This purposefully misleading claim that wokeness cost Carlson his job was straight out of Fox News playbook, as pioneered by its CEO Roger Ailes in the mid 2000s.
The civil war between Fox News and its parasitic satellite media companies isn’t the only rupture in the right-wing-o-sphere. Ever heard of Steven Crowder?
Crowder first came to prominence when he was punched in the face by a union protester in 2012. Along with people like Candace Owens, Ben Shaprio, Jordan Peterson, and to a lesser extent, Charlie Kirk, Crowder is a sort of lower tier of the right-wing-o-sphere online. It’s a media space that caters mostly to very angry, young, and occasionally despondent men. Their job is to provide ahistorical scaffolding, reinforcing the unsophisticated belief they should blame structural inequalities in our country on everyone but the billionaire class. Usually, the targets of their ire are the most marginalized people. As uninspired as those characters are, they do have solid followings, online revenue, and in the case of Owens, Shapiro, and Peterson, lucrative platforms at the Daily Wire.
Back in January, transphobic gun-toting manchild Crowder released a video accusing the Daily Wire of trying to negotiate a ”slave contract” with him. Rather than ignore it, Owens released a video saying Crowder was clearly dealing with something and called Crowder’s airing of business negotiations a “bitch move” on her show. The Daily Wire’s CEO Jeremy Boreing followed this up with one-hour video going through seemingly every detail of the contract that Crowder was crying about, not that anyone cared.
Things quieted down until April when Crowder released a new video announcing that he had been going through a divorce, and hilariously accused Owens of threatening him with exposure and “extorting” him. His video included strange assertions about things nobody would possibly ask about. For example, he kept saying that the dissolution of his marriage wasn’t his kids’ fault (his kids are younger than 2, by the way), and that there was “no abuse.” Then Crowder lamented that he lived in Texas (a no-fault divorce state) where his estranged wife was allowed to file for divorce no matter what he wanted.
Owens fired back, calling Crowder “a crazy man” and saying she was going to send him a cease and desist letter. Then video was leaked online from the Crowder residence’s Ring camera showing a seemingly abusive Crowder berating his eight-month-pregnant wife about taking the car for errands. It’s two of the worst people in the world fighting each other.
Vying for a place in the right-wing world is a matter of finding oneself a billionaire patron. It does not matter if you are on television, the web, or on Capitol HIll. The problem with billionaires is that they are almost all one-trick obsessives. The power they can wield does not mean they have a meaningful strategy to run a country.
Just ask Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose presidential campaign launch on Twitter, in tandem with Elon Musk’s endorsement, went almost as catastrophically as Trump’s Truth Social media efforts.
This is partly why the Republican Party is unable to organize around any meaningful strategy (let alone popular public policy) besides eliminating democracy and individual rights. Whether it’s on Capitol Hill or in the right-wing media landscape, the conservative movement is sewage circling the drain. The result is a completely ineffective group of screaming narcissists demanding power and attention with no plan for anyone but themselves.
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