Fox News, Waving the Free Speech Banner, Launches a Flagrant Censorship Campaign Against Tucker | SYSTEM UPDATE #99
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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, Fox News loves to wave the banner of free speech, accusing others of censorship.
Yet they are currently waging one of the most flagrant censorship campaigns against an influential public voice seen in some time.
Seeming out of nowhere, Fox in April fired the host of its 8 p.m.
program, Tucker Carlson.
They took him off the air effective immediately, not even with an opportunity to speak to his audience of millions of loyal viewers one last time.
And they did so despite the fact that Carlson not only hosted the most popular show on Fox, but was the most successful host in the history of cable news as a medium.
So why did Fox fire Carlson?
Nobody knows for sure.
There's been a lot of speculation about it, but one fact seems increasingly clear as the evidence emerges.
At least part of the motive appears ideological.
That is because Fox is not content simply to remove Carlson from its airwaves, nor are they really content to enforce a non-compete clause in his contract which bans him from taking a show to a competing network, such as CNN, MSNBC, Newsmax, or one of the other networks, until the end of his contract in 2025.
Fox is going far beyond that.
They are demanding that Carlson be silent everywhere, in every venue, until 2025, upon threat of being sued by that corporate giant.
That includes social media, where every Fox host and reporter, like employees of almost all news outlets, have always been free to speak.
Two or three times a night, Carlson is posting 10 to 12 minute videos on particular issues onto Twitter, onto his Twitter account.
He's doing this for free and under no contract with Twitter.
There's no conceivable argument that Twitter is a competing network to Fox, and yet, Fox is demanding that he even stop speaking on Twitter.
There is no commercial rationale for Fox's position.
They are insisting on paying Carlson $20 million a year just to remain silent.
Why would they view his silence as so valuable?
If one assembles all the facts, as we will tonight, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Fox and the Murdochs are now seeking to realign the Republican Party with the same establishment dogma the Murdochs have always supported.
That's the party of Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell, and Marco Rubio, and not the party of Tucker Carlson.
By threatening to sue Tucker Carlson if he speaks anywhere, they are clearly seeking to silence the single most influential anti-establishment, anti-war, and anti-corporatist voice in Republican politics, if not in the country.
And no matter how you slice that, the effect, if not the intent, is clearly to impose radical censorship, highly consequential censorship, on our political discourse.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the defining political debates of our time that often separates right versus left is the question of free speech and censorship.
And Fox News has planted itself very flamboyantly on the side of free speech and against censorship, running segment after segment after segment for years.
Including ones of which I was a part, in which they denounce any attempt by large corporations, including Big Tech, to keep particular voices silent on the grounds that those corporations dislike the ideology of the speaker.
And yet it seems very clear, and this is something I've waited two months to argue because I wasn't sure that it was true until now, that Fox News is seeking to keep its previously top-rated host Tucker Carlson completely silent on every conceivable media platform, despite the fact that Fox, out of nowhere two months ago, decided to fire Tucker Carlson unceremoniously and immediately and remove him from its own airwaves.
As you almost certainly know, once Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox and his show was canceled and he was removed from the air, he announced that he would be starting to comment on various issues on Twitter, one of the very few places where he felt he could do so and have free speech.
He didn't go to CNN.
He didn't try and negotiate a deal to go to NBC or MSNBC or any of the networks.
He simply decided he would use social media.
Like millions and millions of people do as his place where he could now be heard.
And he was very clear, as was Twitter and Elon Musk, that there was no contract governing the relationship between Tucker Carlson on the one hand and Twitter on the other.
Twitter's not paying Tucker Carlson to speak on Twitter.
He's not charging subscriptions.
He doesn't seem to be making any money at all from doing it.
He's simply trying to use his First Amendment rights to be heard on critical issues now that he is denied any platform on Fox.
It's not just that Fox canceled his show.
They removed him completely from the airwaves.
He doesn't appear on any programs on Fox.
In fact, the name Tucker Carlson Ever since that first night, when they had to announce that he was gone, has not been mentioned on Fox News.
And according to at least one guest, Chad McMorris, who's now writing a book on Tucker, he is banned from Fox because they believe he will talk about Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson is unmentionable on Fox News, apparently, according to the management.
And they are now going out of their way, taking very extreme steps to try and ban him from being heard at all.
Now let's start with the basics of what Fox is doing.
As I said, Tucker has posted so far three episodes of just a monologue, a 10 to 12 minute monologue, no guests, nothing else that resembles his show, onto Twitter, three times in almost a week and a half.
So it seems to be a show that, or a video that will air twice a week on Fox.
I don't know when it airs.
Look at it and watch it the way they do other videos on Twitter, whenever they see it, whenever they find it.
Clearly a 10-minute show is not intended to be a live show to distract other people or take people away from watching television.
It's only 10 minutes long.
It's not appointment viewing, the way his previous Fox show was.
And yet, Fox is adamant, emphatic, that he is not allowed to speak, even on Twitter, that he's allowed to speak nowhere, that you are not supposed to hear From Tucker Carlson at all until 2025, until notably after the 2024 election is over, after the GOP primary is done, the Republican Party picks its nominee.
After the various criminal cases now facing Donald Trump work their way through the criminal justice system and until the 2024 election is held you're not supposed to hear from one of the most influential voices in all of American politics at all because Fox News has decided that they're going to threaten to sue him if he speaks.
