Ship of Fools: The Strategic Fear-Mongering of Tucker Carlson

There are passages in Ship of Fools, Tucker Carlson’s 2018 bestselling book, that read like summaries of democratic-socialist talking points. He rails against corporate business practices, laments the co-opting of leftist causes, and points out the hypocrisies of conservatives and neoliberals alike. Unlike some of his Fox News counterparts, he goes into detail describing America’s flaws, and he frequently criticizes Republican politicians.

But despite Carlson’s “reasonable skeptic” persona, Ship of Fools quickly reveals itself to be about as noxious as anything you could purchase this side of a Barnes & Noble. At its core, the book is a thinly-veiled argument for a certain kind of modern white nationalism. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise for anyone who pays much attention to Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox News show that has turned Carlson into the most popular news anchor on television, but it’s still a little shocking to see such a worldview laid out in the form of an easy-to-read New York Times Bestseller. 

As a piece of pure entertainment, Ship of Fools isn’t too bad. Carlson writes a lot like he speaks when he’s on TV; he keeps the sentences short and uses rhetorical questions to keep you thinking and wanting more. There’s a condescending quality to his writerly voice, but it’s easy to fall into his rhythm. Despite plenty of anecdotes and statistics, it’s a light and easy read at under 200 pages. You’ll always know how he feels and you’ll never be confused.

If anything, he lets you in on the book’s “secret” a little too early. The prologue serves as a mini-version of the full book, with Carlson laying out exactly what his argument will be. He evokes Plato’s “ship of fools'' allegory and describes how the country is being run by incompetent elites who have no understanding of real Americans or how a man like Donald Trump could become president. As is common throughout the book, he doesn’t write in terms of democrats and republicans, even writing asserting that “left and right are no longer meaningful categories in America. The rift is between those who benefit from the status quo and those who don’t.” In this prologue, he sums up what he feels is the cause of the country’s downward slope: “Our political leaders ought to be concerned. Instead, they work to make the country even less stable, by encouraging rapid demographic change.” Soon after, he writes that “Immigration is far from the only example” of what’s ailing America, but shifting demographics turns out to be the unifying theme of the book. Regardless of the supposed topic, Carlson always omes back to immigration.

Take the first chapter, “Convergence,’ for example. He spends much of the chapter arguing that democrats no longer do enough to curb the unfettered capitalism of billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. He claims to genuinely miss the old-school bleeding heart liberals who would have wept at the conditions of an Amazon fulfillment center. The democrats and republicans have “converged” in their embrace of markets, he asserts, and the country is worse off for it. This is not exactly an incendiary way to look at the world; most of the woke college leftists that Carlson often derides feel the same way. Some of his arguments are so uncharacteristically tame and left-leaning that you start to wonder where he’s going with this. And then he hits you: “Perhaps in order to inoculate himself against elite criticism, Zuckerberg has immersed himself in fashionable political causes. In 2013, he launched a nonprofit called FWD.us to advocate for mass immigration.” Carlson continues to write about FWD.us, he argues that liberal elites and politicians will let Zuckerberg and his ilk get away with anything as long as they show support for mass immigration.

Carlson believes that changing the demographics of America is the number one goal of those who benefit from the status quo. He prioritizes immigration to such an extent that he’s happy to concede on other traditionally conservative issues. At one point, he enthusiastically sings the praises of Cesar Chavez, a hero to many leftists. Why does he do this? Because Chavez “didn’t support illegal aliens” and “didn’t like immigration at all, generally.” Carlson describes how “Immigration hurt the members of [Chavez’s] union, undercutting their wages and weakening their leverage in negotiations with management.” In just a page or so, Chavez’s use of the slur “webacks” is quoted multiple times; Carlson characterizes Chavez as “blunt” and pragmatic. It’s a clever strategy for Carlson: he doesn’t have to explicitly condone the use of such a slur in a modern context and he doesn’t have to talk in-depth about Chavez’s politics outside of immigration. By focusing on his favorite pet issue, Carlson reduces Chavez to a one-dimensional figure who backs up a nationalist, isolationist view of the country.

