Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

Today, I’m excited to finally, finally, bring you the first excerpt of my upcoming memoir, The MAGA Diaries, out later this month. It’s a memoir that finally answers the two questions I always get asked as a reporter: How did you know the MAGA movement was rising? And then, inevitably, when they learn about my background in conservative activist circles: Wait, whywere you there back then?! The answer is complicated, and the journey takes a lot of twists and turns—but trust me, I’m a very entertaining narrator and tour guide. (You can preorder here.)

This excerpt goes into one of those early, defining relationships: meeting Tucker Carlson as a star-struck college graduate in 2011, when I interviewed him for a job… and then interviewing him again 11 years later, at the apex of his Fox career, from across the political-media divide. All that, below the fold.

But first…. a few scoops from around town, from Teddy Schleifer on the Silicon Valley beat, Abby Livingston on the Hill, and myself…

• Haley’s money hunt: Nikki Haley is organizing at least eleven high-dollar fundraisers for the furious campaign sprint after New Hampshire, according to invitations I’ve obtained. On Jan. 29 and Jan. 30, Haley will head to Wall Street for four events in New York City, including one stacked with big names: Cliff Asness, Campbell Brown, Annie Dickerson, Stanley Druckenmiller, Dan Lufkin, Henry Kravis, Ken Mehlman, Ken Langone, and more. Then, she’s off to Florida on Jan. 31 for three events in Miami and Palm Beach. Hosts there include billionaire hedge fund manager Dan Och and real-estate legend Barry Sternlicht. Finally, around the time of the Nevada election, assuming she hasn’t dropped out by then, Haley will head west with four planned fundraisers in California on Feb. 6 and Feb. 7, per invites I’ve seen. Hosts include Tim Draper in the Bay Area and megadonor Ron Simon in the O.C. I’ve tweeted all the invites (here, here, and here) if you want to know more about each and every host. —Teddy Schleifer

• Vivek’s pivot: It’s never a bad idea to bash the media in order to woo the MAGA base, especially if you’re Vivek Ramaswamy and CNN has just announced that you didn’t qualify for the latest G.O.P. debate. On Tuesday, the fourth-place presidential candidate went on a Twitter/X tirade enumerating the ways that he’d been wronged by the network and announcing he would be taping a podcast with hard-right personality Tim Pool instead—a creative alternative, but a poor replacement for his bombastic debate stage fights with Haley and snarky swipes at Christie and DeSantis. (Donald Trump had already taken the only other viable counter-programming slot: a town hall-style interview with Fox News.)

  And yet, there’s something to be said for sitting down with Pool, whose show is a regular stop for MAGA influencers and hardliners. Alas, however, it isn’t really a platform beloved by Midwestern caucus voters. “If it was a debate two months ago, I don't think almost any Iowans would have tuned in to CNN,” a Republican operative in Iowa told me. “But it’s five days before the caucus, when people are going to be making up their minds. I mean, realistically, there’s a lot of people who tune in to that debate just to go and get, like, a final ‘Okay.’ A good debate for somebody could move points big time.” It seems that somebody won’t be Ramaswamy. —Tina Nguyen

• Sign of the Times: The House Democratic leadership-aligned House Majority PAC released a new ad this morning showing Tom Suozzi, who’s locked in a special election contest with Republican Mazi Pilip for George Santos’s old seat, palling around with former Republican Rep. Peter King—an apparent attempt to underscore Suozzi’s cross-partisan posture on immigration. (The pair co-authored a 2019 Times op-ed proposing an immigration deal when they were neighboring congressmen.)

  That’s not a surprise: Among non-border states, New York has been front-and-center in the immigration debate, given that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has bussed enough migrants to NYC to overwhelm city services. As my colleague Tara Palmeri reported months ago, this crisis could make or break hometown Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s chances of becoming speaker next year. New York congressional maps haven’t yet been released this cycle, but there are likely to be several competitive seats in the metropolitan region.

• Garden State Fundraising Blooms: New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim raised an impressive $1.75 million in the third quarter last year, per The New Jersey Globe, for his Senate bid. At times, it’s easy to forget there is actually an incumbent up for reelection in this race—Bob Menendez— because he keeps getting indicted.

  With Kim putting up such a strong number, there may be some intrigue surrounding Menendez’s January F.E.C. report, which will detail his first full fundraising quarter following his most recent indictment (there have been several). We’ll discover how much the spigots have dried up amid his legal trouble and how much his campaign spent on legal fees. Expectations will also be high for the first campaign finance report from New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy, also running to oust Menendez: The Garden State has one of the most powerful governors in the country, and it’s very New Jersey to leverage that power.

