Tucker Carlson moves to Twitter after Fox News ouster
Lots of speculation has been going around since Fox News made the baffling decision to axe their most-watched on-air Talent: Tucker Carlson. We now have an answer about his new home.
"Free speech is the main right that you have. Without it, you have no others.” - Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson, after some downtime interspersed with only one other video release since being fired from Fox News, has again taken to Twitter to speak his piece — and to make an announcement.
Tucker’s popular primetime show is returning, but not on any network or cable news networks. It’s returning on Twitter.
In a new video posted to his Twitter account, Tucker had some things to say about the newsmedia and the way they do things, highlighting that they often use nuance and lies of omission to tell you things that are factually true, but missing much-needed context. You can see it below.
I would also like to give my take on what he has to say.
"You often hear people say the news is full of lies. But most of the time that's not exactly right. Much of what you see on television - or read in the New York Times - is, in fact, true in the literal sense. It could pass one of the media's own "fact checks." Tucker stated.
He continues, ”But that doesn't make it true. It's not true. At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie. A lie of the stealthiest, and most insidious kind. Facts have been withheld on purpose, along with proportion, and perspective. You are being manipulated.”
I can think of no greater example of what Tucker is talking about than the biased coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse’s situation in Kenosha, where the newsmedia skewed the facts so badly that there are still people to this day who think he killed 2 black people and wounded a third during the riots in Kenosha during the infamous “Summer of Love” riots of 2020 that happened all over the country. Riots that largely happened in response to alleged instances of police brutality that the mainscheme media also horribly skewed to stoke the embers of indignation in simple people who can’t read very well, and are too lazy to look into the facts of much of anything. And these riots were infamously portrayed by lie-spinning news hacks like those at CNN as “mostly peaceful”.
I find Tucker’s comment on manipulation is a massive understatement. Those who choose to entrust companies like CNN to tell them the whole truth about any event rather than doing their own research — an act that the New York Times also infamously decried — are doing so at their own peril. You’re guaranteed to be deceived 100% of the time.
Why is that, though? Well, you’ll be hard-pressed to find many institutions at all that haven’t been ideologically captured in one way or another. It’s so bad now that even supposed ‘conservative’ outlets are often met with skepticism by people who align with them politically because they tend to kowtow to the powers that be in a similar fashion to the liberal media juggernauts, often failing to report effectively on events that would boost conservatism’s favor in the public sphere. Or worse, letting themselves be drowned out and silenced when they do actual reporting on embarrassing events.
The Hunter Biden laptop story fits the bill there. It was impossible to even post a video of the New York Post article about it. I know, I tried. And my account was very quickly banned. The story was quickly scrubbed from social media entirely.
We later found out through the Twitter Files that the full weight of the Washington establishment was mobilized through the intelligence community and Congress alike to censor anyone who engaged in wrongthink up until Elon’s purchase of the platform was finalized last year.
Context matters. Perspective matters. Having ALL of the facts that allow you to make up your own mind about anything matters. And those are things that no propaganda mill wants you to have, because then they can’t control what you think about anything.
You wouldn’t go buy a car without doing at least a little research into which cars are reliable and which ones are not. Sadly though, our perspectives on current events and the world around us don’t often carry such severe stakes. At least, not immediate ones.
Think back to 9/11; did you ever imagine that such an event would lead to a palpable erosion of your rights in which EVERY President since George W. Bush has willingly particpated, and carried out? And yes, that includes Trump. Remember how he signed a continuation of the National Defense Authorization Act that effectively spelled the end of honesty in media and habeas corpus that Obama originally signed into law?
If you don’t remember, then there’s your reminder. But let’s keep going.
Tucker continued, ”If I tell you that a man has been unjustly arrested for armed robbery, that is not - strictly speaking - a lie. He may have been framed. At this point, there has been no trial, so no one can really say. But if I don't mention the fact that the same man has been arrested for the same crime six times before, am I really informing you? No, I'm not. I'm misleading you. And that's what the newsmedia are doing in every story that matters, every day of the week, every week of the year.”
The story surrounding people like George Floyd and Jordan Neely is all you need to prove the premise that Tucker is putting forth here. The media painted both of these individuals as good, innocent people who were killed for being black. The truth of the matter is that they both had criminal records a mile long thanks to the ‘revolving door’ policy on crime in this country that has grown markedly worse at the hands of Soros-backed District Attorneys like Alvin Bragg in New York.
George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose and I have a feeling that we will find a similar scenario in the death of Jordan Neely. But it won’t matter, because angry leftists have already crafted the narrative they want.
”What's it like to work in a system like that? After more than 30 years in the middle of it, we could tell you stories. The best you can hope for in the news business, at this point, is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits. And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it.”
With all the buzz and speculation surrounding Tucker’s dismissal from Fox News, this is a telling statement. He effectively proved how much it takes for a major news corporation to see more value in dismissing their most popular on-air talent. It also proves that ratings don’t matter nearly as much as currying favor with whomever controls Rupert Murdoch enough to get him to torpedo his own business.
