Tucker Carlson on Global Populism, the Censorship-Industrial Regime, Israel/Ukraine, His New Network, & More
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Welcome to the 200th 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, As I just noted, this week System Update commemorated the one-year anniversary of the debut of our show.
Our first show launched on December 12, 2022, and tonight marks the 200th episode of this program.
To mark this anniversary, we have a very special episode for you.
We are devoting the entire program to a conversation we recorded that I had on Wednesday with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, whose program was canceled under quite mysterious circumstances, despite the fact that his show was the most watched of any on cable news.
Tucker just announced that he was launching a brand new media outlet, the Tucker Carlson Network, that has quite high ambitions in terms of the kind of journalism it intends to do.
We spoke with Tucker in a very wide-ranging interview about his new project and what it intends to achieve, but also about all sorts of prominent and pressing political issues, including the new U.S.-supported war of Israel and Gaza, the about-face done by certain sectors of the American right since October the about-face done by certain sectors of the American right since October 7th on issues such as free speech and
The primary pathologies of corporate media, the 2024 election, the possibility of his own political future and much, much more.
I've, of course, spoken to Tucker many times on his old Fox program and even appeared once on his longer form streaming show that he had on that network.
And we've spoken on camera and off camera in various settings.
But this is the first time he's been on System Update where I was able to turn the tables a bit on him by being the one finally who is asking him the questions rather than having to Answer the questions that he posed to me.
And I think the result was a quite illuminating and different sort of conversation that we are very confident that you will enjoy and we are excited to show you.
Before we get to that, just a few programming notes.
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For now, here is the interview that we are very excited to show you with Tucker Carlson to commemorate both the one-year anniversary of our show and our 200th episode.
Enjoy. - Tucker, it's great to see you.
I was just talking to my colleagues here about the fact that I had to spend years enduring your harassing me and hectoring me and coercing me to go on your show all those times, and I finally now have a show where I get to turn the tables and do the same to you.
I love it.
But yeah, I'm really delighted to commemorate our year on the air and 200th show by speaking with you.
I'm really looking forward to it.
Thanks for taking the time to do it.
Well, it's so funny.
I woke up thinking about you so weirdly.
I have nothing to do with this, but the world has gotten so dark.
I literally thought of you within four minutes of waking this morning, and I thought, trying to count my blessings, and one of them is, everyone's gone so insane.
I've lost, you know, most of my friends, but I've really become close to all these remarkable people I never would have been close to otherwise, and you're way up on that list, so thank you.
Yeah, I feel the same.
We used to joke all the time about how as recently as 2015, if anyone had said we'd be doing anything like this, we would have told everybody that you're crazy.
That's Tucker Carlson.
That's Glenn Greenwald.
And yet, here we are.
It's the nature of the world.
Alright, let me...
Let's begin.
I obviously want to talk to you about this exciting new venture that you announced and I'm excited by it and I'm excited to hear a lot about it.
Before we get to that though, I just want to talk about the context a little bit of where this is going and what caused you to create this.
I want to start by asking the following, which is, I know when I left The Intercept, where if you had asked me the whole time up until the day I left, Yes.
"Am I free to say whatever I wanted?" I would've said, "Yeah, absolutely.
"Nobody ever tells me what to say.
"Nobody could tell me what to say.
"I'm totally free." And yet once I left, I felt this liberation that I feel until this very day.
Obviously, there were all these ways I was constrained subliminally in ways that I didn't really realize.
I definitely see this in you too and the way that you speak about things and how you speak about them.
You just seem happier personally but also in your work.
I'm wondering if you found that, that you feel liberated, even though I know at Fox people weren't telling you what to say, but were there chains that were on you that you didn't really realize?
That's so smart, and only someone who's experienced it would know that, and you're absolutely right.
Solzhenitsyn writes about this, that one of the costs of an authoritarian structure is what it does to the way you think and the way you permit yourself to think, and that is absolutely what happened to me.
And I would always brag about the arrangement I had on Fox, which was real, which I said, you know, it's your channel if you don't like it.
What I'm saying, pull me off, but you can't control what I say while I'm on the air, and they live by that.
But I never, and I always think of myself as a strong person and a free man, and I'm gonna say what I think, and to a large extent I did, but I never appreciated how that affected the way I allowed myself to think And the second I left, and what a blessing that was.
And of course, most of your blessings come in disguise.
You don't realize what they are when they happen, but that really was a huge blessing for me.
And yes, I mean, there were all sorts of things.
I mean, for one thing, just the structure of television, not just the company I work for, but all of them, is inherently partisan.
And I'm just not partisan.
I never have been partisan.
I've never been fully on board.
I don't like the Democratic Party.
I'm happy to say that.
But I've never been for the Republican Party especially because I don't think they're sincere.
I don't think they mean it.
I don't think they believe anything, most of them.
And yet the structure of cable television is inherently partisan.
You kind of can't get out of that.
And so I'm happy to say almost all Democrats are bad, but I am not happy to say, and I wouldn't be honest if I said most Republicans are good office holders, because that's not true.
They're not good.
So that really, I felt a lot freer to express that and to really think about it more deeply.
There's no reason that I would have any loyalty to say that the new Speaker of the House Who's literally first public statement after getting that job, third in line for the presidency, was to announce his concern for other countries at a time when our country is really degrading in a scary way.
Yeah, I know.
He attended that tribune and he said, the first thing we're going to do, all of America was listening, what are you going to do?
Are you going to re-industrialize the Midwest?
Are you going to do something about the fentanyl crisis ravaging our communities?
He said, the first thing we're going to do is get a bill passed for our friend Israel.
