RAGE DRIVEN PROFITS

Lucker Carlson ebulliently enters his barn in Bryant Pond, the small Maine village known for good trout fishing that's now the former Fox News star's headquarters. He glides past the pelt of a big game cat and bookshelves stuffed with a range of historical interests and titles that practically troll the browser, from Mark Tennien's No Secret Is Safe to Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to The Goebbels Diaries.
Fresh off bagging a few woodcocks, he removes a live 28-gauge shotgun round from his hunting jacket and begins hand-grinding coffee beans. It's election day eve, and in a few hours, Carlson, who already voted for Donald Trump via absentee ballot, will get a haircut and fly down to Florida so he can watch the results from Mar-a-Lago with MAGA luminaries such as Elon Musk, Majorie Taylor Greene and, of course, the once and future president.
"I hope we're successful and make a ton of money, but this isn't a business play," says Carlson, dipping his tongue into a small plastic container to retrieve two nicotine pouches.
"This is rage." This is a notable statement for two reasons. First, on a day everyone else in America is focused on politics, Carlson isn't discussing the election-he's talking about the nicotine pouches he tucked between his lips, a brand he has just launched: Alp, of which he owns half, along with his business partner. Second, Carlson uncharacteristically undersells the larger picture in a polarized country: how, increasingly, partisan rage is the business play.
Yes, rage-driven profits have already been a proven media formula for most of this century, pioneered by Carlson's former employers Fox News, then aped by everyone from Newsmax and OAN on the right to MSNBC and the Young Turks on the left. This decade has seen a similar cleaving in social media, from Trump's own Truth Social as well as Rumble, which cloned Twitter and YouTube from the right, respectively. (Twitter, reborn under Elon Musk as X, has drifted this way as well.) Aside from almost $10 billion in combined market caps, these channels help fuel information echo chambers that may prove one of 2024's most lasting (and civically dangerous) legacies.
Less noticed: a new ecosystem of startups of the Trump era that create customers by imbuing otherwise apolitical businesses with partisan tribalism. This goes beyond the vague and fuzzy associations of the old-school left-Ben & Jerry's, Subaru-or the hucksters selling Trump commemorative coins on late-night television.
Instead, these are real companies selling goods and services that people use every day, primarily with a right-wing tint to a right-wing audience. Take finance: You can invest your money with Vivek Ramaswamy's antiwoke Strive ETFs and bank at Larry Elder and Ben Carson's Old Glory Bank. In retail, you can shop on Public Square, an online marketplace that features products made by companies that "respect traditional American values." Donald Trump Jr has joined 1789 Capital, a firm that invests in companies "building the next era of American prosperity," including the Tucker Carlson Network, the New York Times reports.
Even Rudy Giuliani, who has self-immolated his credibility with remarkable speed, has recently launched a line of organic coffee. As he says in his commercials, with Rudy Coffee, available in packaging that allows you to choose between his prosecutor days or his octogenarian self on the beach, "You're also supporting Our Cause, the cause of truth, justice and American democracy." And of course there's Mike Lindell's MyPillow, which took a product everyone needs and turned it into the final personal statement-sales hit $300 million in 2019 but have cratered due to his 2020 election lies-that you can ponder every night before you close your eyes.
Now, thanks to Carlson, even your gums can have their own politically motivated pillow. While he objects to the notion that Alp, named after the European mountain range, is a political product, he simultaneously calls his pouch the "American Lip Pillow" and pitches it as a nicotine fix for the "free man." "There's a kind of lightness to a free man," he says. "A free person is not afraid, and he's willing to laugh. I'm struck by the amount of fear in American life right now. It's a very fearful country. 'Am I going to get fired? Get denounced on social media? Is somebody on Tik Tok gonna call me a racist?' There's a fog of fear that settled over the country. And I think that fog is breaking."
To Carlson, 55, this new venture is about more than standing up for his values. It's using commerce to give the finger to, well, pretty much everyone. "It's the entire world. It's the entire pronoun world, the he/him, she/her bullshit world of corporate America that I just had it with," he says. "I'm sick of it, and I'm not going to participate in it."
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Maine Man
Tucker Carlson at his barn in Bryant Pond, Maine, where he shoots his eponymous showas well as a few woodcocks-and planned the launch of his new nicotine pouch, Alp. "This is not a conservative product," he says. "This is a nicotine pouch. It has no politics."
