that I appreciated from the book:
• Do the thing for which you’re naturally suited. Pay attention to who you are. Do the thing that you are naturally good at, that you love without being prompted, that you would do for free.
• I’m a huge believer in people staying in their lane. Identify our strengths, orient your life around maximizing those and minimizing your weaknesses.
• From Tucker’s wife: But I feel like he feels he’s doing what God called him to do. He’s been given these gifts and he’s so articulate, and he feels like he makes a difference.
• All of my spiritual beliefs are grounded in that — seeing people’s kindness to each other, doing something to help others for no reason.
• I have a religion; I don’t need a new one. But for a lot of people on the left, it (politics) is their religion and this is a holy war, and they can’t be friends with unbelievers.
• The truth is contagious — lying is, but the truth is, as well. And the second you decide to tell the truth about something you are filled with this, I don’t wanna get supernatural on you, but you are filled with this power from somewhere else. Try it. Tell the truth about something, you feel it every day, the more you tell the truth, the stronger you become.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fast read but wow I had no idea really who this guy was. Wish I had followed him sooner. This book portrays him as a very likable guy and also explains why he’s so hated. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him. I love it. He’s clearly focused on doing what right and telling truth along the way. Refreshing in this single minded culture that says believe what we say or /& you don’t get a voice. Just this week the media cuts out a NFL quarterbacks comments about thanking Jesus and talking about his faith. We live in a culture where truth no longer lives. Evil days. Hope he get back & is successful at telling the truth & what so many are afraid to speak!

[Jana Botkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no one as transparent, honest, bold, and authentic, fearlessly pursuing truth without any thought as to how people perceive him as Tucker Carlson. Moore captured that undaunted high-energy, and if you like the man, you will thoroughly enjoy this in-depth look into his life.

The QR codes after some of the chapters will take you directly to videos of Tucker, referenced within the chapters.

[Nick Palczewski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography of Tucker Carlson is an easy read that dives into the personal life of the media commentator. Whether you agree with his politics or not, the book does a great job of showing a more candid side of Tucker away from the camera. I especially enjoyed reading about the influence his father had on his early life and the lessons he learned from him.

[Nick Carrico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short biography on one of the last journalists. It could’ve and should’ve been a lot longer. Probably more so a four star because of that. Hopefully that will happen at some point. It did a good job of capturing his quirk through print, which was nice.

[Negin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much that I’m thinking of reading it again, not right away, but eventually. It’s that good. The funny thing is that I never used to watch Tucker or FOX News. I would have, but it wasn’t really done in my family. It’s only since FOX got rid of him, that I’ve watched every single episode on X, and boy, have I loved them. Chadwick Moore’s writing is a delight. Reading about Tucker, from his early childhood on, all the stories, his love for his wife and children, I enjoyed every moment.

Here are some of my favorite quotes.

Al Sharpton
“Sharpton doesn’t hate whites after all. He just hates white liberals.”

Architecture
“I look at the country and I notice that virtually everything built after 1945 is less attractive, less pleasing, less human-centered than everything built before … Think about your own town. The prettiest buildings, they’re built in 1920. The closer you get to our current moment, the more everything looks like a Dollar Store, and the Republican Party somehow found itself in this position where they feel like they have to defend the aesthetics of the Dollar Store and the economics of it. It’s an atrocity that diminishes people, that destroys God’s creation, that oppresses us with its ugliness. That is true, and no one wants to say it because, I don’t know, some libertarian think-tank was paid to tell you that the Dollar Store is attractive? I don’t think it is, actually. Their idea of beauty is a female impersonator screaming at you. No. Beauty is nature. . . . The Republican Party should be for nature and not just in its aesthetics. Not just in its design, but in its human relationships. People are born wanting certain things.”

“Noble ideologies produce beautiful results. They produce beauty. Poisonous ideologies produce ugliness. There’s a reason the architecture in Bulgaria in 1975 was hideous — because Sofia in 1975 was controlled by the Soviet Union. Soviet architecture was horrifying, so was architecture under Mao. They knocked down everything worth having been built during the preceding millennia, and they replaced it with concrete boxes. Why’d they do that? Because those boxes, those buildings, that architecture, that design sent a very clear message — which is you are worth nothing. There’s no beauty for you. Now why is beauty so important, and why did tyrants always destroy it? They destroy it because beauty reminds you that the most important things are eternal. They’re unchanging, beauty is recognizable across cultures, across centuries.
Why does beauty happen? Because it’s derived from nature. It’s derived from God’s creation. The closer we are to God’s creation, the straighter the path and the better the path.”

