His Covid coverage was a notable example: At a time when the public health and political establishments weren’t taking the coronavirus as seriously as internet alarmists, Carlson was willing to issue dire warnings, to break with the partisan optimism of the other Fox hosts, even to make a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to force Donald Trump out of his denial. But once the establishment went all-in on Covid restrictions, he swung all the way the other way, elevating not just criticism of shutdowns and vaccine mandates but the full anti-vaccine case.
In a recent interview with the “Full Send” podcast, Carlson was asked about his greatest regret. He said, first, supporting and defending the Iraq war. And second, this:
… for too long, I participated in the culture where anyone who thinks outside these pre-prescribed lanes is crazy, is a “conspiracy theorist.” And I just really regret that. I’m ashamed that I did that. And partly, it was age and the world I grew up in. So when you look at me and say, “Yeah, of course [the media] is part of the means of control.” That’s obvious to you because you’re 28, but I just didn’t see it at all — at all. And I’m ashamed of that.
There have always been conservative versions of this kind of suspicionism; Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was directed rightward. But for a long time after the 1960s the most influential version of suspicionism was left-wing. It was the hippies. It was don’t trust anyone over 30. It was Noam Chomsky. It was Oliver Stone. It was Michael Moore.
The young Reaganite or the George W. Bush admirer certainly believed the media was liberal and that the Ivy League could not be trusted. But he or she believed in the C.I.A. and NATO, in General Motors and Wall Street, in Coca-Cola and the American Medical Association and the United States Marine Corps.
Not so for the conservatives who have come of age since the Iraq war, the financial crisis and the Great Awokening. Alienated from many more American institutions than their predecessors, staring at a record of elite failure and a social landscape where it seems like there’s little to conserve, they increasingly start out where Carlson ended up — in a posture of reflexive distrust, where if an important American institution takes a position, the place to be is probably on the other side.
Which is why Carlson, more than other cable-news hosts, found a younger audience to supplement the baby boomer foundation that (for now) keeps the Fox News enterprise in business, putting the very-old in touch with the very online.
