Tucker Carlson’s new Fox primetime show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” is turning heads and attracting a large audience — the news network even broke records in November.

Fair and feisty, the founder of The Daily Caller grasps America outside the elite media bubble.

This exclusive video interview with him for The Daily Caller News Foundation has a candid Carlson riffing on the media’s gaffes, President-elect Donald Trump’s win, American culture, his background and more. He even discusses why he fell asleep one morning on “Fox and Friends,” something his friends have mercilessly teased him about.

Carlson says “the entertainment industry is pushing perverse things on America,” further coarsening the country’s toxic culture. He rejects the label of being intolerant for thinking traditional families help children thrive — marriage works and is worth fighting for, he says.

He explains Trump won the White House because of the “primal scream by people who have been ignored and despised” by the cultural, media and political elites. It was “a revolt of the middle class and people voting with their middle finger,” he says. “People think the game is rigged by the elites and in a democracy that is not sustainable.”

As for the excuses offered up by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Democrats for why they lost, Carlson says “the left has gotten dumb and shallow and unable to see clearly. Identity politics has made them dumb.”

Identity politics, as practiced by President Barack Obama — a man Carlson had great respect for coming into office — divides people. He calls the weaponization of race “an unbridgeable divide” as it diminishes people as individuals. Race, when used as a rhetorical weapon, creates tribalism and separation, since you cannot change immutable characteristics. Carlson appreciates an honest debate on the merits, minus the name-calling.

[dcquiz] As identity politics dominates the cultural narrative, the founder of TheDC says, “we are so fixated on one man’s character” in America, we are missing important world events and trends.

During the election, the media, he says, surrendered its First Amendment responsibility to not side with the powerful and to hold them accountable no matter what, and therefore were so wrong about the election results.

“Data does not tell you the whole story either,” he says. The bulk of self-satisfied prognosticators couldn’t see the real story because they were too immersed in the numbers. If Trump asked for his advice, he would encourage the president-elect to laugh at them, not lower himself to their level.

The ever-curious, witty and provocative Carlson relinquished his post as editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller when Fox absorbed his time and talents, and The Daily Caller team is thrilled to watch his TV success.

For more on Carlson, see his show at 7 p.m. ET on Fox. Follow him on Twitter @TuckerCarlson, where he has nearly 400,000 followers, or on Facebook where almost 92,000 like his page.

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