Not if he speaks on a competitor or a competing network, but anywhere, including social media.
Here from the New York Times on, I believe this is June 12th, so I believe this is Monday, there the headline is, Fox News Tells Tucker Carlson to Stop Posting Videos on Twitter.
Quote, Fox News has demanded that Tucker Carlson stop posting videos to Twitter, escalating the dispute between the network and its former star host over how and if he can continue to speak publicly now that his primetime show is off the air.
In a letter sent to Mr. Carlson from Fox lawyers, the network accused him of violating the terms of his contract, which runs until early 2025 and limits his ability to appear in media other than Fox.
The letter is labeled, quote, NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN ALL CAPS.
It's so funny.
When lawyers think they have the right to order you to keep their threatening letters a secret, as though they're allowed to create some legal obligation on your part that you have to keep it concealed just by ordering you to do so, as though if they make it in all caps, it's somehow extra-official.
Lawyers have no right to send you a letter and then force you to keep it a secret.
Only the government has that power, and even that power is abusive when the FBI sends you a subpoena and orders you under a gag rule not to mention it.
But private lawyers don't have that right.
But the fact that they're reporting to Tal Tucker, he's not even allowed to discuss what Fox is doing to him, shows how thuggish they are trying to be with him.
Quote, after the discovery of one particularly incendiary text from Mr. Carlson, the Fox Corporation board decided to begin an internal investigation into his conduct.
Now remember, it was the Fox board It's very important to look at the Fox board, who composes that board and what their politics are.
Because when it comes to the question of whether Fox is acting ideologically or politically as opposed to solely in their corporate financial interest, seeing who's on the board and what their politics is and how that politics relates to Tucker Carlson's views is extremely revealing.
The New York Times goes on, quote, Mr. Carlson's cancellation, he is still an employee of Fox unless the network decides to let him out of his contract, has upended Fox's lucrative and popular primetime lineup.
Fox, the perennial top rated cable news network, has seen its lead over its competitors slide.
Roughly one third of its primetime audience has tuned out.
Since Mr. Carlson was taken off the air.
Think about how significant that is.
Fox, with one personnel decision, lost a third of its audience.
33%.
It's just, Fox viewers are just gone.
They would show up at 8 o'clock to watch Tucker.
They would stay for the subsequent shows by Hannity and Laura Ingraham, sometimes show up early to watch Jesse Watters.
And other than Greg Gutfeld, who amazingly leads all programs at 11 p.m., all these late night stars like Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, Greg Gutfeld is the most watched late night host in the country, and he still is.
He seems insulated for the most part, but other than him, Fox's primetime lineup is decimated.
Their ratings are in freefall as a result of Tucker's firing, and they don't seem to be recovering.
So for those of you who want to argue, and I already heard this when we promoted this topic of the show, that Fox is somehow only acting in its corporate interest to maximize their profits.
If that were true, please tell me why they would have fired their most watched host.
They had to have known, these are people whose jobs it is to understand this industry, that Tucker commanded a uniquely loyal audience.
I could have told you this.
Just from seeing how people react to him in public, seeing how he just for years has maintained the most watched show.
You could see them going there at 8 o'clock to watch Tucker.
I can't tell you how many people I know who are not conservatives who watch Tucker Carlson and never would dream of watching other Fox shows.
It's obvious he was doing something unique.
He was doing something different.
He was doing something that was attracting a lot of attention, including often he was leading The demographic of 24 to 54 Democrats.
Because for all the numbers that sometimes look decent for MSNBC, never for CNN, but sometimes for MSNBC, the reality is almost their entire audience is old.
And the reason that matters is because in cable, the only audience that matters in terms of monetizing the audience are people who are 24 to 24, 25 to 54.
Advertisers have no interest in old people because they're already very set in their ways in terms of what they buy.
They're not very consumeristic.
Advertisers only pay for access to young audiences.
And MSNBC and CNN have none.
And Tucker, aside from posting the largest numbers overall, was posting very large numbers in that key demographic and keeping them there.
And now that he's off, they're gone.
So if you want to tell me That Tucker Carlson's, that the attempt to silence Tucker Carlson by Fox is just a sort of standard thing that corporations do to protect their economic self-interest.
I'm going to show you a lot of evidence, which I hope you'll hear with an open mind, to disprove that view.
But let me start with this question.
If that is really the case, if Fox were only motivated by its economic interest, why did they fire their biggest star, the most highly rated show host?
And cancel the most popular show on their air, knowing that it would drive away viewers.
Why would they do that?
That was an economic hit, a massive economic hit that they've taken, which is not consistent with a corporation acting in their economic self-interest.
I can think of other reasons why you would want to fire a well-watched host.
In 2012, when Glenn Beck was posting numbers at 5 o'clock, the 5 o'clock hour, some of the things he was saying were offensive to the Murdoch family, were offensive and embarrassing to the Republican establishment.
And ultimately drove away advertisers and so they fired Glenn Beck or didn't renew his contract even though he continued not at the peak to post the same ratings but incredible ratings for the five o'clock hour and he was gone.
They didn't want him there despite the fact that he drew so many viewers because of the content of what he was saying.
The ideas he was expressing were no longer consistent with the corporate agenda of Fox News.
Now, one of the things that is so overlooked is how much ideological divergence and dissonance there is within Fox News.
