By Paul Collits

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, literally, 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 forced departure from Fox.  This is big news stateside.

Carlson is a force of nature whose demise may well be highly exaggerated.  Leaving Fox 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 continue to 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 World War Three – 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 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.

Tucker Carlson

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 take-away 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” any more 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.

It hasn’t been a good week for the Murdochs and for Fox News, what with the astronomical settlement they were forced to make with Dominion Voting Systems, thought by Fox (and others) to have assisted Donald Trump’s departure in 2020 (in the way that assisted death works in those societies, like ours, deemed lucky enough to have this available).  800 million US dollars might be loose change for Murdoch, but it 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. Yet what he bought for that money is priceless. With a kind of quintessential Murdochian double-think cunning, he neutralised the damage of all of us knowing that the stooges of Fox — notably Carlson, that smug bow-tied P.J. O’Rourke as reptilian ringleader of misinformation — are even bigger liars than we thought.

Coming from a left-wing rag, accusing someone else of being a “reptilian ringleader of misinformation” is a little like pots and kettles. 

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 wu-flu was the biggest factor.  It gave the best-in-breed Democrat election-rigging machine the perfect vehicle in 2020 to ensure a Biden victory.  It unleashed on the USA in an election year the biggest change in the voting system, always notoriously open to (shall we say) tweaking, in modern American history.  It meant that millions of people who would not normally have voted at all had their ballots delivered to them and picked up by spivs and crooks. 

Those with a stake in steering people’s votes had unlimited access to voters in a way that has never applied previously.  Like known paedophiles being allowed close contact with, and access to, their targets, if you will.  Suddenly, the USA had a postal voting system to add to the already bizarre way they use computer software to count votes, without the rigorous scrutineering that we take for granted.  Of course, it has to be said that Trump was walked into the Covid policy trap laid for him by the CCP and by Fauci and friends, but that is another matter. 

From a month ago, this video simply demonstrates how many people perceive a spiritual dimension in this remarkable period of history.

That Trump’s legal efforts to have the truth about the 2020 election outed went to custard do not show that the election wasn’t fraudulent in all sorts of ways. But leftist media narratives are powerful things.  It is unfortunate that the big fraud, the electoral elephant in the room, got lost and was missed in the perfectly legitimate pursuit of evidence of specific software vote counting scams.

Carlson was correct to examine Trump’s claims about rigging. They were highly plausible claims.  Carlson was also correct to demand evidence from Trump’s colourful then lawyer, Sidney “release the Kraken” Powell, of electoral malfeasance.  Specific, compelling evidence.  She wasn’t able to provide it.  And Carlson said as much.  On air.  He gave her enough rope to make her case, and she hanged herself.

“You keep telling your viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you prove that very soon,” Carlson tells Powell. “You’ve convinced them that Trump will win. If you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.”

On November 19, 2020, Carlson grilled her on her rigged election claims on his show, and by November 22, 2020, the Trump team had cut ties with Powell, according to Politico. An email included in the filings showed Fox News staff discussing the negative conservative reaction on social media against Carlson after he had challenged Powell’s claims. 

I am not sure that any of this makes Carlson a reptilian liar, to be honest.  Just a journalist doing his job, and moving, always, in the direction the evidence leads.  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.  Murdoch is king of the vaccinators.  End of argument.  He has never been a Murdoch operative.

It has been all downhill for Fox since the late, legendary Roger Ailes was fired for the alleged sexual harassment of staff.  They are now controlled opposition, putty in the hands of the ruling elites.  As I say, Carlson was their only hope in the post-Bill O’Reilly version of Fox.

The appointment of the semi-demented Trump-hater, obsessed about conspiracy “factualists” (as Laurence Fox calls them), 2012 Mitt Romney running mate (God help us) and establishment Republican, Paul Ryan, to the Fox Board in 2019 is most likely relevant here.  Carlson revealed a few home truths about Paul Ryan in Ship of Fools.  They were not flattering.  Perhaps Ryan has a long memory.

And Lachlan Murdoch’s paws would seem to be all over the Tucker Carlson departure.  Lachlan has now dropped his defamation case against the egregious, low-rent house of hacks, Crikey.  In battles like this, one is minded to say, “couldn’t they both lose?”  CEOs wish to minimise risk.  Especially just after losing nearly a billion in a law suit.  Tucker Carlson was an ongoing risk.  He would have made Fox management very, very nervous on multiple fronts.  When the progressive brigade smells right-wing blood, they don’t stop. That is why they always win.

Then there is the whole saga over the 6 January 2021 affair – risibly called a violent insurrection by the left-wing media – and the possibility that it was a false flag operation engineered by the American Deep State. Sounds like an eminently plausible and investigable story to me. That most corporate suck-hole “journalists” don’t go near these stories is all the more reason why truth-tellers should.  Courage, again, in spades from Tucker Carlson.  Flip the bird.

Paul Collits is an Australian freelance writer and independent researcher. He publishes widely across a number of Australia’s leading publications and has been one of the country’s single most cogent commentators throughout the Covid era. He has worked in government, industry and the university sector, and has taught at tertiary level in three different disciplines – politics, geography and planning and business studies. A collection of his writing published in A Sense of Place Magazine can be found here. You can follow him on Substack here.