• Retirement: As expected, another House retirement dropped during the congressional recess: G.O.P. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri. This positions French Hill of Arkansas to likely succeed the retiring chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Patrick McHenry. There are still many, many state candidate filing deadlines ahead, which means the list of retirements is likely to grow. The next few delegations to watch are: Utah, (Jan. 8), Mississippi (Jan. 12), Indiana (Feb. 9), Pennsylvania (Feb. 13), Nebraska (Feb. 15), and West Virginia (Jan. 27).

I hadn’t known that he would be speaking until I saw the program. In fact, I was surprised that he’d even set foot in Washington: Tucker had notoriously fled D.C. in the summer of 2020, amid Covid restrictions and racial justice protests, and now split his time between his summer house in Maine and his winter house in Florida, vowing never to live in an urban area again. He’d even convinced Fox News to build him a permanent studio in both locations.

Briefly, I thought it over. On the one hand, it would be fascinating to see Tucker in person—we had not met up since 2016, long before he became a Fox primetime host. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be speaking for about five hours, and as a credentialed member of the press, I would only be allowed in the ballroom for 30 minutes just to watch his remarks, before being politely escorted out. The likelihood of saying hi to Tucker was slim. My apartment was 45 minutes away by car. And the next day was my birthday.

Crabbiness won out, as well as the need for a nap. Screw it, I’m going home, I thought, walking past several equally tired Heritage conference attendees wolfing down sandwiches and sushi, unaware that this was the weekend Tucker and Fox News would finally, dramatically break up.

At first, no one knew whether it was something he’d said at the Heritage dinner that set off the Murdoch family, or if it was the ongoing fallout from Fox’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Or if, perhaps, there had been some sudden, Succession-esque boardroom drama. All they knew was that on Monday morning, without warning, Tucker Carlson had been axed. Although I’d known him for years, I found out via a New York Times push alert in the parking lot of my allergy doctor, at the same time that everybody else did.

“BRO,” I texted him. “WHAT.” He didn’t respond.

There was something immediately familiar about the place, as if Tucker had teleported the office of a New England prep school headmaster into a bleak office building as a prank. Tucker himself was wearing a pink oxford button-down and chinos, sans bow tie—the very embodiment of the magazine feature writer I dreamed of becoming.

Long before he became a cable news figure—and even while he was on CNN and MSNBC—Tucker was churning out features for Esquire, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, thousands and thousands of three-dollar-per-word assignments. The legendary editor Tina Brown, who’d run Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, had brought him on to write for her latest venture, Talk. He had coasted through the skies of Liberia on a rickety prop plane with Al Sharpton; he had been a fly on the wall next to George W. Bush during his first campaign, so good at his job that he could get the future president to let his guard down enough to make a mocking imitation of a woman on death row, begging for clemency. He had written odes to the ingenuity of the potato cannon for a print issue of GQ. And he had sat at bars, long after he became sober, scribbling slice-of-life articles about the Palm’s long-time maître’d’ for The New York Times.

He was, in short, exactly the sort of boss and mentor I had been looking for, after graduating from Claremont McKenna and its conservative media training camp: a professional adventurer and hilarious establishment-hater, wrapped in WASP decorations. He hired me, sans any experience, as a tech reporter.

The Caller, in those days, was a sort of early-aughts amalgam of National Review Online, Buzzfeed, and Animal House. Whenever Tucker emerged from his office, there was a certain level of gravitas that swept into the Caller newsroom with him, such that we almost felt like we were working at a print magazine, or at least someplace without a traffic needle ticker. It was the place where people rolled their eyes that the slide shows of supermodels in bikinis were getting more traffic than a deeply reported story on the Obama administration’s latest issues, but clicks were clicks and ad revenue was ad revenue, so more slide shows it was.

But regardless of the churn, if you were a politics reporter at The Daily Caller between 2010 and 2012, you probably had the time of your life. We were part of a fratty camaraderie of journalists within the creaky wreckage of IKEA furniture and scrawled jokes on whiteboards, whose libertarian-to-right-leaning ideology was carefully cultivated as a way to keep ourselves honest, and to help us find stories that our peers at other outlets wouldn’t. We developed a thrill for pissing off Obama officials and getting into Twitter fights, as well as a taste for whiskey and cigars. We didn’t fully understand then that being a journalist at an institution described as a “right-leaning outlet” would, with exceedingly few exceptions, condemn us to what my colleague Matt Lewis called the conservative media ghetto.

In those early days, of course, the Caller had pitched itself as a sort of conservative alternative to The Huffington Post. As an exclusively digital operation, the Caller also hoped to be more nimble, untethered from the plodding process of print journalism, and ostensibly financially secure: more like Talk or The Weekly Standard than a Drudge Report-style news aggregator, or Andrew Breitbart’s all-caps scream machine.

