The rise of the rock-star conservative

When Tucker Carlson took his live show to Hershey, Pennsylvania, earlier this month, accompanied by GOP vice presidential nominee Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a local reporter who covered the event wrote that the arena where the men spoke was “more accustomed to hosting hockey games and rock concerts — not political theater.”
Sure enough, rapper Post Malone had performed the previous night at the 10,500-seat Giant Center, and it’s the home of the Hersey Bears Hockey Club.
But this wasn’t a case in which you could say one of these things is not like the other. Carlson’s live tour had a distinctive rock-star vibe to it, with music, cheering crowds and even people tailgating before the show and holding up lights in the darkened arena. All that was missing was a live band.
Welcome to the age of the rock-star conservative, best described — with apologies to Glenn Beck — as the fusion of entertainment and politics.
It is an American tradition that feels modern, the fulfillment of the late social critic Neil Postman’s vision of Americans “amusing themselves to death,” but in fact, this sort of tour dates to the 19th century. Then, there were parades and outdoor lectures related to politics, many organized by James Redpath, a Republican and abolitionist who was said to have “organized speech into a mercantile staple” by arranging lecture tours of electrifying speakers such as Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain.
While some wring their hands about political discourse accompanied by merch and advertisements, others, such as Liesbet van Zoonen writing in “Entertaining the Citizen,” have argued that “politainment” can increase civic knowledge and engagement.
But it’s mainly doing so on one side of the political spectrum — the right.
Tucker Carlson’s live tour, which concluded Sept. 28 in Jacksonville, Florida, with Donald Trump Jr. as a guest, followed a nationwide tour earlier this year by Jordan Peterson. (Carlson has also done shows this year in Australia.) Glenn Beck has told the Deseret News that he’s planning a road tour in 2025. Such events, which can fetch upwards of $200 for a ticket, can be lucrative for conservative commentators, just as they are for touring bands.
“Like musicians, there’s a lot of money to be made with live touring. That’s how musicians actually make their money these days,” said Jeffrey P. Jones, professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia. “It doesn’t surprise me that folks who create a following online take that live.”
While many of Carlson’s shows were touted as sellouts, it’s unclear how many people paid to see him. It’s safe to say that he didn’t draw the crowds of the record-breaking country singer George Strait. And the live audiences didn’t approach the numbers that Carlson attracts on social media, or in his previous life on Fox News, where his was the top-rated show among the most desirable demographics.
But in terms of selling books or merch — or a message — it’s well worth Carlson’s time to go on the road, where he’s not so much inventing a new way of doing politics as adding bells and whistles to strategies employed in the past. In fact, you can plot the path from the early days of Carlson’s career, sparring on “Crossfire” before a live audience, to the live shows of Rush Limbaugh and Beck — and ultimately end up at a Donald Trump rally.
In Carlson’s show in Salt Lake City Sept. 7, he was joined by Beck, who has also filled arenas and auditoriums on multiple tours, including the “Bold and Fresh” tour he did with Bill O’Reilly in 2010.
Jones was living in Norfolk, Virginia, at the time, and recalls seeing the sign for Beck and O’Reilly and thinking how odd the pairings were. “One day, it’s the Black Keys; the next day, it’s two political commentators,” he said.
As HuffPost reported that year, the tour was promoted as “an event that makes professional wrestling seem like a night at the opera. …. You’ll hear from Bill, you’ll hear from Glenn, and then they’ll take the stage together. What happens then? Heaven only knows, but one thing is for sure — you’ll want to see it with your very own eyes.”
Live events that featured political discourse certainly weren’t new. William F. Buckley Jr. used to take his show “Firing Line” on the road, and Margaret Hoover does so in the show’s latest iteration. And one of Carlson’s pre-Fox jobs, the political TV show “Crossfire,” was, for a time, filmed in front of a live audience at George Washington University.
But the main antecedent of “Bold and Fresh” and other contemporary political tours was Rush Limbaugh’s “Rush to Excellence” in the 1980s and 1990s. As the late broadcaster explained it in 2018, “If you’ve seen a Trump rally, that’s what the Rush to Excellence tour was.”
Limbaugh, who died in 2021 at age 70, said that in the early days of his show, when few people believed that a national political talk show would succeed, he would do live appearances in every city that added his show.
