Was Tucker Carlson fired by Fox News for his lying or his hypocrisy?
As millions of rational Americans and a historic courtroom settlement last week have now confirmed, he’s been lying for a couple of years about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
He kept calling Donald Trump the winner when he knew all along it was Joe Biden.
But Carlson’s full hypocrisy surfaced only recently as part of the flotsam washed ashore in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox. That’s when we learned about the emails and text messages that Carlson secretly sent.
And it’s when we learned the sheer contempt Carlson has for Trump and for the Trumpian lackeys Carlson nevertheless kept putting on the air every night, even though he considered them out of their minds.
In “FoxWorld,” contempt for Trump is considered a hanging offense.
In January of 2021, Carlson texted a colleague that he was exasperated by Trump’s empty, unfounded claims of a rigged election. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump on most nights,” Carlson wrote. “I truly can’t wait.”
This, while championing Trump on the air every night.
Then, there’s Carlson texting of Trump, “I hate him passionately. … I can’t handle much more of this.”
Failure to pucker up to Trump — remember, that was the big offense that got Fox into trouble in the first place.
On Election Night 2020, they were the first to declare Biden the new president. Fox viewers were outraged. They started watching other conservative “news” outlets, the ones that continued to insist Trump was the winner and had gotten cheated by rigged voting machines.
That initial loss of viewers set Fox off on its lunatic run of stolen election lies — the lies about Dominion’s voting machines stealing votes from Trump and slipping them to Biden
Fox was overcompensating for its original sin of actually telling the truth.
And all of this led to last week’s courtroom settlement in which Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million.
Somebody has to help pay that bill, and his name is Carlson.
You know what’s ironic? For years — especially since he became Fox’s big ratings star — Carlson’s been spouting all kinds of garbage. Think of his nightly drumbeat of immigrant bashing, of his defense of antisemitic and white supremacy gangs.
Think of his reaction when Trump found “good people on both sides” of that 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Carlson called the outrage against Trump “fraudulent, entirely manufactured by the left and its servants in the media.”
Think of the reaction to all of this from neo-Nazi groups that have praised Carlson as “a one-man gas chamber” and lauded the way he “lamp-shaded Jews on national television.”
Carlson’s nightly diatribes have not only spread lies across the American landscape, they’ve given courage to the nation’s most scurrilous hate groups.
This has gone on for years.
So why did Fox finally get rid of him? For his years of lying or his hypocrisy?
Or for finally letting people know his real feelings about Trump?
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