Tucker Carlson is in love with America again as he crisscrosses the country on tour. Last night, he played Fort Worth with Roseanne Barr; on Thursday, he’s in Greenville, South Carolina, with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jason Whitlock. Last week, over in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he hosted J.D. Vance. The politician — who is claiming to be a true soda drinker — admitted to Carlson that he is putting up rookie numbers with only three Diet Mountain Dews per week.
On Monday this week, Carlson was dressed in his usual khakis, blazer, and sockless loafers before a packed crowd at the 7,000-person capacity minor-league hockey arena in Reading, Pennsylvania. The former Fox News host who became a conservative powerhouse by discharging hate was talking about all of the beautiful people he was meeting. “I haven’t met a single angry person,” Carlson said, only the “people I grew up with.”
Reading is a small city of charming rowhouses out on the edge of horse-and-buggy country, where two out of three residents now are Spanish-speaking. Built by German immigrants working coal and rail jobs that are long gone, just a decade ago Reading won the award for highest rate of poverty of any small city in America. “There are a bunch of big, substantial brick buildings built over 100 years by people who cared. And to see a town like that dying from lack of care, from lack of love”? Well, Carlson said, that “enrages me.”
The people of southeastern Pennsylvania were excited to see Tucker Carlson. He got a big pop when he came on, and the audience listened attentively to a tangled metaphor about how political leaders should be like parents and how Josh Shapiro and other Pennsylvania elites were “evil” for allowing cities like Reading to turn from “a safe place to a slum in ten years.” As he went on, they got a little impatient waiting for the real star of the night.
Alex Jones, the provocateur founder of the conspiracist network known to uncles everywhere as Infowars, was in the house. In a country where the freedom of expression is applied foremost on a T-shirt, Jones was dominating the apparel game. I counted more tees that said “I Will Eat Your Leftist Ass Like Corn on the Cob” than merch from Carlson, which they were actually selling at the arena.
After a brief and unnoteworthy appearance by far-right activist and white-power enthusiast Jack Posobiec, Jones came out to a roaring crowd, all on their feet with phones in hand. He is big and lumbering and eggheaded with a gray beard at the temple that ombres into black by the time it reaches his chin. I cannot express to you just how much he looks and sounds like a rabid John Goodman. Every single line was an applause line, and the crowd got to the end of Jones’s catchphrases before he did. “If they want a fight,” Jones began, “you better believe they got one!” the crowd yelled back.
Donald Trump, surprisingly, was only mentioned a few times.
The stage was designed for a panel-style talk; three white couches sat against a blood-red curtain. But it soon became clear that the rest of the night would belong to Jones. Once he locked in, howling into the middle distance in front of him, there was no interrupting or restraining him short of a blow dart.
During his own speech earlier, Carlson had derided the force of globalism as an economic blight responsible for tanking heartland towns and making American elites rich off cheap stuff made abroad. Jones, too, obsesses over globalism. As Infowars listeners know, this is more of a spiritual battle of good versus evil. Individual politicians — the Clintons, Obama, Kamala Harris — matter less than the Old Testament struggle faced by hardworking Americans. “We are getting sucked down a vortex into literal hell and we gotta reach up to God and God will take us out of this,” Jones said. “We have forced them out into the open, they are weak, the mask is off, and now the sleeping giant is awakened.”
Carlson, forced into acting as moderator at his own event, threw Jones a tough question: “What’s it like to be vindicated on everything?”
Jones has been in a state of permanent financial crisis since he was ordered nearly two years ago to pay $1.4 billion to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting. Jones had repeatedly claimed that the massacre of children was a false-flag operation to have the U.S. government repeal our Second Amendment rights. His personal assets are currently being liquidated, and the families he defamed are deciding in court how Infowars should be dissolved. None of this was apparent at the live show, where he made new predictions — Diddy is the new Epstein — and played the gay frog hits.
Nor would you know that Tucker Carlson took the hit of his career last spring, when he was fired by Fox News for a myriad of reasons; maybe it was staff mistreatment or the private texts showing he was not just acting racist on TV. After a few months off, he rebounded to some extent, launching his own show on X, then a podcast, then a media network, which now claims to have 400,000 paid subscribers.
His viewership is hard to estimate. His YouTube videos rarely crack a million views, but his podcast is up there in the top-ten most popular podcasts on the Apple charts. Advertisers used to flee his hour on Fox News, particularly after especially racist incidents. Now, Sephora, Kraft, and the ABC Thursday night lineup are paying to reach his audience just days after he had a Hitler apologist on his program.
More revenue streams are pending: After a tiff with Zyn, the nicotine pouch that’s very popular in the manosphere, Carlson is launching his own product, which he says will pack more nicotine per unit than any other on the market. “I don’t even know what I do for a living at this point,” he told J.D. Vance onstage. The answer seems obvious. Podcasts, products marketed to guys, talking tours, a revenue stream reliant entirely on social media? Tucker Carlson is an influencer now.
On Monday, though, Jones had him beat, like the smaller band on the bill that has the better drummer and the more hard-core fans. After an hour or so of rambling about animal-human hybrids and spider goats and the tyranny of life on a prison planet, it was easy to zone out. I followed when the couple to my right made an early break for it. Outside, I saw a white F-150 with two Trump flags, an American flag, and a Gadsden flag in each corner of its truck bed zoom past the botanica and the storefronts with all the Puerto Rican flags on the way out of town.
