Tucker Carlson vs. Death, Inc.
Tucker Carlson vs. Death, Inc.
Caught in humanity's struggle to chose life over death, with Rupert Murdoch in the role of Moloch
The mediasphere is still awash in speculation about why Tucker Carlson was fired on April 24, 2023, by Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox Corporation. Theories abound because Carlson was such a relentless critic of so many officially sanctioned regime narratives.
Consortium News has published a handy compendium, with video clips, of Carlson’s withering attacks on official narratives ranging from Syria to Nord Stream 2 to Covid to climate, gender ideology, mainstream media corruption, the decline of a dollar denominated global economy and many more, including the disastrous Ukraine war.
Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press” on Substack dishes a collection of backroom Fox gossip today about why Carlson was axed, including the idea that Rupert Murdoch wants to sell Fox News, and Carlson, while a ratings phenom, was toxic to advertisers. There are nods to several other theories, including Carlson’s opposition to the Ukraine war.
I don’t know why he was fired, but the darkest and most chilling possibilities center on Ukraine, and they need to be explored.
UKRAINE AND THE MARCH TO NUCLEAR WAR
Recent revelations from whistleblower Jack Teixeira show that Ukraine is losing the war against Russia badly even after being given $143 billion in US, EU and UK aid as of February 2023, one year after the Russian invasion. Alone among mainstream media commentators, Carlson reported the substance of Teixeira’s leaked documents and spoke out against official lying and obfuscation about the war, while also reporting the fact that US troops are on the ground, illegally, in Ukraine.
Teixeira’s leaked documents also reveal that British special forces are fighting in Ukraine and that the US is pressuring Israel to supply lethal advanced weaponry to Ukraine to counter Iran’s assistance to Russia as a major supplier of drone technology being used in the war.
What could possibly go wrong here?
But what if Rupert Murdoch supports the war? Teixeira’s revelations make it clear that Western policymakers believe that more money, arms and troops will need to be poured into Ukraine, and that the danger of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons is extremely high, yet Murdoch appears to be on board.
Carlson has repeatedly stated his opposition to the logic, goals and likely outcome of the dangerous, intentionally provoked regime change proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The very real potential for escalation to the use of nuclear weapons in that war was a point of agreement during his recent interview with Donald Trump.
Given this background, the most troubling theory about Carlson’s firing comes from Michael Cernovich, who Wikipedia describes as “an American right-wing social media personality, political commentator, and conspiracy theorist.”
In an interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson, Cernovich asks who Rupert Murdoch is serving –“God, the American people, decency?” The answer is obviously none of these. Cernovich says:
"Even though Tucker is the biggest person at Fox, they don't care. They don't care what the ratings are. They care that Fox News is part of the Regime... I think that Murdoch said 'we need nuclear war with Russia, we need WWIII...we can't have Tucker acting as a wedge against that...' It's a spiritual dimension."
In Cernovich’s theory of the case, the Western oligarchy knows that conventional war against Russia using Ukraine as a proxy force is not winnable, and they are now locking in for a final march to nuclear war between the US and Russia. Murdoch does not want Fox (or himself) to lose their privileged position as regime players. Carlson was getting in the way and needed to be silenced.
Although he is circumspect because of his friendship with Carlson, Glenn Greenwald’s comments on the firing hint at a possible Ukraine connection as well.
Whatever one makes of Cernovich, I think it is a mistake to dismiss his dark theory. Set against the backdrop of the last three years of pandemic authoritarianism, mass censorship, heedless warmongering and a looming economic collapse, it is clear that madness reigns among a leadership class across the West, and especially in the US, that has suffered a historic loss of credibility and legitimacy, to a 20% trust level in the US.
These are dangerous people, and easily threatened. The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer shows that only 41% of people worldwide continue to have trust in government, and only 47% trust journalists. Society is breaking down, and the decline in the legitimacy of those who still hold the levers of power makes them even more treacherous. The solution in times of multiple crises is too often war.
