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1 May 2023
7:00 AM
On a day when we remember fallen heroes who gave their lives in useless wars, and still do, we have the news of an apparently ‘fallen’ American hero. One who is, decidedly, not fighting in a useless war.
Tucker Carlson has been the one thing making Murdoch’s Fox News bearable. The liberal media establishment’s automatons, with all of their progressive talking points at the ready, are celebrating Carlson’s departure. This is big news stateside.
Carlson is a force of nature whose demise may well be highly exaggerated. Leaving Fox News will not hurt his bank balance. Likely the reverse. And wherever he lands, hopefully, like his friend, the recently resigned Mark Steyn (from GB News), he will continue to speak truth to power and annoy all the right people. Including, on many occasions, people who the progressive set might consider to be his allies.
Carlson vehemently denies being ‘courageous’, despite more threats to the lives of his family than any man should expect.
Anyone who has dipped into his bestselling 2018 book, Ship of Fools – written well before the Covid evil and the slide into the opening refrain of a third world war – or watched him speak, say at the 2019 National Conservatism conference or as recently as this past week at the Heritage Foundation, will know that he is super-smart, fundamentally decent, very funny and extremely perceptive. He understands profoundly what is wrong with our culture and polity, and he knows that the old rules of combat no longer apply.
At the start of his book, Carlson stated:
Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class… Yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it.
Herein lies the core of Carlson’s beliefs about where we have landed. The hollowing out of the middle class. The opioid pandemic. Unwanted, unvoted-for mass immigration. Repeated military adventures that serve the interests of the military-industrial complex and few others. Stratified meritocracy. Oligarchy posing as democracy. Unhinged identity politics foisted upon us by authoritarians.
America was radically and permanently changed, against the will of its own population.
Carlson explores the inconvenient. He calls out what the Independent Institute, which hosted Carlson to talk about his book, has termed ‘neo-mercantilism’.
Little wonder he is especially targeted by both the left and the corporate, establishment right. By the ruling class, that weird new amalgam of the moneyed and the Woke. He has a little in common – perhaps a lot – with both Senator JD Vance from Ohio and RFK Jr. And perhaps with Pat Buchanan, too.
As Rusty Reno said in introducing his 2019 speech, a fish rots from the head down. He was talking about the leadership class in the USA (read also Australia, and the rest of the Anglosphere), which Carlson always has firmly in his sights.
Here, Carlson made a few fundamental observations:
- The main threat to liberty now comes from the private sector, which is, these days, in an alliance with the progressive left, not from governments;
- Government is basically corrupt, and a lot of the ‘good guys’ are not;
- They lie not just routinely but also aggressively;
- The right is captivated by an antiquated way of viewing the world;
- The progressive left’s push is an example of Freudian projection – they are the masked, violent, projectile-throwing marauders calling others ‘fascists’ and ‘racists’;
- The other side is not interested in peaceful co-existence – the progressive faith is evangelical.
Some of the key takeaway points from the Heritage speech are:
- The country is moving at high speed in the wrong direction;
- It is doing so ‘in ways that are unfathomable’;
- Most people are breaking down under the pressure to conform to things they know to be lies, in order to keep their jobs;
- The herd instinct is the strongest instinct, from birth;
- People will (mostly) do anything not to thrown out of their group;
- Those who resist are heroes, even more commendable than the physical heroes who do heroic things instinctively;
- The institutional destruction that is going on is wide and deep;
- What is happening to our society isn’t a ‘debate’ anymore in which both sides can proceed with ‘rational’ arguments;
- The other side doesn’t want debate;
- What is going on is evil.
It will be apparent that Carlson is also the holder of splendidly heterodox views on all sorts of issues. He is hard to put in a box. He is no libertarian, for example, and libertarianism has been the dominant force in conservative politics for quite some time. He mocked the default libertarian line, ‘go start your own Google’ as the answer to everything that conservatives might think wrong about our current predicament. He sniggers openly at the Republican Party. He calls evil, well, evil. He cuts to the heart of things. He looks at what is in front of us all and asks, what is really going on here? This used to be termed ‘journalism’. Now it is called ‘conspiracy theory’.
Here is some context to the Tucker Carlson departure from Fox News.
It hasn’t been a good week for the Murdochs or Fox News, what with the astronomical settlement they made with Dominion Voting Systems. 800 million US dollars might be loose change for Murdoch, but it still must have hurt.
Of course, the leftist corporate media sees the settlement with Dominion as an opportunity to diminish Tucker Carlson, and some will see his departure from Fox as related to the Dominion issue:
You could make a case that in recent weeks, Murdoch’s circus of happy-talk dystopian propaganda (otherwise known as any random half-hour of Fox News) took a major hit. The release of documents subpoenaed during the Dominion Voting System’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News revealed something that was, or should be, profoundly embarrassing to the network: that there are moments when its star huckster, Tucker Carlson, actually tells the truth (at least in private). The revelation that Carlson, along with a number of Fox News executives, peddled Donald Trump’s crackpot assertion that he won the 2020 election not because they believed it, but because they thought they had to go along with what their viewers wanted to hear, made the Fox team look like craven cowards.
… The $787.5 million paid to settle the Dominion lawsuit is, to Murdoch, another digit on a ledger; it’s the cost of doing business.
Carlson, like many of us, realises that Trump was ‘assisted’ from office by a range of bad actors and circumstances. The Chinese Communist Party’s ‘WuFlu’ and the domestic political fallout was the biggest factor.
That Trump’s legal efforts to at least open a conversation about the 2020 election and its voting practices made necessary by Covid health orders, did not amount to much.
Carlson was correct to at least acknowledge Trump’s claims about the election. Carlson was also correct to demand evidence from Trump’s lawyer of electoral malfeasance. Specific, compelling evidence. She wasn’t able to provide it. And Carlson said as much. On air. He gave her plenty of space to make her case, but she failed to do so.
Carlson is famous for taking his own line and not bowing to corporate or ratings-driven imperatives. Witness his persistent and powerful stance on Covid. Indeed, Tucker Carlson was Fox News’ only real hope in the post-Bill O’Reilly media world.
My heart bleeds for the post-Covid, post-Trump Fox News empire.
As for Tucker Carlson, he won’t be too worried by the insults printed in various rags. When someone titles a talk ‘Big Business Hates Your Family’, or sub-titles his book ‘How a Selfish Ruling Class is bringing America to the Brink of Revolution’, it is a wonder that that person has lasted as long as he has in MSM.
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
TUCKER CARLSON WAS BORN FOR A TIME SUCH AS THIS
I have cancelled my subscription to Fox News.
Tucker Carlson’s show was the only reason I subscribed to the channel and without him I have decided to end my subscription.
“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” was a motto suggested, but not used, for the Seal of the United States.
The rebellious Tucker Carlson is a true hero and a man of God. He has been born for a time such as this.
Prof Augusto Zimmermann PhD
Nelle's journey 