Two longtime Fox News contributors have quit over host Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge,” a three-part movie on the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg announced on the conservative news site The Dispatch, which they co-founded, that they’re resigning after seeing fabricated claims and conspiracy theories frequently shared by Carlson and other opinion hosts in support of former President Donald Trump.
“Fox News still does real reporting, and there are still responsible conservatives providing valuable opinion and analysis,” the pair wrote Sunday. “But the voices of the responsible are being drowned out by the irresponsible.”
Goldberg told NPR that “Patriot Purge,” a special Fox Nation series claiming the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “false flag” targeting right-wing politics, was the “last straw.”
“It’s basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country and this is the War on Terror 2.0,” Goldberg told NPR. “It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That for me, and for Steve, was the last straw.”
The Daily Beast reports “Patriot Purge” was written by Scooter Downey, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker best known for co-directing “Hoaxed,” a 2019 documentary from far-right Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich claiming the media was biased against the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. “Pizzagate” supporters so strongly believed that Hillary Clinton was operating a pedophile sex ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, that a North Carolina man fired a gun inside the restaurant in 2016.
According to the Washington Post, the series also appears to build on Carson’s unsubstantiated claims the FBI was partly to blame for starting the violence at the Capitol that led to the deaths of five people. The trailer, mixing footage of Osama bin Laden with Ashli Babbitt, sparked widespread criticism last month, with Geraldo Rivera even calling it “bulls--t.”
Goldberg told NPR that he was assured by Fox News executives at Fox Corporation that the cable news network would “tamp down on incendiary commentary and claims” after Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, but objections — including from anchors Bret Baier and Chris Wallace — remain.
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