The American liberals, the Democratic Party, the left, love to think of themselves as this very intellectually vibrant, independent-minded group that disagrees on so many things.
And if you turn on CNN, if you turn on MSNBC, you will never see the hosts disagreeing with each other on virtually anything.
You will never see Democratic Party leaders being criticized in any meaningful way.
Maybe occasionally on strategic grounds that they're not being mean enough to the Republicans, but nothing substantive.
Nothing ideological or political.
They are in total alignment, total agreement.
And yet on Fox, if you watch the 8 o'clock show hosted by Tucker Carlson, and then watch the 9 o'clock show hosted by Sean Hannity, and then watch the 10 o'clock show hosted by Laura Ingraham, you would feel like you were in a bizarre, ideologically confused world.
Because Tucker Carlson's views on so many critical issues were not just different then, but radically divergent from the views held by Sean Hannity.
Starting with the most important foreign policy question that we face right now, which is the U.S.
proxy war in Ukraine, which Tucker vehemently opposed, Sean Hannity vehemently supports, and then Laura Ingram also opposed.
But it goes all the way down to the question of U.S.
imperialism in general, the wisdom of pursuing regime change wars and sanctioning other countries to try and change their governments in Syria, in Venezuela, in In terms of how you view the benevolence or malevolence of the U.S.
security state, Tucker Carlson was a vehement critic of regime change operations and the idea that we should be spending money on foreign countries, whereas Sean Hannity wears CIA label lapels on his jacket and cheers for the war in Ukraine and says we have to fight Russia until the end.
This kind of divergence ideologically within Fox News and within the primetime lineup is unheard of in cable.
And so there clearly are grave political differences between Tucker Carlson and most of the other Fox personalities.
And the fact that they fired Tucker, but not anyone else, including all these people who have very different political views than he, who support the GOP establishment, rather than spend all their time bashing it, is a pretty good clue about why Tucker was singled out.
This is certainly Tucker Carlson view.
Here is a tweet from his lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, who posted on the day the New York Times article came out in response to it, quote, My friend and client, Tucker Carlson, will not be silenced, not by the far left or by Fox News.
Scoop, Fox sends Tucker Carlson a cease and desist letter.
She was linking to the Axios story that Reported that and here is that story to which he was responding.
This is the day Right before the New York Times article came out from Axios scoop Fox sends Tucker Carlson cease and desist letter It's the same letter that the New York Times is describing quote Fox News has sent a cease and desist letter to Tucker Carlson as he ramps up a competing series on Twitter that drew a combined 169 million views for its first two episodes Axios has learned Fox is continuing to pay Carlson and maintains that his contract keeps his content exclusive to Fox for the end of 2024.
Carlson is making a First Amendment argument for posting on Twitter and asserts that Fox has committed material breaches of his contract.
Now, just to illustrate to you How severe the collapse in ratings is at Fox as a result of Tucker Carlson's firing.
Let me show you somebody who is an expert in this question, Megyn Kelly, who worked for more than a decade in cable news, including many years on Fox's primetime.
She hosted the 9 p.m.
show after Bill O'Reilly.
She obviously understands as well as anybody does the how to read ratings and what the ratings show since her career depended on understanding that for many many years she's very smart and that's certainly something she would understand listen to how she was describing the collapse in fox's ratings
just a few days ago after tucker's firing msnbc became within 15 000 viewers of taking the month off of fox in the key advertising demo of 2550 if you were I don't remember when that's ever happened before.
Within 15,000.
Now, both of the numbers are down in the basement.
135,000 was Fox's demo average in May in the prime time.
My God.
MSNBC had 120,000.
That's nothing.
That's embarrassing.
Ben Shapiro, we would be embarrassed to be logging those kinds of numbers.
But even just this week, on Monday, we pulled the numbers.
7 p.m., Jesse Watters almost lost to Joy Reid.
He did lose to her on Tuesday.
Jesse Watters lost to Joy Reid on Tuesday.
The 8 p.m.
hour on Monday, Harris Faulkner's in.
She lost both to CNN and to MSNBC.
Tucker Carlson has never done that in his life.
That's never happened.
Just listen to that.
Fox's strength in the last six years was the 8 o'clock hour.
Tucker Carlson would destroy Chris Hayes at the 8 o'clock hour.
He would have often five, six times the amount of people viewing in the key demographic as Chris Hayes would.
Tucker would usually have significantly more than MSNBC and Fox combined.
And yet now without Tucker, Fox is losing outright to both MSNBC and CNN in the 8 o'clock hour, which is where Tucker was.
An hour that he was dominating.
They're losing to CNN and MSNBC two months after they fired Tucker.
That audience is gone.
Tell me who's going to get that audience back.
Because that audience was there for a very specific worldview that Tucker offers and nobody else does.
I don't think he's replaceable.
Now, let's listen to the rest of her numbers.
They're apocalyptic for Fox.
He was getting four times these ratings.
And indeed, it's been, I think I wrote down, it's what, a 62% drop in the Fox News demo average for primetime year over year.
Year over year, Fox has lost 62%.
Hannity, too, lost.
percent.
Hannity, too, lost.
He lost to Cooper and Maddow on Monday night.
My God, the entire primetime is blown up, Chad.
The entire primetime lineup is blown up.
Now, if you want to argue to me that Fox here is acting with financial motives and ideological ones, I want you to explain to me why they would have done this.
