Did Tucker preview his Fox exit at Heritage this weekend?
Conn Carroll
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Tucker Carlson is done at Fox News. According to a statement from the cable news organization, his last show was Friday, a show in which Tucker did not say goodbye to his audience or hint in any way that it would be his last broadcast.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean Monday’s announcement by Fox News was a complete surprise. Tucker might have had a sense Fox executives were up to something. And as it happens, Tucker gave a brief speech at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th-anniversary celebration Saturday night that might hint at part of the reason he is no longer with the company.
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You can watch the whole 26-minute speech here, but I’ve pulled out what might be some hint at where Tucker’s head is right now:
“You look around and you see so many people break under the strain under the downward of whatever this is that we are going through. And you look with disdain and sadness as you see people you know become quislings. You see them revealed as cowards. You see them going along with the new, new thing which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing. You know, saying things you know they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs. If there’s a single person in this room who hasn’t seen that through George Floyd, COVID, and the Ukraine war, raise your hand? Oh nobody? Right. You all know what I’m talking about.” “And you’re so disappointed in people. You know you are. And you realize that the herd instinct is maybe the strongest instinct. I mean it may be stronger than the hunger and sex instincts actually. The instinct which again is inherent to be like everybody else and not to be cast out of the group not to be shunned, that’s a very strong impulse in all of us from birth. And it takes over unfortunately in moments like this and it’s harnessed in fact by bad people in moments like this to produce uniformity and you see people going along with this and you lose respect for them and that has certainly happened to me at scale over the past three years.” “…But there is a countervailing force at work always. There’s a counterbalance to the badness, it’s called goodness, and you see it in people. So for every 10 people who are putting he and him in their electronic JPMorgan email signatures there’s one person who’s like, ‘No I’m not doing that. Sorry I don’t want to fight but like I’m not doing that it’s a betrayal of what I think is true. It’s a betrayal of my conscience, of my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy. I am not a slave. I am a free Citizen and I’m not doing that and there’s nothing you can do to me to make me do it and I hope it won’t come to that but if it does come to that, here I am. Here I am.'” “…There’s in one case someone who I made fun of on television and certainly in my private life in vulgar ways who was really the embodiment of everything I found repulsive, who in the middle of COVID decided, ‘No I’m not going along with this.’” “And once you say one true thing, and stick with it, all kinds of other true things occur to you. The truth is contagious. Lying is, but the truth is as well. And the second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this, I don’t want to get supernatural on you, but you are filled with this power from somewhere else.” “Try it. Tell the truth about something. You feel it every day. The more you tell the truth, the stronger you become. That’s completely real and it’s measurable in the way that you feel.” “And of course the opposite is also true. The more you lie the weaker and more terrified you become. We all know that feeling when you lie about something and all of a sudden you’re a prisoner of that lie and you are diminished by it. You are weak and afraid.” “Drug and alcohol use is the same way it makes you weak and afraid. But you look around and you see these people and some of them really have paid a heavy price for telling the truth and they are cast out of their groups whatever those groups are but they do it.” “Anyway, I look on at those people with the deepest possible admiration. I’m paid to do that. I face no penalty. Someone came up to me, ‘You’re so brave.’ Really?!?! I’m a talk show host. It’s like I can’t have any opinion I want. That’s my job. That’s why they pay me. It’s not brave to tell the truth on a cable news show and if you’re not doing that you’re really an idiot, you’re really craven. You’re lying on television? Why would you do that? You’re literally making a living to say what you think and you can’t even do that please.”
I think that is the mindset Tucker had going into work Monday. He believes what he believes and no one at Fox News was going to force him to say something he didn’t believe. And when they tried to force him, he refused. And then he did, in fact, face a penalty … at least in the short term.
I have no idea what is next for Tucker, but I doubt we have heard the last from him.