Today, Dan and Jordan conduct a trial run of seeing how it feels to cover Tucker Carlson's new show on Twitter. In this installment, Tucker covers Ukrainian dams, tautologies, and how the media doesn't care enough about UFOs.
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys knowledge fight | |
| Dan and Jordan knowledge fight need money Andy in Kansas Andy in Kansas Andy in Kansas Andy in Kansas you're on the air thanks for holding us Hello Alex I'm a first time caller in the future | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dan. | |
| Jordan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| I have a quick question for you. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today, buddy? | ||
| My bright spot today, Jordan, is got a little bit of a zip package from Black Dragon Queen Christy. | ||
| Oh, hey Christy! | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Lovely mini block Lego kit of succulents. | ||
| I got some little cacti and what have you. | ||
| I've not built this yet. | ||
| I've not opened it up, but I'm very excited. | ||
| It's a great compromise. | ||
| I love building little mini-block stuff. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| It's plants that won't die. | ||
| They won't die. | ||
| Although, succulents are the ones that you don't have to water that much. | ||
| So this is like taking the problem that doesn't exist with succulents. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Because you could just leave a succulent forever. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It'll be fine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's basically a Lego to begin with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But yeah, that's very nice. | ||
| And it included a lighting kit, a Lego lighting kit that is... | ||
| I have no idea how this thing is going to work. | ||
| It's got like wires and shit, but it's Lego branded. | ||
| I don't know if it's a fake light. | ||
| I have no idea what's going on, but it looks really cool and I'm excited to build it, so thank you so much, Christy. | ||
| Yeah, that is very cool. | ||
| Also came up with a nice book, How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| Which I have not opened up to figure out if it's a joke book with a fake title and all the pages are blank, or if someone actually wrote a book about how to talk to your cat about guns. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No, that does seem like an interesting sequel to Where to Hide Your Guns. | ||
| Don't give it to your cat. | ||
| Don't give it to your cat. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's not where you hide it. | ||
| See, that's why you have to write the second book, because everybody was like, oh, whatever, I'll just give it to my cat. | ||
| Boom, that's where guns go. | ||
| Hey, Celine, put this in your litter box. | ||
| Hide it. | ||
| No, no, don't do it! | ||
| Oh, that's not how you talk to your cat. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| Anyway, what's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot, Dan, is that school is over! | ||
| For the summer! | ||
| Yeah, I mean, obviously. | ||
| And it's perfect that it's winter today. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Perfect time for summer break. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But no, my wife is free from the evil clutches of work. | ||
| Sweet. | ||
| Day-to-day nonsense. | ||
| It's going to be great. | ||
| Hey, all right. | ||
| It's going to be great! | ||
| More tennis. | ||
| We've got time together. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| Exercise, walks. | ||
| Tennis. | ||
| A little bit of tennis? | ||
| Eating better. | ||
| The whole thing. | ||
| We're going to do it all! | ||
| Eating tennis rackets? | ||
| If only. | ||
| If only. | ||
| We're going to make them out of cotton candy. | ||
| I'm going to make you a tennis racket out of beef jerky. | ||
| A beef jerky tennis racket. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Are you going to weave it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| I was just trying to think of the ways that you could do something. | ||
| I've got no buttons to make, so I need a project. | ||
| All right, so you get the jerky for the racket. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You get the hard stuff. | ||
| But then you've got to use the beef sticks for the netting. | ||
| Do I? | ||
| I mean, I would assume. | ||
| When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| I mean, that wouldn't be the first time I've done either of those things. | ||
| I haven't thought this through fully. | ||
| I might use Twizzlers. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's not Joel! | ||
| Oh, now you're in trouble. | ||
| Jerky might be the outside and then Twizzlers for the netting. | ||
| Listen, salty and sweet are fine, but not with Twizzlers and jerky. | ||
| That's just not going to happen. | ||
| That's like chocolate and peanut butter. | ||
| No, it is not. | ||
| Those are the two worst textures to combine together in history. | ||
| Yeah, they're pretty bad. | ||
| I recently saw a Twizzlers commercial. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And it was something like... | ||
| Chew it over? | ||
| Or something like that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| I'm like, that's the Twix slogan. | ||
