Indeed, throughout the 2016 election cycle Carlson routinely deployed his anonymous neighbors as a device in his political punditry—pointing to them as emblems of the educated elite’s insular thinking. He scoffed at their affection for Marco Rubio in the primaries, and he ridiculed their self-righteous reactions to the Republican nominee in the general. “On my street,” he wrote in Politico Magazine, “there’s never been anyone as unpopular as Trump.”

This shtick worked brilliantly for Carlson, catapulting him from a weekend hosting gig to the coveted 9 p.m. slot in Fox’s primetime lineup. He now regularly pulls in more than 3 million viewers a night—a marked improvement on the program he replaced—and he counts the commander in chief among his loyal fans. Just this past weekend, President Trump set off a minor international firestorm when he suggested Sweden was experiencing an immigrant-fueled spike in crime—a (dubious) claim he picked up by watching Tucker Carlson Tonight.

In an era when TV talking heads are more influential than ever, Carlson has suddenly—and rather improbably—emerged as one of the most powerful people in media. The question now is what he wants to do with that perch.

To the extent that Carlson’s on-air commentary these days is guided by any kind of animating idea, it is perhaps best summarized as a staunch aversion to whatever his right-minded neighbors believe. The country has reached a point, he tells me, where the elite consensus on any given issue should be “reflexively distrusted.”

“Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”

“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”

Carlson recounts, with some amusement, how he saw these attitudes surface in his neighbors’ response to Trump’s victory. He recalls receiving a text message on election night from a stunned Democratic friend declaring his intention to flee the country with his family. Carlson replied by asking if he could use their pool while they were gone.

“I mean people were, like, traumatized,” he says. And yet, in the months since then, “no one I know has learned anything. There’s been no moment of reflection … It’s just, ‘This is what happens when you let dumb people vote.’” Carlson finds this brand of snobbery particularly offensive: “Intelligence is not a moral category. That’s what I find a lot of people in my life assume. It’s not. God doesn’t care how smart you are, actually.”