FIGHT ON THE RIGHT: Tucker Mocks Fox News Contributors Who Quit in Protest of His Documentary

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Fox News host Tucker Carlson ridiculed the departures of network contributors Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, who on Sunday resigned in protest of Carlson’s new documentary series about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

SO WHAT

Former president Donald Trump may be out of office, but his unfiltered rhetorical style is still the dominant language on the right.

WHAT HAPPENED

On Sunday, Goldberg and Hayes announced their resignations in an email message to subscribers of The Dispatch, the center-right news outlet they founded in 2019.

The now-former Fox News contributors characterized “Patriot Purge” as “a revisionist history of January 6” and claimed one of the documentary’s protagonists was “a racist fired from the Trump White House for his associations with white nationalists.”

  • According to Hayes and Goldberg, the project’s message was that the “U.S. government is coming after patriots as part of a ‘War on Terror 2.0.'”
  • “This isn’t true, and it’s dangerous to pretend it is. And for us, it was way too far. We resigned after watching the series in its entirety and asked Fox to release us from the rest of our contracts,” they wrote.
THE RESPONSE

Following publication of a New York Times media column on the feud Sunday, Carlson and his people rubbed it in.

Carlson celebrated the development, telling The Times that Goldberg and Hayes’ exodus is “great news” and “Our viewers will be grateful.”

FIGHT ON THE RIGHT

Fussy Goldberg and bombastic Carlson could be seen as opposing symbols of the two prevailing approaches in right-wing politics.

  • “Tucker’s wonderful, he’s provocative, he’s original, but — man oh man,” Geraldo Rivera, a Carlson supporter, told the Times last month. “There are some things that you say that are more inflammatory and outrageous and uncorroborated. … I’m wondering how much is done to provoke, rather than illuminate.”
By We'll Do It Live