The Border Crisis
“’The party of diversity is strongly, overwhelmingly, led by people who prefer all-white neighborhoods for themselves and their families. There are an awful lot of Democratic donors in Aspen, Colorado. What do we do about this? Imagine an Aspen airlift, a national effort to rescue the people of Aspen from the suffocating prison of their own whiteness. Instead of food and coal and medicine, the Biden administration could deliver an even more essential life-saving commodity, and that’s diversity into the cultural wasteland of Pitkin County, Colorado, which if you can believe it, as of tonight, is only one half of one percent black. Into that, Joe Biden could deposit Haitians and Somalis and Congolese — hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them — Guatemalans, Guineans, Algerians, the entire population of the Cape Verde Islands. We can do that. We’re America. And why stop with those countries? As of tonight, there are still four million people living in the impoverished state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Do you care about them? We do, because we’re good people. So why shouldn’t a quarter of all Oaxacans move to Aspen by next ski season. And to be clear, not move there to run the chairlifts at Snowmass, move there to ride the chairlifts at Snowmass to benefit fully from the economic bounty of that isolated blindingly white mountain community we call Aspen. Is there anything more American than that? Next stop on the equity train has got to be Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a natural.’
Carlson went on that the Vineyard, where former president Barack Obama recently purchased a $12 million waterfront compound, has ‘effectively zero diversity, which means zero strength. They are begging for more diversity. Why not send migrants there in huge numbers? Let’s start with 300,000 and move up from there.’”

Depth and Sadness
“… all deep people are sad on some level. There’s a lot to be sad about, if you let yourself experience it. He was fully connected to nature and the seasons, which if you’re not, you’re an idiot and missing something super important. You’re missing wisdom.”

Family
“… for Tucker, family is key to everything. ‘The unchanging fact is, your work actually doesn’t mean very much, in the end,’ as he told his audience in Des Moines. ‘Imagine a ruling class, the people with actual power, committed to telling young people that it does. And doing so with the aide and financial backing of the biggest companies in the country. They’re promoting the idea your family is worthless compared to loyalty to your employer and a political party. That is the sickest message I can possibly imagine. It’s a totalitarian message.’”

“I can’t imagine anything worse than losing contact with a child over politics. I don’t care what politics my kids have, who they’re having sex with, or what they believe — I would never disown my own children, ever, for any reason, and I think most parents feel that way. But the separation comes from the kids, the kids disowning their parents, and it’s a terrifying thing.”

Feelings
‘’There’s almost nothing that upsets Americans more than the idea that somewhere, somehow somebody is getting his feelings hurt,’ as he mockingly wrote. ‘In the eyes of most of us, that’s a sin worse than murder. Literally.’”

Freud
“Tucker would tell me his thoughts on Freudian psychiatry, which was once almost universally respected, but in recent decades has been roundly ‘dismissed as total crackpot, self-absorbed bullshit. And I agree that in its details a lot of it was completely silly. But Freudian psychology was a huge force. That way of thinking was universal in the United States — people would ascribe motives to human behavior that were based in your childhood, your lived experience. People would do things, and the explanation that you’d hear would be like, well, you know, he had some conflict with his mother in his childhood, or severe toilet training. People talked like that. And a lot of it was silly, Freud himself was kind of silly, but that way of thinking was real. There’s a lot going on inside of people that has to do with the experiences they’ve had. You are a product to some extent of genetics but also, to another hard-to-quantify extent, the product of the life you have lived and the emotions that life has generated within you. Now, we’ve just reduced people to chemicals. Someone decided chemistry could describe human behavior. I don’t know who decided that — probably the biotech firms, pharma. But what it’s done, in effect, is gotten everyone on drugs, which is the trend in American life I hate most. Secondarily, or maybe even more importantly, it ended the conversation about why people do the things they do and why they feel the way they do. Why do you feel that way? There are clearly biochemical reasons for depression, I’m not pretending that’s not true, but for the overwhelming majority of people anxiety and depression are signs that you’re not living in the right way. If you burn your finger on the stove and someone says to you, ‘I have a painkiller that will make that go away so the next time you touch the stove you won’t feel anything,’ you’d say, wait a second! Maybe your body is telling you that your flesh is burning off and you shouldn’t touch the stove. Maybe it’s a sign that you should change your behavior. And that used to be much more obvious. Like Freud, as silly as he was in some ways, pointed us back to something real, which was: the way you live matters.’”

