Fox is Tuckered Out

Rupert's kids sell their #1 star down the river.

Rush Limbaugh is dead—Now Tucker might as well be.

Let’s pretend, just for a moment, that you are the greatest sled-dog racer in the world. You have entered the famed Iditarod race from Anchorage to Nome. Halfway through the race you are literally miles ahead of your closest competitor.

Then in a quiet section of the vast Alaska forests, you press the brake on your sled and your dogs come to a halt. You step off the sled and walk around to your lead dog, a brilliant animal that’s won for you many times in the past.

You pull out a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum, aim it at the dog’s head, and pull the trigger.

Would that make any sense? No. Nor does it make any sense that Fox News just fired Tucker Carlson. Carlson has been the highest-rated personality on Fox News for years, and Fox News has been the highest-rated cable news network for years. Compared to Fox, CNN is a booger on its rear-view mirror. Some Fox News programs have been the highest-rated programs on cable TV, period.

And Tucker Carlson is their lead dog.

Understanding why this happened requires an ability to surmise from limited information, because no one at Fox or elsewhere is going to tell you what actually happened. Here’s my theory:

1. Rupert Murdoch, the man who built the Fox network and Fox News, is 92 years old.

2. Rupert Murdoch has three adult children itching to take over his business.

3. As the children of an extremely rich person, Murdoch’s kids grew up in a very rarefied world. Like King Charles, they were allowed to say outrageously stupid things with no one contradicting them. They are far more liberal than Rupert. Their friends are appalled, just appalled, that Fox News says all those conservative, conspiracy-theory things.

4. Fox knew it would lose the first defamation trial with Dominion Voting Systems. The judge in the case made two rulings last month that basically guaranteed it. He first ruled that 19 statements made by or on Fox News were false, doing the jury’s job for them. Then he ruled that Dominion had been defamed per se and didn’t need to show it had suffered monetary damages, taking another key decision out of the hands of the jury.

5. But rather than appeal the case after losing, Fox settled the case last week for $800 million, essentially admitting guilt and leaving it with no recourse. Who would do that?

6. Rupert’s kids would do that. They didn’t have to sweat for the $800 million; that’s the stockholders’ problem. And they don’t like Fox News anyway. They’d rather have a mildly-liberal network with lousy ratings that would get advertising from big nationally-known businesses. Fox has been suffering under a boycott from multinationals for years, and the Murdoch kids don’t like people like Mike “My Pillow” Lindell. He’s crass. He’s a Christian. He made his own money. He’s not one of them. Their friends would be nicer to them if Mike Lindell and Tucker Carlson were gone.

7. Whatever happens to Fox News now, it isn’t gonna be more conservative in the future. Expect the slide to mediocrity to begin forthwith.

Carlson’s firing makes it even clearer that the 2020 election featured huge doses of voter and election fraud. Dominion may not have been involved—even though their software and machines could have been set up to deliver false results—but somebody was.

It was hard to believe that a doddering old fool like Joe Biden could stay in his basement throughout the campaign, appear in “Town Hall” meetings where the hand-picked citizens read pre-written questions and Biden read off pre-written answers, and win an election against a popular incumbent president.

A quick comparison of the votes in 2016 and 2020 might help. At one in the morning on Election Night 2016, here’s how it looked:

Michigan: Trump leads by 33,000 votes.

Georgia:    Trump leads by 350,000 votes.

Wisconsin: Trump leads by. 72,000 votes.

Pennsylvania: Trump trails by 66,000 votes.

By the morning, Trump had won all four of those states and the presidency.

Now let’s look at 2020, once again after one a.m. on Election Night:

Michigan: Trump leads by 300,000 votes.

Georgia:   Trump leads by 247,000 votes.

Wisconsin: Trump leads by 108,000 votes.

Pennsylvania: Trump leads by 650,000 votes.

But by the time the counting was complete, Trump had lost all four of these states and the presidency. If Trump had been trailing at 1:37 a.m., his losing might have been acceptable, but the huge change between late at night and the next day or so truly defies credibility. Trump, and the American people, were robbed.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise that Fox News anchors and commenters were filled with disbelief, and they should have been allowed to say so. If firing Tucker Carlson was part of the Dominion settlement, we can now look forward to years of Soviet-style news reports applauding Our Glorious Leaders in the Democratic Party. If the Democrats could overcome Trump’s big leads in 2020—and then get people who bring up inconvenient facts fired from their jobs—they could make Daffy Duck our next president.

And he’d still be better than Kamala Harris.