And not only did they do it, they're now making it worse.
They're declaring war on Tucker publicly.
How do you think his loyal audience is going to perceive that?
Do you think that's going to make it more likely or less likely that they will go back to Fox at some point, knowing that Fox is completely betraying its claim values, constantly waving the flag of free speech, talking about the evils of censorship when the left does it?
And yet they're using all of their resources, their corporate lawyers, every single conceivable argument that they can to keep Tucker silenced, even from speaking to his audience on Twitter.
How do you think that's going to be perceived?
If they were really concerned only about Their corporate financial self-interest and not a political or ideological agenda separate from it.
Is this what they would be doing?
It makes no sense at all unless you see it through an ideological prism.
Which is what makes that censorship so much worse.
It would be one thing if all Fox was doing was trying to enforce a standard non-compete clause because they don't want Tucker going to CNN or MSNBC and stealing Fox's audience.
Which is why they negotiate that non-compete cause in a contract.
That makes sense to me.
But he's not competing with Fox.
Fox's audience collapsed.
Their ratings collapsed before Tucker uttered a word on Twitter.
And no one can make a good faith argument that Tucker being on Twitter has any meaningful impact on whether people are watching Fox.
It's a 10 minute show that you can watch at any time.
If people want to watch Harris-Fockner at 8 o'clock p.m., or whoever they put in that chair, they are free to, and they can also watch Tucker.
There is no actual conflict between Fox's attempt to keep their audience and having Tucker be on Twitter.
None.
There is no rational way to make that connection.
So then the question was, well, what is the ideological agenda I'm talking about?
What is the ideological motive that I'm talking about?
It is no secret that a large segment of the GOP elite, not GOP voters, the GOP elite are completely tired of Trump.
They want him gone from the Republican Party, excised.
And for a long time the person they viewed as the only one who could achieve that, who would both get rid of Trump Appeal to Republican voters by purporting to follow in Trump's ideological footsteps and yet in reality being someone the establishment would be very comfortable with was Ron DeSantis.
And there is ample reporting.
About the fact that Fox began positioning itself as a booster of Ron DeSantis and the Murdoch family in particular.
This is certainly something President Trump has been complaining about loudly for a long time, that Fox is clearly pro-DeSantis, urging his viewers to no longer watch Fox.
And while Tucker was no shield to Trump, he criticized Trump often, not just in private, but in public.
When Trump decided he wanted to kill General Soleimani, the Iranian general, Tucker went on the air and said, why would we possibly risk a war with Iran?
To kill this Iranian general.
He has often been critical of Trump's foreign policy in particular, of his character flaws.
Just this week he talked about how Trump's big weakness is his susceptibility to being flattered, and as a result hiring people who are there to sabotage him, who do not share his agenda, which I think is Trump's worst weakness, was the thing that he did most that undermined his presidency, putting people like Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley or John Bolton, simply because they succeeded in flattering him.
So Trump is no, Tucker is no Trump-shill.
But ideologically, he's clearly more aligned with the anti-establishment populism that has become the dominant ideology of the Republican Party under Trump and has contempt for the GOP establishment in its ideology.
Contempt for it.
In fact, Tucker has spent more time on his show attacking the GOP establishment than the Democratic establishment.
Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy.
That's who his targets were.
And so what Fox succeeded in doing was removing a huge roadblock to its ideological agenda of realigning the Republican Party with GOP establishment politics.
Now, I understand that DeSantis is kind of a blank slate on a lot of questions.
He's been the governor of Florida, so understandably he hasn't spoken much about any of these questions involving foreign policy and war or the U.S. security state.
The one time he talked about Ukraine and seemed to have sent signals that he was kind of reluctant to support it, he kind of walked it back when huge numbers of people in the Republican Party screeched about it, including GOP funders.
But we should hear from Governor DeSantos.
I'm not ready to proclaim him to be an establishment representative, although I think clearly establishment forces in the Republican Party see him that way, which is why the big GOP funders are lined up behind DeSantis.
I put in a request, I think a week ago or 10 days ago, to the DeSantis campaign, asking for a sit-down interview with him.
I would fly to Ford, I would sit down with him, I would interview him about all of these issues on which we've heard very little from him, including the war in Ukraine, his views about confronting China, his views of free speech, about the CIA and the FBI.
I'd want to hear from DeSantis.
And if it's not me who interviews him, someone should sit down and get to interview him on those questions.
We haven't heard from him very much at all.
It's kind of a big oversight for a presidential candidate.
But clearly there are people, including the Murdochs, who see DeSantis as the figure that can bring the GOP back to the pre-Trump establishment dogma that the Murdochs have always believed in and still do.
So let's look at one report from CNN.
There you see the headline, quote, it's not an accident.
Murdoch's media empire celebrates DeSantis as the future of the GOP after the midterms.
Quote, Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who controls some of the most powerful organs in conservative media, appeared to make clear Wednesday that he would prefer to cast aside former President Donald Trump in favor of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the leader of the Republican Party.
The New York Post, a tabloid Murdoch controls, hailed DeSantis' election night victory on its front page Wednesday morning.
Quote, the future.
The headline in the Post blared alongside a photo of DeSantis and his family celebrating their major win in the Sunshine State.
On Fox News, The dominant television voice Murdoch controls.