”The rule of what you can't say defines everything. It's filthy, really. And it's utterly corrupting. You can't have a free society if people aren't allowed to say what they think is true. [Free] Speech is the fundamental prerequisite for democracy. That's why it's enshrined in the first of our constitutional amendments.”
The problem with online discourse is that we are very much ruled by a set of concepts and topics that people with pronouns and pride flags in their Twitter bios working in tech — as well as their FBI handlers — deem to be offensive. A free society is evaporating before our very eyes because we have established taboos of thought. And with saying the wrong thing bearing the penalty of career suicide, or worse; people have begun to compulsively self-censor. Hell, I won’t even say certain things around electronics of any sort, now. I’m not trying to get raided like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for mumbling the wrong thing under my breath around a smartphone.
I’m reminded of that famous Washington Post slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” Yes, it does. And yet people like myself and anyone else who is genuinely speaking truth to power often find that when we say the wrong thing, we get swiftly disciplined and deboosted.
Can you say ‘over the target’?
Sorry to be all smarmy, but it will never fail to amuse me how blatantly we’re seeing our rights violated, and yet only a small minority of us have the balls to speak up about it.
Tucker had the balls to speak up about it, and even he wasn’t safe. Rupert Murdoch would rather lose billions than allow the truth on his telecasts. The Silicon Valley stranglehold over online discourse will continue to constrict tighter and tighter until even those of us with the gall to keep talking will no longer have the air to do so.
”Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren't many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one remaining in the world, the only one - is Twitter. Where we are now. Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and develops. Twitter is not a partisan site. Everybody is allowed here. And we think that's a good thing.”
This is where Tucker lost me, somewhat. Twitter is still very much a partisan site. While it did improve initially and is still at least workable to the point that you don’t get tossed off for not towing the official narrative lines, there is still proof of favoritism on the site.
People like alleged human trafficking survivor Eliza Bleu proved that all you need to police speech on Twitter is connections in high places. That is not free speech. It’s favoritism skewing moderation decisions.
I see Tucker’s point, but I’m far more skeptical than he seems to be about how free he will be to say what he wants on Twitter.
That said, I am a true free speech absolutist, unlike Elon. So I agree with the premise that everyone deserves a say, as it’s also my job to call them on their lies and to expose them for telling them. I wouldn’t have nearly as much material to work with, otherwise.
”And yet, for the most part, the news that you see analyzed on Twitter comes from media organizations that are themselves thinly-disguised propaganda outlets. You see it on cable news, you talk about it on Twitter. The result may feel like a debate, but actually, the gatekeepers are still in charge. We think that's a bad system. We know exactly how it works, and we're sick of it.”
Another hefty understatement. Just today we got this little gem from CNN, posted from my own Twitter account because I’m a slut for my own things and CNN should be paying me for the exposure.
Talk about admitting you’re flat-out frightened at the prospect that not only will Tucker be returning to host his show, but it will now be on Twitter. What will CNN and other propaganda mills do? Boycott Twitter? They tried that, and no one cared.
Another gem of propaganda that we got just today was this post from the BBC, courtesy of Ashley St. Clair.
She’s absolutely right. Idiots will legitimately think that Tim Pool, host of Timcast IRL and proprietor of his own budding news organization, is a suspect in the recent mass shooting in Allen, Texas.
It’s time to lawyer up, Tim. That is defamation if ever I’ve seen it.
The real context to that spurious article by the BBC is trying to head off the revelations that the narrative surounding the mass shooter in Allen, Texas is false. I wish this was uncommon practice by propagandists, but it is a preferred play to run, especially now.
I can also show you another instance of one of the cointelbros himself, Brian Krassenstein, trying to falsify a narrative by cropping out the shooter’s head in order to try and spread the implication that he was white and not hispanic.
The tactic at play is abusing the fact that most people who are scrolling their feeds will not click through on anything to learn the real context. It’s all about glance value. Whatever information can be gleaned from something at a glance is usually enough for the average low information voter who is more obsessed with reality tv and consuming the current product in anticipation of the next product than actually being well-informed about important events.
Brian Krassenstein knows that he is never going to fool people like myself and others in the space who work to try and accurately inform in the face of such massive amounts of gaslighting. He isn’t trying to fool me or anyone like me. He knows he can fool people who don’t do their own research, though. And those people are much more numerous than people like myself.
But anyway, let’s move on.
”Starting soon, we'll be bringing a new version of the show we've been doing for the last six-and-a-half years to Twitter. We'll be bringing some other things, too, which we'll tell you about. But for now, we're just grateful to be here. Free speech is the main right that you have. Without it, you have no others.”
I don’t know what other things Tucker means, but maybe he’s implying that he and Twitter will be establishing something of a news organization right there on the platform itself. That would be a sight to see, though it sounds too good to be true.
Still, this announcement of a partnership between Tucker Carlson and Twitter is as close to a glimmer of hope as we’re going to get during this tumultuous time.
Hella-tumultuous times indeed.