I’m so old I remember—I think it was about two weeks ago—when Fox News was a leading opponent of cancel culture.
Tribunes of the free press and the First Amendment filled the airwaves with coverage of the dirty dealings, revealed by Elon Musk, between Twitter and government intelligence agencies in suppressing information and people.
Earlier, they exposed the propagandistic lies about the Hunter Biden laptop promulgated by 51 current and former intelligence officials.
Earlier still, they led the charge against the bogus accusations of Trump–Russia collusion that opened the door to the reprehensible cancelation of several patriotic Americans, not to mention the hideous disruption of President Donald Trump’s first term.
That was then. This is, unfortunately, now.
The Fox of now canceled its most popular host, indeed the most popular host in all of cable news, by peremptorily taking him off the air with no warning—but without firing him and, therefore, keeping him under contract.
By not firing Tucker Carlson and continuing to pay his handsome check, they’ve restricted him from going elsewhere for reasons that in every way run contrary to freedom of the press and indeed place Fox at the head of the cancel culture class.
Possibly the only bigger cancellations that come to mind are when the old Twitter canceled Trump and Facebook suspended him. Both have been rescinded.
Carlson’s case may have been for greed, but I doubt it. The economic fallout, which we’re already seeing, would have been too obvious.
It was ideologically driven. Fox’s and News Corps’ owners—the Murdochs, as well as “woke” investment giants such as BlackRock and Vanguard—want their network singing from the same pro-Deep State Never Trump songbook as the others, such as ABC (which recently censored presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), CBS, NBC, CNN and so forth, not to mention almost all our major newspapers from The New York Times down.
Carlson stood in the way of all this and had to be silenced.
His fans had to be ignored or, better yet, scattered to minor outlets in the hopes that they wouldn’t turn into major ones. That’s a lot of people, a number roughly similar to Trump’s fans, subtending almost the same areas if you were to draw a Venn diagram.
Carlson, naturally furious at what happened, has employed a “pit bull” lawyer, Bryan Freedman, to help extricate him from the situation, the downside being that he might have to talk to Don Lemon, who, fired by CNN, hired the same lawyer.
As Moon Unit Zappa said back in the 1980s, “Gag me with a spoon.” Doesn’t everyone do this from time to time to blow off steam?
OK, not absolutely everyone but most of us, anyway. About Moon’s time, in the ‘80s, I was writing screenplays for Disney. People working there were so sick of the dictatorial behavior of some of the company’s executives that they regularly referred to the studio as “Mouseschwitz.”
It wasn’t meant that seriously, just as much of what Tucker may or may not have said probably wasn’t either. But it’s been coming out recently obviously to tarnish him at a time when he'll be engaged in some heavy legal jousting in order to get back on the air and recapture his giant audience.
That he was excommunicated now, roughly a year and a half from an epochal presidential election that will determine so much about the future of our country and the Western world, is far from accidental.
Speaking of which, as most of us know, we live in a time of extreme change, including, obviously, the pervasive epidemic of transgenderism and so-called sexual reassignment that seems to be popping up everywhere we look, wreaking havoc on the basis of our society, the family.
Not inconsequentially, a sex change of sorts of great significance has taken place between our two major political parties, Democrat and Republican. They’ve switched roles. The Democrats that, for most of our lives, were the staunchest defenders of freedom of speech and the press have become the party of censorship, even to the extent, in some instances, of disallowing the Constitution. The Republicans, some part of them anyway, are the ones who defend freedom now.
As for Fox News, once a nightly viewer, I seem to have become allergic to it, no matter who their replacement hosts are. I wouldn’t doubt many of you feel the same.
