Kennedy vs. Trump: who got Tucker Carlson fired?

Election 2024 is forcing a lot of chess moves already

What you missed…

• Last year in October I called Tucker Carlson “pop-op”, meaning that although he was not “controlled”, he followed a pattern of needing to stay within the safe zone of public discourse, regurgitating widespread beliefs with milquetoast reactions which knowingly missed the real point of what is happening in the world.

• In this sense, Tucker provided damage control for the elite by attributing their criminal conspiracy to lesser evils like partisan bias, bureaucracy, foolishness, ego, etc.

• Tucker Carlson was fired abruptly from Fox News yesterday.

• (For what it’s worth, Don Lemon was also fired from CNN, unrelated.)

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr was a guest on Tucker’s show recently and said this about the reason for his firing:

Is criticizing Big Pharma really why Tucker got fired?

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Was it his racism, or his dangerous conspiracy theories?

Tucker Carlson is currently a defendant in a defamation lawsuit by a former Fox News producer named Abby Grossberg, whose attorneys speculate that this lawsuit played a role in ending his job, as if his reputation would become so tarnished that they couldn’t afford to keep him on the air:

“Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News is, in part, an admission of the systemic lying, bullying and conspiracy-mongering claimed by our client, former top producer Abby Grossberg,” said Tanvir Rahman, one of Grossberg’s attorneys. “Mr. Carlson and his subordinates remain individual defendants in the [Southern District of New York] case, and we look forward to taking their depositions under oath in the very near term.”

Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch supposedly made the call himself, causing reporters to speculate. Some think it was due to Tucker’s “promotion” of “conspiracy theories” such as the idea that the FBI had agent provocateurs inside the January 6th guided tour of the U.S. Capitol building:

Murdoch also was said to be concerned about Carlson’s coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The host has promoted the conspiracy theory that it was provoked by government agents, and Carlson has called Ray Epps — an Arizona man who participated in the storming of the Capitol but did not enter the building — an FBI plant, without presenting any evidence.

The LA Times piece goes on to speculate that it could have been due to many different controversies, but none of them make sense. Being against illegal immigration, questioning Democrat talking points, and fighting for middle America are the bread and butter of the Fox News success story, and Tucker is only guilty of repeating what Sean Hannity and everyone else would say in those regards.

Zero Hedge speculates that his firing was due to his spiritual leadership. As if some vague, lukewarm speech about good vs. evil at a conference dedicated to Heritage is so controversial today that a massive news network would fire their #1 host. Give me a break.

What about the Trump factor?

Since we’re all just speculating on the matter, I want to toss in another possibility: what if Rupert Murdoch had Tucker fired because it’s now known that Tucker hates Trump and would no doubt have a massive influence over the Republican election narrative in 2024? The Guardian reminds us of the text messages discovered from Tucker in the recent lawsuit:

Carlson is leaving less than a week after Fox settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5m. Filings in the case featured scores of vulgar text messages from Carlson in which he said he “hated [Donald] Trump passionately” and called Sidney Powell, a lawyer for the former president who was spreading false election information, a liar.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he wrote in one text message in January 2021.

Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign is already a disaster, and his image has been cracking as the years go by. He needs all the help he can get, which will especially rely on controlling the conservative sphere from top to bottom. He clearly has no smart people steering him anymore, like Steve Bannon, who could keep him on target and prevent him from making an ass of himself. Instead, he’s just flaming Ron DeSantis and LARPing as a martyr, calling for massive protests and uprisings, and promising flying cars and freedom cities if he’s elected.

Ominous: Donald "Lockdown" Trump's rant at CPAC and Agenda 47

We already have a “reaction” from Trump on Tucker’s firing, just a week after an interview with Tucker. He acts totally unaware of the situation, and speculates that Tucker might be voluntarily leaving to become more free. This doesn’t tell us much, since Trump is very good at playing dumb and wouldn’t let anything slip if he had nudged the decision behind the scenes. The interviewer acknowledges the strangeness of the situation, since Fox News stocks were sinking from the announcement already.

Back in the Tucker interview, interestingly, Trump goes out of his way to downplay environmental concerns repeatedly, saying that it’s “not even close” to being the #1 problem in the world. This feels like advance strategy against Kennedy, who will no doubt hit Trump with vaccines and environment more than anything. Trump has been unwilling to admit any fault on Operation Warp Speed and claims to have saved millions of lives.