| The slogan. | ||
| Are you guys just ripping off Twix? | ||
| Everybody who chews stuff, you gotta take your time with it. | ||
| Sooner or later you say a chew it over. | ||
| I was infuriated. | ||
| That's a little disappointing. | ||
| That's dirty, man. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I thought that was done whenever Big League Chew did it. | ||
| You know, Big League Chew it over. | ||
| But they didn't have a commercial that said that. | ||
| Yeah, they weren't allowed to. | ||
| Too close to tobacco. | ||
| I feel like my parents didn't allow me to have that. | ||
| Or candy cigarettes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, those were things that were very much, no, no, no. | ||
| I'm not going to say that candy cigarettes led to me smoking, but I did enjoy candy cigarettes, and then I also greatly enjoyed regular cigarettes. | ||
| So, I mean, it's not unrelated, I suppose. | ||
| I think, did you just enjoy the gesticulating you could do with a candy cigarette? | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| And I think I did the same thing with a regular cigarette, too. | ||
| Yes, you did. | ||
| Did you ever... | ||
| Did you ever try and light a candy cigarette? | ||
| No! | ||
| Smart. | ||
| What? | ||
| That's very smart of you. | ||
| I didn't even know. | ||
| It was made out of chalk, wasn't it? | ||
| They were just garbage. | ||
| I think they were like gum inside. | ||
| Oh, you had better candy cigarettes than I did. | ||
| I think there may have been different varieties of candy cigarettes. | ||
| I want to say that the ones we had were essentially chalk. | ||
| What about wax lips? | ||
| You ever fuck with wax lips? | ||
| Never fucked with a wax lip in my life. | ||
| Not once have I fucked with a wax lip, and you can quote me on that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I will. | |
| I'm not going down for any of this wax lip cancellation nonsense. | ||
| There's a lot of rumors that Jordan Holmes is a man who's known for... | ||
| I've never done the wax lips. | ||
| ...the notorious wax lip enjoyer. | ||
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unidentified
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No, no, no. | |
| And I get it. | ||
| I understand why people do the wax lips, but that's not for me. | ||
| Oh, I'm really glad to hear that. | ||
| Why do they do it? | ||
| Well... | ||
| Because it's been an issue for me. | ||
| I've never understood. | ||
| Me neither. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have an episode to go over. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I do believe we do. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I was thinking about it. | ||
| So, on our last episode... | ||
| I ended by saying, we're going back to the past. | ||
| And that was something that I was going to do. | ||
| But I also felt a little bit of a draw towards doing something a little bit different. | ||
| Right! | ||
| Novelty. | ||
| Well, kind of. | ||
| So, for a long time, people have wanted us to branch out to cover other things. | ||
| And there aren't a whole lot of other things that really fit within the category of, you know, stuff that... | ||
| That we can cover in a way that I think is in our wheelhouse. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| You know, there are folks like Tim Pool who are kind of an option, sort of, but he's also like a shithead, clout-chasing, troll-y asshole, and I don't really care to engage with a lot of stuff like that. | ||
| Not to say that he's not somebody who shouldn't be, you know, monitored and paid attention to. | ||
| It's just maybe that's not what I... | ||
| Find my abilities suited for. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Project Camelot is kind of a bummer lately. | ||
| Jim Baker is a disaster. | ||
| Gone. | ||
| There's people like Russell Brand, but I don't know. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe I'll do an episode about him at some point. | ||
| But in terms of a regular source of something to look at, I'm not sure that that's our lane. | ||
| I feel like we come into an issue where finally we and our audience are at odds here, right? | ||
| So when we do episodes about other people, our audience enjoys them. | ||
| And the reason being is because we are making an enjoyable episode out of it, right? | ||
| We do not enjoy it because it is not enjoyable. | ||
| So, there's a little bit of a pushback there. | ||
| There's a disconnect. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I think that whether it's enjoyable for us is kind of really down the line of priorities. | ||
| How enjoyable is it ever to really even talk about Alex Jones? | ||
| None at all. | ||
| We've gotten used to it in a way that other people maybe were not used to hearing. | ||
| But I think that there is a certain type of figure that we are... | ||
| Well-equipped to discuss. | ||
| And then there's figures that maybe our skill sets aren't designed towards. | ||
| You know, someone like Tim Pool, I feel like you could end up... | ||
| In a situation where you want to scream at him on Twitter like you did with Glenn Greenwald, and that plays into his whole thing. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Because he's kind of trying to make people angry. | ||