HOW BAD DOES IT HAVE TO GET?
In December 2022, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that 71% of US citizens “were extremely or somewhat concerned” about nuclear war between Russia and the US. The level of concern rose to 77% when poll respondents were asked specifically about Ukraine as the likely flash point.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ infamous Doomsday Clock is now at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe.
Yet the streets are quiet, without a peep of protest, even as a clearly deranged, oligarch-driven transnational regime of self-styled “sovereignty free actors” works openly to supplant the old order of sovereign nation states on their march to nuclear war.
Why are the people quiescent?
Whatever one thinks of Tucker Carlson, and ignoring the hysterical shrieking of the herd of Kens and Karens at CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, Washington Post, New York Times, et. al., he was going through a powerful transformation in the public eye.
His April 25th remarks and interview at the Heritage Foundation make this clear. He knew that the current upheaval and division in US society and in the West generally went far beyond politics, parties and ideologies. It is spiritual.
Are the people attuned to this loss of a spiritual connection to life? Mythology holds more important answers than politics.
EROS AND PSYCHE
Joseph Campbell believed that mythology represents the human search for what is true, meaningful and important. He argued that what we seek is “an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences resonate within our innermost being and reality [until] we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Ancient Greek and Roman myths have real beauty of this kind. In the mythology, Eros, the “deathless” god of love, has always signified erotic attachment to and love of life, thus it makes sense that he married Psyche (Psukhē), or soul, against his mother Aphrodite’s will.
Psyche was born a mortal. She had to undergo a series of super human tests in order to accept and return the love of Eros. She passed all of the tests, was granted immortality, reunited with Eros and gave birth to a daughter.
Psyche also means breath and butterfly. When we die, breath departs the body, hence the spiritual and dream symbolism associated with butterflies. These deities and their fantastical stories represent the manifold forms of attachment to life.
For too many people today, the connection to spirit and myth has been broken, the sense of life’s beauty and mystery that endured in myths even through enormously difficult trials has been lost.
With that loss, with the connection to spirit and myth broken, many people have become enervated, robotic, self-mutilating and suicidal. Yet it is also true that many others have not succumbed to the miasma of fear and anger that dominates modern social and political life.
Hannah Arendt identified the root of tyranny as the act of making other human beings irrelevant. She believed that love is the only antidote to this marginalization of others, and that love is a form of fearlessness.
The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake.
Fearlessness is what love seeks. Love as craving is determined by its goal, and this goal is freedom from fear.
Tucker Carlson had an enormous audience, averaging 3.3 million viewers nightly right to the end. The first video that he released on Twitter after his firing, on April 26th, generated more than 75 million views in the first two days. His message focused on the decency and good humor of Americans.
Beneath the cauldron of emotions that Carlson seemed to bring to a boil in the body politic, his popularity also serves as powerful evidence of a desperate search for alternatives to the toxic, life sapping vision of the US that is currently being presented in monolithic, brain dead official narratives, and worse, in actual policy.
Perhaps that is a positive development at a time when 80% of the population believes the US, still the world’s most consequential empire, is headed into serious decline and is dangerously off course. People are actively looking for ways to counter government and regime aligned media propaganda that leads to the dead end of nuclear war.
Conquering fear long enough to demand life affirming change, to embrace eros, is the first and most essential precondition for civilizational survival.
The other day at my conversation group I presented the topic of "Censorship". It was pretty fun, but one guy got steadily angrier and angrier. He basically played the role of Establishment Apologist. Pretty funny actually. It was bizarre because it was as if he took any and all criticism of the empire personally. He's usually a nice guy too. Oh well, I'll chalk it off to yet another example of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Yes, it was surreal listening to Tucker for the last couple years. He kept getting better and better right up to the end. I can only hope that this incident will get lots of people thinking about free speech, corporate media and the like. Brilliant as usual Michael. Thanks!