Inside the Strange New World of Tucker Carlson

A visit to the former Fox News host’s Maine home shows why he’s become a spokesman for millions of Americans disillusioned by mainstream politics.

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The road to Tucker Carlson’s rural home meanders among the pristine lakes and ancestral forests of western Maine. Moose and black bears sometimes descend on the nearby village of Bryant Pond, looking for food. The landscape, dotted with clapboard houses and birch-white churches, feels familiar from the works of another famous Maine resident, Stephen King.

Carlson’s remote home in the woods feels like a world away from this week’s Republican National Convention, but he has been in the spotlight in Milwaukee, attesting to his resurgent role in the conservative movement. Carlson appeared alongside a bandaged Donald Trump earlier this week at the convention, and he is scheduled to speak Thursday night, ahead of the former president’s acceptance speech. Carlson is also close to Ohio Sen. JD Vance, whom he actively boosted for the V.P. spot on the ticket. Some Republican insiders believe that Carlson himself could someday make a serious run for high office. “Tucker has the power to raise difficult issues that the public needs to confront…He’s proven he is here to stay atop the conservative movement in a powerful role,” said Richard Grenell, a leading figure in the Trump campaign.

I interviewed Carlson in late May in Maine. It took me a long way from my day job as a Berlin-based Wall Street Journal correspondent covering European politics, but I had interviewed Carlson for a piece after his controversial interview with Vladimir Putin last February. I wanted to know what the Russian strongman had told him about my colleague Evan Gershkovich, who has now been held in Russia for more than a year on false accusations of espionage and is facing a sham trial. Carlson concluded our conversation by inviting me to visit him at his home.

What ensued was an extraordinary five-hour discussion of his familiar and less familiar preoccupations, ranging from his critique of what he calls U.S. imperialism and “gay race ideology,” to his disgust with America’s current political system, admiration for Putin’s leadership, hatred of social media and belief in aliens as manifestations of demons and angels.

A large wooden barn, resembling a mountain lodge on the inside, is now the hub of Tucker Carlson Network, or TCN, his media startup. From here he reaches millions of people across the internet, broadcasting political and ideological views that many observers consider radical, even dangerous, and that a younger, more conventionally conservative Carlson might have considered beyond the pale.

In April 2023, Carlson was ousted from his Fox News show—at the time, the highest-rated show on prime-time cable news—amid mounting friction with the network’s management. Some of Carlson’s private messages, in which he showed disregard for management and colleagues, had been made public in the defamation lawsuit by the voting-machine company Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News for its reporting on alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election. Fox later settled the case for $787.5 million.
Carlson’s new show made its debut on Twitter (before its rebranding as X) in early June 2023, and that December he launched TCN, which became profitable, he says, within weeks.

Most of its revenue comes from over 200,000 paid subscribers, according to CFO Faizaan Baig. Carlson’s Putin episode last February gained 200 million impressions on X and 20 million views on YouTube. His podcast has had over 26 million downloads since its December launch and is currently No. 1 on Spotify’s news podcast chart.

Before Fox News ousted Tucker Carlson in 2023, he hosted the highest-rated show on prime-time cable news.

In person, Carlson feels different from the incendiary television personality. Dressed in a bright-colored flannel shirt, baggy pants and Birkenstocks, he is relaxed and warm as he welcomes me to his spacious man cave. The chandeliers are made of deer antlers, and the walls are a carefully crafted mosaic of rifles, flags, newspaper clippings, artworks, harpoons and machetes. A 2,000-year-old Roman spear tip stands alongside psychedelic posters of the Grateful Dead, his favorite band. Hunting trophies include stuffed bears and a moose head. Carlson owns many weapons, including a Ruger LCR Special 38-caliber revolver that fits neatly into the front pocket of his pants—for self-protection, he says.

A keypad-secured back door leads into his state-of-the-art broadcasting studio. Here Carlson hosts most of the guests who appear on his show; others are interviewed remotely or from his studio in Boca Grande, Fla.

Notable guests have included former President Trump, NFL star Aaron Rodgers, former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and Ice Cube, the L.A.-based rapper. He has also had conversations on his show with some of today’s biggest pariahs, including Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist convicted of defamation for claiming the Sandy Hook shooting was a government hoax, and Andrew Tate, the social media personality and self-described misogynist facing charges of rape and human trafficking in Romania (Tate has denied the allegations).

