The Fall of Tucker Carlson, and the Making of Candace Owens

04/28/23 • 39 min

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Once a Beltway neoconservative, Tucker Carlson came to embody the angry, forgotten white man—railing at “the élites” and propagating racist conspiracy theories and the lie of the stolen election. “Unlike a lot of his colleagues at Fox News, he made news, he set the agenda,” Kelefa Sanneh, who wrote about Carlson in 2017, says. “People were wondering, What is Tucker going to be saying tonight?” Sanneh joins Andrew Marantz and David Remnick to discuss Carlson’s demise, and what comes next. And Clare Malone reports on Candace Owens, the powerful right-wing influencer and provocateur who’s set her sights on the future of right-wing media—and on a younger and more female audience than that of Fox News.

Previous Episode

The Bipartisan Effort to Rein in Presidential Military Power

Just three days after 9/11, Congress authorized a major expansion of executive power: the President could now wage war against terrorism without prior approval. The resolution was called the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and it passed almost unanimously. Its reauthorization, in 2002, brought our country to war with Iraq, and has been used to deploy American forces all over the world. More than twenty years later, the mood in the country has changed dramatically, and lawmakers in both parties are pushing to roll back the President’s discretion to use force. A bill to revoke the A.U.M.F. passed the Senate 66–30 a few weeks ago, and it is expected to pass the House as well. David Remnick talks with the senators who led that effort—Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, and Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana—and with Representative Barbara Lee of California, who, in 2001, cast the sole dissenting vote in all of Congress.

Plus, David Remnick remembers the beloved cartoonist Ed Koren, a fixture of the magazine for more than half a century.

Next Episode

Harry Belafonte, the Pioneering Artist-Activist

We take it for granted that entertainers can—and probably should—advocate for the causes they believe in, political and otherwise. That wasn’t always the case: at one time, entertainers were supposed to entertain, and little else. Harry Belafonte, who died on April 25th at the age of ninety-six, pioneered the artist-activist approach. One of the most celebrated singers of his era, he had a string of huge hits—“The Banana Boat Song,” “Mama Look a Boo Boo,” “Jamaica Farewell”—while appearing as the rare Black leading man in the movies. At the same time, Belafonte used his platform to influence public opinion. He was a key figure in the civil-rights movement, a confidant of Martin Luther King’s; a generation later, he worked with Nelson Mandela to help bring down apartheid in South Africa. Belafonte joined The New Yorker Radio Hour in 2016, when the staff writer Jelani Cobb visited him at his office in Manhattan.

This segment originally aired September 30, 2016.