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On January 3rd, in Palm Beach, Florida, Donald Trump stood behind the lectern at a press conference, to regale members of the media about the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan President. Tan and hoarse, sloshing his syllables together imprecisely, Trump looked and sounded like someone who’d rushed away from a sedate moment of his vacation to take a work call. He gave a short speech about the operation in Caracas, sometimes looking up from his prepared text to offer seemingly impromptu annotations: “It was an assault like people have not seen since”—here he took a pause, searching the air for an apt point of reference—“World War Two.” The military officers’ work there and in other recent actions was “all perfectly executed and done.”

You could tell that Trump found the mission just plain cool. “It was dark,” he said, narrating the adventure. “The lights of Caracas were largely turned off, due to a certain expertise that we have.” What expertise? He didn’t say. Conveying helpful information wasn’t really his aim. The point was to project his own power and, perhaps, to inspire in his listeners a pang of jealousy at his great big chest of war toys.

The Trump Administration, seizing upon the opportunity of untrammelled time to brag and hold attention and boldly reframe and bend the truth, has made the press conference its signature rhetorical form. Even more than in Trump’s famously long, digressive, “weaving” rally speeches, he and his spokespeople have used the formerly staid tradition of speaking to and taking questions from the media to set forth their distorted vision of the future—and, maybe more subtly, to let slip their estimation of the public. Throughout January, the members of the Trump regime welcomed the New Year by blitzing the podium: they took the chaos they’d created—the sudden power vacuum in Venezuela, the fatal incursions of ICE in Minnesota, a spun-up territorial crisis over Greenland—and tried to wrestle it into the shape of a story in which they would prevail.

On January 9th, still basking in the glory of his gangsterism in Venezuela, Trump gathered the press at the White House, where he’d convened a gaggle of oil-company C.E.O.s. The President’s personality resembles an id livid with tropes and types. He knows as well as anybody that the oil executive—tight-jawed and genteelly conservative—embodies ideas that play lastingly along the edges of the American imagination. Both Bushes spent time tapping Texas oil fields for crude before successfully running for President—as much to establish strong images as to earn a family fortune. These are the ultimate capitalists, pecking ruggedly at the earth’s skin and turning its lifeblood into piles of cash. The men surrounding Trump were the kinds of guys he always seems to want to impress.

Now Trump, having asserted control over Venezuela’s resources as well as its immediate political fate—an arrogation he has taken to calling the “Donroe Doctrine”—had something to offer them. He started to deliver his remarks without having turned on the microphone in front of him; his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, leaned over unstealthily and pressed a button that activated the audio and made a green light on the microphone glow. Trump didn’t skip a beat. Now amplified, he was already midsentence, rushing off urgently, like a burbling river. Leaders of all the “biggest” countries had called to congratulate him about nabbing Maduro. “They’re all impressed,” he said, implying that the oil guys should be, too.

Playacting for journalists standing in an unruly huddle just off camera, Trump asked questions of the oilmen, wondering how soon they could suck the ground under Venezuela dry. “And you’re very much set up for the heavy oil, right?” he asked at one point. There was an implicit cruelty behind the exercise. He wanted the cameras to see him place Venezuela on the table like a celebratory goose and start slicing.

The White House press-briefing room, a small theatre for an increasingly sick show, sits atop what used to be a swimming pool. The pool was installed during the Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who swam to maintain his strength after his paralysis. Today, the room is the central site of the Trump Administration’s ritual humiliation of the American media. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, presides over the space, transmitting the spleen and the constantly shifting imperatives of the President.

She’s good at the job. Some press secretaries show hints of strain, managing the dual tasks of carrying the boss’s message and playing it straight with the press. Leavitt—who ran for Congress, in 2022, and lost—betrays no such struggle. She has a placid, open face and often, when she’s in a jovial mood, jokes around behind the lectern. When a wonky issue like health care comes up, she tends to read deftly and quickly from a sheet of talking points. When one of the President’s favored hot-button issues arises, she speaks fluently off the cuff, as she did recently when describing undocumented people being hunted by ICE as “criminal illegal-alien killers, rapists, and pedophiles.”

Even when Leavitt is acting enraged, she does so with a small smile. Case in point: a fracas with Niall Stanage, a columnist from The Hill, who wanted to know how the Administration could possibly believe that ICE’s activity was going “correctly,” as the President had enthused, when, for instance, one of its officers had been filmed shooting and killing Renee Nicole Good.

Leavitt took on the strict tone of a teacher: “Why was, uh, Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?”

“You’re asking me my opinion?” Stanage asked.

“Yeah!”

“Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably.”

Leavitt pounced. “Oh, O.K., so you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion.” She said “left-wing opinion”—referring to an opinion she’d solicited just a second ago—with a slight, taunting singsong in her voice. She continued, “Yeah, because you’re a left-wing hack, you’re not a reporter, you’re posing in this room as a journalist, and it’s so clear by the premise of your question. And you and the people in the media who have such biases but fake like you’re a journalist—you shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat.”

This short diatribe, delivered with a raised voice (but, still, that smile) was a characteristic sample of the Administration’s verbal style. Its members apply names and labels—illegal, criminal, alien, left-wing, agitator—in order to dehumanize the people to whom those words are supposed to refer. If you fit into this ever-growing lexicon of categories, you shouldn’t have your job, or sit in your seat, or try to protect your neighbors, or even, in Good’s “unfortunately and tragically” illustrative case, be left alive.

A few days earlier, Vance had given a press conference to shame the media about its reporting on Good and her killer, Jonathan Ross, and to slant the story in a more Trump-friendly direction. Vance showed off a way with words quite similar to Leavitt’s, and to Trump’s. He made sure to note that Minnesota was under siege by fraud, perpetrated mostly by “Somali immigrants.” Without the benefit of a thorough investigation, he nonetheless asserted that Good had been trying to ram Ross with her car, called her a “deranged leftist,” and, admitting that her death was a tragedy, deemed it “a tragedy of the far left.” So many names for nonpersons, emitted with such ease!

And yet Trump doesn’t always sound so pleased with the promotional efforts of his team. On January 20th, to mark a year since he retook office, the President made a guest appearance at Leavitt’s briefing. She’d teased the spot on her X account with QVC-ish good cheer: “A very special guest will be joining me at the podium today. . . . TUNE IN! 👀🇺🇸.”

Trump showed up with a thick sheaf of papers, listing the “accomplishments” of the year. He’d turned the United States into the “hottest country anywhere in the world” and wanted to get some credit. “We’ve had the best stock market in history,” he said. “I mean, I’m not getting—maybe I have bad public-relations people, but we’re not getting it across.” ♦

One of the photographer William Eggleston’s great strengths—his inspiring force—is to know when he’s telling the truth about something and to stick with it. Although a number of critics didn’t respond especially warmly to his landmark show “William Eggleston’s Guide,” when it opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976—it was the first one-man show of color photography the museum ever presented—he dusted off that critical debris and continued to capture what he knew: an American South that had echoes of Zora Neale Hurston’s melancholy, amused reports from that region of the world, and that was as trenchant and lyrical as Tennessee Williams’s mid- to late-career one-act plays about Southern life. Now eighty-six, Eggleston—who was born and lives in Memphis—has a distinctly Southern sense of humor that draws on observation, gossip, and a love of the absurd. Although he has said that the South he grew up in bears little resemblance to the present-day version, he still mines what he’s always mined: the pockets of loneliness that Truman Capote—a New Orleans native—evoked in an essay about his home town and the “long, lonesome perspectives” of its streets. Eggleston’s loneliness stems from being an insider who also isn’t one. Like a writer, a photographer works alone. (Though that’s where the similarity ends for Eggleston; in a 2016 interview, he said, “Words and pictures . . . they’re like two different animals. They don’t particularly like one another.”)

The kind of details that Eggleston fixes on in his pictures—the placid swimming pools, say, or a suddenly startling view of racial “difference”—further substantiate his identity: he isn’t the person or thing he’s making an image of, but he recognizes himself in its Southernness. Unlike other photographers of the South—Robert Frank, for one—Eggleston understands the extraordinary, sober stateliness of the place, a remote grandeur that marks many of the women and Black people in his photographs: no matter how close the camera gets, you’re not allowed in.

