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April 25, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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TUCKER’S NEXT MOVE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep565
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Coming up, I'll draw on my long experience with Fox to try to provide some insight into the strange and untimely departure of Tucker Carlson.
Also to ask what's next for Tucker.
Andrew Breitbart famously said, politics is downstream from culture.
I want to show that culture is also downstream from politics.
And Caroline Leavitt, spokeswoman for MAGA Inc., joins me.
We're going to talk about how the GOP can reach young people.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please hit the subscribe button.
I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
Happy birthday! Happy birthday to me!
Here we go. America needs this voice.
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The news that exploded yesterday about Tucker Carlson leaving Fox...
It's taken everybody with, well, not just surprise, I would say even a sense of shock.
Well, it's shocking on a number of levels, and of course it's also the implications of it.
It changes a lot of things about our media landscape, even our political landscape.
Tucker was and is different.
Even though he was one of the primetime hosts at Fox, he was, in a sense, in his own category, in his own league.
He went places that other hosts won't go.
He took on topics.
And his approach was unconventional.
It was also Trumpian, in a sense.
He was probably a more vocal critic of the Ukraine war than just about anybody else, not just at Fox, but certainly in media in the country.
He was at least willing to go down the road of exposing January 6th.
Now, it looks like after he published a couple of clips, they reined him in, they pulled him back.
And in fact, this kind of putting the reins on Tucker, I think might have actually been an important factor in his departure.
But with Tucker out at Fox, and who knows what Tucker will do next.
I'll talk about that in a minute.
But it's very clear that this will have implications for the Republican primary.
It will have implications for the big presidential race coming up next year.
In fact, Debbie's like, are you going to talk today about Biden announcing?
It's kind of strange, but that's almost become kind of a non-event.
The talk is mainly about Tucker.
In fact, the other thing that got off stage, and I'll talk about this in a future segment, Don Lemon.
Don Lemon got fired and CNN and Don Lemon were trying to make a big deal about it, but no one was paying attention.
Well, I mean, no one paid attention to Don Lemon even before.
But the Tucker news has been totally front and center.
Now, the first question is, what really happened here?
And it's not clear that we know the answer to that.
I mean, did Fox fire Tucker?
Or did Tucker get disgusted and kind of walk out at Fox?
Now, it seems that Tucker was let go.
It seems that they fired him.
And I say this because when Tucker did his show on Friday, he was basically like, see you Monday.
And evidently, at least according to reports over the weekend and even on Monday morning, Tucker was emailing his producers and basically getting the show kind of organized.
Tucker, by the way, doesn't live in New York, so he's kind of dialing it in, so to speak, from out of town.
And I believe he lives in Maine.
And he was kind of getting ready for the show, and then suddenly he calls back and basically lets his producer, Justin B. Wells, know that, you know what?
I've basically been let go.
And then, of course, Justin B. Wells decides that he's going to quit as well, and go wherever Tucker goes next, I presume.
Now, why would Fox do this?
Tucker was the number one ranked host at Fox, but he was the number one ranked host in all of cable primetime.
And he was obviously making a whole bunch of money for Fox.
I mean, Fox was paying Tucker well, but not even close to what Fox was making off of Tucker.
And if you get rid of Tucker, it's not clear that Tucker can be easily replaced.
I mean, this was a very unceremonious departure.
Tucker was basically just out the door and Fox had to scramble to put something together.
Brian Kilmeade stood in for Fox, stood in for Tucker yesterday.
But, well, Fox searches for a replacement.
But what kind of replacement?
Who can you pull in?
There are a lot of people, I have to say, and we would see this, Debbie and I, in social life.
We'd run into people who'd be like, I gotta go.
I gotta watch Tucker. Or I watch Fox mainly for Tucker.
So Tucker was clearly, in that sense, a draw.
At a time when Fox has been having troubles, at a time when Fox seems very unsteady at the wheel, at a time when a lot of conservatives and a lot of MAGA people distrust Fox.
In fact, they don't really see a reason.
