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Two Fox News Contributors Quit in Protest of Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 Special

The trailer for Tucker Carlson’s special about the Jan. 6 mob at the Capitol landed online on Oct. 27, and that night Jonah Goldberg sent a text to his business partner, Stephen Hayes: “I’m tempted just to quit Fox over this.”

“I’m game,” Mr. Hayes replied. “Totally outrageous. It will lead to violence. Not sure how we can stay.”

The full special, “Patriot Purge,” appeared on Fox’s online subscription streaming service days later. And last week, the two men, both paid Fox News contributors, finalized their resignations from the network.

In some ways, their departures should not be surprising: It’s simply part of the new right’s mopping up operation in the corners of conservative institutions that still house pockets of resistance to Donald J. Trump’s control of the Republican Party. Mr. Goldberg, a former National Review writer, and Mr. Hayes, a former Weekly Standard writer, were stars of the pre-Trump conservative movement. They clearly staked out their positions in 2019 when they founded The Dispatch, an online publication that they described as “a place that thoughtful readers can come for conservative, fact-based news and commentary.” It now has nearly 30,000 paying subscribers.

Their departures also mark the end of a lingering hope among some at Fox News — strange as this is for outsiders to understand — that the channel would at some point return to a pre-Trump reality that was also often hyperpartisan, but that kept some distance from Republican officials. Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, recently deplored Trumpism while acting as though — as Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien noted — he didn’t run the company.

The reality of Fox and similar institutions is that many of their leaders feel that the tight bond between Mr. Trump and their audiences or constituents leaves them little choice but to go along, whatever they believe. Fox employees often speak of this in terms of “respecting the audience.” And in a polarized age, the greatest opportunities for ratings, money and attention, as politicians and media outlets left and right have demonstrated, are on the extreme edges of American politics.

Mr. Carlson became the network’s most-watched prime-time host by playing explicitly to that fringe, and “Patriot Purge” — through insinuations and imagery — explored an alternate history of Jan. 6 in which the violence was a “false flag” and the consequence has been the persecution of conservatives.

Mr. Goldberg said that he and Mr. Hayes stayed on at Fox News as long they did because of a sense from conversations at Fox that, after Mr. Trump’s defeat, the network would try to recover some of its independence and, as he put it, “right the ship.”

“Patriot Purge” was “a sign that people have made peace with this direction of things, and there is no plan, at least, that anyone made me aware of for a course correction,” Mr. Goldberg said.

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by Anonymousreply 36February 15, 2022 4:35 AM

“Now, righting the ship is an academic question,” he continued. “The ‘Patriot Purge’ thing meant: OK, we hit the iceberg now, and I can’t do the rationalizations anymore.”

Mr. Hayes, 51, and Mr. Goldberg, 52, spoke to me over video from their homes in the Washington, D.C., area, both clad in athleisure and sporting graying beards. When they joined Fox News in 2009, they were the leading ideological players in the very different conservative movement of the George W. Bush years. Mr. Hayes had championed the invasion of Iraq at The Weekly Standard, while Mr. Goldberg had just published a book called “Liberal Fascism.”

They now find themselves in a group of Americans who think the threat that Mr. Trump poses to America’s democratic system outweighs many other political differences. Mr. Hayes said that he was particularly concerned about Fox lending support to the idea “that there’s a domestic war on terror and it’s coming for half of the country,” he said. “That’s not true.” Particularly disturbing in “Patriot Purge,” he added, “was the imagery of waterboarding and suggestions that half the country is going to be subject to this kind of treatment, that’s the same kind of treatment that the federal government used when it went after Al Qaeda.”

Mr. Carlson “pumped that stuff out into society, and all you need is one person out of every 50,000 people who watch it to believe it’s literally the story about what happened, that it’s true in all of its particulars and all of its insinuations. And that’s truly dangerous in a way that the usual hyperbole that you get on a lot of cable news isn’t.”

Mr. Hayes said he’d been particularly disturbed recently when a man at a conference of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA asked its leader, “When do we get to use the guns?”

“That’s a scary moment,” Mr. Hayes said. “And I think we’d do well to have people who, at the very least, are not putting stuff out that would encourage that kind of thing.”

For his part, Mr. Goldberg said he has been thinking about William F. Buckley, the late founder of National Review, who saw as part of his mission “imposing seriousness on conservative arguments” and purging some extreme fringe groups, including the John Birch Society, from the right.

“Whether it’s ‘Patriot Purge’ or anti-vax stuff, I don’t want it in my name, and I want to call it out and criticize it,” Mr. Goldberg said. “I don’t want to feel like I am betraying a trust that I had by being a Fox News contributor. And I also don’t want to be accused of not really pulling the punches. And then this was just an untenable tension for me.”

Now, their views have put them outside the current Republican mainstream, or at least outside what mainstream right-wing institutions and politicians are willing to say out loud. But while in recent years both appeared occasionally on the evening show “Special Report” and on “Fox News Sunday,” which the network classifies as news, it’s been years since they were welcome on Fox’s prime time, and Mr. Goldberg clashed bitterly with the prime-time host Sean Hannity in 2016.

