WorldNetDaily continued to be Tucker Carlson’s PR division as it touted everything it could about his plans after Fox News fired him. In addition to publishing articles it took from the right-wing Western Journal, it has published its own articles as well:
- An April 26 article by Peter LaBarbera claimed that Carlson’s firing “has drawn renewed attention to one of his detractors, the self-proclaimed ‘Never Again Trumper’ and former Republican House Speaker, Paul Ryan, who sits on the Fox Corporation’s Board of Directors.”
- An anonymously written May 4 article hyped that Carlson “has considered running his own GOP candidate forum for the 2024 presidential election.”
- A May 9 article by Joe Kovacs touted Carlson’s decision to post videos to Twitter. WND has linked to nearly every Carlson video posted since they began appearing in early June.
- A May 11 article by Kovacs cheered that Carlson “did, in fact, tell a reporter this week that he would be running for president and announcing his candidacy this week. But then, within moments, Carlson admitted he was just joking.” Kovacs attacked the reporter Carlson pranked as having a “leftist ideological slant” for no actual reason beyond that he accurately reported on leaked internal text messages showing Carlson to be the jerk we all knew him to be.
- An article it stole from right-wing site Just the News hyped that Carlson’s first video “had more than 100 million views in less than two days since its launch.” In fact, Twitter’s “tweet view” counter is so broad that it counts merely scrolling past a tweet as a “view,” making it utterly unreliable as a viewing metric.
- A May 16 article by Bob Unruh touted: “An undercover video obtained by OMG News, run by James O’Keefe, shows a Fox insider revealing that Tucker Carlson’s dismissal was part of the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.”
- A June 8 artlcle by Unruh noted the legal wrangling between Carlson and Fox News, followed by a June 12 article complaining about a cease-and-desist letter Fox sent to Carlson.
Then there was a May 25 article by Peter LaBarbera carrying the declarative statement “Tucker is Americans’ most trusted news source.” But the poll LaBarbera said nothing about “trust,” as he seemed to concede in his opening paragraph: “A new survey by Gallup and the Knight Foundation reveals that Tucker Carlson, recently ousted by Fox News despite being their top show host, is the ‘most followed or watched public figure in the United States for information,’ dominating legacy media news names like NBC’s Lester Holt and ABC’s David Muir.” Being “followed or watched” does not equal trust. LaBarbera went on to botch his version of the list, getting a couple numbers wrong and list NBC’s Lester Holt twice. (Apaprently, having a competent copy editor is an expense WND can no longer handle.)
Meanwhile, Joseph Farah and Wayne Allyn Root weren’t the only WND columnists who weighed in on Carlson’s firing. Jim Darlington’s April 28 column was “An open letter to Tucker haters about the truth he taught us” in which he repeated not “truth” but Carlson’s misinformation and propaganda:
You know the election of 2020 was an exercise in treason. You were there. You saw what was done. We all did. You can say there is no God, but He will disagree. You can say the election was fair and honest. Or you can say the vaccines were safe and effective.
You know that Joe Biden is a corrupt and thoroughly compromised puppet, who was selected as our presidential figurehead solely by virtue of his willing ascent to every lie placed before him and his unique and in-your-face talent for delusional embellishment. You know his presence in the White House is a purposeful mockery, telling us of our impotence to even know who is truly governing us.
You know that it is impossible for us to avoid the most obvious. That every policy of this administration has been directed at our destruction and that every implausible justification is pure rot.
[…]We didn’t need to gift the Taliban with $80,000,000,000-plus worth of U.S. military equipment. We didn’t need to gift the Chinese the biggest military airbase in the region, fully equipped. We didn’t need to move the military out before securing the evacuation of American civilians and the Afghans who had been our allies.
[…]You know Ukraine was one of the prime troughs of corruption, at which the Biden crime family fed. You know that the U.S. State Department squashed efforts, early in the war, for a cease-fire, then amenable to both sides in the conflict. You can’t pretend to be ignorant of the unbeatable odds that millions, if not billions of the U.S. “aid” going to Ukraine are finding their way back into the coffers of the American left, for the purposes of buying additional elections.
We didn’t need to become a nation confused over what a man is and what a woman is, or whether 7-year-olds need an insane rationale for choosing which sex to be, training manual to follow.
[…]We didn’t need the House speaker’s refusal to honor the president’s request for the National Guard to control the expected protests January 6. We didn’t need the incitement of the Capitol Police lobbing stun grenades into peaceful crowds. We didn’t need for a host of coordinated operatives to lead the breach of the Capitol. We didn’t need the unanswered killing of U.S. citizens, by those same police. We have not needed the attribution of “white supremacy” to a racially mixed crowd of protesters, for whom the Capitol Police opened doors. We didn’t need two and a half years of political persecution and unlawful imprisonment of those who stood in the gap against the coup that has taken us to the brink of chaos.
To correct just a couple of Darlington’s falsehoods: Ther U.S. didn’t leave $80 billion in military equipment to the Taliban, Trump made no request to Pelosi to activate the National Guard the day of the Capitol riot (and it was not in her power to activate them even if he had), and Ashil Babbitt was committing an act of domestic terrorism when she was killed by law enforcement inside the Capitol.
WND also posted a May 3 video by messianic Jew and onetime WND gravy train maintainer Jonathan Cahn titled “Was Tucker Carlson actually removed by the spirits?” After a lot of gobbledygook about spirits and “demonic powers” and transphobic ranting, he declared that Carlson “stood in [the spirits’] way” and, thus, was targeted, citing Carlson’s anti-abortion rantings likening abortion to “child sacrifice” and alleged exposure of the “dark trinity.” Cahn also shoehorned in lots of promotion for his latest book.