Tucker Carlson Torches Fox News After Network's Panicky Reaction to Biden "Wannabe Dictator" Chyron
Fox News has been a different place since Tucker Carlson’s been gone — and the network would like Tucker to stay gone, because he’s reminding people of that fact on Twitter.
Take, for instance, what happened on Tuesday night after President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice had his main opposition — former President Donald Trump — arrested for mishandling classified information in federal court. Never mind that Biden himself had mishandled classified information, or that the FBI had decided against arresting the Democratic candidate in 2016 for mishandling classified misinformation herself, instead letting the voters decide.
As Carlson noted on his Thursday show, “just before 9 p.m. that night, as part of its coverage, Fox News ran two live video feeds next to one another. On the right, Donald Trump addressed his supporters in New Jersey. On the left, Joe Biden spoke at an event for the secretary general of NATO in Washington.
“Beneath those videos at the bottom of the screen, Fox’s banner read this way: ‘Wannabe Dictator Speaks at the White House After Having His Political Rival Arrested.’
“Those words were up for less than 30 seconds, but the effect was immediate,” Carlson noted. “Inside Fox, the women who run the network panicked.
“First, they scolded the producer who put the banner on the screen. Less than 24 hours after that, he resigned. He been at Fox for more than a decade, he was considered one of the most capable people in the building,” Tucker continued.
“He offered to stay for the customary two weeks, but Fox told him to clear out his desk and leave immediately. Then the company issued a public apology for the 27 second long ‘wannabe dictator’ line, that the chyron was taken down immediately, Fox’s PR department said, and then added ominously it was, quote, ‘addressed.'”
Much like one assumes Tucker had been “addressed” a few months prior.
However, all the prostrating in the world didn’t help Fox News yet again. As Carlson noted, The Washington Post said it had “crossed the line.” Alexander Vindman — the former National Security Council member whose whistleblowing on Ukraine led to Trump’s first impeachment — demanded that Fox News be taken off the American Forces Network. Actor John Cusack, who happens to be a bit more loopy, demanded the whole outlet be shut down entirely.
It is absolutely unacceptable for American Forces Network @AFNtelevision to carry programming that directly (spuriously) attacks the Commander-in-Chief of American Armed Forces @POTUS . What are you going to do about this @SecDef @DepSecDef @JakeSullivan46 ? https://t.co/Jd3zVCz8d7
— Alexander S. Vindman ❎ (@AVindman) June 14, 2023
If Fox is calling Biden an aspiring dictator while shilling for trump
Who actually tried to overthrow democracy. The gov has to take away their broadcasting license.
They are a pro fascist propaganda house organ -and that rhetoric will get people killed – Fox should not be…— John Cusack (@johncusack) June 15, 2023
As a cable network, it’s worth noting, Fox has no “broadcasting license,” but never mind. Carlson had an important question: Why all of this outrage if it’s false?
After all, this sort of talk of dictatorship and fascism was stock-in-trade at MSNBC and CNN when George W. Bush and Donald Trump were president. A 30-second chyron noting that a president who has the political opposition arrested is acting like a “wannabe dictator” is kiddie stuff — and Fox panicked like the same weak-kneed outlet that fired Carlson just two months ago.
“If some cable news producer had called Joe Biden a genius, or accused him of being secretly Sudanese, would anyone be yelling about it?” Carlson asked. “Would Fox News have apologized for it? Probably not. But calling Joe Biden a ‘wannabe dictator,’ that stung.”
The White House’s official position, when press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about it, was pretty straightforward: “So there are probably about 787 million things that I can say about this. That was wrong. But what we saw last night, but I don’t think I’m going to get into it.”
“No comment necessary,” a laughing Carlson said. “Of course Biden is not a ‘wannabe dictator.’ Just because he’s trying to put the other candidate in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he himself committed doesn’t mean he has a totalitarian impulse. Come on. That’s absurd. It takes a lot more than jailing your political rivals to earn the title ‘wannabe dictator.'”
