Lou Dobbs on the set of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on the Fox Business Network on December 13, 2018 in New … [+] GETTY IMAGES
Lou Dobbs Returns With Online Show Catering To The Far-Right Fringe
By Mark Joyella
Three years after he was fired by Fox, Lou Dobbs is back—if you can find him.
Dobbs, who once hosted the most-watched business show on television, Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, returned Monday night by debuting a show with the same name on FrankSpeech.com, a website run by Mike Lindell, the pillow company chief executive who has become a prominent proponent of false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
“Good evening, everybody, and welcome to Lou Dobbs Tonight,” he said, telling viewers “and now we resume our conversation that was unexpectedly, and in my opinion somewhat rudely interrupted some three years ago.” Fox fired Dobbs in 2021 just 24 hours after he and Fox were named in the $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Smartmatic.
“That was then, and this is now,” Dobbs said, before observing that “we’re still talking about a rigged election, a stolen election, just as we were three years ago.” That statement speaks volumes about where Dobbs finds himself, sitting in a bookshelf-lined home office, hosting a show on a fringe website catering to far-right supporters of former President Donald Trump.
Trump, who sat for an interview with Dobbs, repeated his false claims about the 2020 election, saying “we had a rigged election, it was rigged, 100 percent rigged,” which went unchallenged by Dobbs, who made it clear he was no longer restrained by any veneer of journalism. The host described the 2024 election as an opportunity for Trump to prevail against “the awesome power of a government that is controlled by the permanent bureaucracy, the deep state…a Marxist Democrat Party, and this corrupt Biden regime who mean to destroy Trump and our Constitutional republic.”
As Brian Stelter, the former Reliable Sources host on CNN, put it, “let’s look at the homepage of Lindell’s far-right YouTube wannabe. Some of today’s titles: ‘Voter fraud in the swing states’ ‘Biden at war with supporters of the republic’ ‘J6 was a conspiracy at the ‘highest level’ ‘What really happened on 9/11?’.”
While it’s likely few saw the debut of Lou Dobbs Tonight on “Lindell TV,” the Trump interview did end up making a bit of news when Trump told Dobbs he “hoped” a market crash would happen “in the next 12 months.” The Biden campaign immediately shared the clip on social media, saying “Trump says he hopes the economy crashes so he can blame President Biden.”
Mark Joyella – Senior Contributor
Mark Joyella is a five-time Emmy Award-winning reporter and news anchor for television stations in Miami, Orlando, Tampa and New York City. He’s worked in cable news at CNN and Fox and his writing has appeared in Adweek, the New York Post, the Orlando Sentinel, The Dallas Morning News and Men’s Health.
From forbes.com