On Tuesday, about a month-and-a-half after being canned by Fox News, Tucker Carlson debuted his follow-up show on Twitter. It wasn’t the slick, long or even energetic program his viewers were used to. Instead it ran a mere 10 minutes, looked like it was filmed in a rec room, and featured him being decidedly low-energy. At one point one could hear the sound of someone off-screen closing a door. Hope it was worth it because, one day later, the inevitable happened.
As per a letter obtained by Axios (and verified by Mediaite), Fox News notified Carlson’s lawyers that their client had breached his contract. Thanks to a noncompete clause, the news network can keep him off the airwaves (and maybe Twitter) all the way through January 2025, i.e., another year-and-a-half. Carlson has vowed to give them hell over the contract he’d signed, but so far his only move is to create an online show for a social media service, despite any legal headaches it may cause him.
Carlson’s lawyers told Axios that any legal action is purely hypocritical. “Fox defends its very existence on freedom of speech grounds. Now they want to take Tucker Carlson’s right to speak freely away from him because he took to social media to share his thoughts on current events,” lawyer Bryan Freedman said in a statement.
Fox News abruptly fired Carlson in late April the week after they agreed to a whopping $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over false claims they made about the 2020 election. The reason(s) for Carlson’s firing have never been made public.
In his maiden Tucker on Twitter episode, Carlson offered a dense thicket of conspiracy theories involving everything from Ukraine to BLM protests to 9/11 to aliens to the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. As of this writing, the video has racked up over 90 million views.