Chris Licht Out at CNN—The Latest Casualty of a Dying Medium, Tucker’s Explosive Return on Twitter, Ukraine’s Terrorist Attack on Russian Dam | SYSTEM UPDATE #94
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, CNN's top executive barely lasted a year on the job, Chris Licht.
Who is brought in by the most trusted name in news in the wake of multiple ethical scandals and collapsing ratings that drove out his predecessor Jeff Zucker, was fired today after barely a year in the job.
Most of the corporate press barely disguised their delight over his firing.
One of Lick's primary directives was that the only way to save CNN and find a way to again attract an audience to watch their shows was to have CNN cease being little more than a messaging clearinghouse for the Democratic Party.
And nothing enrages corporate media employees more than the idea that a news outlet should be independent, rather than held in captivity to establishment neoliberalism.
One of the few weapons they have left is ensuring that these large media corporations remain a dissent-free sector of liberal propaganda, and Licht explicitly vowed to liberate CNN from that grim task.
The reality is that cable news as a medium is dying anyway and CNN is close to irretrievably dead.
So it hardly matters who captains that rotted ship as it deservedly crashes and then finally sinks.
But the story is nonetheless worth covering because the media reaction to Licht and their determination to keep every media corporation in the United States in line strictly with Democratic Party ideology reveals a great deal about their ongoing function.
Then, while CNN collapses, Tucker Carlson, the most successful cable host in the history of that medium, launched his show last night on Twitter in scaled-down form for now.
But there was no denying that the launch was a success.
While view counts on Twitter are less than models of clarity and reliability to understate the case, it is clear that millions of people watched Carlson's first monologue about Ukraine, that he is able to find such a big audience without Fox, and that he's already obviously feeling less constrained now that he's both independent and away from that corporate structure both of those things are highly encouraging signs for the future of independent media and highly discouraging signs for the future of corporate media
and then finally russia once again suffered a major attack on its key infrastructure that it controls a huge dam and russia-controlled southern ukraine to Despite the fact that the destruction of this dam deprives Crimea of water, both Ukraine along with leading US and European elites are declaring, as though it is proven fact, That Russia is responsible for this attack.
All this despite the fact that we have repeatedly been subjected to lies and propaganda falsely assigning blame to Russia in the past, including claims that they blew up their own pipeline, exploded a cafe in St.
Petersburg that killed a Russian nationalist journalist and injured 19 other Russians in attendance, and that Russia even attacked itself at the Kremlin with drones.
We'll attempt to sort this all out, as well as analyze these other stories with the most independent of independent journalists, Michael Tracy, who will join us shortly.
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It posts 12 hours after the show first airs live here on Rumble.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting now.
System Update, starting now.
He was brought in roughly a year ago as the chief executive of CNN after his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, suffered all kinds of ethical scandals, including claims that he was involved in a consensual adult relationship with another CNN executive.
That he was helping Chris Cuomo combat allegations against that CNN host, that he too had been engaged in improper conduct in helping his brother, the governor of New York, fend off assault allegations and all sorts of other problems at the network, including the fact that nobody was watching the network.
It was simply a collapsing disaster.
And Crick was brought in and one of the things that he immediately did and tried to implement was the idea that one of the reasons CNN is falling and failing is because nobody trusts it any longer.
And the reason nobody trusts it any longer is because it is openly and blatantly little more than a messaging machine for the Democratic Party.
And anybody who wants that already has MSNBC to give it to them and there's no reason anybody would go to CNN in order to get it.
They became addicted to the ratings high, which was nothing more than a sugar high that they got that was actually ushered in by Donald Trump.
And by talking about Trump 24 hours a day, they staved off collapse.
But with Trump gone, there was simply no reason for anybody else to tune in to CNN any longer.
And their ratings continued to collapse, under-licked.
And what makes this story interesting is not the fact that now they're going to bring somebody else to oversee CNN's inevitable and well-deserved collapse.
What's interesting is the reaction among most of the corporate media, both inside CNN and out, who are celebrating Lick's demise solely because he wanted to transform that network away from being shills to the Democratic Party and into the independent news network that it once was.
That really reveals how the corporate media sees itself in general.
And the fact that they wanted his head on a pike and now have it and now are celebrating Even while they know that it hardly matters who supervises or runs CNN, that cable news is dying along with much of the corporate media, that's the really revealing part.
So let's look first at what the story is from the New York Times today.
There you see it on the screen.
It says, quote, Chris Licht, the former television producer who oversaw a brief and chaotic run as chairman of CNN, is out at the network.
There's the RWB headlines.
Chris Licht is out at CNN, leaving network at a crossroads.
Mr. Licht's turbulent time running the 24-hour news organization lasted slightly more than a year.
And there's that first paragraph that we just read to you.
It goes on, quote, David Zavlev, the chief executive of CNN's parent, Warner Brothers, Discovery, informed staff on Wednesday morning that he had met with Mr. Licht and that he was leaving effective immediately.
Mr. Licht's 13-month run at CNN was marked by one controversy after another.
He got off to a bumpy start even before he had officially started when he oversaw the shuttering of the costly CNN Plus streaming service at the request of its network's new owners, who were skeptical about a standalone digital product.
Let's take a moment to remember that, because it was one of the funniest things to ever happen in media.
Prior to Chris Lake's arrival, CNN and their bosses, including Jeff Zucker, had decided that one way to save CNN was to create a streaming service that you had to pay for.
And on the streaming service, they were going to offer the same host who you could already watch for free, but like everybody else in the country, were choosing not to because you had no interest in what they were saying.
So they were essentially saying, here are all these people.
Who, if you want, you can watch for free, and you're choosing not to.
Nobody watches them, and so our genius idea is we're now gonna make you pay to watch them, so that we can generate profit for ourselves, and you will pay to watch the people you've already made clear you have no interest in.
It lasted a grand total of 21 days.
They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, on marketing, on publicity, on trumpeting the arrival of this exciting streaming service.
And then Chris Lick was brought in and they ordered him to kill it.
After 21 days, it was dead.
And as the New York Times says, the cuts resulted in scores of layoffs, for which he was blamed.
It goes on, quote, ratings plummeted during Mr. Lick's management and a series of programming miscues, including an ill-fated morning show co-anchored by Don Lemon, as well as organizing a town hall featuring former President Donald J. Trump that was subject to withering criticisms.
Do little to shore up support with his colleagues.
Now, I think this is the really important part.
The straw that broke the camel's back for Chris Licht was his decision to take the presidential candidate who was leading in all the polls, not only to become the Republican nominee, but to be the next president.
He's leading virtually all polls against Joe Biden, if he were to get the nomination, and leading all polls by 20 or 30 points over the next leading candidate, Ron DeSantis.
So, needless to say, by definition, Donald Trump has a very good chance to become the next president.
He also happened to be the president just two years ago.
And yet the idea that CNN should interview him, should allow him to go on their airwaves and let the American people hear what he has to say.
In response to questions being asked of him by a reporter who was told to and is fully capable of responding to whatever he says, fact-checking him if she thinks it's merited as she did, this idea was so controversial inside CNN.
In fact, it was worse than controversial.
It provoked large amounts of indignation among CNN staffers.
To the point that people like Anderson Cooper and Christiane Amanpour went on the air and criticized CNN for the crime of interviewing Donald Trump.
This is how institutionally rotted that network is.
They really do believe that their only mission is to promote the Democratic Party, or at the very least do everything possible to sabotage Donald Trump and his movement.
They are overtly an activist organization.
And that activism is all about promoting the Democratic Party and ensuring the Trump movement never obtains power again, even if the American people decide to vote for Donald Trump.
And so putting him on the air and that town hall that they had with him was by far their biggest rating night in a long, long time.
It got over 3 million viewers.
Which is in a different universe for what CNN ever gets.
They just had a similar town hall with Nikki Haley, who's another GOP presidential candidate, with Jake Tapper, and they got a grand total of 550,000 people watching.
