Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes resign from Fox in protest of Tucker Carlson content

Journalists and conservative pundits Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, whose commentary has not supported President Trump, have resigned from their paid TV contributor jobs at Fox News.

Hayes and Goldberg, long-time conservative commentators who most recently have rebuked Republican politics that revolves around Trump, co-founded The Dispatch in 2019. The site is described as "a place that thoughtful readers can come for conservative, fact-based news and commentary."

On Sunday, they announced their joint resignation from the posts they have respectively held since 2009. They write that the network's irresponsible coverage now outweighs its responsible coverage, which long kept them tethered to their lucrative contracts.

Specifically, they identify as a last straw Tucker Carlson's recent "Patriot Purge" special, which aired on Fox Nation – the network's streaming service – earlier this month and explored the idea that the Jan. 6 Capitol breach was a deep state "false flag" operation meant to justify the subsequent persecution of conservatives.

"Fox News still does real reporting, and there are still responsible conservatives providing valuable opinion and analysis. But the voices of the responsible are being drowned out by the irresponsible," they wrote. "A case in point: Patriot Purge, a three-part series hosted by Tucker Carlson."

When asked by New York Times' media reporter Ben Smith, who broke the story about the resignations, Carlson said, "Our viewers will be grateful."

Despite contracts with the network, Goldberg and Hayes have for the past several years made markedly fewer appearances on Fox as the network's audience of mainstream Republican voters rejected the firmly anti-Trump sentiments of the two commentators.