While looking at images in Eggleston’s current show in New York, “The Last Dyes” (at the David Zwirner gallery, through March 7th), an exhibition of dye-transfer prints from the first half of the seventies, I marvelled at his commitment in the early years of his art-making, given that he did not have much of an affirming audience until, at about thirty-one, he met the brilliant curator Walter Hopps, who recognized in Eggleston’s Kodachrome world an unexplored universe. Eggleston’s first images were in black-and-white; like many photographers of his generation, he was influenced by Frank, and by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment.” But, by the mid-sixties, he had met the astute and poetic Alabama-born photographer William Christenberry, who turned him on to color. Christenberry’s photographs of abandoned houses and road stands have some of the order and calm of the unforgettable images that Walker Evans produced for “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” his groundbreaking 1941 book with James Agee, documenting sharecroppers in the South during the Great Depression.

Eggleston, however, used color in a different way: he employed the bright shock effect of advertising—Drink Coca-Cola! Drive this Buick!—but separated it from capitalism. There’s so much junk in Eggleston’s pictures. Junked cars, used cars, dusty parked cars, cars going nowhere or maybe about to go somewhere. In one of his most famous images, “Memphis”—it’s not in the Zwirner show—we see a tricycle parked on a suburban street. The tricycle is shot from below, at an angle that renders it monumental. And if you look between its wheels, you can see a car parked in the garage of a ranch house. The tricycle frames the car just as Eggleston frames the tricycle. The world is a series of frames. For me, this image, so simple and heartfelt, is about time. We all go from the tricycle to the car to the grave, under that big sky. But what happens to us in between? That’s part of what “The Last Dyes” addresses: the days we live in. Days upon days. Though the ostensible reason for the show is to exhibit Eggleston’s dye-transfer prints—a painstaking process (no longer in use) in which three film matrices are separately submerged in dye and then pressed and rolled onto a dye-receptive fibre paper to create a single image—the outmoded technique only underlines the show’s concern with temporality.

Made up of thirty-one photographs (with ample space between them for the viewer to dive into one without feeling distracted by another), “The Last Dyes” presents a world that feels fictional but fact-based, as if you were reading a true-crime novel. The truth here is Eggleston’s love not only of images but of beauty—or of what he considers beautiful. Part of his great accomplishment was to take the European aesthetic of beauty and redefine it for the South, with its heat and its billboards, its indolence and humor and thick nights. Indeed, one of the more astonishing pictures in the show combines all of these last three elements. At first, it is difficult to make out “Untitled” (c. 1972)—it’s a dark image—but then it starts to find you. Oh! Look! I recognize that crumpled pack of Winstons in the ashtray, your mind says. That receptacle must be in a car. What is that shape in the car, though? It’s a woman’s head thrown back—we guess this only because of the long strands of hair across her face, long dark hair that seems to be of a piece with her sort of fuzzy apparel. They’re all there, Eggleston’s signifiers: the brand name, the partially unseen (and thus unknown) person, the textures and colors of mysterious night. In this image, Eggleston grabs at what Flannery O’Connor, in her 1960 novel “The Violent Bear It Away,” called “this lonesome place”: the lonesome place of being, doubly lonesome because it’s in the South, the dumping ground for all that tremendous industry and hatred, constantly in the throes of reconstruction—even if no one remembers that word. It takes a long time to understand what you’re seeing in this photograph, but once you do the picture seems to belong to you.

Another thing that became clear to me as I went through the exhibition is how rarely Eggleston’s photographs represent people interacting. He is less interested in the drama behind closed doors—which fascinated Hurston and Williams—than in what the people involved leave behind: the food stuffed in a freezer, the eerie abandoned gas station. His pictures are filled with the detritus of being, and they make us feel sad, not about being alive but about what life requires of us, the necessity of leaving things in order to keep moving.

When there are folks in Eggleston’s images—and there are not that many of them here—you feel a little jolt, and then you remember how spread out the South is and how communities are formed in that vastness. (Unusually for a photographer of his generation, Eggleston’s photographs are not portraits—or, rather, his portraits are not necessarily people-based. When he photographs a dog beneath a lowering sky, that’s a portrait, too.) Even though I like the wit and show of a 1972 work in which we see a white woman with a bouffant hairdo giving a little leg as a Black man passes—it’s a strong image of what the world looks like once the party’s over and the weight of a white woman being looked at by a Black man takes on terrible connotations—I feel it owes too much to Garry Winogrand and his extraordinary series “Women Are Beautiful.” The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating.

In September, the Swedish government released a national kulturkanon, or culture canon: a list of a hundred art works and accomplishments that define the nation. There were some expected items—a play by the nineteenth-century writer August Strindberg, a painting series by the abstract artist Hilma af Klint—but also a ski race called the Vasaloppet and the invention of paternity leave. Laws, churches, and IKEA were all anointed.

That the country which bestows Nobel Prizes should play this parlor game is no surprise. Less expected was how the Swedish Academy, which selects the Nobel in Literature each year, condemned the project. “Anyone who wishes to establish a canon is by definition seeking to make their own small, authoritative list, which requires instrumentalizing literature and using it ideologically,” the Academy’s secretary, Mats Malm, wrote. This opposition was part of a broader debate that has swept the country, amid the rise of a conservative government and a demographic transformation that has called into question the very idea of “Swedish culture.”

In the past twelve years, more than a million people have migrated to Sweden, a country of fewer than eleven million. A fifth of its residents are foreign-born, and a population that was for centuries mostly white and Lutheran has become far more diverse. After a period of relative openness to immigrants, and especially to asylum seekers, public opinion and policy have shifted. Immigrants are now regularly blamed for taking resources from the state, driving an increase in gang and gun violence, and contributing to the country’s high unemployment rate—around eight per cent, twice that of the United States.

As in America, nativist anxieties have accelerated a reactionary political movement. Partly because Sweden has a parliamentary system, this turn emerged not through an existing conservative party but through the rise of a new one: the Sweden Democrats. A good example of their platform is a recent resettlement proposal, which would pay the equivalent of around thirty-five thousand dollars to each immigrant adult who leaves Sweden. The kulturkanon—which the Sweden Democrats championed—can be seen as a softer product of the same mentality. We want you to leave, but if you stay you should read some Strindberg and watch the Vasaloppet.

Like Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and Rassemblement National in France, the Sweden Democrats started as a fringe operation, with neo-Nazi roots. Although they didn’t enter parliament until 2010, by 2022, the year of Sweden’s most recent election, they had twenty per cent of the vote. Sweden’s coalition of center-right parties had long refused to collaborate with the nativist upstarts, but this time they changed their tune. They accepted the Sweden Democrats’ support to form a government, and when the new coalition released its official platform, it included a mandate to create a canon. A five-person committee, led by the historian Lars Trägårdh, was appointed, and the committee then selected two groups of six experts: one for art, another for society. The average age of the experts was sixty-seven, and two-thirds of them were men. Swedes were invited to propose items through a web page, but the experts made the final decisions.

When the list was released in the fall, the selections seemed to confirm detractors’ fears. This vision of Sweden was antiquated, out-of-touch, and white. One feature came in for particular scorn: a requirement that all hundred works predate 1975. (Otherwise, the committee argued, they could not be said to have stood the test of time.) ABBA was thus excluded, causing many a dancing queen to clutch her boa. For the social anthropologist Marlen Eskander, the cutoff silently excised immigrant experiences and second-wave feminism from Swedish culture. Eskander had been part of the original canon committee, but quit a year into the work. “The entire project is characterized by distinct national Romantic overtones and excludes a third of the contemporary Swedish population,” she wrote.

These are, in some ways, old debates, but Sweden has revived them in a new moment and with a new frame. Long the purview of classrooms and anthologies, the canon is now of interest to the state itself. For the Sweden Democrats and their coalition, culture, like borders, merits strategic defense. This is not nineteenth-century nation-building, but twenty-first-century national crisis management.

Canons are by definition exclusionary. The word derives from the Greek kanon, for “rule,” or standard of excellence. It arrived in Old English through Latin and French, by which time its meaning had become ecclesiastical, referring to the set of Church laws judged to be authoritative. Its first secular use, as a term for major literary texts, dates to the eighteenth century, and that sense became gradually more pervasive as authority was divorced from scripture. Today, “canon” is also used in fantasy communities to denote those texts which properly belong to an imagined world. The seven Harry Potter books are canon; fan fiction that couples Hermione and Malfoy is not.