Only 100 or 150,000 people in the so-called demo, the only thing that matters, really, the age group that advertisers care about, which is 25 to 54.
They could barely get a half a million people to watch a town hall with Nikki Haley, so the only time anyone watched CNN still is when they got Donald Trump to come on their network, and yet because so ingrained in the culture and the ethos of American corporate media is the idea that their singular mission is to ensure the victory and success of the Democratic Party, they were outraged.
CNN journalists were, openly.
About Chris Lick's decision to allow Donald Trump to vandalize their airwaves.
That is how far gone the corporate media is in the United States.
And it's not just CNN journalists who thought that way.
Most of the corporate media did.
The Atlantic published, as the New York Times says here, quote, things deteriorated last week when the Atlantic published a 15,000 word profile extensively documenting Mr. Lick's stormy tenure, including criticism of the network's pandemic coverage that rankled the network's rank and file.
The entire media was out to get Chris Lick.
For no reason other than the fact that he wanted to prevent CNN from continuing to act as a servant to the Democratic Party.
Not for ideological reasons, but just because CNN was failing and collapsing by trying to be that.
Nobody was watching.
The New York Times article goes on, quote, further worsening matters with CNN's financial performance.
The network generated $750 million in profit last year, including one-time losses from the CNN Plus streaming service, down from $1.25 billion the year before.
Now, you may wonder how CNN makes that much profit when nobody watches, and the answer is twofold.
One is they still do attract a lot of attention to things like their website.
But the bigger reason is because CNN is on every cable network and it's on every cable package.
And cable companies pay CNN to include their network in their cable package because they assume, even though it seems to be quite untrue, that people who pay for cable want CNN.
They never watch it.
But that's where CNN's profit comes from, that cable companies pay them for the right to include them in the cable package even though nobody watches them.
The article goes on, quote, Mr. Lick's abrupt departure earlier reported by POC represents the latest hit in a tumultuous era for the network.
In December 2021, the primetime anchor Chris Cuomo was fired amid an ethics scandal involving his brother, the former governor Andrew Cuomo of New York.
Two months later, The network's longtime chief executive Jeff Zucker was let go for failing to disclose a relationship with a colleague, the senior executive Allison Golas.
He was likewise pushed out within weeks of Mr. Zucker's departure.
It did not help matters for Mr. Licht that Mr. Zucker enjoyed wide loyalty from top anchors as well as rank-and-file workers, even after his exit.
Once employees began souring on Mr. Lick, Mr. Zucker turned into a quasi-grievance switchboard for frustrated staff members.
One of Mr. Lick's first big programming moves was to reassign Mr. Lemon from his primetime perch to a new morning show.
Mr. Lick said the show, which Mr. Lemon would anchor with Poppy Harlow and Caitlin Collins, would, quote, set the tone for the news organization.
Instead, CNN This Morning, which debuted in November, was marred by low ratings and tensions on and off the set.
Two months after Mr. Lemon said that a woman over the age of 50 was not, quote, in her prime, he was fired.
Effectively blowing up the show that had been Mr. Lick's signature project.
That was not the only misstep.
Mr. Lick took his time.
Warner Brothers Discovery executives believe far too much time to figure out a primetime lineup as it was rapidly losing viewers.
To the shock of many CNN staff members, the network began last month to occasionally lose to Newsmax in total viewers in primetime.
And the Trump Town Hall, which aired on May 10th, was excoriated both outside and within CNN.
In other words, that was really the last straw.
The fact that he dared put a Republican, and not just any Republican, but Donald Trump, on CNN's airwaves.
They simply do not believe that media outlets any longer should report on People who disagree with Democratic Party ideology or who in any way have any relationship to Donald Trump or to his campaign.
Now, a serious historical revision is going on in the way that only our media can do.
What they're trying to say is that This is proof that any attempt to liberate media outlets from Democratic Party servitude or to suggest that the media outlets have a responsibility to do something other than just advance American liberalism is likely to fail.
In other words, they're trying to say CNN was this model of great success until Chris Lick came in.
And caused it all to fail.
Here, for example, is a tweet today from a former Washington Post journalist, and then he went to the Atlantic, Wesley Lowery.
And there you see on the screen, quote, Chris Licht, the latest in a line of media leaders who burned their own house down with their determination to be anti-woke and prove their, quote, independence from liberals who criticized them on Twitter.
So that's the narrative that they're trying to create, that CNN failed under Chris Licht, Because he had the audacity to say that news outlets should be independent and that they should be immune from the demands of liberals on Twitter that they only adhere to liberal ideology.
That is as explicit as it gets about what their views are on what media outlets should do.
Now, the reality is, this is all a fairy tale.
Long before Chris Schlicht came in to run CNN, CNN's ratings were already in total decline and freefall precisely because nobody trusted them, precisely because everybody knew they were a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.
Here from Forbes in February of 2022, so just days before Chris Schlicht was hired and Jeff Zucker was fired, There you see the headlines, quote, CNN's ratings collapse, primetime down nearly 70% in the key demo, 70%.
CNN's ratings were described as in collapse before Chris licked.
Came on board and in great part that was due to the fact that CNN lost all the trust it had built up over several decades by turning itself into a pro-democratic party anti-Trump outlet during the Trump years.
Here too from the Daily Beast in December of 2021, so a couple of months after, or before rather, Jeff Zucker was fired and Chris Slick was brought in.
Quote, CNN bottomed out in 2021.
Will viewers come back?
The network reigned supreme at the end of the Trump era, but has fallen back to earth.
What happened?
So, that I think is the most important thing to note here, is that the reason these media outlets are collapsing is because people no longer trust them.
And how you rebuild trust, there's only one way to do that.
And that is to prove that you are not captive to either one of these parties, but instead are independent and willing to report things honestly.
A major reason, according to Chris Licht, that CNN had lost faith among the public, that nobody trusted them any longer, was because of their constantly hysterical COVID coverage.
You probably remember when Donald Trump was president, they constantly had a clock or a chart counting, in this gruesome, dreary way, the number of people who died of COVID, as though each one of those corpses was the direct fault of Donald Trump.
And then suddenly when Joe Biden came in, CNN totally lost interest in how many people were dying of COVID, even though more people died of COVID under Joe Biden than under Donald Trump, despite the fact that Trump ushered in the vaccine that CNN told everybody to take.
And obviously when you do things like that, when you so blatantly exploit a pandemic for purely partisan and political lands, of course The public will lose trust in you.
Hear from the new media outlet Semaphore that reports a lot on media.
Its editor-in-chief is Ben Smith, who was the longtime media columnist for the New York Times.
This is by Max Tanney on June 2023.
There you see the headline, CNN lost trust over COVID coverage.
Internal report found, quote, The Atlantic's Friday profile of the embattled CEO Chris Licht drew cringes at Hudson Yard, that's the CNN headquarters, but also anger over Licht's criticism of the network's award-winning pandemic coverage.
Quote, in the beginning, it was a trusted source, this crazy thing, no one understands it.
Help us make sense of it.
What's going on, Licht said.
And I think then it got to a place where, oh, wow, we got to keep getting those ratings.
We got to keep getting the sense of urgency.
People walked outside and they go, this is not my life, this is not my reality.
You guys are just saying this because you need the ratings, you need the clicks.
I don't trust you, he said.
The network won multiple prizes for its coverage of COVID-19, including the Annenberg Public Policy Center's Cronkite Jackson Prize.
What has Cronkite in there and the Annenberg Public Policy Center must be incredibly prestigious.
And it was awarded to Dr. Sanjay Gupta for his coverage, quote, correcting COVID-19 misinformation.
But Lick's criticism was drawn from CNN's own research.
Last year, CNN commissioned a survey examining viewer trust and the places where CNN was succeeding and falling short with viewers across the ideological spectrum.
