No Facebook, No Fox, No Problem
Dominion Voting Systems on Friday morning filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, alleging that the conservative network pushed false accusations that the voting company had rigged the 2020 election…. Dominion has…filed similar billion-dollar defamation suits against other Trump allies…including Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney…and Mike Lindell, the Trump-aligned pillow magnate.
—ABC News, March 26, 202111
To return Trump to the White House in 2024, we must all kick the Facebook-Google-Twitter habit even as we endeavor to cut the Fox cable news cord.
I have made it abundantly clear here that Silicon Valley’s social media oligarchs have become America’s self-anointed censors and thought-control shifters. So every day you engage with Facebook and Twitter, limit your internet searches to Google, or view videos on Google’s YouTube, you run the very real risk of being spoon-fed disinformation by woke leftists who have already revealed themselves to be virulently Never-Trump and who seek nothing less than to indoctrinate you and your children into the ways of their radical cancel culture, virtue signaling world.
Accordingly, we must begin this very day to wean ourselves from the worst of the worst of these woke organizations. So…
•As a substitute for Google’s search engine, try DuckDuckGo;
•To kick the YouTube habit, give Rumble a spin; and
•On the Facebook/Twitter front, how about the Trump-backed Truth Social or my favorite “Twitter Killer” which I am helping to build—a social media app called GETTR.
More broadly, as the 2022 and 2024 election seasons approach, we in the Trump movement must work together to build alternative social media communities within which we can communicate directly and honestly with one another, without fear of censorship, shadow banning, or other tricks of the Facebook-Google-Twitter crowd.
Cutting the Fox News Cord
As we have also discussed extensively in this book, far too much of the so-called “mainstream media” spoon-feed us fake rather than real news. At the top of this pyramid of disinformation sits the overtly uber-liberal CNN, MSNBC, and PBS. Yet this problem also bleeds down to the broadcast news of ABC, CBS, and NBC, and this misinformation is particularly acute on Sunday shows like what the Boss likes to call Sleepy Chuck Todd’s “Meet the Depressed” and Margaret Brennan’s “Deface the Nation.”
Yet, the biggest danger to a Trump 2024 presidential victory may not be any of these woke progressive news outlets who wear their Never-Trumpism on their teleprompters but rather a news organization that far too many in Trump Land still trust and still believe supports Donald Trump’s return to the White House. I’m talking, of course, about the Fox Corporation with its Fox News and Fox Business flagships.
As we have discussed, in the golden era of Roger Ailes, Fox was a reliable conservative trumpet—and during the 2016 campaign, a fair and indefatigable Trump supporter. Today, however, Fox is at war with itself—to the point where a contentious battle between pro- and anti-Trump forces now ominously threatens both the rise of Donald Trump in 2024 and the taking of Congress by Trump Republicans in 2022.
The precipitating event for what effectively has been a Never-Trump coup at Fox was a multi-billion-dollar defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox over its coverage of alleged voting machine fraud and irregularities in the November 3 election. In the face of that lawsuit, Fox fired the inimitable pro-Trump Lou Dobbs as a sacrificial lamb.
Fox’s hope was that Dominion’s lawyers would back off—or at least that is how much of the media reported the Dobbs de-platforming. Noted CNN Business:
Fox News’ official reason for canceling Lou Dobbs’ show—a post-election programing adjustment—doesn’t quite add up. Dobbs was the highest-rated host on Fox Business. He often doubled his lead-in’s ratings.
Although Fox isn’t saying, the timing of Dobbs’ cancellation Friday appears to be no coincidence: It took place 24 hours after Dobbs and Fox were named in a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Smartmatic.
Fox may see Dobbs as an acceptable sacrificial lamb. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik said…that the network’s decision…reminds him of the way Rupert Murdoch’s news tabloids in London handled their phone-hacking scandals about a decade ago. “They would throw somebody over the side and see if that was enough.”12
Since the filing of the Dominion lawsuit, Fox has been a pale shadow of its former Roger Ailes self. On the one hand, Fox personalities like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity still seem to be at least mostly in sync with the Trump agenda. Each is, in fact, too big to be completely silenced by Fox management given their robust ratings.
On the other hand, Fox also has a key and influential member of its board of directors in former RINO congressman Paul Ryan who is as anti-Trump as it gets. Corporate governance may therefore be having a hand in guiding the Never-Trump movement inside Fox.
Talent-wise, there is also Fox’s Karl Rove faction to contend with. Rove, as we have discussed in this book, is one of the biggest Trump haters on the planet, and Kingmaker Karl still hits very much above his weight when it comes to moving the on-air Fox Never-Trump agenda.
