In today’s newsletter, Andrew Marantz reports on Tucker Carlson’s influence on Trumpism, and then:
“Put your earphones on to white noise, and just look around,” Tucker Carlson has said. “Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?”Photographs by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker
The Tucker Carlson Road Show
After his Fox show was cancelled, Carlson spent a year in the wilderness, honing his vision of what the future of Trumpism might look like. This fall, he took his act on tour.
“Sometimes, when Tucker Carlson is in the shower, he takes a quiet moment to reflect on whether his haters may be right about him,” Andrew Marantz writes. “These reveries always lead him to the same conclusion: he’s clean. It is the haters who are wrong.” In a deep dive on Carlson, Marantz reports from the Tucker Carlson Live Tour—a road show running this fall, aimed at shutting those haters down and promoting his chosen people, which has taken the former TV host to sixteen arenas across the country, from Anaheim, California, to Sunrise, Florida, and all around the heartland.
Since he was fired from Fox News, Carlson has cobbled together a successful, dexterous career tweeting, podcasting, and speechifying. His ability to hold an audience’s attention is remarkable, “better than just about anyone on the planet,” Marantz argues. This skill has garnered him a lot of political influence, centered on what might be called Tuckerism. The driving force of this ideology, underneath the strange ideas about daddy Trump and demons and declining sperm counts, is to convince Americans, especially members of the working class, that they are being replaced by immigrants—and that far-right nationalist politicians will be able to do something about it. Read the story »
The Lede
Members of Starbucks Workers United meet at their office in Buffalo, New York.Photograph by Lindsay DeDario / Reuters / Redux
Is the Labor Movement Screwed No Matter Who Wins the Election?
Joe Biden promised to be the most pro-labor President in history, and E. Tammy Kim argues that he delivered on that promise. “His backing of jobs bills and unions made possible, and were made possible by, worker agitation,” she writes. But what will happen when his Presidency ends? During her campaign, Kamala Harris has committed to strengthening labor laws and raising the federal minimum wage—but, with likely opposition from Congress and the courts, it will be difficult to deliver. If Donald Trump wins, and his Presidency is anything like his previous one, the Administration’s policies will skew more toward employers and billionaires. Read the story »
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P.S. Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel opened for public viewing on this day in 1512. In “Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants,” the novelist Mathias Énard, inspired by Michelangelo’s correspondence, imagines what would have happened if the artist had gone to Constantinople in 1506, after the Ottoman ruler Bayezid II asked him to build a bridge across the Golden Horn. It is “a tale of bastard genius that might have been,” Julian Lucas writes, “and a cautionary fable about the consequences of parochial timidity.” 🎨