According to a partial copy of the report, which hasn't been revealed before, CNN's coverage of COVID-19 was the third leading cause of distrust in the network.
Behind liberal bias, that was the first cause of distrust, liberal bias, And then the Chris Cuomo situation.
Survey respondents of all ideological stripes criticized the network's, quote, overly dramatic and sensational, end quote, dire reporting, the report said.
So this is the reality, that the reason trust and faith in media outlets and corporate media outlets are in free fall at exactly the time
People are turning to independent media more and more, as we're about to show you with the next segment regarding Tucker Carlson's return, the return of his show to Twitter, is precisely because people understand that in the Trump years, these media outlets devoted themselves to the destruction of one party and the advancement of another.
They also got extremely irresponsible with hysterical and false reporting on things like Russiagate and COVID.
They are widely perceived to have a liberal bias and therefore nobody trusts them any longer.
And so with the exception of a couple media giants, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, pretty much every sector of media is failing.
Fox News is now failing because it got rid of Tucker Carlson.
And their ratings have been in decline ever since because people understand that if you're a news network that fires your most popular host because he won't promote your ideology, you're not really a news network, you're an ideological activist outlet and people no longer trust those.
And that's why increasingly people are turning more and more to independent media.
And the fact that the corporate media, almost all of them, reacted with such anger toward Chris Slick's attempt to make CNN just a little bit more independent.
And to say that it should no longer be this outlet of partisan captivity of the Democratic Party shows you that the corporate media believes, even if it means they're going to fail, that their overarching mission is to advance the Democratic Party and ensure the defeat of the Republican Party.
People already see this.
Polls overwhelmingly show that they see it.
And the reason we decided to cover this Somewhat amusing episode is not because it matters who steers the ships of any of these declining organizations, it doesn't, but because the reaction of the rest of the media is so revealing about how they see their own function.
No, as I said, in just a second, after this little break, we're going to be back.
We're going to have Michael Tracy come on.
We're going to talk about Tucker Carlson's new program and the reaction to it, and also the destruction of a dam in Ukraine that, yet again, American and European elites are saying with no evidence was carried out by Russia.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
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Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News on April 24th, just about six weeks ago, despite the fact that he had long been and continued to be the most watched host on any cable network.
And the question is, why would Fox News fire its most popular and most watched cable host?
That is still a mystery that has not really been answered, although I think we're starting to get a lot of clues about part of the reason being ideological.
The fact that Tucker Carlson was increasingly out of step with Republican establishment ideology.
His most frequent targets, along with the CIA and the FBI, were leading Republican figures like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, much more so often than even Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer.
On the most central priority of the CIA in the U.S.
security state, Joe Biden's war on Ukraine.
Tucker Carlson was one of the leading opponents of that war, even though most of the GOP establishment is fully on board with it and vehemently supports it.
And so just like what happened with Glenn Beck roughly a decade earlier when he was Certainly the most watched host in the history of cable at the five o'clock hour and yet Fox News fired him.
Part of the reason is ideological that no matter how many viewers you get watching your show, if what you're convincing them of is contrary to the political views or the interests of the owners of that network, you will only last for so long.
And that's the reason why corporate media really cannot be trusted.
There are people doing good work in corporate media.
I certainly think Tucker Carlson did good work while he was at Fox.
There are a couple other people at Fox who I think are doing their best within those constraints, but the reality is that you can only do so much because as long as people are paying your paycheck and controlling what it is that you can and can't say, eventually, if you step over too many lines ideologically, it doesn't matter how successful you are, you will end up being fired.
That was something I obviously discovered myself when I was at The Intercept, my own media outlet that I founded, and yet because I wanted to report on Joe Biden in a way that was incriminating of him just a couple of weeks before the election, the senior editorial staff at The Intercept
Even though my contract prohibited them from doing so, interfered in my editorial process, prohibited me from publishing my own article at the media outlet that was founded on my name, because they had ideological lines that could not be crossed.
Specifically, anything that might have helped Donald Trump win the election, even if it was good reporting, was something that could not be done.
And it was only once I left That I realized the full extent to which I had been constrained, even subliminally or subconsciously, by the fact that I was working within a structure, a corporate structure and a media outlet controlled by other people.
And obviously Tucker Carlson has found that out firsthand as well.
I can see it in how he left and now how he is speaking in a different way already.
With the first episode of his show that appeared on Twitter last night, here you see it.
He entitled it Episode 1.
It is a scaled-down version of his show for now.
He doesn't have on any guests yet.
It's only a 10- to 12-minute monologue, similar to the kind that he would begin his show with.
When he was at Vox, I think probably the most important and popular part of his show was this monologue.
So for now, until they're capable and ready and up and running to have remote guests on, this is what the show is going to be, the monologue.
And as I said, I don't think Twitter's metrics are particularly reliable.
You see here that it's been watched by 87.6 million people.
I doubt 87.6 million people watched this monologue.
I highly doubt that in fact.
If so, that would be the most watched television event in the history of TV for at least several decades.
That's essentially one-third or one-fourth of the American population.
I think what happens a lot is if this gets retweeted into your feed, that counts as a view.
If you scroll by it, it counts as a view.
But what clearly is the case, just based on the number of retweets alone, we don't have that here, but it's something like 270,000 retweets, close to a million likes.
Yeah, it's 180,000, 6,000 retweets.
And 700,000 likes already, 40,000 bookmarks, 21,000 quote tweets.
Clearly...
More than a million people, well over a million people watched this monologue, which already makes it more successful than pretty much any show on CNN or MSNBC.
And we'll see how once the awareness builds up, the Tucker Show is on Twitter.
Remember, only 20 to 25% of Americans use Twitter regularly.
So he has a lot of ceiling left to fill.
We'll see how many people end up watching it, but clearly this is a successful debut.
Now before I bring Michael on to talk about this, and most importantly the content, of what Tucker said in this monologue and the way in which it was characterized by the media, I wanted to show you the media reaction to it.
It was as predictable as it was negative, but the way in which they were angry over specific things that he said, I think is incredibly interesting.
So here, just take a couple examples.
CNN, which would kill to have that many people watching any of their programs when they don't have Donald Trump on.
You see the headline, quote, Tucker Carlson launches first episode of low-budget Twitter show after Fox News firing.
Nearly a month after vowing a return to right-wing commentary through a show on Elon Musk's Twitter, the fired Fox News host made good on his promise.
So already you see these words.
On Elon Musk's Twitter, a right-wing show already signaling to the audience that this is supposed to be someone you hate, you're supposed to hate this show, it's a right-wing show, and it's very cheap, it's low budget, just all these fillers.
So here's, and remember, this is a news article, not bad.
So the article goes on, quote, The commentary, which appeared next to a, quote, Tucker on Twitter logo at the corner of the screen, was in the same style as viewers have come to expect from Carlson.
What is that style, CNN, that viewers have come to expect from Carlson?
Quote, a conspiracy-peddling talk show host who gave voice to some of the most extreme ideas in right-wing politics.
The New York Times' Katie Robertson and Jeremy Peters summarized the first episode like this, quote, he expressed sympathy for Vladimir Putin of Russia and mocked President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine.
No mocking President Zelensky.
He accused the mainstream media of lying.
Oh, perish the thought!
Apparently, only right-wing people mock President Zelensky and accuse the mainstream media of lying.
Which, by the way, Is what right-wing means now.
That if you don't trust institutions of power, mainstream institutions of power, the CIA, the FBI, big tech and large media outlets, that is how you get labeled right-wing.
Nothing else is required.
He wrapped up his show by declaring that UFOs and extraterrestrial life are, quote, actually real.
Just to try and make him seem crazy, even though there are a lot of scientists, a lot of people who study extraterrestrial life who believe that there is now evidence that it exists.
But this whole article is just kind of an exercise in empty labels tossed around to signal to people that you're supposed to hate him, even though he focused his entire monologue on something that many, many Americans support, which is even though he focused his entire monologue on something that many, many Americans support, which role in the proxy war in Ukraine.
