Tucker? I hardly know 'er!

 

Everybody has to put in their take on Tucker, I guess, including his pal Glenn Greenwald:

Can't decide whether Grindelwald here is so focused on advancing the Russian program that he can't see anything else or so anxious to change the subject from white nationalism that he can't do anything else https://t.co/KACHRT8PEz

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) April 25, 2023

Or I guess it must be opposite sides of the same coin, Glenn's leftist Putinism (the story that the bloodthirsty US started the war in Ukraine by forcing pacifist Putin to launch another involuntary invasion like those in 2014 or in Georgia in 2008) serving as a beard for the fascist Putinism (Tucker's) he can't quit associating with.

That's basically Glenn's theory of why Carlson was axed at Fox—specifically, over Carlson's "passionate defense" of the four members of the African People's Socialist Front in Florida charged a couple of weeks ago with taking money from Russia's FSB foreign intelligence agency to "covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda, and interfere illegally in U.S. elections", or as Glenn puts it, being "dissidents" against US support for Ukraine. 

No, as Emptywheel explains,

They were charged because after one, Omali Yeshiteli, went on an all-expenses paid trip to Russia in 2015, the group started getting funding and completing requests for their FSB handler, Aleksandr Ionov, who ran a front called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia

and failing to disclose it to US authorities and taking "steps to conceal and obfuscate financial transactions in furtherance of the conspiracy, including the use of multiple bank accounts and cryptocurrency and the structuring of financial transactions in order to thwart detection..." Glenn's theory about the firing seems to have some backing from foreign minister Lavrov, though.

Then there's another red-brown take, Matt Stoller's "populist" theory that Carlson got fired for being a domestic leftist like Josh Hawley, even going so far as to praise Senator Elizabeth Warren and her 2004 book The Two-Income Trap

(at the "National Conservatism Conference" in July 2019, where Carlson declined to go so far as to call Warren an "ally for national conservatism"). As James Pethokoukis pointed out at the time, Warren's book was not actually a reactionary hymn to the days when women stayed out of the paid workforce, but more like a demand for higher wages so a single-earner family could avoid bankruptcy, equity for women's wages so a two-earner family could come out ahead, and subsidized childcare. 

I don't think that's why he got fired either.

I very much enjoyed the idea of the Vanity Fair piece by Gabriel Sherman alleging that Rupert Murdoch was freaked out by a dinner with his then-fiancée Ann Leslie Smith and Carlson at which Smith and Carlson exchanged end-times Bible enthusiasms while Rupert stared, appalled, broke off the engagement in response, and dumped Tucker after a Heritage Foundation dinner last Friday when Tucker gave another religion-filled address, but as Steve M points out in the first place, there's too much evidence it isn't true. I cling to the part about the fiancée, but whatever Rupert may think about religion intruding into his private life, he absolutely doesn't mind it on Fox News.

Steve's own view that the firing is meant to help Fox News distance itself from Carlson in the suits by Abby Grossberg, a producer/guest booker first for Maria Bartiromo's show, then Tucker Carlson's, where Fox and Carlson are both defendants, sounds much more like a typical Fox decision—cold—and coherent with some of the known facts, one of which is that there are actually two suits, one in federal court in New York, focusing on the employment discrimination and other horrors Grossberg claims to have endured particularly while she was working for Carlson (outrageous misogyny and anti-Semitism—Grossberg is Jewish—, along with underpayment, intimidation, retaliation, and general harassment), and one in the same state court in Delaware as the Dominion suit, which mainly concerns her allegations that Fox lawyers tried to manipulate her testimony on Dominion, coerce her, and at some point "throw her under the bus". Fox may feel it can really detach itself from the New York case, just because of the independence with which Carlson and his men created his show's atmosphere (she hated working for Bartiromo, but moving to Tucker was considerably worse, from the first day), and concentrate its efforts on Delaware, where they're undergoing a considerably different kind of jeopardy with little direct connection to Carlson.

Then tonight's news reported by Rutenberg, Peters, and Schmidt in The Times, adds a remarkable new wrinkle:

The day before Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation trial against Fox News was set to begin in a Delaware courthouse, the Fox board of directors and top executives made a startling discovery that helped lead to the breaking point between the network and Tucker Carlson, one of its top stars.

Private messages sent by Mr. Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive and crude remarks that went beyond the inflammatory, often racist comments of his prime-time show and anything disclosed in the lead-up to the trial.

The Fox lawyers knew something about the material, but apparently the board and executives didn't, and were really shocked (there's some suggestion that whatever it was was worse than the stuff we've seen from Grossberg's testimony), and the signal fact, which the Times story doesn't dwell on, that this happened two days before Fox made its abrupt and totally unexpected decision to skip trial and settle the case.

I think that's the big thing, if this story holds: what the directors and executives heard at that meeting convinced them that they had no chance to win the Dominion suit, and the decision to get rid of Tucker was no more than an easy consequence of the decision to settle.