I was among the many who thought that whatever Rupert Murdoch decided to do in the wake of FNC’s expensive and humiliating settlement of the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit, he wouldn’t sack the network’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson.
Wrong, Tom, wrong.
Carlson’s out at FNC and what’s more, he was not even granted the courtesy of an on-air farewell to his large and devoted audience. His departure comes on the heels of Dan Bongino’s exit from FNC, purportedly over a contract dispute. Yeah, right. Murdoch just ponied up almost a billion dollars to get out of the hole that Carlson, Bongino, Shawn Hannity, Jessie Waters, Jeanine Pirro, Laura Ingraham and various lesser lights dug for him. It’ll be interesting to see who else gets the boot—for if Tucker Carson’s ratings couldn’t save him, all bets are off.
Not that I’m shedding tears for Carlson and the rest of them. Plenty of people in America lose their jobs every day for mistakes and malfeasances that are trifling by comparison with the Dominion debacle. The sheer irresponsibility on display, the cynical promotion of a stolen election narrative that they knew to be false, the harm done to the nation’s political and social fabric, is inexcusable. That the Left is guilty of equally outrageous and destructive behavior cuts no ice with me. From 2016 to this very day, Democrats, progressives and their media lapdogs have promoted a series of egregious lies, e.g. that Donald Trump, with the help of V. Putin, stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton. But I will add this: Nobody who’s been promoting the equally egregious lie that the 2020 election was stolen for Joe Biden has any business criticizing the other side. Tu quoque, Tucker Carlson, tu quoque.
It's true that Carlson will probably land on his feet. The penalty he so richly deserves, a career in tatters and lasting disgrace, will never be levied on him. His many fans will hail him as their tribune of the people, a fearless truth teller who stood up to progressivism and the Deep State and paid the price.
But Tucker Carlson’s defenestration supplies a teachable moment of quite a different character, for it may be traced back to Donald J. Trump, the focus of destructive hubris and mendacity in contemporary America. That’s what you get for carrying the water of an uber-narcissist for whom lying is as reflexive as breathing. Loyalty to Trump means swallowing—or pretending to swallow—his lies, no matter how outrageous they may be. Carlson is too intelligent to have believed that the 2020 election was really stolen, or that the January 6 riot was an FBI false-flag operation. He repeated those Trump lies because they were embraced by the former president’s MAGA loyalists—people who constituted a sizeable percentage of his audience. No doubt Carlson convinced himself that they were noble lies, necessary to combat the evil influence of progressivism. Trump, he must have thought, was the lesser of two evils.
Winston Churchill quipped that in wartime, the truth must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies. What tripped up Tucker Carlson was the opposite supposition, that in contemporary America’s political wars, the lie must be protected by a bodyguard of truth. For it’s absolutely true that postmodern progressivism, which has captured the Democratic Party, is a force for evil—nihilistic, malicious, inhuman, intent on the destruction of America as we know it. Conservatism should be, in the formulation of William F. Buckley, Jr., the opposing force, standing athwart history, crying Stop! But instead of conducting that noble defense of American ideals, people like Tucker Carlson, calling themselves conservatives, are conducting an ignoble, even immoral, defense of a man who wouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond to embrace po-mo progressivism if he thought it would help him get back in the Oval Office.