In 2022, Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog, declared Carlson the “Misinformer of the Year,” saying that his “venomous rhetoric” was a threat to American society. The Anti-Defamation League, an antisemitism watchdog group, has accused him of embracing white supremacy and of promoting the conspiracy theory that American elites—politicians, business executives, media—are using immigration and other policies as a tool to reduce the white population.

“When they shout that at me, I say ‘Wait, I’m a sexist, not a racist’,” he says with a thunderous laugh. He denies being either and says that he has “understanding and empathy” for migrants trying to improve their lives but that recent mass migration has been a source of disorder and decline in the U.S. In 2018, his Fox News show lost several advertisers after he said on air that “unregulated” migration was making America “poorer and dirtier and more divided.”

Carlson went Grouse hunting in Maine with Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, in 2022.

Carlson is trying to expand his reach outside the U.S. He says he’s negotiating an interview with Xi Jinping of China and will soon visit Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. He has repeatedly requested an interview with Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine but wants to conduct it in a third country because he believes (without offering any evidence) that Ukrainian intelligence is trying to kill him. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, hugely popular at home for eradicating rampant gang crime but widely criticized for alleged human-rights abuses, visited Carlson in Maine for bird hunting in November 2022.

‘I don’t want radical views.’

Though Carlson’s new career is dependent on social media, in his own household it is banned, dating back to when his now-adult children were young, because he believes it “traduces and radicalizes” people. The account managed in his name has nearly 13 million followers on X, but he never uses it himself. He says that he has no access to any of his or the company’s social-media accounts, which are run by his staff, and that he doesn’t own a TV or computer or use email.

“While I’m grateful to have an audience, and for the effect of social media on news, I think the net effect of it has been very bad,” he laments, saying that it has made public discourse too extreme and concentrated power in the hands of tech oligarchs, such as his ally, Elon Musk. Last week Musk announced his endorsement of Trump, and The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Musk intends to give tens of millions of dollars to a super PAC supporting Trump’s candidacy.

Carlson admits to being a “hypocrite” on the subject: “Unfortunately there are very smart people on social media with very radical views, and I don’t want radical views…It’s probably cowardly of me, but I don’t want it in my house.”

Some of his own views certainly qualify as extreme. For instance, he dismisses climate change as a “climate lie,” claims that the CIA killed President John F. Kennedy and that the government hasn’t told the truth about 9/11. He also holds some esoteric beliefs: He insists that UFO sightings are in fact spiritual events that ancient societies and the Bible rightly understood to be visitations by angels and demons.

Tucker Carlson interviewing Alex Jones at his Maine studio in 2023.

Untethered from mainstream TV, Carlson has become a tribune for those whose disillusionment with U.S. politics and America’s global hegemony has turned into a surprising conviction: that Putin’s Russia, autocratic as it may be, now stands for order and traditional values, while America has degenerated into an agent of chaos. Moscow is clean, safe and the prettiest city he’s ever been to, Carlson says, while American cities are dirty, decaying and crime-ridden. Across the policy spectrum, ranging from gender issues to migration to the economy, Russia now feels more instinctively familiar to Carlson, he says, than the U.S.4

I suggest to him that he resembles Cold War-era Marxists in the U.S., who wound up enamored with the Soviet Union after becoming disillusioned with their homeland. He accepts the comparison: “The truth is they were right about one thing: The big decisions that the U.S. government makes are totally insulated from the will of voters.”

in power.” U.S. leaders of both parties behave like “big, fat, decadent Ottoman sultans” without a care for the governed.
His heroes: Snowden, Assange and Orwell
Carlson supports former President Trump, with whom he says he speaks regularly, because he believes that Trump, if not the people around him, pushes for policies that reflect the views of most Americans, such as curbing mass migration and ending U.S. military adventures. Carlson declined to answer when I asked him if he was considering a run for president in 2028.

During the lawsuit filed by the voting-machine company Dominion against Fox for its reporting of election fraud in the 2020 election, Carlson’s private messages to executives were made public in court documents. In them he vehemently rejected the election-fraud conspiracy that he repeatedly aired on his show and said he loathed President Trump, calling him a “demonic force.”

Carlson lauds Trump but derides his promise to deport millions of illegal migrants as ‘lies.’