That was the first thing he told Americans we were going to do is something for a foreign country.
Well, exactly.
And it's hardly an attack on Israel to be offended by that if you're an American, which I am, born here.
So I thought that was outrageous.
And I always would have thought it was outrageous, but I would have thought to myself, well, you know, he's better than the other guy or whatever.
Now I just feel like I don't know.
It's outrageous.
I mean, it doesn't mean he's going to hell or he's a terrible person.
That's not up to me to judge, but it means that statement betrays a mindset that is repugnant to me, and I feel totally free to say so.
Etc.
So it's not so much what I was allowed to think, it's the way that you think is heavily influenced by the structure that you live in.
And I'm glad to be out of that structure, I will say.
Exactly.
I want to ask you now that you're a really fully-fledged member of The Independent Media.
Welcome to The Independent Media.
I mean, you already were that with your show on Twitter, but now you're really all in.
I feel like Nat and Toph.
Yeah, and you know, as somebody who's really been, you know, kind of thinking about this a lot over the past few years, I think one of the really interesting things, too, is just the nature, the structure of how discourse has to happen on television.
And actually, the best person who's talked about this is Noam Chomsky, who obviously lots of people have disagreements with in a lot of other ways.
Nonetheless, one of the things he once said that I found so insightful is that on television you have the requirement of concision, meaning you have to make your points in seven minutes in between commercial breaks, or sometimes you could do 15 or 17 minutes with your monologue.
But still, there is a concision requirement, and what he said was that it inherently serves establishment orthodoxy.
Because if you want to go on TV and say something that most people already think, like, oh, Iran is really evil, and Russia is terrible and China is repressive, you don't really need much time.
People already think that.
You just take a few minutes.
You say it.
Everyone nods their head.
But if you want to really dig in and challenge establishment orthodoxy in a fundamental way to say, well, what about our own government?
Or whatever else it is that you want to do, you need time to do it.
You don't have that time when you have to speak in between these commercial breaks using the attribute of concision.
You did have that longer form show, but it was on your streaming service.
I did it once, and I did think it enabled a different kind of conversation.
But is that something as well, that looking back, do you think constrained you in what you could do?
Hugely, hugely, and it's one of the reasons that I got out of debating on TV, which I always really enjoyed.
I mean, the real reason I got out was the DNC boycotted me, and so no Democratic member could come on.
But after a couple years of not doing those debates, which had been kind of my bread and butter for 25 years on TV, I realized how unhelpful they are, not just because they're contentious, there's nothing wrong with a contentious conversation, we need more, but because they were They pushed each person into a box that you kind of couldn't get out of.
And that form was a lot of the reason for it.
So I got away, you know, my out was writing myself like a long form 12 minute open every night where I could just think about it and really say what I wanted to say.
But that's that's a soliloquy, not a colloquy.
So I did miss the conversation.
And You know, I don't drive very much, and when I do, I just listen to bluegrass music and space out.
So I've never really listened to podcasts in my whole life, and I've done a lot of them now in the past seven months.
I've done a lot of podcasts.
What an amazing forum that is!
Just the structure is amazing because of the lack of time limits and the conversational nature of it.
And it just becomes like this incredible experience.
It's like the best dinner party you've ever been to, kind of thing.
And I just absolutely loved it, and I can see why.
And I'm sure you have the same experience.
Like, the people in my world, you know, the smart people who are really interested in what's going on and sincerely trying to figure out what's true, a lot of them listen to podcasts a lot.
And I thought that was weird, but now I understand why.
And so the fact that podcasts Long-form independent media are replacing, say, NBC News, which will not exist in 10 years.
Like, no chance.
That's a good thing.
That's a cause for hope.
We should be happy, I think.
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
I think the first time I was on your show, or one of the first times I was on a Fox show, the segment before me, you were interviewing Adam Schiff about Russiagate, and I remember it so well because all you were doing was saying, hey, you keep asserting these things that the FBI and the CIA leaked to the Washington Post and the New York Times, but there's actually no evidence for it.
Do you have evidence for it?
And his response was, sounds like you should put your show on RT.
And I know at some point, you kind of lost the ability to interview Adam Schiff because Democrats wouldn't go on your show.
We find the same thing.
We've had a lot of members of Congress from the Republican Party on this show.
Democratic members of Congress keep saying maybe they will, but most will never come on our show.
And so you do have that ability to have this long form discourse where you can deconstruct people's ideas, even though they may not be here Yes.
for you to confront it.
Let me ask you about the cancellation of your show by Fox because I know you've been asked this before. - Yes. - And I've heard you say, look, I don't know.
They didn't give me a reason.
I don't know for sure why.
And I know that's true.
But one of the things we do know for sure is that when your show is canceled, there were a bunch of Republicans in Congress in the most cowardly way possible, which is their nature, who ran to places like Politico and other outlets to say, "We're so happy he's off the air "because his opposition to the war in "We're so happy he's off the air "because his opposition to the war in Ukraine "made it so much harder for us to fund the war in Ukraine "because a lot of our voters were asking, "Why are you funding this war on the other side of the world "when there's so
We also know that by canceling your show, it basically removed the most vocal opponent Of the top priority of the U.S.
security state, which is the war in Ukraine.
It left a couple of people kind of questioning it, but nowhere near to the extent and with the dedication that you were doing.
Do you have any doubts, even though there may be other reasons?
I mean, obviously it wasn't because of your ratings.
You didn't have a scandal that brought down other Fox hosts or other people with top-rated shows before you didn't have anything like that.
