Over the past five years, I've watched a lot of Tucker Carlson.
Not in an obsessive or unhealthy way (depending on who you ask). But at some point circa 2018, the opening 10-15 minute monologue of Tucker Carlson Tonight became a staple of my nightly media diet.
So naturally, when Fox News abruptly fired Mr. Carlson last week, I spent some time combing through the litany of post-mortems dissecting what happened.
Many articles re-hashed Mr. Carlson's history of racist and xenophobic commentary. I wasn't surprised that much of the media coverage also focused on the man himself and the details that led to his abrupt dismissal. Or that media organizations and journalists enmeshed in the business of news were inclined to ask what the end of Mr. Carlson's run at Fox signified for the industry. But it did strike me that an important piece of the story was being overlooked: Tucker Carlson Tonight helped transform modern conservatism in the U.S. into a movement fixated on gender.
In March 2016, North Carolina became the first state in the nation to pass a bill restricting transgender people from using the bathroom of their choosing. The law sparked an unexpected backlash. PayPal, Adidas, and Deutsche Bank were among dozens of companies that halted plans to build new facilities in North Carolina, and the NCAA and NBA pulled major events out of the state. The AP estimated that the law would cost North Carolina $3.76 billion in lost business over a dozen years.
That November, the Republican Governor at the time, Pat McCrory, lost his re-election bid to Roy Cooper, a Democrat who ran on repealing "the bathroom bill." In March 2017, one year after the law initially passed, state lawmakers scrapped the bill. The more conservative factions of the Republican-controlled state legislature were dismayed. But the lesson from the past year had been clear: The political and financial costs of focusing on transgender issues outweighed the benefits.
The next month, in April 2017, Rupert Murdoch promoted Tucker Carlson to succeed Bill O'Reilly in the coveted 8pm timeslot on Fox News. While "Reagan Republicans" spent much of that year focused on enacting sweeping new tax cuts, Mr. Carlson devoted the bulk of his airtime to immigration. In the aftermath of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that summer, conservative pundits tamped down on some of the more inflammatory racial rhetoric. Mr. Carlson doubled down. He exclaimed that "black and brown immigrants make our country poorer and dirtier", and criticized leaders from both parties who didn't share his view. He spoke frequently of a "Great Replacement", a racist conspiracy previously relegated to the fringes of far-right forums that posits that white Americans are intentionally being overrun by non-white immigrants.
All the while, Mr. Carlson's following skyrocketed — his nightly show routinely drew over 3 million viewers, and he amassed over 5 million followers on both Twitter and Facebook. By the end of 2017, Mr. Carlson's praise of neo-Nazis and venomous anti-immigrant rhetoric seemed to garner weekly headlines. Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group, had staff dedicated to documenting his every word. And organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center issued pleas to Fox News to take Mr. Carlson off the air.
Meanwhile, with a loyal following intact, Mr. Carlson had quietly begun a new crusade, one that was attracting much less attention from mainstream news outlets. Interspersed between racist tirades about migrant caravans and conspiratorial conjecture about America's ruling class, Tucker Carlson Tonight began warning viewers of a developing trend: Shifting gender norms in society. Specifically, more young people were identifying as transgender, and the notion that gender is not a biological construct fixed at birth but rather a social construct that is in fact more fluid was gaining acceptance.
Initially, the segments on Tucker Carlson Tonight about gender were seemingly innocuous and focused almost exclusively on transgender athletes. Between 2017–2019, at least 13 episodes featured cherry-picked anecdotes about biological men who transitioned and then competed in women's sports. A handful of other episodes showcased disgruntled professors whose former universities had begun instituting new guidelines on the use of gender pronouns. Mr. Carlson spoke of these incidences with a sense of bemusement and curiosity. At the time, Mr. Carlson was hard-pressed to get any elected officials to join him to comment on the issue — against the backdrop of Trump's presidency and with the North Carolina fiasco still fresh in recent memory, discussing such a taboo subject felt fraught with unnecessary political risk. Mr. Carlson's periodic rants about transgender athletes and gender pronouns were simply a cable news sideshow.