They feel like Fox coddles them and pushes them along and then stabs them in the back and then coddles them and pampers them and appeals to them and then stabs them in the back.
So there's a feeling of real, I mean, some of it is sublimated rage, and some of it is just a kind of wariness.
Like, I'm watching Fox, but I don't know if I'm really getting the full scoop.
Who's really running this place?
There's a lot of distrust.
Murdoch, by the way, his sons are known to be more liberal than he is.
Now James Murdoch, one of the sons, is a real leftist and is married to someone even more left-wing than he is.
If that guy were running Fox, Fox would basically be worse than MSNBC. I don't think he is running Fox.
It's the other brother, Lachlan Murdoch.
But Lachlan Murdoch is also more of a guy who wants to be liked.
He wants Fox to be more mainstream.
He wants to attract more mainstream advertising.
I return to my question, why would a company let go of its most valuable property?
Even looked at it in purely crass terms, even putting aside ideology, why would they want to let Tucker go?
And here there are a number of sort of competing theories and competing explanations.
One is that it was the fallout over the Dominion suit.
One variation of that is that Dominion basically took less money in its deal with Fox in the kind of settlement on the condition that Fox makes some changes in its lineup.
I don't know if that's true, but that's again a theory.
So when we come back, I'll talk about some more theories, more on Tucker, more on Don Lemon in the next segment.
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Feel the difference. Continuing my discussion of Tucker Carlson and his sudden and somewhat shocking departure from Fox.
Well, a theory about this is that Tucker is being sued, apparently being sued by somebody for creating a hostile work environment.
The accusations seem kind of vague.
Mostly it seems to be the fact that Tucker just kind of rounded up his staff and subjected them to various red-pilling exercises, and this was supposedly very disturbing to this individual.
In any event, it's hard for me to believe that that is in fact the real explanation.
True, it's coming on the heels of the Dominion Settlement, but unless there's something far more to all this than we know, that seems to me to be a dubious explanation.
Another explanation that's been reported, and I'm merely passing this along, is the idea that Tucker was angered Rupert Murdoch by going down the January 6th road.
If this is true, and if either Rupert Murdoch or the Murdoch family was upset about this, that shows that Fox is in serious trouble.
Why? Because they're taking mainstream topics of genuine public interest and certainly of intense interest on the right.
Topics like election fraud.
What really happened in 2020?
What happened in 2022 in, say, Arizona?
The continuing tragic plight of the January 6 defendants, the real abuses of judicial process and procedure, the corruption of judges, the ruthlessness of the prosecution, penalties out of proportion to the offenses, Solitary confinement for months, in some cases years before trial.
All of this is going on.
It's an outrage.
It is of deep concern to many Republicans and conservatives.
And if the Murdochs are like, well, this is not going to be off limits at Fox, well, that's going to be very bad.
That's a very bad comment on Fox itself.
Now, it could be that this was a mutual parting.
In fact, that's what the Fox press release said.
And that Tucker had basically had enough.
That's the other possibility.
And I think back, for example, to our experience with Tucker with 2,000 mules.
Where we were trying to get 2,000 mules covered by Fox.
And time and time again, the Fox hosts were like, well, we're thinking about it.
But it was very clear over time that they were saying that, but in fact, they had been ordered not to touch the topic.
In fact, none of them could touch it, including Tucker.
And Tucker had the most latitude at Fox because I guess he had the highest ratings.
They let him do more of what he wanted than other Fox hosts who are more reined in.
But nevertheless, you know, imagine Tucker wants to cover 2,000 mules.
They're like, no, you can't do it.
Tucker wants to... He gets exclusive access to 40,000 hours of January 6 footage.
He finds all this stuff. He's really excited.
No, we're really upset you put out the two clips that you did.
No more of that, Tucker.
And we're not going to have any two ways about it.
Basically, this is a final order.
So Tucker probably realized, well...
I've basically become a pawn of the political interests and agenda and even feuds of the Murdoch family.
They might be angry or infuriated with Trump.
