Global Courant
Tucker Carlson launched his promised new show on Twitter today with stories about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, UFOs, who killed JFK, and what really happened on 9/11 — and the onetime Fox News host was a hit.
In just over four hours, the 10-minute low-tech video posted on Elon Musk’s social media platform has been viewed 27 million times.
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Broadcasting from what appeared to be a home studio in a log cabin and postulating that “American citizens are the least informed in the world,” and his well-trodden take on the failings of the American media, Carlson essentially delivered what counted for a more caffeinated version of his nightly monologue on FNC’s Tucker Carlson Tonight.
While the topics and themes boomed on Tuesday may have been right at home in the Rupert Murdoch establishment where Carlson reigned supreme in primetime for more than six years before being suddenly axed on April 24 — his numbers on Twitter left Fox in the dust.
Setting the GOP agenda daily and embracing the far right, Carlson averaged 3.25 million viewers in March, his last full month on the air. The network has rotated hosts in its former 8 p.m. ET time slot, and they’ve generally racked up a lot about half the size of that audience in March.
Technically still under contract with Fox until January 2025 and paid more than $20 million a year, Carlson has enlisted Hollywood heavyweight attorney Bryan Freedman to negotiate his departure from the firm. With his last show on April 21, Carlson’s departure from Fox’s airwaves came shortly after the company paid nearly $800 million to settle the Dominion Voting System defamation case about false election fraud reports. Fighting a leak of incriminating texts and video from his time at Fox, Carlson also faces a lawsuit from TCT’s former senior booking producer Abby Grossberg for rampant misogyny and harassment on the show.
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Often accused of taking racist and anti-immigrant positions at Fox, Carlson promised on May 9 that he would debut a show on Twitter because it is one of the few “platforms that still allow free speech”. While that may be debatable, tonight’s Twitter premiere of Tucker could be in violation of Carlson’s FNC contract — or a sign that he’s clear of it.
Neither attorney Freedman nor Fox News responded to Deadline’s request for comment on the new Twitter show. On the other hand, just back from a whirlwind and much-celebrated visit to China, Elon Musk had something to say about Carlson’s launch on his financially distressed platform:
Not that Carlson himself didn’t have much to say with thinly veiled antisematic attacks on Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky as “sweaty and ratty, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians.”
“What happened to the hundreds of billions of dollars we sent to Ukraine? I don’t know,” Carlson pointed out. “Who organized those Black Lives Matter riots three years ago? No one has gotten to the bottom of that. What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it’s still a secret.”
Flattering Trump as Senator Lindsey Graham as “a starving man contemplating a breakfast buffet” for his support of U.S. aid to Ukraine against the Russian invasion, and becoming “thrilled” by the deaths of Russian troops, Carlson also became current with a look at what really happened with the Kakhovka dam.
“Any honest person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up,” he said of the damage to the Russian-occupied facility that has forced thousands of Ukrainians to leave their homes due to flooding. Just as you would assume they blew up Nord Stream, Russia’s natural gas pipeline, last fall, he added. “In fact, the Ukrainians did, as we now know,” Carlson continued, noting a situation that is still quite murky.
“Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more, and for that very reason the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it,” Carlson said Tuesday, while US officials say they are still assessing who the dam actually blew up. both Russia and Ukraine blame each other.
With his usual rant that the “skinny dude in dress is a girl,” and discussions of race relations, Carlson then turned his attention to reports by a former member of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office that the U.S. government has “aliens” spacecraft” and “dead pilots”. Veteran of US military intelligence named David Grusch
“UFOs are real, and alien life apparently is too,” Carlson exclaimed of Air Force veteran David Grusch’s statements to the fledgling NewsNation today. Claiming whistleblower status, Grusch also admitted that he had not seen any of the vehicles or aliens, but he had spoken to people who had. For Carlson, the real news wasn’t that we might not be alone in the universe, but that the New York Times and Washington Post hadn’t covered Grusch’s story.
“Now, in a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell story of the millennium. But not in our country.”
Of course, Carlson being Carlson, he couldn’t stop himself from promising to take his ball home if he wasn’t allowed to play with it the way he wanted. “We’ve been told there are no gatekeepers here,” he said on Twitter at the end of his online pro-Russian diatribe tonight. “If that turns out to be false, we’ll leave. But in the meantime, we’re thankful to be here. We will be back soon with much more.”
Ted Johnson contributed to this report
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