In a completely surprising turn of events, Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News on Monday without explanation. This move begs the question, why would Fox News fire its most popular host? We live in a media environment today that is driven by ratings, and Carlson drove Fox’s ratings and its revenue. He also drove the ratings of other hosts like Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity, who shows came on before and after his. Tucker Carlson was the only reason why many people watched even a minute of their shows.
His firing has been linked to accusations against Carlson by his recently fired producer, Abby Grossberg. She wants us to believe that Tucker Carlson is absolutely the worst human being on the planet. She is claiming that he is a misogynist, a sexist, an anti-Semite, a racist, a bully who created a hostile work environment. It appears that every possible slur that anyone could throw at a person, she is throwing at Tucker Carlson. And usually when accusations are this over the top, they are baseless and have ulterior motives. Very few people are as evil and unaware as he is being portrayed to be.
With Carlson’s firing, it has become clear - we are not allowed to question anything anymore. The one powerful person who was willing to question the official narratives coming out of Washington and corporate America is being silenced. There’s no two ways around that. He was Fox’s most popular host on the network because he was willing to ask the questions that nobody else was willing to ask, and he was just fired for it.
But we went through this back in February when James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was surprisingly fired from the news organization that he founded, that he made successful, because he, too supposedly, created a hostile work environment. His firing came shortly after he exposed, a Pfizer executive admitting on video that the pharmaceutical company was attempting to create new variants of the Covid virus so they could sell millions of more Covid vaccines and make billions of more dollars. You cannot expose evil and systemic corruption of Washington politicians’ campaign donors, and get away with it. It’s not allowed. There is too much money at stake.
So, the journalists who are actually reporting the truth, who are willing to challenge the accepted narratives, who refuse to be water carriers for the uni-party, are the ones who are getting fired. The more that this stuff goes on, the more I realize that what journalists like Tucker Carlson and James O’Keefe are exposing is the truth because the people who are actually running this country want to shut them up. They are afraid that their deep seeded corruption will be exposed. The powerful and the elite are not bastion of integrity, so, when they silence someone, it is to hide their lack of integrity not a stand for integrity.
There are certain things that you cannot say in this country, but Tucker Carlson was willing to say them. Carlson was not afraid to question the Ukraine war. He was extremely outspoken about giving Volodymyr Zelensky, a blank check in his war against Russia. This war is making many powerful people in our country, a lot of money, while its deficit spending is driving the inflation that is strangling the middle class and the poor. The powerful and elite do not care that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have already died, and hundreds of thousands more will die fighting this war that the Ukrainians have little chance of winning unless the United States deploys troops there.
There is no such thing as debate anymore in our country. You must agree 100% with the Democrats, or you will be labelled a ‘racist, misogynist, antisemite, conspiracy theorist, threat to democracy’. You can’t question the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines. You cannot question the integrity of an election that a Democrat won; you can only question the integrity of election that a Republican won. You’re not allowed to point out that 2 million illegal immigrants walked across our southern border in 2022, and you definitely you can’t warn that hundreds of potential terrorists have walked into our country as well. You can’t question why Joe Biden sold over 100 million barrels of oil from our strategic reserves to our number one geo-political enemy, China. You’re not allowed to say that Ukraine is one of the most Corrupt nations in Eastern Europe, even though everybody was saying that five years ago. And you definitely are not allowed to point out that our military has chosen to push equity over meritocracy. If you do any of these forbidden things then you are labelled a ‘white supremacist, conspiracy theorist, threat to democracy’, and Tucker asked all those questions, and was fired.
Many of his critics, who are rejoicing in his departure from Fox News, will claim that his firing was warranted because he pushed conspiracy theories and pedaled lies to his audience. If every journalist and every politician who lied on a regular basis were fired from their jobs, there would be no more journalists or politicians. Washington, DC is the most dishonest place in our country, maybe the world. I cannot claim that Tucker Carlson was 100% accurate in every news story he covered, but I feel confident saying that he was much more truthful and accurate than over 95% of the journalists and politicians working today. The overwhelming majority of what comes out of the people’s mouths who work in Washington or who cover Washington are lies. Watching the news has become a continual process of digging through a mountain of lies to discover grains of truth. It is like panning for gold. And more often than not, those grains of gold were coming from the mouth of Tucker Carlson, and that is why he was fired. He wasn’t fired for telling falsehoods or pedaling conspiracy theories; he was fire for telling the truth and exposing the conspiracy theories.
And that more than anything is why we need to ask questions; we need to have freedom of speech. The liars win when the people are silenced. We know who the liars are. The liars called the riots by Democrats “mostly peaceful protests”, but claimed the riot by Republicans was an “armed insurrection”. The liars call America’s borders racist, but act like Ukraine’s border is sacrosanct. The liars are the ones who promoted the accusations of voter fraud after the 2000, 2004 and 2016 Presidential elections, and then called anyone who questioned the results of the 2020 election, a ‘crazy conspiracy theorist, threat to our democracy’. The people who did all that, and there were many prominent politicians and journalists who did, are the liars. I did not agree with the accusations of voter fraud in the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections, but I never smeared or falsely accused anyone who did. I understood that those people, although they may be wrong, had the right to voice their opinions and ask questions, because that is what a democracy is all about. We are allowed to voice our opinions; we are allowed to ask our questions, even if they are rooted in a conspiracy theory. But Tucker Carlson was fired for asking the questions that many of us wanted the answers to.
It is very clear that if you go after the corrupt established Washington, they will come at you hard. We saw it with James O’Keefe; we just witnessed it with Tucker Carlson; and Donald Trump is a living monument to that. The established Washington hates people like O’Keefe and Carlson, but most of all they hate Donald Trump. I have never seen so much fear of one political candidate as I see with Trump. They do not fear him because he is a threat to democracy like they say, ad nauseum; they fear Donald Trump because he is a threat to their corruption of our democracy. And they fear Tucker Carlson for all the same reasons. He noticed what was going on and had the temerity to say it out loud, and that is why he had to be silenced. But they are not simply silencing Tucker Carlson; they are silencing you and I. They are taking our voice away from us which means we must be louder and ask more questions because when we lose our right to question the powerful, tyranny will reign.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.