This is far from the only time that Carlson breaks from Republican orthodoxy. One chapter finds him writing about unnecessary foreign conflicts and the painful realities of the War on Terror. He comes off as sincere in his renunciation of the Iraq War and his criticism of war hawks in the media, but this anti-interventionism predictably serves to mask Carlson’s chief viewpoint. He criticizes the decision to wage a war on terror while simultaneously welcoming “huge numbers of immigrants from places known for Islamic extremism.” Later, he ends a passage focusing on the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi by noting that “Gaddafi had blocked illegal migration to Europe,” and that now “hundreds of thousands of African migrants have made their way to Europe from Libyan ports.” In his criticism of former colleague Bill Kristol, a fierce early advocate of the War on Terror, he effectively and concisely points out the failings of American foreign policy post-9/11. Then, as he’s wrapping up his section on Kristol, he makes sure to devote a couple of paragraphs to Kristol’s support of immigration. To Carlson, this is the best indicator of Kristol’s stupidity and disconnect from the American people.

Even his isolationism isn’t as simple as not wanting to wage unnecessary wars. In a 2006 recording, he said that Iraq’s “don’t use paper or forks.” In 2008, he was more explicit, calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” incapable of being governed or civilized. This is the same man who recently caught flack for saying that immigrants make America dirtier.
The sudden switch into nationalism after pages of reasoned critique could feel like whiplash, but Carlson is a master at twisting common sense positions such as anti-interventionism into excuses for his racism and contempt for a culturally diverse America.

The final chapters of Ship of Fools suffer because they shift away from addressing populist and economic concerns, instead of focusing on familiar and tired pet issues of the GOP. He calls global warming “abstract” and calls out Leonardo DiCaprio and celebrity environmentalists for flying private jets, hardly a novel or profound criticism at this point. 

His overall argument is that modern environmentalists care more about performative activism and leftist virtue signaling than picking up trash. To Carlson, the climate science consensus is both a conspiracy and a result of mob mentality. Therefore, our environmental duties are simply cleaning up after ourselves and making sure our local rivers aren’t full of litter. He asserts that anything else is unnecessary or harmful, such as wind turbines that kill hundreds of thousands of birds. This is an alluring perspective because it harkens back to a simpler time when the effects of climate change weren’t so immediately apparent and we could focus on our own backyards. Tellingly, Carlson is uninterested and distrustful of “macro” environmentalism except when he informs us that illegal immigrants are responsible for 40 percent of forest fires and environmental damage due to human trafficking.

The environmentalism chapter is embarrassing and willfully ignorant, but Carlson’s chapter on feminism is perhaps his worst. The entire section serves as a greatest hits of right-wing criticisms of feminism and gender equality. Unhappy working women, low male wages, transgender athletes: the gang’s all here! One of his chief concerns is abortion, and his statements on the issue are too cliche to repeat. Predictably, he’s also very concerned about the exploitation of women in the Muslim World, especially as it pertains to immigrants. Referring to genital mutilation and honor killings, he writes “Thanks to mass immigration, these customs have arrived in the United States.” At this late point in the book, it’s hard to feel anything other than boredom reading this. Not only is his reasoning offensive and cynical, but it also doesn’t do enough to separate itself from the same tired talking points repeated by wannabe Islam experts like Sam Harris and Bill Maher.

To fully buy into Carlson’s message on immigration, you have to buy into two key assumptions. The first is that prejudice, a fear of the “other,” and a desire for demographic consistency are inherently present in all humans. The second, and far trickier, is that increased diversity leads to increased racism. He believes that “as America grows more racially diverse, rifts will inevitably open between more groups.” Early in the book, he explains exactly why this would be: “You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace. It disorients them. Over time it makes even the most open-minded people jumpy and hostile and suspicious of one another. It encourages tribalism.” The irony here is that there aren’t many major political voices who encourage tribalism the way that Carlson does. At least as it pertains to those he deems white.

