Media reports on Tucker Carlson’s removal are focusing on a personal text message that supposedly horrified Fox’s corporate board — but the reports are ignoring the obvious populist vs Wall St. differences between Carlson and Fox’s eight board members.
The decision to shut down Carlson’s show came as he kept pushing pro-American policy priorities into the 2024 presidential campaign — but those priorities clash with the rival priorities of several board members, including Chairman Rupert Murdoch.
The most glaring clash is over the nation’s economic policy of migration. Carlson has repeatedly opposed demands for more migration into American society, saying the economic policy makes Americans poorer and divided.
But Murdoch is a long-standing advocate for more migration. In 2010, he formed a lobby group with Michael Bloomberg to lobby for the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty-and-more-migration bill. Throughout the 2013 debate — and since then — Murdoch’s news shows displayed the chaotic visuals of illegal migration while ignoring the economic impact of illegal and legal migration.
But his advocacy failed, in part, because Carlson’s former news site, TheDailyCaller.com posted many articles which exposed the exploitative economics behind the legislation. The bill’s death in 2014 also helped to kill off Murdoch’s Spanish-language network that sought to profit from the huge wave of migrant consumers that were expected once the bill had passed. The network quietly died in 2016.
Carlson’s work also undermined another board member, Paul Ryan, a former top Republican in Congress, who also tried and failed to pass the Gang of Eight bill through the House. Moreover, Ryan also used his clout in 2017 and 2018 to quietly kneecap President Donald Trump’s immigration reforms, which were supported by Carlson.
Carlson has repeatedly opposed and denounced Ryan — but Ryan now sits on the Fox board that has pressed the mute button on Carlson.
Murdoch’s son and likely heir, Lachlan Murdoch, also sits on the board. He has not revealed his view on the decision to take Carlson off the air.
The political views of the younger Murdoch do include some support for mainstream cultural views: “How can we expect people to defend the values, interests, and sovereignty of this nation if we teach our children only our faults and none of our virtues?”
The board’s role in Carlson’s firing was spotlighted in May 2 article by the New York Times.
The firing decision, according to “several people with knowledge of the decision,” supposedly began when the board members read a Carlson text message about a brawl in which three white men were beating one Antifa supporter. “It’s not how white men fight,” Carlson texted as he criticized the unfair, three-on-one fight.
That comment was eagerly interpreted as racism, or as “his views on racial superiority,” according to the New York Times, which reported:
The text alarmed the Fox board, which saw the message a day before Fox was set to defend itself against Dominion Voting Systems before a jury. The board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial when Mr. Carlson was on the stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise broader questions about the company.
The day after the discovery, the board told Fox executives it was bringing in an outside law firm to conduct an investigation into Mr. Carlson’s conduct.
The New York Times article — and its editors — downplayed the economic policy differences between Carlson and the eight board members.
For example, board member Roland Hernandez was the head of the Spanish-language Telemundo Group from 1995 to 2000, which gains more advertising dollars as the Spanish-language population increases. He has also been a board member of retail giant Wal-Mart, The Ryland Group home-construction company, and Sony, all of whom would gain from any inflow of immigrant customers and consumers.
Hernandez also was a director of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. from 2005 to 2008 when the firm bet that Latino immigration would drive up housing demand. The bet failed when many of the new buyers could not afford their mortgages, helping to trigger the 2008 economic crash and sweeping Lehman into bankruptcy.
Many retired executives are hired to sit on multiple company boards. They represent the interests of major investors in company debates over strategies, investments, and partnerships. This job description ensures that board members know they are hired to represent the interests of Wall Street — which gains from any migrant inflow of consumers, renters, and workers.
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For example, board member Jacques Nasser is a board member of several U.S. and foreign companies with strong ties to Australia, Turkey, and his native country, Lebanon. He was a top executive at Ford Motor Co., and he helped move auto production to Mexico and South America in the 1980s and was promoted to CEO and President in 1999. He also headed an investment firm for JPMorgan Chase and urged more migration in Australia when he headed a mining company in that country.
Another board member is France-born Anne Dias, who runs an investment firm named Aragon Global Management. Her site says:
We have an international DNA and many members of our investment team have lived and worked in several countries. Our team operates out of offices in New York and Paris. Having “feet on the ground” is important to developing our differentiated view on companies in Europe.
Dias is the former wife of Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel LLC — a huge hedge fund –and a major donor and advocates for more immigration. In general, investment funds gain when the federal government imports more consumers, workers, and renters.
Board member William Burck formerly worked as the “Deputy Staff Secretary, Special Counsel and Deputy White House Counsel to President George W. Bush.” But Carlson is a frequent and sharp critic of George W. Bush, partly because of Bush’s emotional support for cheap-labor migration. In April, for example, Carlson said Bush had a record of “wrecking the country.”
Fox’s chief legal officer, Viet Dinh, is a wild card in the board’s decisions.
He was carried from Vietnam to the United States in the 1970s by a leaky boat and his mother, where he embraced the country and seemingly avoided identity politics. But he also worked as a top Department of Justice official for George W. Bush and has kept his distance from Trump.
He no longer sits on the board because he is reportedly the top executive at Fox Corp.
In 2021, a Washington Post columnist targeted Carlson by arguing that immigrant executives at Fox should take personal offense at Carlson’s political views on migration:
The founder and co-chairman of Fox Corp. is, of course, Rupert Murdoch, a mogul who was born in Australia and now spends a lot of time in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The co-chairman and CEO is his son, Lachlan Murdoch, who was born in London and now lives in Australia. The person who is often said to be the most powerful day-to-day executive at Fox is Viet Dinh, a Vietnamese refugee born in Ho Chi Minh City who is now the corporation’s chief legal and policy officer. The lead outside director is Jacques Nasser, a former Ford CEO who was born in Lebanon and grew up in Australia. Another Fox director is Anne Dias-Griffin, the founder and chief executive of Aragon Global Holdings, who was born and educated in France.
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration.
This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio. The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.