Now you can ignore Twitter and Tucker Carlson at the same time.
Just weeks after leaving Fox News amid the wreckage of its $787 defamation lawsuit settlement with Dominion over lies about the 2020 election, Tucker Carlson has announced his show is coming back soon in “a new version,” but this time, it’s on Twitter.
In a three-minute video haranguing the mainstream media circus he’s spent his career as a part of, Carlson insists that “the only one remaining” platform allowing free speech is Twitter, as opposed to the cable news outlets that he calls propaganda outlets.
“We bring some other things too, which we’ll tell you about. But for now we’re just grateful to be here. Free speech is the main right that you have. Without it, you have no others,” says Carlson.
According to Dylan Byers of Puck News, Carlson will forgo “at least $25 million” owed by Fox to break a non-compete clause with the new show. Axios reports that prior to posting the video to Twitter, Carlson’s lawyers sent a letter to Fox News accusing the network of fraud and breach of contract. The argument positions Carlson to argue that Fox News violated the contract first and claim he isn’t violating any non-compete clause with a new show elsewhere.
There are no details we’ve seen yet about any financial arrangement between Carlson and Twitter or its owner and CEO, Elon Musk. Musk has repeatedly promoted the idea of Twitter as a platform for creators, with potential sharing of ad revenue and the relaunch of subscriptions for followers.
From Musk’s first meeting with Twitter employees (most of whom have been let go in the months since): “We’re not trying to put YouTube out of business, but I’m just saying, do we really need to give YouTube a whole bunch of free traffic? Maybe not. So at least give creators the option if they would like to put their video on Twitter and earn the same amount as they would, or maybe slightly more, on YouTube or TikTok or whatever the case may be.”
Developing…
