An excerpt from former CNN media guy Brian Stelter’s upcoming book on Fox News (his second) printed in Vanity Fair on Monday still doesn’t stick to any one single hypothesis for why the network’s now-former top propagandist Tucker Carlson was fired abruptly in April, even casting doubt specifically on the prevailing theory – one supported by the timing – that it was secretly an additional condition imposed by Dominion Voting Systems on top of the $787 million settlement in the 2020 election defamation case. “Though Carlson would later suggest his ouster was a ‘condition’ of the Dominion suit, there’s no evidence to support that theory, and both parties deny it,” Stelter writes before concluding it was simply a confluence of multiple factors, with Tucker’s monumental hubris, arrogance, and internal abrasiveness being by far the largest of them.

Further down in the piece however, and funny as fuck, is one suggested by an unnamed friend of Tucker: That the Dark Lord himself, Rupert Murdoch, dropped the hammer to get revenge on his most recent ex-fiancee, conservative radio host/former dental hygienist/San Francisco Police Department chaplain Ann Lesley Smith, whose hardcore Evangelical views scared Murdoch. The friend thinks that, since Smith believed Tucker was a messenger sent from God, Rupert wanted to “rub it in further” by firing the twisted primetime host after their wedding had been called off.

Like the Dominion theory, this one’s also supported by the timing since Murdoch and Smith broke it off just weeks earlier. April 2023 was a pretty bad month for the Murdochs and Fox News – and MAGAmerica at large. Still, it seems like maaaybe a bit of a stretch. Rupert isn’t that petty, is he?