Like their Christian cousins, literary canons derive authority from institutions. In the first decades of the twentieth century, American colleges began to implement Great Books courses: surveys designed to introduce students to the touchstones of Western thought. Some of these programs, including Columbia’s famous “core curriculum,” had a surprising origin in the First World War. As part of the war effort, the government installed conscript units on campuses and required that the soldiers receive an alternative curriculum, including a class on “war issues.” This was not a crash course on military strategy but an introduction to literary and philosophical classics such as Plato’s Republic. The goal was to link American culture with its European antecedents—a heady way to justify shedding blood for another continent’s conflict. “This is a war of ideas,” one government report asserted, and conscripts needed “some understanding of the view of life and of society which they are called upon to defend.”

After the war, these programs were largely disbanded. But the Columbia faculty campaigned for their course’s preservation, and in 1919 the name changed to Western Civilization. In the thirties, other institutions, such as the University of Chicago and St. Johns College, developed similar curricula, and by mid-century “Western Civ” was a standard fixture of higher education. The Great War paved the way for Great Books.

But which books were great? In the seventies and eighties, core curricula were attacked for their Eurocentrism and exclusion of minority voices. Known today as the “canon wars,” these skirmishes were a prelude to the debates over diversity, equity, and inclusion that dominate higher education today. And, just like today, they triggered a backlash. In “The Closing of the American Mind,” from 1987, Allan Bloom synthesized the counter-argument, declaring the “Great Books approach” to be the “only serious solution” to the nihilism and relativism plaguing American society.

As Sweden’s canon debate attests, such rhetoric remains part of the global right-wing playbook. But Bloom’s legacy has had the unfortunate effect of making even more reasonable canon defenses look reactionary. Consider a modest point. The Great Books provide common objects—besides the state of dining-hall food—for all undergraduates to discuss. This may not solve teen-age nihilism, but it offers the chance to gain new perspective on that angst. Plus, there’s a social and federating function at play. As a colleague who attended the University of Chicago put it, “You could go to a frat party, and even there everyone would have something to say about Aristotle.” These works needed some minimum level of aesthetic value, he thought, but the most important thing was that they were shared.

The critic John Guillory made a version of this point in his book “Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation,” from 1993. Guillory believed that participants in the canon wars were asking the wrong questions. For him, debates about what should be on a syllabus reflected an anxiety that both literature and those who taught it were losing their relevance. “It is much easier to make the canon representative than the university,” he wrote, suggesting that progressives were fixated on a facile form of representation. Did it matter how much working-class poetry was taught, if the pupils were all élites? Cultural capital was changing currencies, but it remained vested with the same people. Professors had scaled up the political stakes of homework to the detriment of real social reform.

Because the Swedish canon is a state-funded initiative, capital is literal as well as cultural. The actual issue, some have argued, is not what the list includes but the Ministry of Culture’s decision to invest precious resources in the project. Why make a list, when the state could be supporting artists and organizations? (The initiative is estimated to have cost around eight hundred thousand dollars, with more than a million more allocated to disseminate the results.) It didn’t help that the Minister for Culture, Parisa Liljestrand, became a punch line just before the canon’s release. In August, she posted a video recommending that Swedes support their local bookstore. The sentiment was fine, but the delivery was absurd. “Books are such an incredibly important part of literature,” Liljestrand began, leading many to wonder what else she imagined was part of literature.

One of the main justifications for the kulturkanon was pedagogical—the idea that it would eventually structure curricula in Swedish schools. Across the Atlantic, it already has. I’ve been taking Swedish classes for a couple of years, and in September, on the first day of the semester, my instructor led a discussion of the canon. We consulted some news articles, looked up a few words, then began to debate.

My classmates weren’t big fans. Many American students have internalized the idea that such lists are constructed and ideological—not simply because the selections tend to be white and male, but because claims of aesthetic value tell you more about the people making the judgments than about the objects themselves. We were intrigued that the kulturkanon included works from the Sámi—an Indigenous people who live in northern Scandinavia, and whose long history of persecution has parallels with that of Native Americans. But we also sensed lip service. This was just the sort of thing that clever reactionaries do: make space for one minority to better silence others.

For homework, we each put together a short presentation on one canon entry. Choices ranged from the Falun copper mine, which once furnished half of Europe’s copper, to the poet Edith Södergran, one of the first women to publish a modernist art manifesto. We learned so much that we decided to repeat the exercise. This time, I read that work we’d suspected of being tokenized, Johan Turi’s “An Account of the Sámi,” from 1910, and was astounded. Turi’s is the first secular book by a Sámi in a Sámi language, and he writes with ethnographic precision about reindeer herding and marriage rituals. But I was most drawn to his trenchant critique of how Swedes and Norwegians had introduced alcohol—and alcoholism—into Sámi society as a way to exert economic control. Turi explains how these “settlers” would trade their distilled liquor for reindeer, then turn around and pay the Sámi to tend the animals they had once owned. “And some Sámi have grown so drunk that they have gone through all their reindeer in this way,” Turi laments, “and they have been left with no herd of their own.”

I began to wonder whether we had been too critical of the kulturkanon. A list that looked restrictive to Swedes was incredibly useful for someone trying to learn the language and culture. The leftist Swedish journalist Maciej Zaremba made a similar point, accusing his fellow-progressives of an ironically provincial mind-set. Zaremba, who immigrated to Sweden from Poland as a teen-ager, in 1969, noted that those who had grown up in Sweden couldn’t see the value of such a project to foreigners. “I would have been grateful if in 1969 someone had laid this canon on my lap,” he wrote. What he wanted was not recognition but exposure to something new: “I already have a grasp of my own experiences. It is Sweden’s that I want.”

After two rounds of presentations, a classmate suggested a new direction: we would each discuss something that should have been chosen for the canon. The next week, pop music finally received its due. One student pointed out that ABBA’s “Waterloo” won Eurovision in 1974, and thus met the fifty-year requirement. Another insisted that, though the d.j. Avicii would need to wait a few more decades to qualify, his beats surely merited a place. A third swerved into politics, arguing that the Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander, whose record-holding tenure spanned from 1946 to 1969, deserved a spot for leading the country’s enormous welfare expansion. Even our teacher joined in, making a case for sill (herring), most famous in its inlagd (pickled) form. She noted that the canon didn’t include any of Sweden’s memorable foods, from meatballs and cinnamon buns to the less internationally renowned banana-curry pizza.

But the more we quibbled, the less we worried about the project itself. “I rather like the canon,” our teacher observed after the presentation on Avicii. “When the list was first released, I was skeptical. But not anymore.” It didn’t seem like a coincidence that this change of heart came while we were arguing against the selections. One of the best things about canons—about any such list—is that they cry out for dissent. They trigger immediate claims of justice and injustice, initiate fevered discussion with our friends and family. Then, as others reveal their divergent opinions, knee-jerk reaction turns to reflection, and we must establish principles to explain our selections. Why, exactly, do you think Avicii’s song “Levels” is the banger of the century? Canons offer occasions to question our own tastes as much as those of the tastemakers.

There’s a difference, however, between a universal canon, like that touted in a Great Books program, and a national one like Sweden’s. The former aspires to global, or at least hemispheric, coverage, while the latter is inevitably a little blinkered. It risks replicating the national bias it’s supposed to represent. The flip side is that it gives you access to material you won’t find in your bookstore or on most college syllabi. Swedish is a “minor” language, and few American colleges offer it. At my institution, it—along with other Scandinavian languages—will be phased out in the next two years. This context is helpful to keep in mind when we reflexively disparage cultural nationalism. Nationalism looks rather different when we see it as a rare bulwark against the dominance of English, as a source of linguistic diversity. One of the joys of learning a minor language is falling in love with the periphery.

In the 1869 work “Culture and Anarchy,” the critic Matthew Arnold famously defined culture as “the best that has been thought and said.” He would have found the phrase “culture canon” redundant. Arnold’s exclusion of what we now call “low culture” has made him a latter-day punching bag, an easy mascot for academic élitism. But his detractors don’t always give him enough credit. He was far from parochial, arguing that “every critic should try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the better.” Indeed, he urged readers to fight against their bias by giving “particular heed” to any work that “while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him.” Arnold’s own criticism often focussed on expanding horizons and recovering unknown authors, from the moralist Joseph Joubert to the diarist Eugénie de Guérin. “Though it is by no means true that from what is new to us there is most to be learnt, it is yet indisputably true that from what is new to us we in general learn most,” he wrote in an essay on Joubert. In highlighting the lost and the marginal, Arnold anticipated the canon wars.