| He's baiting. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's an intentional strategy of boosting engagement that comes along with that. | ||
| It's really transparent that that's what he's doing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So anyway, this is a long way of saying, I decided that now that Tucker is away from Fox News... | ||
| I thought maybe we should try. | ||
| We should give it a test balloon and see if we can apply our skills and our shit to his Twitter show. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| We had a slight conversation about this. | ||
| Yeah, I told you we shouldn't do this. | ||
| Wherein you argued that we should definitely not do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you couched it in terms as though it's entirely my fault, which I'm fine with. | ||
| I'm fine with that. | ||
| No, I couched it in terms of trying to save you from, like, what... | ||
| Like, you have sensitivities about people's voices. | ||
| I do, that's true. | ||
| So, like, you know, Trump or Tucker, they're kind of... | ||
| The people that, like, you get mad hearing them. | ||
| As opposed to Alex, which you've gotten... | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, I will say this, all right? | ||
| Here, I think, is why I'm more willing to jump into that now than otherwise. | ||
| Tucker doesn't have a boss anymore. | ||
| That's what's important to me. | ||
| The more I think about the thread that keeps people interesting, it's not having a boss. | ||
| It's not having a boss. | ||
| There is an ability to speak freely that can lead you towards... | ||
| Making huge dumb mistakes! | ||
| Pretty negative tendencies. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, well, when I texted you, I said, you know, I'd been going down this road, preparing an episode, but I didn't think we should do it. | ||
| Because of, you know, this is going to be awful for you. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then also, I was just like, I don't know exactly if it works for us. | ||
| I just had some kind of like, I'm not sure. | ||
| And that's part of the reason why I want to try a test balloon. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Let's see what we do. | ||
| But yeah, you said... | ||
| No, I think we should. | ||
| I'm like, well, alright. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| You did it to yourself. | ||
| This is what we do. | ||
| I earned it. | ||
| I do not get to complain about it now. | ||
| That's what's important. | ||
| So we're going to talk about the first episode of his Twitter show. | ||
| And so it might be a little bit shorter of an episode than some of our other ones because his episodes are only like 10 minutes long. | ||
| What? | ||
| Or so on Twitter. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| It's just basically like what would have been his opening monologue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| And so I was going to do the... | ||
| We'll do the first two episodes, because those are the ones that are out now at the time of recording. | ||
| But I figured, you know, we'll try out the first one, and if it works, we'll do the second one. | ||
| We'll go from there. | ||
| So let us know if you enjoy it, and we'll find out. | ||
| If you're hearing this, we did release the episode. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So before we get down to this, Jordan, let's take a little moment to say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Oh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, Athena and her wife are not loser little titty babies. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, Cult of Selene Merch Wen. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Next, I want to take a time out from thanking wonks and make sure everyone knows I'm considered the Bret Hart of podcasting. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| How dare you make me compliment myself. | ||
| Is Bret Hart the good? | ||
| He's the hitman. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| He's the excellence of execution. | ||
| Alright, alright, alright. | ||
| Yeah, one of the best. | ||
| Alright, alright. | ||
| But he's Canadian. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Next. | ||
| Hey, Timmy IT. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And happy birthday, Shay. | ||
| I appreciate you like Alex appreciates donuts in the break room. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| That wasn't part of the shout-out. | ||
| I just wanted to throw it in. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And we have a technocrat in the mix, Jordan. | ||
| So thank you so much to ex-spouse of God. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Four stars. | ||
| Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | ||
| Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Shark. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's a loser little titty baby. | |
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ! | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Yes, thank you very much. | ||
| And I guess I should acknowledge right now that Alex, we'll cover on Wednesday his coverage of Trump being indicted again. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| I know probably people are curious about that. | ||
