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Sept. 12, 2024 - Conspirituality
01:13:27
223: Tucker Carlson’s Toxic Cleanse

In 2022, Tucker Carlson produced a documentary called “The End of Men,” his contribution to the so-called “masculinity crisis.” That’s when testicle tanning hit the mainstream, which one astute observer dubbed “bromeopathic therapy.” Turns out the former Fox News host isn’t done dabbling in conspirituality. This year, he’s platformed the QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley; lyme disease conspiracist, Kris Newby; the “other” Naomi, Naomi Wolf; brother-sister optimizers, Casey and Calley Means; and he’s currently on a 16-city tour with the likes of Russell Brand and Alex Jones. He’s also partly responsible for helping usher RFK Jr into Donald Trump’s camp. While the former CNN and MSNBC host turned far right provocateur isn’t leading wellness retreats (yet), he’s certainly being shared by an increasing number of wellness influencers, and we want to know why. Show Notes DOJ Accuses Russia of Sprawling Election Interference Campaign Homeland Violence and Diaspora Insecurity: An Analysis of Israel and American Jewry | Politics and Religion | Cambridge Core  Safety through Solidarity by Shane Burley, Ben Lorber Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So it's not obvious why the leadership of a country would hate the very people they need most and hate the most beautiful and valuable thing they have, which is nature.
Why do they hate those things?
It terrifies me to contemplate, Tucker, that people like Alex Jones and, in our country, David Icke, who, aside from some views that are impossible to corroborate around quite occultist and, shall we call them, marginal ideas, difficult to corroborate ideas, when it comes to the subject of globalization and the increasing authoritarianization of our planet, appear to have been ahead of the curve.
Hey, it's Julian.
If you've been paying attention to this last year's presidential campaign, not to mention our podcast feed, you've heard about Project 2025.
It's a plan of deregulation that former President Trump's allies aim to implement if he wins.
It might seem like a brand new thing, but what if I told you it stems from a secret plan first written by a Supreme Court Justice nearly 50 years ago?
If you want to hear more of this history and the scandal that set it all off, then I highly recommend Listening to Master Plan.
It's the new investigative series from our friends at The Lever that was recently named a must-listen by The Guardian and Apple Podcasts.
For the past two years, award-winning journalist and former Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota has been working to unearth never-before-reported documents showing how a group of tycoons legalized corruption for the wealthy.
On Masterplan, you'll go on an epic journey from the 1970s to the present, hearing the untold stories of infamous folks you already thought you knew, like President Richard Nixon and Fox News boss Roger Ailes.
And you'll meet operatives and oligarchs you've probably never heard of, because they've wielded their power in the shadows.
If you somehow think government corruption doesn't affect your daily life, think again.
From high medical bills to lower wages today, it's all part of the master plan.
So, listen to Masterplan every week, wherever you get your podcasts, and tell them we sent you.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspirituality 223.
Tucker Carlson's Toxic Cleanse.
Tucker pulls his 1987 red and white Silverado onto the gravel drive of his barn broadcast studio in the fall, main morning.
He unbuckles the dog-chewed seatbelt and creaks the steel door open to the brisk air.
There's a nice contrast of cool on his lumberjack shirt sleeves and coziness under his goose-down vest.
He slams the door and pauses to take in the convergence of light and smell.
His blood is warm.
The soil is fragrant.
The Silverado is pre-digital.
No electronics under the big red hood.
No one from the deep state can track him out here.
But inside the futuristic post barn, a warm glow radiates from a whir of servers and satellite uplinks.
The studio lights are already warming up, turned on remotely by staffers now tramping through the shadowy forest, hunting down chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms for the wild harvest lunch later today.
The offset kitchen is aromatic with auto-brewed coffee.
Wake up America patriot blend.
He's down to his last pound of it from when Alex Jones brought up a case from Austin.
Such a great guy.
Tucker fills his cup of liberal tears mug.
He sits down at his podcast table and empties his mind, watching his inhale and exhale.
How does it all fit together this week?
Money, race, preserving civilization, guns, vaccines, testosterone, Hitler, Jesus, trans people, raw milk, and Harris is a strident shrew who might be Indian, might be black, who knows?
The topics tumble together like lotto balls in his head while his subconscious assesses their combos for maximum punch.
And then his eyes rise to meet the chandelier of antlers over the table, trophies from so many bucks he's shot and owned, entangled like a crown of thorns fit for a giant.
Each white bone is like a piece of the puzzle for this week, he thinks.
The anti-vax doctor, the Catholic convert accused by the cabal of sex crimes, the Russophile, the guy who learned to do Holocaust denial by podcasting.
Everyone has a role to play, and everything is connected.
And finally, he gazes at the far wall, at his prized display of fly-fishing lures.
He hand-tied each bright feather and bit of fur to each gleaming hook.
There are so many ways to snare the trout, the salmon, and the lonely listener looking
for a confident friend for meaning and for someone to blame.
This week in Conspiratuality.
Massive news this past week regarding 2024 Russian election interference propaganda
and its ties to right-wing alternative media.
It's really a post-truth story about how algorithmic incentives can drive not only audience capture, which we've talked about quite a bit, but it also opens doors to lucrative partnerships with hostile governments because we're in the Wild West.
As most listeners will no doubt know, a sprawling Russian election influence campaign was uncovered by the DOJ last week.
32 internet domains, some impersonating trusted U.S.
news organizations were seized.
All of this was carefully calibrated to exploit certain anxieties and divisions ahead of the 2024 election.
American right-wing influencer Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan, Appear to have founded their company in Tennessee called Tenet Media in 2022 to participate in a Kremlin-funded propaganda operation.
Through Tenet, two Russian operatives are accused of funneling $10 million through shell companies in exchange for creating pro-Russian videos.
Then allegedly paid influencers as much as $400,000 a month to make just four videos each month for their millions of social media followers.
It's incredible.
And so far, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin and Lauren Southern seem to be the most likely creators involved.
And listeners, if you don't know who they are, good for you.
But these are some really prominent, you know, A-list just Awful human beings.
So they were getting a month what we get an episode, basically.
Right?
There's no justice.
So one such video blamed Ukraine for the March terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall for which ISIS-K claimed responsibility, like maybe the Ukrainians did it.
And you can find videos of Tim Pool ranting and raving about how Ukraine is our enemy and we should apologize to Russia.
This is in line with the media company that already pushes Trump's false election fraud claims.
They positively cover white supremacist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and promote the excess death narratives about COVID vaccines.
The charge here is that Tenet Media failed to register with the State Department as a foreign agent or that it was working for RT, formerly known as Russia Today.
So where do we go from here?
As of Friday, YouTube had terminated Tenants Media accounts.
Unsurprisingly, all of their content is still up untouched on Rumble.
Tim Pool got ahead of the story as it was breaking by putting out a statement saying he knew nothing about any of this.
And if it turned out to be true, well, he was a victim.