Kennedy + Carlson = Trump loss

Kennedy and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines

While Trump has been furiously sniping at his clone DeSantis, Tucker gave Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr a platform to promote his actual agenda, which was about ending the corporate inequality in America and stopping the proxy war in Ukraine more than anything. At his core (I do believe he has one, he just doesn’t use it much on his show) Tucker is slightly more libertarian than his peers. He is disgusted at the cult of personality, fascist fantasy of Trump Inc. As I’ve expressed before, I believe Trump’s #1 political enemy is libertarians, which is why he couldn’t run against Ron Paul or join the Tea Party movement, and had to wait for it to die before he could seriously run.

Remember, when given the opportunity on a real debate stage, he spontaneously attacked Rand Paul out of nowhere, trying to get him off the stage in the next debates:

This is a sign of fear. Any hint of libertarianism is like kryptonite to Trump, who wants to have the biggest, meanest, most totalitarian version of America it has ever seen, but doesn’t want conservatives to realize what this implies.

The fact that Tucker is spotlighting Democratic candidate Kennedy right now, so soon after an interview with Trump, seems to most analysts like a classic strategy to split the Democrat vote against Biden—just as Democrat diehards consistently promoted Ron Paul in order to hurt the establishment Republicans—but it actually hurts Trump even more. Biden is extremely unpopular and would only be running as a placeholder until they can find a real candidate, and Kennedy will need to be stopped by both parties and their media tentacles in order to stay off the ballot.

He is strongly against vaccines—and not just the mRNA gene therapy experiments, which is a losing battle for Trump.

Kennedy, the anti-vaccine climate advocate

In this old interview, Kennedy talks about the mercury levels in the wombs of pregnant women, and says this is causing autism and other problems. (Of course, his celeb wife might end up causing some waves because she’s pro-vaccine and is now embarrassing him publicly.) The point is, he has always been serious about environmental toxins, and wrote books about climate long ago trying to drum up popular support:

Lately Kennedy ranks with Michael Moore, Al Gore, and Al Franken as one of the most vociferous and effective critics of the Bush administration. But unlike many other detractors, Kennedy concentrates his reproach on environmental rollbacks — an issue that usually registers as barely more than a tremor on the Richter scale of election-year concerns. For the past six months, Kennedy has been storming the lecture circuit and helping to fill the coffers of the John Kerry campaign. This August, he will release Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy, a book that will be, if all goes well, the green community’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

Yes, he wrote a book on climate alarmism, and hoped to make it the top issue of elections. This is sad news for me or anyone who might otherwise want to root for him. Although any conscientious adult cares about ecology, pollution, and health when it is genuinely under threat, the Green World Order happens to be Enemy #1 today, justifying de-industrialization, depopulation, and green feudalism.

Perhaps Trump really likes Tucker and would never want him off the air, even though he has enough clout to sway Republicans in this election. Perhaps Tucker being revealed to privately hate Trump doesn’t mean anything to Trump, who is notoriously spiteful. Perhaps his positive promotion of Democratic power threat Kennedy is also not enough to tip the scales, even though his biggest agenda is a combination of things Trump has very little defense against. And perhaps, even if Trump demanded that Tucker be fired, Rupert Murdoch would only laugh in his face and do nothing about it.

Controlling the dialogue

If my speculation has any merit, it would be reminiscent of 2020, where we saw a further downfall of Alex Jones for similar reasons. Jones was an early supporter of Trump, but became critical over time. During 2020 election hype, Jones announced his special plan to send his listeners to Trump rallies and hijack them with free speech anti-censorship talking points; Jones felt that Trump wasn’t doing anything about censorship, but just before he could implement the plan Trump had already locked down America and canceled his rallies. Jones then sat in the bizarre situation of watching Trump become the very thing he hated and warned about for decades, and an explosion of other astroturf, New Age, “truth-seeker” personalities bubbled up out of nowhere and pushed the conversation towards the Great (Satanic) Awakening.

Realistically, I suspect that Tucker has gotten tired of being the pop-op nice boy for Fox News, and genuinely does want to unleash some more substantial, journalistic stories against the corporate world and their incestuous ties to the Republican party, and I bet he was trying to use his show to impact the election dialogue in a big way. From his giant pulpit, he wanted to force candidates to address certain real problems, including Trump. Fox News execs may have tried to sit him down and put a leash on him about the upcoming election, and with the lawsuit in the immediate foreground he was expected to sit tight and obey. But instead, Tucker probably flexed his ratings, his clout, and his popularity, and learned quickly that Rupert Murdoch was not going to tolerate a radical free agent. And just like that, they hit an impasse.

So in a way, the interview with Kennedy may have torpedoed Tucker’s show, but not for any of the reasons people think.

What do you think?