His Way
“He is, above all, a person who hates hypocrisy and admires bravery. He regularly commented, unscripted, on his admiration for those who go against the grain and speak up in defense of what they believe, liberal or conservative or anything in between. The tagline of his show — ‘the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink’ — hadn’t come from nowhere. A civil libertarian himself, unlike most of us Tucker doesn’t bat an eye at accusations of ‘racism’ — a smear he faces daily, disseminated from America’s most powerful and wealthy individuals and institutions. In fact, the allegation is hilarious to him. ‘The only people I actually hate are white liberals. It’s people who look like me! Does that make me racist?’ he would later tell me one night over dinner, followed by his characteristic, high-pitched, cutting chortle — an outburst delightful to both his viewers and anyone sitting around a dinner table with him.”



Humility
“… ‘people today have decided they are God,’ he says, ‘and it’s too horrible to raise questions that suggest otherwise. It suggests your insignificance in the natural order. ‘If you acknowledge nature and its total independence from you — that it’ll still be here when you’re gone, trees will still be talking to each other — on some level that’s really scary. If you look at the stars long enough, it will scare the shit out of you, because the main message is: you don’t matter.”

National Babysitter
“Like his father, he gets fired up by the government acting as national babysitter.”

“’It turns out that liberals are very eager to intrude as deeply as possible into people’s personal lives just as long as they control the government. Once they were in charge, they set about doing this with no limits and no acknowledgment of the existence of personal liberty,’ he said, going on to rail against mask mandates; the proposed 95 percent tax on cigars in New York; bans on menthol cigarettes (‘some people like them, particularly poor people. They don’t have a lot of pleasures, menthol cigarettes are one of them. But they can’t have them anymore’); incandescent lightbulbs (‘the Department of Energy has just banned them. They looked too good. So now you’re stuck with some glowy fluorescent crap’); plastic straws; and laundry detergent. ‘In Massachusetts now you can’t throw out your old jeans and your old socks anymore. It’s a civil offense to dispose of textiles. It makes you want to go throw T-shirts all over Martha’s Vineyard just to break the law,’ he raged. ‘None of this is in your purview as a politician. Fix the freaking roads. You’re totally incompetent. This is a country that was founded because people didn’t want to pay a tea tax, and so they started a war.’”

Personal Relationships
“For a man assumed by his adversaries to be ideologically driven and callous, it’s striking how often Carlson talks about the importance of nurturing personal relationships. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, he cautioned the well-heeled crowd to hold on to their classic books, because the digital versions were being undermined by the woke, then added ‘don’t throw away your relationships with other people, because they can’t be disappeared, either. The material, the physical things that you can smell, those are the things that you can trust — your spouse, your dogs, your children, especially your dogs, but you know, your actual friendships, your college roommates, people in person. . . . I think the only way to stay sane is to cling more tightly to the things that you can smell. And I’ve really gotten to the point where if I can’t smell it, I’m not dealing with it.’”