| We will get to that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This was something that I felt drawn to trying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, if you wait too long, then he's on episode six or seven of his Twitter show. | ||
| And by then, you know, who knows if it's time for this trial balloon. | ||
| It's too late. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It may be. | ||
| We can't jump in unless we're jumping in at the beginning. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| That's stupid, but that is exactly how I feel. | ||
| Also, I mean, you're not wrong. | ||
| Also, about it being stupid. | ||
| But also, I feel a little bit excited about this, not least of which because this is the first time in 800-odd episodes where I genuinely can't say I really don't know anything about Tucker. | ||
| I don't know anything about his show. | ||
| I don't know anything about what he does. | ||
| I try and avoid all of this as much as possible. | ||
| As you said, I have a thing for voices. | ||
| Anytime I hear it, I shut it off. | ||
| So this is true to the original premise, Dan. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's exciting. | ||
| Although you don't know everything about Tucker. | ||
| No, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I didn't do a ton of, like, who is this man in this, but that's exploration for future episodes. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| If we do continue down this road. | ||
| Man, maybe we can get him a billion-dollar show. | ||
| Give it time. | ||
| We don't work fast. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| It takes a while. | ||
| There are results. | ||
| We'll see you in seven plus years. | ||
| So here is where the first episode jumps off. | ||
| And I will say I was pretty impressed by how little time he has for pleasantries. | ||
| Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. | ||
| This morning it looks like somebody blew up the Kokovka Dam in southern Ukraine. | ||
| The rushing wall of water wiped out entire villages, destroyed a critical hydropower plant, and as of tonight, puts the largest nuclear reactor in Europe in danger of melting down. | ||
| So, if this was intentional, it was not a military tactic, it was an act of terrorism. | ||
| The question is, who did it? | ||
| Well, let's see. | ||
| The Kokovka Dam was effectively Russian. | ||
| It was built by the Russian government. | ||
| It currently sits in Russian-controlled territory. | ||
| The dam's reservoir supplies water to Crimea, which has been, for the last 240 years, home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. | ||
| Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more. | ||
| And for precisely that reason, the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it. | ||
| In December, The Washington Post quoted a Ukrainian general saying his men had fired American-made rockets at the dam's floodgate as a test strike. | ||
| So really, once the facts start coming in, it becomes much less of a mystery what might have happened to the dam. | ||
| Any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up. | ||
| Okay, so that was quick. | ||
| Okay, so that's literally the way he opened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, what's up? | ||
| Damn exploded. | ||
| It wasn't the Russians. | ||
| It totally wasn't Putin. | ||
| Even though we know that would be exactly right up his wheelhouse, it makes strategic sense for them militarily. | ||
| We are off to the races, just... | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Hello, my name is Tucker. | ||
| Dictators are great. | ||
| Let's go from there. | ||
| So let's start here with that Washington Post article that he's talking about. | ||
| That is a real article, but Tucker is wildly mischaracterizing what it says. | ||
| The article itself is a discussion of Ukrainian counter-offensives against Russian-occupied areas, largely focusing on the successful push to liberate Izum. | ||
| After that operation concluded in the northeast of the country, Ukrainian generals were interested in attempting similar tactics in the south to drive Russia out of Kurson. | ||
| Essentially, the story is about a fake-out tactic that allowed Ukrainian forces to make it appear that they were heading for Izum when they were actually approaching from the north, which led to a mass retreat by Russian troops and a victory for Ukraine. | ||
| The hope was to be able to create another situation near Kurson where Russian troops would be isolated and forced to surrender or retreat. | ||
| The area around the city of Kherson is mainland Ukraine, bordered to the east by the Dnepr River. | ||
| On the other side of that river is more of the Kherson Oblast, and ways further south you end up in the Crimean Peninsula. | ||
| From the opposite side of the river, from Kherson to the land bridge to Crimea, it's still over 100 kilometers. | ||
| But this land is also... | ||
| At this point, under Russian occupation. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| For the last year. | ||
| So, like, here's what I understand about the dam. | ||
| It's hard to just fully, like, verbally explain geography. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right, right. | |
| But that was about as good as I can do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, from what I understand of the dam scenario, all right, it's been under Russian occupation for quite some time. | ||