At the time, Tucker seemed committed to it. After all, he’d been famously booed a few years earlier at the Conservative Political Action Conference when he suggested something audacious: that the right needed its own version of The New York Times—something that may have reflected a conservative view of the world, but one that was aggressively facts-first. “The New York Times is a liberal paper, [but] it’s also a paper that cares about whether they spell people’s names right; it’s a paper that cares about accuracy,” he said at the time. “Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions.” The latter part of the quote didn’t matter to the crowd—they just heard New York Times and that set them off—but it was enough for him to get $3 million from a wealthy investor and launch his dream media property.

But then, at some point in the summer of 2020, he sold his house in Northwest D.C. and left his fellow Coastal Elites for good. He began filming his Fox News show exclusively from deepest MAGA Country, in rural Maine. His politics got meaner, channeling the kind of stuff that I’d read on white nationalist forums and heard from the most die-hard people at Trump rallies. My friends, family, and everyone I knew who existed outside of the media loved him. And so did the Fox audience: At one point, during the summer of 2020, Tucker was breaking records as the highest-rated program in cable news history.

I wasn’t on the Tucker love/hate spectrum, myself, but as someone who’d worked for him and then moved on to more “mainstream” political reporting jobs at Vanity Fair, Politico and then Puck, I was simply fascinated with his metamorphosis. I was also working to reconnect with Tucker, after his self-imposed exile, to interview him for my book. I had hoped to catch him in Washington, in the summer of 2022, when I saw he was scheduled to be on a panel with Semafor’s Ben Smith, only to discover that he’d opted to Zoom in from what appeared to be his walk-in-closet, in Maine. The Semafor interview was a bit of a train wreck, for Smith, and also exemplified the difficulty of pinning down Carlson’s far-right, but often cryptic, views on race. When Smith challenged him on popularizing the white nationalist “language of replacement theory,” Carlson fired back: “This is why you’re considered, correctly, a propagandist and not a journalist.” Then he laughed.

Later that month, when I finally managed to get Tucker on the phone, I asked him about their back-and-forth. The framing of Smith’s question, it seemed to me, was almost comically broad, designed to get a rise out of Carlson and generate headlines rather than elicit a thoughtful response. So I tried another tack: I asked him, what is a white nationalist to you?

“I literally have no fucking idea,” he said, the exasperation clear in his voice. “No one’s ever explained it to me. I assume, because it’s nationalism—I mean, the word nationalism suggests a country—it’s people who want an all-white country and they just want to expel everyone who’s not white from the country? . . . I have kind of like very old-fashioned liberal views on race, like Dr. Seuss views—‘we’re all the same underneath our skin and all that,’ which is actually my real view, which I’ve explained about a thousand times in public.”

It was the sort of answer that got more complicated when Carlson declared himself “strongly for the Western civilization,” presumably as opposed to whatever other cultures or civilizations were fighting for space in the American melting pot. “You know, I’m a product of Western civilization,” he continued. “And I think I have the right to want to continue it. . . . [I]f you said to a Nigerian, you know, how far would you go to protect African civilization, he’d be like, what wouldn’t you do?”

As we caught up, I observed the similarities between the Tucker who had fled the establishment oasis of Washington—who swore to me that he would never set foot in any city again, if he could help it—and the Tucker I’d met 11 years ago, with his ability to nurse a grudge or craft a withering epithet: Ben “Reptile” Smith, Arianna “Narcissistic Rich Lady” Huffington, Bill “Never a Genius” Kristol, and so on. It was a talent befitting a former magazine writer turned pundit. (In the days of print magazines, the withering bon mot was the coin of the realm.)

But I also noted a new depth of hostility toward the news industry that had made him. Tucker, in this way, was not so different from the majority of Americans who have disengaged from mainstream media, whether from lack of interest or out of spite. I’d read a poll earlier that week from Gallup with alarming statistics: Only 16 percent of Americans trusted print media. Only 11 percent trusted television news.

I was particularly curious about how Carlson, a journalist from the print era, who’d flirted with digital, and now lived on cable, viewed the modern flow of information. After all, he’d been the one who suggested that the right needed its own version of The New York Times, back in 2005. Had the right met that challenge and followed the trajectory he had hoped?

He paused briefly to greet a neighbor in his tiny town. “I don’t know how interested in conservative journalism I am anymore, but not very,” he went on. “What I’m interested in is freethinking, open-minded journalism. And, to me, it’s just super simple.” What he hated: sites like The Daily Beast, where Andrew Kirell, my old Mediaite colleague and fellow escapee from libertarian journalism hell, was now an editor. “If the State Department says, ‘Well, Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people,’ I think a journalist would say, ‘Okay, that sounds bad. Show me the evidence that proves that he did that,’” Tucker said. “The Daily Beast, rather than sort of running that story down, will find like the three people—in that specific case, one person, me—who questioned the story and asked for real evidence, and then denounce that person for being skeptical of whatever the official story is.” What he liked: “Anyone who doesn’t do that.” That seemed broad, so I prodded. “I definitely don’t think it’s a matter of Republican versus Democrat or left versus right,” he insisted.

