A review of Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by Jason Zengerle; 400 pages; Crooked Media Reads (January 2026)

In the autumn of 1980, as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were preparing for their second presidential debate, Tucker Carlson’s sixth grade teacher decided to stage a classroom debate between Carlson and Carlson’s best friend Russell. Although the pair were only eleven years old, they were already rabid political junkies, albeit of very different sorts. Carlson was an outspoken conservative, while Russell was a die-hard liberal. There was a twist, though: in the debate, Carlson would have to play President Carter, the Democrat, while Russell would play Reagan, the Republican, forcing each student to see things from the other side.  Russell dutifully studied Reagan’s positions, and when debate day came, he did an admirable job reciting them to the class. Carlson took an entirely different tack.  Rather than touting Carter’s policies, he simply went negative. “Ronald Reagan is like Lassie,” he told his classmates. “He’s a trained dog. They just put words in his mouth and he says them.” When the debate was over and the students were polled, Carlson/Carter won in a landslide.

This anecdote comes from Jason Zengerle’s excellent new book, Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. “I didn’t want to write a biography of Tucker Carlson,” Zengerle explained on a recent podcast. “I also didn’t want to write a hate-read.” And he has largely succeeded in that two-pronged aim. Neither hagiography nor hit-piece, Hated by All the Right People probably isn’t the kind of book that Carlson would want written about himself, but it’s just the kind of book he deserves. The story about Carlson’s sixth-grade debate is illustrative of Zengerle’s technique. The lesson, he explains, that Carlson learned from that youthful experience was that “a strong argument against someone can be far more effective than a strong argument for [someone].” Zengerle leaves it to readers to draw the other obvious conclusion—that, for Carlson, popularity has always outweighed principle.

That’s not to say that Carlson has no principles. He was a superb writer when he started out as a contributor to the Weekly Standard in the mid-1990s. “This kid was born knowing how to write a magazine article,” the Standard’s deputy editor John Podhoretz enthused upon reading Carlson’s first submission. Part of what made him so good was that he was willing to skewer his own side. Despite his conservative disposition, he often took potshots at Republicans, including George W. Bush, the GOP’s presidential candidate in 2000. “Though Bush can afford to shop anywhere,” Carlson wrote of the governor’s sartorial style, “he often looks as if he has just returned from an afternoon of shoplifting at Sears.” In a 1997 article for the New Republic, Carlson exposes Grover Norquist, the founder of Americans for Tax Reform, as a “cash-addled, morally malleable lobbyist” selling access to anyone with enough dough, from African strongmen to Fortune 500 CEOs. “Norquist assumed a revolutionary persona,” Carlson writes of his pudgy, bespectacled subject, “eschewing bourgeois conventions like a wife and family, table manners, even personal relationships. When I asked Norquist which of his friends could tell me what he’s like as a person, he suggested I speak to ‘anyone in leadership, House or Senate.’”

It also turned out that Carlson had a natural flair for television. In the broadcast era, print journalists rarely made TV appearances. That began to change after cable came along. Networks like CNN, Fox, and MSNBC had an enormous amount of airtime to fill, and the cheapest way to fill it was with pundits rather than hard news reporters. Carlson fit the bill perfectly. With his bow tie and blow-dried hair, he looked like a junior George Will, and while he might have lacked Will’s erudition, he was a quick study, easily (and enthusiastically) pontificating on a wide range of subjects. As Zengerle puts it, “he popped on-screen.”

In 2001, Carlson was invited to co-host Crossfire, CNN’s popular political debate show, alongside James Carville, Paul Begala, and Robert Novak. Friends like David Brooks and Christopher Hitchens urged Carlson not to give up his day job. They thought TV was just a side hustle—a way to promote their real work, which was on the page. Carlson took this line too, at first. When a viewer complained that his TV commentary wasn’t nearly as nuanced as his writing, Carlson acknowledged the point: “This is something I’ve thought about a lot and tried to correct. Partly it’s the venue—Crossfire exists to highlight clear arguments—partly it’s the medium: television isn’t conducive to nuance.” But the allure of television was too powerful. As Zengerle notes:

Carlson intuited more acutely than many of his ilk, that the brass ring we were all reaching for—the column in Time, the staff job at The New Yorker, the book contract with a major publisher—would be worth a whole lot less by the time any of us grasped it. Television, on the other hand, offered the surest path to what he sought.

And, for a time, he seemed to have it all. While other wealthy Washingtonians moved to the suburbs, Carlson stayed in the city, hobnobbing with elites in both parties. He was a regular at The Palm, DC’s most fashionable restaurant, frequented by people like Henry Kissinger, Eugene McCarthy, and Larry King. After Carlson promised to eat his shoe if Hillary Clinton’s book Living History sold a million copies, Clinton appeared on the Crossfire set, bearing a cake in the shape of a men’s wingtip—“a right wingtip,” she noted, just in case anyone missed the joke. Carlson was the toast of the town.

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