Significant attention was given on Wednesday to DeSantis' victory.
Quote, I think Governor DeSantis is the single biggest winner of the night, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Fox & Friends, adding that he will, quote, almost certainly become the rallying point for everybody in the Republican Party who wants to move beyond President Trump.
The homepage of Fox News also prominently featured a column by conservative commentator Liz Peek that declared DeSantis, quote, the new leader of the Republican Party.
Fox News dubbed it a new era.
And the Wall Street Journal, the broadsheet owned by Murdoch, the newspaper's conservative editorial page, published a piece proclaiming the, quote, DeSantis Florida tsunami.
Quote, there's little doubt that his Florida success will grab the attention of voters outside the Sunshine State, the editorial board wrote.
You can bet Donald J. Trump was watching unhappily.
Now, that is the breach, the ideological breach within the Republican Party.
And I don't understand how anyone can have doubts about on which side the Murdochs fall.
They have been promoting the same Republican ideology and the same establishment figures For decades, you think they just overnight became MAGA populists and anti-war figures and anti-imperialist and anti-corporatist of the kind that Donald Trump represented and that Tucker Carlson increasingly advocates?
I can't prove what was in Rupert Murdoch's mind or Lachlan Murdoch's mind.
I can never prove that to you.
All I can do is show you the evidence that is suggestive of their motive, and there is a very real and important and consequential ideological division, a sharp ideological division on key issues, not ancillary ones, within right-wing and Republican politics, and Tucker Carlson is on one side of that divide, and the Murdochs are on the other.
They absolutely have ideological conflict.
Now, in case you think I'm overstating that, when The world learned that Tucker Carlson was fired.
Among the people leading the celebrations were top-level Republican politicians.
They are thrilled that Tucker is off the air.
Why?
Why are GOP lawmakers thrilled that Tucker is no longer on Fox News?
Because the ideology he advocates is one that is In conflict with the ideology they advocate, that the Republican establishment believes in.
Obviously there's some overlap on culture war issues, on immigration, but by and large on the questions that determine where real power and real wealth are distributed.
Tucker's views are wildly at odds with the Republican establishment.
The Republican establishment is much closer to the views of Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio and Joe Biden than they are to Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump.
That is the split in the Republican Party.
Look at this from Axios.
The headline, this is after Tucker was fired, quote, good riddance.
Republican lawmakers private glee at Tucker Carlson firing.
Obviously, it goes without saying, that if some other leading cable host on CNN or MSNBC were fired, you would never see a headline, let's say Rachel Maddow got fired or Don Lamond got fired.
You didn't see a headline with Don Lamond getting fired.
You wouldn't see one with Rachel Maddow getting fired saying, Democratic lawmakers are gleeful that they're gone, that they made our lives so hard because they don't make their lives so hard.
There's a unified democratic dogma and everyone on CNN and MSNBC promotes it and promotes Democratic Party leaders.
Tucker, by contrast, was a vicious critic of the Republican establishment and he often named names.
He made life difficult for Republican lawmakers and the establishment and that's why they were celebrating.
The fact that he's now off the air.
Here's what Axios said.
Quote, a sizable number of Republican lawmakers are quietly cheering Fox News' decision to remove Tucker Carlson from its airwaves as making it easier to provide aid to Ukraine, Axios has learned.
Why it matters.
Carlson was one of the most vocal critics of continued support to Ukraine, often going after lawmakers by name on his program.
His commentary was a source of regular heartburn for defense hawks.
One House Republican pointed to Speaker Kevin McCarthy's rhetoric this week as a sign of the tides potentially changing.
McCarthy, who earlier opposed giving a, quote, blank check to Ukraine, gave his full-throated support while speaking to reporters in Israel on Monday.
So, that was something that was very important that happened.
Very deceitful.
When Kevin McCarthy was desperate for the Republicans to win the midterm election, he believed that the public was tiring of endless support to Ukraine.
And so he sent signals, much like Ron DeSantis did, that he was starting to become a little bit more scrutinizing about how much money is flowing to Ukraine.
Saying, well, we're not going to give a blank check if I win.
It wasn't a very meaningless claim.
Nobody says, I'm going to give a blank check.
No one ever says that.
But the rhetoric was interpreted, as he intended, to be a promise that he would start pulling in the rain some on this endless flow of money from the U.S.
Treasury into the coffers of Zelensky and his friends in Ukraine.
And he also needed to say that to get the votes within the Republican caucus needed to win the speakership.
As soon as he won the speakership, as soon as the Republicans won the midterm, barely, and then put the Republicans in the majority and then McCarthy won the speakership, he immediately turned around, he made all of the hawks in the Republican Party Who vehemently support Joe Biden's policy in Ukraine, who are hardcore supporters of Biden's policy in Ukraine, who seek a hawkish confrontation with China.
He made those people to his committee chairs.
And then Kevin McCarthy turned around with Michael McFaul at his side, one of the harshest pro-war hawks in the Republican Party, to standard neocon right out of the Bush-Cheney era, who's now the Speaker and the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
And Kevin McCarthy went on cable and smirked, we showed you this when it happened, saying, of course I support the war in Ukraine.
I'm a vehement supporter of it.
I agree with Joe Biden.
We need to be there until the very end.
We'll give Ukraine everything they want.
He just lied to the public to win that midterm and then get the speakership and then turn around and said, of course I didn't mean that.