Technology
“Odd as it might seem, Tucker Carlson does not own a television. He does not have one in either his Florida home or in his home in Maine. On an average day, the only time he so much as sees a TV screen is when he’s looking at a guest on his studio monitor. In this sense, Carlson might be regarded as a Luddite, the gently mocking term for those with an abiding distaste for technological progress. Yet, unlike the late-eighteenth-century English weavers from whom the term is derived — who destroyed the new steam-powered looms that threatened their livelihoods — he doesn’t so much hate the technology as the uses to which it’s been put: the ways it’s made us more soulless, and how it has served to undermine family and community. One day he tells me that one of his children recently showed him an episode of the popular black-comedy HBO series The White Lotus, noting he couldn’t even make it to the end. ‘It just made me too sad. I thought, ‘I don’t want these horrible people in my life. Everyone’s lying. They don’t love each other. I want to be as far away from them as I can. It was worse than pornography, because it was so sophisticated in its execution. The episode I saw there were two married couples in fake marriages, fake for different reasons. Can you imagine not even trusting your spouse?’ His eyes widen, in that classic Tucker expression of disbelief. ‘We don’t have any fake people in our world, at all. That’s the most important thing, that the center of your life is real. That’s your armor for when you go out in the world, and the place to be able to retreat back into where you can fully be yourself.’ As we talk, Susie stands at the kitchen counter, hand-writing a letter to a friend. Susie is a big fan of handwriting. Tucker once made the mistake of buying her an iPad, thinking she’d get great use of the calendar function. She never even turned it on, and it went into a drawer. Tucker very much admires this. ‘Our stationery bills are very high,’ he laughs. ‘She makes phone calls, she doesn’t watch TV, she loves books, reads about two hours a day, she writes things out because the physical touch of writing means something to her; you think about people as you write with your hand. She really is like the last Japanese soldier in Okinawa. She’s just living in another age. And she’s way happier. You have a conversation with her, and she looks at you. Living with her, you see the cost of progress. She doesn’t imagine that all change is an improvement. And it’s so inspiring for me to see, because she’s right.’
How different would his own life be, he is asked, if he didn’t have a smartphone? ‘Oh, it would be wonderful! I’d probably just spend the whole day bullshitting with dudes in my kitchen, like now. But my wife actually lives that life.’ He pauses. ‘Because really, an interior world, a personal life that’s completely authentic and loving and protective, that’s more important than anything else — your salary, your house, everything. Being focused on other people, rather than yourself, lacking self-consciousness — those are signs of emotional health. If you don’t have that you become fearful, self-hating, and narcissistic, like a lot of people I know. Narcissism is actually self-hatred misidentified as self-love; narcissists hate themselves so much, they’re so weak inside and so fearful of self-examination, they have to turn everything outward, away from themselves. Narcissism is like having a suppurating, throbbing wound that you can’t bear to have touched because it hurts so much. That’s why narcissists inevitably self-sabotage. You see this in the public sphere with leaders who are narcissistic: they always end up hurting themselves, and it’s clearly intentional. And they don’t even realize they’re doing it. I’ve watched political figures, including some I know very well, hamstring themselves, create scandals when they’re ascending — just when they’re getting traction, becoming more popular — and all of a sudden, they’ll say something that’s so damaging.’”

“People hurt themselves a lot. I think that’s what separates people from the animals. Animals don’t commit suicide. Animals don’t destroy themselves on purpose. People do. Politicians especially do, because they’re the most insecure. You don’t want any falseness or lying in your immediate world at all. That’s more dangerous than cancer. Neither Tucker nor Susie is on social media. In her case it is ‘because of the hate. He’s a target for a lot of people, and I truly don’t understand it except, I guess, people need somebody to attack or blame.’ But Tucker, she says, genuinely doesn’t care what people think, ‘he just doesn’t worry about stuff like that. It’s so refreshing, I wish I was more like that.’ Susie’s aversion to the news has everything to do with maintaining a level of inner peace. ‘I just don’t want to be mad at people,’ as she puts it. ‘I don’t want to feel angry. I don’t like if people hate my husband, but I don’t hate them. It’s not that I feel sorry for them, because that sounds condescending. On the other hand, even though I’m not on social media and don’t watch TV, I do live in this century, and I talk to people and I’m not dumb. So we have security.’ She pauses. ‘One time we were in Logan airport and this woman shoved herself against Tucker and swore at him, ‘Go to hell, you eff-er!’ I can’t believe people talk like that. But they know where you live, and it can be concerning sometimes.’ What’s startling is that Susie has never seen Tucker’s show, save for one time she visited the studio to watch in person. But she does read his monologues every day just before they’re sent off to the producers.
Moreover, she’s long had a recurring alarm set on her phone for every night at 7:55 p.m. That’s when she texts him to tell him that he is ‘the best husband in the world.’ (I asked Susie about this after I noticed, during the three nights in a row that I sat in studio, at precisely 7:55 Tucker picked up his phone, furrowed his brow playfully, and said under his breath, ‘Really? The best? How does she know that?’). ‘I do it because I’m so proud of him, and I’m thinking of him, and I want him to know that he’s loved. He’s great and that’s a big job. I can’t believe he’s going live on TV for an hour and I’m, like, sitting at dinner with a friend,’ she tells me later on.”