So do you have any doubts that your vehement opposition to this Again, I have no evidence, but as you said, I also have no doubt.
that the U.S. security state had as their top priority, was at least a factor in why you got removed from the air? - Again, I have no evidence, but as you said, I also have no doubt.
I mean, the explanation that filtered out from wherever the explanations filter out was that they, you know, I was a racist.
Well, I'm actually not a racist.
And everyone who knows me knows I'm not a racist, so I know it wasn't that.
So it was clearly a position that I was taking of significance that was deeply unpopular.
In the world that the people who run these companies live in, and they're really... I mean, I took a position on the Vax that they really hated, but that had kind of passed.
But the war in Ukraine had not passed.
In fact, it was kind of a critical point, and my views were really despised.
And I know that because I was told that to my face, but never asked to change them, I will say.
But it was really clear, like, people don't like this at all.
But I didn't stop.
And I guess I kind of have to wonder, it's not even about me, and maybe you have a good hypothesis here, but like, what was that exactly?
It wasn't, it's not as simple as, you know, people are getting rich from the war.
Of course they're getting rich from the war.
And of course the weapons manufacturers love the war.
They've said so.
I get it.
They just met with Zelensky yesterday.
But that does not explain how the entire American ruling class became emotionally involved in the fortunes of the Ukrainian government.
Like that's, that's something much deeper.
What was that?
It was like some weird dog whistle that only sort of high-income, well-educated people could hear, and they went all in with like religious fervor.
Do you have any ideas about what that was?
Yeah, I mean, if you go back, it's so interesting, from before 2016, so before Russiagate, What you had was the bipartisan political class in Washington really attacking President Obama.
It was one of the things on which they most attacked him.
When Hillary Clinton wrote her book and had criticisms of Obama, it was almost always about the fact that he was insufficiently militaristic, and particularly she was so angry that he wouldn't confront Russia more on Syria, on Ukraine.
And when Obama gave an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Supreme Neocon Jeffrey Goldberg, and Jeffrey Goldberg said, why don't you do more to confront Putin?
Obama said something that, if you said now, you would be called a Russian agent.
Look, we don't have a vital interest in confronting Russia in Syria.
We don't have a vital interest in confronting Russia over Ukraine.
Ukraine's not a vital interest to us.
And yet you had both John McCain, but then the kind of pro-war Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton, demanding they confront Russia.
So there's been this long-term attempt to seize control of eastern Ukraine, to take it away from Russia, to threaten Russia and eastern Ukraine right at the border.
Victoria Nuland worked with in the Clinton State Department, and she's now running Ukraine, as you know, for Biden.
But then I really think, and I'm wondering if you agree, that what Russiagate did, and the reason I was so opposed to it for so long, wasn't just because it was a fake manufactured, evidence-free, McCarthy-8 scandal from the CIA to sabotage Trump, although it was that, and that's what made it dangerous.
More dangerous was the geopolitical project was to re-inject this idea into the American bloodstream, which is always kind of latent from the Cold War, that our existential enemy is the Kremlin.
Even though Obama was saying we can work with the Kremlin, George Bush said we can work with Putin, Bill Clinton said we can work with Putin, And yet they convinced a lot of Democrats that the reason Trump lost was because of Putin.
They kept ratcheting up the hatred for Russia, and I think that's why you combine the kind of long-standing Republican willingness to go to war against enemies, including Moscow, with this newfound Democratic hatred for Russia, and it served this pre-existing geopolitical agenda that The United States wanted to control Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine, and that meant undermining and challenging and weakening Russia.
I agree with every word of that, and I remember that interview very well, though I don't think much of Obama.
I remember thinking he seemed very reasonable in it.
And Jeffrey Goldberg, of course, one of the most sinister, dishonest people in the media, in my opinion.
But I remember it very well, and I remember thinking, wow, they must hate him for this.
But it doesn't answer the question, like, why would you want to be at war with Russia?
What is the appeal of hating Russia?
I just will speak for myself.
I love Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but that's just, I like the literature of 19th century Russian novelists.
I've never been there.
I have no strong feelings about the country.
So I think I can sort of see it less emotionally than maybe some in Washington.
I just don't get it.
It's almost like they picked it off a map.
Like, why Russia?
We won the Cold War.
That's not enough.
Why do we need to keep fighting them?
I think it's very weird.
Yeah, I mean, you know, if you go and, I know, ironically, even though everyone knows you're an agent of the Kremlin, I've heard you say before you've never even been to the country.
I have a couple of times in part because my source and my friend Edward Snowden is there, but I also find it a super interesting country.
It's an incredibly beautiful and cultural place, St.
Petersburg and Moscow.
Looks a lot more like Europe than it does like Asia.
And Putin, for a long time, wanted a good relationship with the West.
He wanted to be part of NATO, in fact, at some point.
And I do think it's very strange that the United States deliberately sought out to turn Russia into an enemy.
And I agree that all of the reasons aren't entirely clear.
Let me ask you about this.
One of the things that I think is so interesting that you've been doing since you left Fox is that you have been traveling around the world.
And not just journalistically, but almost kind of as your own political figure, have been speaking to and meeting with key figures of what's called the international populist right.
You already, you know, I think while you were still at Fox, you interviewed the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban twice, but since then you've, you know, you went to Brazil and interviewed the then-President Jair Bolsonaro.
You just were in Argentina talking to the newly elected President Javier Mele.
You were just in Spain meeting with the right-wing leaders of that country, the right-wing opposition leaders.
And if you look at all these figures, like doctrinally on foreign policy, economic policy, cultural issues even, they have a lot of differences.
But I feel like there's this sort of common appeal politically, this common ethos that ties them together and permits you to kind of locate them on this coherent Pull as a part of a coherent political movement the international populist, right?