Yeah, and he was actually just getting paid market value for his stuff.
Yeah, totally.
It wasn't a big deal.
I mean, it was just the kind of money I would get anywhere.
Dave Rubin tweeted something almost identical, which is kind of par for the course for Dave Rubin.
But the real questions for me here are these.
Will other heterodox talking heads cover this story in alignment with the facts?
Will even this level of radioactivity be enough to make Lauren Chan and Dave Rubin and Betty Johnson, whoever else turns out to be involved, be on the pail, both as podcast guests and to their followers as right-wing digital media titans?
And I'm going to predict a no on both of those questions, because after writing my first draft of this, Ben Shapiro hosted an entirely softball interview with Poole to affirm his innocence and downplay, as Matthew pointed out, the massive revenue that was being generated through this deal.
Nothing special, really.
Glenn Greenwald then chimes in, immediately running Whataboutism.
Like he said, Kamala raised $500 million in a month, so $10 million from Russia is a drop in the bucket.
It's just like an amazing argument.
Plus, he says America runs influence campaigns too, so these are just government assertions from a grand jury.
And as we all know, they wouldn't die to a ham sandwich.
Where did Glenn post it since he can't access Twitter any longer?
You know, I don't know.
I just saw Dave Pakman doing a takedown on it.
As Russell Brand, RFK Jr.
and Donald Trump illustrate to us so clearly, we live in a time when the monetizable value of controversy is more determinative than whatever alleged criminal or treasonous actions or patently false and harmful statements and campaigns are associated with an individual.
There's nothing you can do that doesn't still make you a big draw.
In fact, it may increase it in a massive and still largely unregulated social media environment.
Fake news, propaganda and conspiracy theories are not just a side effect.
Zombie algorithms amplify privilege and yes, monetize sensational content, Charismatic influencers and outrageous lies.
Those influencers, in turn, play the censorship martyr every time they get fact-checked or criticized, let alone demonetized or deplatformed.
And this could have a serious impact on their reach.
But within red-pilled subcultures, it also only increases the demand.
for their banned content and the appeal of their renegade voices.
Well, I just checked. Glenn is still all over Twitter. So apparently he's willing to pay the
fine for using a VPN. I guess that's how he's accessing it.
But I guess if you're getting 100,000 a week, you know, those the fine is only probably a
couple of hundreds. So he's probably good with that. So there's a there's a fine in
Brazil for using a VPN.
Yes.
Okay.
To access Twitter, correct?
Okay, so do either of you feel a little bit nauseous to find out?
I mean, obviously this is bad, but a lot of the disinformation, we don't know how much that we've been analyzing and battling for years.
Now, we know a lot of it is probably more astroturf than organic.
How do you guys feel about that?
For me, it's always a question when I see stuff like Tim Pool defending Russia.
It's a question of, is he really this historically and politically ignorant, or is he getting paid to do it?
Yeah.
Because it has to be one of those two things.
Either has to be being backed by someone to say such outlandish things, or I've seen other videos of him, like his famous restaurant where he just complained because he didn't understand what making a reservation at a restaurant was.
And because he's Tim Pool, he was mad that other people got in ahead of him.
That was just a thing.
And so he also seems to be pretty idiotic as well.
It's wokeness.
Reservations are wokeness.
Balancing those things is always the challenge we're going to have.
Are these people authentic or not?
But when you are confirmed that, no, no, they were being paid, it does line up.
You know, the thing is, is that the suspicion that they're being paid to say outlandish things is actually conspiratorial.
Of course.
Until you get confirmation.
And that's what we don't want to do.
It's really ironic.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is ironic.
I mean, it goes to your question from last week, Matthew, you were wondering out loud, What's the deal with RFK's Ukraine foreign policy position as opposed to his stance on Israel?
And so this is the weird thing, and this is what I think we've come to understand over time about the nature of propaganda and malign foreign influence, is that it's a kaleidoscope of different intersecting streams of things that can be exploited.
And so it may start off as astroturfed.
Uh, but the way that it spreads and the way that it becomes part of the discourse means that it can end up with someone like RFK Jr.
saying, we shouldn't be sending money to Ukraine.
Unless he's astroturfed as well.
Well, maybe.
Okay, so my twig this week unpacks something quite complicated that's been clanging in the margins since
October the 7th, and that we haven't directly addressed.
And that's that the paradox of anti-Semitism being the driver of fascist conspiracy theories.
But then also the perception of antisemitism rooted in legitimate historical traumas and amplified by real instances of bigotry and protest movements and also stochastic attacks on synagogues is used to deflect criticism of Israel And as that happens, it ironically may provoke more anti-Semitic outbursts.
Okay, so every paradox has two parts.
Number one, we're talking about Tucker today for a long time, and one of the most outrageous turns he's taken at this particular moment is towards outright Holocaust denial.
And as Julian, you're going to get into, this is an off-brand given his history with the Great Replacement Theory and, you know, all kinds of guests who love that sort of thing.
Now, when Daryl Cooper, amateur historian and creator of the Martyr Made podcast, appeared on Carlson for two and a half hours recently, the most reported riff of his was that Winston Churchill was the ultimate villain in World War II.
But I think that's a complicated distraction from his core insanity.
You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the East in 1941, They launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle.
They went in with no plan for that.
And they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.
You know, you have, uh, you have like letters As early as July, August 1941, from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who are surrendering or people they're rounding up.
And so it's two months after, a month or two after Barbarosha was launched.
And they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can't feed these people.
We don't have the food to feed these people.
And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?
I feel like my eyes are bleeding out of my head.
So did you hear that, guys?
The poor Nazis in Russia were so unprepared for political prisoners, which I think is how Daryl pronounces Jews, that they ran out of bread.
They didn't want to see them starve.
So like the Humane Society, they just made the compassionate choice.
So according to this guy, No Mein Kampf, no Final Solution, no Kristallnacht, Warsaw Ghetto, no Yellow Stars or gas chambers.
No plan!
No plan!
No decades-long propaganda campaign to make anti-Semitism in Germany boil over.
The Holocaust, with its dedicated train routes and made-to-order death factories, all of this came out through a tragic lack of planning.
And throughout this incredibly dangerous bullshit, Tucker sits there in Feroz's brow and nods along.
And then a thousand chuds in the YouTube comments say, wow, thank God someone is finally telling the truth.
Yeah, the courageous truth teller who actually could have used a dissertation committee, right?
He could have used some academic guardrails where people were like, dude, we need to talk about this before you go any further.
Here's the second part of the paradox whiplash.
So we know we've covered that anti-Semitism is a tool of fascism.
We know that denying the aims and effects of fascism is anti-Semitic.
But in a Naomi Kleinian mirror world way, she actually writes about this precise complication in Doppelganger in relation to her journalism on Israel.
The weaponization of real fears of anti-Semitism can be employed to deflect criticism of and resistance to the ethno-nationalist aims of the state of Israel.