When it came time for my class presentation on what should have been in the canon, I opted for a novel, or rather a novel sequence: the “Stockholm Series” by Per Anders Fogelström, written in the nineteen-sixties. Comprising five books, the series takes place from 1860 to 1968 in Stockholm, and recounts the city’s transformation from poor and barely industrialized to a shining capital of the modern welfare state. Much of the action takes place on Stockholm’s southern island, Södermalm, which was once a working-class area but is now—in the pattern of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Berlin’s Kreuzberg—home to a high concentration of natural-wine bars. Fogelström’s novels provide a pre-history of that gentrification, as told through the perspectives of a few dozen Stockholmers who see their personal fortunes rise with those of the city.

The natural label for the Stockholm series would be “family saga,” but this is not quite right. Families in these books are rarely nuclear, or even biological. Food is so scarce and making rent so difficult that characters are perennially taking in lodgers who share beds and sleep in kitchens. Often these residents become domestic fixtures, companions more important than siblings who live across town. A stream of orphans and adoptions make parentage, too, a matter of circumstance. In one heartbreaking plot, a poor mother gives away her son, August, to the upper-class industrialists who employed her now deceased husband. The sacrifice relieves an economic burden and provides August with an education and, eventually, a small business empire.

If the series has a uniting theme, it is solidarity. Fogelström repeatedly asks what we owe to our families, our fellow-workers, and our nation. One powerful example concerns August’s sister, Emilie, the series’ moral heart and the closest thing it has to a protagonist. A small child in the first volume, Emilie lives until her late eighties, almost to the final pages. At the age of twelve, she begins folding boxes at a cosmetics factory, and after several decades of assiduous, menial work, she becomes a supervisor. Then the infamous General Strike of 1909 arrives, and more than three hundred thousand workers walk off the job. Should Emilie join? She still perceives herself as lower-class, and so does the reader, given the many family members her income must stretch to support. Yet she is technically in a management role. When she asks for advice, her brother-in-law responds, “It really depends on who you want to stand in solidarity with, with what you feel yourself to be.” In the end, she joins the strike and, upon returning to work, is demoted. Her identification remains with the class she came from, not the one she is moving toward.

In the final volume of the series, “City in the World,” Fogelström asks whether solidarity is possible not only with one’s own class or nation but with other nations as well. After a century of heavy emigration—mostly to America—postwar Sweden began to change from a port of departure to one of call. Both travel and settlement skyrocketed, bringing a wave of new residents to a long-homogenous Stockholm. Should the welfare state extend its embrace? Should Swedes? There are no easy answers to these questions, but Fogelström posed them in an early and perceptive fashion. The novels have sold millions of copies; reading the books in Stockholm last summer, I felt like every Swede I spoke to had also read them, or at least seen a film adaptation.

The Stockholm Series reminded me that one function of canons is to create solidarity. They claim that a culture, a nation, or a world has shared treasures, works that are worth remembering and protecting. Canon critique boils down to the claim that because those treasures have been ill-defined, the cohesion they generate will be, too. But what if we thought of these lists as invitations rather than threats—not as the hundred things you must know to be Swedish, but as a hundred new ways to see the country? What if we came to these lists looking not for ourselves but for precisely what we don’t already know? It’s not easy to have solidarity with the world. But learning other canons isn’t a bad way to start. ♦

In October, a few days before Halloween, Tucker Carlson invited Nick Fuentes to his home in rural Maine. For months, the two right-wing media stars had been savaging each other on their respective platforms. On “The Tucker Carlson Show,” one of the top-ranked conservative political podcasts in the country, Carlson had called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid in his basement” and suggested that he was being used as a pawn by sinister, possibly government-controlled forces. “I have noticed that his targets are all people who are sincere, non-crazy, non-hateful opponents of neocon politics,” Carlson said. “He is clearly part of a campaign to discredit non-crazy right voices.”

Fuentes, on his late-night streaming show, “America First,” which averages about five hundred thousand viewers on Rumble, had alleged that it was Carlson, in fact, who was the deep-state agent, unspooling a baroque conspiracy theory in which Carlson has worked as a C.I.A. asset since college. “Everybody’s calling everybody else a Fed, but I think this one’s pretty cut-and-dry,” Fuentes said. “Who’s the C.I.A. cutout? Who’s the poseur? Who is America? I am America!” Addressing Carlson, he added, “You disgust me. But, seriously, you are filth.”

The reasons for the mutual animus weren’t entirely clear. At twenty-seven, Fuentes was arguably America’s most prominent white nationalist—someone who was forthright about, and seemingly proud of, his bigotry. Summing up his core political beliefs last year, he said, “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the fuck up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part. And we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.” On another occasion, he said, “We have to go a little bit further than to say something’s up with the Zionists or Israel. It’s not Israel. It is the Jews.” These and other similarly odious utterances—questioning the Holocaust, celebrating Hitler, frequently using the N-word—meant that Fuentes was no stranger to criticism from fellow right-wingers. During the 2024 election, the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, was asked about Fuentes, who had recently attacked Vance for having an Indian American wife and therefore being an insufficient “defender of white identity.” “Look, I think the guy’s a total loser,” Vance said. “Certainly, I disavow him.”

But Carlson was a conservative who didn’t feel the need to put much distance between himself and Fuentes. In 2019, when Carlson still had a prime-time show on Fox News, he interviewed an extreme anti-immigration North Carolina congressional candidate named Pete D’Abrosca. After the show, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, who disagreed with Carlson’s anti-immigration stance but still considered him a friend, sent Carlson a text message alerting him to the fact that D’Abrosca was being strongly supported by Fuentes. In response, Carlson sent Goldberg a series of hostile texts professing ignorance and warning Goldberg not to make his criticism public.

After Carlson was fired from Fox News, in 2023, he often gave voice to incendiary views that were not substantively different from Fuentes’s own—especially as they pertained to Israel and certain prominent Jewish figures. Carlson employed classic antisemitic tropes in attacking Ukraine’s Jewish President, Volodymyr Zelensky, describing him as “ratlike” and a “persecutor of Christians.” In the middle of the war in Gaza, Carlson accused Israel of “blowing up churches and killing Christians” and criticized the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, and other pro-Israel Americans for being “focussed on a conflict in a foreign country as their own country becomes dangerously unstable.” “I’m from here,” Carlson said. “My family’s been here hundreds of years. I plan to stay here. I’m shocked by how little they care about the country.”

On his podcast, Carlson has twice interviewed Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist who has argued that concentration camps were a “humane” solution to widespread hunger during the Second World War—and whom Carlson introduced to his audience as “the best, most important popular historian working in the United States today.” After Charlie Kirk’s death, in September, far-right influencers promoted a conspiracy theory that, because Kirk’s long-standing support for Israel was waning, the country had orchestrated Kirk’s assassination. Carlson gave a eulogy at Kirk’s memorial service in which he likened Kirk to Jesus and then implied that Jews had killed Jesus. “I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamplit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus thinking about, What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us?” Carlson said. “We must make him stop talking!”

Perhaps the feud between Carlson and Fuentes could be attributed to the narcissism of small differences. In any case, Carlson was losing. On social media, he was getting pilloried by Fuentes’s legions of fans, many of them alienated young conservatives who call themselves Groypers, in honor of an obese version of the Pepe the Frog meme. “Tucker’s mask slipped,” Fuentes gloated on his show, “and he forgot for a minute that for eight years he’s been pretending to care about the plight of weird kids in their parents’ basement who are broke.”

Carlson has long possessed a finely tuned professional and political radar. In the early two-thousands, when he was a gifted young magazine writer, frequently contributing stories to publications like New York and Esquire, he realized that print journalism would no longer offer the same fame and power that it had once afforded his literary heroes, such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. He abandoned print to work as a pundit on CNN. During the 2016 campaign, he revived his flagging cable-news career by being an early defender of Donald Trump’s Presidential bid, recognizing that a populist candidate who campaigned on nativism, white grievance, and sexism might have a lane in the Republican primary; he was ultimately rewarded with his own prime-time show on Fox News. And in the two and a half years since he’d been fired from Fox he’d masterfully navigated the attention economy, starting his own media company and routinely drawing enough outrage (and eyeballs) that he reëstablished himself as the most significant media figure on the American right. Now he had concluded that if he wanted to maintain that perch he could not afford to alienate the Groypers—and so he extended an olive branch to Fuentes, in the form of a podcast-interview request.

