Fox fired Carlson for promoting antifa-kids: a crisis of conscience in Carlson’s battle against a Trump bully
The text message added to a growing number of internal issues involving Mr. Carlson that led the company’s leadership to conclude he was more of a problem than an asset and had to go, according to several people with knowledge of the decision. In other messages he had referred to women — including a senior Fox executive — in crude and misogynistic terms. The message about the fight also played a role in the company’s decision to settle with Dominion for $787.5 million, the highest known payout in a defamation case.
The text is part of redacted court filings and its contents were previously unreported. Interviews with several people close to the defamation lawsuit against Fox revealed the contents of the text. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a message that is protected by a court order. Behind a block of black text, it is hidden.
In that text, Mr. Carlson described his own emotions as he watched the video of the violent clash, which he said took place on the streets of Washington. Mr. Carlson did not describe the race of the man being attacked.
“I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I wanted them to hurt the kid. He wrote that he could taste it. “Then somewhere in my brain an alarm sounded: this isn’t good for me.” I am becoming something I don’t want to be.
That story — about Carlson’s conflicted response to the sight of “a group of Trump guys” dogpiling an “Antifa kid” — appears to involve a crisis of conscience, an unexpected, chastening eruption of empathy. The narrator starts to fall in love with the perpetrators of the attack as he acknowledges their victim’s humanity. This looks like the kind of wishy-washyness Carlson often mocked on the air, a departure from the demonization of political and cultural enemies that was his nightly bread and butter. You might think that Fox had fired him for making too much noise. But a closer reading elucidates what that brand always was.
That is a jaw-dropping sentence — as empirically ludicrous as it is ideologically loaded. A glance at American history — taking in night riders, lynch mobs, the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 and the killings of Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins in New York in the 1980s, to say nothing of Jan. 6 itself — suggests that this is exactly how white men fight. Not all white men, of course, and not only white men, but white men precisely when they perceive the symbolic and material prerogatives of their whiteness to be under attack.
Thinking otherwise isn’t just a fantasy of Anglo-Saxon righteousness, it’s more akin to Kipling and The Barons of Queensberry. The old imperial myth undergirding that fantasy — the belief that a program of plunder and subjugation was, in spite of everything, a noble crusade — survives in the curious amalgam of genteel preening and pseudo-proletarian rage that Carlson manifested in his nightly broadcast.