I said it to deceive people.
So when Tucker was fired, basically the most important voice by far, voice by far on TV against the US role in the war in Ukraine, All these Republicans who want to support and fund Joe Biden's war celebrated, according to Axios, quote, what they're saying.
Multiple House Republicans speaking on the condition of anonymity because they're all cowards slammed the former Fox News host's rhetoric on Vladimir Putin and Russian aggression and said his inflammatory remarks on an array of issues often put them in a tough spot.
Quote, Tucker being gone makes my life easier with many things.
Think about what a coward you have to be to be a member of Congress and imply that Tucker was doing the bidding of the Kremlin and be afraid to put your name on that accusation.
quote, "Well, no one is more unhappy about Tucker's departure than the Russians," another House Republican added.
Think about what a coward you have to be to be a member of Congress and imply that Tucker was doing the bidding of the Kremlin and be afraid to put your name on that accusation.
You run to Axios like a little coward And you say, I'm willing to criticize Tucker, but only if you let me hide behind anonymity.
I would never want to put my name on this criticism.
You're a member of Congress and you're begging the media to let you slam people as Kremlin agents while hiding who you are.
It's pathetic.
A third lawmaker argued that Carlson quote, thrived on destroying Republicans.
I say, good riddance.
Isn't it amazing that if you ask a liberal, They would tell you that Fox News is just this unified, homogenous network showing for the Republican Party, and yet the minute Tucker Carlson is fired, what do you see leading Republican politicians celebrating?
The fact that Tucker is now not on the airwaves anymore because of the fact that he constantly attacked them.
Let me just remind you of one of the attacks that Tucker launched against Kevin McCarthy.
Not just some random member of Congress in the Republican Party, but the leader of the Republican caucus in 2021.
Someone who obviously wanted to be Speaker and then he did become Speaker.
Tucker Carlson had gone on his show several days earlier and made a lengthy report on Frank Luntz's ties to Google.
Frank Luntz, as you probably know, is a longtime Republican pollster.
He carries great weight within Republican establishment circles.
He advises them on how to frame issues.
He tells them which issues they should pursue and how to talk about them.
He's sort of like the guru of Republican Party politics.
He had a lot of influence in Republican Party circles in D.C.
and has had that for a long time.
And for that reason, companies like Google paid Frank Luntz a lot of money to do their bidding.
He's a lobbyist for Google.
And he uses that influence in the Republican Party to do Google's bidding and to enrich himself.
He doesn't use that influence in the Republican Party on your behalf or on the behalf of any American citizen.
He enriches himself and then pours out his influence for Google and other companies.
So Tucker did a long segment on Frank Luntz's ties to Google.
At the same time, the Republican Party is claiming to its voters who don't trust Big Tech that they're willing to go to war for Big Tech.
In reality, the most important people in their caucus are listening to someone who is a Google lobbyist, Frank Luntz.
And then, a couple of days later, a very reliable source told Tucker that Kevin McCarthy is living with Frank Luntz.
Living with him.
A roommate.
In other words, the head of the Republican Party caucus in the House.
Constantly telling their voters Big Tech is their enemy is living in an apartment in Washington when he's in Washington with a Google lobbyist.
And Tucker said, even though this source was someone he's known for years and found totally reliable, he thought the story was too incredible to believe.
He didn't believe it.
So he contacted Kevin McCarthy's office, thinking that of course they would deny it.
And then it turned out it was totally true.
And here's part of what Tucker Carlson did to Kevin McCarthy over this fact, in case you're wondering why the Republican establishment hated Tucker Carlson so much and is so glad he's gone.
Listen to what he did in this segment.
But this morning, since we heard it, we called to check with Kevin McCarthy's spokeswoman.
And when we raised this, she all but chuckled at the suggestion.
No!
When he's in Washington, she told us Kevin McCarthy rents hotel rooms or sleeps in his office in the Capitol.
He certainly isn't living with Frank Luntz.
Okay.
And that seemed logical to us.
But we did press a little bit because we got the tip from someone we consider reliable and we just wanted to be sure.
So the spokeswoman said she would get back to us.
Two hours later, we got this text, quote, following up on our conversation from earlier today.
Because of the pandemic, McCarthy has rented a room in Washington at a fair market price from Frank Luntz.
So actually, the top Republican in the House does live with someone who lobbies for Google.
Mystery solved.
Not only are they friends, they're roommates.
So now you know why they listen to Frank Luntz, but they don't listen to you.
Okay, so there's, that's a little on-screen graphic.
Let's see if we can pull that up.
There it is.
The little on-screen graphic that they made.
This is Tucker viciously mocking the head of the Republican House caucus.
Imagine somebody on MSNBC or CNN doing this to a Democrat.
It's unthinkable!
Unthinkable!
And yet, every single time I was asked to go on Tucker's show, I either heard him before my segment, or during our segment, spent a lot of time bashing Republican Party establishment ideology.
And increasingly he became an opponent, an enemy, of that ideology.
He often talked about it being a uniparty.
Permanent, bipartisan consensus in Washington that will distract you with culture war issues.
They're thrilled to bicker about trans kids and abortion and gun control, things of that nature, to make it seem like they're at each other's throats all the time.
But in reality, on the most important questions that determine how policy is made, what the role of the United States is, how wealth and power are distributed, they're completely on board with each other.