Then that outcome is exploited by the right But also some leftist Jewish commentators like Max Blumenthal, who last week started talking about the Zionist occupied government in control of the US.
So on the Tucker side, we have old school anti-Semites, like Cooper, saying that the Holocaust didn't really happen.
And on the other side, we have some supporters of Israel and defenders of Holocaust memory going so far to say that criticism of Israel's genocidal response in Gaza to the slaughter of October the 7th is anti-Semitic, even when that criticism comes from Jews.
So, Naomi Klein, Jewish Voices for Peace.
Jewish currents and numerous Jewish-Muslim cooperation groups are not really driven by anti-war and anti-colonial values.
No, their protests are a conspiracy driven by secret self-loathing, if they're Jews, with which they will destroy the state of Israel.
And this is super murky territory because there are mass shootings and domestic terror attacks against synagogues.
And part of the pattern of such attacks is that they increase whenever there is an IDF escalation.
So I'll link to a study on that in the show notes.
And there are instances of anti-Semitic speech and graffiti at some ceasefire rallies.
Despite the fact that most organizers attempt to eliminate that with tight movement guidelines.
But when it happens, and Jewish students on campus are reasonably afraid, that tends to get more coverage than the movement discipline of protesters.
So the cognitive dissonance of equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism is something that anti-Zionist Jews have been battling for decades.
But now we're in a situation where segments of the Israeli population are going totally mask-off with unbridled bloodlust.
IDF soldiers hooting and hollering on TikTok videos as they level buildings.
They pose for selfies in the underwear of dead Palestinian women.
And then there's this, which went viral through some weird, toxic serendipity in the same week as the Cooper interview.
If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow.
I would press it in a second.
That's just, I think, I mean, I think most Israelis probably agree.
If that's the choice, yeah.
Yeah.
So that is from the Two Nice Jewish Boys podcast, which is the longest running English language podcast in Israel.
You just heard the voice of tech bro Eitan Weinstein.
And chiming in there is Neor Menninger, who ran Netanyahu's online PR department for three years.
Now, there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting Netanyahu's war in the streets as I write this.
But the views of these two guys are not fringe.
And they go on to openly admit that they don't care about children in Gaza contracting polio.
They give the opinion that Palestinian prisoners should be executed via anal rape.
And they also have this history that Klein is referring to of framing criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.
But I think at this moment, seeing and criticizing content like this for what it actually is, obviously has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
Yeah, absolutely.
When you say that it went viral, I saw that it was being widely clipped and criticized and used to show the mask off thing that you're describing.
When you say it went viral, do you mean that or do you mean that this is like one of their biggest episodes that like people are receiving very well?
Yeah, I don't know in terms of its domestic reception, and I don't actually think the influence of their download numbers is really the point.
We can maybe talk about that in a bit.
Well, that's what viral refers to is what I'm asking.
Downstream effects mean that the rhetoric like this, plus the IDF's rising body count, Just is like red meat to people like Candace Owens, who's now soapboxing about the spiritual bankruptcy of Judaism, and groipers like Nick Fuentes, who's preaching against the genocide every day as if he cares about Palestinians, which I doubt.
And on socials, there's this flood of commentary from diaspora Jews noting how much more dangerous this makes their world.
So, it's the picture of a snake eating its tail.
To be victimized by antisemitism is a devastating, centuries-long trauma that resulted in the Holocaust.
And then to weaponize that history, to capitalize on fear and trauma for ethno-nationalist goals is also a thing.
And the danger is it fuels more old-school anti-Semitism.
This pretty much broke my brain this week.
I want to direct you all to an excellent new book that helped me a lot.
It's by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber.
It's called Safety Through Solidarity, A Radical Guide to Fighting Anti-Semitism.
These are veteran progressive organizers that address both sides of this disaster, which is how fascists scapegoat Jews, but then curdle the trauma of that scapegoating into rage and how to recognize it and create solidarities that might transcend it.
You opened this segment talking about paradoxes, and I think to balance this, we should look at the other paradox that I think well-meaning and intentioned people have to deal with as well, which is there is a segment of people who, when they criticize Hamas as a terrorist organization, for example, is accused of being Islamophobic.
So it works across those various categories, which makes it all the more confusing.
But this whole idea crosses over into territory we've discussed often, which is impact.
So, Julian, you mentioned impact.
Fortunately, these two guys, they don't really have that much of a following.
I mean, 7,000 YouTube followers, 1.7 thousand on Instagram, just a thousand on Twitter.
They did make a clarification about their statements, which they say is more about self-defense from the very real threat of Hamas.
Yeah, I got some words about that.
It was still a terrible way to frame everything, I think, and the way that that comes across is horrible.
So my question in this The longstanding 5,000-plus-year-old battle for this one piece of land that we're now living through and we have to deal with the consequences with is, how different is this for my Jewish friends in New York City who text me photos of pro-Hamas messages that they see spray-painted on monuments and in subways, which I get once or twice a week at this point?
What sort of influence does that have in the story when tens of thousands of people walk by that every single day?
Now, obviously the people doing this don't have huge followings either, but those messages are weaponized in the same way that the two nice Jewish boys who don't have a huge following is weaponized.
And when we see Americans cheering on a terrorist organization under the guise of activism, I'm curious how this fits into this mirror world ideology and this equation of antisemitism when people who are rightfully looking to end a genocide tip over into supporting the perpetrators of terrorism.
Now, these friends of mine also lived in New York City in 9-11 where we all were and we convened at that time.
And it's almost like seeing Go Asama painted in Tribeca on walls, but that never actually happened.
And that terror from my friends who are trying to navigate that space, that is something they're dealing with on a daily basis.
Yeah, that never happened, but the viral TikTok sensation of people reading the Osama Bin Laden letter, like fairly soon after October 7th, did happen.
And that was a thing.
I think you bring up some good points that I want to respond to, because I want to be careful that we avoid a category confusion here.
Like, first of all, the graffiti sounds terrible.
You know, and I'm sorry that your friends had to see that, or anybody has to see that, and that it increased their general level of fear and alienation.
I mean, it's personally bad for everyone.
Like in extreme cases, for Jewish people, it can provoke PTSD responses.
For others, it could harden bigotry against Jews.
But like, as I'm suggesting in this segment, mask off antisemitism is dangerous because it stokes fear that can get weaponized into blind pro-Israel support.
So bigotry and hate speech, if that's what it is, is always a mistake all the way around.
But I'll get back to that.
We have to say that the two nice Jewish boys didn't clarify their statements in relation to Hamas.
After the segment got a lot of airplay, they doubled down on their statements by posting a meme of a finger pressing a white or a red button with a laughing emoji.
Then in the thread that you referenced, they tripled down by basically saying, we're not calling for a button, we're just saying the majority of Israelis are, which deflected from the language used, which was, if you gave me a button, I would smash it and ask for another button.
