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He Tucked around and found out.

Tucker Carlson, the biggest star in cable news history, found out he no longer had a job at FOX News on Monday, reportedly only ten minutes before the rest of the world got the news. His show Tucker Carlson Tonight ran from 2016 to 2023 and was the highest-rated cable news show ever, at times averaging over five million viewers.

Carlson, who TIME magazine said in 2021 “may be the most powerful conservative in America,” closed his show on Friday promising viewers he’d be back on Monday, but by Monday he was gone. He wasn’t even given an opportunity to bid his viewers a fond farewell, which one critic called “the television equivalent of an execution.”

Some sources say FOX’s top dog Rupert Murdoch fired him. Others say the decision came from Murdoch’s son Lachlan and Suzanne Scott, FOX’s dead-faced affirmative-action gender-equity-hire CEO. Carlson’s replacement has yet to be named. For now, FOX is using a rotating series of talking stiffs to fill the vacuum left by his absence.

Neither Carlson nor FOX have commented on the specific reasons for his axing, so for now it’s all speculative.

Some suggest he became the fall guy for the fact that last week, FOX News settled a lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems had filed against them for $787.5 million. Two days after the 2020 presidential election, possibly suggesting that FOX’s executives saw a financial incentive in supporting Trump’s claims of election fraud, Carlson texted a producer:

We worked really hard to build what we have. Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me. . . . What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.

In the weeks following the election, when FOX’s management was attempting to appease Trump’s base by alleging that Dominion was involved in undermining the results, Carlson was their lone voice crying out that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell had failed to provide evidence of her claims. On November 19, 2020, Carlson told viewers, “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

As part of discovery in the case, it was revealed that Carlson had messaged Powell by saying:

You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon. 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.

He privately texted FOX host Laura Ingraham:

Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane. . . . Our viewers are good people and they believe it.

Although Carlson was FOX News’ biggest human asset, he was hardly a company man. Some theorize that although he might have been the only honest person at the network regarding the fact that Sidney Powell wasn’t coughing up any evidence for her claims about Dominion Voting Systems, FOX executives and their bruised egos placed all the blame on Carlson for having to fork over nearly a billion dollars in damages for pushing that narrative.

It’s been rumored that Rupert Murdoch was displeased with Carlson’s coverage of whatever you want to call what happened at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a friend of Murdoch’s, has publicly stated that Carlson has drawn “offensive and misleading conclusions” about January 6. At various times, Carlson has suggested the event was a federal setup and that Ray Epps was an FBI plant. Earlier this year, he aired footage provided to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that undermined the Biden Administration and FBI’s insistence that the event was a strictly violent white-supremacist terrorist insurrection.

Another theory being floated about Carlson’s dismissal is the fact that FOX News, which has been dogged for years by sexual-harassment cases ranging from Roger Ailes to Bill O’Reilly and many, many others, was sued in late March by the decidedly mannish and unpleasant-looking Abby Grossberg, who served a brief stint as producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight before taking a medical leave of absence, claiming she’d been effectively crippled by enduring a toxically woman-hating workplace. Grossberg’s lawsuit manages to embody every extant stereotype of hysterical women and why they really belong in the kitchen, barefoot while suckling one child and pregnant with another:

[There is a] misogynistic environment that permeates Fox News and fosters a toxic workplace where truth remains a fugitive while female workers are verbally violated on almost a daily basis by a poisonous and entrenched patriarchy. . . . Clearly the #metoo movement’s slogan, “Believe All Women,” had not made its way to Fox News. . . . Ms. Grossberg encountered systemic chauvinism at Fox News. . . . In these discussions, no woman, whether she was a Republican politician or a female staffer at Fox News, was safe from suddenly becoming the target of sexist, demeaning comments, such as being called a “cunt.”

What a cunty thing to say!

Interestingly, despite the rampaging sexism and objectification of women that was alleged in her workplace, Grossberg’s suit makes no mention of any males in the office making a single sexual come-on toward her, but since pictures of her face are readily available to the viewing public, perhaps Grossberg’s lawyers advised her not to press the matter too far.

