Last Updated on May 19, 2023
The newly-launched Draft Tucker Carlson PAC is now running ads in early primary states calling on voters to sign a petition drafting Carlson to enter the 2024 Presidential Election. The ads are airing nationally on NewsMax, particularly in early primary states like South Carolina and Iowa.
The grassroots push for President Tucker Carlson comes as the shadow campaign being run by Paul Ryan-backed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has floundered after a series of political faux pas drew scrutiny to the Harvard-educated DeSantis’s billionaire-funded non-campaign campaign infrastructure.
DeSantis is expected to officially announce his bid in the coming days, as is former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
“Republicans need a new leader, and Tucker Carlson is ready to lead,” says the new ad from the Draft Tucker Carlson initiative, that’s playing on the airwaves in early primary states.
“No one in America is more articulate and pins down leftists in both parties better than Tucker,” the ad goes on.
“Tucker Carlson is witty, sharp, and mocks woke nonsense. Tucker will whip Biden in a debate,” the ad says.
Watch the Ad Below:
Republicans need a new leader that can stand up to Biden. It's time to draft Tucker Carlson pic.twitter.com/FV9s3wxalc
— Draft Tucker Carlson (@DrafttuckerPAC) May 19, 2023
FOX FEATURES DeSANTIS, FIRES MOST POPULAR HOST
The strategic decision by Fox News to elevate Ron DeSantis while simultaneously marginalizing Carlson has befuddled millions of Americans.
Tucker’s popularity among broad swaths of Americans is unquestionable, as evidenced by the massive number of views his few short Twitter messages have drawn.
Carlson’s tweet, in which he stated simply, “We’re back”, piled on a staggering 100 million views in less than 24 hours, and the three-minute video with the tweet netted 21 million watches in the same 24 hours. Carlson’s numbers have gone far past those early tabulations.
Newsweek reported that Fox News’s ratings “fell off a cliff” in the immediate aftermath of Tucker’s departure.
Tucker’s Populist Moment
Tucker’s exit from Fox, rather than hurting him, seems to have boomeranged his popularity far beyond that of the mainstay Republican cable news channel. The divergence in paths has been brewing for some time within the Republican Party, going back to the Ron Paul candidacies of 2008 and 2012, John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s losses to Barack Obama, and Mitch McConnell’s and Paul Ryan’s crack down on conservatives in D.C. as a reaction to the ascendancy of the Tea Party surge in 2010 and 2012.
The Karl Rove and George Bush wing of the GOP has successfully managed to co-opt conservatives who arrive in D.C. Jim Jordan didn’t vote against Kevin McCarthy once in his 15 votes in early January of 2023. Neither did Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The Tucker Moment represents a clap back at what some populist leaning conservatives spotlight as traitorous behavior from within their own ranks.
That behavior can nearly always be traced to the funding that pays for it. Donors like Paul Singer and the Koch network are often behind conservative divergence from populist sounding campaign promises once an official is sworn in by Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell.
PAUL SINGER, KEN GRIFFIN, VULTURE CAPITALISM, FOX NEWS and RON DeSANTIS
The effort to elevate Ron DeSantis by Fox News cannot be discussed without considering the contrast between Tucker Carlson’s relentless hammering of Fox-aligned vulture capitalists like Paul Singer – one of Ron DeSantis’s top donors – and Singer’s close ties to Fox News via one of Singer’s top investments, former House Speaker Paul Ryan.
The American Opportunity Alliance, Paul Singer’s political donor coalition – a more sinister, darker version of the Koch donor network – recently hosted DeSantis at one of its private gatherings. The events are an American oligarch’s version of Klaus Schwab’s annual confab in Davos, except far more clandestine.
Singer’s events also drew appearances by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador.
These deep ties to global oligarchs make Tucker’s coverage of those same global oligarchs all the more impressive.
In one devastating segment, Tucker laid waste to Elliot Capital Management, Paul Singer’s Mitt Romney-tied vulture capitalist outfit which hired Paul Ryan staffers and even funded the launch of Paul Ryan’s political career going back as far as 2012.
Watch the Segment Below:
Ron DeSantis’s effort at rebranding is a recent development in what has been a short career, marked early on by establishment ties. Prior to the build up for his presidential run, his brief career has been marred badly by handouts to Singer-tied Puerto Rico, lenient sentences for rapists and child predators, and even close ties with the more NeoCon wing of the Republican Party.
DeSANTIS and PUERTO RICO
Further alienating DeSantis from his own party’s voter base, when he was a member of Congress, DeSantis was an ardent supporter of Puerto Rican statehood. In 2018, he co-sponsored legislation, along with thirty Democrats, to make Puerto Rico the 51st state, and hand two Senate seats and more electoral votes over to the Democrats on a silver platter.
If DeSantis had gotten his way, Puerto Rico would have joined the United States as the poorest state in the union, with Spanish as its primary language and infrastructure resembling that of the third world.
DeSANTIS’ LENIENT SENTENCES FOR CHILD PREDATORS
Despite signing tough-on-crime messaging bills as he gears up for a 2024 presidential run, Ron DeSantis repeatedly cut lenient plea deals for child predators when he was working as a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s’ office.
One of the pedophiles DeSantis got off easy was hoarding child pornography depicting children as young as 9 years old. The pedophile, a US Navy sailor, faced 30 years behind bars, but DeSantis cut him a deal to serve just 6.
DeSANTIS FLIP-FLOPS on UKRAINE
Ron DeSantis has been a prolific flip-flopper on the war in Ukraine, publicly claiming at times that he is against US intervention there while casting votes and taking governmental action to further the war, which could turn nuclear.
In addition to supporting the Obama-era intervention that overthrew Ukraine’s elected government, a special detachment of the Florida National Guard was sent to Ukraine to train Ukrainian fighters and was tasked with reporting their findings on the ground directly to Ron DeSantis.
Recently, after DeSantis said in an interview that the Russo-Ukrainian War is a foreign “territorial dispute” and implied that the US should stay out of it, globalist billionaire DeSantis donor Ken Griffin paid the Florida Governor a visit, to adjust his viewpoint.