How Tucker Carlson’s “Frat House” Foreshadowed Trump
Julia Ioffe julia@puck.news via h.ckdlv.net
August 19, 2021
Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse, your dispatch from the nation’s capital, which feels especially swampy in the sticky August heat. As you may recall, TWBW will become part of Puck after Labor Day, and if you would like to continue reading my missives from Washington, I highly recommend subscribing. If you do so before our September launch, you’ll get a hefty discount to thank you for your early and loyal support. You also get access to columns and emails from my incredible colleagues, including Baratunde Thurston, Tina Nguyen, and Matt Belloni, to name a few. And speaking of Tina ...
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I first met my new colleague Tina Nguyen this summer. I had read her phenomenal dispatches from the grassroots trenches of Trumpworld for Politico and Vanity Fair, but I’d never spoken to her in person. Nor had I heard her personal story, about how she had begun her career in journalism under the unlikely tutelage of Tucker Carlson, before finding a better mentor in our mutual friend David Frum. We met for coffee one hot D.C. morning and, three hours later, I was still listening, slack-jawed, to Tina’s stories about her travels among the conservative activists that traditional media still struggles to understand. It made sense that Tina, who describes herself as ideologically burned out, was so fluent in the language and culture of this universe: unlike most of the Washington reporters writing about the American right, she had lived it.
After Tina formally joined Puck this month, I decided to introduce her to readers of Tomorrow Will Be Worse. She is so smart, so funny, so searingly eloquent and insightful that I knew my readers would love her, too. It’s a long read, but I promise it’s worth it. I think you will find her stories and explanations about the conservative media-tech-political ecosystem as fascinating as I did. And I’m pretty sure you’ll want to subscribe to her pre-launch private email.
Mike Lindell’s Meltdown, Tucker Carlson’s “Frat House,” and Life Inside the MAGA Bubble
Julia: So, where are you right now?
Tina: I am packing up from Sioux Falls. I was here for the cyber symposium held by [MyPillow founder and conspiracy theorist] Mike Lindell, who claimed he was going to prove to everyone that the election was stolen. Of course, without going too much into the conspiracy web that Lindell spun, he did not prove that the election was stolen, and nobody’s mind was changed.
I was going to say, did he do it? Did he tie up the case with a clean and convincing closing argument?
Not at all. The first day, he was on stage for pretty much the entire time, just rambling about how there were certain people in the media that he hated and how he was about to expose the truth. But the thing is, he never provided any proof. He claimed that he’d gotten data from a couple of voting machines from either Dominion or Smartmatic, and that he could prove that there was Chinese interference, as well as interference by George Soros, but by day two, it was evident that they didn’t have the data that he claimed. By that point, most of the serious people had left.
There were serious people there?
There were a couple people there for academic purposes, or who had been invited or hired to provide independent analyses. There were a couple of G.O.P. officials there. But within the first day or so, they all realized, no, there’s nothing real here. By that point, the only people left were mostly running for office—people who wanted ammunition for their own campaigns, or to build their own legislative caucus in state houses, and they were really grasping at straws. When the conservative Washington Times reported, in the middle of the symposium, that Lindell’s own analyst couldn’t prove there was election interference by the Chinese, or Soros, or anyone else, Lindell had a meltdown onstage.
Wait, the Chinese government and the Jews were working together? I missed this development.
No one could really make heads or tails of it.
I don’t know that everyone knows this about you, but you have a fascinating personal story. You’re not just reporting on this as a disembodied, disinterested observer. You come from this world, right?
Well, mostly I was booted from it unceremoniously. I went to a fairly conservative-leaning college back in 2008. Keep in mind that was right at the very start of the Tea Party. So this institution, Claremont McKenna, had a lot of conservative academics, but they were more of the libertarian, pro-freedom, anti-government regulation mold. Reagan was pretty big there.
Did you come from a conservative family? Were you interested in conservative politics? How did you end up at Claremont McKenna?
It’s actually a well-regarded school and the people who go there tend to be pragmatists. Many graduates go into finance, but there is also a robust government program that emphasizes how to do real policy work in Washington or at the state level. I took an entire class on health care. Another, which is sort of legendary among Claremont graduates, simulates two Senate committees trying to pass bills, pitting our class against a rival party at Pomona college. People went wild trying to figure out ways to sneak in poison pills. The hyper-partisanship was really baked in.
Did you like it?
