by David Stockman, International Man:
We are not sure what the Murdochs were smoking last Monday morning when they shot the immensely profitable Fox News Channel in the kneecaps, but we do know that Tucker Carlson was one of a kind among commentators in the vast journalistic wasteland otherwise known as television news.
Indeed, on issue after issue in recent years Tucker treaded forthrightly where his MSM competitors in both print and broadcast media feared to go. Perhaps that was because he was deeply informed, historically read and literate and possessed of an incisive, open, inquisitive mind that was not about to play passive stenographer to either the Deep State or the lobbies and corporate interests that suffuse the Washington beltway.
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Accordingly, Tucker has been nearly alone in smoking out the big issues of our time with a unique breadth, edge and consistency that neither Republican shills like Sean Hannity nor DNC conduits like Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow could hope to approach.
Thus, unlike the GOP’s neocon war-lovers and their echo chamber at Fox News, Tucker Carlson exposed the futility, stupidity and danger of the Ukraine proxy war against Russia. And he did so thoroughly and aggressively, exposing serial Deep State war-promoters like Victoria Nuland, while giving learned and incisive refugees from the national security apparatus like Colonel Douglas Macgregor a forum to refute the official lies and delusions.
By the same token, he had gone after the Dem/left earlier on when he relentlessly debunked the RussiaGate hoax. His facts and truths about this latter-day outbreak of McCarthyism are now unassailable, but at the time their mere mention was strictly verboten on the Dem venues at CNN, MSNBC, the broadcast networks and the New York Times/Washington Post axis.
Similarly, he was on to the Covid Lockdown scam early on and did not hesitate to follow the facts and the truth as the Vaxx fiasco unfolded. So doing he gave a platform to the likes of Alex Berenson and Robert Kennedy Jr. at Fox News where they otherwise had no prayer of being heard. And he did so because they were right and worthy of the airtime he seconded to them.
Then there is the whole assault on free speech, civil liberties and an independent 4th estate by the Silicon Valley giants. Tucker didn’t hesitate to expose how the latter had been drafted into the cause of Washington ordered censorship, cancellation, deplatformings and propagation of official propaganda.
Of course, this terrain was the historical bailiwick of the liberal media ala the Pentagon Papers (NYT) and the Watergate expose (Washington Post). But they were nowhere to be seen when (the old) Twitter, Facebook and YouTube/Google signed-up for censorship duty on Covid, Ukraine, the Climate Change Hysteria, the Black Lives Matter scam, the LGBTQIA+ insanity, the January 6th insurrection baloney and sundry other tenets of politically correct opinion. So Tucker filled the news void with aplomb and sagacity.
He was especially on the mark about the January 6th insurrection narrative as peddled by the MSM and the Washington uniparty leadership. For crying out loud, it wasn’t an insurrection or anything that even smelled like a coup or a remote threat to American democracy.
Instead, it was a spontaneous riot and hurly-burly assemblage in the nation’s Capitol Building enabled by abysmally poor police work. The rioters were unarmed, unorganized and unprepared for anything except to eventually be shooed out of the building after they had unexpectedly been given entry by sympathetic Capitol Hill police officers. Tucker Carlson’s vivid video segments of Jacob Chansley (aka the QAnon Shaman) being escorted around the building by these officers put the lie to the whole January 6th narrative in one delicious fell swoop.
Even on a very specific matter like the shocking sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline it was Tucker Carlson who put America’s most capable and renown journalistic investigator, Seymour Hersh, back on the news platform. My god, the Russians didn’t blow up their own pipelines and neither did the other part owner in Germany.
So who had the means and the remit to do it without Washington’s blessing or participation? Tucker rightly pointed the finger where it belongs—straight at Joe Biden— when the rest of the media remained deaf and dumb about one of the most egregious act of war during recent times.
There was also the matter of Fox Corporation’s 15% shareholder. We are referring to Blackrock and its kindred asset-manager bullies, who have forced the wholesale politicization of financial decision-making upon the markets, led by the hideous scam called ESG and the implicit decarbonization-based industrial suicide on which it is predicated. Tucker Carlson took them on with elan, even as the natural venue for this issue—CNBC and Fox Business—remained largely mute.
Still, amidst the daily Gong Show that passes for politics, finance and media news in America and the radio silence on all these crucial matters among the MSM, there was one reassuring fact: Tucker’s average nightly viewership at about 3.25 million during the first quarter of 2023 was more than 1.6X the combined 2.03 million of lobotomized lefties and/or liberal sheeples that tuned into Anderson Cooper (CNN) and The All In With Chris Hayes Show (MSNBC) during the 8PM slot.
Needless to say, Tucker’s audience isn’t going to vanish. And he will undoubtedly find a way to reconnect with it via one of the lesser conservative networks or thru some new streaming/podcast style gig worked-out with the likes of free speech patrons such as Elon Musk.
That is to say, the big spark of revolt against the mainstream establishment ignited by Tucker Carlson is gonna have legs, even as his shocking cancellation reminds that today’s rulers will stop at nothing when it comes to preserving their power and pelf.
And that includes economic asphyxiation by means of politics-based, not market-based, corporate actions. That is, Tucker Carlson should be an advertisers gold mine, but apparently the kind of woke deputy assistant marketing directors that savaged their own employers at Budweiser, Nike and Disney, among others, had been hard at work promoting boycotts of the Carlson brand long before the ballyhooed settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.
A commentator at American Thinker, for example, has suggested that Tucker’s massive viewership was not translating fully into ad dollars due to a de facto boycott by woke Corporate America.
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