“I did that 48 weekends a year for the first two years to cement a relationship with the stations that took the show and to cement a bond with the audience,” Limbaugh said on his show in 2018. “I was stunned at how many people showed up. It’d be 5,000. If the place held 10,000, that’s how many showed up. I would do an hour and a half, sometimes two hours, with just some notes to remind me of things I wanted to say. That’s why when Trump started his rallies, I knew exactly what was going on.”
In his appearances, Limbaugh was promoting himself and conservatism generally, not a political candidate, but he was also building community and trust. In their live appearances, Carlson, Peterson and their contemporaries are doing the same — even though their critics see it much more cynically.
“Tucker Carlson is filling arenas, but does he have anything to say?” The Washington Post asked in a headline that made clear the writer thought the answer was “no.” The Post’s article went on to describe the Carlson tour as “a bit like a 1960s variety show” with “anti-woke schtick,” and derided guests Beck, Dan Bongino and Megyn Kelly as “Fox castoffs” despite their post-Fox success.
Rolling Stone was even more savage, calling the tour “Tucker Carlson’s Traveling Conspiracy Show.”
Some of Carlson’s guests, admittedly, were not mainstream and made even some conservatives uncomfortable with their inclusion. Jones, the University of Georgia professor, dubbed Carlson’s guest list a “gallery of rogues” — his guests included Alex Jones, Roseanne Barr and Russell Brand, all of whom have become something of cultural pariahs, for varying reasons.
But each guest on the list played into a theme of the tours, which is that the mainstream media isn’t telling the truth — about anything. That’s what Beck and O’Reilly were saying even back in 2010. Per O’Reilly, who worked for Fox News then (he was let go in 2017 after reports of sexual harassment, which he denied), “We are not encouraging press coverage of the tour because both Beck and I know that in a two-hour presentation, the liberal media will pull two or three lines out of context to try to hurt us. That’s what the liberal press does.”
Looking at the coverage of Carlson’s shows this year, it’s hard to say that he was wrong.
A writer for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer seemed both incredulous and snide when he wrote, “The people of southeastern Pennsylvania were excited to see Tucker Carlson” — a line that perfectly sums up why “You don’t hate the media enough” shows up a lot on conservatives’ X posts.
But it was true. Carlson’s fans were excited to see him, and many in Carlson’s crowds will turn out for Beck with the same enthusiasm next year. No doubt Megyn Kelly, Matt Walsh and other conservative superstars could draw equivalent crowds on a live tour, which raises the question, where are their liberal counterparts in this space?
Democrats do live shows — the entertaining political strategist James Carville has an upcoming show in Boston with Al Hunt, his partner in the “Politics War Room” podcast — although not on the scale of the Carlson tour, the show does have a VIP “meet and greet” option like Carlson’s shows did. The hosts of the progressive “Pod Save America” podcast do live shows, but the men, former aides to President Barack Obama, are hardly household names. There’s always a stream of touring liberal comedians and late-night talk show hosts having their say.
It’s not that they haven’t tried — progressives tried to match conservative talk radio with a liberal alternative, Air America, which went under in 2010. Meanwhile, conservatives kept building from the base of talk radio with other forms of media, including publishing and film, which has resulted in the powerful media ecosystem that virtually guarantees the success of a live tour.
“The way you have to look at it is, especially on the political right, there is a full industry of books and radio and digital and television and magazines — there’s a multimedia empire that people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and now Tucker Carlson have built,” Jones, at the University of Georgia, told me. “And even if they exist their TV show or network, they’re able to make this amazing living on proselytizing the truth, or whatever it is they proselytize.”
It would be a mistake, though, to emphasize the entertainment part of these tours over the politics — and to dismiss Carlson as “unemployed” as his former Fox colleague Chris Wallace recently did.
As Jason Zengerle recently wrote for The New York Times, Carlson’s streaming service is said to have more than 400,000 paid subscribers — a credible number, and possible low, for someone who once had the highest rated show on cable TV — and his podcast “now regularly sits in the top five of Spotify’s weekly podcast ratings and occasionally beats ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ for the top spot.” He has 14 million followers on X, 10 million more people than tuned in to his show on Fox. And Zengerle pointed out, that although JD Vance was the guest at the show in Hershey, it was Carlson, not Vance, that the crowds had turned to see.
America once saw a movie star become president. It’s not inconceivable that a rock-star pundit could become one too.