What Tucker Carlson’s ‘fire’ lefty merch tells us about the modern influencer economy

Tucker Carlson’s online store sells right-wing apparel and home goods, like hoodies in the Supreme streetwear style mocking Somali people or mugs with The Godfather puppetmaster iconography edited to feature AIPAC. But last week, a handful of other products caught the attention of those outside Carlson’s typical audience: one is a red and yellow “NY Commie” baseball cap, with a hammer and sickle replacing the “C” (the icon is mirrored to work for the joke); another cap is emblazoned with “Neocons are gay for Israel”; and an “I HEART NICOTINE” mug.

The merch seems to have captured a subset of people whose politics are at odds with Carlson: irony-pilled leftists who would rather lean into the right-wing hysteria imagining a Communist takeover of New York than tiptoe around our new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, being a Democratic Socialist.

“What are the moral repercussions of buying dope merch from an ontological enemy,” one post on X reads. A video on Instagram with 4.7 million views is captioned, in part, “I need these to hit the thrift stores because as a socialist girlie I cannot support.” (A worker-owned media company already made dupes as part of a “F*ck Tucker Carlson” collection.)

Carlson is no stranger to hawking products — he also has a brand of nicotine pouches that he markets as a Zyn alternative, which he sees as a “ladies brand” and too liberal. To be clear, the new “fire” Carlson merch that “goes kinda hard” (not my words) is a niche curiosity in a corner of the internet. Progressives aren’t going out in droves to buy stuff from Carlson’s merch store, at least that I can tell, but the incident does relate to something I’ve wanted to prod at for a while: for influencers and content creators, one of the best things that can happen is they become a purveyor of branded physical goods.

Removed from his perch at Fox News, Carlson now grinds away in the digital content mines, co-mingling with white supremacists and baiting people into resharing short segments of his podcast where he sounds reasonable. He churns out hour-long video podcasts, and shares affiliate discount codes for anti-woke coffee brands and financial services. Viral merch was the next step.

Despite the “content creator” moniker, it is often not the actual organic content — Reels, photos, tweets — that makes a creator money. It’s everything else that pays the bills: the brand deals, the mid-roll ads, and increasingly, the merch. MrBeast, whose name is invoked as proof-of-concept for the job title of content creator, loses money making his splashy videos. What is taking off is his food product line, which now includes things like gummy snacks and chocolate bars. Last year, an executive at Beast Industries told Bloomberg that the content side was “a marketing investment in everything else we do.” Planning, filming, editing, and promoting videos week after week is tedious, demanding work; on the other hand, MrBeast doesn’t have to personally appear every time he sells candy. The videos are a promotional avenue for the snack line, the TV show, and more recently, the financial app.

Influencers regularly use their social media audiences as a launching pad for new ventures — not satisfied to simply earn an affiliate commission from other brands, many content creators eventually begin selling followers their own products. Beauty influencers launch makeup lines, lifestyle influencers sell matcha, fitness YouTubers have activewear brands, and podcast hosts hawk protein drinks. Khaby Lame, the most-followed TikToker, signed a $975 million deal in January that allows a Chinese e-commerce company to use his likeness (and an AI avatar) to sell products in beauty, fragrance, and apparel categories. In a way, Lame’s deal is the final iteration of the promise of the creator economy: by temporarily ceding control of his likeness to a third party, Khaby Lame the salesperson exists independently from Khaby Lame the human. He has quite literally cashed in on whatever trust or goodwill he created with his fan base.

Even beyond Carlson, merch is central to the MAGA project (a red “Make America Great Again” hat will be an enduring image for this era). The right-wing, agitator-slash-vlogger Nick Shirley, whose viral video alleging massive fraud in Minneapolis triggered the federal occupation of the city in January, also followed this pattern: one of the first things he did after he got blowback was to start selling merchandise mocking one of the subjects of his video. He’s since added new items — like a hoodie reading “Support independent journalism” — which he promotes at every turn. Never one to let a financial opportunity slip by, the Trump Organization in recent months has attempted to use controversial legal maneuvers to crack down on unauthorized merchandise for sale online after years of official and knockoff MAGA hats, apparel, flags, and other items becoming mainstays on e-commerce sites. Donald Trump is as much a content creator as he is the president; if he could slap his branding on dogshit, he would try to sell it.

But back to Tucker Carlson’s dirtbag left-y merchandise. His press team did not respond to The Verge’s questions about the designs or whether they’ve seen a meaningful boost in sales. It is knowing and ironic, but plays to both sides — the “NY Commie” hat appeals to both the person who earnestly believes New York City has fallen to radicals and a Brooklyn DSA member. It does not matter, really, whether Carlson has sold any of these hats to the latter, only that they noticed and found it funny, and sent it to group chats where the response was something along the lines of, “Someone cooked here.” Like when political figures pivot to new talking points or content topics, the merch is a way for Carlson to ingratiate himself with corners of the internet where he would otherwise be unwelcome. By poking at the audience’s impulses of conspicuous consumption, Carlson is working to normalize his presence for a new segment of the public. The message reached the intended audience — you don’t even have to watch his videos.