Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star, is launching his own eponymous streaming service. The network “went live on Monday” and “will be home to multiple shows, including interviews, short-form videos and monologues,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Carlson is the newest member of what I call the “Fox News diaspora” of network stars-turned-competitors. His streaming service is another entrant in an increasingly crowded field of right-wing outlets helmed by former Fox figures, all seeking the approval, money, and time of the same audience traditionally dominated by the right-wing outlet.

Fox has long minted right-wing luminaries, its large audience and credibility on the right converting network hosts and contributors into celebrities and even Republican Party power players. But when those figures leave the network (usually on bad terms), many end up either signing up with Fox’s existing right-wing competitors or launching their own. At this point, there is more talent in the Fox diaspora than at the network proper — and at a cheaper price to boot. The result is an increasingly fractured right-wing ecosystem that leaves Fox’s hegemony in doubt.

Glenn Beck, perhaps the network’s biggest star during Barack Obama’s first term before he was drummed out in 2011, launched TheBlaze. That outlet has waxed and waned in size and influence, but it still provides him and a cohort of ideologically aligned figures a venue through the streaming service BlazeTV.

Ben Shapiro was once a Fox fixture and hosted an ill-fated limited series about elections for the network. His podcast now appears via the outlet he founded, The Daily Wire. His Daily Wire colleagues Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan also boosted their personal brands through frequent Fox appearances.

Greta van Susteren left Fox after a contract dispute, while Eric Bolling was fired after reportedly sending unsolicited photos of genitalia to co-workers. Both now host shows at longtime Fox competitor Newsmax, alongside former Foxers Mike Huckabee and Sebastian Gorka.

Then there are the independents. Megyn Kelly left Fox for a disastrous turn at NBC, Bill O’Reilly was fired following the public revelation of numerous sexual harassment settlements, and Lou Dobbs was apparently dropped for being too Dobbs-y. Each now reaches fans through a personal podcast show.

So does Dan Bongino, a Fox weekend host who left the network earlier this year, and Steven Crowder, a former Fox contributor who has achieved notoriety on YouTube and Rumble. Lara Logan, who was banned from Fox for comparing Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and from Newsmax after going on a QAnon rant, is now in a similar position, publishing a docuseries pushing January 6 conspiracy theories on X.

Right-wingers who wanted a rage fix once had nowhere to turn but Fox. But now they can subscribe to cable and watch Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld on the network, or they can cut the cord, sign up for some services, and watch familiar faces like Beck ($10 per month for BlazeTV+), Carlson ($9/month for Tucker Carlson Network), O’Reilly ($6.95/month for The No Spin Zone), and Kelly (free on YouTube) instead. And some members of the diaspora even share a loose alliance — Carlson used to regularly host Beck on his Fox show, and he is promoting his new venture on Kelly’s program.

Fox still has the advantage of audience inertia — many fans have been watching for years and are simply used to keeping their television tuned to the network all day or turning it on for the prime-time shows.

But the business model of the Fox diaspora benefits from lower overhead, since its outlets don’t require the pretense of an expensive newsgathering apparatus. Instead, the former Fox stars can just rant angrily about whatever is reported elsewhere. And one of the things they rant about is Fox: They have a vested interest in tearing down the network, decrying it as insufficiently anti-woke or pro-Trump in an effort to steal away its viewers, which in turn can lead the network to course-correct in their direction.

We saw a version of this play out following the 2020 election, when Fox’s executives and stars, including Carlson, promoted Trumpian conspiracy theories about voter fraud out of fears of losing market share to relatively weak rivals like Newsmax. Since then, competition for Fox’s viewers has only grown.

The new Tucker Carlson Network will doubtlessly allow Carlson and the flunkies who join him to channel the same lies and hate that fueled his Fox show, along with passion projects his old bosses may have opposed airing. If the X show Carlson has hosted in recent months is any indication, that means nodding along with lunatic conspiracy theorists who claim that they had gay sex with Barack Obama and that Joe Biden wanders the White House naked, and producing even more hagiography for international autocrats.

But it will also give Carlson, who has hobnobbed with Donald Trump and drawn attention as a possible running mate for the man he once privately claimed to despise, another platform to weigh in on the 2024 presidential election.

If Trump once again tries to subvert American democracy, and Carlson and other members of the Fox diaspora come to his aid, how will Fox respond? The question answers itself.