Tucker Carlson likes to style himself a populist. But every time there’s a fight over something that might actually make life easier for working-class people, he never misses the opportunity to take the side of big business and the rich.

Watching Carlson’s show means wading through an ocean of passionate, angry screeds taking aim at all sorts of the usual right-wing bugaboos: mask and vaccine mandates, immigrants and refugees, critical race theory, crime, wokeness, trans people, and so on. What you won’t find — despite the host’s preferred self-image as a tribune of the downtrodden working stiff — is discussion of any of the pocketbook issues immediately pressing to most working Americans, whatever their backgrounds — the kind of issues you’d expect an actual populist would be focused on.

To be fair, over the past year, Carlson has, on occasion, discussed some of the major economic questions confronting the country. He just happened to take the side of employers and the rich on every one of them.

Take expanded unemployment insurance, a pathbreaking policy that actually began under Donald Trump, and which lowered US poverty, kept families afloat in a once-in-a-century crisis, gave many low-wage workers their first taste of a halfway decent living standard, and allowed them the breathing room to get off the hamster wheel and rethink their careers and life paths.

Not to Carlson. Despite his show’s paeans to the working class, he is firmly opposed to the measure, complaining in May that the government was paying people “up to $700 a month not to work” and blaming it for the country’s labor shortage — a claim repeated endlessly by corporate executives and neoliberal pundits, but one that facts on the ground consistently showed was untrue. (Even his fans were wise to this nonsense, with one commenting, “Who can live on 700 a month. Not a great point Sir. The rest was well said!”)

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