Despite the former contributors’ hopes, Fox’s programming has hewed to Mr. Trump’s line, as have its personnel moves. The network, for instance, fired the veteran political editor who accurately projected Mr. Biden’s victory in the key state of Arizona on election night, and has hired the former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

Mr. Hayes and Mr. Goldberg are the first members of Fox’s payroll to resign over “Patriot Purge,” but others have signaled their unhappiness. Geraldo Rivera, a Fox News correspondent since 2001, captured the difficulty of internal dissent at the network when he voiced cautious criticism of Mr. Carlson and “Patriot Purge” to my colleague Michael Grynbaum. “I worry that — and I’m probably going to get in trouble for this — but I’m wondering how much is done to provoke, rather than illuminate,” he said.

by Anonymousreply 1November 21, 2021 11:14 PM

On air, two programs with smaller audiences than Mr. Carlson’s scrambled after his special to rebut the false theories presented in “Patriot Purge.” “Special Report” called in a former C.I.A. officer on Oct. 29 to debunk “false flag” theories. And on “Fox News Sunday,” Chris Wallace turned the same question over to one of Mr. Trump’s few foes in the Republican congressional delegation, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

Mr. Carlson called Mr. Hayes’s and Mr. Goldberg’s resignations “great news” in a telephone interview on Sunday. “Our viewers will be grateful.”

A Fox News spokeswoman, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on the resignations but sent data showing that independents watch Fox.

And yet resignations like Mr. Hayes’s and Mr. Goldberg’s remain rare at Fox. Cable contributor jobs are lucrative — often six figures or more — and open doors to book deals and speaking engagements. Senior journalists and producers at Fox typically receive a salary premium for the opprobrium that comes with working at the company in New York, Washington or Los Angeles. That means there aren’t easy ways to leave without taking a steep pay cut.

“There are lots of people there that I respect and like and consider friends, and they’re making a decision based upon how to provide for their families and deal with their careers and all of that. And I’m not going to second-guess them,” Mr. Goldberg said. “And there are also lots of people over there who think the Fox opinion side today is awesome.”

by Anonymousreply 2November 21, 2021 11:15 PM

Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg have been on the anti-Trump side with Bill Kristol and the rest since the beginning. It’s surprising that Fox allowed them to have any connection with the organization.

by Anonymousreply 3November 21, 2021 11:56 PM

Agreed, R3. In his brief capacity as a Fox contributor, I once saw George Will on Fox being quite critical of Trump. I thought that I'd never see him on the Fox airwaves again ... & I was right.

by Anonymousreply 4November 22, 2021 12:01 AM

I see now that the two only have shown up on the shows of Bret Baier and Chris Wallace. That makes sense.

by Anonymousreply 5November 22, 2021 12:04 AM

I didn’t realize that they were making six figures from their contributor roles. That’s a lot of money to sacrifice for non- independently wealthy people. Kudos to them.

by Anonymousreply 6November 22, 2021 9:13 AM

And Bret Baier continues to end his broadcast by saying that Fox News “remains unafraid.” IMO, this unctuous blowhard may be the worst of the bunch. While the others spew their bile on opinion shows, his has always been what Fox has proudly represented as its signature, journalistic news hour. Instead, it’s just another product of its 24/7 political campaign.

by Anonymousreply 7November 22, 2021 9:23 AM

Maybe you take a look here.

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by Anonymousreply 8November 22, 2021 12:39 PM

[quote]I didn’t realize that they were making six figures from their contributor roles. That’s a lot of money to sacrifice for non- independently wealthy people.

There are no non-independently wealthy right wing pundits. They all have sugar daddies and mamas paying their bills and pulling strings in exchange for them pushing their pet agendas.

by Anonymousreply 9November 22, 2021 12:58 PM

Tucker completely emasculated Goldberg.

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by Anonymousreply 10November 22, 2021 11:53 PM

Good for them. Hope more of them quit in protest. Tucker is horrible.

by Anonymousreply 11November 23, 2021 12:11 AM

I am old enough to remember when Tucker was the less crazy Right winger when he was on CNN.

by Anonymousreply 12November 23, 2021 12:47 AM

I remember when Tucker had a show on MSNBC, where he was a critic of the Iraq War. As I recall, Willie Geist was his producer/sidekick.

by Anonymousreply 13November 23, 2021 12:53 AM

FOX News is a lie in name- it is registered with the FCC as entertainment which was its argument when sued by voting machine vendors for their “reporting” (lying). If you’ve ever wondered how a civilized nation descended into barbarity (Nazi Germany) wonder no more. It’s in process right now in our nation. I still hope the good guys and the better angels among the public will prevail.

by Anonymousreply 14November 23, 2021 12:55 AM

I wonder if any more of their stable of conservative, but not Trump-bootlicking, pundits will be shamed into following suit. Or perhaps they were the last two holdovers.

by Anonymousreply 15November 23, 2021 11:31 AM

Gay Guy Benson is one who needs to bail, too.

by Anonymousreply 16November 23, 2021 11:41 AM

My parents are big Fox News people and when I mentioned this story to them, they had absolutely no idea who these guys were.