I'm wondering if you agree with that and if so, what do you see?
That's common among these figures not necessarily in terms of their beliefs, but why they're appealing to voters Well, I mean, I agree with the first part of your question, which is there's a lot that's different about them.
I mean, to be right-wing in Spain is very different from being right-wing in Great Britain or anywhere else in Europe, in Portugal even, or in Hungary, or much less the United States.
So, you know, there are many, many differences.
But here are the things that I believe they all have in common, and not just in Europe, but in Latin America and, by the way, in the world's emerging power center, which is the Gulf.
There are these things.
One, there's the recognition that the post-war order is collapsing and deserves to because it no longer serves really anybody except a small group.
So it just doesn't work.
These are aging institutions created to respond to threats that no longer exist.
Two, and the US is at the center of that, so we're actually going to lose in this transition, but I'm just noting this as objectively as possible.
Two, neoliberalism, which really is the global religion at this point, doesn't serve the populations of these countries very well.
doesn't increase living standards or happiness suicide rates are way up uh...
and as as one measure of that wages are are frozen so it doesn't actually work so you have two options either you're going to just get rid of the pretense of democracy and have some kind of authoritarian system is forced people to eat their grueling shut up or you change the system So they're all very suspicious of that.
And the third thing they all have in common is kind of a mild nationalism, not a scary goose-stepping nationalism, but a literal nationalism, like a belief that my country's different.
It may share interests with other countries, but they don't always overlap.
And in the end, if I'm elected democratically to represent my citizens, I should do that.
And I should be more loyal to their interests than to the interests of some international body like the UN.
Or, you know, the World Health Organization, or the WEF, or whatever.
I should be loyal to my country because my job is to govern my country on behalf of my country's citizens.
These are very simple, moderate concepts, in my opinion, and there's nothing radical about any of that.
But it's so interesting that ghouls in Washington, people who are supposed to be smart people, I'm thinking specifically of Ann Applebaum, but the entire roster at the Atlantic Magazine, who are reportedly the smartest people in our society, and spoiler alert, they're not, actually some of the least impressive people in our society, but anyway, see that as so unbelievably dangerous and scary and radical, when of course it's the opposite of any of those things,
It really reveals the radicalism and the darkness in our leadership.
I mean, it kind of is a mirror holding up to the face of the State Department, and it's like, if you think it's scary for a country in a gentle way to say, I'd rather make friends than murder, I'd rather increase the living standards of my population than fund somebody else's country.
If you think that's bad, then guess what?
You're bad.
That's my view anyway.
Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting.
The Atlantic is such a perfect representation of, I think, like the rotted, sickening face of the Washington establishment.
I mean, for one thing, it's run by Jeffrey Goldberg.
Who got caught spreading total conspiracy theories.
He was the one who convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein had an alliance with Osama Bin Laden which led Americans to assume that we must be going to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein planned the 9-11 attack.
He won National Magazine Awards for that fake conspiracy theory.
And then the Atlanta became ground zero for Russiagate.
And you have all these people whose careers are just filled with bloodshed based on lies.
But also what they have really done is in the name of claiming that Trump is this grave existential threat to democracy and to liberty, they have united the power centers and the media has become a critical part of it in suppressing core democratic values like they have united the power centers and the media has become a They're huge advocates of censorship.
They're weaponizing the justice system to try and imprison the person leading the presidential polls.
They really convince themselves that their authoritarianism is just.
Because they believe they're the only guardians of democracy.
Or do you think they really have convinced themselves of this kind of messianic mission that they're on to save democracy by becoming tyrannical because you can't trust people to know what's in their best interest, this kind of populism?
Or do you think they're more consciously corrupted in what they're doing?
You know, I'm in a weird position where I know them.
You know, I know a lot of them personally.
I mean, I've had meals with them, and I lived there for my whole life, so... I don't know the answer for certain, but I have a couple theories.
One, well, first let me say it's totally sincere.
They mean it.
I mean, Ann Applebaum...
Means it.
And I know her and she's like, you know, I don't think she thinks of herself as a terrible person.
I'm sure her kids love her.
I'm not, I don't think she's Stalin.
I'm not saying that, but, but effectively she's arguing for a totalitarian state.
And why is she doing that?
And I think there are two reasons.
One, she does have, and they all have this kind of unshakable belief in their superiority because they went to National Cathedral School and Cornell or something.
I mean, they're really all midwits.
Very much including her, but they believe that they've ascended to the top of our system out of merit.
Okay, that's the first thing they believe.
The second thing they believe is that they're in danger.
They're hysterical because they're afraid.
Now, why are they afraid?
It's obvious that they're afraid.
You know, who was my editor at one point at the New Republic, who's a very thoughtful and very smart person, and a nice person, actually, has become hysterical, completely hysterical, and arguing for totalitarianism.
Why is that?
And I don't know.
I haven't talked to him.
He would never talk to me again.
But I think they feel that the jig is up, kind of onto them.
And if they allow democracy to proceed in, say, the presidential race in this country, they're going to be in deep trouble.
I think they think they've gone too far.
They've done too much to stop the populist movement.
And if they allow it to succeed, there's going to be a reckoning.
And I think they feel that on an animal level, and they're terrified.
They're clearly terrified.
I don't know if you read the last special issue of The Atlantic, but it's panic.
Yeah, it's self-terror.
The Washington Post saying, we're really headed to dictatorship.
I mean, the rhetoric is really ramped up now.
And I agree that they, you know, actually do believe it.
They've talked themselves into it.
