In the era of conservative cancellations, I’m often asked a plaintive question: “What happens when Rupert Murdoch is gone?”
Fox News regulars know that they have no real alternative in the television-news universe and worry that the successor to the 91-year-old mogul will move the channel leftward.
As a former Fox News VP and host of a podcast, I’ve followed the Murdoch family dynamics for decades, and I always hedged my answer. I hoped, but wasn’t certain, that Rupert’s successor would value the channel’s billion-dollar profits enough to maintain it as a conservative antidote to mainstream television news.
I don’t need to hedge anymore.
Lachlan, now executive chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation, recently emerged from behind the scenes and gave a coming-out speech that could have been aired on Fox News itself. His words were radically different from those of both mainstream-media bosses and his siblings.
I’ve been in enough meetings with the Murdochs to know that the siblings bear virtually no relationship to their moronic doppelgangers in HBO’s Succession. Yet Rupert’s children never really gave us a reason to think their support for the company went beyond bare tolerance.
But in his speech at the Centre for the Australian Way Of Life, Lachlan pulled no punches, and his “bro” persona may never recover.
He spoke about the importance of a country’s values, and warned of the dangers when great societies failed to uphold and celebrate the values that made them so.
He bemoaned a recent poll showing that just 55 percent of Americans would stay and fight if invaded like Ukraine, with 38 percent saying they’d flee the country, asking, “How can we expect people to defend the values, interests, and sovereignty of this nation if we teach our children only our faults and none of our virtues?”
He talked about “the damage done to the American psyche” when media and politicians attack a country’s core values, slammed the “destructive rewriting of its history,” and told Australians to “learn from this cautionary tale.”
He went beyond those generic, and somewhat safe, statements as he homed in on current issues.
He took on Covid alarmism, hitting the press especially hard for not asking tough questions but bowing to a government narrative and a flawed WHO. He criticized the “1619 Project” because it “recast American exceptionalism as racist from inception.” He hit Twitter and Facebook censorship, invoked George Orwell, and mentioned the cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story. He defended free speech.
Ironically, his speech got little attention, especially in the conservative press, and few people saw it online. You can watch the full 30-minute version here and a shorter version here.