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

In these latter days, two very different-seeming men embody the chthonic forces rising in America. Those forces are not ideological or political. Rather, they are manifestations of reality reasserting itself, against the anti-reality Regime which rules us. The first such man is Elon Musk, and we will discuss him later, in another piece, coming soon. The second, our topic today, is Tucker Carlson. Despite Carlson’s prominence, this book is the only biography, so far, of Carlson, and it is far from being the definitive Tucker Carlson biography. But it’s short and accessible, so it is as good a place as anywhere to start, and to discuss what the presence of Carlson on the public stage says about our present moment.

I have never been a regular watcher of Tucker Carlson (maybe I should not admit that, given he was kind enough, in 2022, to host me on his daytime program for an hourlong discussion). It is not that I am against watching Carlson; it’s just that I watch nearly zero video of any type. Still, I have always had a favorable impression of him, even when he was a young man on the move in media circles (some time ago; we are almost exactly the same age). My favorable impression came from knowing that he rejects, and has frequently attacked and demolished, the suffocating tissue of propaganda lies, the Narrative, which our rulers use to control us. To be sure, many people reject the Narrative, not only Carlson. But those, the little people, lack any ability to broadcast their message outside of small circles, though even that is a big problem for the Regime. Carlson is unique in that he both has had, and has used, a media platform with enormous reach to spread his message of truth, thereby creating a catastrophic problem for the Regime.

What comes across more than anything else in this book is that Carlson marches, always and only, to his own internal drummer. Rather than wondering “how will this look to others?”, or trying to pin down the future with precision, he does what he wants and thinks is best at the moment. In other words, he does not calculate much. He is instead biased toward action to meet challenges as they arise, based on embedded knowledge and experience. (This is almost always true of successful men, because constant calculation leads to the error of thinking one can control events, and also tends to lock you into reactions when events, as always, take unexpected turns.) Total indifference to the opinion of others, rare in our present society, makes Carlson unpredictable, which, completely aside from Carlson’s possible leadership in remaking the future, makes him refreshing.

But this raises the obvious question, which is not addressed in this book or anywhere else I have seen—what does Carlson want? What drives him? What future does he anticipate or hope for from doing what he does? We learn in Tucker a good deal about Carlson’s thoughts on various matters, many non-political, and about his philosophy of life. But what is his ultimate goal, if he has one? It’s not clear, but I will, below, hazard some guesses.

Independence of thought makes Carlson dangerous to the Regime, which more than anything else fears that which it cannot control. This fear is natural, understandable, and even wise. After all, the Regime is Left, root and branch, but reality has a very strong right-wing bias. As a result, Regime control is fundamentally unnatural and thus eternally fragile. Therefore much of the energy of the Regime is spent desperately trying to convince the masses that reality is something other than what it is. Carlson is an existential threat not only because he reveals to the masses the emperor is naked, but because his wide popularity and the topics he addresses give them permission to notice and discuss among themselves forbidden truths, overcoming the isolation and stigma by which the Regime tries to stifle any opposition. Worst of all for the Regime, Carlson is willing to specifically identify, and to directly threaten, effectively, his enemies. This is the greatest sin possible for the Regime, which only allows, and that in very limited quantities, controlled opposition. Effective opposition is the Regime’s utmost nightmare, and much of what opposition there is today coalesces around Carlson. It is a wonder to me they have not tried to kill him.

The writing of this book, which seems to be more-or-less an authorized biography (it is based on extensive conversations between Carlson and the author, Chadwick Moore) appears to have followed the usual Carlson uncalculated path. Moore isn’t a professional biographer. He’s never written any other book, much less a biography. He’s a journalist, and a homosexual, and a conservative (although the latter two, obviously, sit uneasily together, at best). He first appeared on Carlson’s show Tucker Carlson Tonight in 2017, after he wrote a short piece in the New York Post about his “coming out as a conservative.” Moore was immediately fired as an editor by two homosexual publications for which he worked (as we all know, “inclusion” really means “total obeisance to left-wing dogma”), and Tucker deemed this worthy of interest. Thereafter, Moore became a “regular guest” (uncompensated) on Tonight, including (by chance) appearing on the final episode, before Carlson’s unexpected firing by Fox in April, 2023. He seems to have suggested he write a biography, and Carlson agreed.