by Anonymousreply 17November 23, 2021 11:52 AM

How long have your parents been viewers, R17? Pre-Trump, they were fixtures on the “All-Star” panel on Special Report, first hosted by Britt Hume & now, for the last 10+ years, by Bret Baier. They were definitely less visible during Trump’s presidency, but have returned this past year with some degree of regularity. It seems that they were booked when the panel subjects were more geared for their brand of conservatism (& didn’t require them to weigh-in on Trump-related matters).

by Anonymousreply 18November 23, 2021 12:22 PM

The reason Bret Baier kept talking with Hayes is that they went to college together.

by Anonymousreply 19November 23, 2021 1:03 PM

I didn’t know that, R19, but you could tell they were friendly. Hayes’s Fox presence, though, long predated Baier’s stewardship of Special Report. I trust Hayes’s departure, along with that of Goldberg, another pre-Baier Fox contributor, causes much-deserved angst for Baier as he continues to rake in his $12+ million salary along with access to authorship of best-selling books that his role at Fox affords.

by Anonymousreply 20November 23, 2021 2:00 PM

The only thing interesting about Goldberg was his mother.

by Anonymousreply 21November 23, 2021 2:05 PM

They've only been Fox viewers since they joined the Trump Cult, r18.

They completely dismissed me when I told them about this. Since Trump the parents I knew are long gone. I mourn them.

by Anonymousreply 22November 23, 2021 2:06 PM

[quote] Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, recently deplored Trumpism while acting as though — as Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien noted — he didn’t run the company.

Fucking loathe Murdoch.

by Anonymousreply 23November 23, 2021 2:17 PM

Wonder what Luciferanne thinks of what Fucker Carlson said about her boy?

by Anonymousreply 24November 23, 2021 2:19 PM

R22, I can relate. I have a sister - wholly apolitical when we were growing up - who’s deep in the Trump cult. In her case, though, I’ve belatedly realized that, long before Trump, she was seized by the forces of Facebook.

by Anonymousreply 25November 23, 2021 5:37 PM

On yesterday's Special Reports panel, former host (and onetime ABC White House correspondent), Britt Hume said, without prompting, that Biden was "clearly senile." What a hack!

by Anonymousreply 26November 23, 2021 10:11 PM

Two no names quit. This has already been forgotten

by Anonymousreply 27November 23, 2021 10:21 PM

R27, they may be "no names" in your new Trump party, but both Hayes & Goldberg were - as their long-term contributor status attests - very high profile figures in the Republican party.

by Anonymousreply 28November 23, 2021 10:28 PM

[quote] Gay Guy Benson is one who needs to bail, too.

He has a name. It dehumanizing to just refer to him as the gay guy.

by Anonymousreply 29November 23, 2021 11:36 PM

[quote] He has a name. It dehumanizing to just refer to him as the gay guy.

Obviously, I did identify him by name. And I designated him as gay because (i) he's openly gay & married, and (ii) as someone who's so availed himself of progressive efforts, he has a heightened responsibility to join with his former colleagues to specifically renounce Tucker Carlson & the white supremacist movement.

by Anonymousreply 30November 24, 2021 12:16 AM

The execrable former Cabinet secretary Bill Bennett, who made a fortune writing books about virtue in the ‘90s in response to the Clinton presidency only to be a reliable Trump bootlicker, yesterday on Special Report referred to Biden’s totalitarian tendencies. Oh, the virtue of being utterly shameless. The token non-right wing panelist, the WaPo’s Charles Lane, made some effort at least to call him out on this, referring to Trump’s role in orchestrating the 1/6 insurrection.

by Anonymousreply 31November 25, 2021 9:45 AM

Lot of good it did.

by Anonymousreply 32December 9, 2021 8:12 PM

Trump never sucked up to the neocons so they panicked and ran to Hillary and then Biden. It's hilarious after all these years watching you hate neocons now try to make them into heroes.

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by Anonymousreply 33December 9, 2021 8:28 PM

Politics is not a straight line, R33. Former staunch democrats are now committed republicans and vice-versa. One can believe that the Trump pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic party poses an existential threat whatever one's past politics.

by Anonymousreply 34December 9, 2021 11:46 PM

Their 6:00 news hour devoted its first 24 minutes to news that a verdict was reached - & then announced - in the Smollett case. Because that was more important than the next story it briefly touched on, the appellate court decision ruling in favor of the 1/6 Committee against Trump.

by Anonymousreply 35December 10, 2021 1:59 AM

Oh gee, so Jonah Goldberg pretends he has integrity and quits Fox News over Carlson's propaganda. Tucker Carlson is a vile human being, but so is Jonah Goldberg. He pushed SO much fucking misinformation at the public during the Iraq War, supporting the lies told by the Bush administration in order to justify the war. He even wrote a book "proving" a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda (there was none at all). And then what happens after he quits Fox News? Yeah, CNN promptly hires him as a consultant.

Fuck Tucker Carlson. Fuck Jonah Goldberg. Fuck Fox News. Fuck CNN. I hate you all.

by Anonymousreply 36February 15, 2022 4:35 AM
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