They want to make sure Trump never runs again or Trump can never make it again.
Fox has turned against Trump and we see indications of this.
From the way that Trump is covered now by the New York Post.
We see it also from the Wall Street Journal.
We see it on Fox. And wait a minute, all those happen to be Murdoch properties.
So it tells you something. But again, Tucker's like, why do I have to be part of this billionaire squabble?
It's kind of undignified.
It's humiliating. And so Tucker might have decided, I'm basically out the door.
This, I think, is risky for Fox, right?
This was my tweet. Nobody watches Fox because of Fox.
Fox seems to have forgotten that.
And think about that. Do you have a brand loyalty to Fox?
It's like, it doesn't matter who Fox puts on it.
I'm going to be watching Fox.
No. Most people aren't like that.
They watch Fox because of Tucker.
They watch Fox because they like Fox& Friends.
Their loyalty is to those shows, and their loyalty is to those hosts.
And now with Bongino leaving Fox or Bongino is exiting Fox, Tucker is exiting Fox, it's kind of like what's really left at Fox?
Tucker has a lot of opportunities in front of him.
He can go Joe Rogan style and do a podcast.
He can try to start his own TV network and maybe pull some people at Fox and some other people into it.
It's not clear what his next move would be.
Debbie had a hilarious suggestion this morning.
She goes, CNN should hire Tucker.
She goes, CNN keeps claiming we're going to try to be more fair-minded.
They would rock the whole cable world if they were to bring on Tucker.
And then Debbie goes, and then Fox, if they want to go left, they can hire Don Lemon.
I don't think this will happen, by the way, because I don't think that either network is willing to go to that extent.
But certainly, I mean, if I were running CNN, that's what I would do.
And it would rescue the entire network.
And you could have a whole bunch of left-wingers stay because Tucker would be the counter.
And it would be very clear that CNN has become suddenly more fair and balanced than Fox.
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On a happier note, Don Lemon has gotten the boot at CNN. Now, the news came same day as Tucker's departure.
And while Tucker's departure has, I think, large implications, with Lemon, this was like overdue.
This guy was a complete dud.
His ratings were horrible.
And in fact, Trump was with characteristic glee.
He's like the dumbest man on television.
He goes, what took him so long?
And apparently the firing was completely unexpected.
Don Lemon, in fact, put out on Twitter, he says, I am stunned.
After 17 years of CNN, I would have thought someone in management would have the decency to tell me directly.
At no time was I ever given any indication, blah, blah, blah.
Now, CNN put out a statement basically saying, well, we offered to have a meeting with management and you, Don Lemon, declined and just decided to go do your rant on Twitter.
So there's a little bit of back and forth between Lemon and CNN. Now, the interesting thing about Lemon is that, well, first of all, I was kind of chuckling because remember when Lemon referred to Nikki Haley as being, quote, past her prime?
Well, Don Lemon is definitely not past his prime.
In fact, that's kind of what makes his firing so great.
If he was past his prime, we would be understandable.
He's past his prime.
Time to make room for someone else.
But Lemon was fired in his prime.
So even in his best years, the guy was just not all that good.
And yet, I do remember thinking back a kind of Don Lemon that was more moderate, was more open-minded.
And I guess it reflected CNN at the time.
In fact, I've been on with Don Lemon multiple times in the old CNN. You know...
Lemon was on the left, but he was willing to ask questions, engage in discussion.
He didn't start shouting and screaming right away.
But then CNN veered to the left, and it seems like Don Lennon was like, I better move to the left, too, because that's going to give me the inside track at CNN. So there's a...
My guess is a kind of opportunism with Don Lemon.
He moved left in order to keep a pace with CNN, but he didn't count on the fact that CNN would start sinking in the ratings and a new boss would come in, Chris Licht, and Chris Licht would be like, I need to fix this.
And one way to fix this is we have to tack a little bit more toward the center and you've got this Left-wing maniac Don Lemon.
He's not the only left-wing maniac, but at least he comes across as more obviously left.
