Carlson Harder to Find than El Chapo

I keep feeling like I woke up in a reboot of The Twilight Zone.

Today I came across something about Tucker Carlson, and I decided to see what was going on with his career. When he got booted from Fox for some pretty uninspiring behavior, I predicted he would fade away.

I don’t think he’s very good at what he does, as I said back when they made the mistake of giving O’Reilly’s golden spot to a person who had been failing at other jobs for years. I think the time slot is what makes 8 p.m. Fox hosts great.

He’s gone. Not just from Fox. Gone, period. The web says he started a Twitter show called Tucker on Twitter, which sounds like a confused man trying on bathing suits. I can’t find it. I can’t find his Twitter page, which is supposed to be at Twitter etc. TuckerCarlson.

What happened?

I know Fox sent him a cease-and-desist. The idea is that Carlson is still under contract to Fox until December of next year. The month after the next presidential election, I should note. That will sting, if Fox gets its way. “It’s me, Tucker, back with a bottle of Ensure and my take on the election I missed.”

I can’t find any stories explaining why Carlson is gone. My guess is that he and/or Elon Musk took his account down in order to minimize their exposure until the dispute is resolved one way or the other.

Why not tell the world what’s happening? It’s a bad idea to comment on potential lawsuits, but you can at least say there’s a potential lawsuit and that you are exercising caution.

I can’t find anyone talking about Carlson’s disappearance. That’s even weirder than the disappearance itself. Hasn’t anyone noticed?

We don’t even know what’s in Carlson’s contract. There must be some kind of non-compete clause or some other language granting Fox exclusive rights to his content. There are little snippets out there, but I haven’t seen anything really helpful.

I learned a little bit about non-compete clauses in law school. Courts do not like them. They stifle competition. They keep prices high. They starve people. In order to make one work, an employer has to make sure it’s reasonable. The duration and geographic scope have to be reasonable, for example. You can’t tell a barber who worked for you in Alaska that he can’t set up shop in Florida for 300 years.

The only kind of non-compete clause I know about kicks in when an employee leaves. Carlson, however, seems to be a current Fox employee. They’re claiming his contract has over a year left to run, so maybe Fox is still paying him, and he has no post-employment non-compete obligation. In that case, it seems reasonable to require him not to work anywhere else.

Another possibility is that the press has things wrong, as usual. Maybe when they say he’s “under contract,” they really mean he IS fired, he’s NOT getting paid, and he has a normal noncompete agreement and maybe a severance package.

I don’t know what’s happening. I can guarantee you Carlson’s lawyers are trying to fix it, or maybe Musk’s are, or both, or maybe Carlson and Musk are fighting over who has to hire lawyers and pay the bill.

I don’t think Twitter is liable for anything, but Musk and Twitter have lots of money, so that makes them seem liable to opportunistic attorneys willing to roll the dice.

I think what’s happening is very bad for Carlson, because as people get used to not watching him, they may start to realize he’s not very good and not particularly smart. They may even start to think rationally about his bad behavior (alleged alleged alleged infinity no tags back) at Fox.

While he’s gone, Jesse Watters is filling the Fox Spot. Another great Fox move, right up there with The Half-Hour News Hour and hiring Rachel Marsden. Watters is smug and annoying. He also lacks O’Reilly’s gift for showmanship. He seems to share Carlson’s maturity issues. Will viewers want to watch him smirk every night for a whole hour?

Maybe they will. That time slot is really something.

I still think Carlson is headed for platform miniaturization, like Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly now airs his views on Youtube. His videos are getting numbers like 7,000, 20,000, and 169,000. I watch a random guy who does things like covering steaks with Kraft macaroni and cheese sauce and cooking them, and he gets something like 10 times O’Reilly’s traffic. He just flew himself and his wife to Japan first class, at $25,000 per ticket. Of course, I’m assuming he paid. The airline may have given him tickets to get him to do a video.

I don’t think anyone will ever pay O’Reilly $50,000 to review a product. My bet is that he pays for everything now and has to wait in line at restaurants.

Are you still wondering who Rachel Marsden is? Should I have not mentioned her? You probably don’t remember.

Her career pretty much ended over a decade and a half ago. To me, she was a conservative cross between Mary Katharine Ham and the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction.

I think people have been watching Carlson on Twitter just to feed the delusion that they’re punishing Fox. I believe they have the same kind of enthusiasm you had the last time you started a diet on January 3rd. February will probably be a very cold month in Carlsonland.

Well, it already is, since Carlson is deplatformed. But I think it will continue to go badly for him.

I pushed the metaphor too far.

Maybe Carlson should pay Dylan Mulvaney to say he hates him. Mulvaney has incredible power to shape consumer behavior, and the Mulvaney Effect seems to have a very long half-life.

Maybe there never was anyone named Tucker Carlson. Maybe there was, in a different reality, but Joe Biden put on a shiny brass gauntlet, snapped his fingers or had someone snap them for him, and made Carlson vanish from the past, along with his memory. Carlson’s memory, I mean. And I was shielded from the effects by my backyard rifle berm.

Now it’s my fate to roam the world with a shaggy beard and long toenails, insisting Tucker Carlson existed.

He’s in the Phantom Zone, with Rachel Marsden and Brent Spicer. Sean Spicer, I mean. See?

When Carlson got the boot, conservatives put up all sorts of gloating memes. Carlson got tons of traffic on Twitter, so people concluded that he had totally 3wned Fox. Talk about celebrating early. Will people want those memes online a year from now?

I don’t care too much who does what at Fox, since I rarely see Fox material, but it would be neat if they gave the golden spot to someone smart and reasonably mature.