Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Tucker Carlson Ousted Before He Could Respond to 60 Minutes and Ray Epps
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Tucker Carlson Ousted Before He Could Respond to 60 Minutes and Ray Epps

So I Will Respond for Him
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[Imaginary Tucker Carlson Monologue for Monday, April 24th, 2023]

TUCKER CARLSON: “Good Evening, and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. No doubt you’ve heard of the name Ray Epps. You have heard his name many times on this broadcast in connection with the events of January 6th. You’ve heard me tell you that our government was lying about what happened that day and that they haven’t stopped lying, and that they have an entire media empire helping them lie to you every day.

But those compliant patsies are never going to be threatened with legal action, like a defamation case, to shut them up, just like all of the talk about hacked voting machines after 2016 by Jill Stein and many in the media never led to defamation cases like the one Fox just settled with Dominion for $800 million.

Oh no.

If you’ve learned one thing from watching my show, it’s this: it’s always okay when they do it, but not when you do it. They are special, and you are not.

They get to say what they want and always have. They don’t like it that I also feel like I have the right to say what I want and that defamation is only provable if they can prove I intentionally lied to hurt the reputation of Ray Epps, which I did not.

When Chuck Schumer called out my boss, Rupert Murdoch, from the Senate Floor for helping to exonerate the wrongly accused Jacob Chansley in the Court of Public Opinion, he did so for a reason. They all belong to the same class of very powerful oligarchs who run this country. Did you think we were actually living in a Democracy or a Constitutional Republic?

Guess again.

If Chuck Schumer tells Rupert Murdoch to silence me and my show, Murdoch will listen. They go to the same parties, don’t you know. This is embarrassing for people who don’t like being exposed. That isn’t the only reason they want me gone from Fox — and if you don’t see me tonight on your television screens, you’ll know they finally did fire me. But the 60 Minutes episode was a warning.

It was like that scene in Godfather II when Frankie Pentangeli’s brother is brought into the courthouse, and suddenly, the testimony goes away.

How do I know that? Well, because Epps now has a fancy lawyer from Team Blue called Michael Teter, he appears to have been threatening a defamation case against Fox News and this program.

If Fox were to suddenly pull me off air the morning after 60 Minutes aired, that would mean avoiding a potential lawsuit by Michael Teter and his powerful friends. No official censorship necessary.

Fox would have known that the Cease and Desist letter came just a few weeks before the 60 Minutes segment, and that would have been too hard for me to resist.

Of course, I would have to respond to Ray Epps’ idiotic comment that I was “obsessed” with him. I would have to respond to such a blatantly biased, lazy report (even for 60 Minutes) on January 6th. I could not and would not allow them to have the last word with sloppy reporting like this:

On the 60 Minutes broadcast, Epps is cast as someone who had a change of heart halfway through, even after saying the quiet part out loud with, “They’re going to think I was part of it.”

But anyone who knows what happened on January 6th knows plenty of protesters were trying to stop the violence, including Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by Capitol Police.

Everything Ray Epps says he did on that day, others have been arrested, demonized, and lost jobs for - yet somehow he has become a media darling, constantly covered by the likes of the NY Times and now, 60 Minutes. They don’t even respect the American people enough to tell them why.

They just say, “It’s a conspiracy theory, shut up peasants!”

Here is what Influence Watch says about Teter and his company, the 65 Project:

The 65 Project was “devised” by Democratic consultant and former Clinton administration official Melissa Moss. It is a project of Law Works, a group with no website or public financial disclosures. 1 LawWorks has previously received grants from public policy-oriented foundation Democracy Fund and is a fiscal project of the Franklin Education Forum, a nonprofit organization that provides training and support to, “advance and broaden the appeal of the progressive cause.” 2 3

The name “65 Project” refers to the number of lawsuits filed by supporters of President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 4

OH.

Teter, on behalf of Epps, has sent a “cease and desist” letter to Fox, as told to the New York Times in March:

A lawyer for Ray Epps, the man at the center of a prominent conspiracy theory about the Capitol riot, sent a letter on Thursday to the Fox News host Tucker Carlson demanding that he publicly retract his “false and defamatory statements” that Mr. Epps had worked as a government provocateur on Jan. 6, 2021, and helped to instigate the mob attack.

The letter to Mr. Carlson from the lawyer, Michael Teter, also demanded a “formal on-air apology for the lies” that have been “spread about Mr. Epps” by others at Fox.

“The fanciful notions that Mr. Carlson advances on his show regarding Mr. Epps’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection are demonstrably (and already proven to be) false,” Mr. Teter wrote. “And yet Mr. Carlson persists with his assault on the truth.”

So far, though, I haven’t been fired. My friend Megyn Kelly announced on her show that there are still negotiations underway and that I’m still under contract. I haven’t been told why exactly they pulled me off the air on Monday, but I think we can put two and two together.

If you step back and look at the bigger picture, you can plainly see what the game has been all along. The same way the government stuck its tentacles into social media to subvert the Constitution, they have to do more or less the same thing to get around the First Amendment if they want me off the air and to censor Fox News.

For the Murdochs, if they can shut me up, they might be able to salvage their network. Why, because the administrative state, the Democrats, and RINOs want to destroy Fox News. They liked it when Fox was just material for their late-night hosts, like Jon Stewart back in the day or Stephen Colbert.

But my show became too powerful, too popular, and too influential. They have to shut me up for the same reasons they have to shut you up and shut Trump up or anyone who goes against their Official Narrative, their reality, their “facts.”

