Tucker Carlson’s Manufactured America

First comes the piece of timber. Then the strip of leather. Then the fence, the mountain, the trees, the river. The pictures whirl, like icons in a Western-themed slot machine, until they land on their final image: the smiling face of Tucker Carlson.

This spring, Carlson began hosting a new show on Fox Nation, the network’s digital streaming service. Tucker Carlson Today features interviews, one-on-one and in-depth, with Carlson’s preferred guests—skeptics of multiculturalism, skeptics of science, skeptics of “the system” as it currently operates. The show is pretty much what you’d expect it to be, save for one thing: It takes place in a Foxified version of Frontierland.

It begins, episode after episode, with that reel of images. And Carlson hosts it from a gaudy facsimile of a log cabin. The set is constructed almost entirely of wood, or a wood-like substance. Just behind Carlson’s chair is a backlit American flag. The space is otherwise spare: a shelf with a display of tattered books, a sepia-toned globe, a rug, a large desk (made of thick glass, the set’s one concession to cable). A screen mounted on the wall sometimes serves as a portal for the guests who do not come to Carlson’s cabin in person. Its default image, however, offers a window into the cabin’s imagined environs: a farmhouse and a field, overlaid with.