In the school of Tuckerism, I was a prospective PhD. I never missed Tucker’s Fox News monologues. Every night, I imbibed his lively lectures, treating his conservative social critique as a nightly devotional. His cuts into liberalism were scalpel-sharp. I once commented to my wife, after another of Tucker’s surgical vivisections of some liberal propagandist, “I’d hate to be one of his liberal guests.” Though sometimes, looking back, the red flags were there—baseless conspiracy theories punctuated with an emphatic “This is just true, period!”—he still put on a nightly clinic on how to deconstruct the left. But now the scalpel-like...