by Twitter critics are lining up to demand that Australian-born right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch be stripped of his US citizenship and deported after he undermined American democracy with a cascade of recently exposed Fox News lies about the 2020 presidential election.
Murdoch, whose media outlets frequently rail against immigration, became a US citizen in 1985, which allowed him to circumvent a law banning foreigners from owning more than 20% of a US broadcasting license.
(Fox News host Tucker Carlson had a tongue-in-cheek moment on the show just last year about the damage foreign-born billionaires can wreak on a nation.)
Despite Murdoch’s lucrative change of citizenship, he doesn’t appear to be a big fan of US democracy. He and Fox News continued to peddle Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claim of a fraudulent presidential election, which news anchors and executives did not believe, according to a bombshell letter filed earlier this week.
Murdoch blasted a memorably distraught press conference by Trump ally Rudy Giuliani and attorney Sidney Powell in the wake of Trump’s election defeat, which bizarrely claimed voting machine software had been tampered with in a plot led by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who was then seven years in the grave.
“Really crazy stuff. And harmful,” Murdoch wrote in a November 2020 text message, revealed in a brief filed Thursday by attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems. The company is suing Fox News and its parent company Fox Corporation for $1.6 billion for alleged defamation.
Carlson said in a message obtained by Dominion that Powell “lied” about having evidence to support her wild claims and called Trump a “demonic force,” according to the brief. Fox executives were so concerned about the danger Trump posed that they refused to put him on Lou Dobb’s program on Jan. 6, 2021, believing it was “irresponsible,” the brief said.
Despite this, Murdoch’s Fox continued to support Trump and his story of a rigged election to support the former president’s supporters.
Now his enemies are raging on Twitter to chase him out of the country.
Murdoch could not be immediately reached for comment.