I really did, and I don’t want to paint Claremont McKenna as hyper-conservative, per se. It’s more that there was a small group of conservative academics that found a home there. The school is connected to an outside institution called the Claremont Institute—imagine a California version of the Heritage Foundation—which, by virtue of being ensconced in liberal California, was at the forefront of the culture wars that are being fought today. The Claremont conservatives were really the first to blame declining quality of life on the progressive policies coming out of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The institute has been critical of immigrants trying to, in their opinion, chip away at American values over time. They took a stand against certain Marxist concepts that eventually became intertwined with “woke culture.”
So how did you get from Claremont into conservative media?
Most college campuses tend to be liberal, but Democrats don’t have the same infrastructure that conservative institutions have developed for molding activists, academics, lawyers, scholars, lawyers, and eventually politicians and legislatures from the ground up. It goes beyond Young Republicans. The fellowship I received, at the Institute for Humane Studies, was at the time pretty libertarian. It was funded by Charles Koch, run by George Mason University, and it offered a lot of programs and internships for students who wanted to study economics or take political philosophy seminars.
And they offered a journalism scholarship. That’s all I really cared about at the time. It was 2009. There weren’t many paid journalism scholarships out there; I couldn’t work for free in New York City for an entire summer. One of the stipulations for receiving the internship was that you had to attend a seminar in Bryn Mawr, so I went. Kevin Williamson, who ended up at the National Review, led a couple of seminars, as did Megan McArdle; both are conservatives who ended up being pretty anti-Trump. Many of the graduates of that program went on to become phenomenal journalists as well, like Rachel Bade, who writes Playbook, and Lachlan Markey, who’s now at Axios.
I recently explained to a Democratic strategist that the goal of these sorts of programs isn’t indoctrination. It’s a more soft-touch effort to embed people with conservative beliefs into mainstream media in order to push back against their perceived liberal bias. This Democratic strategist told me, it sounds like they were sifting for zealots. And that was the perfect way to describe it. You have normal people, but the incentive structure also creates new and weirder opportunities for radicals. There was this one guy, who ran the journalism program at the Institute and approved my application for the program, who became a mentor of mine. Even when I left conservative journalism, I would still talk to him. Later I found out he ran a secret Nazi listserv.
Pardon?
Oh, yeah. John Elliott. It was called Morning Hate. Apparently, they would refer to Hitler as “our friend” and they would refer to Trump as “our friend’s son.”
Were you surprised when you found out?
Extremely. It was already a bit of an eyebrow-raising moment when it turned out that he was a Trump supporter circa 2016, but a lot of people had become Trump supporters by that time. When this story came out, I was working at Vanity Fair and I stood up in the middle of the office and started swearing and had to leave the room. It was extremely disappointing.
You later went to work for the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s publication. How did that happen?
Much of the conservative media that transformed into the extreme right-wing journalism you see today looked very different in 2009, 2010. It was built at outlets that initially presented themselves as, or attempted to produce, hard-hitting journalism. When I was up at the Daily Caller in 2011, there were a lot of journalists that went on to do amazing work.
Like Kaitlan Collins, right?
Yes, Kaitlan Collins at CNN. Alexis Levinson. Alex Pappas went to Fox for a hot second, but now he’s an editor at Hachette.
What was it like working for Tucker Carlson?
He was a fun guy with a real New England, preppy bent. He loves fly-fishing, and there were times when Tucker would just take out his fly-fishing rod and pretend to fish for interns. We once had a party at Neil Patel’s house and we successfully plotted to throw Tucker into the pool. It was a frat house. It really was a frat house.
What were his politics like back then? Was he the Tucker of today?
Not by a long shot. His politics were purely anti-establishment at this point. Just kind of wacky with a libertarian streak. I think ultimately what he loved was being the guy calling out the establishment while also being a bit of a part of it.
More than a bit. The guy’s a Swanson heir!
There are rich assholes in Washington who come from important families and they just behave like rich assholes from important families. I think Tucker really enjoyed being part of the media scene, but also within that scene, being known as the asshole who’s thumbing his nose at them. He worked for Tina Brown for a while and that’s the entire point of everything Tina Brown does, right?
Did he set out a political mission for your newsroom? What were you guys supposed to do and what were the politics supposed to be?
Go find the stories that liberal media won’t cover. And in a lot of cases back then, there ended up being some pretty good things that we dug up. There were definitely a lot of stories that the Caller broke around that time that ended up shifting the conversation in Washington. I was brought in to cover tech policy and it sort of became clear at a point that the Caller just wasn’t going to be a place where tech policy was going to drive traffic, especially with the kind of libertarian bent that they wanted. I never really got involved in any of the ideological stuff.
