While some Fox News personalities have condemned QAnon, the network’s top host went to bat Monday night for the deranged right-wing cult. Tucker Carlson lashed out at the supposed “dictators” trying “to take total control of everything” via online censorship and asserted what was essentially an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” argument on behalf of Americans who believe in the sprawling conspiracy theory that features Donald Trump battling a secret cabal of Democratic pedophiles. “Listen as the geniuses explain how the single biggest threat to this country isn’t Chinese hegemony, or even the coming hyperinflation, pretty much a certainty now, which was 100% caused by elite mismanagement of our economy,” Carlson began, before sarcastically describing the “forbidden idea” QAnon as the country’s “real [top] threat.”
Carlson aired a series of clips in which various TV pundits questioned what should be done “about QAnon and its droves of loyal followers” and whether its “too late to bring our loved ones back to reality,” along with noting that many of those cult-ish Trump supporters backing “totally unfounded conspiracies and prophecies of QAnon expected” adamantly “expected January 20 to be judgment day.” The montage included video of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wondering aloud about the “frightening” number of Americans who have been “marinated in these conspiracy theories” and “QAnon craziness.”
If Carlson had cut the segment there, these rebroadcasted sentiments might actually be beneficial for Fox viewers susceptible to the QAnon cult or whose loved ones have become converts. Instead, the segment pivoted to Carlson directing his ire at the supposed real top threat that Americans are facing: private companies curbing extremist content from movements like QAnon. The segment tied into a running obsession on Fox News and in right-wing media and politics that elites in media and tech are trying to silence conservatives. Senator Josh Hawley, who has faced backlash for trying to disenfranchise millions of Americans voters after pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol to stop the Electoral College vote, portrayed himself this week as being muzzled across Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, from the front page of the New York Post to Fox News, where he appeared Monday night on Sean Hannity’s show. Later Monday, host Laura Ingraham warned against an “ideological purge” amid attempts to root out extremism in the military.
“We’re watching a profound change taking place in American society that’s happening very fast. The stakes could not be higher,” Carlson told viewers. “There is a clear line between democracy and tyranny, between self-government and dictatorship, and here’s what that line is: That line is your conscience. They cannot cross that…. No democratic government can ever tell you what to think. Your mind belongs to you. It is yours and yours alone. Once politicians attempt to control what you believe, they are no longer politicians, they are by definition dictators. And if they succeed in controlling what you believe, you are no longer a citizen. You are not a free man. You are a slave.”
Carlson made the remarks after Twitter installed a new policy in reaction to the storming of the Capitol that aims to curtail “coordinated harmful activity.” In a January 8 statement, the tech company explained its reasoning for changing its terms of use, which were rolled out in tandem with a mass account ban against swaths of QAnon accounts, Trump ally Michael Flynn, former Trump lawyer and election conspiracy peddler Sidney Powell, and former 8kun administrator Ron Watkins. “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm, and given the renewed potential for violence surrounding this type of behavior in the coming days, we will permanently suspend accounts that are solely dedicated to sharing QAnon content,” a Twitter spokesperson said.
Later in the segment, Carlson interpreted the recent and all-too-late attempts by the “entrenched powers” to stop QAnon from spreading on their platforms as a potential assault on conservative media outlets like the one that employs him. To make his point, he cited a Sunday Washington Post column, which, in light of the Capitol riot, described Fox News as a “hazard to our democracy,” by dramatically describing such accusations as part of an effort by “hysterics” to ensure that his network is “eliminated by force.”
Glenn Greenwald, who was once a top investigative journalist but now runs a Substack, appeared on Carlson’s Monday night program so the two could ring their paranoid “censorship” alarm bells together. “Tucker, they genuinely want everyone who disagrees with them, silenced,” Greenwald said, before decrying the downfall of Parler––a right-wing Twitter clone that had its server deal with Amazon shut down, in part because its administrators refused to stop Trump supporters from publicly calling for the murder of Mike Pence––and claiming “[Democrats] destroyed an entire social media platform, they just took it off the Internet because they instructed Silicon Valley monopolies that it was their obligation to remove it.” In Greenwald’s opinion, the “bloodthirsty” fascists are actually the Big Tech companies that are supposedly on a mission to “silence everyone [who] disagrees with them.”
In recent months, Carlson offered his show’s platforms to several guests whose pro-QAnon stances are publicly known, one of which was Osama bin Laden’s Trump-supporting, Q-loving niece. Another pro-Trump Fox News personality, Jesse Watters, vouched for QAnon last year, claiming they are responsible for uncovering “a lot of great stuff when it comes to Epstein and when it comes to the deep state.” Under scrutiny, the weekend Fox New host walked back the praise. “While discussing the double standard of Big Tech censorship,” Watters said at the time, “I mentioned the conspiracy group QAnon, which I don’t support or believe in.”
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