Fuentes was wary. Carlson can be a tough interviewer. In June, he hosted Senator Ted Cruz on his podcast and ridiculed him for not knowing the population of Iran, despite favoring regime change in that country, and for not being able to provide a specific citation for a Bible verse that Cruz invoked to justify his support of Israel. Fuentes feared a similar ambush. But the night before their interview, during dinner at Carlson’s house in Maine, Carlson went over the topics that he wanted to discuss with Fuentes. The next day, their two-hour-plus conversation could not have been chummier. The pair revelled in their mutual contempt for Cruz, Shapiro, and the Fox News host Mark Levin; celebrated their shared identity as “American nationalists”; and commiserated about being deemed racist and antisemitic. Carlson apologized to Fuentes for calling him gay, and they both acknowledged that neither of them was a Fed. Their biggest point of disagreement was whether all Jews were to blame for the U.S.’s misguided support for Israel, as Fuentes believed, or just some of them, as Carlson maintained. “It’s not cucking to say that you’re not talking about all Jews when you oppose a foreign-policy position,” Carlson said, noting that many “self-described Christians” have been “seized by this brain virus” of Zionism. Eventually, they appeared to reach a sort of consensus that “organized Jewry,” as Fuentes called it, was the problem.

Carlson’s sit-down with Fuentes fractured the conservative movement. In the days and weeks after the interview aired, prominent Republican politicians and conservative commentators lined up to denounce Carlson for giving Fuentes a platform. Shapiro called it an “act of moral imbecility.” Cruz, in a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, said, “If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.” When Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation—which had advertised on Carlson’s podcast—released a video message attacking Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and “the globalist class,” Heritage staffers rose up in protest; five board members resigned. (Carlson, who did not participate in the reporting for this piece, said in an interview with Megyn Kelly that his critics can “buzz off.”)

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Carlson was not the first prominent conservative to have a close encounter with Fuentes. In 2022, two Republican House members, Paul Gosar, of Arizona, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, delivered speeches at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference, in Florida. More significantly, that same year, Trump dined with Fuentes after Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, brought him as his guest to Mar-a-Lago. At the time, the outcry came mostly from liberals. Perhaps the conservatives who stayed silent when Trump met with Fuentes but lambasted Carlson for doing the same were simply picking an easier, more convenient target for their virtue signalling. But it’s also possible that the people who were more alarmed by Carlson’s dalliance with Fuentes concluded that Carlson was a bigger threat to the conservative movement than even Trump himself.

Carlson’s evolution from cable-news journeyman to conservative-movement leader began in the winter of 2009, when he received an unexpected phone call from the head of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Carlson, who had recently been fired from his job as a prime-time anchor on MSNBC, would later confess that, at the time, he was at a professional and personal nadir. Four years earlier, when he was hired at MSNBC, he had moved his wife and their four kids from Washington, D.C., to the ritzy town of Madison, New Jersey, where he paid $3.3 million for a nine-thousand-square-foot mansion and drove a Hummer. So, when MSNBC canned him, he didn’t just lose his job; he lost his life style and his identity. “I looked around and I was, like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m living this totally unsustainable life, and I’m not making any money,’ ” Carlson later recalled. “It was a pretty low-grade disaster. I didn’t lose a limb in war or get paralyzed in a car accident. But for me, who’d grown up in a pretty privileged world, it was distressing and a shock.”

Carlson sold the New Jersey mansion and returned with his family to Washington. Pulling into his driveway at night, he thought that he saw his neighbors averting their gaze. He couldn’t shake the feeling, he said, that “everybody hated me.” But the reality was actually worse: people didn’t hate Carlson; they didn’t think about him at all.

Ailes had never much cared for Carlson’s preppy, fraternity-rush-chair shtick. His taste in cable-news hosts (male ones, that is) ran toward confrontational populists like Bill O’Reilly, who was then Fox’s biggest star. Ailes also wasn’t one to forget a slight. “I don’t ignore anything,” he once said. “Somebody gets in my face, I get in their face.” He no doubt remembered all the nasty things that Carlson had said over the years, when he worked at CNN and MSNBC, about Fox (“a mean, sick group of people”), O’Reilly (“a humorless phony”), and Ailes himself (“sucking up to power”). According to an account of the phone call with Ailes, which Carlson later related to his former college roommate Neil Patel, Ailes began their conversation with a gratuitous insult. “You’re a loser, and you screwed up your whole life,” he said. It seemed as if Ailes just wanted to get in Carlson’s face. But then, before Carlson could hang up, Ailes got to the point. “The only thing you have going for you is that I like hiring talented people who have screwed things up,” he told Carlson, “because once I do you’re going to work your ass off for me.”

Ailes especially relished hiring broadcasters who had flamed out at other networks. (O’Reilly, who’d anchored the syndicated tabloid show “Inside Edition,” had left television entirely and was studying for a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard when Ailes brought him to Fox.) “I look for people who haven’t reached their potential,” he said. “I think I’m pretty good at developing talent.” By resurrecting careers, Ailes was able to prove his own genius—that the audience he convened was so large and so loyal that Fox was capable of making almost anyone a star. “I could have put a dead raccoon on the air this year and got a better rating than last year,” he once boasted.

Ailes grew up in the blue-collar town of Warren, Ohio, where his father worked in a Packard Electric factory. Memories from his youth of seeing “college boys give my dad orders in the shop in an inappropriate manner,” he later said, were seared into his brain. No matter how much wealth and power Ailes accrued, he never lost the sense that he was an outsider in New York’s media élite. “They think I’m this rube from Ohio,” he complained of his peers in the city’s executive class. “They all look down their noses at me.” Counterintuitively, hiring Carlson—the son of a former U.S. Ambassador, whose stepmother was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune—presented an opportunity to exact some revenge. “Roger liked the idea of Tucker coming to him on his hands and knees,” one former Fox executive said. “Roger took no small amount of pleasure in being able to tell Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, ‘You’re a loser.’ ”

Ailes offered Carlson a contributor contract at Fox. It was the same type of deal that Carlson had received from CNN a decade earlier, when he was still a magazine writer and was just breaking into the cable-news business—five figures a year to appear on the network’s various programs when they needed to fill airtime with a talking head. It was quite a comedown, in both compensation and prestige, from having his own prime-time show. But, for Carlson, it was a lifeline. He was grateful for the money, even if it was a pittance compared with the salary that he’d earned as an anchor. And he was glad to still have a place, even a tenuous one, in television. “I’m doing whatever they want me to do,” he told the Times when his Fox deal was announced.

Carlson knew that he was low in the pecking order at Fox. Still, he had ambitions. His biggest was to become a regular on the so-called All-Star Panel on “Special Report,” Fox’s 6 P.M. political-news show, which was broadcast out of the network’s Washington studio and was considered Fox’s most highbrow, cerebral program. But Ailes had other plans. “Roger loved kicking Tucker down the stairs and beating him up,” the former Fox executive said. That meant not just denying Carlson the opportunities he craved but saddling him with obligations he hoped to avoid—like co-anchoring the weekend version of “Fox & Friends,” which was less political and even more aggressively stupid than its weekday counterpart. “Roger’s idea was to throw Tucker onto the worst thing: the weekend morning show,” the former Fox executive said. “It’s early. He has to go to New York. He has to drive go-karts. It was inconvenient and humiliating.”

Outwardly, Carlson appeared to embrace the assignment, eventually becoming a full-time weekend anchor. He not only careened around the set in a go-kart; he participated in cooking segments with guests like Billy Ray Cyrus, played the cowbell with the seventies rock band Blue Öyster Cult, competed against (and lost to) his female co-anchor in a Spartan Race, and subjected himself to a dunk tank. Just as Ailes had predicted, he worked his ass off—and he did it with a smile. “He never acted too good for it,” the former Fox executive said. “A lesser person would have said, ‘I had two prime-time shows!’ ”

And yet, although Carlson might not have said it, he certainly thought it. He struggled with the “Fox & Friends” predawn call time, at one point dozing off while on air, and he hated being away from his family and his social circle in D.C. He tended to spend his weekends in New York alone, hunkered down in his hotel room tying flies and then walking a dozen blocks to Central Park to fish in one of its ponds.

