The various theories floated to explain why Tucker Carlson was forced out of Fox are correct. All of them.

Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch canceled America’s top-rated news show because its host challenged the official narrative about January 6; he criticized Big Pharma, vaccine mandates, and the media’s role in hiding the mRNA shots’ lack of efficacy and potentially harmful effects; he questioned the wisdom of waging a proxy war on the border of a nuclear-armed state that did not obviously serve the interests of the American public; he said that the mutilation of children in the name of medical care was obscene and evidence that the struggle forced on us by the ruling establishment is fundamentally a spiritual one, a war between good vs evil.

Carlson laid out his overarching thesis nightly, a brief against the ruling class. He showed how political and corporate elites were conspiring with government bureaucrats and the media to strip Americans of their liberties and warned that uncontested they’d turn the country into a one-party totalitarian state. So, for the sake of an oligarchy shielded by intelligence services, Big Tech, NGOs, and the media, Tucker had to go.

According to press sources, Fox took him off the air as part of its nearly $800 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. The arrangement may well doom Fox itself and set a precedent to crush smaller right-wing media companies and silence independent journalists and other dissidents on the right as well as the left. As intended, the suit has consolidated the national security regime’s control of America’s public communications infrastructure.

Tucker’s broadcasts from the immediate post-election period give clear evidence, and internal Fox communications prove, that he was skeptical of the claims made by some of the network’s hosts and guests that voting machines had been jimmied to swing the vote to Joe Biden. So how did he become the fall guy in what was supposed to be a defamation suit against Fox?

The answer is found in Dominion’s March 2021 complaint, where the voting machine company accuses Fox of launching a “disinformation” campaign against it. It’s jarring to see a concept derived from national security circles employed in a legal document, and it occurs in the Dominion complaint dozens of times.

“Disinformation” is a fancy locution for black propaganda. It’s a translation of the Russian dezinformatsiya, and became popular in the US press during the 2016 election cycle when Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign funded a dirty tricks operation alleging that Donald Trump was an agent of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Russiagate gave rise to an industry of instant dezinformatsiya experts who flattered the sensibilities of a performative elite incapable of otherwise understanding Trump’s victory unless it was a plot seeded by “Russian disinformation.” And now, as anyone who’s read the Twitter Files knows, when used by US intelligence agencies and their media validators, “disinformation” is coded language to discredit evidence of Democratic Party corruption and rationalize censorship of the oligarchy’s enemies.  

During the 2020 election cycle, FBI and Department of Homeland Security cyber-units used bogus claims of “disinformation,” usually of the “Russian” variety, to justify suspending social media accounts and censoring posts. According to government records, the aim was to protect “critical election infrastructure.” For the national security establishment, critical election infrastructure meant not just voting machines or polling places, but even American voters themselves, their decision-making abilities.

Therefore, to defend democratic processes, US spy services insulated the electorate against “disinformation” — like, social media posts expressing concerns about the security of ballot drop-boxes, or how mail-in-votes and ballot-harvesting are well-trodden pathways to voter fraud, or any other feature of the covid-era revisions of election laws designed to assist the oligarchy’s candidate. Biden was such an obviously bad choice for commander-in-chief that the national security establishment had to gut the first amendment to keep him in the game.

Parts of Dominion’s lawsuit read like a memo from DHS’ Disinformation Governance Board, or a tweet thread from its one-time head, disinfo spokesmodel Nina Jankowicz. Fox’s “lies did not simply harm Dominion,” according to the complaint. “They harmed democracy. They harmed the idea of credible elections. They harmed a once-unshakeable faith in democratic and peaceful transfers of power.”

The complaint’s cliché language about “disinformation” and “democracy” reflects the coded preferences of the ruling class — censorship and oligarchy — and give evidence that the lawsuit was from the beginning an instrument to hollow out dissident media. The means for doing that was to force out the opposition’s most prominent journalist.

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Conservative audiences are right to be mad at Fox for handing over Tucker but should take no joy from the fact the network is hemorrhaging audience share. That was part of the regime’s plan.

The logic of conflict dictates that the Murdochs should have dug in. When Sen. Chuck Schumer and other Democrats started to demand Carlson’s head for airing videotape showing that the official January 6 narrative was fake, Fox should have doubled down. Instead, it folded, believing, like many in the regime’s crosshairs, that it could deter a larger assault by granting concessions. So the Murdochs gave up their most valuable piece, assuming their enemies would relent after they’d gotten what they said they wanted. But by bloodying the waters, Fox imperiled itself.

