Pictured: Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson, whose cable news show on Fox News is the most watched in the US, has been pushing Trump’s Big Lie for over two years. As late as the other day (February 17th 2023) he was still at it.
Trump’s Big Lie: This is the idea that the 2020 election for US president was stolen from Donald Trump. It is what the Capitol Riot on January 6th 2021, Trump’s coup attempt, was based on. As of September 2022, nearly two years after the election, 61% of Republicans and 29% of grown people in the US still believed the Big Lie.
But Tucker Carlson was never one of them!
Dominion v Fox News (2023): This is a lawsuit that was announced on February 17th 2023. It is for defamation – because Dominion is one of the of companies whose voting machines Fox News maligned in their defence of Trump’s Big Lie. Thanks to this lawsuit some of Carlson’s behind-the-scenes text messages and emails are being made public. Fox News says they were cherry-picked and taken out of context. If they were, that should become clear in time – because Fox News will have to demonstrate it in court.
Some of what Carlson said behind the scenes in the weeks after the election on November 3rd 2020:
November 5th, after Fox News’ decision desk had (correctly) called elections in key states against Trump:
“We worked really hard to build what we have. Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”
“What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
November 7th, as Fox News declared Biden the winner:
“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real … an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”
He turned out to be right about that: Fox News started to lose viewers to Newsmax, which, further to the right, was not declaring Trump the loser.
November 12th: When Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked lies Trump was telling, Carlson told Sean Hannity:
“Please get her fired. Seriously…. What the fuck? I’m actually shocked… It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
The next morning Heinrich removed the inconvenient facts.
November 13th: Behind the scenes, Carlson wants Trump to concede, because “there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome.”
November 21st: Carlson texts that it was “shockingly reckless” to accuse Dominion of rigging the election without some proof – “there isn’t any”. He said that Sidney Powell, Trump’s lawyer who was badmouthing Dominion, was a “nutcase”. To his credit he never had her on his show, though Fox News featured her elsewhere.
Just two months before, in September 2020, a judge said of Carlson in a slander case against Fox News:
“Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statement he makes.”
As they should! But apparently something like 29% of the US prefers feel-good lies to the truth.
– Abagond, 2023.
See also:
- The Republican bubble
- tribal epistemology
- The Mythic Past
- Fox News
- Trump tweet news diet – a review – I got all my news from Trump tweets for a period after the election
- US cable news
- The Hair Dye Coup
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Abagond 
Where are the “brown-skinned people like the Whitehawk Woman” in this story? 🙂
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Worth noting a few things here:
First, as the Elon Musk Twitter drops and Zuckerberg’s recent Rogan interview proved, the CIA/FBI was forcing social media to censor stories about the Hunter Biden laptop, which they knew to be legitimate (showing the Bidens getting tens of millions in kickbacks from China, Ukraine and Russia for political favors), and which would have easily changed the result of the election if well publicized outside of conservative media (assuming no other fraud).
Second, the movie 2000 Mules shows very strong evidence (hard data based on phone records and some video) of massive ballot dumping taking place in the very swing states where Biden managed to win by razor thin margins.
There’s also statistical evidence that shows Biden getting 99%+ of certain batches of votes in swing states, after counting suddenly stopped in the middle of the night defies credibility.
So “the Big Lie” is actually that Biden won the election fairly. We KNOW that is not the case, just based on CIA/FBI interference, which is now well documented. If you could include that in your post it would be more honest.
That said, the Dominion stuff with Sidney Powell could have been faked. The hard evidence there was never shown. In retrospect, it may have been the people who rigged the elections trying to create a “Big Lie” to take attention from the “Big Steal”. Most of the Carlson tweets seem to be taken out of context. It’s entirely possible that he thought the election was legitimate before 2000 Mules and the Twitter drops came out (though most Republicans didn’t).
Also, I’ve seen surveys showing more than half of Americans now feel that the 2020 election was severely tainted. Sad to see that abagond, as educated as he is, is one of the few who still believes the system is not fundamentally corrupted.
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