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Tucker Carlson is willing to give up a $25 million contract for this? [1]

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Date: 2023-05-10

Here's the video, embedded instead of linked so that Elon can't make any advertising dollars off it. The good news is that Tucker's remaining staff already know that nobody can stand his voice, so they helpfully provided subtitles so you don't have to listen to it.

x It's so much weirder he's still talking in this completely alien cadence from what appears to be a ski lodge on a website where people now post snuff films. https://t.co/OQa53h8LP2 — Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) May 9, 2023

Yeah, fine, blah blah blah. The news industry that sustained you through your entire bowtie-to-white-nationalist life, that paid you absolute craploads of money to lie and whine your way through innumerable segments turning an ever-more-paranoid audience against whatever new enemies you could scramble to prop up for them, has been very mean to you and is full of dirty rotten jerks and so you're going to make your own news program, one with fireworks and blackjack, one with 50 American flags and a spin-the-wheel segment to pick out America's newest internal enemy, and you're going to do it on Twitter after getting fired from every other job that matters just to put those meanies in their place.

There was really no chance Carlson, of all people, could stand for just shutting the hell up—no matter how many millions of dollars he was getting paid to do it. He is not the sort of person who can stand not being the center of conservative attention. He had it all, with a show that got increasingly white supremacist and conspiracy-based with each passing year, and a position in the company that he thought gave him permission to heckle, insult, and seek vengeance against anyone else in the company who he didn't like. Going from that to sitting silently in a dimly lit room themed like a Disney World ride queue was not going to happen. The man needs an audience like a fish needs water.

Putting on a "new version" of his old show is quite clearly a breach of his Fox News contract, though, and Carlson is already making the moves to be rid of it. In an angry letter from his lawyers to Fox News reported by Axios, Carlson says it was Fox that breached the contract first. Carlson's lawyers are claiming that Fox executives broke their promises to him by leaking his private messages to the media. However, there's no apparent proof it was Fox that did so as opposed to anyone else who was involved with the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit that brought Carlson's private messages into the public eye.

The more ridiculous breach Carlson's accusing Fox of is a supposed agreement to not use his private messages "to take any adverse employment action against him," which would not appear to be a promise Fox was ever in a position to make. Carlson filled his private text messages with insults directed at other company employees, including calling at least one of them a "c--t," and at that point Fox News either had to take "adverse employment action against him" to respond to his misogynistic behavior or face God only knows how many more lawsuits against them for knowing about that behavior but not taking action to stop it.

Carlson really doesn't have much legal ground here, but if there's one thing the American legal system has proven over and over, it's that once someone who's able to spend a seven-figure sum on lawyers is involved, laws and regulations are quickly made negotiable things. Carlson’s letter is the first shot fired in what will undoubtedly end in some settlement between Carlson and Fox; he's just staking out territory for that upcoming fight.

We know that Carlson wants out of his contract because he'd rather chew his own limbs off than not have a "show," but why is the Murdoch family so eager to pay him millions even after they've taken him off the air? That one's easy: They don't want Carlson to start a new competing show that might hurt their own ratings. All they have to do to render him an utter has-been is keep him off the airwaves for another six months or so, after which the attention span of their audience will have wandered and nobody who flips to the channel will even remember he exists.

They needn't worry. Carlson announcing that he won't be joining Newsmax or any of the other far-right establishments that want his attention in order to put up video clips on Twitter is something between pathetic and hilarious. To say it's a risky move is an understatement. Carlson appears to be of the opinion that Newsmax and other askers are so far beneath the reach of Fox News that he couldn't stomach the embarrassment of making the move, and so wants to do something affiliated with none of them.

His answer, which boils down to "I'm going to put up videos on Twitter," is perhaps the saddest one he could have come up with. Twitter has no reach in offline American life. It is a nonentity compared to YouTube, Facebook, and other social media giants. What most separates Twitter from those other social media outlets is that the others all have much stricter rules against racism and hate speech, ones which could have gotten his new "show" demonetized in a red-hot minute, while Twitter is now owned by a neo-Nazi-sympathetic conspiracy crank who doesn't just tolerate hate speech but has been reinstating banned hate accounts at a rapid clip and who is far more likely to promote dangerous far-right conspiracy theories than condemn them.

But how is the new Tucker White Power Hour going to monetize itself? How is he going to pay for the portion of his staff that apparently followed him out of Fox (probably not willingly) in order to help him produce it? The chances of making a living as a Twitfluencer are approximately zero, which is still something Elon Musk himself hasn't managed to find a solution for. Musk has so far claimed that he "hasn't signed a deal of any kind" with Carlson and that his videos will be treated like any other content.

If Tucker's going to make any money off of the social platform famous for its inability to make anyone money, he's going to have to add his own commercials for gold coins, or protein powders, or "testicle tanners." On a social media site that advertisers have been fleeing from. On a show that had already been demonetized 6 feet into the ground by fleeing advertisers in its Fox News incarnation.

No, Carlson has exactly one thing going for him as he attempts to remain even slightly relevant, and that is that he has not-coincidentally decided that his new social media home will be the place now infamous for providing pay-for-visibility to the far-far-right. Twitter, under Elon Musk, is now focused on monetizing trolls even as the rest of its readership either drifts away or runs. Musk himself boosts conspiracy theorists and sneers at journalists. Twitter is the perfect venue for a failed and eternally malicious twerp of a host whose show is devoted to propping up neo-Nazi conspiracy theories about the world's "elites" flooding the nation with immigrants in order to "replace" whites.

But it's not Fox News. It's not beamed directly into the brains of elderly viewers devoted to their favored paranoias. It's not in airports. It may not even manage to make it to YouTube. Even the most optimistic scenario would allow Carlson to muster influence barely equal to Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly. We can't count Tucker out completely, because he's spent the past decade conducting daily social experiments teasing out just how far the American right is willing to descend into conspiracy-laced violence—and never once found the bottom to it.

"I'm gonna put up videos on Twitter" is, however, among the least plausible paths to nationwide influence there is. It's right up there with handing out flyers at the local roller rink. It's a move of desperation for Carlson, who seems to be willing to forgo any amount of money in order to get his strangely plastic face back in front of a camera.

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