And I think, you know, I hate this, like, constant comparison of everybody we don't like to Nazis.
So I don't, I say this not to do that.
But, you know, Hannah Arendt observed when she watched the Nuremberg Trials what she called the banality of evil.
That, like, you think that people who are doing evil things and tyrannical things have horns growing out of their head and are like fangs with blood dripping out of it.
And usually they're just kind of like very mild personalities who get They're swept up into their own righteousness and have no ability to see what it is they're doing.
And I think most of all, they know the public hates them.
They know the public doesn't listen to them anymore.
In fact, the public, if they hear them saying something, wants to do the opposite, which is why Trump being indicted actually has politically strengthened him, because people don't trust the guardians of these systems like the people at the Atlantic and like the people who are in D.C.
Let me just ask you about one more question before we get to your new media outlet, because I do think you're— - Wait, can I just interject for one thing? - Yeah. - And just say about, One of the great shocks for me as an aging man is to see Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud written out of the public conversation.
Both of them were huge when I was a kid.
Smart people read Sigmund Freud or talked about Sigmund Freud or underwent Freudian analysis and read Hannah Arendt.
And both of them are so unfashionable now for reasons that no one will specify.
I'm sure my kids have never heard of either one of them.
And why is that?
Because both of them had a deeper analysis of human motive.
Both of them were concerned with why people do things.
And in general, we've kind of given up trying to figure out why people do things.
Well, why is that?
Because the people doing things don't want their motives analyzed.
That's why.
And so Hannah Arendt, whatever you think of her, was like a very honest observer of people, like too honest for today's discourse.
And I have to say, if Hannah Arendt were around, I think she would judge the Atlantic very harshly.
I mean that.
Yeah, I'm always fascinated by this kind of underlying motive.
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 warned about this human desire to go to war as long as the people who get to order the wars get to stay safe in imperial capitals, that they get this kind of pulsating sense of amusement and purpose and strength.
And how they don't actually want the war to end because they love to read the papers and see all the conquering achievements of this army, of their army, while they stay safe.
And I mean, nothing is more relevant to our current political culture than that psychoanalysis before psychoanalysis even existed.
Let me just ask you, I do want to get to this new media outlet because I think one of the reasons they're scared is because they see the ascension of new media that they have no ability to control, of independent media.
But just before we get there, just one last question about this international right that really interests me, which is, you know, you and I have talked a lot about how, like, Trump's America First politics and this agenda have changed foreign policy, the foreign policy thinking of the American right in so many ways.
He ran against Bush-Cheney wars and neoconservatism, and it opened up all this space to question the CIA and be skeptical of the FBI in a way that I had never seen before in the American right.
But it also Kind of transformed economic policy.
He frequently kind of denounced the classic sort of Reaganomics, this idea that, oh, we should all cheer for the richest people in our society to get richer because a rising tide lifts all boats and everybody watches Raytheon and Boeing and BlackRock and Amazon get richer and richer and richer and their boats aren't rising.
And it really allowed a lot of people who have been capitalists their whole lives to at least start questioning, not capitalism as a theory, but capitalism, how it manifests in American society.
What is your view about sort of where the populist right is, the Trump movement is, when it comes to these core questions of economic theory and economic populism?
I think a lot of people have awakened to the now demonstrable fact that libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending.
So they created this whole intellectual framework to justify the private equity culture that's hollowed out the country.
That's my personal view, and I've seen it up close my whole life, so I think it's a fair assessment.
I think a smarter way to assess an economic system is by its results.
So you can assign whatever name you want to the economic system of the United States.
You could call it market capitalism.
You could call it a whole host of different things.
But I don't think any of that's useful.
Those are boring conversations.
I think you need to ask, does this economic system produce a lot of dollar stores?
And if it does, it's not a system that you want, because it degrades people.
And it makes their lives worse.
And it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society.
And anything that increases ugliness is evil.
And let's just start there.
So if it's such a good system, why do we have all these dollar stores?
The dollar store is not the only ugly thing being created in the United States, but it's one of the most common, and it's certainly the most obvious.
So if you have a dollar store, you're degraded.
And any town that has a dollar store does not get better, it gets worse, and the people who live there lead lives that are worse.
So, and the counter-argument is, oh they buy cheaper stuff, great, but they become more unhappy, and the dollar store itself is a sort of symbol, it's a physical thing, it's a real thing, it's not just a metaphor, but it's also a metaphor.
For your total lack of control over where you live, and over the imposition of aggressively, in your face, ugly structures that send one message to you, which is, you mean nothing.
You are a consumer, not a human being or a citizen.
And so, again, I don't know what we call our current system, but its effects are grotesque.
They're grotesque.
It's wrecked.
I've been here 54 years and I watch carefully.
That's my only gift, is I watch.
And this has become a much uglier place, a much more crowded place, a much more hostile place, a place that cares much less about people.
So, whatever system that produces that outcome is a bad system.
And you can call me whatever you want.
Oh, you're a socialist.
I don't care what you call me, actually.
I'm beyond caring about name-calling.
It's bad, and I oppose it.
Yeah, believe me, I know I got in a lot of trouble once for suggesting that you and Steve Bannon are a lot more socialist in a certain limited sense than a lot of people who claim that title, and of course the nuance of that point got completely lost, but I do think the fact that you are focused so much on
Kind of the welfare of ordinary people and you know you go to anywhere in the world you go to obviously you go to Western Europe and you see these structures that people spent 200 years building just for the sheer beauty of it and you go into nature and you see beauty like it never exists and you go to developing countries and you see a kind of dedication to buildings even that are designed to be inspiring and to kind of stimulate things in the human soul.