“Or, like, conservative media versus MSM?”

“No! I don’t care about that! I read The Grayzone every day. Do you know what that is?”

“No.” I truly didn’t.

“It’s like some forbidden hard-left website run by Max Blumenthal and his wife or his partner, who are just absolutely wonderful people. And they have a different foreign policy perspective.”

Either Tucker had evolved to a new level of information diet, or this was the way that everyone outside the Times readership consumed the news, and I was panting in the distance, trying to catch up. And I thought I was good at this. “Wait, so what other sites are you reading besides that? Like what’s in your daily information diet?”

“I do most of my reading, honestly, based on texts that I get. I do most of my communicating by text and I don’t email.”

I let him spin through another rant about Arianna Huffington (“Totally deep into frivolous bullshit . . . No one wants to hear your boring self-care lectures anymore”); the sanctification of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (“No one asked any questions. Zelensky was George Washington. If you don’t agree, you’re for Putin.”); and his wealthy liberal neighbors in D.C. hanging Black Lives Matter signs in their windows (“It was only about ‘I’m a good person.’ It was almost like going to SoulCycle for them”).

But underneath his barbs and quips and grudges was a palpable, roiling anger against his former industry colleagues, their brains rotted by the incentive structure of the iPhone and the internet, and who’d turned him off the Times and toward… Grayzone. “All the little feature pieces, all the soft feature pieces, are about the same class of people,” he seethed. “This tiny class of people—and they’re tiny; globally, it’s like a hundredth of a percent [who] are affluent, well-educated, urban dwellers with Twitter accounts in American cities. That’s just a sliver of the world population. And yet, almost all media caters to them. And even if I didn’t hate them—comma, which I do, comma—I would still find it totally disproportionate. I really would. I really, really would. Because it is.”

Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman, an old colleague of mine from the Hive and an author who’d written the definitive book about the network’s founding, had reported several notably different theories floating around Fox’s leadership: one claimed that Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old chairman of the parent company News Corp, had recently broken off his engagement to his would-be fifth wife, Ann Lesley Smith, after she had declared Tucker a “messenger from God” and was seemingly infatuated with him during a dinner back in March. The firing, this theory went, was driven by jealousy. A further theory claimed that when Murdoch watched Tucker’s speech at the Heritage dinner, he was immediately reminded of his fiancée’s messianic obsession with Tucker, and was “freak[ed]” out by the “spiritual talk,” as one source told Sherman. I was initially dubious: Murdoch had run Fox freaking News for decades as a mouthpiece for conservatism, which required a high tolerance for even the wackiest segments of American Christianity.

But as I went through Tucker’s speech again, I could indeed envision someone in Fox leadership freaking out over it: a Christianity-laced sermon implying that the forces of the left were spiritually evil, accelerating the destabilization and possible end of Western civilization itself. Loving Jesus was one thing; invoking theology to wage a holy war on the foundations of government was not. Here was Tucker in his own words:

• When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history, decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, “Hey, let’s tear it down,” what you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.

• . . . And I’ll stop with this. I’ll put it in nonpolitical or rather nonspecific theological terms, and just say, if you want to know what’s evil and what’s good, what are the characteristics of those?

• And by the way, I think the Athenians would’ve agreed with this. This is not necessarily just a Christian notion, this is kind of a, I would say, widely agreed-upon understanding of good and evil. What are its products? What do these two conditions produce?

• Well, I mean, good is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict, cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness. It’s true. It is.

• And evil is characterized by their opposites. Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth. So, if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you’re really advocating for is evil. That’s just true. I’m not calling for religious war. Far from it. I’m merely calling for an acknowledgment of what we’re watching . . .

I immediately ran into a local coffee shop with my laptop, sending messages to sources and scouring Twitter for clues, my keyboard loudly clacking away to the annoyance of the other patrons. And in the back of my mind, as I tapped away like a woman possessed, was an odd sense of irony mixed with wonder mixed with bafflement.

All of my universes had started to concentrate down into one man—the man I used to dream of being. Yet our paths had diverged so wildly, looping past each other and into our opposing worlds. He was now the right-wing internet creator, brash and bold and twisting the world by the sheer force of his personality, with the message that the conservative movement had wanted to push for decades. I was now the magazine writer, observing the world in the background, as neutral as I possibly could be.