An unexpected side benefit of Scooter’s recent documentary, Patriot Purge, is the way it flushed a pair of cuckservatives from Fox News:
The trailer for Tucker Carlson’s special about the Jan. 6 mob at the Capitol landed online on Oct. 27, and that night Jonah Goldberg sent a text to his business partner, Stephen Hayes: “I’m tempted just to quit Fox over this.”
“I’m game,” Mr. Hayes replied. “Totally outrageous. It will lead to violence. Not sure how we can stay.”
The full special, “Patriot Purge,” appeared on Fox’s online subscription streaming service days later. And last week, the two men, both paid Fox News contributors, finalized their resignations from the network.
In some ways, their departures should not be surprising: It’s simply part of the new right’s mopping up operation in the corners of conservative institutions that still house pockets of resistance to Donald J. Trump’s control of the Republican Party. Mr. Goldberg, a former National Review writer, and Mr. Hayes, a former Weekly Standard writer, were stars of the pre-Trump conservative movement. They clearly staked out their positions in 2019 when they founded The Dispatch, an online publication that they described as “a place that thoughtful readers can come for conservative, fact-based news and commentary.” It now has nearly 30,000 paying subscribers.
Their departures also mark the end of a lingering hope among some at Fox News — strange as this is for outsiders to understand — that the channel would at some point return to a pre-Trump reality that was also often hyperpartisan, but that kept some distance from Republican officials.
Notice how small their actual following is, despite the fact that these guys have been getting massive amounts of media exposure for decades and the probability that The Dispatch is being propped up by the same people that keep National Review and the American Enterprise Institute going and going and going.
This doesn’t mean that Fox News can be trusted in the slightest. But it’s demonstrating, once more, that the Right’s erstwhile opinion leaders were always anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Western gatekeepers. You can always tell the self-appointed moderate, they love the word “thoughtful” more than the average gamma loves the word “actually”.