One afternoon, while fly casting in Central Park, Carlson noticed a man with a video camera standing in some nearby bushes. Seeming to assume that he was a paparazzo or a liberal stalker, Carlson confronted him. “Are you videotaping me?” he demanded. The man confessed that he was—because he’d never seen anyone fishing in Central Park before. He explained that he recorded things that he found “interesting and unique about the city of New York” and then uploaded them to his YouTube channel.

As the man peppered Carlson with questions—“Where did you grow up?” “Do you live in New York now?”—it became clear that he wasn’t a paparazzo or a stalker. Indeed, the man had no idea who Carlson was. Charmed, Carlson proceeded to rhapsodize about fly-fishing.

They continued to talk, and the man told Carlson about his other pastime—pranking journalists. Now Carlson no longer seemed so happy about his anonymity.

“What’s your favorite cable channel?” he asked.

CNN, the man told him.

“Do you watch Fox?” Carlson pressed, perhaps hoping to kindle a spark of recognition.

“I watch Fox,” the man replied. But no, still not so much as a glimmer. Even to a self-professed cable-news junkie, Carlson was now just some random weirdo fishing in Central Park.

For most of his time at Fox News, Carlson was far removed from the decisions that were made—and the dramas that played out—on the second floor of the news channel’s Manhattan headquarters, where Ailes and his top lieutenants had their offices. On his trips to New York, he’d sometimes stop by to schmooze with Fox executives and remind them of his existence. “He seemed a little lost,” someone who encountered Carlson on one such visit remembered. And he was always seeking opportunities to demonstrate that he was aligned with the network’s biggest and most important projects. As Carlson half jokingly told a shock-jock radio host about Rupert Murdoch, “I’m a hundred per cent his bitch. Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.” But these displays of loyalty didn’t seem to boost his standing inside the organization. Relegated to the frivolous afterthought of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Carlson was on the outside looking in.

Until, that is, Trump’s first Presidential campaign. Carlson was by no means a fan of Trump’s. In 1999, when Carlson was still a magazine writer, he branded Trump “the single most repulsive person on the planet.” A few years later, after Carlson had become a cable-news host, he made a throwaway joke about Trump’s hair on CNN—and Trump responded with a short voice mail. “It’s true you have better hair than I do,” he said in the message. “But I get more pussy than you do.” Carlson thought that the episode was funny; it maybe even made him like Trump a little bit. It didn’t, however, make Carlson think that Trump was suited to be President.

But by 2016 Carlson’s thinking had begun to evolve. Part of the change was a result of his usual contrarianism. “On my street in Northwest Washington, D.C., there’s never been anyone as unpopular as Trump,” he wrote in Politico during the campaign. “Idi Amin would get a warmer reception in our dog park.” Carlson believed it was his long-established role in the city’s political and media ecosystem to defy that consensus. But there was a deeper, more substantive reason for the shift in his attitude. Six years earlier, Carlson and Patel, who’d served as a chief policy adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney, had launched the Daily Caller, a news website that they vowed would be the conservative answer to the Huffington Post; instead, in pursuit of clicks, the site found itself competing with Breitbart News to produce increasingly inflammatory takes on immigration, race, and gender. Carlson had immersed himself in the site’s web-traffic metrics, which served as an early-warning system of where the conservative base was headed.

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This insight made Carlson unusual at Fox. In 2014, Ivanka Trump had arranged a lunch with her father and Murdoch, according to the journalist Joshua Green’s book “Devil’s Bargain.” “My father has something big to tell you,” she announced at the lunch. “What’s that?” Murdoch asked. “He’s going to run for president,” she replied. Murdoch did not even bother to look up from his soup. “He’s not running for president,” he said. Murdoch and Trump had been friendly for decades, and they travelled in some of the same New York social circles, but Murdoch did not take Trump seriously—not as a person, not as a businessman, and certainly not as a Presidential candidate.

Neither did the pundits at Murdoch’s cable-news channel. “Even among conservatives at Fox, there was the view that Trump’s an idiot, he’s not a serious person, that there wasn’t a chance of him winning,” Ken LaCorte, a former Fox News executive, recalled. This posed a problem for Fox, especially since Ailes knew that covering Trump was good for ratings; to make for compelling television, the channel needed to put people on air who wouldn’t simply dismiss Trump out of hand. “The project at Fox of trying to find normal-seeming, television-camera-ready human beings who would make a sensible case for Donald Trump was no small lift,” a former Fox producer said.

Enter Carlson. Fox producers had taken notice of the heterodox views about Trump that he was offering on “Fox & Friends Weekend.” Soon, he was appearing with increasing regularity on “Special Report,” whose All-Star Panel had become something of a Never Trump redoubt. A few days after Trump officially announced his candidacy, Charles Krauthammer, the panel’s most esteemed member, hailed Jeb Bush’s official campaign announcement as “the biggest news” of the race. Carlson countered that Trump’s entry would significantly complicate Bush’s bid for the Republican nomination. Trump was “filling the role” of the candidate who “has his opinions,” Carlson said. “Some of them are kind of interesting. Some of them are right, by the way. He can say exactly what he wants. I think it could potentially be a problem.”

Going into 2016, Murdoch and Ailes believed that Fox had the power to pick the G.O.P.’s nominee. But as the campaign went on and Trump’s hold on the Republican primary electorate became clear, Murdoch and Ailes recognized that Trump had the power to topple Fox. Before long, O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and even Megyn Kelly—who had famously clashed with Trump during the first G.O.P. debate—were boosting him on their shows. In September, two months before the general election, Hannity filmed a testimonial for Trump that was featured in a campaign video. Carlson never went that far, but Murdoch didn’t forget his prescience. In the summer of 2016, after more than twenty women at Fox News alleged that Ailes had sexually harassed them, Murdoch forced Ailes to resign and took control of the news channel, appointing himself as its interim C.E.O. Murdoch sought to stabilize Fox but also to plot a course for its future—a future that, no matter what happened on Election Day, would have to take into account a viewing audience that had been deeply affected by, and was now extremely loyal to, Donald Trump. In November, five days before the election, Murdoch made his first big move: Fox News announced that its new 7 P.M. show was “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, a small group of conservative intellectuals tried to reconcile their ideological movement with the man who now, improbably, sat atop it. They identified themselves as “national conservatives,” or NatCons. At think tanks like the Claremont Institute and in journals and on websites such as American Greatness and The Federalist, the NatCons tacked hard to the right on culture-war issues, denouncing critical race theory and drag-queen story hours while voicing a set of economic concerns more typically associated with the left, supporting child subsidies and industrial policy.

Depending on your point of view, NatCons were either attempting to add intellectual heft to Trumpism or trying to reverse engineer an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s lizard-brain populism. Either way, it was a difficult, frequently humiliating task. Trump proved to be a vexing ideological lodestar—aggressively anti-intellectual in his attitudes and consistently inconsistent in his views. Which is where Carlson came in. Each night on Fox, he articulated a populist-nationalist ideology that was far more coherent than anything being offered by Trump himself.

Carlson’s world view, which was eventually described in much of the press as Trumpism without Trump, mixed anti-immigrant and oftentimes outright racist tropes with a clinical dissection of consumer capitalism and its deleterious effects on American families, the working class, and civic society in general. It was a highbrow version of white grievance which painted the country as imperilled by a callous ruling élite and the violent migrant hordes infiltrating its borders. Carlson, with his staple rep ties and Rolex, assumed the role of class traitor. The entire package was irresistible to NatCons, who began to view him, as much as Trump, as their standard-bearer.

Carlson’s show specialized in finding relatively unknown liberals for him to slap down; it also excelled at taking stories, arguments, and conspiracy theories from the far-right corners of the internet and putting them in prime time. On one episode, Carlson would run a segment about Romanian immigrants (he referred to them less kindly) who had settled in a Pennsylvania town and who “defecate in public, chop the heads off chickens, leave trash everywhere, and more.” On another night, he’d complain in his monologue that America’s leaders insist that “we’ve got a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor . . . even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided.” Just days after a racist white gunman killed twenty-three people in an attack on Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in Texas, Carlson insisted that “white supremacy” was “actually not a real problem in America” and that it was, in fact, “a hoax.” In the summer of 2018, Carlson devoted multiple segments to South African land-reform policy, falsely claiming that the country’s Black-led government was seizing the farms of white South Africans because, according to him, “they are the wrong skin color.” He went on, “That is literally the definition of racism. Racism is what our élites say they dislike most.” (Seven years later, the plight of white South Africans became the core of the second Trump Administration’s refugee-resettlement policy.)