The book did need a better editor. Errors and infelicities abound. Bryant Pond, where Carlson spent summers as a child and now has his Maine studio, is referred to in the paragraph after its introduction as Bryant Park, which, last I checked, was in New York City. A picture of Tucker and his brother on their “first day of school” is identified as “circa 1968,” when neither of them had been born, and that’s only one of several dates that are wrong. Still, Moore did the work, not only interviewing Carlson, but interviewing many others, including high school teachers. And he’s not biased against his subject, as nearly any more mainstream biographer would be. The result is worth reading, even with the problems.

Moore briefly sketches Carlson’s present life, including well-done descriptions of Bryant Pond and the violent 2020 attacks on his Washington, D.C. residence (for which, of course, nobody was arrested, much less punished, and which were encouraged by the Left as a whole) that led to him leaving D.C. (he now lives in Florida in the colder months). We then turn, for the first half of the book, to Carlson’s early life, which was happy, though somewhat irregular. He was born in 1969, in San Francisco, to one Richard Carlson, a local television reporter, and his wife. Richard Carlson, born Richard Boynton, as a baby was given up for adoption by his parents, lived for some time in an orphanage, and was adopted by a family named Carlson. In one of the sad episodes in the book, Tucker Carlson’s grandfather regretted placing his son in the orphanage, and concocted a plan to spirit away the boy and elope with the mother. But when the mother backed out, he shot himself.

This was not the only family trauma that would cause a weaker man to imagine he needed lifelong therapy. Carlson’s mother was a spoiled flower child from a wealthy family, and the apotheosis of selfish Boomerdom. Richard Carlson chose poorly, though his wife did give him two sons. The mother, when not taking drugs, aspired to be an artist, but mostly just attached herself parasitically to art-world types. She abandoned the family when Carlson was six; neither he nor his brother ever saw her again. A poignant passage in this book is when Carlson is told, in 2011, that his mother is dying; he and his brother agree that it’s not important, and a child’s soccer game that night is much more important. “I mean I felt sad for her, I guess. I don’t know much about her. She had shows, okay I guess, and all that, but she wasn’t part of my life. I wasn’t part of hers. And I just—I don’t know.”

When Carlson was ten, his father remarried, to a descendant of the Swanson food products fortune. Carlson is rich today from his own efforts, and sometimes people say that he grew up rich (I thought so before reading this book), but it appears that his mother did not get much, if any, money from the Swanson fortune, and Carlson’s upbringing seems to have been upper-middle class. They lived in La Jolla and they had a housekeeper, but do not appear to have been wealthy. Aside from his father’s marital turmoil, Carlson had the idyllic free childhood of a Gen X boy, with the additional benefits of living in southern California before it went to hell, and having a father with an interesting line of work, to which he regularly exposed the boys.

He was an indifferent student, with dyslexia, which resulted in “an uninterrupted string of Ds from about third grade until . . . the end of college.” Yet he was, and is, a voracious and broad reader. Dyslexia is usually associated with difficulty reading, but in Carlson’s case, it seems more associated with difficulty in spatial reckoning. It seems that Carlson is an extremely intelligent autodidact, a type that was once common in America, before forced routinized lowest-common-denominator government schooling became the norm (Abraham Lincoln is a classic example of the type). This self-starting, aggressive personality also shows in his dating the daughter of the new headmaster at his high school (a boarding school), and then marrying her, after concealing their relationship from her disapproving parents all through college. Further suggesting a devil-may-care approach is that Carlson didn’t even bother graduating from college, nor did his wife, Susan (whom he calls Susie). Instead, Carlson got a job, in 1992, as a writer at the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review, later a flagship publication of the catamite Right, but back then very influential.

