Jonah Goldberg was one of two Fox News employees to resign in protest of Tucker Carlson’s dangerously irresponsible Patriot Purge special that claimed January 6th was a “false flags” operation. “The release of Patriot Purge wasn’t an isolated incident,” Goldberg and fellow conservative commenter Stephen Hayes wrote at the time, “it was merely the most egregious example of a longstanding trend.
On Thursday, Goldberg published an essay about his decision to leave Fox News and why he “didn’t want to be complicit in so many lies.” On The Dispatch, he wrote, “For most of the Trump years, when I was invited on Fox it was to talk about anything but Trump. And as a conservative, I was perfectly willing to criticize Democrats and progressives. But opportunities to criticize Trump were studiously avoided. With one exception, I was never told by anyone what I should or shouldn’t say. But… I was really only welcome to train my fire leftward. Eventually, I felt like a cog in the whataboutist machinery.” Goldberg also accused Fox News hosts (the same ones who reached out to Mark Meadows on January 6?) of being dishonest in their support of Donald Trump.
I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it.
The essay ends with a quote from Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” You can read the entire thing here.
(Via The Dispatch)