Throughout his career, Carlson has stoked fear in his white audience, speaking and writing about the “disadvantages” that white Americans face. He writes about “blaming” white people for their ancestors and how this shouldn’t be done in a multicultural society, but this is disingenuous. Carlson doesn’t want a multicultural society at all. Not really. Almost anything that shifts the country away from what Carlson knew in childhood is written about as a threat. 

For all his pretend outrage over the rich growing richer, he doesn’t talk much about just how privileged that childhood was, and he certainly doesn’t remind you of his current power and incredible wealth. He consistently attacks elites who preach diversity but live in majority-white neighborhoods. Choosing not to outwardly grapple with why rich neighborhoods in America are overwhelmingly white, Carlson implies that the Clintons and Obamas of the world are choosing where they live based on racial statistics. The underlying logic is that the rich can organize their lives around race while telling everyone else that diversity is a value and they must integrate. But what’s the racial make-up of Tucker Carlson’s neighborhood? And if he truly believes what he says about other elites, then what does that say of where he chooses to live?

Carlson has a habit of telling on himself. His xenophobia and racism aren’t always entirely explicit, but they’re not very well hidden, either. That might be the point. Perhaps the most transparent segment of the book revolves around identity politics and its supposed dominance in the culture. According to Carlson, political elites and minority groups care more about race than merit or individual worth. Bringing up campus politics and affirmative action, he depicts identity politics as being harmful and unproductive. This is the standard conservative stance, but Carlson takes it to its logical extreme when he writes the following:

“In a country where virtually every nonwhite group reaps advantages from being racially conscious and politically organized, how long before someone asks the obvious question: why can’t white people organize and agitate along racial lines, too? People have asked the question before, of course, but so far they’ve been self-discrediting: haters, morons, and charlatans. What happens when someone calm and articulate does it?”

Carlson doesn’t quite dare to outright admit that he is the “someone” asking that question. He doesn’t need to. There’s no doubt that he finds the question to be an important one. He at least believes that it’s capable of being asked by someone “calm and articulate.”

It’s an incendiary paragraph, but Carlson has a built-in defense. He goes on to say that it would be catastrophic if white people decided to “organize and agitate” as a group, explaining that “when white people become another interest group fighting for the spoils, America as we’ve known it will be over.”

Something so loaded and alarming can be hard to absorb, so let’s borrow Carlson’s favorite rhetorical tool and ask some questions:

Why would white people becoming an interest group signal the end of America? How could America’s worth and status hinge on one racial group? Why didn’t America end when Black citizens had to organize along racial lines? How about Hispanics or Muslims? If members of every nonwhite group have to think of themselves in terms of race, what makes white people so special? How important is it that white people stay ‘above” identity politics, unburdened with having to seriously think of race? Going further, how important is it to someone like Tucker Carlson that white people stay “above” other races entirely? It’s very important; the fate of the country depends on it, after all.

Carlson can talk all he wants about a class divide and uncaring CEOs and the bleeding heart liberals of yesteryear, but putting an end to exploitation isn’t his chief concern. If it was, wouldn’t be the biggest name in Fox News. He would speak at least somewhat positively of politicians who foreground exploitation and economic justice. He doesn’t, of course. He recognizes that the two major parties have come together to bolster capitalistic excess, yet he does nothing about it. Instead, he writes books and long monologues about immigration and why diversity isn’t a virtue. Then, he uses phony economic populism to make his isolationism more appealing. His true danger is that he’s one of the only mainstream conservative voices currently admitting that America has problems. They are scary and urgent and tough-to-solve. Funnily enough, most people on both sides of the aisle would agree with Carlson’s identification of these problems. The evil comes in his solutions.