The demise of Fox’s Tucker Carlson came as a surprise, not only to him but to the millions of palavering fans who couldn’t get enough of his racism, his lies, his misogyny. Rupert Murdoch reportedly felt compelled to cut his losses after Tucker’s texts and emails were made public during the course of the Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit against Fox.
Tucker, feeling mightier than Goliath against David throughout his tenure at Fox, was hoisted by his own petard, caught out in black and white, talking smack about everybody, especially women he worked with and about whom the “C’ word tripped ever so flagrantly off his tongue.
For Murdoch, Tucker’s use of the “C” word was apparently a consonant too far.
Tucker’s Russian Oligarch funders were not pleased. They’d just `lost their pipeline to the brains of millions of Americans who had eagerly been slurping up Trump’s Putin-inspired anti-democratic pablum pumped into their living rooms night after night after very dark night to such a point that they didn’t seem to mind that Tucker had once broadcast his show from Viktor Orban’s Hungary. How easily they overlooked Orban’s anti-democratic regime and his blood-brother ties to Putin.
The Oligarchs, knowing the sort of rat fink that is Tucker, approached him the day after his firing. Concerned that he might “out” them as his funders and turn over their secret information to the US government, three muscle-bound Russian emissaries made him a Godfather-esque offer:
Move to Hungary and become Orban’s “Minister of Information.”
“Or what? Are you nuts?” cried Tucker. “I’m not moving to Hungary. That was just a publicity stunt for your, er, our show, as you well know. They don’t have freedom of speech over there, so, no, I’m not doing that.”
“No? To us, you say nyet?” said Boris, the tallest of the three, stepping forward, looking down at Tucker, arms folded across his chest.
“Yes, nyet.” Tucker sneered and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“One word, comrade Tucker: Navalny.” Boris, of the dead eyes, made nary a twitch as he spoke.
(Alexei Navalny, Russian lawyer and critic of Vladimir Putin, was poisoned in 2020 with the nerve agent Novichok. He survived, but now languishes in the notorious Penal Colony No.2, east of Moscow.)
Tucker’s eyes grew wide, and his boyish face took on a light shade of lavender.
“When do you want me to leave?”
Rosie Sorenson is a humor writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her column is satire and, like Fox “News,” cannot be believed as fact (but it is considerably more amusing). You can contact Rosie at: RosieSorenson29@yahoo.com
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2023
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