Jake Tapper is left.
Wolf Blitzer is left.
Alison Camerota is left.
But they camouflage it a little bit more.
Wolf Blitzer, you know, puts on the sort of as if he's merely reporting what's going on.
Jake Tapper, you know, pretends to be some sort of a public intellectual, which he's far from.
But nevertheless, there's at least the pretense that And so they decide that Lemon is a bit now out of sync with the current trajectory of CNN. So I guess my point is that opportunism doesn't always pay.
If Lemon made this pivot left to appeal to CNN, well, that very pivot can then end up costing you your job.
So, where is CNN going with all this?
It seems to me that they would be so much better to take decisive action.
I've said this before in the podcast, just fire everybody, clean the whole place out, reconstruct the network.
Now I mentioned in an earlier segment, hire a prominent conservative and there happens to be one, Tucker Carlson, who's available.
I don't know if CNN could afford him.
He was paid a lot of money at Fox, and it could be that CNN just doesn't have, with its current ratings, its current ad revenue, they just don't have the cash.
But of course, it would be an investment in CNN picking up in its ratings, picking up in its ad revenues, and it would be the kind of imaginative move.
Now, the reason... I don't think CNN will do it.
CNN is like these woke corporations.
They can probably improve their bottom line, they can improve their fortunes if they were less woke, but they can't make themselves do it.
And I think it's partly because they are too beholden both to the culture, to the approval of the culture, and by the culture here I mean the mainstream media.
I mean the ones who set the kind of cultural tone, the ones who define what's cool and uncool.
But also they cannot withstand their own staff.
And I don't just mean the CNN hosts.
I also mean the interns.
I mean the young people who come into CNN. I mean the young producers.
Half of these people are gay.
A lot of them are on the left.
And so the whole mood is over.
Oh my gosh, you're hiring Tucker Carlson.
We can't do that.
So CNN just doesn't know how to cope with that.
Publishing houses don't either.
Corporations don't. And so they end up succumbing to this kind of pressure.
And it ends up costing their own bottom line.
From a business point of view...
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but they don't see any other course of action.
So my guess is CNN will continue to plod along.
They're now minus Don Lemon and they're better for it.
But still, as a network overall, CNN still sucks.
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I want to talk about a slogan that has acquired a certain almost mainstream status on the right.
It's a slogan that goes back to Andrew Breitbart.
And it is the slogan that politics is downstream from culture.
That's the slogan. Politics is downstream from culture.
Now, what does this mean?
Well, it means that cultural change precedes political change.
That cultural change comes first and then causes the political changes that flow from it.
And this is intended typically as a kind of admonition or even a critique of the Republican Party and of conservatives who tend to focus a lot on politics.
And in fact, this is pretty normal.
Typically when I am raising money for films, I go talk to potential investors.
They're used to putting money into campaigns.
They're used to giving to candidates.
But they're like, what is the purpose of these films?
What do these films actually accomplish?
And of course, it's very much in my interest to say, politics is downstream from culture.
In other words, that if we can shape American culture and American mores and values and American public opinion, then surely the American people will vote for the right candidates and will choose the right policies and the rest of it will kind of follow.
Now, as I say, there's a good deal of evidence going for this, and perhaps the best example I can think of to support the point that politics is downstream from culture is the issue of gay marriage.
So the American public, going back, gee, two or three decades, was by and large pretty ferociously Against gay marriage.
In fact, gay marriage had only a small sliver of popularity.
Even Democratic candidates stayed away from that topic.
They would say, we believe marriage is between a man and a woman.
I believe Clinton said that.
Obama even may have said that as late as 2008.
And then things changed.
But how did they change?
Well, perhaps the earliest assault, political assault or cultural assault, came from the left.
the left began to attack the idea of the traditional family and also to present gay couples and gay marriage in a kind of very positive and a very humorous and a likable way.
And really this goes back to Ellen coming out of the closet.
Think of all the various sitcoms featuring gay characters in the 80s and 90s.
