Former Fox News contributor Jonah Goldberg says a “huge share” of people who appeared on TV to praise former President Donald Trump were “dishonest.”
In a column published in The Dispatch on Wednesday, Goldberg wrote, “I’ve shown a good deal of restraint since news broke that I left Fox News.”
“I haven’t done any TV about it, and I’ve let a lot of nonsense go by without a response,” he continued.
He went on to state that a “major reason I chose to leave with more than a year left on my contract was that I felt conflicted about speaking freely.”
Additionally, Golberg said he decided to leave the network because “I didn’t want to be complicit in so many lies.”
He continued:
“That’s the thing. 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.”
Goldberg, a longtime writer for the conservative opinion magazine National Review, co-founded The Dispatch in 2019 — a news and opinion outlet for conservatives skeptical of Trump.
The commentator went on to say that if he did not “hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it. (“Guess what so-and-so said during the commercial break?).”
“Punditry and politics is a very small world—especially on the right—and if you add-up all the congressmen, senators, columnists, producers, editors, etc. you’ll probably end up with fewer people than the student population of a decent-sized liberal arts college,” he added.
Still, Goldberg wrote, “Yes, yes, some people started to drink the Kool-Aid and actually came to believe their own lies, but that’s a subject for another time. Suffice it to say, however: Just because you’ve come to believe a lie that doesn’t make that lie true.”
Additionally, he maintained that he “never deliberately lied on Fox, but over time I felt like I was becoming complicit in a series of lies of omission.”
Golberg also said that when he 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,” he added.
The commentator noted that he “was never told by anyone what I should or shouldn’t say,” but aside from a “Special Report” and “Fox News Sunday,” he was “really only welcome to train my fire leftward.”
“Regardless, while I will miss many decent people who try to do what they can where they can at Fox, I am utterly content with my choice,” Goldberg wrote.
In November, Goldberg and Stephen Hayes announced they were resigning from the contributor positions over Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” documentary, which suggested the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol was a “false flag.”
A Fox News executive told The Hollywood Reporter that the network did not plan on renewing their contracts.
