The Tucker Carlson Coalition Against the Deep State
The Tucker Carlson Coalition Against the Deep State
What Fox Could Not Allow to Exist
There have been as many theories about why Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox than there are media outlets looking to hire him.
Some say Tucker allowed himself to get fired so that he could run for president.
Some say Fox is nervous about a lawsuit from Tucker’s former producer Abby Grossberg, who has admitted that she has never met Tucker Carlson, in which she alleges that her feelings were hurt because her fellow employees didn’t like her.
Others claim Fox is afraid of a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, who is angry because Tucker was causing people to believe he encouraged protesters to go into the Capitol Building on J6, mostly by showing a video of Epps encouraging protesters to go into the Capitol Building on J6.
Some think that Fox wanted to prevent Tucker from airing more J6 tapes. Tucker had thousands of hours of video from that protest, but suspiciously only managed to air a few clips on one show before abruptly moving on, supposedly because Fox bosses demanded that he do so.
Others argue that Tucker was pushed out by the Murdoch family, who are accused of being increasingly against Trump and the “ultra-MAGA” wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, it was only weeks ago when Steve Bannon attacked the network for not supporting Trump, which he did in a speech at CPAC where Fox and its hosts were conspicuously absent.
Vanity Fair has somehow determined Tucker was fired because he’s too religious for Murdoch. This theory is especially odd given how many books like Faith Still Moves Mountains, Serenity in the Storm, and The Women in the Bible Speak are being published by Fox hosts. But what do I know?
In my previous Substack post
I offered my two cents, writing “Although the exact reason for this split has not been announced as of this writing, one can reasonably suspect that Tucker’s lingering skepticism over 2020 is a major reason for the split. ”
I wrote this because I believe that the Dominion lawsuit was politically motivated. As Mark Levin put in on his February 28, 2023, radio show:
Now here's the thing that none of them are reporting … it was the Democrats who were questioning machine voting, including this company, prior to the election.
NBC News did a whole segment on it. There was some expert at one of the universities who did a whole study. You had Democrats in Congress, I believe Elizabeth Warren was one of them — I can go back and check — who said she didn't trust the machines. And it goes on and on and on. Said media outlets, you had a college or colleges and universities. You had so-called experts and Democrats questioning machines. How come none of them have been sued, mister producer? How come none of them have been sued?
If I'm a lawyer, and I am, why wouldn't I sue them all on behalf of my client?
The answer why Fox was sued, while others were not, may be that Sidney Powell’s claim contributed to the perception that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimately won, which is a perception that the Deep State — the authoritarian oligarchy that controls so much of American life — cannot allow to exist.
In fact it should be noted that Tucker is still under his Fox contract. While he presumably can write, give speeches, make videos (his recent Twitter video got 74 million plus views ), appear as a guest on other shows, and so on, he will not be able to launch his own show until Fox frees him. Since his contract runs to December 2024, Tucker could be somewhat muted until after the next presidential election. This would excite some of his critics to no end.
Yet silencing Tucker’s criticism of the integrity of our voting system is not the only reason was fired. One of Tucker’s strengths, and why he will be difficult to replace, is his willingness to challenge the Deep State narratives on a variety of topics, from Ukraine to UFOs. This made him as much an ally to progressives — true progressives; not the Deep State statists who parrot White House talking points or spent the last half-decade talking about Russian collusion — as he is to conservatives. To this point, Tucker was not only the top-rated cable news host among Republicans but for Democrat viewers as well.
It is interesting how often progressives and conservatives find themselves to be strange bedfellows due to their shared enemies. For example, both embraced the Twittergate reporting, in which mostly liberal reporters like Matt Taibbi exposed the “censorship alliance” between Twitter and the FBI.
Statists however rallied to discredit Twittergate. AOC, one of the most public spokespersons for the Deep State, at least for teenagers, complained about the House Oversight Committee having “a whole hearing about a 24-hour hiccup in a right-wing political operation.”
Other Democrats characterized Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger who was also testifying, as “so-called journalists,’ asked him to reveal his sources, and threatened him with imprisonment for perjury after a minor error in his reporting was found. Taibbi was routinely called a “sell-out” by liberals on Twitter. And, quite coincidentally I’m sure, while Taibbi was testifying, his house was visited by the IRS.
In contrast, Tucker used his show to highlight Twittergate:
Tucker routinely platformed progressives and certain progressive causes — such as American foreign policy in relation to places like Syria, Ukraine, and China — in a way no show on CNN or MSNBC would dare. Neither network covered the Seymour Hersh story that Biden ordered the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. On Tucker that was a lead story.
Fox may also have had a limit to how much they were going to allow of this kind of talk. Jimmy Dore for example came on Tucker Carlson Tonight in March to say “I want to remind everyone, the United States is the world's terrorist.” A little over a month later, Tucker was fired.
Fox’s ratings are at this moment in a free-fall. Tucker’s last Wednesday show drew 3.05 million viewers. The Wednesday following his firing his 8 PM time slot drew 1.33 million views, a 56% decrease.
Meanwhile, the audience for both MSNBC and Newsmax is soaring.
The coalition that Tucker created has splintered back into partisan camps in his absence.