And then you go to the places in the United States where our infrastructure is falling apart, where our new structures are designed to be as ugly as possible.
And it's a very difficult thing to do to communicate these sort of spiritual components of our politics.
But ultimately politics does have no purpose other than to elevate the happiness of our citizenry.
And by every metric, the happiness of our citizenry is declining.
Suicide, addiction, use of antidepressants, all of that.
Do you see a kind of movement of people trying to explore those issues and how politics can improve that component of American life?
No, I don't, but I do know, and obviously, you know, this is a belief that's consistent with what I do for a living, so in some sense it's self-justifying, but I sincerely believe that the first step to change is describing what's wrong and then describing what you want instead.
Of what you currently have.
And so I do think there are so few people putting this into words that there couldn't be a movement of people who want it because it's inchoate in most people.
I do know in my own life that the few times I've, you know, when I worked at my previous job, I worked for a huge company and my job is to talk about the news of the day.
There weren't too many outlets to talk about it, but I once gave a speech that somehow went on the internet.
Someone filmed it and put on the internet where I talked about architecture because it's a real love of mine and a real concern of What you make is the clearest indication of who you are.
And obviously.
And so, this goes on the internet, and I must have gotten, I mean, everything for me is by text message, because I don't go on the internet that much, so I get all these texts like, I love your thing on architecture!
And I'm like, I thought I was the only person who cared.
And I think this longing for beauty and decency exists in every single person.
No one ever talks about it.
The conversation is only about GDP and war.
I can't imagine a more tiresome conversation.
And so as soon as someone says it out loud, you get a whole lot of people saying, holy shit, I agree with that.
I've never thought of that before.
So it's really just a matter of talking about it.
And last thing I'll say is I was really surprised.
I gave the speech and it wasn't very long or very interesting, but it was just basically noting that beauty is a reflection of truth.
The truer something is, the more beautiful it is.
And so you want to be shunned by beautiful things.
And beautiful buildings really matter because you live in them and you see them every day.
Super obvious stuff.
And I was denounced as, like, a Nazi because apparently the Nazis liked architecture.
Now, in my opinion, I actually went and looked it up online.
I didn't know anything about Nazi architecture.
Kind of not my style, okay?
So I'm not endorsing Nazi architecture.
It's very baroque.
Yeah, it was very baroque.
It's not anything that you discuss.
But like I said, everything is, I think, There must be some sort of development in education in the United States that I'm not aware of because I haven't been in school for a while where the only historical event taught to Americans these days is World War II and Nazism because every single issue gets immediately put into that prism.
Every war you're either Churchill or Chamberlain.
Everything is defense or appeasement.
It's the only thing we know.
Every new enemy is the new Hitler.
Every political enemy is the Hitler as well.
Let me ask you, Tucker.
And by the way, I do think it's interesting that as you get older, especially if you're fortunate enough to kind of have some freedom in your life or you're not tied into a city, I see so often people who are more free not seeking bigger buildings or even increasing wealth.
Some people do, but seeking a return to nature, seeking to be around animal life, seeking to kind of simplify their life because it's so spiritually cleansing.
And you would think there'd be some model to find in that for politicians who ultimately will get the payoff if they make people's lives happier.
Not on paper but in reality and there's just so much unhappiness that's driving our political culture.
I do need to ask you with the time I have left about the Tucker Carlson Network in part because I actually have questions about it and I want to know about it and I want people to hear about it.
So let me just begin by asking you like what is the core idea of this and what is it that you decided you wanted to do that isn't readily available or being done by other people with this new network?
Well, I never would have done anything if I'd stayed in my previous job, and I probably would have stayed if I hadn't been fired.
So, you know, I'm so grateful that I was because, you know, you just sort of get into it.
I mean, you've got a daily show, you know, you just get into the rhythm of it.
And so I was forced to decide to do this.
And I'm so thankful that that happened.
I mean it, too.
And so basically, I want to do what I was doing before.
But with an even more inflexible commitment to honesty, true honesty, and not just in my professional life, but in my personal life.
I mean, I really want to be honest for the rest of my life, I've decided.
So, how do you do that?
Well, we've been doing it on X. We're also on Rumble, by the way, and proud to be.
The guy who runs Rumble, obviously you know him very well, Chris Pavlovsky, is really one of the good people in the world, and certainly one of the best people in media, so I'm proud of that.
But it really comes down to the question, like, how do you pay for a staff?
Because we took most of our staff from Fox.
And another thing I'm truly grateful for every day, the best people.
But how do you do it in a way that's invulnerable, that's protected?
I mean, we're about to enter into real volatility, in my opinion, over the next 12 months.
You need, you can't have an advertising model for that.
And I've lived that for decades.
You pay the bills with advertising and Sleeping Giants or SPLC or one of these groups, Media Matters, comes in and takes all your advertisers away and then your business is done and you can't speak.
So a subscription model, from my perspective, is necessary.
And so we have a subscription model at TuckerCarlson.com We're putting a lot of stuff out for free and then we're putting some stuff on that site and we hope to cover the news and to do it kind of at a bigger scale and we've got a lot of people working there.
We're gonna have a lot more work in there.
- You want to hire reporters and have bureaus around the world to actually report on news, not just to do punditry, not just to opine, but also your show, but then a team of journalists. - Yes, that's exactly right.
And that's achievable.
It's actually, and I won't bore you because it's not that interesting, this is all like terms of art stuff, but it's not that expensive.
And I learned that this summer.
We did seven foreign trips, and I was paying for them myself, because I didn't have a job.
And I was sort of amazed by how cheaply you could do it if you had good people.
