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b'Formerly a Beltway neoconservative, Tucker Carlson came to embody a populist figure\\u2014the angry, forgotten-feeling white man, an archetype that Carlson inherited from Bill O\\u2019Reilly when he took over Fox News\\u2019s coveted eight-o\\u2019clock slot. \\u201cUnlike a lot of his colleagues at Fox News, he made news, he set the agenda,\\u201d Kelefa Sanneh, who\\xa0profiled Carlson in 2017, says. \\u201cPeople were wondering, What is Tucker going to be saying tonight?\\u201d But though Carlson sometimes challenged Donald Trump more than other colleagues at Fox did, he overtly embraced white nationalism. He trumpeted especially the \\u201cgreat replacement\\u201d conspiracy theory, which has inspired racist mass killings. He lavished attention on authoritarian, anti-democratic rulers like Viktor Orb\\xe1n, of Hungary, and Nayib Bukele, of El Salvador. \\u201cOne of the things a very talented demagogue like Tucker Carlson can do is put you on the back foot if you\\u2019re critiquing him,\\u201d\\xa0Andrew Marantz, who covers extremist politics, notes, \\u201cnever quite coming out and saying \\u2018the thing\\u2019 but coming as close as possible to saying it. So that if you\\u2019re then in the position of critiquing them, you . . . sound hysterical.\\u201d\\xa0It\\u2019s unclear whether Carlson\\u2019s extremist politics contributed to his ouster from Fox. His e-mails and text messages, disclosed in Fox\\u2019s legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems, made plain that his cynicism is even larger than his ego or his ratings: in private, he hated Trump \\u201cpassionately\\u201d and talked about women in terms that may cause further legal troubles for Fox. Even if Carlson initially adopted extremism cynically, as a matter of entertainment business, Sanneh says that \\u201cmost of us don\\u2019t love living with that kind of cognitive dissonance. Most of us, over time, find ways to convince ourselves that the things we\\u2019re saying we really believe in.\\u201d'