Tucker Carlson is scooping up his massive viewership and taking his show to Elon Musk’s janky, zombified Twitter.
Set against the backdrop of what appears to be the inside of a rustic and masculine cabin in the wood, Carlson made the announcement with a familiar scowl and posted the video to his Twitter account Tuesday afternoon. He said a bunch of his usual stuff about the media being misleading and cable news being propaganda, while making some unsubtle digs at Fox, like:
“The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits. And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it,” he said.
But primarily Carlson confirmed that he would be bringing his show and “some other things too” to Elon Musk’s free speech mecca where Carlson would be free of the amorphous, evil “gatekeepers.” It all kind of makes sense — Twitter has become a graveyard of right-wing inflammatory content in recent weeks as Musk destroys the platform’s algorithm and functionality, scrubs the site of blue checks and allows troll and cat meme accounts with three followers to buy relevance for $8 a month.
Puck reported that Carlson plans to forgo the remainder of his contract so he can break the non-compete clause. That’s about $25 million.
Describing Twitter as the “place where our national conversation incubates and develops” Carlson argued the lively “debate” culture on Twitter is festering with disinfo — from “media organizations that are themselves thinly disguised propaganda outlets.”
“We think that’s a bad system. We know exactly how it works and we’re sick of it,” he said, supposedly characterizing himself and his ex-Fox compatriots as whistleblowers brave enough to make the pivot to a dying Twitter.
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