The suit also alleged a stifling environment of virulent anti-Semitism at FOX, but the only “evidence” the suit coughed up was an alleged incident where an associate asked Grossberg whether Judaism forbade Jews from having tattoos (it does), and another situation where one worker said that a Jewish co-worker went to a Jewish bakery to buy bread and “see his people.” Oy vey, it’s anuddah Shoah!

Yet another rumor about Carlson’s defenestration revolves around the sudden cancellation last month of 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch’s two-week-old engagement to dental hygienist Ann Lesley Smith, who reportedly referred to Carlson as a “messenger from God” shortly before Murdoch broke off the engagement. “Rupert Murdoch was perhaps unnerved by Carlson’s messianism because it echoed the end-times worldview of Murdoch’s ex-fiancée Ann Lesley Smith,” writes Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair. Last Friday, Carlson spoke at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th Anniversary gala and spoke of a battle between “good” and “evil” hinging on the issues of transgenderism and abortion. “That stuff freaks Rupert out,” a source told Vanity Fair. “He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk.”

Another thing that neither Rupert Murdoch nor his son are likely to enjoy is losing advertisers. Carlson, who seems unique among American newscasters in that he seems to say what he wants rather than what he’s told to say, has lost dozens of advertisers for speaking his mind about Vladimir Putin, women, immigration, Black Lives Matter, the COVID vaccines, trannies, the war in Ukraine, unchecked American militarism, Deep State corruption, elite manipulation of the media, bankers’ malfeasance, GOP ineptitude, and especially the Great Replacement, which is roundly derided as a wackadoodle and thoroughly debunked white-supremacist conspiracy theory, despite the fact that major newspapers openly print editorials with titles such as “We Can Replace Them.”

He’s the only major broadcaster I can think of who is entirely unpredictable and seemingly uncontrollable. You don’t expect such a high-profile “conservative” to love the Grateful Dead, to speak at Hells Angels president Sonny Barger’s funeral, to say that a book by Elizabeth freaking Warren was “one of the best books I’ve ever read on economics,” to admit he was wrong about the Iraq War, and to draw more viewers among Democrats than any other cable news host.

My favorite thing about him is that face he makes when listening to someone on his show struggling to disagree with him. He’s mastered that face, and it says, “You make absolutely no sense, you are clearly mentally ill, and I’m very concerned not only for your welfare, but for that of everyone around you.”

At 8:01 PM EST last night — almost the exact time when his show used to air — Carlson posted a two-minute video on Twitter. Here is the full transcript of what he said:

Good evening, it’s Tucker Carlson. One of the first things you realize when you step outside the noise for a few days is how many genuinely nice people there are in this country — kind and decent people, people who really care about what’s true, and a bunch of hilarious people, also. A lot of those. Gotta be the majority of the population, even now. So that’s heartening. The other thing you notice when you take a little time off is how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are. They’re completely irrelevant. They mean nothing. In five years, you won’t even remember that we had them. Trust me as someone who’s participated.

And yet at the same time — and this is the amazing thing — the undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in media. Both political parties and their donors have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it. Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state. That’s a depressing realization, but it’s not permanent. Our current orthodoxies won’t last. They’re brain-dead. Nobody actually believes them. Hardly anyone’s life is improved by them. This moment is too inherently ridiculous to continue, and so it won’t. The people in charge know this. That’s why they’re hysterical and aggressive. They’re afraid. They’ve given up persuasion; they’re resorting to force.

But it won’t work. When honest people say what’s true calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful. At the same time, the liars who’ve been trying to silence them shrink, and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe. True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some. And that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon.

Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023

I hope he pulls a Joe Rogan and starts his own media company, one where he depends on subscribers rather than advertisers and feels free to say whatever the fuck he wants. Despite what seems like a devastating setback, I trust that he has the intelligence and integrity to keep on Tuckerin’.

America’s last sane TV newsman is gone. Hopefully, so is American TV news.

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