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A lot of us were surprised when Trump came on the scene and that this ideological framework appeared around him very quickly. Given your background, were you surprised?
Not really, no. It was similar in some ways to the politics that Ted Cruz espoused, but Trump expressed it in a much more emotionally charged way. Cruz was always trying to couch things in polite, academic terms. Trump spoke to a part of the conservative movement that just wanted to troll the libs and make the snowflakes cry. Conservative politics was traditionally a genteel place, but that repressed, angry strain was always there, which is why Trump was so successful at taking over the movement. Not just the party, but movement conservatism overall.
Were you surprised that the Republican Party apparatus folded so easily?
Honestly, after five years of following this movement and staying in touch with friends, I had this notion that there were certain principles that leadership would adhere to: more economic freedom, less government intervention. There was also a strong neocon bent at the time, so there was not a lot of chatter about withdrawing troops from Iraq, not until Trump. He gained the support of a libertarian minority in the G.O.P. that was really anti-war.
As the movement turned increasingly nativist and racist, how did it feel as somebody who used to be part of that world and who is an Asian-American woman?
If I had stuck around, I could have gotten crazy good career opportunities. I’m not lying.
Because then they could hold you up and say, see, we’re not racist, we have Tina?
There’s that, but there’s a less cynical aspect to it, too. While there are genuinely racist elements, the hate directed toward minorities is focused on people who are perceived not to hold American values. Generally, if you are a minority, but you also really like being in America, then you’re fine. It’s when you point out, hey, there are a lot of differences between how white people are treated and how we’re treated in this country, then they start going, no, no, no, no. It’s you. You’re the one who wants to be different. You’re the one who’s being racist. I don’t think of it as the Republican Party being reflexively anti-minority. It is the idea that minorities could possibly have different values.
You’ve been able to see around corners a bit because you know this political movement from the inside, so I have to ask: what’s coming around the bend? Who is the heir apparent to Trump?
That remains to be seen. The ideal candidate for Republicans would be a less lazy Trump—someone who is actually more engaged in the politics of what this base wants. But this base has a really apocalyptic view of where the United States is headed. Some portion of Trump’s followers are disillusioned with democracy altogether. Most of the likely Republican contenders for the presidency—governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas—are still nominally invested in the democratic process.
Do you think either of them will end up running in 2024?
It all depends on whether Trump decides to run again. There are all of these little shadow campaigns with shadow campaign infrastructures, that the politicians with an eye toward 2024 are informally building around themselves in the event that Trump bows out. But you know how Trump is. He’s very dramatic and likes to leave things hanging until the last minute, so if he decides to run, then obviously all those shadow campaigns will just be completely scuttled and everyone will fall back into line.
What should we be on the lookout for in the next couple of years?
The big enemy that the right is focused on now—more than Nancy Pelosi or A.O.C. or even Joe Biden—is big tech. That is something Republicans can all really agree on: Social media sucks, and Silicon Valley is censoring us. You’ll see that sentiment echoed from the fringe to the swampiest of swamp creatures. So you can expect a continued assault on the primacy of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, not to mention Jeff Bezos, because he’s just so omnipresent in their lives.
It’s important to understand that one of the reasons the Republican Party and the conservative movement have become so supercharged and so angry over the past ten years is because social media gave them a conduit to say whatever the hell they wanted without gatekeeping by mainstream institutions. There was a progression of conservative websites that evolved to cater to an increasingly radicalized readership. Trump recognized the power of the Breitbart machine, and the Republican Party expanded the parameters of their coalition to keep those people in the tent. Now, when Facebook or Twitter starts to place limits on hate speech or disinformation, they view those restrictions as a direct attack on their community and power and values. You really can’t underestimate how alarming that feels to a lot of conservatives.
Is the anti-technology stuff what is feeding the anti-vax sentiment in the Republican base? Because I’m having trouble understanding why people like DeSantis are interested in killing their own supporters.
Again, it’s that fear that there is a more nefarious power ruling over your lives. Maybe the Republican governors who have banned mask mandates are more cynical. But there is a very potent energy that these politicians can tap into. The mask itself has become a visual differentiator. It’s a sign of what you believe in your heart that you put on your face.
That’s it for this week, friends. Remember to subscribe to Tina’s private email here and to Puck here and tune in next week for more swamp content.
Good night, tomorrow will be worse,
Julia
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