Fox and Tucker Carlson have split, Fox willing to part with their number one star in an unexpected move. Tucker Carlson was the one pundit who understood the forgotten America and was willing to go outside the box when it came to thinking outside the box. My own view is that Fox is trying to redefine itself in the post Rupert Murdoch era and I suspect that Murdochs did not care for Carlson reporting on January 6th.
When it came to 2020 elections, Fox team missed the bigger story which Don Surber explained, “Dominion’s cheating was a distraction from the real evil of the 2020 election: ballot harvesting. Democrats were able to get people to vote from home. Voter participation leaped from 56% to 67% — setting a century high by a large margin. People voted from home because so many Americans are too lazy to go to the polls.”
I find it interesting that every network other than Fox could push the Russian Collusion hoax and no one ever paid the price, the Pulitzer prizes never returned when it became obvious this was fake. Elon Musk exposed through the twitter files the cooperation of social media and many government agencies in censoring stories that were detrimental to Biden campaign in 2020 and then detrimental to the Biden administration. Much of the media was quiet when it was released and still is. Don Surber added, “Russiagate’s lies cost no one their jobs. The cover-up of Hunter’s laptop cost no one their jobs. The lies about the Raid on Mar-a-Lago cost no one their jobs. Welcome to post-truth America. If Carlson is surprised, he has not been paying attention to what has happened to us. We are no longer a great nation because we are led by greedy little bastards who saw nothing wrong with Hillary emailing state secrets to Red China and to foreign donors of her fake charity while secretary of State. We are led by greedy little bastards who saw nothing wrong with Barack Hussein Obama using the FBI to spy on candidate Donald John Trump. We are led by greedy little bastards who saw nothing wrong with Biden withholding a billion dollars in aid to Ukraine until it fired the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, the company that gave his worthless son an $800,000-a-year no-show job.”
As Megyn Kelly noted, Fox news had exclusive videos on January 6th and much of it told a different story that was reported. Fox news department outside of Carlson did nothing with it and Carlson only spent two days on it, most likely due to pressure from within the network. We know that while many crashed through windows, others were invited in. One story that was not reported by the media and that Carlson found that many of the Capital police were not informed of intelligence that their leaders knew about the potential of violence but failed to pass on. Nancy Pelosi have never questioned or been forced to account for what she could have done to prevent what happened since she could have asked for more protection. She did not.
The reality is that much of the media has long since decline into state media and as for Fox, its successes was due to counterprogramming as they reached out to the audience that other media ignore, the 50 percent that was conservative or independent. Much of the media has always been dominated by the left but today, the façade of neutrality has been lifted and the media makes no pretense whose side they are on. CNN collapse was due to the end of the Trump presidency as the reason for its existence for the past several years was gone and many leftists simply got their news from MSNBC. Fox coming collapse will be due to many conservatives deciding that after Carlson firing that the network that catered to them no longer cares.
Carlson parting with Fox is as much about defining conservatism, the right is still trying to define what conservatism means today. Fox began its quest to be a conservative alternative but as but now we are asking what conservatism is. Carlson brand of conservatism combined questioning previous conservative ideas of foreign policy and wondering to what extent America’s role in the world and viewing much of big business in opposition to the spirit of America. He even questioned free market economy when he criticized other conservative for “worshipping free market as a religion and not a tool.”
Carlson, like Robert Kennedy, feared the power of big business and big government uniting and the threat of losing our civil liberties. What Carlson saw was the rise of oligarchy threatening to place much of the Middle Class into a neo feudal state, a warning that scholar and writer Joel Kotkin has detailed for years. The Covid pandemic exposed the collapsed of our leadership class and how much of our business class, scientific class and political class united to strip away much of a freedom to save us for a virus that may have killed 3 to 4 per 1000, not much higher than many flu pandemics. As I noted in my book, America at the Abyss, Will America Survive, we saw the biggest transfer of wealth from the small businesses and the Middle class to big corporations. We witnessed big Media tech working closing with government agencies to censor thoughts they did not like and the rise of misinformation racket in which the left and corporate media will decide what is truth. This will prove to be a serious threat to our civil liberties and even to the freedom of the press.
I will repeat the argument that I made in my book, the path to conservatism will be uniting the best of Reagan conservatism with Trump populism. Trump foreign policy was not an isolationist policy but a more modest policy that concentrated on our primary rival China and supported free market policies at home. His tax plan was similar to Reagan and while he was a protectionist at heart, the one treaty he redid, NAFTA, was essentially 90 percent the original treaty, allowing more goods allowed while adding minor protection for US workers.
Carlson is on the populist wing of the movement, defending the forgotten America but to win 2024, you have to combine what worked in the past into a program of providing the average American a fair opportunity to succeed. Market economy is not a religion but a pathway to protection of liberty and prosperity. The Democratic party is the socialist party of America, using government to protect those major corporations whose goals aligned with the Party starting with the Green new deal in which we move away from traditional industry such as fossil fuels industry. What Carlson and RFK, jr are rebelling against is not free market but the uniting of major corporations and big government in a corporativism vision in which government directs big businesses into an economic polices it desire. Those businesses that cooperate are guarantee their share of the marketplace and profits. This has been tried in the past and we would recognize by two names, National socialism, or fascism.
Carlson may not have been right on his solutions, but he was right in identifying the threat before us. As for Fox, it success was due to reaching out to those forgotten Americans. It appears Fox have forgotten that.
The Donelson Files 