| The last year. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's quite some time. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| In my world. | ||
| All right. | ||
| In the grand scale. | ||
| Sure, that's fair. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| I mean, wartime a year is a long time. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then the seismic people were like, oh, there was an explosion and it probably came from inside. | ||
| The Russians are inside. | ||
| And it's technically really smart for them to blow up the dam, even though that's a war crime. | ||
| So it kind of makes sense for them to have done it, and they did do it. | ||
| There are a number of thoughts around it, and I would say that it's probably, at this point, based on the information I am aware of, pretty difficult to say with certainty anything about who did what, but there are indications and factors. | ||
| And so if that's the conclusion you're coming to, I think it's fine for you to reach that conclusion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I think it would be reckless of you to say definitively Fair. | |
| What I will say is that I have just figured out Blue's clues. | ||
| How does that sound? | ||
| Great. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So the goal of this operation that Ukraine was engaged in, that this Washington Post was talking about, was to cut off the city of Kursan from the area to the western side of the river. | ||
| That's where Kursan, the city, is. | ||
| You're trying to isolate that from Russian-occupied areas so that the Russians couldn't restock supplies to the forces there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| From that article, quote, the 25,000 Russian troops in that portion of Kursan, separated by the Broad River from their supplies, had been placed in a highly exposed position. | ||
| If enough military pressure was applied, Moscow would have no choice but to retreat, Kovalchuk said. | ||
| Russia had to arm and feed its forces via three crossings, the Antonovsky Bridge, the Antonovsky Railway Bridge, and the Novakakovka Dam, part of a hydroelectric facility with a road running on top of it. | ||
| The two bridges were targeted with U.S.-supplied M142 high-mobility artillery rocket systems, or HIMARS, launchers, which have a range of 50 miles and were quickly rendered impassable. | ||
| There were moments when we turned off their supply lines completely, They managed to replenish ammunition. | ||
| It was very difficult. | ||
| Kowalczyk considered flooding the river. | ||
| The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with HIMARS launchers on one of the floodgates at the Novo-Kakowska Dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Naper water would be raised high enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages. | ||
| The test was a success, Kowalczyk said, but the step remained a last resort. | ||
| He held off. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that is the thing in that article that Tucker is referring to. | ||
| Right, gotcha. | ||
| One variable that's important to recognize here is that the Ukrainian forces were able to force a retreat from the city of Kursan, but that wasn't all that happened. | ||
| From that same Washington Post article... | ||
| The pressure from Ukrainian troops forced a retreat, but they didn't manage to run down or destroy the fleeing Russians. | ||
| Mines, in some case laid a meter apart and three rows deep or tucked in thin strips of road, prevented the Ukrainians from giving chase. | ||
| There are a lot of possibilities for what happened with that dam, and it's not a foregone conclusion the way Tucker is saying it is. | ||
| It's possible that Ukrainian forces blew it up, but it doesn't really serve a meaningful strategic purpose for them right now. | ||
| When flooding the dam was considered an option late last year, it was in the context of a larger objective which was ultimately achieved, so using this article to justify present-day actions doesn't really make sense. | ||
| it's also possible that Russia blew it up for any number of reasons or it's not impossible that it collapsed due to completely unintentional causes it could have been one of the mines that was left behind or a freak accident. | ||
| There are a lot of possibilities. | ||
| But when you're Tucker and you're presenting the situation through an extremely Russia-promoting lens, then it makes sense to say that any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians blew it up. | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| If your evidence is inherently unfair, then an unfair person wouldn't even look at it, whereas a fair person would be like, well, I guess that's all the evidence, so you must be right. | ||
| Well, the only primary source he's even pointing to is this Washington Post article, and that doesn't work. | ||
| Yep, yep, yep. | ||
| One thing I think you can notice right away that sets Tucker apart from Alex is how intentional his words are. | ||
| Alex talks shit off the top of his head and intuitively understands how to spin these yarns, which is often a sloppy process, and it can lead to complete incoherence. | ||
| But Tucker doesn't turn on the camera and just go live. | ||