In 2019, Carlson devoted an eleven-minute monologue to the woes of Sidney, Nebraska, which had once thrived as the headquarters of the sporting-goods chain Cabela’s. After Cabela’s merged with Bass Pro Shops, the headquarters was closed, costing a town of six thousand people more than two thousand jobs. The merger, Carlson explained, was done at the behest of a hedge fund run by the billionaire Republican megadonor and Jewish philanthropist Paul Singer, which had taken an ownership stake in Cabela’s and netted nearly ninety million dollars after the merger drove up the retailer’s short-term share prices. This sort of “vulture capitalism,” Carlson told his viewers, “bears no resemblance whatsoever to the capitalism we were promised in school. It creates nothing. It destroys entire cities. It couldn’t be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United States? The short answer: because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our political process.”

Mike Enoch, a prominent white supremacist, shouted out Carlson’s remarks about Singer on his podcast, “The Daily Shoah,” noting that Carlson had begun the segment by describing how the notoriously antisemitic Henry Ford once raised the wages of his workers. “If you didn’t catch the German-shepherd whistles where he praised Henry Ford and then went into a diatribe of a Jewish financier,” Enoch said approvingly, “I don’t know what universe you’re existing in.”

Blake Neff, the head writer at “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was responsible for many of the words that came out of Carlson’s mouth. As he once boasted to Dartmouth’s alumni magazine, “Anything he’s reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me.” The anti-immigrant and racist sentiments that dominated the show came naturally to Neff. At the same time that Neff was writing for Carlson—first as a reporter at the Daily Caller and then as a staffer on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”—he was also writing posts on a racist and sexist message board called AutoAdmit. Posting under the username CharlesXII, the eighteenth-century Swedish warrior king who later became an icon for Swedish neo-Nazis, Neff joked about “foodie faggots” and proposed an “Urban business idea: He Didn’t Do Muffin!,” which would sell “Sandra Bland’s Sugar-free Shortbreads!”—a reference to the twenty-eight-year-old Black woman who, in 2015, was taken into custody by a Texas state trooper after a traffic stop and was later found dead in her jail cell, becoming an early symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Neff agreed with other AutoAdmit commenters who argued that Michael Brown deserved to be killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, complaining that “the violent criminals are even MORE heroic to Black people.” He claimed that the four liberal congresswomen known as the Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—want to “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES.” In another post, Neff warned that “once Democrats have the majorities to go full F**K WHITEY, things are going to get really wacky really quickly” and lamented that “there’s a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin.”

In July, 2020, after a CNN reporter discovered Neff’s AutoAdmit posts, Neff resigned from Fox News. (Years later, Neff, who went on to work as a producer on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, would maintain that he was “the least racist person on AutoAdmit,” noting that, unlike many of the site’s users, “I never posted the N-word.”) Carlson, for his part, said that he was unaware of the posts. “We don’t endorse those words,” he said. “They have no connection to this show.” But Neff’s AutoAdmit habit was not a secret to some people he worked with. At the Daily Caller, Neff bragged about his posts to at least one colleague. “He was really proud of his AutoAdmit persona,” a former Caller staffer remembered. And Neff’s connection to Carlson was not a secret on AutoAdmit, either. In 2017, when Scott Greer, who had been a colleague of Carlson’s and Neff’s at the Daily Caller, appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to promote his book “No Campus for White Men,” Neff dropped a favorite AutoAdmit catchphrase—“the sweet treats of scholarship”—into Carlson’s script introducing Greer. Neff’s fellow AutoAdmit members didn’t miss the Easter egg. “We maed [sic] it,” one wrote.

An analysis of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer found that, between November, 2016, and November, 2018, Carlson was mentioned in two hundred and sixty-five of its articles, most of them featuring clips of his show, with titles like “Tucker FILLS Liberal Kike with LEAD for Demanding Gun Control” and “Tucker Carlson FORCES Fat Beaner Whore to CHOKE to DEATH on GREASY TACOS.” (Hannity, by comparison, was the subject of twenty-seven Daily Stormer articles during that period; Laura Ingraham, another of the network’s prime-time hosts, was the subject of four.) As one blog post on the site celebrated, “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Other than the language used, he is covering all our talking points.”

On a Monday morning in April, 2023, Carlson was at his winter home in Florida, having just sent his producers the first draft of his monologue for that evening’s show—a lengthy attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom Carlson liked to refer to as Sandy Cortez, invoking her high-school nickname—when he got a call from Fox News’ chief executive, Suzanne Scott. “We’re taking you off the air,” Scott told him. He was being fired. Scott offered him the opportunity to include his own statement in a press release that Fox would send out in fifteen minutes announcing his departure, a face-saving gesture that would make it seem like the decision was a mutual parting of ways. Carlson refused. If Fox was firing him, he wanted the world to know. When the phone call was over, he sent an e-mail to his staff—known inside Fox as the Tuckertroop—telling them the news.

In the days after Carlson’s firing, there was much speculation, both inside and outside of Fox, about the reasons behind it. Six days earlier, the network had settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, which alleged that Fox News hosts, including Carlson, had knowingly aired false accusations that the company’s voting machines were used to change vote totals in the 2020 Presidential election. Some thought that Carlson’s dismissal had to do with offensive comments that were revealed during discovery, including a text message in which Carlson reportedly called Irena Briganti, the head of Fox News’ media-relations department, a “cunt.” Others wondered whether it could have been because of another lawsuit, brought by Abby Grossberg, a former head of booking on Carlson’s show, who accused him and the network of creating a hostile work environment. (Fox settled the suit for twelve million dollars.) Still others speculated that it had something to do with a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, a January 6th protester from Arizona who was at the center of a conspiracy theory—amplified by Carlson—that Epps was a government provocateur placed in the crowd to spur an insurrection. In fact, a sympathetic profile of Epps had appeared on “60 Minutes” the night before Carlson’s firing. Perhaps Murdoch, who, at ninety-two, fit squarely in the CBS show’s viewer demographic, had seen it and got spooked. (Epps’s suit was eventually dismissed.)

Among Fox hosts and executives, stories circulated about a recent dinner Carlson had attended at Murdoch’s California vineyard, with Murdoch and his then fiancée, Ann Lesley Smith, during which Smith, who believed that Carlson was “a messenger from God,” treated him as such. A few days later, Murdoch cancelled his engagement to Smith. Now, the theory went, he was cancelling Carlson. For his part, Carlson later claimed that his firing was part of Fox’s settlement with Dominion; as he told his biographer, Chadwick Moore, he believed that Murdoch had refused Dominion’s demand to fork over a billion dollars, and got the plaintiffs to accept seven hundred and eighty-seven million dollars and his scalp instead. None of the explanations were especially satisfying.

In any case, Carlson did not have the luxury of perseverating on what befell him. The 2024 Presidential election was just eighteen months away. Carlson had assumed, with good reason, that “Tucker Carlson Tonight” would be a major player in that race. But now that he’d lost his Fox megaphone he’d have to come up with a new vehicle. Complicating matters, Fox was keeping him under contract through 2024, with the express intent of preventing him from hosting a show on another network. That meant he’d still be making the nearly twenty million dollars a year that Fox owed him, but he wouldn’t be able to take his act to Newsmax or OANN.

Fortunately for Carlson, he had no shortage of other offers that didn’t run afoul of Fox’s noncompete clause. Just hours after his firing, Elon Musk—who, six months earlier, had bought Twitter and was reshaping the social-media platform into a Republican hub, rebranding it as X—called him to talk about a deal. So did Carlson’s friend Omeed Malik, who runs 1789 Capital, a venture-capital firm that invests in conservative companies. “The world is his oyster,” one person who was talking to Carlson as the offers came in said. “Many billionaires and others with deep pockets would be eager to fund a new venture.” Carlson immediately began laying the groundwork for a digital-media company, the Tucker Carlson Network, securing Musk’s help to boost Carlson’s content on X and fifteen million dollars in seed money from Malik’s firm and other investors. He became a frequent visitor to Doha, Dubai, and Riyadh—cities that he once derided as “chintzy” and “prefab”—where he developed relationships with other ultra-wealthy individuals. (Carlson has said that his network has not received any Gulf money.)

