(OPINION) Tucker Carlson may have been given the boot at Fox News over his emphasis on the importance of prayer and his suggestion that America is not presently afflicted by bad politics, but rather by the forces of evil.
Carlson gave a keynote speech Friday at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala in Maryland wherein he stressed that the old political binary fails to account for the division presently afflicting America. Instead, it can be better understood in theological or spiritual terms as a battle of good versus evil, suggested the 53-year-old.
An unnamed source reportedly briefed on Fox Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch’s decision-making told Vanity Fair that Carlson was ousted largely over the speech on account of its religious overtones.
“That stuff freaks Rupert out,” said the insider. “He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk.” Carlson, whose journalism career started at the Heritage Foundation, told a crowd of around 2,000 that recent trends — such as the DEI and ESG initiatives that have swept big business or the medical tyranny that swept the nation along with COVID-19 — exposed not just cowardice but the strength of the herd instinct.
“The herd instinct is maybe the strongest instinct,” said Carlson. “It may be stronger than the hunger and sex instincts, actually. The instinct, which again is inherent, to be like everybody else and not to be cast out of the group, not to be shunned — that’s a very strong impulse in all of us from birth. And it takes over, unfortunately, in moments like this, and it’s harnessed, in fact, by bad people in moments like this to produce uniformity.”
The former Fox News host cited the LGBT movement’s incoherent speech codes and the efforts by many to contort to satisfy them as an example of herd instinct trumping rational and independent thinking. Many Americans have surmounted this instinct, however, argued Carlson.
“There is a countervailing force at work always. There is a counterbalance to the badness. It’s called goodness. And you see it in people,” he said. “So for every ten people who are putting ‘he and him’ in their electronic JPMorgan email signatures, there’s one person who’s like, ‘No, I’m not doing that.
Sorry, I don’t want to fight but I’m not, like, doing that. That’s a betrayal of what I think is true. It’s a betrayal of my conscience, of my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy – I am not a slave, I am a free citizen, and I’m not doing that. And there’s nothing that you can do to me to make me do it. And I hope it won’t come to that, but if it does come to that, here I am.Here I am. It’s Paul on trial. Here I am.’” (READ MORE)
