In response to Tucker Carlson’s series on the January 6 siege, Fox News commentators resign
Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, both Fox News commentators since 2009, have quit in protest over Tucker Carlson’s recent Patriot Purge docu-series. The episode, which is presently playing on Fox’s online streaming service Fox Nation, promotes a variety of conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 Capitol insurgency, including the ridiculous allegation that the tragic riot was staged by the federal government.
The now-ex-contributors, who launched the center-right Never Trump website The Dispatch in 2019 and revealed their departures to The New York Times’ Ben Smith on Sunday, branded Carlson’s documentary “truly dangerous” and factually wrong. “Whether it’s ‘Patriot Purge’ or anti-vax stuff, I don’t want it in my name, and I want to call it out and criticize it,” Goldberg added.
However, in recent years, the pair’s beliefs have fallen out of favour with the Republican establishment. As a result, they have been barred from the network’s primetime opinion programming, and can only be seen on Fox’s so-called straight news programmes such as Special Report and Fox News Sunday on occasion. Goldberg also expressed hope that Fox News would “right the ship” with Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, but that Patriot Purge was “a sign that people have made peace with this way of things, and there is no strategy, at least that nobody made me aware of for a course correction.”
Carlson, for his part, congratulated Hayes and Goldberg on their departure after 12 years, calling it “great news” and stating that the network’s “viewers will be grateful.”