Censorship of Tucker Carlson and the Struggle for Civilizational Sanity

... Carlson didn’t say it directly, but this seemed to suggest that there are a lot of people out there who don’t buy the Left’s increasingly nonsensical view of the world, and refuse to be intimidated into silence. That would be heartening indeed....

... Carlson noted that the really important things that are happening in the U.S. today are going virtually unnoticed and undiscussed amid a general fascination with minutiae and trivia: “The other thing you notice when you take a little time off is how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are. They’re completely irrelevant. They mean nothing. In five years, we won’t even remember that we had them. Trust me, as someone who has participated. And then at the same time, and this is the amazing thing, the undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media.”...

Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state. That’s a depressing realization, but it’s not permanent. Our current orthodoxies won’t last. They’re brain dead....

Carlson’s firing has awakened numerous people who were previously unaware of how much the media endeavors to control what we see and hear, so that we only think that thoughts that they consider permissible....

... But with the exit of Carlson, Fox News is a huge step closer to declaring that it’s completely on board with the media monopoly’s efforts to create the illusion of unanimity of thought. Such illusions are meant to tease out the conformity impulse by making us feel all alone in our views, and, therefore, less likely to express them.

This is the essence of my book, “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” How ironic that my conversation with Carlson — about the very ability of human beings to have conversations in this era of censorship — has been silenced in the wake of his silencing on Fox.... The goal is to cut us off from information and, ultimately, to cut us off from one another until we are completely atomized and socially controlled...

Perhaps most important is Carlson’s reminder that the truth is contagious: “The more you tell the truth, the stronger you become. And the more you lie, the weaker and more terrified you become.”...

... Carlson is emblematic of what conservative media has become: a wide diversity of voices on a variety of platforms that all oppose the leftist narrative propagated by legacy media outlets. By dumping Carlson, Fox’s leaders are deciding to return to the good ol’ days of Conservative Inc. From now on, news and opinion broadcasts will be safe, filtered, and milquetoast.... in the long term, this assures that Fox will fade into oblivion along with the rest of cable television as alternative online media takes over....

Rather than treating this as a loss, conservatives should welcome the change. This might push more people, especially older generations, to abandon cable news altogether. Conservatives can leave the insipid programming of cable news for the leftist midwits who pride themselves on being (mis)informed....

Most conservatives were shocked and surprised when Fox News took the Tucker Carlson program off the air last week. It was watched by 3.2 million mostly affluent viewers each night.  It was the seventh most popular program on cable TV.  It attracted nearly twice as many viewers as MSNBC and CNN combined...

However, Tucker Carlson’s program had been on life support since December 18, 2018.  That is when “progressive” Democrats cancelled most of its sponsors...

... at least 26 mainstream corporate sponsors publicly announced that they would no longer sponsor the Tucker Carlson program.

... Those sponsors included CareerBuilder, Takeda Pharmaceuticals (makers of Entyvio), TD Ameritrade, IHOP, the United Explorer credit card, Just For Men, Jaguar Land Rover, Ancestry.com, SCOTTeVEST, Zenni Optical, Voya Financial, Nautilus, Inc. for Bowflex, SmileDirectClub, NerdWallet, Minted, Pacific Life insurance, Indeed.com, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Red Lobster, Farmers Insurance, Lexus/Toyota, Mint Mobile, Graze snacks, Samsung, SodaStream, Pfizer’s Robitussin and SanDisk....