According to The Guardian, there the headline is, Tucker Carlson peddles conspiracy theories on Twitter debut from his barn.
So this is all part of the mockery.
It's low budget.
There were people noting that he operated his own teleprompter.
He did it from his barn.
Why is this bad?
In order to be credible as a journalist, you have to work for a gigantic media corporation and have a team of 100 people around you to make your, to operate every little device that you use.
The sub-headline here is, Xbox news host backs Russia and insults Ukraine Zelensky in a 10-minute monologue greeted with widespread derision.
Widespread derision among whom?
Here's what they say, quote, Tucker Carlson's debut on Twitter was greeted with widespread derision.
It was watched by millions of people.
Way more than would ever read a Guardian article.
Where is this widespread derision?
They mean the liberal part of the corporate media that nobody watches.
As the Fox News host backed Russia in its war with Ukraine, abused the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, invoked conspiracy theories about 9-11 at Jeffrey Epstein, meaning that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself, And mused on the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life.
Quote, Tucker Carlson's lies cost Fox $800 million, said Anne Applebaum, a historian of authoritarianism.
Referring to the $787 million settlement the network signed with Dominion Voting Systems over its broadcast of Donald Trump's election lies shortly before Carlson was fired.
Quote, now he is still lying, and Twitter will eventually pay the price too.
Now, that paragraph is itself a lie.
Tucker Carlson was not one of the people spreading the claims about Dominion voting machines.
Not even the law student alleged that.
In fact, Tucker was one of the people going on the air at the time, as we showed you in a prior show we did examining this, telling you that, and his audience that didn't want to hear it, that the claims of Sidney Powell and others that Dominion had engaged in voter fraud lacked evidence.
And until that evidence was presented, you shouldn't believe it.
So the idea that Tucker Carlson cost Fox $800 million, which is what The Guardian said, quoting Ann Applebaum, is a lie.
But who is Ann Applebaum?
Ann Applebaum is a neoconservative who was one of the people who told the American public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
She was a vocal advocate of the war in Iraq.
She was a vocal advocate of the regime change operation in Syria to remove Bashar al-Assad that destroyed Syria.
She was a vocal advocate of the regime change war in Libya that turned Libya into a hellhole of ISIS and slave markets and anarchy.
And of course, she was one of the people pushing every version of Russiagate, including the Steele dossier and all the ones that got proven to be lies.
The fact that she's held up as this paragon of truth While The Guardian says that it was Tucker Carlson who spread conspiracy theories and lies, shows you how just utterly manipulated these terms are.
The article goes on, quote, the first taste of what that audience can expect included claims that Ukraine blew up the Kakova Dam, not Russia, and lewd insinuations about the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
Carlson said Graham was, quote, attracted to the, quote, rat-like Zelensky and aroused by the aroma of death.
How is that not true?
Like Ann Applebaum, Lindsey Graham has also supported every single American war, including Joe Biden's war in Ukraine.
And it's very reasonable to conclude that they are indeed aroused by the aroma of death since they spend their lives dedicating themselves to urging more and more wars.
Carlson also called Zelensky, quote, sweaty, a comedian turned oligarch and a persecutor of Christians.
And he was referring there to the fact that President Zelensky closed, ordered closed, some of the oldest Russian Orthodox churches in Ukraine because of suspicions of their loyalty.
Carlson also said, quote, what exactly happened on 11?
Well, it's still classified.
How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money?
How did he die?
How about JFK and so endlessly on?
Meaning, we're constantly being lied to by institutions of authority and power that use classified documents to hide the truth and hide what they do and to mainstream media outlets, which are supposed to be devoted to being adversarial to those institutions, which are supposed to be devoted to being adversarial to The only Pulitzer Prize the Guardian ever won in its long history
Was when we published classified material showing the NSA was lying and yet now they want to stigmatize the idea that anybody who is skeptical of the pronouncements of leading institutions of authority or the idea that whatever Ukraine and the Ukrainian government says we have to accept on faith, that person is a conspiracy theorist, why they quote Ann Applebaum All right, let's bring Michael Tracy on.
of the Iraq War and every other lie told to justify American wars since then as the expert on what is and is not disinformation.
This is the game they play all the time.
All right, let's bring Michael Tracy on.
I know he's, as always, very eager, filled with all sorts of insights and all kinds of wisdom that he's dying to share with us.
Michael, are you there?
There you are!
So I'm good to see you.
I'm here.
Glenn, by the way, I'm now going by the title Historian of Authoritarianism.
I mean, it's just so funny that they invent these titles of expertise.
They just assign whoever they want to be the authority on something.
A historian of authoritarianism or the person who you bring on to say what is a lie and what is not.
So first of all, I just showed you the media's reaction to Tucker's return.
They mocked a bunch of the kind of stylistic stuff.
But the reaction to the substance of what he said, which is really just 10 minutes of urging skepticism about the pronouncements of leading institutions of authority, is kind of amazing given that's supposed to be their job and yet now they stigmatize it.
Well yeah, I especially like that passive voice ridicule in the Guardian article where they said that the show was greeted with widespread derision.
That just means we at the Guardian hereby wish to deride Tucker Carlson.
I mean, who are they referring to other than themselves, but then just phrasing it as this passive voice little dig.
And like CNN journalists on Twitter and like other liberal journalists on Twitter, that's what they mean.
The little tiny incestuous world to which they pay attention and that they think is the only one that matters and that exists.
Yeah, clearly the presumption on their part is that they're going to deride the show no matter what.
Now, I think 87.6 million is a bit inflated of a number.
That would make the viewership of the Tucker debut on Twitter a notch below the Super Bowl.
But regardless, there is the potential for this kind of Broadcasting methodology to gain traction, and that would be a threat to the established interests of people who run these media institutions.
I don't know if that's the exact kind of causal motivator for why they're going out of their way to just blindly spew the same kind of ridicule that they always did, but there you have it.
As far as the content that Tucker touched upon in that monologue, It's true that he went fairly, he took a hard line on Ukraine in a way that you wouldn't see virtually anywhere else in the media, but that was also roughly the case when he was at Fox.
I mean, just a month or so after the invasion started, I happened to be in Poland doing reporting, and he had me on the show, and not just that, but he helped confirm, meaning Tucker's producers helped me confirm a story with the Pentagon.
They got confirmation out of the Pentagon confirming that the Pentagon had imposed a gag order on all U.S.
military personnel in Poland to prohibit them from speaking to the media because they didn't want any information to be publicized as to their activities right across the border from Ukraine and Poland.
And that was at a time when there was even more of an intractable consensus around the Ukraine issue and deviating from that consensus was even more Probably of a risky move.
So I think there's actually what's admirable about Tucker, if you want to kind of find a way to praise him, is that what he said in the monologue, there was relatively, almost entirely, I would say, consistent with what you might've expected him to say on Fox.
In other words, he's not kind of dramatically modifying what he's saying based on the medium or the audience, which, I would contend is actually a marker of intellectual consistency.
Yeah, I think it's very hard to say because you're talking about subtleties and gradations, but I think when you have 10 minutes and you pack in not just a news story about Ukraine and you don't only urge skepticism, but you pretty much say, we're being lied to.
It's not that we don't know.
It's almost certainly the case that it was Ukraine and not Russia that did that.
And then you've got to just throw in for good measure what happened on 9-11 and where did Jeffrey Epstein get his money and how did Jeffrey Epstein die and what about those UFOs?
You're pretty much taking a position in the ground where you're saying this show is going to be very unflinching in its refusal to accept as good faith or reliable the claims about Anything that comes from the leading institutions we're told to trust, even going so far as to question the narrative about 9-11 and Jeffrey Epstein.
So I think you can point to times in his show where he did talk about Jeffrey Epstein skeptically, the claim that he was, that he committed suicide and UFOs.
