Good evening, and welcome back to In The Room. Tonight, news and notes on Tucker Carlson’s fundraising plan and Fox’s new primetime strategy.

The eight remaining members of the Tucker Carlson Tonight team were told Monday that they would need to leave by mid-July, with the option to reapply for new positions. Such an outcome doesn’t seem terribly likely, of course. I am told that the vast majority of these employees will instead reunite with Tucker, who is currently posting Twitter videos from his barn in Maine, with bigger media ambitions afoot.

Fox’s effort to make a clean break from Tucker is understandable, especially given their ongoing legal battle with their former prime-time star. Earlier this month, Fox accused Tucker of breaching his contract by launching the Twitter show. Tucker’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, returned fire by accusing the company of trying to deny the pundit his freedom of speech—an obvious misappropriation of the First Amendment, but whatever. (Freedman is a willing and occasionally excellent practitioner of the media arts.)

In any event, the reputational battle lines were drawn long beforehand, from the moment the Murdochs decided that there was a limit to how much rogue behavior they were willing to tolerate from a nativist, conspiratorial, defamation-adjacent modern-day Father Coughlin with a soft spot for Putin, even if he did rate. Tucker’s subsequent decision to compete with the network by trying to outflank it on the right, via Elon, all but necessitated Fox’s dissolution of his remaining loyalists.

Tucker’s prospects at Twitter remain an open question. His inconsistent, ten-minute video monologues ostensibly play to audiences in the tens of millions but lack an obvious monetization strategy. Even if Elon-buddy David Sacks has protested on the platform that his view count reaches nine-figures, CPMs are preposterously lower in digital media, and Twitter has yet to command the sort of premium advertising that newly appointed C.E.O. Linda Yaccarino fantasizes about. (For a grim look at the company’s debt picture, read my partner Bill Cohan’s latest piece, which is making the rounds on Wall Street.) It’s increasingly possible that the Twitter show is a top-of-funnel play for other things Tucker may soon have cooking.

In fact, I am told he is raising capital to launch a new company that may yet prove more influential. He’ll certainly benefit from an incongruous number of ultra wealthy conservative media investors and a scant (though growing) number of opportunities, as Glenn Beck and the tandem of Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing have demonstrated. A decade ago, the Mercers seemed like lone wolves in their patronage of Breitbart. These days, conservative mediacos are popping up more rampantly, as capital finds opportunities and the conversation moves further and further to the fringes.

Tucker, the movement’s biggest star in a generation, may be able to test the boundaries. It will certainly represent the latest iteration, for better or worse, in the creator economy. And while it might sound slightly insane, given the differences in their politics and audiences, Tucker’s new media play might—if executed adroitly—serve as a paradigm for a generation of TV news personalities with huge followings and fandoms who remain marooned to their desks amid shrinking audiences. Fox will obviously be paying breathless attention to his developments, despite protestations to the contrary, but so will executives and CNN and MSNBC.

Fox believes they can reverse the slide with their new primetime lineup, which will go into effect July 17 and feature Watters at 8 p.m., Hannity at 9 p.m., and Greg Gutfeld at 10 p.m. And, despite the irreversible loss of some Tuckerites, there’s good reason to believe that this slate of smug hippy-punchers will be appealing enough to Fox’s septuagenarian and octogenarian base, and that the talent can draft off the tailwinds of a competitive Republican primary cycle and the right’s anti-Biden fervor to restore ratings.

After all, Fox has always shown an incredible knack for in-house talent development, and the promotion of Watters (who got his start as Bill O’Reilly’s lib-baiting man on the street) and Gutfeld (who once hosted the overnight Red Eye show) are testament to their internal incubation and inculcation factory. Watters has proven quite capable of stoking right-wing grievances and anti-liberal suspicions in a more legally responsible fashion than his predecessor. Gutfeld’s cringey, quasi-comedic trolling of liberals now outrates Fallon and Kimmel.

Last week, I noted that Fox’s post-Tucker strategy would, in many ways, be a return to form for the network, with Bret Baier & Co. providing the patina of hard news while these prime-time stars massaged the right-wing erogenous zones without drifting too far into the conspiratorial fever swamps. As The New York Times noted this week in a lengthy profile of Gutfeld, “merry trolling” and “insult conservatism” will now become “an institutional voice for the next generation” of Fox News viewers. (Fittingly, all three men seemed to be smirking in the promotional material.) And indeed, that may be just enough to offset the nascent challengers on the right—Tucker, Newsmax, etcetera—for the remainder of linear television’s claim on American culture and politics.