And that's why the vast majority of the Republican establishment is completely supportive of Joe Biden's policy in Ukraine.
And not just his policy in Ukraine, but his foreign policy generally.
Nancy Pelosi made a point of meeting with the Prime Minister of Taiwan, something that had been long considered provocative to the Chinese, and then Kevin McCarthy did exactly the same thing.
They have the same exact views on Israel.
They fund the CIA and the FBI and the Pentagon limitlessly.
They're in bed together on so many issues.
And usually people in positions of significant media influence who work for big media corporations like Fox will never ever talk about that.
Their job is to promote to you the theater that the Republican and the Democratic parties are completely and radically different.
That's why you get to know that you are so grateful to live in a democracy like the United States, where you have these completely different choices.
Elections matter so much because Marco Rubio gets along about nothing with AOC, or Nancy Pelosi is so radically different from Lindsey Graham, when in reality the opposite is true.
And Tugger Carlson was one of the very few people pointing that out.
In one of the most influential spots in the media.
And not just pointing that out, but being a leading voice against Washington's most important policies, including or beginning with the proxy war in Ukraine.
And now he's gone.
That voice, that anti-establishment voice, was removed from the air.
And there are people who want to claim that that's just a huge coincidence.
That there's nothing ideological about it?
That the Murdochs are completely embedded with and in bed with the Republican establishment and their decision to fire Tucker had nothing to do with the fact that Tucker became a core enemy of the Republican establishment?
What kind of naivete must you be drowning in to believe that?
That this is bereft of ideology?
Or that Fox's attempt to keep Tucker silenced Through the end of 2024 is also bereft of ideology as though the Murdochs are not ideological actors.
Of course, they're ideological actors.
Now, let me just show you one of the Clips from one of the 10-minute monologues that Tucker posted onto Twitter because I think what has happened is I noticed this when I left The Intercept.
I've talked about this before when I quit The Intercept in October of 2020 after they refused to publish my article reporting on Joe Biden and the Hunter Biden laptop and the contents of it and how the media was treating it because they were petrified of publishing anything before the election that people could blame them for if Trump won.
And so I quit in protest.
And one of the things that happened was after I quit and I went truly independent, I went to Substack, I freed myself completely from any corporate structure.
I had no more corporate colleagues or board of directors or editors.
There were so many ways in which I didn't realize I had been constrained by being there that I began to understand and perceive only once I left.
There's just all sorts of subliminal ways that being part of a corporation constrains you.
You realize that the things you say and do affect them.
You realize that there are certain limits they believe should not be transgressed and that if you transgress them, you're going to be provoking a war with the people with whom you work.
It operates on your brain in subtle and even subliminal ways.
So that once you leave there, you are liberated from a lot of constraints you didn't realize you had.
And then on top of that, if you leave angrily, feeling like you were a victim of corporate censorship as I did, it starts to radicalize you even more about how these corporations functioned.
There's just nothing like a first-hand experience where you experience and endure a certain kind of corporate repression to make your eyes open even further about how corrupted these institutions are.
Now, what I experienced at the Intercept was nothing like what Tucker experienced by being the 8pm host at a corporate giant like Fox News.
The corporate pressures were even greater.
Tucker removed himself from it as much as he could.
He wouldn't go to Washington.
He didn't work in the New York or Washington headquarters of Fox.
In fact, he taped his show six months of the year in rural Maine from his barn and six months from a tiny little studio in an exclusive island off the coast of West Florida because he wanted to remove himself as much as he could from those pressures.
But still, he felt them.
And now the hostility between Fox and Tucker is intense.
Obviously they're threatening to sue each other in public.
There have been leaks that seem very clearly to have come from Fox to the New York Times designed to destroy Tucker's reputation.
And so Tucker is clearly unleashed, radicalized, even more so than before.
I always felt like the extent to which Tucker was subversive of establishment dogma wasn't fully appreciated when he was at Fox.
And maybe that's because he was more constrained than I perceived his thinking to be based on the fact that I also maintained a friendship with him and so understood maybe my perception of what he was saying and doing might have extended beyond what he was saying and doing on Fox.
But now you're going to get the full Unleashed version of Tucker because he's no longer subject to those constraints and he understands that Fox and the powers that be behind it Are censoring him.
That's what you heard from his lawyer.
He knows it's not just a corporate or financial effort to enforce a non-compete clause because it goes so much more beyond that.
So here is what Tucker said on the 10-minute or 12-minute monologue he posted about Donald Trump's indictment, which turned into a broader critique of the bipartisan permanent class in Washington, just to give you a sense for the kind of ideology that Tucker embraces and the worldview that he had been promoting.
Listen to this.
But inside Washington, that was just noise.
None of it really rated.
Identity politics doesn't mean much to permanent Washington.
What matters, then and now, is foreign policy.
The invasions and occupations and proxy wars.
The decisions that determine which global populations will thrive and which will die.
The policies that come with trillion-dollar price tags.
The ones that, over time, have made the counties around D.C.
the richest suburbs in the world.
In Washington, that's what actually matters.
And it's obvious when you look carefully.
When there's a debate about anything else, for example the debt ceiling, both sides take their assigned positions and they start yelling.
But when Congress decides to start a war, no matter how foolish or counterproductive or obviously disconnected from America's core interests that war may be, when that happens, the leaders of both parties automatically jump behind it like circus clowns.