Today, he lauds Trump but derides his promise to deport millions of illegal migrants as “lies.” He feels the country was left “worse off” after Trump’s presidency. The fundamental reason, in Carlson’s telling, is that U.S. democracy no longer works. “There is no democratic mechanism for changing course in the U.S. government,” he says. “Trump runs on closing the border, eight years later we have a completely open border.”

We sit down for dinner at the long, wooden table familiar from his broadcasts. He avoids restaurants, partly because he says prices are out of control due to inflation, and has meals prepared for himself at home—by a chef, who says Carlson is having steak with rice and salad for the 10th dinner in a row.

Carlson speaks freely about the national leaders among his friends, such as the prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orban, who has defied the rest of Europe with his pro-Russia policy. The leader he most admires is Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, popularly known as MBZ, the hereditary ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates, whose country Carlson considers an exceptional success.

He especially respects how MBZ has remained on friendly terms with both the West and Russia.
Carlson’s heroes are Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor who fled to Russia after leaking state secrets, and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder indicted on similar offenses and recently released under a plea deal with the U.S. government. His only journalistic role model, he says, is George Orwell.

Deserted by his mother at age 6 Carlson, who is 55, lives with Susan Andrews, his wife of 33 years—they met at St. George’s School, an Episcopal boarding school in Rhode Island—and their three dogs in a lakeside, timber-framed house near the barn. Their four adult children, all educated at private schools, have long left home.

“I’ve been married to the same girl for 33 years, and every morning I wake up I say ‘I can’t wait to have sex with you,’ Carlson chuckles of his wife, Susan Andrews.

In winter they migrate to their other home in Florida. Carlson regularly goes trout fishing in the Simmental Valley in Switzerland, where he spent two years in an elite boarding school as a boy.

His family life as an adult has been in contrast to his own early childhood. He and his brother and best friend Buckley, who lives nearby, were raised in California by their father Richard Carlson, a journalist who dabbled in banking and politics and later became head of the Voice of America and U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles.
Their mother, the artist Lisa McNear Lombardi, abandoned them for a bohemian life in Europe when Carlson was 6, he says. He never saw her again. On Mother’s Day at school, he would explain that he had no mother. Lombardi died in 2011.

“When you are a little kid and your mom is just not interested or doesn’t like you, you just have to come to terms with it…Not everyone likes you, that’s what I learned,” he said, his eyes widening.

Now a nonsmoking teetotaler, Carlson says that, as a child, he saw cocaine and other drugs at his mother’s raucous parties in their L.A. home. “When I was little in the 1970s, all the adults in my life did cocaine and weren’t embarrassed about it at all,” he says.

His own drug use began in his teens, and when he applied in his early 20s to work for the CIA, he was rejected, he says, because of his history of abusing drugs like cocaine and psilocybin.
Blaming Biden for Putin’s War

Carlson still keeps the diaries he says he wrote while on psychedelics in his vast library. His shelves feature, among other things, a large collection of books on Russia, from Tolstoy to Trotsky to the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography of Stalin, which shaped his views of the country, he says.

Such reading, he says, prepared him for his February interview with Putin, the most-watched TCN episode to date. It took place in the elegant ceremonial hall of the Kremlin, the seat of Russian executive power, and triggered an avalanche of criticism around the world.

Detractors said that Carlson failed as a journalist by allowing the Russian autocrat, whom he has long admired, to speak freely for over two hours without challenging his falsehoods, including a convoluted history lesson going back to the ninth century. In response to his critics, Carlson says that he didn’t go to the Kremlin for a “dick-measuring contest” but to understand Putin’s position on the war in Ukraine.

The only time Carlson pushed back in the interview was on the subject of Evan Gershkovich, the detained Journal reporter. Putin rejected Carlson’s plea to release Gershkovich, saying he wanted to trade the journalist for a Russian imprisoned in the West. Carlson said this was unfair and that Gershkovich isn’t a spy. The exchange took nearly seven minutes.

Carlson, who came under criticism for not challenging Putin in a lengthy interview in February, counters that he didn’t go to the Kremlin for a ‘dick-measuring contest.’