Yeah, absolutely.
Other than 9-11, which I'm not sure.
Yeah, not 9-11, and I think the way that he packed it all in and used very, like, even this language about Zelensky, you know, being like rat-faced and sweaty and Lindsey Graham having an attraction to him.
I think a lot of this stuff is maybe just a slightly more unleashed version of Tucker As compared to how he was on Fox, though I agree with you.
You know, I mean, like I said, you can't really prove it.
It's one show, it's ten minutes.
But to me, having heard Tucker talk about these things a lot on the air, this seems a little bit more aggressive.
And I would hope that he would be, because he doesn't have to be anymore.
Maybe I should retract my statement.
It wasn't probably a bit more audacious than you might expect from just a typical broadcast of the Tucker Carlson Show on Fox.
Not that I was a Regular viewer and I sat around watching it all day, but to the extent that I'm familiar with the contents, this would strike me as probably a bit more audacious.
And I think maybe one way to think about it is, even if it's not deliberate kind of substantive modification of one's content,
If you're on the APM slot on Fox News each night, you have to be mindful, or you inevitably are going to be mindful, that a huge segment of your audience are just going to be kind of default Fox viewers who haven't actively sought you out personally, and maybe don't watch your content or consume what you say because they have a particular ideological affinity with you.
They just have made a habit of watching Fox, including at your hour.
Maybe they like you incidentally, but it's not like they're actively seeking you out.
Whereas if you're not...
Speaking to an audience that has, in a much greater sense, sought you out directly because they're going on to Twitter, they're taking certain steps that they wouldn't have taken if they were just consuming passively your show on Fox, then maybe there is a bit more of a latitude that you have to be totally sort of unrestrained in what you put out there.
Yeah, well I think there's two other aspects to this, which is, and again I'm talking personal experience here, so one is I alluded to this earlier, when you are attached to a media corporation or a news organization that has corporate bosses and senior editors and you have a bunch of colleagues, and especially when you're kind of one of the leading faces of it, the way Tucker was with Fox, the way I was when I was at The Intercept,
There is a kind of subliminal constraint or set of constraints it imposes on you, which are not even really conscious, but you always know that if you're going to go to a certain place that provokes a lot of controversy, that's going to affect not only you, but the entire organization.
You can't not know that.
Yeah, well, I'm saying it kind of gets embedded into your head so that even if you're not consciously interrogating that in that way, that explicit way.
It's just the water you're swimming in, like a fish.
Exactly.
And so once I left the intercept, I realized how kind of liberated I was in ways that I wasn't even aware had been constrained to me before.
And I guarantee you that's going to happen way more so with Tucker, who was under a lot more pressure in terms of having this gigantic news corporation and the Murdochs.
hanging above his head, But the other thing I think that is almost certainly going to happen, and this definitely happened to me, is when I got the intercept under the circumstances that I did, and I realized that I had become victimized by this genuinely illiberal and repressive climate, you know, it wasn't something I was describing any longer.
It was something that had affected me negatively and restricted my ability to speak.
You become a little bit more radicalized about just how corrupted these institutions are and you want to or you're able to speak more clearly about them because you've now kind of personally experienced it.
Tucker got fired despite being the most watched show on that very abruptly and very suddenly in a way I'm certain he feels betrayed by and angry about and kind of thinks is unjust.
And that has to affect going forward how he speaks about a lot of these institutions, including media corporations.
Yeah, and I would think that what you also inevitably would have to supplement is that there's a ton of money that is invested in your position in the institutions So it's not just you on the line that requires you to maybe stay within the confines of a certain set of expectations as to what content you're going to publicize or put out.
In other words, it's not just your own interests that you have to be mindful of, and even financially, it's a whole conglomeration of people's interests that are dependent on you.
And even if you put up guardrails, to kind of insulate yourselves from whatever pressures or potential corrupting influences that presents.
And you can be the most genuine person in the world in wanting to kind of prevent those influences from having any influence on you.
It seems like it's just an inevitable fact of life that it suffuses your world in such a way that there's no, it's just impossible to fully, fully do away with those influences.
Yeah.
So I don't know if you saw this news.
I want to get to the substance of the issue with Ukraine and who blew up the dam, which was the topic of his monologue.
And it's something I want to go over with you.
But just one last thing on this Tucker issue and Fox.
People were a little confused when he said he was going to bring his show to Twitter because it wasn't necessarily the most natural place for him to go, and especially that was the case when it became clear that he had no contract with Twitter.
Twitter's not paying him to be on Twitter.
And the reason, as it turns out, is because Fox's view of their relationship is that Fox has not terminated their contract with Tucker.
He's still an employee of Fox News, according to Fox.
He's still bound by his contract.
They're still paying him under that contract, and it's a lot of money, $15 to $20 million a year.
So if you're talking about, you know, $1.5 million, $2 million every single month that Fox pays to Tucker, every month, $1.5 million.
And their view is because you're still an employee of Fox News, You are prohibited from going anywhere else and working for one of our competitors.
So I think the idea with Tucker was, well, I'm going to just go on Twitter.
I have no contract.
Nobody can say I've taken a job at CNN or even Rumble.
I'm not competing with Fox.
I'm just speaking out on Twitter the way anybody else uses social media to speak out on.
There's no way they can I interpret that as my breaching my contract or trying to silence me there.
And yet right before we on the air, Axios reported that Fox News regards Tucker Carlson as in breach of his contract as a result of him going to Fox and doing a show on Fox, even though he's not being paid by Twitter, not making any money.
I'm sorry, I'm taking a show onto Twitter.
And their view is that for the duration of the contract, which is through 2025, apparently He's barred from being heard publicly in any way, even on social media.
And I have to think there's something ideological about that, that Fox is trying to realign the Republican Party with the old school establishment ideology that it had always been attached to all this time that the Murdochs were promoting it until Donald Trump came along.
And they see Tucker as this hardcore anti-establishment voice who in some way seems so ideologically threatening to the Republican Party and to the Fox News executives who are now trying to kind of have a rapprochement with the Republican Party that they want to use this contract to silence him entirely.
Don't you find that very strange?
Yeah, I mean, I guess it would depend on the actual wording of the relevant clause in the contract, but it would be strange to say that Twitter was one of the competitors that the drafters of the contract had in mind when they inserted that clause prohibiting Tucker from going on the platform of a competitor to Fox.
If anything, Twitter is a supplement to Fox in that Fox, just like every other media outlet, uses Twitter to promote their content and they cite Twitter in their content on broadcasts and so forth.
So it'd be interesting to see how that argument hashes out.
But yeah, I mean, I guess this does potentially lend itself to the theory that there is more of an ideological motivator than maybe some had suspected when he was fired.
That was a popular theory initially that I was a bit more skeptical of, just insofar as given the ambiguities of the circumstances of the firing, it seemed to me that There was probably kind of a more banal explanation that was ultimately at play for it.
And although the ideological explanation might have been a bit more sort of emotionally satisfying, I didn't see a whole lot of evidence for it given that for like, just as I said before, Tucker was going even more against the grain, given the political climate at the time last year ago, than it would have been in April.
So it just didn't add up to me, but I have to be open to evidence.
And if it's established, or if there's a accumulation of evidence that they are seeking to just prevent him from engaging on the public platform at all, even if it couldn't really be conceivably argued to be in breach of that contract, they're still trying to make that argument.
I don't know.
I guess it's possible.
But, you know, at the same time, I do think that these corporate lawyers are pretty, pretty vengeful.
So even if they have to stretch the argument to claim that Twitter is a competitor, maybe they just want to do it just to test their own ability to enforce the I just, I mean, you know, I think Fox has clearly lost a lot by getting rid of Tucker.
I mean, you can see it in the ratings.
You just see it.
They used to get 3 million, you know, viewers a night, starting at 8 o'clock, and then it would kind of go down a little bit, but not much, and now they start off with 1.5 million.
