Hey, everybody. We’ve got an update we’re excited about: in January, Crooked Media Reads is coming out with our next book: Hated byBy All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind, by one of our favorite political journalists, New York Times Magazine writer Jason Zengerle. We just locked the cover art and we wanted you guys to be the first to see it. The book is available for pre-order here.
Why a book about Tucker Carlson? Because the key to understanding the Trump Age is understanding how we as a society stopped seeking truth and started seeking outrage. For our money, nobody is more influential there than Tucker.
Tucker can be a lot of things: strident, shrill, offensive. He’s notorious for promoting racist and xenophobic stories and conspiracy theories. He’s also popular, talented as a broadcaster, and just unpredictable enough to keep you – and Donald Trump – watching. Did you find yourself sharing his smackdown of Ted Cruz on Iran? Or his call for civil disobedience if his fellow conservatives crack down on free speech after Charlie Kirk’s murder? Were you weirded out by that rant about Trump being an angry dad who was going to “spank” America for “being a bad little girl”? Raising our hands for all three.
And that’s the thing: unlike many other right-wing media figures we can think of, Tucker’s not a buffoon. He knows exactly what he’s doing. In Hated byBy All the Right People, Jason Zengerle traces Tucker’s rise from a fledgling intellectual writer to America’s dominant television host, his fall from grace at Fox News, and his inevitable comeback as a self-powered provocateur. From start to finish, it’s a fascinating, informative look at Tucker’s political evolution, and how his rise traces the rise of the MAGA movement.
Trust us: if you like engaging with the questions we wrestle with on our show, you should read this book. We hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it and telling your friends about it. Anyone who doesn’t is getting spanked.
Jon, Jon, and Tommy
