Toxic troll: Tucker Carlson set to be even more dangerous on Twitter

Tucker Carlson is taking his talents to Elon Musk’s Twitter. We should have seen it coming. The pairing, the peanut butter and chocolate of right-wing, edgelord provocation, makes perfect sense: two great trolls that could troll great together, heaven help us.

Sure, what Carlson’s Twitter “show” will look like — and whether it’ll be anywhere close to as influential or remunerative as the Fox News gig from which he was recently ousted — is an open question. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried. With his racist claptrap, including promoting hateful conspiracy theories like the great replacement, Carlson is a singularly malign media personality. As I wrote in 2019, I’ve had a recurring nightmare that he might escape the echo chamber of Fox and become a much larger cultural and political force; Carlson is among the few people I can think of who’d be a more dangerous president than Donald Trump.

Had he joined Newsmax, The Daily Wire, Rumble, One America News Network or another murkier corner of the right-wing mediasphere, I’d have breathed a small sigh of relief at the almost-certain diminishment of his mainstream influence. But the bird app still affords Carlson a pretty lofty perch from which to spew his particular brand of hate. A sort of do-it-yourself internet show also gives him more creative freedom than he had at Fox; freed from network suits and possibly more insulated from advertiser boycotts, Carlson on Twitter could get away with saying things that would make the Fox News Carlson blush or at least make that scrunched-forehead, faux-dumbfounded face that is his trademark.

What I’m saying is: It’s not unreasonable to think Carlson’s Twitter move could work awfully well.

It could also further tweak the meaning of “show.” That word once described the thing you saw on TV as you sat on your sofa. Now it means podcasts and YouTube series and Twitch livestreams. But what is a show by cable’s formerly biggest star on a site that was once known strictly as a place for microblogging? It could be a long video posted every day; it could be short clips posted all the time; it could be something like a Twitter Space, an interactive conversation with fans; it could be some new format entirely.

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I don’t know what Carlson will do, but in spirit, it doesn’t need to be very different from what he’s already done. He’s long been the YouTubiest man on TV; his genius, if you want to call it that, was in bringing the sneering sensibility and extreme views of right-wing internet pundits like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder to the Fox News audience.

Production-wise, his show should be an easy lift. The wood-panelled studio from which he broadcast his latest missive looks good enough for the internet and comports with his red state prepster vibe. At launch, he could simply do his monologues from there and post the clips to Twitter. After a while, he could start making more bespoke fare and charging a fee under Twitter’s subscription program, which allows creators to cultivate an audience that pays for exclusive content.

Last July, in its final earnings report as a public company, Twitter said that about 238 million people used the service every day, close to 42 million of them in the United States. Even if the site under Musk has gone to the dogs, it’s still used by millions, including legions of politicians and journalists who check it daily. Carlson’s Fox News show attracted an audience of about 3.3 million viewers per night last year, according to Nielsen. As I write, his Twitter video sent out this week to announce the new show (captioned “We’re back”) has been viewed more than 25 million times.