They're always funny.
They're always, they make you chuckle.
They're just so nice.
And by and large, public attitudes began to soften toward the idea of gay marriage.
And you also had advocates, by the way, say things like marriage is going to help kind of civilize the gay community.
Marriage is going to help domesticate gay relationships and make them less wanton, less promiscuous, and so on.
And so you have a cultural shift that comes first.
And then suddenly, big changes.
Big changes in the sense that the Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage, in fact, declares gay marriage to be a right, a right enshrined in the Constitution.
And so states are not even in a position now to make laws that restrict gay marriage.
So again, politics, and in this case politics, refers not just to legislation, but also to And this is a big but.
As I think about this phrase, and as I mentioned, it's frequently bandied about when I talk about films and the impact of films and the culture, there is another side to it.
And it's not just another side, it's the opposite side.
One could just as easily say that culture is downstream from politics.
Politics comes first, which is to say legislation and law and policy and Supreme Court decisions come first.
And then public opinion changes in response to that.
And here I can give several examples, but I'll start with the example of Brown v.
Board of Education. Think of the landmark Supreme Court decision that produced school desegregation.
The decision came first.
And then by and large, the public support for desegregation, for ending all these segregation laws.
Essentially went to 100%.
There was virtual unanimity among the American people that segregation is a bad idea and desegregation is the way to go.
But it was not so clear before the Brown decision that the court would decide that.
The court went first and then public opinion followed.
In a strange way, even the gay marriage issue illustrates how culture is downstream from politics.
When the Supreme Court asserted gay marriage as essentially a fait accompli, a done deal, a constitutional right, notice what happened.
Public resistance to gay marriage essentially became very marginal, became very small.
Cultures stopped speaking out against it.
The center of the culture moved dramatically.
So yes, I guess what I'm saying is that cultural shifts produced a Supreme Court decision, and then the Supreme Court decision itself produced a further liberalization, if you will, a further acceptance, a further tolerance, a further, I've got no problem with that, attitude toward gay marriage.
So in summary, what I'm saying is that, is it true that politics is downstream from culture?
Yes, it is sometimes, maybe even often true, but it is also true, and just as often, that culture is downstream from politics.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome a new guest to the podcast.
Caroline Levitt. She's the spokeswoman for President Trump's Super PAC. It's called MAGA, Inc., Make America Great Again, Inc., Caroline ran for Congress in New Hampshire's 1st Congressional District.
Actually, she came really close, and I'm delighted to welcome her.
By the way, the website for the PAC is just magapac.com, magapac.com.
Caroline, great to have you.
Thanks for joining me.
Well, let me start by actually just asking you about running for Congress.
I mean, you were one of the youngest, if not the youngest candidate in the field.
You were the Republican nominee.
And what was that experience like and what did you take from it?
Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me, Dinesh.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
I did run for Congress in my home district, New Hampshire's first congressional district, the live free or die state, the first in the nation primary state.
I grew up here and it was a great honor to run.
I ran in a competitive primary and against a lot of odds and a lot of establishment money.
I prevailed. We won our primary by 10 points as the outsider America First MAGA candidate and unfortunately did fall short in the general election to my Democrat incumbent representative Chris Pappas.
But throughout that experience, my goodness, I learned so much about connecting with people.
That's what I loved the most about campaigning was going to events every day, different states, different cities, different towns in New Hampshire, connecting with people, understanding The real issues and the great impact that Joe Biden's administration and policies has had on so many families just in a few short years.
And it comes on the heels of his announcement today.
We cannot afford four more years of this president.
I saw that impact firsthand on the campaign trail myself.
Here in New Hampshire, our domestic energy production, we had some of the highest utility bills, highest electric rates of any state in the country because of Biden's war on our domestic energy.
Of course, inflation, Prices of groceries and gas hitting a lot of families hard.
We really need a change.
Caroline, what do you think? When I look at Biden, I see a little bit of Jimmy Carter in him, by which I mean just rank incompetence.
But I also see a good bit of Obama.