I mean, we did interviews in foreign countries with three people.
Me and a producer and our cameraman, Kyle Rothenberg.
It was like, it was incredible.
So you could actually get a lot done.
You could cover a lot of news, honestly.
With, you know, with 50 people or 100 people.
I mean, you could really replicate the efforts of a very big news organization, and I think you're gonna need to do that.
Because the truth is, and you know this because you've lived it for so long, the number of stories that legacy media cover is so limited.
They're like eight stories.
Each is like a serial, and they keep pushing, you know, whatever it is, help Zelensky, send the Gaza refugees to New Mexico, or whatever line that they're pushing this week.
They never talk about anything else.
And so there's all these amazing things going on that get no coverage whatsoever.
And that's a huge hole that needs to be filled, and I want to help fill it.
And so that's what we're doing.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things they just don't cover, which ends up being, as a result, most things, is they only really cover issues where they can present it as the Democrats and the Republicans fighting over something.
As you were saying earlier, it has to have a partisan angle.
The reality is almost all consequential policies in the United States have bipartisan support.
So we hear constantly the two parties can't agree on anything.
Yes.
The reality is there's no disagreement, and so to these people who do cable news, either they don't see that these issues matter because the parties aren't arguing, so it must be such a clear consensus, or there's no benefit in covering it.
So let me ask you that.
Even though I'm a huge advocate of independent media, it's where I am, I probably wouldn't be here if I didn't have to leave The Intercept.
I thought at the time it was a very tumultuous, bad thing in my life that I had to quit my own media outlet.
It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened, just like you said before for you.
But there are a couple of flaws in the model, or potential flaws in the model.
One is that if you do rely on subscribers, there's that danger of audience capture.
Namely like, you know who your audience is, you know what they believe, and sometimes you may have to take positions that you know they don't want to hear, and the danger is that they may go away.
You may lose your revenue as a result of doing that.
And then the second one is is that you also then have to talk about the things in which they're interested as opposed to things that you're trying to get them to be interested in.
Have you thought about those challenges and how to navigate those?
I've thought about it so much.
I've thought about that so much.
And thankfully, I have a lot of experience on this topic because I lived it for 14 years in my previous job.
So I showed up there having worked at other networks, a number of other networks, And they were the dominant news business in the United States when I showed up.
I mean, I didn't make that company.
Far from it.
I arrived.
It was already really successful.
And they had trained their audience on what the storylines were.
And I was kind of on board for most of them.
That's why they hired me.
But there was a big one that I really dissented on, and that was foreign policy.
I just was not on board with the neocon agenda at all.
In fact, I found it disgusting.
And very, very contrary to the interest of the United States.
And so that was a huge thing for me because, you know, and I can give you a thousand examples, but one of them was Iran.
There's always been this drumbeat to go to war with Iran.
And my position on that has never changed.
Why would you want to do that?
You criticized President Trump for one of his signature foreign policy moves, which was killing General Soleimani.
And for all the talk about how there's no dissent on Fox, you were constantly actually doing those sorts of things.
And somehow you obviously kept your audience and even built it.
What was the secret to that, that you were telling the Fox audience things that they've been trained?
Go ahead.
Exactly.
And so I actually went systematically through our contributors at the company, and there's a public record of this, I'm not making it up, and I would invite them on, and they were people our audience had been trained to really love and trust, and I would debate them.
And some of those debates were really tough.
I mean, John Bolton, you know, I felt like I was going to get in a fistfight with the guy on the set.
And he was paid by the company.
I mean, he was an employee of the company.
And I think, you know, I would let the audience decide.
Who do you think is right?
He could not defend his positions.
None of them could.
And they all left.
And so I think there was a real peril at the time.
Like, well, the audience really likes these people and trusts them and thinks they're strong.
You know, anyone calling for war is read as strong.
Well, my view was they're weak.
They're cowards, actually.
And they're hurting You.
And you don't even know it.
That was the argument that I was making.
And in the end, I'm not bragging, but I think I was able to bring the audience to my side by being rational and trying to be super honest at every turn.
And my belief is, and I know you know this because you do a show, people can smell it on you.
It's like dogs.
Like, they know.
You can't fake that.
I mean, a dog knows if you're deceptive.
A dog knows if you don't like the dog.
You've got a lot of dogs.
I know you know this.
You can't fool a dog, actually.
And you can't fool viewers over time.
Maybe for a day or a week, but if they watch you, they know who you really are.
And so I think I won those arguments.
And by the time I left, I mean, Ukraine was the hardest of all.
Our audience was totally on Ukraine's side.
And I kept it up.
We didn't lose audience share at all.
And so were the hosts on all sides of you.
You know, it would be like, Three hours of pro-Ukraine Tucker Carlson against it, more pro-Ukraine stuff, and you carved out this hour of dissent where your audience ultimately went with you on it, which is why they were happy when you were gone.
Well, exactly.
So you can't, in other words, they, you know, I don't think the audience tunes in to have them, you know, to have you give them the finger.
I don't think that.
They don't want you to hate them, and I don't hate them.
Of course, I love them.
But they also want to be taught and led.
That's your job.
Your job is not to repeat back to people what they want to believe.
They're busy.
They're working.
My whole profession is to sit in the middle of the day and take a sauna and think about this stuff.
That's what I do for a living.
So there's the expectation that you're going to teach them something, try to convince them of something, try to lead in a sense.
I'm not a leader of anybody.
I'm just a talk show host.
But in a moral sense, to take a position that other people won't take and to explain why you're taking it and to bring them over.
And that works.
I'll just say one last thing.