As Tucker noted, “it’s quite a process,” which Joe Biden most certainly, definitely, obviously, completely, totally doesn’t fulfill. Because the first part involves the money.
“The one thing that all dictators have in common is they enrich themselves and their families even as the countries they’ve governed grow steadily poor and more desperate,” Carlson said. “They take kickbacks and businesses from other dictators. They used the official functions of their government to funnel cash to themselves. They don’t bother to hide the fruits of this. They live in garish mansions with big lawns far from the teaming cities.”
Cue footage of Joe Biden’s Delaware mansion, natch.
“Even as their own citizens, languish in growing poverty, in some cases, literally living in tents on the street,” Carlson said. Cue footage of your average American homeless tent city in, say, Los Angeles.
Naturally, people resent dictators enriching themselves like this. “And wannabe dictators know they resent. But they don’t care. There’s nothing the population can do about it in a dictatorship. It’s no longer possible to fight injustice in a system like that. People can gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator. If they try that, they’ll be arrested by state security services, even years after the fact.”
Say, years after Jan. 6, 2021. Just throwing a random date out there.
“And if citizens persist in believing they can gather in groups to protest, they may be shot to death, a bullet to the throat,” Carlson continued. “And then just to make the humiliation complete, to make the lesson gin clear to everyone else. Watch it. Their relatives can be arrested for daring to complain that their children were killed for complaining. That actually happens in some places.”
Cue footage of Ashlii Babbitt’s mother being arrested for merely protesting her daughter’s death on Jan. 6, 2021, asking for answers as to why she was shot in the throat and killed.
Ep. 4 Wannabe Dictator pic.twitter.com/MDcs5g0gxB
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 15, 2023
Furthermore, in a wannabe dictatorship, your opinions would be censored on the internet — nothing like the total blackout from social media services that Donald Trump experienced in the wake of Jan. 6. And wannabe dictators would be collecting reams of information from the internet you use, the phone calls you make and the financial transactions you take part in — just like the Biden administration is doing, Carlson noted, but in a totally different way.
And it’s not like in North Korea, where state media refused to cover “an enormous, baseball-sized tumor” on the back of former leader Kim Il Sung’s neck: “Thankfully, nothing like that is happening in our country or ever will if Joe Biden ever developed some profound physical or mental problem that was obvious to everybody,” Carlson said.
Nor does he “have the family to match all dictators,” like Saddam Hussein’s sons, who “were princelings who lived above the law, indulging their most decadent fantasies with total confidence.”
“There’s no one like that around Joe Biden. He doesn’t have weird sex scandals at the heart of his family that no one in the media will ever talk about,” Carlson said. Cue Hunter Biden looking every bit like Hunter Biden.
Nor would Biden take the final step of a wannabe dictator, Carlson noted: claiming dominion over your family, including your children.
To the LGBTQI+ Community – the Biden-Harris Administration has your back. pic.twitter.com/ZlUNwWOcch
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 13, 2023
“He’s saying something very different from that,” Carlson said after playing that lovely (and telling) clip. “He’s saying America’s children are quote ‘our children,’ not his alone. ‘Ours.’ You share your children with Joe Biden evenly, right down the middle, with alternating weekends.”
Carlson went on to note acidly that “the nation is like a family. Every family has a head, a father — that’s Joe Biden. Our nation’s father. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is now his fatherland. Just don’t call it a dictatorship. Or we’ll have to issue a statement disavowing you.”
Just like his former employer did.
Well, you certainly can’t say Tucker isn’t quite a bit freer now that he’s on Twitter. The problem is that, at his old employer, you can’t say the glaringly obvious. Fox News, may I remind you, is supposed to be the conservative counterbalance to the liberal media establishment.
It’s hard to tell these days, because they’re the ones who are supposed to be calling out a president who allows his opponent to be indicted for mishandling classified documents when he did the same thing. Instead, they weeded out the producer who dared say it, just like they weeded out the guy who called the network out for its moral panic over calling Joe Biden a “wannabe dictator.”
Nice work, Fox.
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