This is war. This is Civil War. It’s a cold war, mostly fought in backrooms with fancy lawyers and social media users. But it is war nonetheless between the powerful and those without power. The elites vs. the populists. If they can shut me up, they win a very big battle in that war, and honestly, that serves the Murdochs, too, because they like being part of the upper crust that runs the country now.

Those late-night comedians? They’re basically flattering court jesters giving Joe Biden virtual smooches every night. They’re not funny. They’re not watchable. Now that the public found out Rachel Maddow was lying to them about Trump and Russia, who cares what she says anymore?

And don’t get me started on Joe Scarborough. I’m sorry that this is what they’re serving up to Americans. I’m sorry that anyone should have to listen to his self-righteous prattling. Nicolle Wallace, what a shill. She can’t say anything without smirking her way through it. Is that supposed to count for news?

Everyone knows that people watch my show because they’re SICK TO DEATH of the pretty little lies the Left tells itself. The jokes aren’t funny. The movies are unwatchable. There is no such thing as news anymore. Their blue-check army on Twitter (shame about the blue-checks, RIP) are thought robots. It’s all SO BORING. So flat. So fake. So insincere.

They’re all so good, so polite, so careful, so afraid, so very very afraid. They’re afraid of everything, freedom of thought most especially. They hate words. They hate books. They hate anything that challenges their groupthink.

When you stop being able to tell stories of ordinary Americans, when all you care about is a tiny little bubble of elites cloistered into a Royal Court, then you have nothing to say, and no one wants to watch your show anymore. I was never going to do that. I had to scratch where they didn’t want my fingers to reach and that is why people tuned in.

The more I ripped off the veneer of phony bullshit that passes for news, the more my audiences liked it. It was a little like this scene from Network:

So, that’s been the game all along, right? To silence Fox News and make me shut up? Kind of like how they got rid of Howard Beale at the end of Network? Let’s just move on to the next thing because if we don’t the lawyers will never stop coming, the lawsuit will never stop coming, the media and the bored army of blue-checks will have to keep coming for Fox?

Isn’t that what Sandy Cortez has wanted all along? Wouldn’t she be doing a happy dance if the Murdochs fired me? Oh wait, she did.

I like to think that this is still a free country and that rich lawyers and corrupt politicians, and compliant “journalists” would not use their power to silence their critics, but then I remember what just happened to Matt Taibbi, threatened with prison time by a member of congress over his testimony about the Twitter Files:

And then we look at what Taibbi just wrote about the media blackout of a story bigger than Watergate about how they did “rig” the 2020 election by not just burying the Hunter Biden laptop story, but falsifying a document to lie that it was “Russian disinformation.”

From RacketNews:

By any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceeds that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world — including five former heads or acting heads of the Agency in Morell, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John McLaughlin — conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale.

And we’re not supposed to talk about that on a major cable news show? Does anyone think Joe Scarborough’s tiny brain could ever think oh, there’s a story here? How about Maddow? No? Not one of them? Not even Bill Maher? Not the New York Times? No, no, and no. So Rupert Murdoch is now joining them, refusing to stand against the tide and stand up for journalism, the First Amendment, and the truth.

They default to the terms “Conspiracy Theory” or “far right” because it, like the “Big Lie,” “Insurrectionists,” and “Extreme MAGA Republicans,” is code for their unified flock to fall in line and never question them. They are incurious. They are scared. They will do anything to cling to power.

No government in my lifetime has come this close to the level of authoritarianism we’re seeing at the hands of this one, now dangerously close to violating the First Amendment again, though by proxy with their lawyers, who can simply sue or threaten to sue an oligarch like Rupert Murdoch and that works just as easily.

So you know, there are lots of reasons they might want to fire me…from the Jimmy Dore show:

They have all of the money, all of the power, all of the culture, and all of the government, but they don’t have what they need and want: freedom of the mind. That will always be just out of reach because the price you all must pay to be left alone by them is to think like they do, believe what they believe, shut up when they tell you to.

I could have been one of them. I could have stayed silent when they told me to. I could have shut up about Ukraine, Big Pharma and Jacob Chansley, and Sandy Cortez, and the riots in the Summer of 2020. I could have been a good little boy and collected my millions. But instead, I stuck to what I believed was right.

It isn’t only about money. It isn’t about being liked. It’s simply about one thing: being able to sleep at night and wake up and face myself the next day. No matter what else I do in life, I have to be able to do that.

Otherwise, I could not close out my show every night as “the program that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and group think.”

I wish I could say I will see you tomorrow night. I know so many of you count on my show for relief against the madness of the Left. But instead, I’ll just say, I’ll see you when I see you.”


Tucker Carlson Will Be Missed

Here are some memorable moments that resonated with me over the past few years. Who knew that the guy I was told I had to hate loved animals and was kind to ordinary people? But that is who he is, who he really is.

On his last show on Friday, he invited the President of PETA to defend rats in New York City.

A lifeguard who rescued a little white dog who had swam out too far in the ocean and lost his way.

An Iowa teen who rescued an elderly man and his dog from an icy lake.

And sheep who escaped and were rescued from the slaughterhouse:

Just 12 years ago, Ana Marie Cox stood alongside Tucker Carlson to help rescue dogs - seems like another world, doesn’t it?

He once honored a dog as “Employee of the Month”

He often hosted the “Chicken lady” on his show to talk about the kindly nature of owning chickens:

I offer Mr. Carlson a crisp salute and a big thank you for making my day every day by making sense in a world gone wrong.

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Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left. Sashastone.substack.com