Carlson says that after the cameras were switched off, he and Putin talked privately away from the production crew and bodyguards. As he describes the scene, midnight was approaching, and the Russian president guided his guest across the grand oval chamber built for Empress Catherine the Great and normally reserved for dignitaries. The iconic long table that Putin used in meetings during the pandemic was shoved aside for the occasion.

Standing in the shadow of a statue of Peter the Great, Putin told Carlson in a hushed voice, he says, that he was worried that his invasion of Ukraine might escalate into a nuclear conflict—Putin himself has repeatedly raised that prospect as a threat—and complained that he hadn’t spoken with President Biden since the war started. According to Carlson, Putin voiced what he said was his frustration and alleged, without evidence, that some members of the Biden administration with family roots in today’s Ukraine were obstructing peace efforts.

Carlson then indulged one of his own peculiar obsessions, quizzing Putin about the secret Soviet files on Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy who defected to Britain in 1941 and allegedly told interrogators that the Nazi leader had been possessed by demons.

A practicing Christian with a degree in history, Carlson says “demonic possession is real, I happen to know for a fact.” Putin seemed unable or unwilling to respond.

Instead, according to Carlson, Putin outlined his alleged peace plan: He would be ready to pull his troops from Ukraine’s territory surrounding Crimea, known as the land bridge, in exchange for a treaty guaranteeing a demilitarization of the region and Russian use of civilian infrastructure to supply the annexed peninsula. Carlson wouldn’t speculate whether this was a genuine signal to the U.S. administration or empty rhetoric. Western officials familiar with previous negotiations with Russia say that such proposals are unlikely to be sincere.

Carlson showed me Putin’s parting present: a folder filled with neatly prepared facsimiles of historical documents, including 17th-century letters that the Russian leader said he had personally selected from the Kremlin’s archive as alleged evidence of Russia’s claim on modern Ukraine—a claim that Ukrainians and Western historians adamantly reject.

A self-described devotee of the First Amendment, Carlson says he knows that in Putin’s Russia a contrarian like himself would end up like Alexei Navalny, the Putin critic who died in prison shortly after Carlson interviewed Putin. Putin is no democrat, he says, and Russia is “an authoritarian country, capable of great cruelty.”
Still, Carlson blames the U.S. for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “The Biden administration started the war. They pushed Russia into doing this by yapping about Ukraine joining NATO,” he snaps. “They are the villain here.”

U.S. invasion he wholeheartedly supported. This shattered his belief in America’s ability to administer global order.
The second revelation took place in 2021, at the table where we are having dinner, when he hosted a former senior U.S. official who, he says, revealed to him that the CIA had killed American citizens inside the U.S. He was left in a state of shock after his guest departed and then collapsed on his front porch. Two of his vertebrae had caved in, he says, and he was taken to the hospital for emergency surgery. The surgeon, he says, told him that it could have been a stress-related injury.

Carlson has since doubled down on his opposition to U.S. policies and American global influence, which to his mind have made a “horrible mess” of the world since 9/11. Much like his left-wing opponents, he sees the U.S. as a destructive imperial power.
“Gay race communism isn’t an appealing export to anyone, and that’s what we are exporting,” he says, referring to what he sees as the social agenda of America’s cultural and media establishment and, to some extent, the U.S. government. “The purpose of empire cannot be to make other people’s children transgender.”

“The tragedy is no empire has ever ended in a more pointless, wasteful way,” he says. Nothing durable will remain from U.S. hegemony but “shipping containers.”
Carlson rejects any suggestion that he himself might be fanning the flames of radicalization. In a recent show, however, he wholeheartedly agreed with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, when he called for a “war to the knife” against the “illegitimate regime of neo-Marxists, from the Justice Department to the FBI” should Trump return to power.

He finds solace in his Protestant faith, reads the Bible and regularly goes to an Episcopalian church, even as he believes that Christianity is now divorced from the churches, which he says have become liberal and secularized. The “woke” political movement and its ideology, he says, have replaced Christian spiritual values and “effortlessly moved into the husk of Protestant Christianity in the U.S. It was a hollow tree, and they just occupied it, like a family of raccoons.”

As it nears midnight, Carlson climbs into his pickup truck to drive the short distance back to his house from the barn. He reaches into the glove compartment to show me his Glock pistol. “Everyone’s got one around here, that’s how we Americans are, and that’s the one thing Europeans will never understand,” he says, before driving off into the night.