In fact, Rove is actively campaigning against Trump-endorsed candidates in key districts across the country, and Rove is in sync with other Never-Trumpers on Fox News, from Bret Baier and John Roberts to Brian Kilmeade and, before he left for CNN, the ever-acerbic Chris Wallace.
The not-so-stealth Never-Trump movement at Fox is further complicated by Fox’s cancel culture executive team in charge of Fox programming and talent development. Both Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News and Fox Business, and Lauren Petterson, president of Fox Business, have played key roles in keeping true Trump surrogates off the Fox airwaves like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell along with, I might add, yours truly.
My case is particularly instructive as it draws a sharp contrast between former Trump officials like Larry Kudlow and Kayleigh McEnany who have bent the Never-Trump knee before Fox. They who are now flourishing with their on-air appearances—Kudlow with his own show and McEnany as a contributor.
In contrast, after leaving the White House, I was repeatedly invited by a large number of Fox News and Fox Business anchors and hosts to appear on their shows. This long list includes most prominently Judge Jeanine Pirro for her now cancelled eponymous Justice show—Jeanine initially invited me to be a weekly contributor to host a “five alarm fire” policy segment but that got nixed by Suzanne Scott.
In addition, I received repeated invites from other Fox pro-Trumpers like Rachel Campos-Duffy, Charles Payne, Mark Steyn, Gerard Baker, and Maria Bartiromo. Yet almost just as often, my requested appearances would be vetoed by “the second floor”—that’s Fox code for Suzanne Scott, Lauren Petterson, and others in the executive suites.
On several occasions, even the seemingly untouchable Tucker Carlson was pressured to cancel long form interviews with me scheduled for his Fox Nation show. Fox producers have even killed pre-taped segments of mine that were scheduled to air—including a beauty on Fauci’s role in funding bioweapons gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
Here’s the really broader point I’m trying to make: if we folks out here in Trump Land can’t trust Fox to have the Boss’s back when he will be fighting a huge woke and radical multimedia cartel leading into the 2024 cycle, then we must cut the Fox cable cord. To be abundantly clear and exact:
We must cut the Fox cable cord until Fox ceases its cancel culture, Never-Trump ways.
The Boss must lead the way on this. He should cease doing any and all interviews with Fox News and Fox Business unless and until the network both restores coverage of his rallies and ceases its cancellation of pro-Trump surrogates who hold different views than the Never-Trump producers, executives, and talent hiding behind the conservative Fox umbrella.
And Boss, this must be a highly disciplined and blanket ban. So no Tucker. No Sean. No Laura. No Maria. Not even a whiff of Mark Levin no matter how tempting.
While these folks have all shown strong sympatico with Trump and the Trump movement, each of these highly talented Fox hosts has been under tremendous pressure to reject many of the basic tenets of a Trump 2024 campaign, first and foremost of which is the issue of a stolen election.
No Cold Fox Turkey
In cutting the Fox cable cord, you, dear reader, will certainly not need to go cold turkey.
Today, for example, one of the very best sources of Trump and MAGA-related news is a pair of Steve Bannon shows—War Room: Pandemic and the aforementioned WarRoom BattleGround. Over the course of four hours a day, Bannon and his cadres of in-the-trenches journalists offer real news packaged in hard-edged analysis.
You may also want to consider as part of your daily news diet livestreaming Newsmax, One America News Network (OANN), Real America’s Voice, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA featuring Jack Posobiec, and Mike Lindell’s new Lindell-TV network.
On the written word front, I once again strongly recommend websites like the Hoft Brothers’ Gateway Pundit, Just the News with John Solomon, Revolver News with Darren Beattie, Raheem Kassam’s National Pulse, The Federalist featuring stars like Mollie Hemingway, and the hands-down best alternative national newspaper in the country, The Epoch Times.
And by the way, Boss, you may want to pursue a policy of détente with CNN leading up to the 2024 election. With Never-Trumpers Jeff Zucker and Chris Cuomo gone in a cloud of sex scandals, with Zucker’s replacement Chris Licht talking about a return to straight news, and with Liberty Media’s John Malone publicly denouncing CNN for its woke content and bias—Liberty has a big stake in CNN—there may be an opportunity here.13
If hacks like John Berman, Alisyn Camerota, and Jake Tapper are put out to pasture, that may be your sign, Boss, to move in with an olive branch. In the meantime dear reader, please also consider this:
Even as you are cutting the Fox cable cord, do tune in on occasion to both CNN and MSNBC.
“Know thy enemy,” is the concept here and there is no better way to understand the Never-Trump spin than to get it right from the horses’ asses.