Conservative publishing is trading politics for piety

Conservative publishing is trading politics for piety
From Ann Coulter’s bestsellers to Tucker Carlson’s new imprint, right-wing books have descended into lifestyle slop

By Sophia Tesfaye
Senior Writer
Published April 18, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned popular right-wing podcaster, recently announced he is teaming up with Skyhorse Publishing to release books by a familiar cast of provocateurs. Among his stable of authors is Russell Brand, the actor currently facing multiple sexual assault charges in the U.K. — to which he has pleaded not guilty — and Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right media figure who once identified as gay but now advocates for so-called “conversion therapy,” and whose previous publishing deal imploded after comments widely interpreted as condoning sex between adults and minors.

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Carlson’s inaugural slate of writers is a good snapshot of where the right’s intellectual life has arrived in 2026. Conservative publishing isn’t dead — but it is drifting, trading politics for piety, and intellectual rigor for the safer margins of lifestyle content and cultural signaling.

For decades, the right-wing publishing industry was one of the most potent and profitable engines of American conservatism — and was a serious enterprise. Books were central to the movement’s identity and translated ideology into mass-market form. Unapologetically intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr.’s seminal 1951 work “God and Man at Yale” was a provocation aimed at the Ivy League establishment that set the stage for the author’s career as a conservative intellectual and, eventually, for the conservative moment itself. Many followed in his wake. From the success of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” in 1987 to the rise of dedicated conservative imprints in the early 2000s, the right treated publishing as a legitimate place to contest ideas.

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Shannon Bream, anchor of “Fox News Sunday” and the network’s chief legal correspondent, recently completed her Bible trilogy. “Fox & Friends” personality Carley Shimkus released a cookbook. Her former colleague Pete Hegseth, now secretary of defense, sold more than 300,000 copies of his last two books, both of which were military grievance memoirs. In all of these publications, the politics are implicit, carried by the authors’ public personas rather than articulated through sustained argument. The intellectual work of the Coulter era — arming the reader with talking points meant to “expose” the left — has been replaced by something that functions more like branded merchandise that is almost always explicitly Christian. ........................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/18/conservative-publishing-is-trading-politics-for-piety/