Fox News Fired Tucker Carlson and the World is a Better Place
An overview of the firing along with some highlights of Tucker Carlson's time on Fox News
Last week immediately after the news hit that Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million several of my followers asked me if I thought Tucker Carlson would get fired.
I replied that he was probably the last person that Fox would terminate since his show had the second highest ratings on the network. In the legal briefs from the Dominion lawsuit that were released to the public it appeared that Fox News seemed more concerned about ratings and income than anything else. I was dead wrong.
Monday morning Tucker Carlson found out he was fired from Fox News approximately 10 minutes before it was announced on air. On his show last Friday he signed off as if he would be returning the following week.
Carlson’s final words were, "we'll be back on Monday."
According to reporting by the New York Times the decision to sever ties with Carlson was made by Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive officer of Fox Corporation and the son of its co-founder, Rupert Murdoch along with Suzanne Scott the Chief Executive of the network.
So far there is nothing specific that points to exactly why Fox got rid of its second highest ratings draw. Some have speculated that it might have something to do with a lawsuit filed by a former Fox News producer, Abby Grossberg, who claimed the workplace was misogynistic and discriminatory towards Jewish people.
According to reporting by The Los Angeles Times sources have said Rupert Murdoch thought Carlson had gone too far with his conspiratorial coverage of the January 6th riot.
After Speaker McCarthy handed Carlson over 41,000 hours of previously unreleased surveillance footage from the riot, the Fox host only managed to showcase 10 and a half minutes of fairly dull coverage that didn’t show much of anything.
On Sunday “60 Minutes” featured a segment about a January 6th rioter named Ray Epps who said his life has basically been ruined by Tucker Carlson’s relentless promotion of various conspiracy theories about his involvement at the riot.
“He's (Tucker Carlson) obsessed with me. He's going to any means possible to destroy my life and our lives,” said Epps during the segment.
There were also a number of embarrassing text messages and emails written by Tucker Carlson that were released as part of discovery in the Dominion lawsuit. In the correspondence Carlson said former President Donald J. Trump was “a demonic force,” and that he “hated him (Trump) passionately.”
By firing Carlson the network will lose a lot of revenue. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” brought in roughly $77.5 million in advertising revenue last year according to Vivvix, a research firm.
In 2016 the network paid out several enormous settlements in sexual harassment cases filed by female employees. Fox is facing another defamation lawsuit by Smartmatic for $2.7 billion.
Carlson’s expulsion might be due to simple accounting. Even though his show generated a lot of income for the network it could also cost more than it’s worth in legal fees and settlements.
Tucker Carlson peddled in the most divisive and hateful conspiracy theories. He promoted white supremacists and platformed Neo Nazis. He spread misleading stories to his audience and feed deep-seated paranoia.
The following is a greatest hits of sorts of the content I captured and analyzed since I began this project in February 2022.
I fear Tucker Carlson will start his own media venture where he’ll be even more emboldened to spread hate, fear and bigotry. For now he is silenced and the world is better for it.
Tucker Tried to Insult Jon Stewart and Failed Miserably
On August 4th, 2022 Tucker Carlson tried to insult the popular comedian Jon Stewart. It didn’t end well for him.
“That's Jon Stewart. The famous Jon Stewart looks like a homeless mental patient. He's shrinking and disheveled and very short. Really short. Too short to date. Was he always that short? What happened? Where's he been the last seven years?” said Carlson as he scrolled through still images of Stewart at outside the U.S. Capitol advocating for The PACT Act a bill that expanded health care for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances.
After this clip aired the clip was circulated throughout social media platforms with most people taking the side of Stewart. I decided to unearth an old clip from “Crossfire” a long since canceled political debate show co-hosted by Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala from 2004.
I attached this excerpt from the longer segment to pair with Carlson’s criticism of Stewart.
In this episode Jon Stewart confronted Carlson about the divisiveness of his program.
“You're doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. It’s not honest. What you do is perfectly partizan hackery,” said Stewart.
Carlson responded.
“You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you're accusing us of Partizan hackery?” said Carlson.
“Absolutely, and I’ll tell you why,” said Stewart.
“You're got to be kidding me,” said Carlson.
“You're on CNN. Say the show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?” said Stewart.
“Well, I would say there's no reason for you when you have this marvelous opportunity not to be the guys, Butt Boy, to go ahead and be his Butt Boy,” said Carlson.
“I was absolutely his Butt Boy, I was so far you would not believe what he ate two weeks ago. You know, the interesting thing that I have, you have a responsibility to the public discourse and you failed miserably, said Stewart.
Carlson interrupts him, “You need to get a job in a journalism school.”
Stewart responded, “I think you need to go to one. The thing that I want to say is when you have people on for just knee jerk reactionary talk,” said Stewart.
“I thought you were going to be funny. Come on,” said Carlson.
