Conservative Fox News contributors Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, co-founders of The Dispatch have quit Fox News citing long-simmering issues with the network, then Tucker Carlson's three-part series on Fox's streaming service, Fox Nation, as the tipping point.
"Like Ernest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it came gradually and then suddenly," said Goldberg in a column for the Los Angeles Times.
Goldberg who has been a prominent critic of Donald Trump, called Carlson's streaming special, Patriot Purge, about the Jan. 6 insurrection "a perfect example of propaganda that weaves half-truths into a whole lie." The special insinuates the riot might have been orchestrated by the FBI or "deep State" and that the Biden Administration could be coming for the "real patriots," Trump voters, he wrote.
Goldberg said there are many people doing good journalism at Fox and that given his many friends there it was an "unhappy" decision, but one he made clear he felt he had to make. "This dangerous nonsense was the last straw for me (and Steve)."
"In the wake of the Jan. 6 riot, it became routine for Trump partisans to claim that criticism of his effort to steal the election amounted to an insult to everyone who voted for Trump, as if 74 million people voted for the riot and the lies that led to it," Goldberg wrote. "The government is not coming for “half the country” — it’s lawfully prosecuting a few hundred people who broke the law on Jan. 6. But we’re supposed to believe that the Trump base is not merely indivisible but defined by a tiny sliver of the worst actors on the right. That’s the real insult to the 74 million." ■
