Why Was Tucker Carlson Excommunicated from the Church of Rupert Murdoch?

Another round of virtual bloodshed in the West's unceasing religious war.

“Don’t let them smell how badly you need it.” Everyone with a Tucker story to tell is airing it out right now — I see a retrospective from Puck’s correspondent, whose exposure to Tucker being Tucker in her 2012 interview for a spot at the Daily Caller apparently left an enduring mark on her psyche…

So be it. Roll back to 2008. My first job in “new media” had melted down along with the world economy. My grad school fellowship had withered away. “Don’t be afraid to run” is what my committee chair told me, but now, in a corner office at the Daily Caller, it was Tucker Carlson telling me to conceal my desperation, lest its stink repel all would-be employers. He had, he told me, felt that cold chill run down his own back one sunny day, on the sidelines of a school soccer match, as the boss at MSNBC called to say the show, his show, was over.

Where to go? What to do? Panic, stooped in the near distance, rubs its hands and cackles. Chemicals swell beneath the skin. The sweat begins. Don’t let them smell how badly you need it, he said. They can smell it on you.

No rank stench coming off of that video of Tucker agrin in a golf cart, laughing in particular at an extra-sulfurous Rupert Murdoch, fresh from what feels a lot less like a firing than an excommunication — one where, as Glenn Beck learned not all that long ago, if you cross the line toward a certain level of public piety, you’re out.

FROM REFORMATION TO TRANSFORMATION

Chatter has swirled around several motives. What interests me most is exactly what church or anti-church Murdoch seems to believe he belongs to. The last impression of Tucker the world enjoyed before judgment day was that of a self-described Episcopalian warning the Heritage Foundation that even a Christian adherent to so thin and vague a denomination could plainly see — in the contours of what so many so bloodlessly call “the trans issue” — that American politics had left the realm of policy argument and entered into that of stark battle against sheer evil.

On Tucker’s daytime show last year, I had told him “trans” had had its own suffix chopped off with such surgical speed and precision because what it really identified was a morphing not from one sex to another but from human to cyborg. I had told him this attack on our given self — and He who gives it — put the “trans” at the vanguard of the digital politics of spiritual war consuming American life. I had suggested that the only way to make heads or tails of this conflagration was to recognize that the triumph of technology over our visible and invisible world threw us back on ultimate questions about who we are, questions which demand theological answers.

And so when Tucker’s Episcopalian alarm led at once to Murdoch’s act of secular (yet all but literal) excommunication, my first thought was of the history of religious conflict that has riven the West since — well, since when is an interesting question; for our purposes, since theological communication was forcibly transformed by the advent of the printing press. By what authority, spiritually speaking, was Murdoch dishing out his godlike wrath, which no man, it seems, might propitiate?

Sure enough, Wikipedia — for the sake of brevity and convenience — told the tale.