Tucker Carlson requires no introduction. The guy who used to co-host “Spin Room” – one of the most bizarre news commentary shows ever to grace the airwaves on CNN – with liberal Bill Press is probably the most celebrated newsman since Edward R. Murrow. For conservatives, Carlson is more trusted than Walter Cronkite ever was by middle America. The popularity that Carlson has achieved on social media is unparalleled in the internet age.
He should continue on this course and refrain from ever entering politics and he seems to be confirming that desire.
This week he has become an institution, launching the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN).
When he dropped an interview that he conducted with Alex Jones, Elon Musk reinstated the “InfoWars” media bad boy’s X account. The interview showed Jones at his most reasonable and it was difficult to deny that Jones has a right to be wrong sometimes – like he was about Sandy Hook – especially since he’s been so prescient in his political predictions.
That interview has reached 21 million people. Carlson is pulling in an audience that cable news programs cannot achieve and his numbers are reminiscent of an age when there were only three networks competing for the public’s attention and nearly everybody watched the six o’clock news on CBS, NBC or ABC.
Carlson has become the comet of populist conservatism, a prophet of free speech, exposing the lying media he used to work for.
Most recently that was Fox News, where “Tucker Carlson Tonight” was the most popular show on cable news.
Of course Fox fired him. If you watched the program – as I did virtually every night – you could see it coming. Whether it was because he was the only mainstream media host to invite the brilliant Col. (Ret.) Douglas Macgregor onto his show to explain how Ukraine was massively losing its war with Russia or whether it was because he kept saying that no police officers died during the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot but an innocent protester had been killed, you sensed that this just couldn’t continue.
This kind of honesty, this frank and unvarnished assessment of the news wouldn’t be allowed much longer on a corporate network – even like Fox.
What Carlson is offering – I was tempted to say “selling” but I really don’t think he is motivated by profits – is the kind of sincerity and willingness to explore forbidden topics that has all but disappeared from the legacy media.
He has openly suggested that the deep state won’t allow Donald Trump to be president again. He has even mused about the possibility of the Democratic and Republican establishment taking out Trump in an assassination.
So TCN is the logical next step for Carlson. He spoke about his decision to keep moving forward during a Tuesday interview on the phenomenally successful “Redacted,” a social media program hosted by the terrific husband and wife team of Clayton and Natali Morris. I appear on the show once a week to discuss the latest outrage from Canada and its tyrant prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Morris and Carlson are old friends from Fox and the two are perfectly in sync in their refusal to be subsumed by the lies of the mainstream media and the clarity of their vision for the future of new media.
In explaining why he is creating TCN, Carlson set the stage, describing the current political storm that will soon transform from gale force winds to a hurricane.
“It just dawned on me based on my own experiences, including recent ones that you really need to be protected if you have a shot of saying what you really think is true, particularly in the coming 12 months, which is I mean, it's the most intense period, and not just in this country but around the world. I mean, lots of places are changing dramatically, the whole world is reshuffling and there's going to be a lot of pressure to shut people down because the information war is the real war,” he said.
“Of course, words are more powerful in the end and you know anything Raytheon sells, and more enduring so they're going to try and stop people from noting obvious truths about what's happening. And if you want to be one of the few who is able to say what he thinks you cannot be dependent on advertisers or big companies, you just can't and that means you have to set up some kind of system that pays for a fortress of reporters. And that is, you know, immune to advertiser pressure.”
Yes, he is updating the old adage that “the pen is mightier than the sword” but Carlson is also saying that we can no longer expect that the truth is even a remote objective for the mainstream media and the journalists it pays to repeat its narrative. Ukraine is teetering on the brink of compete collapse; it hasn’t a prayer of winning this war. It should be clear to any village idiot that the hundreds of billions of dollars that we have released to conman Volodymyr Zelenskyy has either been lost or stolen by corrupt politicians or oligarchs, yet the media continues to peddle President Joe Biden’s script that the war is somehow about freedom. Oh, and even though Ukraine is a border dispute, pay no mind to the fact that we have effectively no southern border with Mexico.
Carlson also noted in his Redacted interview how the media rarely has time to discuss issues that really affect people because they are too busy obsessing about race and how you should be obsessing about it as well.
“Conversations about race particularly incite animal fears in people and make them unreasonable immediately. But the truth is that the differences between races which are real, are not that big, but other differences are big in the difference between someone who makes a billion dollars and a person who makes 50,000 a year. Those are much bigger than the difference between the races,” Carlson said.
“I live in this country. I've always lived here … No one ever yells at me because of my race … But if you watched only NBC or these channels, you would think that that was the state of play in the states. It's not and so they're telling you that to divert your attention from the wars … but also from the financial crimes.”
Carlson returned to his prediction that Trump faces a virtually unscalable cliff in achieving his second presidency – even if he manages to overcome the massive extent of judicial persecution that would be comical if the established powers weren’t so earnest in their desire to utterly destroy Trump beyond recognition.
The future is “opaque. It's like looking through a shower curtain.”
But it seems pretty clear what is in store for the former president..
“So you have, you know, basically every power center in the country will do anything to prevent Trump from winning anything. I mean, that's the most important thing for them is to keep Trump from becoming president again,” Carlson said.
“Trump is leading the race in every nonpartisan or liberal polls [that] are showing him leading the race, beating Joe Biden in the battleground states. So like, they can't let them win. But if they don't let them win, then it's just super obvious that all this democracy stuff was fraudulent and that it's not a democracy. It's an oligarchy run by the richest people that [Sen.] Bernie Sanders back when he was a free man was telling the truth [about]. And so at that point, like the veil’s off, we can't pretend anymore, like when they killed [John F.] Kennedy, which they did. They could kind of pretend like everything's fine.”
But Carlson said the age of being able to pretend has long passed. People know everything is not fine.
Carlson said he couldn’t promise that his future work with TCN or X would be free of errors.
“The only promise I guess I would make about it is I can't promise I will never be wrong and I've certainly been wrong before. Probably will do so again unfortunately – but we will never lie: no lying. So it's going to be as honest as a news organization has ever been. And I'm fanatical about that because I think it's the right thing to do.”
If you should be fanatical about anything in this Orwellian age that pretends perverted middle-aged biological men parading around the girls’ change rooms are really women, one hopes it is for believing in and discovering something called objective truth.
And that’s why Carlson needs to continue to bloom where he has planted himself. Whether the talk of being Trump’s vice-presidential running mate is serious or not, Carlson needs to end the speculation. If he appears to be a journalist who was really working all along on a political career, then all of his work up till now could be deemed as self-serving.
Don’t tell me it can’t happen. If Nikki Haley can appear as a plausible Republican presidential candidate, then anything is possible.
And no one can continue to breathe in the same room as Donald Trump when the former president sucks up so much of the air. Carlson would inevitably become the invisible and powerless half of a political duo.
Politics is no place for a prophet.