But You're talking about impact and you're suggesting that these podcasters have less influence than the protesters who spray paint hate speech because their download numbers are less than the number of people who walk by their graffiti.
Is that part of what you're getting at?
No, no, that's not what I'm suggesting.
What I'm suggesting is What sort of impact do both these sides have?
All I'm saying is if we are looking at the question of antisemitism, which I agree with your overall thesis here about how it's weaponized.
That's absolutely true.
But what I don't hear enough in this discussion from the sort of Palestinian activist side In the U.S.
specifically, but globally as well, is what happens with a terrorist organization as a political leadership in a country.
So, you know, in the comments of our Patreon, if listeners don't know, we have very robust comment sections over on Patreon.
Sometimes.
And you and Julian are going back and forth in ways that we're doing right now, which is, I think, wonderful because we're just working out our thoughts through all of this.
But someone had mentioned that we're not geopolitical experts.
That was me, actually.
So that's true.
So just for a mind experiment here to kind of go along with this, when I say people say defund Israel, the U.S.
government should stop funding them.
OK, if that would end the genocide, I'm all for that.
Defund Israel also comes to the point of Iran seeing that and then possibly exploiting that.
So there are complexity upon complexity.
So when I see two nice Jewish boys say something like this, it's horrible.
It's reductive and it's terrible.
When I see the Hamas spray paint that my friend sent me, it's also reductive and horrible because it flattens everything.
But all I'm hearing in this conversation a lot of the times is that we need to stop these things from happening, which I agree with.
It's how we get there that I disagree with.
Yeah, I think you're asking, what's the difference?
And I think there's a good reason for why you're hearing more from one side than the other, with there being hate speech on both sides.
The difference is pretty clear with regard to who has power in the situation.
Like, on one side you have angry, undisciplined assholes with spray paint cannons leaving hate speech that they can be arrested and tried for, right?
Like, so your friends will suffer that act, but there are criminal law recourse, as there should be.
Nobody is dying in New York City from spray paint.
But on the other hand, you have a completely lawless, ethno-nationalist state dropping bombs on hospitals and refugee camps with impunity funded by the U.S.
government.
And we already know that one of these guys worked for Netanyahu for three years.
It doesn't matter whether their podcast is doing well or not.
It matters that they are acting as English language propaganda mouthpieces for a genocide that is occurring.
So, it's really important that we don't confuse these two categorically different things because you are talking about impact here.
And while I empathize with your friends encountering hate speech, that hate speech is in response to a literal genocide that's going on.
And so, in my view, conflating, if we're not careful, If those two things get blended together in terms of influence instead of impact, that is actually a function of the mirror world, which is a place in which something deadly is confused with something hateful and fearful.
But there is impact.
We know there's a rise of anti-Semitic crimes all across the U.S.
That's been occurring.
So to say that that doesn't have some sort of impact is just false.
I didn't say that, I didn't say that.
I'm saying you're probably hearing about one more than the other, because when you have mask-off, genocidally intentional speech coming from two English-language podcasters in Israel, which, I mean, they're admitting genocidal intent, which is what the state is trying to defend itself in court at the ICJ, right?
When you have them doing that, They're not influencing the culture.
They are speaking for what is happening.
So I don't view them and the spray painters in the same category at all.
I don't think that the two nice Jewish boys are increasing the level of malevolence of the IDF.
They're just speaking for it.
So I don't want to sort of like compare them as though we're talking about two sets of influencers and we're wondering who's doing the worst work.
So there is some recourse in the courts because you just made a distinction being one could be held accountable and one couldn't.
But you both sides could be held accountable by different court systems.
Not the podcast bros.
I mean, they're still up on YouTube.
They're just they're still up on YouTube.
But the guys who spray painted the subways, if they're caught, their asses are going to jail for hate speech.
Like that is what will happen.
And we've seen the crackdowns.
Debatable in New York City.
If they're caught, I said.
If they're caught.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm less concerned about hate speech and more concerned about a protest movement that fails in its messaging to adequately differentiate itself from a terrorist organization.
Yeah, and that's why we have to learn a lot and actually be curious about the difference between movement discipline and individuals who are assholes with spray paint cans.
Well, I'd like to see some spokespeople just stand up and say... You have to find them!
Oh, I have to go in search of them in order for their messaging to reach me.
No, because they're not going to be promoted on CNN.
I'll tell you how to do it.
You tell me.
I'll tell you.
You go to Instagram, you go to Occupy U of T, and you will find the Occupy U of T Palestine encampment that was active back in March.
There's hundreds of accounts like this on Instagram.
And you will see day after day, young spokespeople talking about their movement discipline, about not engaging counter protesters, about the absolute interdiction against anti-Semitic speech.
You'll see them talk about it.
You just have to go find it.
Now, why don't you know about it?
Why isn't it coming up on your Twitter feed?
I wonder why.
Well, I'm not really on Twitter very much.
You're right.
It's a cesspool.
Whatever.
But yeah.
Well, hold on.
Hold on.
Because you're making some very specific observations, and I think they're good.
And I appreciate that.
I will take your recommendation on that.
What I know from the period during the campus protests being such a big deal is seeing a lot of live stream feeds on YouTube where various spokespeople were stepping forward.
And I didn't hear a single one of them say, We dislike Hamas as well as what the IDF is doing.
We are in favor of human rights and, you know, we have these particular positions in terms of what we're actually protesting about.
Well, I guess we need a scientific survey, right?
I don't know that we need a scientific survey.
I think the purpose of a protest movement is to communicate something effectively to the public so as to gain moral support for your cause.
Yeah, what's that going to depend upon?
What's that going to depend upon?
Well, it depends upon not chanting, globalize the intifada.
And it depends upon a media atmosphere in which an automatic assumption about what those words mean isn't like a foregone conclusion by the liberal center.
It doesn't matter what the... No, no, no.
It doesn't matter what the automatic assumption is.
The job of the movement is to communicate effectively.
Sure it is.
So, globalizing into photo... Let's take another phrase.
From the river to the sea, right?
Yeah.
Oh, great.
Let's do that.
That's a good one.
We argued about this for two months back in the fall.
Guess who just used that phrase while displaying a map of Israel on the television to refute the protesters on the streets in Tel Aviv?
A map that did not show the West Bank.
A map that showed complete military control over the Gaza Strip.
He said, this is what Israel is from the river to the sea.
And he's quoting the 1977 Likud Charter.
Now, if you think that from the river to the sea just means one particular thing, it's not true.
It's just not true.
It's your job.
Well, it does matter if you're going to be a journalist, because it's your job to say, oh, actually, these people say that it means this.
These people say that it means that.
It doesn't matter what either of us think as journalists.
It matters what the communication.
It matters what we do as journalists and what you're doing right now.
Let me finish.
Yeah, sure.
What the communication of the protest movement resonates as in the consciousness of the public, whose minds they are trying to persuade towards moral support of their cause.
