Tucker Carlson
Fox News host (fired April 2023); producer of Tucker Carlson Originals documentary series; major platform amplifier for the New Right and Hard Right; his “The End of Men” documentary (October 5, 2022) marked a tipping point in the New Right’s embrace of Manosphere, Great Replacement theory, and Hard Right extremism
Who He Is
Tucker Carlson was the most-watched cable news host in America during his tenure at Fox News (2016–2023), where his show Tucker Carlson Tonight served as the primary TV platform for New Right ideas. His role in the New Right ecosystem was to translate intellectual material developed by thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, Christopher Rufo, Orbán admirers, and Manosphere figures into a mass-audience primetime format.
He was fired by Fox News in April 2023 under circumstances that remain publicly unclear (Fox had just settled the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit for $787 million; internal communications revealed during that litigation showed Carlson’s private views about Trump that contradicted his on-air persona).
”The End of Men” (October 5, 2022)
Carlson produced a 34-minute documentary for the Tucker Carlson Originals series on Fox Nation, titled “The End of Men.” It aired October 5, 2022.
The documentary’s opening montage juxtaposed:
- JFK’s 1962 speech about physical fitness (“A country is, in a way, as strong as its citizens”)
- A muscular man throwing a spear at dawn
- Young men exercising in what appears to be the 1950s
- Biden stumbling on an airplane stairway
- Chemical fertilizer equipment
- A shirtless heavyset Black man; a heavyset white man
- Polluted wastewater, garbage, dead fish
- Senate Democrats (Tim Kaine, Chris Van Hollen, Martin Heinrich, Michael Bennet) masked and kneeling in Emancipation Hall on June 4, 2020 — a moment of silence for George Floyd
- A mangled (white, male) body lying on pavement at a protest
Superimposed throughout: “HARD TIMES MADE STRONG MEN / STRONG MEN MADE GOOD TIMES / GOOD TIMES MADE WEAK MEN / WEAK MEN MADE HARD TIMES”
The documentary’s tagline: “Testosterone levels in American men are collapsing. Fertility is in decline. Is this the end of men?”
Trigger warning attached to the program: “This program contains high levels of toxic masculinity, high levels of testosterone, bro science and testicle tanning, which may be triggering to some viewers. Discretion is advised.”
The documentary included a scene of a man doing “infrared ball tanning” at dawn — which was widely mocked in the mainstream media even before the documentary aired.
Raw Egg Nationalist: The Documentary’s Star Extremist
Carlson introduced Raw Egg Nationalist (REN) — an anonymous Hard Right Twitter/X figure — as the “spiritual leader” of the “bro scientists.” REN gave a long monologue identifying the enemy:
“The enemy today is what I like to call soy globalism. The globalist aim is to destroy nations and local communities. And they do this by isolating communities and sickening them through food, and also through so-called medicine, and all the dreadful chemicals we’re exposed to on a daily basis. The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed and isolated, the better to control you and to milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you. That’s soy globalism in a nutshell. Own nothing, live in the pod, eat the soy.”
REN’s monologue invoked “The Great Reset” — the name of a Klaus Schwab/World Economic Forum economic recovery initiative that became fodder for conspiracists — as a framing device.
What Carlson did not disclose, and REN’s American Mind byline didn’t mention: REN published some of his work with Antelope Hill Publishing, a small fascist publishing house in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that publishes Joseph Goebbels’s novel Michael, Testament of a Russian Fascist, and Richard Walther Darré’s A New Nobility of Blood and Soil (described on Antelope Hill’s website as “foundational to the National Socialist worldview”). A Daily Beast article called Antelope Hill “openly fascist.” On Hitler’s birthday (April 20, 2022), Antelope Hill offered a discount on all books and an even bigger discount on Hitler’s speeches, with the code “birthday boy.”
Field: this is “the easygoing sort of context collapse and selective disclosure that makes ‘plausible deniability’ so easy for the far right, and the normalization of genuine extremism difficult to expose.”
Field had written about REN for The Bulwark (April 2022), after REN published “The Decline Is Real” in the Claremont Institute’s American Mind — making many of the same arguments about testosterone that Carlson featured.
Significance
Field reads “The End of Men” as a snapshot of a tipping point: the moment the more extremist, illiberal elements of the New Right had become mainstream and dominant among GOP leadership. The documentary brought together:
- Manosphere ideology (testosterone, masculinity crisis, “strong men” cycles)
- Implicit racial politics (the montage’s juxtaposition of images)
- Great Replacement theory (fertility anxiety linked to demographic change)
- 2020 election denialism (Democrats as enemies, symbols of weakness and defeat)
This convergence — Hard Right extremists meeting the mainstream GOP media apparatus — marks the point at which the New Right ceased to be a fringe intellectual project and became the dominant mode of Republican politics.
Field’s Chapter 11 surveys this period (the Biden years through Trump’s 2024 nomination), tracing how the failure to elevate Ron DeSantis as an alternative to Trump revealed the limits of the New Right as a coherent movement — ultimately making them “all-in with some of the most brazenly destructive and delusional forces in the country.”
Cross-References
- Postliberalism — the intellectual current Carlson’s platform helped popularize
- Christopher Rufo — appeared on Carlson’s show September 1, 2020 (the Tucker appearance that launched the anti-CRT campaign)
- Ron DeSantis — the New Right’s preferred alternative to Trump whom the movement failed to elevate
- Hard Right — the extremist current Carlson’s documentary embraced
- Great Replacement Theory — one of the ideological currents in the documentary’s DNA
- Manosphere — the masculinity-crisis ideology Carlson amplified