They barely are ahead of MSNBC ever since Tucker's firing.
They're kind of, you know, really brought down a huge peg.
And I would think the last thing Fox would want to do, having angered their viewership to this extent by firing Tucker, is now go to war against him in a way that seems very vindictive, unless there's a real ideological motive.
And I think, you know, I think this has been so overlooked because the liberal wing of the corporate media has been incapable of understanding this.
I think they hate Tucker and his show without really watching it.
It is a very unusual situation to have such radically different agendas from the 8 o'clock show In primetime on Fox to the 9 o'clock show with the second biggest star on Fox, Sean Hannity, where, you know, Sean Hannity is doing what he's always done, which is kissing the ass of every Republican Party leader, cheering on the war in Ukraine, calling everybody a traitor and a Kremlin agent who's against it.
And you have Tucker.
Who is probably the leading voice of everything Sean Hannity is criticizing.
These, you know, the Murdochs clearly have a political agenda.
There's politicians they support, there's ideologies that they hate and that they like, and to have such a radical split Between your two biggest hosts is pretty much unsustainable unless you're only running Fox News as a business and not as a political project.
They don't think anyone has ever thought of the Murdochs as just apolitical, you know, profit mongers.
I mean, they clearly have a political agenda and I think a political agenda is tied to the establishment laying in the Republican Party and they very much want Trump Trump was on Hannity's show again this week.
I mean, it's not as though that Trump has been banished from Fox.
If anything, Hannity is solidifying his ties with Trump.
Yeah, that's fair.
But there was also clearly like an attempt to put DeSantis on.
I mean, they clearly want to elevate DeSantis, I think.
I mean, at the end of the day, they fired Tucker and they didn't fire John Hannity.
Why is that?
Trump is going on vanity every week for a very friendly and lovable town hall.
Yeah, but at the end of the day, Michael, they did fire Tucker and they did not fire Sean Hannity, and there's reports now that Laura Ingraham, the only other voice on there who's really an opponent of the war in Ukraine, is also on her way out, or at least leaving the primetime lineup.
You know, at some point, the proof is in the pudding about who they like and who they don't.
And all of these people were doing fine in the ratings.
The thing that differentiates them is their ideological disposition.
And it's hard not to believe that that wasn't a factor at all, given how these decisions seem to align with that.
No, I think that could probably have been a factor.
I just don't really know how Trump himself factors into that because there was hardly a bigger No, but that's because Trump was the standard bearer of the Republican Party.
There was no way to go against Trump and keep a Republican Party audience.
don't have any actually appeared at campaign events on stage with Trump and campaigned with him actively.
So I just don't know how the- But that, right, that's because Trump was the standard bearer of the Republican Party.
That's because Trump was- In the case that they're trying to get rid of Trump.
No, but that's because Trump was the standard bearer of the Republican Party.
There was no way to go against Trump and keep a Republican Party audience.
You couldn't be openly opposed to Trump during the Trump years or even during the campaign.
I mean, he dominated the campaign and then became the Republican Party nominee and then was the president.
So Sean Hannity was doing what he always does, which is sycophantically hug whoever the standard bearer of the Republican Party is.
I think it remains to be seen what Fox's posture is, what Sean Hannity's posture is to Ronda Sancho- In the past week I just told you Trump was on Hannity's show- Yeah, I'm sure Hannity is- Hannity's never going to be openly hostile to Trump.
But I think Fox and the network is clearly aligning itself more with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, and that is where all the establishment money is going, is behind Ron DeSantis.
All the money that was behind Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush in 2016 is now going to Ron DeSantis.
And even though DeSantis has to position himself as this kind of anti-establishment figure, I think most people in the establishment see him as their best choice for sinking Trump.
And I think Fox is on that side, that they do not want Trump to be the ongoing leader of the Republican Party.
And Tucker Carlson was the single most effective advocate of populist anti-establishment politics within the Republican Party, a much better advocate even than Trump.
And now he's off the air and they're trying to keep him silent, even away from Fox.
And I think the evidence is pretty compelling that that's part of the reason.
Well, I think you're wrong in that DeSantis is most certainly his anti-establishment.
I mean, if the establishment is woke excess on college campus, then, you know, I've never seen anybody who's more anti-establishment.
Yeah, super excited.
That's the emblem of the establishment now is just, you know, college kids doing stupid stuff.
I know that can be a legitimate story at times, but like if your entire political persona is built around combating that particular scourge and nothing else, Then it's amazing to now try to cast that as anti-establishment, as though there are factions of the establishment that are, quote, anti-woke.
Maybe they have been stifled somewhat in the past few years, but to kind of make it... Yeah, because nothing, at the end of the day, nothing serves establishment interests more than keeping everybody focused on the culture war.
Because when you're focused on the culture war, and I'm not saying it's unimportant, it means you're not focused on how financial power, how corporate power, how intelligence and military agencies continue to dominate.
Washington communities are only focused on things like the trans issue to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.
It's a very good way to kind of rile people up and make them think they're doing something radical, but in reality, staying away from establishing power.
It's why it's so popular on the left.
It's 24-7.
It's the only thing people on the left are left with.
Trans establishmentarians should focus 24-7 on this trans issue.
Totally, totally.
There are people on the left the same way.
They know they can't challenge and don't want to challenge any establishment orthodoxy, so fighting Republicans on trans issues.
They don't care about anything else.
They don't care about anything else, exactly.
All right, let's talk about this dam that blew up or got destroyed.
I think it clearly is true that certainly The party that is adversely affected in a major way is Russia.
There's no denying that.
There's pictures of Russian troops, you know, kind of fleeing the waters.
It risks having a consistent water supply to Crimea.
The Ukrainians have talked previously about destroying this dam as a way of undermining Russian interests.
So let's just look at how the corporate media is reporting this story from NBC.
Today, quote, Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up a major dam, Kremlin blames Kiev.
Quote, Ukraine has accused Russian forces of blowing up a vast dam in a Russia-controlled area on the front lines of the war, threatening hundreds of thousands of people across the region and potentially endangering Europe's largest nuclear power plant.
The Washington Post in December of 2022, so five months ago, reported the following, quote, inside the Ukrainian counter offensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the world.
That's the reshape the war.
sparking evacuations and triggering warnings of a, quote, ecological disaster.
The Washington Post in December of 2022, so five months ago, reported the following, quote, inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the world, that's the reshaped the war, that's the headline.
Putin, or rather, Kovachov considered flooding the river, The Ukrainians, he said, even considered a test strike with the HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Kakova Dam, making three holes in the middle to see if the Dnieper's water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.
The test was a success, he said, but the step remained a last resort.
For now, he held off.
The Ukrainians were openly talking about attacking this dam as a countermeasure to impede Russian forces.
Here on Twitter is a picture of Russian soldiers pictured attempting to leave flooded areas on the Russian-controlled side of the Dnipro.
It's probably safe to assume, says this reporter, that Russian equipment would have been lost in defensive positions that are now underwater.
And despite the fact, Michael, that even the U.S.
government is saying we don't have evidence one way or the other, which is usually a sign that it was Ukraine who did it, all sorts of people, like Congressman Ted Lieu, the Democrat from California, are explicitly stating, quote, the blowing up of this dam is another war crime by Russia.
Also, it's well past time for Russia to be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism.
The President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, who is one of the most fanatical supporters of this war, also said, quote, Russia will have to pay for the war crimes committed in Ukraine.
The destruction of the dam, an outrageous attack on civilian infrastructure, puts at risk thousands of people in the Kherson region.
Europe is mobilizing support through our civil protection mechanism.
We also have this British official who also made the same claim, despite the fact that everyone acknowledges there's no evidence as to which party did it.
Listen to him.
This is the U.N.
Ambassador James Karuki, who was talking about the destruction of the dam earlier today.