Through which media platforms?
Media platforms like our own and then larger.
And then the role of journalism is to say, is to say it means this to this people and this to these people.
But what you're saying is, but what you're saying is it has to just mean one thing.
Are you saying that the protesters were chanting it Our chants are floating signifiers.
Our chants are floating signifiers.
I'm saying that it is used by both sides, which means it has a number of floating signifiers in it
that are politicized in different directions and you have to interview the people on the ground
to figure out what they mean instead of saying, oh, they support terrorism.
That's what I'm saying.
Our chance are floating signifiers.
Our chance are floating signifiers.
That'll work.
I just get concerned when people's algorithms show them the horrible footage of IDF soldiers
harming Palestinians, but they don't also show Hamas terrorists
with the Jewish hostages, because those images exist as well.
And that's where I fear the imbalance in this conversation often happens.
In 2022, Tucker Carlson produced a documentary called The End of Men.
It was his contribution to the so-called masculinity crisis, and it featured numerous experts pontificating over why men are no longer men, and if only we could get back to the 50s, we'd be saved.
One moment sucked up all the oxygen, however, and that involved testicle tanning.
Now, of course, that's nothing new on our beat as yogi bros have all sorts of methods for beating and sunning their balls in the supposed quest for this epic testosterone.
But it did introduce the broader world to the idea.
And boy, did they have fun with the ridiculousness of it all.
My favorite was it being called bromiopathic therapy.
Now, to me, Tucker Carlson is one of the biggest opportunists out there, so him crossing over into conspirituality, which is basically what we're focusing on today, isn't that surprising.
Now, before he became the number one host on Fox News, and before losing that gig to launch his own media company, he was a centrist commentator on CNN, and he even skewed liberal on MSNBC for a hot minute.
He infamously talks shit about Donald Trump, as revealed by leaked text messages.
And then you see him cozying up to Trump at a golf outing the next week.
Now, I truly don't know where his allegiances lie beyond to himself, but he has wedged himself into an interesting space on the right, and I'm seeing him increasingly pop up on wellness feeds in recent weeks.
Now, I think this is intentional because he's observed the same drift that we've been covering for years, and he has a chance to exploit and probably monetize it.
When the idea for this episode came after I watched his interview with Casey and Callie Means, who we discussed last week and I explored a bit further on this past Saturday's brief.
And it was interesting to discover that along with Callie, Tucker was a guide that helped nudge RFK Jr.
into Donald Trump's camp.
So let's start with some clips from episodes that I think cross over into our world.
Now, to be clear, I don't think Tucker is going full wellness, but he does seem to dip his toes into the territory quite a bit.
We're going to start with Jacob Chansley, or the QAnon Shaman, who Tucker invited onto his show.
The clip he titled on YouTube is called, Jacob Chansley is not the lunatic the left wants you to think he is.
And he sets up the interview by describing Chansley as a martyr, someone who was supposedly led into the Capitol chambers by the police, though, as it turns out, that's misinformation that Tucker himself spread early on.
Yeah.
And he even prayed for their well-being, Chansley praying for the police.
So here's the opening moment from that interview.
You knew, of course, that you were led into the chamber by law enforcement and that you prayed for them once you were inside.
What was it like hearing people like Steve Schmidt call for your murder, knowing what you did about what actually happened?
Well, for me, given that I understand now especially that January 6 was a deep state setup and a deep state psyop that ensued afterward, I'm not surprised.
That's what these people do.
The whole media apparatus, what I call the mockingbird media, and the government are in lockstep.
He was doing exactly what he was doing on January 6th that he'd done for like three years in public beforehand.
Like the Deep State created my cosplay.
The Deep State chose my rune tattoos.
The Deep State provided vegan food for me in the clink.
It's incredible.
At least he was a performer.
I mean, January 6th really gave him a stage more than anything else, but that is who he is.
And as we said, the whole interview is actually really difficult to watch because Jacob Chansley has now run for Congress.
Who knows if he'll ever get a seat anywhere, but he's now an aspiring politician.
He also, of course, sells QAnon shaman yoga pants.
So he just seems like someone, he had always had trouble finding a job before that date.
And so now he just seems to be trying to get work wherever he can.
Oh, the poison of fame, eh?
Oh, my God.
You get it for the wrong thing.
Wow, you could waste 10 years, 10 more years of your life.
I kind of resent the title of, you know, not the lunatic the left wants you to think he is.
Like, I always saw this guy as just somebody who was completely overwhelmed by New Age propaganda and his own, you know, sort of mental capriciousness.
And, yeah, not a lunatic by any means.
Somebody who's sympathetic.
Right, a performer, but who's also, like, tragically sympathetic in a weird way.
Totally, totally.
And then when he first got out of jail, he tried to rebrand himself with the white suit and the American flag bandana.
And that very quickly figured out, like, people want the costume.
Yeah.
Going along our rogues gallery, we have Naomi Wolf, who was a recent guest on as well.
And the title that Tucker clipped is called, How the Left Tried to Use COVID to Usher in a New Jim Crow.
Now, if you hear a little rasp in my voice, I am recovering from my second round of COVID.
So yeah, I don't think there's anything about that happening over here in liberal Portland.
But for context, and for overseas listeners who might not know that term, Jim Crow laws were a system of state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in America, basically from the end of slavery through 1965 when civil rights were enacted.
They're named after a Black minstrel show character, so anytime you see the right using this term, it's just always going to be egregious.
But let's listen to them compare COVID vaccines with other historical precedents.
The creation overnight, especially by 2021-2022 in New York City, where most of my friendships were and most of my colleagues were, but also in Washington, the creation of a two-tier society, Exactly along the same lines as a Jim Crow society or, you know, during the occupation in France when Jews couldn't go certain places.
Or a Stalinist society.
Exactly.
And all these people who were so right on, who were leaders in the feminist movement, you know, who would never discriminate against people of color or against people in the LGBTQ community, who opposed discrimination, embraced discrimination.
They were fine with it.
They were fine with a city, the greatest city on earth, the most diverse city on earth, you know, famous melting pot city, New York City.
They were fine with a situation in which unvaccinated people had to eat in the street like animals.
I could not walk into a restaurant with my family and they were fine with it.
And then having Uber Eats delivery men of color brave the pandemic to bring them sushi.
Yeah, so that last point is complex and somewhat apt for discussion that Carlson is making, but not for the reasons that he thinks.
They love this stuff.
Doesn't this sound like somebody who has always wanted to aspire to the status of Rosa Parks?
Who has always wanted to have a self-narration about sitting at the back of the bus.
I mean, actually having to eat in the streets, i.e.
the restaurant patio outside in the summer of 2020.
They love this stuff.
They love being able to inflate their grievances, their woundedness.
It's incredible.
Yeah, and it's amazing just hearing, Tucker goes right into like empathic listening, like, oh yeah, no, they would never discriminate against LGBTQ people.
Yeah, he's good at that.