And by that, I mean a little bit more of strategic malevolence.
In other words, that a lot of the things that he's doing, even though you and I might be appalled, it's almost like he wants them.
He intends them. And it's part of a strategy, maybe, to harvest political gain, even at the expense of the country.
What's your reading on Biden?
Do you put him in the kind of incompetent nincompoop category, or do you put him in the sort of strategic malevolent category, or both?
I think a little bit of both.
Look, Joe Biden is a career politician.
He's been clinging to power, and we know abusing that power to enrich himself and nine of his family members, as just revealed by the House Oversight Committee.
He's a public servant, yet he has a net worth of over $100 million.
We know he's been using his power, again, to enrich himself and his family.
So He's a corrupt career politician, but at this moment in time, I believe he's a useful puppet for the far left, for the Marxists, for the globalist order that seeks to have the demise of the United States of America, that wants our country to be just a puppet for the globalist order around the world.
I believe all of his policies are purposeful.
The wide-open border policies are purposeful.
Joe Biden could fix this In a minute, if he wanted to, we did in the Trump administration.
We secured our border.
We implemented the Remain in Mexico policy.
We decreased mass illegal migration into the United States and America to historic lows.
So the playbook is there, but the Democrats are not doing it.
Why? Because they want more political power, right?
They want these people coming into our country because they want votes.
It's the same reason I think?
Do you think, Caroline, that if the Biden administration's effect has been so negative, people can see it, people can feel it, they experience it at the gas pump, they see it in inflation and prices, they see it in the diminution of their savings and their accumulated net worth.
Are the Democrats still viable as a political party simply because they've got the mechanics down?
In other words, they've got a ground game.
They know how to get out the vote.
They've got 4 million people to text in New Hampshire to get them out.
So Republicans focus, as you and I are doing now, on presenting issues and making our case.
But could it be the Democrats are like, we don't care about any of that.
We've got a way to get our bodies to the polls or get the absentee ballots in, and the Republicans cannot match us at that level.
Is this a problem that you're thinking about and the PAC is thinking about?
How are you dealing with this issue?
Yes, absolutely. We've seen time and time again, the Democrat regime knows how to chase ballots.
They know how to push their voters out to the polls, whether that's really stifling up emotions on issues like abortion come Election Day or ballot harvesting.
As you've talked about so much, Dinesh, and you've dedicated your life's work to revealing those truths, the Democrats are good at getting people out to vote and putting ballots in the ballot box.
Republicans We need to get better at that.
We need to ensure that Republican elected officials, we voters, are holding them accountable to strengthen our election laws in states across the country.
We've seen good strides since the 2020 election, but that work hasn't been enough.
I'll give you an example from my home state here in New Hampshire.
We have a Republican governor who allegedly wants to run for president, even though he's not even showing up in the polls in his own home state here in New Hampshire.
Yet we have...
Same-day voter registration in our state.
So people from Massachusetts or Maine can come into New Hampshire, cast a ballot on Election Day.
They have 90 days to prove they're actually a resident here.
Well, guess what? That ballot has already been cast and counted.
So we need Republican governors to get tough on election integrity.
Republicans, Democrats, Independents want to see it and fight back ardently against the left's messaging war that we're somehow suppressing the vote. Joe Biden discussed that in his announcement video today as well, saying we're trying to make it more difficult to vote. No, we're trying to make it more difficult to cheat and easier to vote. And that's the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. And then also, you know, we will continue at MAGA Inc. to hammer away
at Biden's abysmal record. There could not be a more clear contrast between President Trump and President Joe Biden.
We had a secure border.
Now we have a wide open border.
We had a booming economy.
Wages were up. Inflation was down.
Now we have an abysmal economy.
Inflation is up everything from groceries to gas.
We had peace around the world under President Trump.
Now we have chaos around the world.
The botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
Russia invading Ukraine.
China encroaching on Taiwan.
Chaos all around us.
We're on the brink of nuclear war, as President Trump has recently talked a lot about.