Without Fox’s built-in audience—not to mention the guardrails of a publicly traded media company—Carlson’s new show plunged further into the fever swamps. On one episode, he hosted the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who had been successfully sued by the families of Sandy Hook victims for claiming that the shooting was a hoax; Carlson told his viewers that Jones “is not a crazy person.” On another, he interviewed Larry Sinclair, an ex-con who, during the 2008 Presidential campaign, made a long since discredited claim that he had smoked crack and had sex with Barack Obama when Obama was a little-known state senator. For another episode, Carlson travelled to Romania to conduct a friendly two-and-a-half-hour interview with the misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate, who was under house arrest while awaiting trial for allegations of human trafficking and rape. Carlson had argued that Tate’s arrest was “obviously a setup” and the “definition of a human-rights violation” while repeatedly hailing him as a role model for young men. (Prosecutors in Britain eventually charged Tate with human trafficking, rape, and assault. He is also under investigation in the U.S. Tate has denied all wrongdoing.)

“I need a hat that says, ‘I have a legitimate reason for wearing a hat.’ ”

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But Carlson’s continued prominence was largely tied to his proximity to Trump. At Fox, he had been one of the network’s only stars who maintained a personal and professional distance from the President. Although he frequently parroted Trumpian talking points, Carlson tended to praise Trump’s policies rather than the man himself. He didn’t socialize with the President, and he sometimes even let Trump’s phone calls go to voice mail. (“Tucker was the hot girl that didn’t want to fuck him,” one former White House official said.) Toward the end of Trump’s first term, Carlson actually turned against the President. He criticized Trump on air for his handling of COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests; after January 6th, he described Trump in a text message to a Fox colleague as “a demonic force, a destroyer.”

But, after leaving Fox, Carlson could no longer afford to keep Trump at bay. He needed Trump—and, as it turned out, Trump needed him. Their interests were especially aligned in their mutual disdain for Fox News. Trump had not forgiven Murdoch for trying to disappear him after January 6th—“We want to make Trump a non person,” Murdoch wrote to a former Fox executive—and for using his network to try to boost Ron DeSantis’s 2024 Presidential prospects. Trump accused Fox of having gone to the “dark side.” And so when Fox executives began lobbying for Trump to appear at the first G.O.P. Presidential-primary debate, which the network was hosting, in August, 2023—knowing that, without Trump, ratings would suffer—Trump strung them along for months. All the while, he was talking to Carlson about some sort of counterprogramming. Eventually, Carlson and Trump settled on a pretaped interview that was posted on X at the same time that Fox News carried the debate.

Their collaboration continued for the rest of the campaign. Carlson helped persuade Trump to pick Vance as his running mate. At the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, Trump invited Carlson to sit in his private box on the first night and gave him a prime-time speaking slot on its final, most watched night. A week before the election, Carlson spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. And when Carlson launched his own sixteen-city tour, that fall, Trump made an appearance as the evening’s “special guest” in Arizona.

After the 2024 election, Carlson wielded a shocking amount of power in Trump’s Washington. He subscribed to the old Beltway dictum that “personnel is policy.” In multiple postelection visits to Mar-a-Lago, and countless phone calls and texts, he vigorously weighed in on how he believed Trump should fill out his Cabinet and staff, pushing in particular for the appointments of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services and Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National Intelligence. One adviser to the President said, “Trump wanted Tucker’s opinion, and Tucker didn’t ever hesitate to offer it.”

But there have been limits to Carlson’s influence. Last summer, as Trump contemplated assisting Israel in its war against Iran, Carlson pleaded with him to keep the U.S. out of the conflict. An attack on Iran, he predicted in a lengthy post on X, would lead to thousands of American deaths, thirty-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, and the collapse of the U.S. economy; it would also, he said, be a “profound betrayal” of Trump’s supporters, who voted for him in part because they viewed him as “a peace candidate.” In the end, Carlson’s protests were for naught. Trump authorized U.S. air strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, and dismissed Carlson as “kooky.” “I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying,” Trump told reporters at one point. “Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.”

Months later, when Carlson interviewed Fuentes, they both decided not to dwell on Trump’s apostasy—instead choosing to praise him for creating what Fuentes called “this new dialectic” that allowed them and others to see the perfidy of Israel more clearly.

“Trump planted the seed,” Fuentes said.

“And the seed was America First,” Carlson replied. “So, once you accept that, a lot of the way we’re doing things becomes impossible to support or justify.”

“Right, the contradiction becomes apparent,” Fuentes said. “It gets moved to the center, and it becomes unignorable if you’re consistent.”

Trump, for his part, appeared to appreciate their discretion. As Carlson was being denounced by various conservatives for sitting down with Fuentes, the President defended him. “I think he’s good,” Trump said of Carlson while speaking to reporters on Air Force One. “You can’t tell him who to interview. I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes—I don’t know much about him. But if he wants to do it, get the word out, let him. People have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.”

Around the same time, as Trump threatened regime change against Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, Carlson again had critical words for the President’s foreign policy, but his focus was not on the risks of overseas entanglements or concerns about unchecked executive power. Removing Maduro, Carlson theorized, was a means for what he called “globo-homo” forces to reverse Venezuela’s ban on gay marriage, noting that “the U.S.-backed opposition leader”—María Corina Machado—“who would take Maduro’s place if he were taken out, is, of course, pretty eager to get gay marriage in Venezuela.”

But in January, after Trump sent in a team of Special Forces to seize Maduro and bring him to the U.S. to face drug-trafficking and other charges, Carlson offered qualified support for the military action. He hailed the Trump Administration’s decision to turn Venezuela over to Maduro’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez—“not because they love her,” Carlson explained, “but because they’re in favor of stability over chaos.” And he praised Trump for his candor in claiming U.S. control of Venezuela’s oil reserves, saying that “there’s something kind of thrilling about that.” Left unspoken was Carlson’s presumable relief that, even in Maduro’s absence, globo-homo forces do not appear to have established a beachhead in Caracas.

Thirty years ago, as a young magazine reporter, Carlson liked to make sport of Joseph Sobran, the conservative writer who’d been William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s protégé at National Review but, in the early nineteen-nineties, was fired from the magazine for his anti-Israel and antisemitic views. Carlson would joke that he’d run into a rambling, dishevelled Sobran at a suburban Denny’s, where he sat by himself in a booth, holding court before an audience of no one. It is tempting to think that Carlson has followed in Sobran’s ignominious footsteps, that he has suffered the same fate as the man he once ridiculed. Except Carlson is not sitting in an empty restaurant booth. He has the ears of billionaires and heads of state. He is selling out basketball arenas and constantly streaming onto our phones. He has descended into madness, but he is speaking to millions. ♦

This is drawn from “Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.”

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The Washington Roundtable discusses President Donald Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland and his subsequent retreat. At Davos this week, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, characterized the episode as “a rupture in the world order.” To analyze how Trump’s rhetoric has heightened concerns about the durability of the transatlantic alliance, the Roundtable is joined by Carl Bildt, the co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the former Prime Minister of Sweden. “I think what we need to do as Europeans is to do our own thing,” Bildt says. “We now have a United States that, from our point of view, is unpredictable.”

This week’s reading:

“It’s Time to Talk About Donald Trump’s Logorrhea,” by Susan B. Glasser

“An Unhappy Anniversary: Trump’s Year in Office,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

“The Overlooked Deaths of the Attack on Venezuela,” by Oriana van Praag

“The Ice Curtain,” by Ian Frazier

“How Europe Can Respond to Trump’s Greenland Imperialism,” by Isaac Chotiner

“The Congresswoman Criminalized for Visiting ICE Detainees,” by Jonathan Blitzer

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Last October, Bari Weiss—best known as a contrarian opinion writer who launched the right-leaning Free Press—was appointed the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. Donald Trump has called her new regime “the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.” The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone wrote about Weiss’s hostile takeover of CBS News for the January 26, 2026, issue of the magazine. In a conversation with David Remnick, Malone discusses her reporting on Weiss: how resigning from the New York Times launched Weiss to prominence as a crusader against what she has characterized as woke groupthink; how Weiss gained the support of Silicon Valley titans who had their own political grievances; and the headlines about Weiss’s rocky beginning as head of a news network, including the on-air travails of her new anchor Tony Dokoupil.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.