As Dominion’s political and corporate allies clearly anticipated, if Fox sacrificed Tucker, the network’s core audience would leave in droves, thereby crippling the major media outlet that serves Republican voters and promotes GOP officials. Reducing Fox’s viewership by a third to a half at the start of a presidential election cycle is why Carlson’s exit is a strategic victory for the regime.  

Naturally, Fox believes it will survive the loss of its most influential voice, just as it flourished after cutting Bill O’Reilly loose in 2017. But the political landscape has changed since then, and so has the media.

Gone are the days of strictly partisan press organizations, right and left, each advancing the political interests and defending the cultural standing of their separate camps. What replaced that media environment is an information architecture built on a massive scale and modeled after third-world security states in which the media is simply the public face of the intelligence ministry. This new anatomy first became apparent during the 2016 race when print and broadcast press partnered with former and current US intelligence officials to disrupt Trump’s candidacy and then delegitimize his presidency.

It was thanks to Fox guests like then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes as well as journalists like John Solomon and Mollie Hemingway that the network’s audience came to understand the nature and purpose of Russiagate: It was an intelligence operation with the aim of pushing the president out of the White House to complete the coup.

Using that framework to understand the subsequent media leaks and procedural entanglements set to trap Trump, Fox’s audience saw the special counsel investigation, rightly, as a continuation of the weaponized collusion narrative as well as a device to drive down GOP support in the 2018 midterms. When Democrats moved to impeach Trump in Fall 2019, even formerly timid, or obtuse, GOP lawmakers recognized in it the same pattern and the same personnel — spy services, political operatives, media — and rallied to defend the president.

By election night 2020, Fox had been instructing viewers for nearly four years how to recognize anti-Trump information operations. When one of the network’s political analysts called the Arizona vote for Biden with only one per cent of the ballots counted, viewers understood immediately what was happening. Like Russiagate, Charlottesville, the special counsel investigation, Ukrainegate, impeachment, the Russian bounty story, etc. — it was a narrative weapon pointed at the president. The difference this time was that the coup leaders were shooting from inside the palace.

The court filing claims that Fox started spinning conspiracy theories about voting machines to win back viewers, but it was only because of Carlson that Fox recovered from election night. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been a high priority target, hounded by the same forces that went after Trump. To get Tucker, they even recycled the same props from the Get Trump campaign, like Putin.

Carlson and his producers were speaking with Russian officials about interviewing Putin, and by intercepting the foreigners’ communications, it appears US agencies also got Tucker’s. What is euphemistically called “incidental collection” is one method US intelligence services use to spy on Americans, which is illegal. It’s how the FBI spied on Trump, too. A warrant obtained on the basis of Christopher Steele’s phony Trump-Russia memos gave the Bureau access to the communications of a Trump volunteer, through which the FBI was able to reverse-target the Republican candidate.

And like Trump, Carlson won adversaries on both sides of the aisle. GOP House member Mike McCaul said Carlson’s opposition to US support for the war in Ukraine made his nightly broadcast “an organ of Russian disinformation.” When the Fox host showed videotape of the January 6 protest that had not previously been broadcast, Republican leader Mitch McConnell was outraged. When the network capitulated to Tucker’s hunters and pushed him out, Pentagon officials celebrated.

It’s still not clear whether his contract with the network will sideline Carlson through the 2024 elections. As for Fox, it has an upcoming fight against a second defamation case filed by a voting technology company, Smartmatic. The press has reported that Fox lawyers settled with Dominion partly out of the desire to keep 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch from taking the witness stand. Even if that’s not true, Smartmatic’s counsel will open the bidding at twice what Dominion won — and expect a burnt offering, just like Dominion got.

The most crucial takeaway is that America’s largest and perhaps most influential news network chose to settle a first amendment case, a decision that will have long-lasting consequences. Because it won’t stop with Fox. This is a sweeping campaign to undermine civil liberties, trash the constitution, censor political speech, and worse. It’s an all-out offensive to dominate the country’s public communications infrastructure and shut down the opposition.

Fox could have fought. It had a clear shot.