As you heard the Secretary General say earlier today, this is a consequence of Russia's devastating war in Ukraine, and we call on Russia to end its warmongering.
Now our intelligence agencies are looking into this, but you wouldn't expect me to get ahead of the evidence, but obviously we'll share what we can, when we can.
But in the meantime, we're very clear that we've seen Russia use false flag operations in the past, and we expect them to do so in the future.
Any attack, deliberate attack, on civilian infrastructure would be a walk away.
So he's kind of admitting that we don't actually have proof of who did it, but he's very strongly implying he thinks it was Russia.
He's warning Russia that it would be a war crime if they did it.
Would it be a war crime if Ukraine did it?
And then finally, at the press briefing of National Security Official John Kirby today at the White House, a reporter pressed him pretty hard on whether he had evidence that Russia was responsible, and this is what he said.
So, Michael, that was a good question.
We've come to no conclusions on this.
We're working with the Ukrainians.
We'll try to get as much information as we can.
So, Michael, that was a good question.
I mean, the context of all of this is that we've repeatedly been told that Russia was responsible for all kinds of attacks, including on its own pipeline, including on the Kremlin.
The Ukrainians carried out acts of terrorism inside of Russia.
They blew up a cafe where a Russian nationalist journalist was speaking and it killed him and injured 19 people.
They blew up the car where they targeted another Russian nationalist journalist and murdered his daughter.
The truck bomb on the bridge in Crimea.
Exactly, the bridge in Crimea.
So this is all industrialized terrorism.
And every time it turns out Ukraine did it, although we don't know still whether it was the United States or Ukraine or some combination of US allies that blew up Nord Stream, we know it wasn't Russia.
Every time we're told that it was Russia who did these things, only for these same people to come and admit that, in fact, there's no evidence for it.
So what do you make of this situation?
It seems very similar to all these other prior ones.
Yeah, well, if you notice, a lot of these officials putting out statements, like that British official, they will phrase their language very carefully.
So that British official didn't make an explicit attribution of culpability to Russia.
He said that this was a consequence of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, so they'll resort to sort of gesturing at the kind of more ambient culpability of Russia for anything that goes wrong in Ukraine, given the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine and therefore bad actions just stem from that initial bad act.
And it is true that Russia invaded Ukraine, but I think that's a tactic that they're using, that they can't obviously demonstrate with any evidence that Russia committed this bombing as of yet.
So what they'll do is just kind of make vague sort of misleading statements and they'll use Russia's overall responsibility for Ukraine.
Launching the war as a substitute for establishing responsibility for this particular event.
So it's pretty clever.
I don't think Ted Lieu actually attempted that.
He did make a more explicit attribution of culpability.
I actually asked him yesterday, OK, Ted, does this mean you're on the ground in Ukraine with a forensic scuba diving team?
I mean, if so, please share your findings with us so we can evaluate them and we can see where you're getting all this evidence that's led you to Be empowered to make this conclusive statement as to who committed the act, because you seem to know more than the Biden administration itself.
You have greater intelligence assets in the Biden administration.
The point is, no, obviously Ted Lieu doesn't have greater intelligence assets at his disposal than the Biden administration, but he's willing to still make just claims of fact, statements of fact with zero basis.
I mean, think about what that says about a member of Congress.
They're willing to just straight up make statements that they cannot possibly support.
And so what does that just say about his overall reliability?
I think that's the game though, is that as you say, you saw John Kirby when press saying like, it really doesn't make sense that Russia would have blown up a dam under their control that causes Crimea to be at risk of not getting water, that floods their own troops.
None of that makes sense.
And then John Kirby said, well, we're not accusing them yet.
We don't know.
We're working with the Ukrainians to figure it out.
And then you have, you're right, as the British ambassador suggested that Russia was to blame but only through this roundabout way of acknowledging they don't actually have evidence of who did it and saying basically even if Ukraine did it we're still going to hold Russia responsible because they're the ones who invaded.
Two things about that.
One is you have this whole kind of like B-level of people like Ted Lieu and then you have like Bill Kristol and Ann Applebaum who was accusing Tucker of lying who are just out there affirmatively saying Russia did it.
Timothy Snyder did the same thing.
By the way, Ann Applebaum's husband is the Polish government official who famously tweeted out, thank you USA.
On the day of the Nord Stream bombing with the picture of the bubbles coming to the surface of the sea.
Exactly.
So Timothy Snyder today says, the reason we should believe Ukraine is because Ukraine has always proven to be telling the truth, even though we just went through all the instances, including that one, where they blame Russia for things that either Russia didn't do or that the Ukrainians themselves did.
So it's exactly the opposite of reality.
And then you have...
The historian of authoritarianism, as the Guardian calls her, accusing Tucker Carlson of lying for blaming Ukraine, who herself is out there saying Russia did this along with Bill Kristol and all these other professional liars.
And there's just no evidence for it again and again.
And these are the people.
I saw Ann Applebaum at a forum sponsored by The Atlantic in Aspen about disinformation and the evils of it.
She was up there pontificating about— That was the Aspen Security Forum.
It's a very important forum.
Very important.
Aspen Security Forum.
Very, very important.
All the thought leaders from the liberal establishments are there.
And she's pontificating on the need to regulate disinformation.
All these people think that they're the guardians against disinformation, that you have to censor any views that conflict with their own.
And that they're constantly— These are the same liars, Michael, who have been around since the beginning of the war on terror, who were all the people who disseminated the lies about Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.
And even if you go back a little bit further, you know, to the 90s with Saddam Hussein ripping out babies from incubators when they wanted to overthrow him that first time.
You go back even a little further, but now we're going back pretty long, to the way the Vietnam War started with lies about the Gulf of Tonkin.
It's the same playbook all the time.
And I don't think, I really do think, I'm wondering what you think, that having lived through the Iraq War and the propaganda levels and the lies told about it were pretty significant, I think there was more dissent allowed in the media about the war in Iraq than there is about the war in Ukraine where the propaganda is infinitely worse.
Tom Nichols, Ann Applebaum's colleague at The Atlantic, on the day after the Kremlin was hit by a drone strike, put out one of his nifty little email newsletters saying that this was a false flag attack.
Now, it only took a few weeks, usually it takes a little bit longer, but the pattern still holds, for the New York Times to come out and say, oh, oops, Our intelligence sources say that they now understand this to have been a Ukrainian attack, not a Russian false flag attack.
I mean, there's nothing that they can't convince people of if they could convince people that Russia decided to bomb the Kremlin.
I mean, think about that.
It's almost like a parody.
If that was the extent of the convincing that they were able to do, then they're solid, because they can convince anyone of anything.
And Annie Alphabaum, I didn't see condemning her colleague at The Atlantic or The Atlantic itself for propagating that bit of misinformation about that being a false flag attack, because of course they don't care about any of this.
They don't care about any neutral principle.
It's all their ideological and political investment in this cause.
They themselves are disinformation agents.
They themselves are disinformation agents and the people who spread disinformation more aggressively and destructively than any other entity are these Western media outlets that constantly cite them and give all of their claims utter credence even though there's no evidence for it.
Just on this issue of causation as well.
Let me give you one more thing Glenn, this is really interesting.
Go ahead, go ahead.
I think every media, every bit of coverage in the media ought to have included this information as a disclaimer when they were covering this bomb, this dam explosion yesterday.
Almost instantaneously, because it happened sort of in the middle of the night in Ukraine, but almost instantaneously, in the middle of the night, the top advisor to Zelensky, Andrei Yermak, put out a a tweet and a telegram post saying the following.
I want to congratulate journalists on their day.
Today, your work, and this is only in Ukrainian language, by the way.
Today, your work depends on how quickly the world learns the truth about ecocide and Russian terrorism.
It is on this day that we must win on a diplomatic and informational front in the battle for the truth.
I thank you for your work.