“Oh, no, I'm not going to be your monkey. I watch your show every day and it kills me. I can tell you. It's so. Oh, it's so painful to watch, you know, because we need what you do. This is such a great opportunity you have here to actually get politicians really transform their marketing and strategy. It's someone who watches your show and cannot take it anymore,” said Stewart.
Carlson interrupted again, “I just like to have dinner with you. It must be excruciating. Do you like lecture people like this? Would you come over to their house and sit lecture them and you know they're not doing the right thing that they're missing their opportunities evading their responsibility,” said Carlson.
“If I think they are,” said Stewart.
“What I would want to eat with you,” said Carlson.
“I know and you won’t. But the thing I want you to promise,” said Stewart.
There was then crosstalk between Carlson and his co-host.
“We did promise Naked pictures of the Supreme Court. Yeah, we did. Let's get to those. Why in this book, Why can't we just talk?” said both Carlson and Begala talking over each other.
“Please, I beg of you guys, please, please, stop,” said Stewart as Carlson shouted towards the camera to wrap up the segment.
Soon after this segment aired “Crossfire” was canceled.
The Great Replacement
The Great Replacement is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that got started in France by Renaud Camus. Proponents of the concept believe that governments of wealthy western nations are purposefully flooding their countries with illegal immigrants to create a more docile population.
The narrative has been linked to several mass shooting events.
The mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018 and the killer at Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019 both cited the “great replacement” theory as a motivation for their crimes.
The man convicted in the August 2019 attack on a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and the individual who opened fire at a synagogue in Poway, California, and set fire to a mosque in Escondido, California, in 2019 were also inspired by the same hateful narrative.
Tucker Carlson aggressively promoted The Great Replacement on his program for months even after he was called out for doing so by the Anti-defamation League.
The following clip is a montage of several different episodes where Carlson brought up The Great Replacement.
“Us as the nonwhite people cheering the extinction of white people? That was on television. Think about that for a minute. It's hard to think about it, actually, because it's that evil. And if you want to encourage permanent racial division, maybe even violence in America, that is exactly how you would talk on television . . . But wait a second. You ask, what about the numbers? What happened to all those white people who are now missing from the census? Well, it turns out many of them perished in the opioid epidemic. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans, mostly from rural communities, dead from drug overdoses,” said Carlson.
“If you change the population of a country without the consent of the people who live there, is that democracy? Doesn't that country belong to the people who live there? . . .You're changing the population of America without the consent of Americans. You're doing it secretly on a huge scale and no one's noticing. How is this not an invasion?” asked Carlson
“Come literally hysterical if you used the term replacement. If you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the Third world.
But they become hysterical because that's that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it. That's true. Hmm. If look, if this was happening in your house, if you were in sixth grade, for example, and without telling you, your parents adopted a bunch of new siblings and gave them brand new bikes and let them stay up later and help them with their homework and gave them twice the allowance that they gave you.
You would say to your siblings, you know, I think we're being replaced by by kids that our parents love more. . .So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfrachised, as a current voter. So I don't understand we don't understand this. I we never want to make a racial issue out of it. Ooh, the white replacement.
No, no, no. This is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they're importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have is an American guarantee that birth is one man, one vote, and they're diluting it,” said Carlson. .
It Appeared that Tucker Loved Russia
I could have included dozens of examples of Tucker Carlson’s seeming devotion to Russia and the Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carlson praised or defended Russia so often Russian State media featured them in their propaganda.
This is my personal favorite. It’s Tucker Carlson and Putin a Love Story in Three Acts.
Act 1 - “Tucker & Putin,” February 22nd, 2022, two days before the Russian army invaded Ukraine.
“What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him as he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination?
Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn't do any of that. So why does permanent Washington hate him so much?” said Carlson.
Act 2 - “Putin Bad!” February 24th, 2022, the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Whatever it is, it's a tragedy because war always is a tragedy. And the closer you get to it, the more horrifying it seems. It's the ugliest thing that men do ever. Vladimir Putin started this war. So whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it. He fired the first shots. He is to blame for what we're seeing tonight in Ukraine,” said Carlson.
Act 3 - “A Woman is to Blame - Kamala Harris,” March 3rd, 2022, a week after the Russian invasion.
“So this situation appears to become more chaotic by the day, possibly even spinning out of control. And that, we must be honest, is shocking to us. We've been taken by surprise by the whole thing. We're not the only ones who were, but we're willing to admit it. The only thing more embarrassing than being wrong in your estimates is pretending that you weren't. So why didn't we see this coming, this total loss of control? Well, because we assumed that if things were dire, serious people would be involved in fixing them. But we looked up and we saw Kamala Harris involved, and that reassured us” said Carlson.
Tucker Carlson is Racist
The following is a montage of clips of Carlson discussing racism.
