I know I’m probably paying way to much attention to Tucker Carlson lately but he’s an especially dangerous force in our politics and half the time he’s an Orbanesque white nationalist and the rest of the time he’s just nuts. I don’t know quite what to make of it but I feel instinctively that we shouldn’t look away. There’s something going on here and it’s not good. Philip Bump looked at the numbers and it’s worth taking note: In the right-wing media universe, the 500-pound gorilla is now and has long been Fox News. There have been challengers, certainly, including some robust ones. Breitbart’s effectiveness in pulling rhetoric from the fringe into the mainstream conversation about a decade ago, for example, and cable news start-ups like One America and Newsmax more recently. But Fox News has weathered such challenges through co-option, heft, institutional support and combinations of the three. So, when Republicans are asked where they get their news, they are most likely to say Fox. And within the Fox News universe, the 500-pound gorilla is Tucker Carlson. It used to be the case that the most-watched host on the network was Sean Hannity. His prime-time opinion show (using Fox’s gauzy differentiation from its purportedly objective news programming) was not only the top show on Fox but, from 2017 to 2020, the most-watched show on cable news overall. But that was the era of Donald Trump, who operated in symbiosis with Hannity. After running neck-and-neck with Hannity in 2020, Carlson passed Hannity…