But as a television theater the formula works. mr. Carlson reliably attracts over three million viewers. When he championed the idea of demographic “replacement” on another Fox show in April, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, called for his resignation, noting that the same concept had helped fuel a string of terrorist acts. attacks, including the 2018 mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. But when Mr. Carlson showed a snippet of his comments on his own primetime show a few days later, the segment gained 14 percent more viewers in the advertiser-sweet “demo” of 24- to 54-year-olds, according to Nielsen data — year-olds than the annual average of Mr. Carlson.
Every cable network cares about ratings, but none more than Fox, whose post-Ailes slogan emphasizes not fairness or poise, but sheer audience dominance: “Most Watched, Most Trusted.” And at Fox, according to former employees, no host checks their ratings more closely than Mr. Carlson. He learned how to succeed on television, in part by failing there.
humble beginning
The talk show host raving about immigrants and the tech barons of a new gilded age is himself the descendant of a German immigrant who became one of the great peasant barons of the old gilded age. Henry Miller landed in New York in 1850 and built a successful butcher shop in San Francisco; along with a partner, he went on to assemble a land empire that included three states. They got some packages simply by bribing government officials. Others were enforced by money-poor Mexican Californians who, after the Mexican-American War, now lived in a newly expanded United States and couldn’t afford to defend their old Mexican land grants in court against speculators like Mr. Carlson. In the early 1900s, Mr. Miller’s land and livestock empire was “completely dependent on migrant workers,” said David Igler, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, and author of a History of the Miller Empire.
Over the years, the Miller fortune spread, as great fortunes often do, in a heady array of family branches. Carlson’s mother, Lisa McNear Lombardi, was born the daughter of a third-generation Miller heiress, debuted in San Francisco society and met Richard Carlson, a successful local television journalist, in the 1960s. They fled to Reno, Nev. in 1967; Tucker McNear Carlson was born two years later, followed by his brother, Buckley. The family moved to the Los Angeles area, where Richard Carlson took a job at the local ABC affiliate, but the Carlsons’ marriage broke up and the station fired him a few years later. In early 1976, he moved to San Diego to take a new television job. The boys went with him — according to court records, their parents had agreed it would be temporary — and commuted to Los Angeles over the weekend as he and Lisa tried to work out their differences.
But a few months later, just days after the boys returned with their mother from a vacation in Hawaii, Richard filed for divorce and asked for full custody of the children. In court files, Lisa Carlson claimed that he caught her off guard and left her virtually penniless. The couple broke up and started arguing over custody and spousal alimony. Mr Carlson claimed his wife had “repeated problems with alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines” abuse, and that he had expressed concerns about both her mental state and her treatment of the boys. On at least one occasion, he claimed, the boys had walked off the plane in San Diego without shoes; the mother’s own relatives, he said, had urged him not to let her see the children unsupervised. He was granted custody when Tucker was 8, at a hearing that Lisa did not attend: According to court records, she had left the country. She eventually settled in France, never to see her sons again. A few years later, Richard Carlson married Patricia Swanson, an heiress to the frozen fortune, who adopted both boys.
For years, Tucker Carlson kept tight-lipped about the breakup. In a New Yorker profile in 2017, not long after his show debuted, he described his mother’s departure as a “totally bizarre situation — which I never talk about, because it’s really not part of my life at all.” But as controversy and criticism engulfed his show, Mr. Carlson described his early life in dark tones, painting the California of his childhood as a countercultural dystopia and his mother as abusive and erratic. In 2019, in a podcast with right-wing comedian Adam Carolla, Mr. Carlson said his mother had forced drugs on her children. “She acted like she used real drugs around us when we were little, pushing us to do it, and like she was crazy,” said Mr. Carlson. By his account, his mother made it clear to her two young sons that she had little affection for them. “When you realize your own mom doesn’t like you, when she says that, it’s like, oh god,” he told Mr. Carolla, adding that he “felt all kinds of anger about it.”
Mr. Carlson was a heavy drinker until his thirties, which he has partly attributed to his early childhood. But in his own words, his mother’s abandonment also provided him with some sort of preemptive defense against the attacks that have descended on his Fox show. “Criticism from people who hate me doesn’t really mean anything to me,” Mr. Carlson to Megyn Kelly, the former Fox anchor, on her podcast last fall. He went on to say, “I’m not giving those people emotional control over me. I’ve been through that. I experienced that as a child.” A lesson from his childhood, Mr. Carlson told an interviewer, was that “you should only care about the opinions of people who care about you.”