And then they stay there, sometimes for decades.
They defend that war relentlessly, against all evidence, until somebody finally rings the all-clear bell, and they can begin to admit that actually, maybe it wasn't such a great idea.
We meant well, but it just didn't work out.
The good news is, we've learned a lot of important lessons.
In the end, they usually do say something like that, but only after emotions have cooled and the damning details have begun to fade from collective memory.
It's an apology that's not actually an apology, much less repentance, and it's yours too late to matter in any case.
But until then, that's all you're getting.
Until then, no dissent is allowed.
That's the first rule of Washington.
No.
Is that a right-wing or a left-wing message?
Neither.
It's an anti-establishment message that you would hear from anti-establishment voices either on the right or the left.
It was bereft of criticism of one party or the other.
It was a criticism of the DC permanent class as composed of the leadership and the established wings of both political parties equally.
And that was very much his worldview.
And that is a worldview completely at odds with the Murdoch family, which believes in the dogma of the bipartisan political class and wants to put Republican establishment figures into power, at the same time that their most important and valuable airwaves and airtime was being used to condemn and attack the at the same time that their most important and valuable airwaves and airtime was being used to condemn and attack the
Now, just to give you a clearer sense for what I mean, as I told you earlier, the news reports are very clear that this was something initiated by the Fox Board of Directors.
So the question would obviously be, well, what kind of people are on the Fox Board of Directors?
Do we get any insights into what their ideology is?
These are the people, after all, who initiated the investigation that days later led to Tucker Carlson's firing.
So, in addition to Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch, who are widely known to be done with Trump, who supports the Santas, who want the GOP establishment back in control of the Republican Party, these are the people who supported George Bush and Dick Cheney and John McCain and Mitt Romney, unquestionably, for years, when the Republican Party was basically without these ideological divisions, except, say, when Rand Paul, or Ron Paul rather, ran for president.
Fox News was utterly contemptuous of Ron Paul.
Here's the board of directors.
So you have Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, and then here you have, just a couple of examples, William Burke.
Who was appointed to the Fox Corporation Board of Directors in June 2021.
Mr. Burke is the co-managing partner of the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
From 2005 to 2009, Mr. Burke served as the Deputy Staff Secretary, Special Counsel, and Deputy White House Counsel to President George W. Bush.
Mr. Burke previously served in the U.S.
Criminal Division of the U.S.
Department of Justice and as an Assistant U.S.
Attorney in the Southern District of New York.
So you don't get a more establishment pedigree, a more Republican establishment pedigree than William Burke.
And then you have the living, breathing embodiment of the Republican establishment, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's vice president, speaker of the House, someone who has been clear in his visceral contempt for Donald Trump and his movement someone who has been clear in his visceral contempt for Donald Trump and his movement He's also on the Fox board, quote, Paul Ryan was appointed to the Fox Corporation Board of Directors in March 2019.
He is a partner with the private equity firm Solomon Capital LLC and chair of the firm's executive partner group.
It's just amazing how all these people go from public service Into becoming chairman of venture capital funds and hedge funds because they sell their political influence that they've compiled for years either to lobby or to do these sorts of things.
Quote, he is vice chairman of the Tenio Strategy LLC and also serves on the advisory board of Robert Bosch GIM and Paradigm Operations LP and the board of directors of Sactus Formerly Universal CIS and Shine Medical Technologies, Mr. Ryan served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Executive Network Partnering Corporation from 2020 to 2022.
So he's obviously a very important part of the Fox Board of Directors.
Paul Ryan represents exactly the establishment wing in the Republican Party that Donald Trump vanquished, that Tucker Carlson despises and regularly attacked.
And so what you need to believe In order to believe that there's nothing ideological about this censorship campaign to silence Tucker Carlson, is that it's a massive coincidence that Fox News is ending up trying to keep you from ever hearing from arguably their most potent opponent.
Their most potent ideological critic and political enemy.
And that to me seems extremely dubious.
Especially since there is no commercial benefit to preventing Tucker Carlson from speaking on social media because that audience is already gone.
It was gone before Tucker started speaking for 10 minutes a couple times a week on Twitter.
And if anything, the attempt to win back that audience, something obviously Fox needs to do, To restore their profitability model is undermined and jeopardized by looking vindictive when it comes to Tucker Carlson.
The people they need to win back are his fans, his viewers, his supporters.
And the more they're seen as extracting vengeance and trying to censor Tucker Carlson while they have their host look into the camera every day and denounce censorship, and I'm sure many of them I mean it.
I know some of them.
I know some of them do.
But the board of directors and the management of Fox News is engaged in precisely the kind of censorship campaign they constantly profit from denouncing.
And I think that it would be clearly a huge loss if somebody who's able to speak to millions of people And say things to them that they don't hear from anybody else who had that kind of platform on television.
To question the establishment.
To be skeptical of U.S.
wars.
To wonder who actually is benefiting from the policies that both parties support is now silenced until 2025.
And precisely for the same reasons that I think it would be a huge loss to the country to have that person silenced is the same reason Fox News and the Murdochs And the people on the Board of Directors, led by Paul Ryan, think that it would be such a huge benefit.
And I think when you compile this timeline, and you look at all the available evidence, there seems to be no question that, at the very least, there is a partial, if not overwhelming, ideological motive at play here.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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