And those poor black men who had to deliver the food.
Yeah, naming the clip after Jim Crow and saying that, again, it's why he's such a horrible person.
I don't think he has allegiance since anywhere, but he knows it'll get clicks.
Let's bring this a little closer to home.
Let's talk about Lyme disease, Julian, that is something you've suffered from.
Tucker had someone named Chris Newby, and I'll talk a little more about her after on to discuss, but I want to first play her response when he asks where Lyme disease comes from.
So you have a cluster, effectively, of these three previously rare diseases right across the water from the U.S.
government's biological weapons testing facility.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, and if you're working for the CDC and on the lookout for Natural versus unnatural disease outbreaks.
Having three new tick-borne diseases show up, extra deadly disease-causing than in the past, it would get their attention and there would be investigations, which is what happened.
This is exactly like vaccines cause autism.
The diagnosis of this condition, the understanding of how to look at all of the co-infections, the ability to then treat it and to gather data about it, all is a relatively new phenomenon.
So there's a spike in cases!
We've never seen this before.
And it's combined with the leaked from a Chinese lab theory, you know.
So let's give a little context because listeners might not know Chris Newby isn't that well known, but she's the author of the 2020 book called Bitten, the secret history of Lyme disease and biological weapons.
Is it about vampires too?
Is it about vampires?
I haven't read it up, sorry.
It's my reading list.
So Lyme disease was actually discovered in the town of Lyme, Connecticut in 1975, but Lyme disease bacteria have been found in ticks and mice specimens dating back as far as 1896.
And that's far longer than any bioweapons research was ever occurring.
Now, Lyme disease also has a long incubation period, it's rarely lethal, and it doesn't spread person to person, which kind of renders it moot as a bioweapon.
It was studied, as newbies suggested, but none of the research revealed anything.
And this goes as recently as 2019, because the Trump-led House of Representatives reopened the investigation.
So I reached out to Dr. Andrea Love, friend of the pod, who, besides being an immunologist and microbiologist, also works as the executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, so she would know something about this.
And she told me that Lyme disease would be the worst bioweapon, it's poorly transmitted, it's never fatal, but she also said that Plum Island, which is the government laboratory that Newby is referring to, quote, had no capacity or infrastructure in place to work with human pathogens.
She also mentioned she had some run-ins with Newby, who has bothered her on social media before, so she's not new to her.
And researchers there were studying African swine fever virus, which is a tick-borne disease, but that does not affect human beings.
So, it could not have escaped from the lab.
I mean, part of what has made me so mad about this in the last 20 years, I contracted Lyme disease around 2004, completely recovered from it.
I did have a couple of terrible years with it.
But what I found during that time is there was this increase and it's only continued to increase of alternative Medicine practitioners claiming to diagnose people with Lyme disease without the appropriate blood test and then claiming that their bespoke supplement protocols have cured their Lyme disease.
And you know, when I was really suffering and knew a lot of other people who are suffering, there would be this kind of, um, you know, almost dismissive attitude of like, Oh yeah, I fixed it up with this, uh, with this particular supplement, you should see my naturopath.
And it's just, it's maddening and it's part of the grift now.
It's one of the different things that gets, How is the bioweapon argument going to impact the grifty part of this, if at all, do you think?
She also made a 2008, I believe, documentary and then that eventually became the book in 2020.
So I feel like this is a case where For her, that's her specific grift.
So that would be what conferences, it would be media appearances, but being paid to publish articles, things like that.
I think from the Tucker angle, it just speaks to the broader government distrust.
And with COVID bioweapons in the air, it just makes sense to platform this type of material.
Yeah, to survivalist conferences as well, right?
Right.
Because there's a politicized element as well.
It's not just that you have to protect yourself from Lyme disease.
It's also the people who are foisting it on you because they might have other diseases in their little satchels, right?
Yeah, and the bioweapons thing doesn't negate.
If anything, it just supports the, like, I'm going to diagnose you with this and then give you supplements to treat it that you're going to pay me a lot of money for.
Whether it's because it was a bioweapon or because it arose naturally in nature, nonetheless, So let's turn to Tucker giving a keynote at the Heritage Foundation where he actually began working in 1991 and this is from 2023 and it's a portion of a speech that he titled, The Spiritual Roots of Our Political Dysfunction.
Now, I don't know how long the entire speech was.
The clip that he posted is six minutes or so.
I'm starting it after he's talking about how to reach consensus between political parties on a policy level, which then takes a strong religious turn after he lays out the, quote, agendas of the left.
Now it begins briefly like that, and then it turns into his definition of good and evil.
So I kind of clipped two things together here because he's very tangential when he speaks.
But I think this is important because of where he starts and where he ends up with what the left is really doing.
There is no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement.
with that mindset.
Policy papers don't account for it at all.
If you say, well, you know, I think abortion is always bad.
Well, I think sometimes it's necessary.
That's a debate I'm familiar with.
But if you're telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying?
Well, you're arguing for child sacrifice.
If you want to know what's evil and what's good, what are the characteristics of those?
And by the way, you know, I think the Athenians would have agreed with this.
This is not necessarily just a Christian notion.
This is kind of a, I would say, widely agreed upon understanding of good and evil.
What are its products?
What do these two conditions produce?
Well, I mean, good is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict, cleanliness.
Cleanliness is next to godliness.
It's true.
It is.
And evil is characterized by their opposites.
Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth.
So if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you're really advocating for is evil.
That's just true.
I'm not calling for a religious war.
Far from it.
I'm merely calling for an acknowledgement of what we're watching.
Not calling for a religious war, huh?
Yeah, I suppose just calling for sort of a fascist revisioning of bodily aesthetics and You know, how we live in the world where reproductive choice is disorderly, where gender-affirming care is unhygienic.
What else have we got here?
Incredible stuff.
Yeah, that's why I did, again, clip it, but where he says transgender's agenda to abortion, I didn't clip there.
That was just his mind going, just hitting upon topics.
And then there was a brief Like a side into something and then it came back.
But this was all part of one argument.
And again, he posted this specifically to say, here is why our politics are failing and it is a spiritual cause.
So those things fit into that larger narrative.
Alright guys, two more clips on our Tucker tour here.
He has been on a 16-city national tour with a different guest in each city and he kicked it off in Phoenix where it's been 105 days of 100-plus degree weather recently with Russell Brand.
All reports I've seen called this a religious event as that was the main focus and the night ended in an impromptu prayer.
Now, Russell was also on Tucker's podcast in January, which is shortly after he started doing the work of coming, you know, after he was called out for sexual abuse and rape.
He was on his apologetics tour there.
And this conversation was expectedly all over the map, but the moment I'm clipping here really jumped out at me.
So let's hear Tucker be a champion of the people and then see where Russell takes it.
So the things that the people in charge hate include nature.
Yes.
And the class of people who are most useful to your nation.
You described them.
Cops, firemen, teachers, nurses.
