Last month, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, delivered a bombshell 15-minute monologue in which he denounced market capitalism, Wall Street exploitation, private equity, payday loan outlets and America’s ruling class. In a follow-up interview, he even said he would consider voting for Elizabeth Warren.

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Ever since, he has been pounded from both left and right. The Limits of Tucker Carlson’s Anti-Free Market Vision, declared a headline in Slate. Tucker Carlson’s Monologue Insults His Viewers, ran a title line in the Atlantic. In National Review, David French urged the right to reject Carlson’s “victimhood populism”, while Bret Stephens in the New York Times mocked him for questioning elite rule when he himself has so benefited from it.

The uproar reflected the messenger as much as the message. A fixture of Fox’s primetime lineup, Carlson has been a gleeful scourge of liberals, a tireless disparager of social programs and a fierce critic of immigration. After he said in December that immigrants made America “poorer and dirtier”, more than two dozen companies dropped their ads from his show. In his jeremiad, however, Carlson sounded like Bernie Sanders. “For generations,” he declared, “Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars.” Americans “are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule”.

In a rousing peroration, Carlson noted that Americans want to live in a country “whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement” and at the expense of the family – the foundation of a healthy society. Republicans had to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion but a tool like a toaster or staple gun, which it would be foolish to worship. They had to “unlearn decades of bumper sticker talking points and corporate propaganda”. While libertarians were sure to brand any deviation from market fundamentalism a form of socialism, socialism is exactly what America will get unless a group of responsible leaders reform its economy “in a way that protects normal people”.

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Carlson’s warning recalled several similar ones of late. Last year, Laurence Fink, the powerful head of BlackRock, the asset management giant, wrote to CEOs that while those with capital had reaped “enormous benefits”, many faced low wages and inadequate retirement plans, feeding the anxiety and polarization afoot in the world today. He urged companies to adopt “a new model of shareholder engagement” focused less on quarterly earnings and more on producing long-term value for employees and communities.

Henry Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst who now runs Business Insider, said in a talk on Better Capitalism that shareholder capitalism had turned America into a “nation of overlords and serfs”. Noting that executives “have forgotten that one of the reasons companies exist is for the people who work for them”, he urged them to “to share a little bit more of the value with those who make it”.

It was Carlson’s very excoriation of free-market capitalism, however, that most goaded his critics, especially on the right. That economic system, Ben Shapiro asserted, “has powered most of the world’s human beings out of extreme poverty and led to the richest society in human history. It has allowed us to live longer, in bigger houses, in more comfort. It has meant fewer dead children and more living parents.”

Shapiro, in turn, was upbraided by JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy. “Our economy has not produced fewer dead children and more living parents in America, at least not in the section of the country where I live,” he wrote, citing in particular the opioid epidemic, which has ravaged so many communities. In states such as Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, “countless children are growing up with parents in jail, incapacitated or underground”. They may live in a country with a higher GDP than a generation ago, but few would claim they’re better off. If conservatives can’t talk about people’s real problems “because it promotes victimhood”, then “we are fighting a battle that we both deserve to lose and will lose”. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance expressed deep skepticism of government programs, but, as these comments suggest, his views seem to be shifting.

How about Carlson? How genuine is his shift? Given his long record of demagoguery on issues such as immigration, race and social programs, is he breaking with his own past? To find out, I watched two of his shows this past week. The answer quickly became apparent. In a segment on the recent FBI raid on Roger Stone’s residence, he railed against Robert Mueller as “a threat to democracy” and “an authoritarian nutcase” even worse than Vladimir Putin. He mocked the media for panicking at Howard Schultz’s announcement that he might run for president as a “centrist independent”, sneered at Gavin Newsom’s decision to shun the California governor’s mansion for a home in a mostly white neighborhood, and twitted wealthy Democrats for opposing Trump’s wall while they themselves live comfortably in houses protected by high ones.

In his 2 January monologue, Carlson did not mention immigration, but on his show he repeatedly returned to it. Showing clips of a new caravan proceeding from Central America, he interviewed a conservative radio host who, back from the border, described how people are arriving with “a litany” of serious communicable diseases that were being treated “courtesy of the taxpayer”. Carlson accused the Democrats of supporting a policy of open borders and – citing Kamala Harris’s support for health care for all as a right – called it an invitation for “half the planet” to move to the United States “to get free MRIs”.

To amplify the point, he spoke with Tammy Bruce, president of the Independent Women’s Voice (IWV). A healthcare for all program, she said, would produce “a controlled socialist framework” that destroys civilizations and countries. With nothing else to offer, the left promises free things and, to fund them, prints money, as in Venezuela, “where the inflation rate at this point is 80,000%”. It’s “a totalitarian framework” in which “the government is going to tell people to do and what it says they deserve”. Carlson wholeheartedly agreed.

Hearing such unhinged remarks, I went to the IWV website. It said that it works “to educate and persuade those who don’t already share our understanding of the benefits of liberty and free markets”. Its goal “is to share the conservative, free market ideas and solutions with women and independents, while encouraging and supporting them as they decide what is right for them”.

So, in seeking to denigrate both immigrants and universal healthcare, Carlson had on a representative from a very conservative group that subscribes to the same free market ideology he decried in his monologue. Overall, his show continues to transmit Fox’s toxic blend of race-baiting and reality distortion, through which it has done so much to poison the American mind.

What, then, to make of Carlson? Is he a cynic? A hypocrite? A headlong pursuer of ratings? Perhaps he’s best described as a charter member of the same ruling class that in his monologue he indicted for working so intently to divide and confuse the American people.