Like Trump's return to the White House, Carlson's swift reinvention and return to relevance is a remarkable comeback story. Twenty months ago, his extremist views (often punctuated with what have been described as conspiracy theories and racist ideology), his open forum for facttwisting election denialism (Fox settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million) and his contempt for his superiors (he called one female executive the c-word in a private text) seemingly came to a head. Fox's top brass sacked him without explanation despite the dominance of Tucker Carlson Tonight over cable's 8 p.m. hour. (Carlson tells Forbes that he stands by the derogatory word he used against the executive, but clarified that he wasn't being sexist-rather, he says he was using an "accurate description of this person" and he meant it "sincerely from the bottom of my heart.")
After losing his high-profile platform on Fox News and the estimated $15 million-a-year contract that came with it, Carlson retreated to his home in the Maine woods and planned his comeback. Reinvention wasn't new to him. "I have had the highest-rated show on TV, and I've also several times had one of the lowest-rated shows on TV," he says.
Carlson was born and raised in California. His father was a respected journalist who became the director of Voice of America and later a diplomat. His mother left the family when he was 6 years old. His stepmother was an heir to the Swanson frozen food fortune, and Carlson wound up in a Swiss boarding school, where he developed a penchant for cigarettes.
He started his career as a magazine writer, his first big gig at Bill Kristol's conservative Weekly Standard, for which he wrote sharp, witty features. His strong debating skills and stronger opinions led to his first TV job, at CNN, in 2000, where he cohosted the political debate show Crossfire and became known for his combative conservative politics and bow tie. Then came PBS and MSNBC, two outlets he now seemingly detests, before his first foray as a conservative entrepreneur: cofounding the Daily Caller website in 2010. In 2016, just in time for the Trump era, Fox News debuted Tucker Carlson Tonight, which eventually became the highestrated cable news program in primetime until his messy departure in 2023.
Despite acknowledging that many of his critics see him as a "Nazi," Carlson was not in a reflect-on-my-mistakes mindset as he plotted his next move.
Instead, he doubled down on his stridency in December 2023, launching the Tucker Carlson Network, a streaming platform he describes as an alternative to corporate media "news coverage" that "has become a tool of repression and control." He releases around a dozen two-hour episodes a month that generate millions of views, with napalm-style guests like felonious former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In February, he traveled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin. There, he infamously admired Russian subways in the manner of a Soviet propagandist.
No matter: His tribe eats it up. When asked how much revenue his ad- and subscriber-supported network ($9 a month) generates, he's quick, as is his wont, with an over-the-top joke: "I was beating one of my servants this morning with a cane and saying to myself, 'Now that I'm as rich as I am, I don't have to abide by any of the most basic rules of decency or human conduct." Forbes estimates that his network, which also hosts live events, generated at least $30 million in revenue this year-and with low costs, Carlson says he pockets more than he did when he was at Fox, with less work. "[Television] is dying," he says. "And I can smell the decomposition."
Though he no longer smokes, Carlson has an impressive nicotine habit-he pops in a new pouch about every half-hour. He says nicotine keeps him calm and alert at the same time, but one can almost hear his rapid heartbeat thudding from across the table and feel his hostility rising.
"I'm a pretty aggressive nicotine user," says Carlson, who still has a baby face and signature floppy hair. He punctuates his points with a high-pitched laugh. "I doubt you're going to find anyone who uses more of it than I do-from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep." Now he has put his money where his mouth is, launching Alp in November with the Louisville, Kentucky-based Turning Point Brands in the $3 billion nicotine pouch market. Carlson started using pouches five years ago-he calls himself a "sommelier of nicotine pouches"-a segue from decades of dipping, smoking, chewing and sucking on nicotine gum and lozenges. Along with his former college roommate and business partner Neil Patel, Carlson has invested a few million dollars into the 50/50 joint venture with Turning Point, a smaller tobaccoproducts outfit that took in $405 million in revenue last year selling its dip brand Stoker's, Zig-Zag rolling papers and a lesser-known nicotine pouch called Fre.
His "aha" moment stemmed from rage. Long before he founded Alp, Carlson was a devout user of Zyn, the cult nicotine pouch that became a Republican talking point earlier this year after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, citing a potential new addictive threat to children, called for it to be banned and for the Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission to investigate the product. Carlson became the face of what Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the "Zynsurrection."
Sober since 2002-when he quit drinking and drugsCarlson is, by his own account, a nicotine addict. He once quit it for six months. "I gained, like, 40 pounds and became emotionally unstable," he says. "That was fun." So in the past few years, he became known as "Tucker Carlzyn" on the "Zynternet," having previously touted Zyn on a popular podcast as a work enhancer-"once you try this, you will get a lot richer," he said, adding that it is also "a male enhancer."
Patel, whom Carlson met at Trinity College and who cofounded the Daily Caller, reached out to Z...