Tucker Carlson’s Fox News Hour: The Last of the Conservative Corruption, After the Wall Street Journal Abrupt Podolski Investigations

The exact circumstances of his departure remained murky on Monday evening, as he was let go in the midst of a string of high-stakes legal battles being waged by Fox to appease his base and win back viewers who believed that his defeat was.

Until his abrupt ouster on Monday, Tucker Carlson used his primetime Fox News show — the most-watched hour on cable news — to inject a dark strain of conspiracy-mongering into Republican politics.

The nativist insurgency that broke out during the Obama Years was traced to Mr. Carlson’s rise as a populist pundit and media figure. But he prospered in tandem with Mr. Trump’s presidency, as the New York real estate tycoon made frank nativism and seething cultural resentment the primary touchstones of conservative politics.

Murdoch stopped by my office when I was editor at The Wall Street Journal. He was back in the UK after giving testimony to a parliamentary committee investigating the phone hacking scandal at his British tabloids. One of the world’s biggest selling English-language newspapers, News of the World, was closed because of the scandal.

I don’t remember many specifics about the conversation — Murdoch loved to talk politics and policy with his journalists, sometimes by taking us to lunch at the Lamb’s Club in Midtown Manhattan — but I do remember the gist of what he said about the fiasco: Never put anything in an email. His private revelation was not to require his companies to follow high ethical standards. It was to leave no trace that investigators might use for evidence against him, his family or his favorite lieutenants.

In November of 2020, Carlson referred to SIDney Powell as Lying by the Way. I caught her. It is insane. According to evidence collected by the company, Carlson is one of many other people at the network, up to and including Murdoch. “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear,” Murdoch told the network’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott. But the network fired or chastised journalists who reported the truth.

“Fox News is also very sensitive to what their audience wants and what their audience is saying,” Hemmer said. “As that audience has gotten more extreme, as conservative voters and activists have moved even further to the right or have embraced conspiratorial thinking, they’ve embraced media that that give them that,” Hemmer said.

Many of the false narratives Carlson promoted were part of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, the racist fiction that non-white people are being brought into the U.S. to replace white voters.

“Tucker’s show made it a part of his culture and even a part of Republican politics, even if it was a white nationalist conspiracy theory that was not on his show,” said Angelo Carusone. “It really became acceptable to embrace that idea.”

“Tucker is a chameleon,” Ryan said. He’s very able to read the room and figure out where the rightwing base is and give them as much meat as they want.

Fox News: “Let Them Eat Bugs” — A View of a Case Study of “Genocide against White Farmers” by Tucker Carlson

“4chan to Fox to Trump” emerged during the presidency of Donald Trump,” Ryan said. In one notorious example, a conspiracy theory was circulating on the anonymous message board falsely claiming South Africa was engaging in a genocide against white farmers.

“Tucker Carlson talked about it extensively on the air…and eventually Trump tweets about it and says that the United States is going to do something about it,” she said. “It’s sort of insane to think about this content from these forums reaching the president of the United States, and him saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to act, we’re going to do something about what is a debunked, not true conspiracy theory.’”

Right-wing upstarts like Newsmax and Rumble have expanded the universe of conservative media. But unlike its newer rivals, Fox News still has the reach of a mainstream news outlet.

Carlson’s final show ended with a promotion for his latest streaming special, called, “Let Them Eat Bugs”. He claims that Carlson and the global elite are trying to force people to replace meat with insects.