It was a fine job, and Carlson wrote some well-received long-form pieces, but it wasn’t exciting, so within the year, Carlson moved to Arkansas, as a newspaper reporter. By 1995, he was back in Washington, working for The Weekly Standard. He wrote more pieces that got him attention (though reading about the politics of this period gives one an odd feeling—it all seemed important at the time, but in retrospect was totally pointless, stupid, and irrelevant, as the Left solidified its hegemony and destroyed America while the Right argued about tax credits). He was, more or less, a standard conservative, as that type existed in that era. No doubt he worshipped Ronald Reagan; we all did back then. It was in the early 2000s that Carlson got into television, with his first major show being a place on the debate program Crossfire, which had been around since 1982. Moore notes how that time lacked the hatreds that the Left has brought to all discourse today. Thus, Hillary Clinton once unexpectedly showed up live on Crossfire, with a shoe-shaped cake for Carlson, who had said that if her memoir sold a million copies, he would eat his shoe. Everybody laughed and had a good time. That scene is unimaginable today.

In 2003, however, he was sent on assignment (by Esquire) to Iraq, where he discovered that everything we had been told about that conflict was lies, and that neoconservatives were of the devil, for they had fathered the lies. Ever since, he has opposed American intervention abroad, which now exists for the sole purpose of spreading globohomo—and it is largely due to Carlson that more than half the country realizes this fact. His opposition to America’s starting, and continuing, the Russo-Ukraine War, was, it appears, a major reason why Fox fired him. Since then, his positions have increasingly hewed to reality, and therefore diverged from those of the Republican Party, which after all has been for forty years, or maybe more accurately eighty, no actual threat to the Left, merely a device to keep a lid on the feelings and actions of real Americans, while destroying their lives and their country.

Moore goes into much detail about Carlson’s career, but that’s really the least interesting thing about Carlson. The only important matter is that during the past decade Carlson became the most popular talking head in politics, by a huge margin, because, not in spite of, his unique politics. Of course, his politics are far from unique among the American people; they are the closest thing to the mainstream there is. But they are unique among both the media (even the media that falsely pretends it is conservative or right-wing) and unique among the professional-managerial elite, at least among those who are allowed to speak their mind. As everyone knows, the vehicle for this rise was Carlson’s program on Fox, Tucker Carlson Tonight, a daily news show which premiered in 2016.

Carlson’s personality seems pretty much identical with the personality he shows on television, which became well-known as a result of his Fox program. His charisma and presence is obvious, much of it, again, coming from his independence. He does not seem to have any notable vices, though interestingly, he used to be a drunk. But he quit cold turkey twenty years ago, and now is a teetotaler. Another major strength Carlson has is his ability to be self-contained without being solipsistic. Most people who make their living in the public eye are desperate for approval, and only in part because their income depends on it. As Carlson says, “overwhelmingly [politicians] are hollow people who are in [politics] because they yearn for the affirmation of strangers, which is inherently sick. . . . That’s why they’re politicians, because they’re screwed-up people.” The downstream result of this groundedness is that Carlson easily connects to the common man, without pretending he is the common man, which would make it impossible to connect to the common man. He is also fatalistic. It’s an interesting set of personality traits—and, not without consequence, a set common among men of destiny, from Napoleon to George Washington.

At Fox, eventually his enemies were able to dethrone him from the position that was so dangerous to them. Now Carlson is trying to build a new media empire, one that cannot be strangled by his enemies. For several months he has posted videos, with great success, to Elon Musk’s X. Very recently he has started his own online network (you should subscribe). I cannot predict whether these efforts will be successful. It is commonly accepted that a large part of Carlson’s television audience was Boomers, the kind of people who still watch television at 6:30 p.m. sharp. That audience seems likely to be a much smaller part of an online network. But maybe the Boomers are sharing clips on Facebook. And maybe he will be able to reach many new viewers. I just don’t know.

So, we return to what Carlson wants. What does the future hold for Carlson? Does he want power? To what end? Does he just want the world to be better than what it is? Or to remake the world? He is open that he wants what every righteous man wants—safety and prosperity for his family and friends, and for his countrymen (though how to define that latter in today’s America is another question). But beyond that, what is Carlson’s aim? It matters, because while most men have aims (I, for example, aim to remake the society and politics of America on Foundationalist principles), most of those aims are vapor, mere words, at least right now, while Carlson actually has the power, and the connections, just maybe, if a card or two falls right, to accomplish some or all of what he wants.