When we started doing these Ukraine segments, which were pretty tough, I had a gut level dislike for Zelensky just from watching him.
I said, this guy's bad.
I could just feel it.
And I said it, and people were very offended.
And there was a sense that in the company that we were going to lose a lot of audience share over this.
And by the end, by the week I left, our Ukraine segments were the highest rated segments we did, which is a pretty good measure, I think.
And so you can bring people to your side as long as you're reasonable and sympathetic to them.
You're not judging them.
They have a different view.
You're not mad at them about that.
You're not going to call them Nazis or Putin sympathizers.
You just tell them what you think and reason it out for them and take your time and you can easily win people to your side.
It's not hard.
Yeah, you just have to respect your audience and kind of tell them you're not going to always hear what you want to hear, but you're going to hear a very honest and respectful argument.
Tucker, we have to let you go, but I do have just one last question that I think will take a very short time.
And I have to ask you, even though I may not want to, because when we mentioned to our subscribers that we were going to be talking to you, this is by far the question they wanted me to ask most, which is there was this report that Melania Trump and others are talking about you as being Trump's vice president.
Megyn Kelly asked you about it.
And I have to say, knowing you, I thought you were going to scoff at it and be like, this is the most ridiculous thing.
Of course I wouldn't do that.
You were a little bit more open to it than I expected.
Maybe that's just because you haven't even given it any thought.
You just don't want to say no to something that you haven't even taken seriously and considered.
But just what is your view on that possibility?
You just got done saying, I'm not a leader, I'm a talk show host.
You obviously just started a new company.
You're very happy with what you're doing.
I know that.
Is that something that you might actually be open to in the event that it did happen?
Well, look, I'm trying to be thoughtful, and as I said earlier, as honest as I can be.
Of course, the last thing I would ever want to do is be in politics.
I hate politics, and I hate the people who practice it.
Almost all of them.
Everything about it is gross to me.
I've never done it.
I don't really know that much about it, to be totally honest with you.
So no, and I love my life, and you know, I mean, you know my life.
I've been to where you live, you've been to where I live.
We have happy lives, not ostentatious at all.
I live in a 2,000 square foot house, but I have peace in my house, and I don't want to change that.
So, no, it's not appealing to me at all.
On the other hand, I never thought I'd be sitting here talking to you as a friend.
If you told me ten years ago, yeah, you're gonna love Glenn Greenwald and, like, you're gonna be an independent media guy talking to Glenn and you agree on everything, I'd be like, no, that's insane!
And the truth is, the world Changes.
And I don't want it to change.
My parents got divorced.
I hate change, okay?
But I'm not in charge of the world.
And as the world changes, so does your reaction to it.
And I have learned in all this time here that you can't really foresee what's going to happen or your role in it.
And the other thing, last thing I'll say is I'm not in charge of that.
Like, I would never try to convince Trump to ask me to get into politics, ever.
And you can ask around.
I would never do that, and I haven't done that, and I wouldn't do it, because I don't really want.
However...
It's not up to me in the end.
No matter what I do or don't do, it's not up to me.
So it's a little bit like the weather.
I'm not going to worry about it.
And if that ever happened, I think it's pretty unlikely.
But if it ever did, if Trump called me up and said, hey, will you get involved?
I mean, that's the point at which I would really think about it, you know?
And I can't imagine I'd want to do that.
But I also can't imagine what America will look like then.
Yeah, given the people who have actually done it, it's very hard to say, oh, well, this person, you, are somehow unqualified because the bar has been set extremely low by the people who have actually done it.
Anyway, Tucker, I knew this would be a super enlightening conversation.
It's always great to talk to you off camera, on camera.
I'm really thrilled that we were able to commemorate this with you.
The fact that we're able to do this is in part due to the fact that we have been talking on your show and elsewhere, so I'm super appreciative of all that and congratulations on your new project.
I know it'll be a success.
Can I say one last thing?
Yes.
You were asking about moving the audience.
You became one of our highest rated guests.
Glenn freaking Greenwald was, like, loved by the Foxes.
If you told me that when I started at Fox, I would have been like, what?
You know what I mean?
So people change, and cool things happen you don't expect.
Yeah, and the power of reason and persuasion, a lot of people are cynical about it.
I really believe in it.
That is one of the characteristics that define us as human beings.
And if you don't believe in this, you probably wouldn't be doing what you and I are doing.
Tucker, thank you so much.
We'll be talking shortly.
Have a great evening.
Thank you, Glenn.
Bye.
See you, man.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
It also concludes our 200th episode of System Update that coincides with our one-year anniversary on the air.
We debuted our show back in December of 2022.
It's now one year.
We were very happy to commemorate that anniversary, both of those anniversaries, with Tucker tonight.
And we also want to remind you that System Update is available as well in podcast version.
You can listen to each episode.
on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms 12 hours after the episode first appears live here on Rumble.
And if you rate, review, and follow the show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive after show where we take your questions, comment on your feedback and critiques, hear your suggestions for future shows and for future guests.
As Tucker said, if you believe in independent media, supporting it, And the subscription model is the most important thing so that we're not constrained in any way including by dependence on advertisers.
If you want to join our Locals community which gives you access not only to those twice a week after shows but also to the daily transcripts of every program that we produce here as well as a running weekly thread where we take comments and I try and respond to as many of those as possible to keep up the dialogue with our audience.
And it's really the place where we're going to publish our original journalism.
And it essentially is crucial to supporting the independent journalism that we do here.
Simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you to our Locals community.
For those who have been watching either this entire year or most recently have joined us, We are of course very appreciative in having made the show a success and we hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m.
