printUPDATE V (5/11):
Tucker Carlson launches a new show on Twitter in the service of unfettered speech and a search for truth in 2023.
Just imagine what being a dissident from day one means (2002): It means you don’t even get a chance to speak your Truth over time to a large enough crowd, and only then get cancelled. Rather, you show up, begin writing in America and are cancelled almost from Day One.
“PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES! (May 29, 2004): “So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while false …. prophets are called back for encores?”
The answer will not please admirers of the late James Burnham, who blame scheming elites for any popularly accepted project they dislike, be it unwarranted wars or welfare. Contrary to Burnham, elites, media included, can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please – not inform – the populace.
Fox News was able to create the perception of a parallel universe in Iraq replete with big (nuclear) bangs and miraculously materializing al-Qaida terrorists because its Hollywood-inspired vision resonated with viewers. The ratings provided proof. By popular demand, MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times (This means you, Judith Miller) adopted a similar faux patriotism devoid of skepticism and serenely accepting of every silly White House claim.
UPDATE IV (5/5): Tucker Carlson was transformational.
Megyn Kelly no sooner left Fox News than she was forgotten once Tucker stepped into her stilettos.
And Ms. Kelly is smarter than Kayleigh McEnany (whose hard-to-spell names one has to cut-‘n-paste), or simpleton Lawrence Jones. As was Kelly more independent politically.
The other two are tools. Most all at FoxNew are tools, not nimble intellectually, which Tucker is.
If the likes of those two succeed in replacing the independent Tucker–then that’s all Boobus Americanus deserves
UPDATE III (4/26): Fix News is indeed finished. Joy! Two minutes of a cheerful Tucker Carlson
on Twitter, orienting The Idiocracy to what matters, nets more views—seven million to begin with—and climbing, than the sum of all concurrent programming on FauxNews, CNN, MSNBC. Unstoppable.
The Tucker segment is now, a few hours later, inching toward thirty million views!!!!
Rupert Murdoch will be remembered as the Money Man who fired Mr. Tucker Carlson.
Truth will out.
Fix News is finished. Joy! Two minutes of a cheerful @TuckerCarlson on Twitter, orienting The Idiocracy to what matters, nets more views, 7 million+ and climbing, than the sum of all concurrent programming on FauxNews, CNN, MSNBC. Unstoppablehttps://t.co/1c6KD1HI8P
— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) April 27, 2023
GOOD NEWS BREAKING: Fix News aka Faux New is FINISHED.
They just fired their ONLY attraction, Tucker Carlson.
Deep State, aka Fox News, are synonyms.
Prediction: Tucker Carlson might join News Nation. It’s not a bad little outfit, and does decent reporting. This, for lack of better options, as the USA—the embodiment of freedom, we are lectured—has banned most other news sources.
As a writer who put in years of sustained antiwar writing against Genghis Bush and others of the neocon coterie—who burned (and consequently burnt-out) as hot as a Babylonian kiln against invasions backed 100 percent by Fix News and its blond war-porn flank—this mammoth event is a salve. Poetic justice. Fox News is finished, having cemented its bona fides as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, which it always was, until Tucker.
https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/page/2/
https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/
UPDATE: The intuitive and likely reason for the firing by Faux News of Tucker Carlson—their top rating host, and one of the highest-ranked cable news shows in the country—tracks with human nature:
Envy. The regression toward the mean, as we say in statistics. The quest in America for safe mediocrity.
“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans,” wrote my good friend CLYDE WILSON, professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the foremost scholar of JOHN C. CALHOUN.
In the responses from the mediocre media—and I flatter them—one sees nothing but schadenfreude (“joy derived from the misfortunes of others”).
UPDATE: Megyn Kelly is one of a handful to offer an intelligent analysis of the stupidity of Fix News. All other bobbleheads are pontificating about the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. Or the sexual harassment libel. That’s not Tucker. Nonsense. Megyn Kelly was once very good. But in courage, intelligence, and anti-establishment instinct–she could not match or come close to Tucker. And she lost her perch to Tucker due to vanity. She opted to take a job with one of the biggest news networks, NBC, only to be dumped. And she came out against Trump for the silly reason of sexism and palled around with the Left, she now maligns.
“This will be good for Tucker.” Indeed. And as I point out: this will hasten the death rattle of the War Porn channel. “Tucker is about to dominate in whatever space he goes to.” “Tucker is a unicorn.” Also by Kelly’s telling, “Tucker is an avid reader and writer,” who doesn’t own a TV. He’s not a snowflake who crumbles at criticism, but the toxicity of his post affected him, says she.
In truth, Kelly back then did not get Trump’s America.
https://www.ilanamercer.com/2015/08/motormouth-megyn-kelly-and-the-mad-matriarchy/https://www.ilanamercer.com/2016/01/megyn-kelly-production/
There are any number of outlets available to Tucker (see Joe Rogan), and he should be able to write his own meal ticket (as if he needs it). Maybe he’ll even take the gloves off. Tucker Unfiltered? Because, well, didn’t you always think he was pulling his punches, that maybe he had more to say that he wasn’t saying but wanted to say?
RFK-God bless him—tweeted a little while ago that Tucker got sacked because his 4/19 editorial (the same day as the RFK announcement) was a straight-from-the-heart bludgeoning of Big Pharma and the Public-Private collusion under which we must live.
Fox is so over right now you almost can’t see them anymore. Good luck with that Lindsay Graham lead-in, Sean.
Let’s hope Tuck finds a new Home, and is able to provide a continuing platform for the Greenwalds & MacGregors. At the same time, maybe he can trade in his Walshes and Owenses and Devines for the more-than-occasional Mercer segment.
Juvy, thanks. Tucker is lovely, but he’s not so lovely as to love dissident-from-day-one (yours truly). You are right; he is destined for the freedom-filled podcast scene, as Megyn Kelly says. Since I never watch YouTube podcasts and think—no, I know—that watching these talk shows is a matter of 2 minutes of information in an hour of noise (IQ points lost, which could be fed with reading great lit or listening to great music, or walking outdoors…)
Btw, Kelly says Tucker doesn’t own a TV. Smart man. He likely does all the above. But indeed, he won’t need News Nation or NewsMax. He’ll have an audience of 30 million in no time. Fix News is holding him back. Losers.