On Friday, April 21, 2023, author Chadwick Moore appeared on what turned out to be Tucker Carlson’s last program on his Fox News show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Neither the host nor Moore would know until the following Monday that they would become dead to the network after Fox benched Carlson.
It was a bittersweet moment for Moore. On one hand, he was nearing the release of his biography of the cable news host-turned-cultural and news phenomenon. In his book, Moore would explain where Carlson came from and how this conventional Republican writer and professional talking head on cable news would come to Fox, giggle on “Fox and Friends,” move to prime time, and absolutely dominate.
Carlson’s show won, not just cable news ratings, but all cable ratings. With an average of more than three million viewers per night, Carlson often lapped his competitors at MSNBC and CNN. His lightning-in-a-bottle popularity bathed all Fox programming in his afterglow. The show’s popularity gave the network a new burnish after the firing of its North Star (and lech), Roger Ailes. Fox News was still doing well. Carlson’s popularity and maverick news sense made the network great.
And then he was gone.
Like a company that buys another business to remove the competition, Fox News benched Carlson. They chose to keep him off the air for the duration of his contract, which ends one month after the 2024 election. Fox News’s top talent isn’t allowed to be an opinion maker on Fox.
As Moore quotes a Carlson show executive, “They’d lost some big talent before — they probably lost a few Boomers when O’Reilly left — but then Tucker brought in a completely different audience.” Fox News, “frantically scrambling to remake its primetime lineup to patch the yawning chasm in the middle seems to have come to the belated realization that millions of viewers they thought were Fox fans were really Tucker fans all along.”
After over a year of interviews, writing, and editing — the Tucker biography LAUNCH DAY is finally here!
I'm grateful to Tucker, his family, and his team, as well as to my publisher All Seasons Press, for making this book possible.
Visit https://t.co/TitdKWPWAW today to get… pic.twitter.com/z4NIdqx5Xm
— Chadwick Moore (@Chadwick_Moore) August 1, 2023
Sure, after the left got O’Reilly pushed out of Fox, viewers missed his bloviating on all non-specific topics, but Carlson was different. By ending Carlson’s show, the American people were deprived of seeing the rest of the January 6 videos on national TV, the explosive interview with Capitol Hill Police Chief Steven Sund never aired, and the war in Ukraine would never get a full airing with such a large audience.
Why?
The first time I interviewed Moore about “Tucker” on my Adult in the Room Podcast, the book was going back to be revised, but no theory about his ouster had been batted down.
We’d discussed several ideas, of course. One theory was that Rupert Murdoch’s betrothed believed Carlson was a “messenger from God.” When his sons got a whiff of that, they convinced Rupert to drop her and Carlson like a hot rock.
There was the idea his speech at the Heritage Foundation on Friday night after recording his last show was the final nail in his coffin. Carlson spoke of the forces of good and evil in the news business, the role of God in his life, and how all of it informed how he did his work. That may have been too airy-fairy for the suits in the corner office.
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There was the notion that somehow Carlson’s ouster was an add-on to the Dominion lawsuit, a winnable case that saw Fox completely capitulate to the voting machine maker. But that didn’t make sense since Carlson never threw in with the manipulable voting machine theory in private or on the air.
By the time Moore went back to do more reporting, and I spoke with the author the second time (see our interview below), Carlson believed he “now has a pretty good idea why, in seeming defiance of all logic, Fox did what it did.” The theory puts Fox News brass in the worst light possible for a news organization. It would be the worst chickens**t move ever. Without meaning to, perhaps, Carlson’s theory behind his ouster gives entree to darker forces behind the move.
The net effect is that Fox still pays Carlson through December 2024. Carlson has lawyered up and has done what he can to strike out on his own. Fox personnel are forbidden to utter his name or use any of the news coming from his interviews on his new, probably temporary, home base X, previously known as Twitter. His former show producers and writers have all been surgically excised like a tumor from Fox News.
Carlson started his Fox show days after Donald Trump became president against all odds. He saw this deep state we hear so much about using its expansive power to lie and attempt to destroy him, an effort that continues to this day. A good reporter should always ask, cui bono, who benefits? Tucker Carlson was the only reporter out there who asked and wrote cogently about it. His essays are damn close to poetry. When Carlson’s last monologue was disseminated, I thought it would be fake. Then I read it and knew it was Carlson’s.
Moore, a writer for some of the country’s top magazines and newspapers, became a regular on Carlson’s show after he wrote a piece about “coming out” as a conservative and how it was harder to do than telling friends and family he was gay. He was a go-to guest from then on.
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Moore’s book addresses how a bow tie-wearing, snobby, private school douche would become an open-minded, hunting-and-fishing everyman to the masses. How did this callow CNN political carnival barker become an evangelist for truth, rebuking and casting out government lies? Why did he admire Rachel Maddow, and who is his surprising confidante he relies on for professional advice? You don’t live in Washington, D.C., for 35 years and not make a wide array of friends.
How does Carlson order his life after being ousted from his Washington home by the left’s shock troops? How does his wife put up with him? Was his dad a spy? What happened to his heiress mother, and why do we rarely hear about her? Moore covers it all in his well-written, fascinating read.
It’s only 249 pages. Take it to the beach with you this weekend.
Tucker Carlson isn’t the only one sounding the alarm on all things deep state. Forces we don’t even fully understand have combined to create an outcome-based narrative weaving media messaging, censorship practices, and government bad actors. They’re doing it against Trump, and they’re doing it against conservative outlets like PJ Media. The only way we can fight back is to support the good guys — that us — and defund the bad guys.
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