All of them were crushed during COVID, by the way.
Yes.
And farmers.
And it's indisputable that if you don't have those people, you don't have a society.
You could get rid of every think tank and every sociology department and every liberal arts university and you'd probably be okay.
You get rid of your farmers, you starve to death.
So it's not obvious why the leadership of a country would hate the very people they need most and hate the most beautiful and valuable thing they have, which is nature.
Why do they hate those things?
It terrifies me to contemplate, Tucker, that people like Alex Jones and in our country David Icke, who aside from some views that are impossible to corroborate around quite occultist and shall we call them marginal ideas, difficult to corroborate ideas, when it comes to the subject of globalization and the increasing authoritarianization of our planet, appear to have been ahead of the curve.
Wow.
Ahead of the curve.
Yeah, I really want to highlight the fact that Russell Cull, the man who made millions of dollars monetizing the lies around the death of 20 children and six adults in one of the nation's most horrific mass shootings, a cultist and marginal.
And Tucker didn't push back, obviously, because Alex Jones is one of his guests in the coming days on this fucking national tour.
Well, the occultist stuff is Alex Jones's fever dreams about demonic possession and, you know, David Icke's stuff about lizard people.
Maybe the marginal category is, you know, Sandy Hook.
I mean, what's so annoying to me about this is that it really was leftists who laid the groundwork for understanding that international capital would transcend the nation state as an organizing principle.
That's been a known for a century.
You hear Russell Brand there actually using globalization as a sliding signifier, right?
Yeah, well, except that they identify, it's not like the nation state is going to sort of protect the world from capitalist consumption.
So then globalization becomes state policy amongst all of these states that will use it to cannibalize themselves in the 1980s and then suddenly these These fashy weirdos are ahead of the curve because they kind of saw what everybody else had seen.
It's so, so irritating.
Russell Brand is comfortable giving it that double meaning, right?
Because there's a critique of globalization that comes from the left, and then there's this globalists kind of slur that is really code for Jews, and that is really about something that goes against nationalist kind of insularity that Alex Jones is really
talking about.
But yeah, to say that the party that is most in favor of environmental protections hates nature is pretty rich.
Finally, we wind up at Casey and Callie Means, and they're an interesting brother-sister duo.
I covered them in depth on this past Saturday's Brief.
Just briefly, Casey is a Stanford-trained physician who left during her fifth year of surgical residency to become a contrarian biohacking influencer.
She founded A company called Levels, which is a continuous glucose monitoring subscription service for biohackers and optimizers.
Whether or not that works for anyone who's not diabetic, there's really no evidence for that.
She also co-authored a book that's coming out next year with her brother that speculates that metabolic issues are the cause of most every disease known to man, which fits very nicely into a narrative if you're selling continuous Wait, you said they were a subscription service.
I'm imagining that it's a patch that it's like attached to an app on your phone and then it's continually sort of sending blood sugar info back to the company or something like that.
Is that what subscription means?
Subscription means, yes, you're paying for the app of use.
I don't know whether or not they charge for the patches.
They probably charge something nominal.
Oh, there are patches?
Like, I got that right.
Okay.
You did get that right.
And it's, you know, diabetics like using these because they don't want to prick their skin all the time.
But the problem is the skin prick is actually much more reliable to know.
And spikes in blood sugar happen to all of us all the time.
And that's the criticism.
It's just like what happens basically is that you're constantly monitoring.
You see a spike, you're like, oh, I have to not eat now or I have to eat and all these things.
Because you had a banana, right?
Yeah, it leads to an eating disorder.
And that's one of the main issues with this whole thing.
Yeah, and then I'm picturing the dystopian reality in which you pay for the premium level subscriptions so that you can get them to send you supplement recommendations based on what's wrong with you because of your blood sugar irregularities.
Well, it could be continuous, right?
It could be continuous where the little patch also is discharging shit into your arm based upon like a real-time feedback mechanism, right?
As if it were insulin, but it would actually just be supplement protein greens or whatever.
Well, as I covered Saturday, Julie, and Kali's company, TruMed, basically helps you get doctor prescriptions as businesses to be able to use FSA and HSA money to buy supplements and red light therapy and ice baths and things like this.
So they are actually creating a mini corporation here that all works together.
And Levels also has blog posts about supplements, so you're spot on with that.
Yeah, and to be really clear about what you're saying for anyone who didn't catch that, they have found a way to reclassify supplements as medicines through paying doctors probably, right?
For paying these doctors to write these letters to say you need this thing because of what your blood work shows.
Exactly.
And it is actually bonkers when I started looking into all of the little levers that they're using because I'm very familiar with HSAs because they're a band-aid in the for-profit healthcare system.
And the thing is that they're positioning everything about Western medicine and pharmaceuticals as evil.
And it's not medicine, and then they're saying these untested, unregulated products are medicine, and they're actually using government-regulated doctors to be able to access those things, and they're monetizing that off the top.
So, that's Casey and Kayleigh Means, and of course, They did a two-hour and 20-minute episode with Tucker.
I clipped from some last Saturday.
There's so much to work with on this, but I just want to play this one clip because I agree with their overall assessment that there are many problems with for-profit healthcare and pharmaceuticals, but it's their solutions that are the real problem.
But the system is rigged against the American patient to create diseases and then profit off of them.
This is happening across almost every level of our major industries from processed food to tech to pharma.
And so really what Americans need to understand is that these trends can stop immediately.
We need to understand why we're sick, which is primarily our toxic food system and the ways that systematically several industries are profiting off of our addiction and illness.
And if we can understand that and create Very simple, top-down and bottom-up strategy to address it.
Americans will become rapidly healthier.
She's a little bit agitated here, but in general, watching more of that interview, I really get chills watching Kasey Means because she has a level of polish and mainstream personability and a kind of, I would say, skilled political extroversion that we have not seen, I don't think, within the influencer sphere that we typically cover.
Like, she really turns out like a top executive.
She could go toe-to-toe with Kamala Harris in the political theater category, right?
Most of the people we cover who have legit medical educations, but for whatever reason have gone off the rails, seem to be like that type of guy.
They seem to carry the scars of that alienation in some way.
And it makes their charisma like a little jagged or uncomfortable.
To use Walz's terms, they're all a little weird.
Like, they're stilted.
There's something off about them.
And part of the mystery of it all to us has been, like, how do they get as far as they do?
Because they're often very, you know, transparently bad at basic communications.
Matthew, would you say the same thing about Zack Bush?
Well, I'm going to get to him.
I do think he is separated off because he's in his own world.
Like with somebody like Kelly Brogan, she's always talking about herself.
She's always got an eyebrow raised.
She's trying to put something over on you psychologically.
She's teasing you with secret knowledge.
I think Zack Bush is better, more crafted, more sculpted, but he is Transparently in his own world, he's really effective as a pseudomystic.
I don't think he's going to lean into the Tucker Carlson microphone and say, this is what we're going to do with our health care system.
