Tucker Carlson, Global Export: How One Fired American Host Became Worldwide Clickbait

Tucker Carlson’s Long Goodbye: How One American Broadcaster Became Global Clickbait

From the cafés of Istanbul to the karaoke bars of Seoul, the news that Fox News had sacked its prime-time prince landed with the same collective shrug you give when your flight is delayed again: “Ah yes, the empire is still busy devouring itself.” In the grand tapestry of international affairs—where wars smolder, currencies swoon, and glaciers file their resignation letters—the defenestration of one bow-tied polemicist in midtown Manhattan should register somewhere between a sneeze and a TikTok dance. Yet the world’s media class treated it like the fall of Rome, only with better graphics and worse Latin.

Why does a man who once asked why “we” (meaning the United States, naturally) shouldn’t side with Russia over Ukraine still dominate dinner-party chatter in Berlin bistros? Simple: Tucker Carlson was never merely an American broadcaster. He was an export commodity, like corn syrup or drone strikes, packaged for foreign consumption under the label “Authentic Heartland Grievance.” His nightly monologues—equal parts Chaucer and WWE—were clipped, translated, and weaponized from São Paulo to St. Petersburg by anyone who needed proof that the United States is run by a cabal of Davos-addled gender-studies professors. In Moscow, state TV repackaged him as Exhibit A that the West is terminally decadent; in Beijing, censors let his rants leak through to remind citizens that democracy is basically a bar fight wearing a necktie. Everywhere else, he was the American id with a teleprompter: loud, frightened, and convinced the 1950s could be willed back into existence by yelling at them.

The global implications? Picture a planet where the dominant superpower’s loudest internal critic is simultaneously its most effective external propagandist. That’s a neat trick, like selling the bullet and the bandage in the same infomercial. When Carlson mused that Canada is a “failed state” or that the January 6 rioters were mere sightseers, foreign ministries from Ottawa to Canberra didn’t bother fact-checking; they simply updated their contingency plans. After all, if half of America’s own electorate nods along, why bother trusting the other half with mutual-defense treaties?

Then came the off-ramp. Fox’s parent company, fresh from a $787 million defamation settlement that could have bought every Ukrainian a Javelin and still left change for a round of borscht, decided the liability budget had run dry. The timing was exquisite: two days after settling, the board discovered that even carnival barkers have expiration dates. International markets reacted with the sort of mild amusement usually reserved for a royal wedding mishap: European broadcasters scrambled to book the freshly unemployed oracle, while Kremlin propagandists mourned the loss of their unpaid scriptwriter. Elon Musk offered him a seat on the Twitter Spaces rocket to nowhere, proving that in the attention economy, redundancy is just another word for synergy.

Yet Carlson’s real legacy may be pedagogical. From Jakarta newsrooms to Johannesburg lecture halls, he has become a case study in what happens when a country outsources its political discourse to a reality-TV algorithm. Journalism schools screen his greatest hits the way medical students once studied cadavers: clinically, with gloves on. The takeaway is global and glum: when spectacle replaces argument, the whole planet ends up trapped in the comments section of a dying empire.

Still, one must admire the man’s knack for turning paranoia into profit. Somewhere on a yacht off the Amalfi coast, a Russian oligarch is probably toasting the departed host with a glass of overpriced rosé, murmuring, “To useful idiots everywhere.” And somewhere in a Wisconsin diner, a retiree on fixed income is doing the same with a bottomless coffee refill, convinced that both men are on his side.

The curtain falls; the caravan lumbers on. The world will keep spinning, albeit slightly dizzier, now that its loudest American narrator has been benched. But fear not: nature abhors a vacuum almost as much as cable news abhors silence. Somewhere, a successor is already rehearsing the same apocalypse, only louder and in 4K. In the meantime, the rest of us can savor the brief, blessed hush—a momentary cease-fire in the forever war for attention. Enjoy it while it lasts; the commercials are coming.