Carlson’s Out But Fox Disease Remains Rampant as Trump Pulls Strings
Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News, and I see trump’s fingerprints all over the body.
Fox News Media tried to spin the announcement in milk toast terms.
“FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” Fox News said in a statement. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”
It sounds like the same kind of inane statement that Fox made after it settled and agreed to pay $787.5 million in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. It was the largest publicly known defamation settlement in U.S. history involving a media company.
“This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards,” Fox said in a statement. “We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”
Oh really.
Carlson was one of the most-watched hosts on the cable news network, with an average audience of 3.2 million viewers. That’s a lot of advertising revenues. It’s a fair guess that he got a huge golden parachute, probably in the tens of millions of dollars or he would have refused to leave. Where he lands, no one knows.
The parachute is a pittance compared with Fox News’ settlement and agreement in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. Dominion Voting produces and sells electronic voting hardware and software, including voting machines and tabulators, in Canada and the United States. In 2022, Fox helped promote the false allegation that Dominion was part of an international cabal that stole the election from trump, and that it used its voting machines to transfer millions of votes that had been cast for trump instead to Biden.
Dominion sued and claimed it had lost millions of dollars in revenues and contracts because Fox, including Carlson, lied about allegations that the company was flawed. There was no evidence supporting the claims. Carlson continued to genuflect publicly to trump but recordings released regarding the Dominion lawsuit show that Carlson believed there was no truth to the claims about voter fraud and that he “hate[s]” Trump “passionately,” believes Trump is a “destroyer,” a “demonic force,” a president who was a “disaster” and a politician whose behavior after losing the 2020 election was “disgusting.”
Carlson’s secret comments tripped the emperor of his clothes and were a big reason that Fox settled.
Fox has long been trump’s biggest media bootlicker until in past months when it seemed that trump’s star seemed to be falling. Meanwhile, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSanis was getting strong polling number in his unofficial bid for the White House.
Trump the phoenix is not going anywhere. In past weeks, DeSantis’s polling numbers have been falling and like a cancer that can’t be stopped, despite an indictment and multiple federal investigations, trump’s polling numbers have been steadily moving upwards.
Trump has the memory of an elephant and skin about as thick as wet toilet paper so it’s likely that he was livid and sought revenge when he heard what Carlson thought of him. Fox wants to back a winner, so they very likely heeded trump’s orders to fire Carlson. If you play with fire, you will get burned and smeared by trump.
Meanwhile, another $2.7 billion lawsuit is looming, filed by the Smartmatic voting machine company and claiming that Fox lied about the accuracy of the company’s voting machines.
Carlson joined Fox News as a contributor in 2009, and in 2017, he took over the network’s 8 p.m. hour after Bill O’Reilly was forced out.
While Carlson was getting the heave ho, the Republican National Committee (NRC) announced it will be streaming the first 2024 GOP presidential primary debate not just on Fox but also on Rumble, a popular video site for the worst, racist, misogynist, xenophobic, right wing extremists who happen to generally support trump. Coincidentally, Rumble also hosts Truth Social, the misnamed social networking site that is owned by trump. The RNC debate will draw in millions of ad dollars to Fox and undoubtedly there were fears in Murdoch land that if Carlson wasn’t bumped, Fox would not get the RNC contract.
Let’s get ready to rumble.
A common factor in many of Rumble’s programs is unquestioned support of trump and promotion of trump’s false claims of voter fraud.
Rumble was founded in 2013 by Chris Pavlovski, a Canadian technology entrepreneur. The company has gotten around $500 million in funding from two strong trump backers, far right, venture capitalists Peter Thiel and J. D. Vance, now a U.S. senator Ohio.
Rumble got a boost in viewership in 2022 when then-Rep. Devon Nunes, R-Calif., accused YouTube of overly censoring Rumble. Nunes began posting content on Rumble with other prominent conservatives, such as Dinesh D’Souza, Dan Bongino, Sean Hannity, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, following soon after. Nunn later resigned from Congress to run trump’s Truth Social site.
D’Souza is a leading promoter of conspiracies including the lie that the 2020 election was rife with voter fraud. D’Souza has claimed that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and that the Clintons had murdered people. He promoted anti-Semitic claims about Jewish billionaire, businessman and philanthropist, George Soros. In February 2021, D’Souza said the trump supporters who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2022, were little more than “a bunch of rowdy people walking through a hallway.”
Bongino, a right wing radio show host, is an outspoken anti-vaxxer, has claimed that the Obama administration illegally spied on trump’s 2016 campaign, that the investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion was a “total scam” and that election fraud cost trump the 2020 election.
Hannity, a friend of trump and a popular Fox host, has advocated the QAnon and “deep state” conspiracy theories, rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and has claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax.
Jordan is one of trump’s strongest supporters in Congress and said in an interview that he never heard trump lie and that trump has “nothing to apologize for.”
Rumble promotes itself as being “immune to cancel culture.” On paper, the platform forbids pornography, harassment, racism, anti-Semitism, copyright infringement and illegal content but has often failed to enforce its own rules. In November 2022, Rumble was blocked in France, after the company refused to remove Russian state media accounts from the site.
Rumble hosts conspiracy theory mongers like Alex Jones and has signed exclusive deals with far-right commentators Steven Crowder, Donald Trump Jr., anti-vaxxer Viva Frei. Vaccine conspiracists Del Bigtree, Sherri Tenpenny and Simone Gold began to use Rumble to promote conspiracy theories after each was pulled from YouTube or Facebook.
Jones is a radio show host who has promoted numerous conspiracy theories, including trump’s bogus claim of voter fraud. He also has claimed that the government either concealed information or outright falsified the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, and the 1969 Moon landing.
Last October, a Connecticut jury awarded nearly $1 billion in damages to 15 plaintiffs who sued over Jones’ claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax staged by actors following a script written by the government to build support for gun control.
A far right political commentator, Crowder had his YouTube channel demonetized in 2019 after repeated use of racist and homophobic slurs and again in 2021, for violating YouTube’s presidential election integrity policy for advancing false claims about the election’s integrity.
In an Aug. 15, 2022 report, Rumble said it had 78 million monthly active users. That month, Andrew Tate, a professional kick boxer and misogynist, began posting on Rumble. Tate had been banned from most other platforms for hate speech and harmful conduct.
Trump Jr., the ex-president’s son, and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, are among the most prolific conspiracy promoters. Trump Jr. once accused Joe Biden of being a pedophile.
“Awake Canada,” a Rumble outlet in Canada, aired a plan by Marcus Ray and Christopher James to have public officials involved with COVID-19 mandates “arrested, convicted, tried and executed.”
Rumble also hosts Joseph Nicolosi Jr. and his roundly debunked “Reintegrative Therapy” videos which claim to be therapy to help LGBTQ+ people to become heterosexual. His father, Joseph Nicolosi, developed “reparative therapy,” a pseudoscientific treatment that he claimed could help people overcome or mitigate their homosexual desires and replace them with heterosexual ones.
Medical institutions warn that conversion therapy is ineffective and may be harmful, and that there is no evidence that sexual orientation can be changed by such treatments.