Okay, so that's Zelensky's top official putting out an instruction that, as usual, but even more so on this day of all days, Ukrainian journalists are to subordinate any remnant of journalisticals they might have Ukrainian journalists are to subordinate any remnant of journalisticals they might have to the prerogatives of the
And Zelensky, let's remember, did put through legislation in the Ukrainian parliament in December of last year, essentially consolidating his unilateral control over all media in Ukraine.
So Zelensky himself can unilaterally decide anytime he wants to shut down any media outlet he wants in Ukraine for any reason.
Now, we didn't hear much about that in American media.
So we didn't hear about how that factors into this whole authoritarian versus democracy framework that we're all supposed to be teary eyed about needing to to fight the battle of.
But that happened, and there's his top advisor putting out what could be seen as a veiled threat, or at least a very kind of stern reminder for everyone To adhere to this dictate.
And Ukrainian media are still, as they have been from the outset, being relied upon by US and Western media as sources of information for the goings-on on the ground in Ukraine.
And this is explicitly what they're being directed to advance the interests of.
Not of any kind of independent journalism, which could require scrutiny or skepticism of the state, but subsummation into the state itself.
Yeah, I mean that's why I say I think the propaganda is worse here.
There was certainly a sense in 2002 and 2003 that the job of these media outlets was to act in servitude to the U.S.
security state and to convince Americans this war was necessary, but at least there you had major Western powers like France and Germany Who were vehemently opposed to this war, and there were also sectors of the Democratic Party, mainstream sectors of the Democratic Party, who also were opposed to the vote in the Senate to authorize the war.
It was split in the Democratic caucus, I think, almost evenly.
And so there was some dissent.
Yeah, certain major Democratic figures voted against the war in Iraq, so it wasn't just a totally fringe position like Ted Kennedy voted against it, etc.
So it couldn't be confined to just a handful of gadflies or rejects, right?
It was like a legitimately kind of formidable segment of the American political landscape, whereas that had never really been the case for Ukraine, especially from the outset, maybe slightly more ever so much incrementally in the year plus that's transpired since the war started.
Right, whereas the only no votes, the only opposition votes to the war in Ukraine and the spending on it came from, you know, the sector of the Republican Party that is always marginalized and made fun of and dismissed as being kind of the Trump segment or the MAGA segment of the populist.
Even though you had major figures in the Republican Senate caucus like Josh Hawley, I think Ted Cruz voting no, and 55 Republicans...
Ted Cruz voted yes on everything.
Ted Cruz did not vote no.
Okay, then Josh Hawley definitely did recognize...
Rand Paul obviously did.
And there were, I think, 700 Republican senators.
So that's not nothing.
But it's the segment that easily gets dismissed.
And I think the difference here, though, is that Media figures got convinced in the Trump years that they were no longer supposed to be journalists, that they were supposed to be single-mindedly devoted to the cause of sabotaging the Trump presidency and the Trump movement, which is why, as we started off the show discussing, people were so angry inside CNN at the mere fact that they would put Trump on the air, to the point that that led, the last kind of last straw, to the firing of Chris Licht, and they have now transported that
kind of mission, that missionary zeal that journalism is not really about informing people but it's acting as a disinformation agent on behalf of the just causes, which in this case is the war in Ukraine.
I think they've trained themselves explicitly explicitly far more than 20 years ago that their job, as you said, is not to care about the truth.
It's to tell Americans whatever they think Americans should believe to keep them trained and in line and support the policies they think they ought to be supporting.
Yeah.
Then, you know, during the Iraq war, there was a whole ecosystem of democratic, quote unquote, progressive aligned media that were against the war and against Bush and probably more against Bush than against the war ultimately when you look back on it, but still at least nominally against the war.
And that was a significant constituency with sort of some mainstream purchase that you could Paul Krugman in the New York Times was pretty much against the war, because it was perceived as a Republican war.
Didn't Michael Moore have the best-selling book of 2003 or something that was basically a screed against Bush?
Right, exactly, yeah.
And you just don't have that.
Well, you did have it.
You had Tucker, and then he got fired.
You had it.
You had Tucker and the most important voice on cable news, and then he got fired.
Right, but the progressives...
And those who might oppose the intervention of a Republican president being completely silent means that there's no sort of countervailing force on Ukraine within like activist institutions, within think tanks, within the nonprofit sector, the entertainment sector, the academic sector, all the sectors that have a kind of cultural alignment with the Democratic Party and quote-unquote progressives.
With a capital P and a little trademark logo.
And so that segment of society, which is the segment of society that's easiest to activate or to mobilize into action, like if George Floyd dies, within a week you could have the entire country brimming with protesters On every street corner, you don't really have an analog on the right or among conservatives on that.
Obviously, there's a portion of the right which is activist-inclined, but that doesn't really account for the majority of that portion of the populace in the same way that it does for the left-slash-progressive.
So, if the left-progressive anti-war element is just completely Render neutered neutered then there's not really much of a building block or a foundation to build any kind of larger opposition on, even if you can have these sort of more anomalous right wing figures who will oppose things, but they're not going to be as inclined as the left would be to organize things, right?
Or to wage like big pressure campaigns, boycotts, doing obnoxious protests, like interrupting stuff, right?
That's going to be the left.
So I think that's the dynamic here.
And the majority, the vast majority of Republican politicians in the United States are fully supportive of Joe Biden's war policy.
Every single member, every single presidential candidate who's running, with the exception of Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, maybe Ron DeSantis, he's been very coy and evasive thus far.
Supports Joe Biden.
Because he's getting a lot of establishment money and he wants to reassure the establishment that he's going to be an established politician.
I'm hoping to interview Ron DeSantis.
To be able to specifically ask him that.
I'm not going to hold my breath.
Precisely because they know that I am going to ask him that, I don't think that they're going to appear for an interview because he's going to have to be very specific if he does do an interview with me about what he thinks on those questions and that's the reason why... Yeah, you should do it like when he was on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk where every questioner in the launch session that was advertised as a, quote, debate, a robust debate, was somebody who had to, who was required to proclaim how wonderful Ron DeSantis was at first and basically
Smother a wet kiss right all over his ass.
And then they went into their question that was very debate oriented.
But they still didn't even ask him about Ukraine.
- They still didn't even ask him about Ukraine, even in that.
- Yeah, right. - In that there.
All right, Michael.
- You left out that, hold on, because you left out that the Republican leadership in both chambers of Congress, House and Senate, not just Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, but also their leadership teams, they are almost virtually 100%, I think there might be one minor, like partial exception in the House, but you, Even so, 99.9% in favor of Biden's Ukraine policy, and if anything, have criticized Biden for not being aggressive enough.
So that's the Republicans in the House, who we were supposed to be all frightened were going to dramatically cut off aid to Ukraine and leave Zelensky in the lurch and hand over the Donbass to Putin.
Not only was that never going to happen, If anything, it's the opposite, because they're going to demand even more aggressive methods, and they have.
I mean, the people that McCarthy has installed to the key committees, Mike McCall, Mike Turner... Yeah, those are all the hardcore... They're writing letters constantly saying, send Zelensky clustered munitions.
Right, right.
Send them the F-16s quicker.
That's going to be the criticism of Biden is that he didn't do more.
He didn't act aggressively enough.
He should have given more to Zelensky more quickly.
Absolutely.
All right, Michael, I was about to say, and then you ruined it at the end, but you were very well behaved and constrained today for the most part.
Got a little excited there at the end, but I don't know what happened.
It was a very dignified version of Michael Tracy.
We really appreciate your taking the time as always.
I have a 30-minute timer on how long I can remain well behaved in your presence.
I know.
That's why I was trying to go before you.
I knew you were going to lose control and you were hanging on by a little thread.
And I didn't get to go quickly enough.
See, my eye's getting more and more ravaged.
Exactly, exactly.
You're getting all agit-y in your chair.
All right, Michael, have a great evening.
Thank you for joining us.
All right, sign off.
Bye.
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