The stakes have never been higher.
I truly believe good, hardworking Americans understand that.
They're going to vote differently than they did in past cycles.
And the Republican Party also needs to make sure we are getting those people out to vote.
We are chasing their ballots, and we will be victorious on Election Day in November.
I firmly believe it.
We'll be right back in a moment with Caroline Leavitt.
I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
I post lots of exclusive content there, including content that is censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
On Locals, you can also interact with me directly.
On Locals, you can also interact with me directly.
I do a weekly Q&A every Tuesday, so today, 8 p.m. Eastern.
I do a weekly Q&A every Tuesday, so today, 8 p.m. Eastern, and no topic is off limits.
I've also uploaded some very cool films to Locals, both documentaries and feature films, both my films and also films by other independent producers.
I'm doing a new film this year, and I'll be giving you the inside scoop on Locals.
If you're an annual subscriber, you'll also be able to stream and watch the movie for free.
So check out my channel at dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
I'm back with Caroline Levitt.
She's the spokeswoman for MAGA Inc., the website magapack.com.
Caroline, I've got to ask you about this business with Tucker Carlson, this abrupt departure at Fox.
Do you see this as a good thing or a bad thing, just viewed purely from the point of view of Trump and the Trump campaign?
Are you... Happy about it?
In the sense, by happy about it, what I mean is Tucker is now free to be Tucker.
Or do you think, oh, wow, well, listen, Fox, this was an important podium to get a unique type of message out.
Tucker was uniquely capable in delivering it.
This is a real blow to our side.
Well, Tucker is unequivocally one of the greatest voices on cable television ever.
He was interesting.
He's intelligent.
He brought different points of views to his millions of audience members every single night.
And I believe last night at 8 p.m.
there were a lot of very sad and angry Americans when they tuned in and did not see Tucker Carlson enlightening them with his nightly monologue.
So I think it's a bad decision for Fox News.
I think it will hopefully be good news for Tucker Carlson.
We don't know what he'll do next, but he has a very loyal and engaged audience, rightfully so, and I know he'll be successful wherever he goes next.
Okay, let's talk about the primary.
The Republican primary is not sort of in full swing yet, but already there's a lot of back and forth.
Of course, DeSantis is often mentioned.
And my question is this, is, do you think that with regard to DeSantis...
Is he jumping the gun?
I mean, it seems to me I wonder whether DeSantis would be better to say, listen, this is Trump's time.
I'm a young guy.
My time will come.
I should wait it out to the next time around.
I'm just a little worried that an ongoing skirmish Trump-DeSantis ends up really weakening both.
What's your take on all this?
Is it... Do you fear an ugly Republican primary that will have the effect of demoralizing either Trump supporters or DeSantis supporters and prevent us from having the kind of unified front that we're surely going to need next year?
Yeah, I don't think a He is the frontrunner in the Republican primary, and he will be victorious in the general election.
And I think it would be wise for Governor DeSantis to sit this race out, because the more he goes out there in campaigns, it appears the less people like him.
His poll numbers drop as he goes from state to state.
And it would be better for our party if we could unite around our frontrunner.
President Trump has the support of the GOP base.
Voters have made their voices clear, right?
Poll after poll, state after state, week after week.
They know President Trump is the leader that we need on day one.
He is the only candidate in this primary race that can walk into the Oval Office on day one after defeating Joe Biden and call Putin and say, hey, this war in Ukraine, we're going to negotiate a deal.
We're going to end it. He can call Kim Jong-un and say, hey, You've been taking advantage of us.
You've been firing off missiles.
No more. President Trump is the only one that can implement and execute effective day one leadership and get our country back on track.
Governor DeSantis would be wise to stick this one out and support the president as the president supported him and saved his career back in 2018.
It'd be good for him personally to save face and it would be great for our Republican Party so we can take that fight directly to Joe Biden.
Caroline Levitt, thank you so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you. Welcome to my show!
