On weeknights at 8 p.m., Tucker Carlson is beamed into elderly white America’s living rooms like Walter Cronkite used to be, to tell the audience flatly how the world is: Mostly he’s dutifully intoned the long-standing Republican culture-war party line, traditional America under siege from out-of-control leftists and foreigners. Then, in a 15-minute monologue in January, he delivered a different kind of jeremiad, on the sins of market capitalism. “Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster,” he declared. “You’d have to be a fool to worship it.” And the fools worshipping it were Republicans, he explained; they had fought to make the world safe for banking, to prosecute foreign wars, and to provide cheap consumer goods (“garbage from China”), while failing to stop unchecked economic exploitation from destroying “family and faith and culture.” And then, after all that, he reverse-pivoted to end on a flat declaration that the Republicans were the only possible solution. “There’s no option, at this point,” he said.

Such contradictions might destroy a lesser or better man, but for Tucker Carlson they are not even meaningfully understood as contradictions in the first place. This is why he is thriving, even after the serial unearthing in March of things he said years ago on Bubba the Love Sponge’s radio show (“I’m just telling you,” Carlson says in one of the clips, “arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her.”) Advertisers backed away from his show, but viewers did not, and Fox News can weather a weak hour of advertising revenue if the viewers are happy—or more precisely, if the viewers are angry and scared and engaged with their televisions, as Carlson makes them.

There isn’t any real secret to it. Carlson has given himself over as material to a series of magazine profilers through the years—GQ and The New Yorker have done excellent jobs with him—and it’s all been right there on the page, wherever he’s been in his shifting career: the self-assurance, the pettiness, the inconsistencies, the indifference to the inconsistencies. The performative fly-fishing in Central Park, the fly-tying, those outdoorsy yet fussy arts of manliness. The satisfaction and the resentfulness. The profiles have been thorough and incisive, and none of them have kept him from going on as what he is.

“Ultimately, I’m just not a guilty white person,” Carlson wrote for Esquire, 16 years and however many incarnations ago. That was when he was bow-tied and boyish and still wrote magazine pieces, this one about a loopy overseas trip in 2003 with the Reverend Al Sharpton as he led improvised peace talks to end a civil war that had been raging in Liberia since 1999. The key to the gag was his unrepentant right-wing preppy whiteness, and his magazine-writer’s awareness of it (he called himself “the whitest man in America”), as it scraped against the famous or eccentric black leftists he traveled with—Sharpton and Cornel West, as well as three Nation of Islam guys, two of them, he quipped, named James Muhammad, a “league of extraordinary gentlemen.” Writer to reader, that Tucker Carlson would draw you in and smack you with an epiphanic punch line, as he bonded with his most famous companion over their shared outlook: “Sharpton doesn’t hate whites after all. He just hates white liberals.”

Hating white liberals is still Carlson’s theme, but now he wears a long tie and doesn’t much bother with charm. His lack of guilt is hectoring, not insouciant. His voice is whiny. His head has thickened with age in a way that gives him, as he squints contemptuously straight on into the camera, the cross-eyed aspect of a planarian or a South Park character.