“We did have a conversation about and by conversation we mean you shut up. I talk. We now have a conversation about how racist you are, which is very racist . . . Shut up. Racist. . .So what it really means is the EPA is going to spread more identity politics and race hate . . .So let's say you were to make identity politics mandatory in your country as they have. How could you be surprised when that leads, as it inevitably will, to white identity politics. . . white supremacy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” said Carlson.
The Fox News host often joked about white supremacy as if it was an invented boogey man meant to make white conservatives look bad.
Carlson made this odd reference to the antisemitic blood libel conspiracy theory during a rant about Tiffany Cross, a Black journalist who then worked at MSNBC.
“Are they poisoning the wells? Are they baking bread with the blood of your children?" said Carlson.
He also made this strange reference to the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union during World War 2.
“Not since Franklin Roosevelt colluded with Joseph Stalin. Has an American president done anything like that?” said Carlson.
This reference is especially troubling since the United States aligned with the USSR to defeat Nazis. Was Tucker implying that defeating Nazis was a bad thing?
“But someone better alert Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL so he can denounce the Democratic Party. And if you pay him enough, he will, because that's how that works,” said Carlson.
I also included a clip from “America First,” hosted by Nick Fuentes an avowed white nationalist and anti-semite.
“Same with Tucker. You know, Tucker, I respect him because he talked about the ADL and population replacement, but even his show can never go all the way because it's on Fox News. I don't think a Fox News show is ever going to go all the way. Tucker got pretty close and lots of credit to him,” said Fuentes.
Then there was the episode where Carlson defended a Russian nationalist with a Neo Nazi background who advocated for the invasion of Ukraine.
“So if you were to go to Amazon to read books by a man who is in the news and whose ideas are directly bearing on world events, you look for a guy called Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin is one of Russia's most famous authors and political philosopher. She doesn't work for the government is work for Vladimir Putin,” said Carlson.
Carlson also compared the U.S. to Rwanda.
“Because the media for the last several years have pushed Rwanda style race hatred on the entire population,” said Carlson.
He also said that George Floyd wasn’t murdered by a white police officer.
“Just over two years ago that a violent ex-con called George Floyd got arrested in Minneapolis for trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill and promptly died of a fentanyl O.D.. Or at least that's what the medical examiner apparently determined. I think we'll had to see that,” said Carlson.
Carlson also implied that the mass shooting in Buffalo New York was not racially motivated, even though the shooter openly admitted that his motive was to “prevent the elimination of the white race.”
“So they're continuing to tell you, in the face of all available evidence that the mass murder you saw over the weekend in Buffalo was inspired by hateful right wing rhetoric when, in fact, that mass murder was committed by someone with diagnosed mental illness,” said Carlson.
The Fox News host loved to toss around the word racist as a joke.
“It's white supremacy, free speech. . . If you're a racist, racist, racist, racist, that's always the first sign of a racist. The New York Times is preparing yet another story about how this show is racist because we support national borders. If that sounds like a familiar attack, well, because it is not people you'd want to have dinner with. Anyway, The New York Times is calling us racist again, and we're still on the air, which shows you how well it works, said Carlson.
No, Tucker Carlson you are not on the air anymore.
Tucker Carlson is Creepy
This is another collection of strange sexual comments Carlson said over the time I’ve captured and analyzed his program. I could have made one five times longer than this short example.
“Do you feel dirty hearing that?. .Liz Cheney is America's foremost defender of democracy? But democracy spanked her hard last night. . .Democracy is a cruel master. You've got to be careful it can whip around and bite you in the butt. . .And I hope you beat it. Hope you spank it. . .You're going to get a spanking and they know it. . . Savage!. .. And by the way, if they find a meth lab in my basement, it's not real. Just so you know, just kidding, sort of.
So parents in the Ottoman Empire, a lot of them castrated their sons in the hope they would grow up to be the court eunuch, which is a position of real potential benefit to castrating your children in the Ottoman Empire.
Well, your testosterone levels plummet completely emasculated. You'd have to be a masochist to do that.
Is it such a low ‘t’ country that no one's going to do anything about . . There is no one in charge with a normal testosterone level who's willing to just say, no, you're not allowed to do this. . . And if you do, we're going to spank you hard so you don't do it again. Why do you feel dirty hearing that?
You for having us. Thanks for having never done an interview with human blood on the floor. And I like it. . . Should we get a nuclear war with Russia? You're working for Putin, and they completely emasculated. . .You take it like a man to have honor and dignity who have high testosterone levels. They're all gone now. So in your mind's eye, you think of the people who cause disasters as being, you know, testosterone, swollen dictators,” said Carlson.
I’m not sure why Carlson was so obsessed with spanking, testosterone and emasculation but he brought up all three quite often.
Coming up…
Tomorrow I should have my regular podcast/newsletter from last week. I wanted to get this out as soon as possible.