For a number of centuries, there were horrific images of the Inquisition, torture instruments, people being put on the rack, people being torn apart into pieces, so-called Inquisition trials, which were presented as just horror shows.
And all of this was seen as an objective description of the Inquisition until, in the 20th century, scholars went back, looked at these Inquisition trials, and they realized that much of the caricature of the Inquisition was a product of English propaganda against the Spanish people.
This is a very interesting case where you sort of have to look at the historical context.
The English were trying to present the Spanish as narrow-minded, superstitious, Catholic, and then prone to committing all these historical crimes, while the English were, after all, lovers of freedom.
Now, of course, we in America have inherited the kind of Anglo-Saxon tradition, and with that we inherited Anglo-Saxon sort of historiography.
And included in that was a biased.
I mean, biased is kind of putting it mildly.
Today in historical scholarship, the English descriptions of the Inquisition are called the Black Legend.
The Black Legend, why?
Because it's a legend blackening the image of Spain by presenting Spain as the country that did this horrible crime, the Inquisition.
Now... Scholars have taken a closer look at Inquisition trials, as I said.
Henry Kamen's book, which came out a few, about the middle of the 20th century, about maybe the 1960s, it was called The Spanish Inquisition, A Historical Revision.
And that's a very telling title because, of course, Kamen is doing a lot of revising.
He himself had been educated to think X, but the truth is Y. And the whole book is full of this kind of Reorienting of our understanding of the Inquisition.
In fact, one of his chapters is called Inventing the Inquisition.
Not to say that there wasn't an Inquisition, but our idea of it is a sort of invention.
He means that much of the scholarship about the Inquisition over many centuries is essentially made up.
It's invented, and it's invented for political and propagandistic purposes.
Now, Cayman begins by making an important point.
The Inquisition was, he says...
Only for Christians.
It only had authority over Christians.
And this is important because even today, the myth persists that the Inquisition was some kind of a systematic pogrom against the Jews.
The Inquisition was trying to force Jews to convert to Christianity.
Not true at all.
In fact, the Spanish rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella, Ferdinand of Aragon, Isabel of Castile, had actually passed a law that said that if you were Jewish, you could be Jewish, but you could be Jewish somewhere else other than in Spain.
You kind of had to leave. Or you had the option of converting, if you wanted to, to Christianity and then you could stay.
Now many, many Jews did leave, but there were quite a few Jews who decided to convert.
And so in converting, they became, well, they were called conversos, obviously, because of the fact that they converted.
They now came under the authority of the Inquisition.
Why? Because they were, at least purportedly, Christians.
And so the Inquisition did sometimes get reports.
In fact, reports sometimes made by other Jews who were angry that their fellow neighbors and so on had converted.
They would report them to the Inquisition and say, this guy is not really Christian.
He pretends to be a Christian, but in secret he's doing Jewish practices and so on.
So the Inquisition would look at these, you may say, fake Christians because the Inquisition was really about...
It was heresy. It was departing from the established truths or the declared truths of the Catholic Church.
And in fact, the chief inquisitor, Tomas Torquemada, Henry Kamen points out something I didn't know, actually had Jewish ancestry.
Inquisition trials, according to Kamen, were fairer and more lenient than their secular counterparts, not just in Spain but also across Europe.
Very often, if you were convicted by the Inquisition, your penalty was some form of penance.
You'd have to do a fast or make a pilgrimage or what we would today call community service.
I know all about that.
And here's an interesting question.
How many people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition?
Millions? No.
Hundreds of thousands? No.
Actually, Cayman estimates around 2,000.
Other contemporary historians make estimates of between 1,500 and 4,000.
Now, of course, any death is tragic, but we've got to remember that these deaths, these 2,000 deaths, occurred over a period of 350 years.
If you do the math, it's about six guys a year.
So all of this is a way of saying, again, not that there wasn't an Inquisition, not that there weren't cases that were adjudicated unjustly, but the whole thing is preposterously and ridiculously overblown.
If this is kind of the worst you can do in documenting the crimes of religion, you haven't done very much indeed.
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