Mr. Carlson wasn't the only conservative voice at the time discussing the shifting gender landscape. Conservative commentators like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Matt Walsh built cult followings online in large part due to their willingness to espouse anti-trans views. And a network of conservative Christian legal groups and think tanks, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Principles Project, had begun shifting their focus from fighting same-sex marriage to defending traditional conceptions of gender.
But none of these other actors had what Mr. Carlson had: A built-in audience that eclipsed 4 million nightly viewers and the credibility that comes with working at the largest news network in the country, not to mention his effectiveness as an orator and entertainer. The more Mr. Carlson legitimized anti-trans rhetoric and got away with it, the more emboldened conservative pundits with lesser followings felt to take it a step further. Mr. Carlson in turn would scour the web for the most outlandish and incendiary stories on transgender people. A vicious cycle ensued.
By 2020, the segments about transgender people on Tucker Carlson Tonight felt different. The tone was angrier, more unhinged; the language more vulgar and brash. The inquisitive, seemingly benign segments about transgender athletes had escalated into violent attacks on transgender people and groups supportive of them. Mr. Carlson called transgender youth "grotesque" and a "nationwide epidemic." He regularly referred to hormone therapy as "chemical castration" and gender affirming care as "genital mutilation." He routinely asserted that "the trans community is a cult that grooms children."
The same seething bitterness and resentment that characterized Mr. Carlson's earlier rants on race and immigration were now on full display in his segments on gender. And it wasn't just that the language was more dehumanizing and violent. The stakes had risen, too. Mr. Carlson now framed the debate over transgender rights as the defining cultural battle of our time, calling transgender people an "existential threat to the perpetuation of the species." He labeled transgender people the "natural enemy" of Christianity, saying in one episode: "Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled. They are on a collision course with each other. One side is likely to draw blood before the other side."
One might think that all of this would alienate Mr. Carlson from mainstream conservatives. But by 2021, with Trump out of office and many Americans growing wary of Democrats' handling of the pandemic and the January 6 Capitol insurrection, Mr. Carlson's grip on the Republican party only tightened. And the issue Mr. Carlson wanted Republicans — from governors to state representatives to school board superintendents — to confront was transgender rights.
In March 2021, Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, refused to sign a bill that banned transgender girls from sports teams from kindergarten through college. In a tense interview with Ms. Noem, Mr. Carlson ridiculed the governor for "caving to liberals and big business interests." Ms. Noem, facing pressure from her conservative base, went on to sign a near identical version of the bill. Frank Cannon, founder of the social conservative advocacy group American Principles Project, said that Mr. Carlson's interview with Ms. Noem "sent a signal to every other governor in the country that you will be punished if you betray the social conservatives."
Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota, appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight in March 2021 to discuss a proposed bill banning transgender girls from sports.
A similar situation unfolded in April 2021. Arkansas' governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed a bill that criminalized health care for transgender youth. During a scathing back-and-forth, Mr. Hutchinson told Mr. Carlson that he had concerns about government overreach. The Arkansas state legislature voted to override Hutchinson's veto, and he signed the bill into law. As with Ms. Noem, the public shaming from Mr. Carlson appeared to play a role.
By the time Mr. Carlson was fired from Fox News in April 2023, the anti-trans legislative wave he had helped inspire had crested. In 2023 alone, state legislatures introduced over 500 anti-trans bills across the country. More than 80 became law. The Republican Party had made opposition to transgender rights a central pillar of its platform — a striking reversal from the political calculus of just a few years earlier, when the North Carolina bathroom bill fiasco had made the issue seem like a third rail.
Tucker Carlson did not create anti-trans sentiment in America. But he normalized it, amplified it, and gave it a national platform night after night, until it became impossible for Republican elected officials to ignore. That is his legacy — and its effects will outlast his tenure at Fox News by decades.