One clue is something that at first seems anomalous, even disturbing. In his post-Fox career, Carlson has begun sometimes featuring not only the types of Regime enemies he commonly hosted before, but also what are commonly regarded as fringe figures and fringe ideas, even on the Right. He has talked to the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, Rumanian pornographers who have, in the vacuum that exists for examples of real masculinity, developed a huge following among young men. He has endorsed the idea that UFOs are real, and hosted Alex Jones. A few days ago, he had Kevin Spacey, a famous left-leaning homosexual actor destroyed by the Regime, on his show.

Why? My first reaction was that these interviews were mistakes, caused by bad counsel from those around him. They seem like aberrational departures from being reality-based. But upon reflection, that doesn’t seem correct. Carlson’s wife is his most important counselor, it appears, and she hasn’t gone anywhere. It seems likely that he would have featured guests like this before, but was forbidden. What unites these people and ideas? They are all been made notable outcasts by the Regime, at the expenditure of significant energy, because they all directly threaten the Regime in a way that run-of-the-mill political opponents, castrati such as Mike Pence, do not.

Spacey, for example, has intimated that he is willing to expose the rampant sexual perversity, including routine child abuse, that binds together many elements of the Regime. Alex Jones, when you examine his career and thought, has been proven more often right than not in the crazy-seeming things he says about the Regime. The Tates, despite their glaring flaws, threaten to ignite real masculinity among young men, by far the greatest threat possible to the Regime, which relies on passivity and feminization to maintain control. UFOs are probably the farthest “out there” topic, and sometimes when discussing the topic Carlson seems too open to bizarre theories—but there is something about what are called UFOs that also materially threatens the Regime, as unclear as it is to us what that is (and Carlson does nod to the most likely possibility, that supposed aliens are actually demons, with whom the Regime communes).

In other words, Carlson’s purpose in giving a platform to those otherwise wholly deplatformed, other than his natural autodidact curiosity, seems to be . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Silvia · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a huge Tucker Carlson fan, I immediately pre-ordered this book through Amazon when the author first announced the date it would be published. For reasons unknown (cough cough wink wink) after its release, the shipping was delayed for several weeks. Then I received an email from Amazon to confirm that I really did want to order this book and if I didn’t respond they would cancel my order. Wtf?! It was weeks later before I finally received it. I read it, and I’m happy to proclaim I thoroughly enjoyed all of it. The most interesting parts of it were Tucker’s childhood (abandoned by his mother and raised by his father) and his belief to hold on to the people who are most important, whether or not you ideologically agree with them. Having lost friendships over political differences, this profoundly moved me. There was someone in a book group I was in who I thought I was friends with that lamented on Twitter that she was rethinking her relationships with those who voted for someone she opposed. I was shaken as I received messages of chastisements on Twitter from others in my book group. With great reluctance I finally left this book group and closed my Twitter account. I only rejoined Twitter now X (not the book group) after Musk bought it.

Tucker is an informative book that sheds light of what made Tucker Carlson the man. Love him as I do, or hate him, I highly recommend it.

[Steve Eubanks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I call books like this Doritos biographies - tasty and addictive but not as nourishing as your doctor would like.

Moore gives you a good sense of Tucker Carlson here, mostly through the man’s own quotes, which are extensive. It will surprise almost no one that Carlson is exactly the person you’ve always suspected. Some will love that, and some will loath it, but you can’t fault his authenticity.

I like the book’s brevity and pace. I learned some interesting tidbits, but this wasn’t a Walter Isaacson tome
(That’s next on my list) or some psychological case study. It was a good biography of a fascinating man. As it should be.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating!!! I’ve always hesitated if asked, Who would you most enjoy having dinner with? Naturally, answers of Jesus, Ghandi and Martin Luther type figures come to mind, but just for the sheer enjoyment and diversity of subjects and knowledge and often wisdom, I now know my answer…Tucker Carlson…what a romp! Such fun! I now know less than I thought, question more than before and reflect before volunteering answers too fast. I am certain the evening would be a mind blowing, exhilarating and life forming event. It is a very quick read. Enjoy!

[Alparslan Korkmaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moore does an excellent job researching and telling an interesting story of one of the bravest and straightforward journalists working today. From the book:, From Hunter S Thompson: “The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/ cocktail, personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”
Tucker Carlson is that rare commodity.