The Antifa kid
A piquant NY Times headline:
Carlson’s Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight’
A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race.
The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s firing.
His views aren’t all that private.
In the message, sent to one of his producers in the hours after violent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Carlson described how he had recently watched a video of a group of men — Trump supporters, he said — violently attacking “an Antifa kid.”
It was “three against one, at least,” he wrote.
And then he expressed a sense of dismay that the attackers, like him, were white.
“Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously,” he wrote.
“It’s not how white men fight,” he said. But he said he found himself for a moment wanting the group to kill the person he had described as the Antifa kid.
Even though he’s a white man.
The Fox people were worried about this not because it’s poisonous but because it would make Fox look bad (i.e. poisonous) and they had that trial to worry about. It was just all too much.
The text message added to a growing number of internal issues involving Mr. Carlson that led the company’s leadership to conclude he was more of a problem than an asset and had to go, according to several people with knowledge of the decision. In other messages he had referred to women — including a senior Fox executive — in crude and misogynistic terms. The message about the fight also played a role in the company’s decision to settle with Dominion for $787.5 million, the highest known payout in a defamation case.
It must be very delicate work, figuring out how poisonous is poisonous enough without being too poisonous. “Does this poison make my butt look too big?”
It remains unclear how the text escaped more notice earlier, given that the Fox legal team was aware of it and other offensive texts written by Mr. Carlson.
Well quite! How shocked can they be? Being “offensive” is his whole thing.
A recurring theme of his show during the six years that it ran in prime time on Fox News was the displacement of white Americans by people of color. Mr. Carlson often framed topics in the news as part of a larger struggle between “us” and “them,” with immigrants and other marginalized groups steadily and surely taking from whites what had long been theirs: political and cultural power in the United States.
He attacked Black social justice activists and portrayed immigrants from Central America as a blight on the nation. He said in 2018 that immigrants make the country “dirtier.”
I guess that’s how white men fight.
Oh, well. He can just bring his millions here to Maine and retire on the coast.
The moral of all this I suppose could be that when a Tucker starts to tuck with your media empire, it’s time to get the Tucker out, and to get the tuck out yourself.
Tucker should run for public office.
Because that’s how white men fight.
I don’t buy for one second that this text led to Carlson’s firing.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it.
Yeah, I don’t know what the “real” reason(s) is/are, there’s been a lot of speculation including:
(1) He’s not that profitable due to how he’s driven away advertisers and is now inspiring campaigns to lobby cable providers about carriage fees;
(2) He created liability in the defamation cases (but really, he wasn’t the worst offender among Fox hosts);
(3) He created liability in his ex-producer’s harassment case;
(4) He gave some speech at an event that creeped out Rupert Murdoch with its religiosity;
(5) He was the favorite host of Rupert’s ex, and Rupert is just that petty;
(6) His overt pro-Russian propaganda;
(7) It’s a demonstration of power — if we can fire Tucker, we can fire anyone, nobody is bigger than the network.
But I just don’t buy that anyone was shocked or bothered by this email — it’s actually pretty much the kind of thing he said routinely on the air, except without the “what kind of person am I becoming” bit.
I love (5). I hope it’s (5).
It occurs to me that something else might be going on here is this:
There are much, much worse messages and emails out there. This mildly shitty one was leaked by Fox as a shot over Tucker’s bow — watch what you say if you keep doing those home videos, or the next one will be worse.
My husband believes it is because Tucker was getting too big; he thinks Murdoch will always get rid of anyone whose star looks like it might outshine his own. But he has enough ego not to want people to thinks he’s egotistic, so he trumps up some silly reasons for letting someone go.
Of course, I like 5, too.
Cool if you’re right, Screechy – Fox threatening fired Fox hack with horrible things Fox hack has said. It’s almost as if Fox employs people because they’re horrible AND uses their horribleness as a threat. Having it both ways much?
Well, we know (I think you may have posted about it) that Fox allegedly keeps an “oppo file” on Carlson and other star employees. So I’m just extrapolating from that.
Yes, I think I did. I dunno, I just keep marveling at the absurdities even when I’ve seen them 100 times before.