But means is.
Zach Bush is just mythopoetic all the time.
He doesn't care whether or not you're with him.
Casey and Callie Means are super busy.
Callie went to a Harvard and Stanford business school.
So these are very business polished people who can speak in a one-on-one language all the time.
Peter McCullough seems like self-absorbed and cranky most of the time.
And then there's the other end of the spectrum, like JP Sears, like is supposed to be a comedian.
And every day he looks more and more like Mickey Rourke in some sort of wrestling movie.
But Casey Means does not have any of this weirdness going on.
Like, you know, give her a PowerPoint, put her in front of the UN or the whole HHS department
on day one of Trump's second term under Bobby, and she's not going to look or feel out of place.
So I'm pretty chilled by this because it feels like the content of disinformation is like this baton that has been passed on to more trained athletes, like from both the guest and the host side.
Because, you know, to think about Carlson this way, Rogan doesn't create this environment of seriousness.
His vibe of hanging around and chilling out and getting to know each other and seeing where the conversation goes, it works, but it doesn't drive forward in the same way.
And Carlson is really good at driving things forward and his political commitments are a lot less nebulous.
Like, we started the podcast.
By looking at Plandemic.
Do you remember the vibe?
Mickey Willis in his overwrought face and lighting, and Judy Mikovits is sounding like Jay-Z Knight, if Jay-Z Knight worked in a chemistry lab.
But you turn on Tucker now, and we get the same content, the same quality of content, basically.
But it feels like 60 minutes to me.
Going to follow up with more work on this because I think it's important because as a listener pointed out on our Instagram feed, and I'm spacing who it was, but thank you.
Their father, Grady Means, comes from the business world and the medical world.
He's a trip too because after retirement, he started writing pseudo-religious books.
Awesome.
It is in the family and I think it's very fascinating to look at all three.
But I just want to point out what she says at the end there is something that we see often in the wellness space.
She's like, if we only fix this, then we will heal immediately.
And one thing that we know about health and biology in general is things do not come easy.
There's complexities all the way down.
So it's just an old conspiritualist promise, this idea that this one silver bullet will change everything immediately, because it sounds very good as a sales pitch, but in reality, that would never actually happen.
All right, well, Tucker Carlson is, as we've just been recognizing, not just in the realm of promoting wellness pseudoscience.
He has a much longer standing career as a political gadfly.
And as you mentioned, Matthew, this is one of those weeks in which what we're covering as part of our specific beat really overlaps with legacy media headlines, which is not something we like to see.
Tucker got tons of blowback for his interview with Daryl Cooper, as you mentioned.
He's the co-host with decorated military veteran and Manosphere celebrity Jocko Willink of a podcast called The Unraveling, which purports to make sense of the world by disentangling history, politics, and culture.
And then under his Martyr Made, which is just a curious name for a media company, under his Martyr Made solo brand, Cooper creates extremely long and in-depth historical series about topics like the founding of the state of Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Jones's People's Temple.
And as it turns out, he has this forthcoming series on World War II.
Like all purveyors of stigmatized knowledge, Cooper positions himself as the guy whose extensive reading can take you deeper than the headlines.
And Carlson introduced him as the most important historian working in the United States today.
Actually, I should revise that and quote it correctly, the most important popular historian working in the United States today.
As a do-your-own-research kind of guy, Cooper explains to Tucker that there is a rule that you're not allowed to look at this subject and wonder how the Germans perceived it, how they might have genuinely and even legitimately believed that they were the ones under attack, they were the ones being victimized.
But being the fearless truth seeker that he is, Daryl's going to break that rule for us.
And then he goes on to give the repugnant revisionist history of World War II that we heard about from you a few minutes ago, and that's been widely covered in the news.
What I haven't seen flagged yet is that the underlying point of this conversation is that the supposedly dominant false narrative of World War II is used as a founding myth for liberal society and has led, says Tucker, to the destruction of Western civilization.
The YouTube video of this interview has a new thumbnail as of yesterday that reads, the fall of Europe.
And that's over an image of a top hat wearing Winston Churchill.
And during this conversation, Cooper and Carlson also lament how everything to the west of Hungary has fallen prey to what they label the quote unquote worst thing.
And that refers to how countries like the UK, Germany and Spain are increasingly, as they frame it, becoming non-European.
With brown people.
Absolutely.
With brown people. Yeah. What's the phrasing?
It's, the only thing that they have in this world is now being stolen from them.
Right.
Through this demographic crisis.
They praise Viktor Orban's anti-immigrant policies, and Cooper tells Tucker that, oh, you know,
having interviewed Mr. Putin, as he calls him, might have prepared you for our wide-ranging conversation
in which I'm going to, you know, be a galaxy brain.
I guess he means that their brains work in similar ways.
Tucker then ranks Trump, Orban, And Putin as being what he calls a sincere trio of nationalists with fairly neutral ideologies that would have classified them as moderate Democrats in 1981.
Because they're not especially right-wing.
Cooper agrees with this, but then he decries how since Nuremberg, which is something he describes as one of the worst things that has happened to Europe, since Nuremberg it has been illegal to be openly right-wing.
Now, the blowback on this has been strong in the legacy media, though I've seen zero evidence so far of it being criticized on Fox News.
But here's the thing.
As with my segment about tenant media and the central problem of algorithmic incentives, not only does the legacy media condemnation not matter, it's actually beneficial.
That's a big claim.
So look, as of Friday, Four days after the Carlson episode, Martyr Made Podcasts had jumped six places in the Spotify rankings, leapfrogging the Tucker Carlson show to nestle in at number two, beneath only the mighty Joe Rogan.
And then by yesterday, which as we record this is Monday, it was number one, where it had already been sitting on the Apple charts on Friday with Tucker second and Joe Rogan down at fourth.
None of this is new for Tucker.
As I will cover in more detail on my brief this week, he doesn't just praise autocrats from afar.
He's flown to Moscow to interview Putin.
He's flown to Budapest to interview Orban.
He's also hosted neo-reactionary movement philosopher Curtis Yarvin, who's one of J.D.
Vance's friends and intellectual influences.
Yarvin is not only anti-democratic, he thinks the U.S.
should be ruled over by some kind of startup CEO monarch.
And he's the original architect of an almost verbatim policy outlined in Project 2025 that would fire nonpartisan government employees so as to stack the agency with Trump loyalists.
Given that Carlson has a consistently top three podcast now after being fired from Fox News unceremoniously due to a racist text they were worried might be exposed in the midst of the Dominion lawsuit that they settled for over $770 million.
Given that at Fox News he had commanded the number one TV news spot, ranking at 5 million viewers per episode, it's important to underline, as we often do, that this alternative, now media figure, really is the mainstream.
That means he's the doorway for millions of people into an affably curated, ultra-nationalist far-right ideology.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We'll see you here next week on the main feed or maybe on the weekend for our brief.
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