| He does some preparation, and the fingerprints of that preparation are really transparent when you pay attention. | ||
| Look at the way he's presenting these details. | ||
| He begins by establishing the fact that the dam was intentionally destroyed by someone, and that that act could not be a legitimate military target, but was an act of terrorism. | ||
| Yeah, that's the framing of the entire thing. | ||
| But unearned. | ||
| He starts by saying, if this was intentional, and then immediately, without you even noticing, is like, of course it's intentional. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a framing device. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| Yeah, it works. | ||
| He then goes on to say that the dam was, quote, effectively Russian because it was built by the Russian government and sits in Russian territory. | ||
| That sounds pretty persuasive, except that Tucker fails to mention that the dam was built in the 1950s when Ukraine was part of the USSR. | ||
| And that the territory that the dam is in can only be called Russian territory because the Russian army is occupying it. | ||
| It's been an illegally occupied area since the invasion began in 2022. | ||
| Tucker is trying to play that game that other Russia apologists do, where they argue that areas like Crimea or the Donbass are actually really Russia, evoking the idea that the invasion is just Russia taking back what's actually already theirs. | ||
| That's not accurate about those areas, and it's even less true of Kursan, but if you're listening to the way that Tucker speaks, his words contain conclusions that he hasn't earned. | ||
| If you're not paying attention, you'll just like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| And if you put it in a different context, you go, well, that's an absurd line of thinking. | ||
| Like, okay, so this guy sold you a house, and then he just broke in and took the house back and then threw you out. | ||
| And you're like, well, I mean, he built the house, so I guess it is. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| So then Tucker adds that the dam and the reservoir provides water for Crimea, an area that Tucker is comfortable saying is rightfully part of Russia because that's where their Black Sea fleet is stationed. | ||
| That sounds good. | ||
| Tucker isn't giving the full picture here. | ||
| In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, and at that point they needed the water that came from the Napa River and the Kokovka Reservoir. | ||
| It wasn't as much of an issue for drinking water, but the North Crimean Canal, which is fed from that reservoir, is responsible for a vast majority of the irrigation systems in the area. | ||
| After the annexation, Ukraine began requiring payments from Russia for the delivery of water, which Russia did not go along with. | ||
| In the present invasion, Russian troops seized the area and they blew up that dam, reopening the canal for the delivery of water, which in turn lowered the level of the reservoir considerably and caused some concerns about issues that Tucker is even bringing up now, like the danger to the... | ||
| The nuclear power plant. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So that was there then when they did that to open up the water to the channel. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| So you're saying that Russia has already blown up a dam? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| But it is a little different, too. | ||
| You know, there are different reasons you would do these things. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Just because they're both dams doesn't mean they're the exact same situation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| I'm not saying that they're the same situation. | ||
| I'm just saying that if you have a group of people who have already blown up a dam, will... | ||
| Get strategic value out of it, have evidence of being there, and we're in control of the dam at the time. | ||
| There's a lot of evidence mounting! | ||
| I'm not saying that there aren't interesting factors, but... | ||
| It's not a smoking gun. | ||
| It's not a smoking gun, nor am I saying it is. | ||
| So here, when Tucker says that this provides water for Crimea, it's kind of true, but it's actually a much denser picture than he wants the audience to see, because when you consider nuance and detail, it's harder to just accept the Russian apologist framing that he's taking. | ||
| So then Tucker says, quote, He then transitions into the Washington Post article that we discussed as the justification for the basis of that claim. | ||
| But that article doesn't support Tucker's position. | ||
| That article is not about Ukraine considering destroying the dam because it would hurt Russia more than them. | ||
| It has an element in it of Ukraine considering destroying part of the dam, and Tucker is But in this case, Tucker is just... | ||
| Cherry-picking one detail and then writing a context around it that doesn't exist in the original. | ||
| No, it's very clear, literally from clip one, that this is a slicker version of Alex's show. | ||
| Yeah, but it also gets less slick as it goes along. | ||
| Well, that I also believe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, just from the writing, the fact that he's using the local TV news voice, you know, like, inside and then outside. | ||
| They go to the thing. | ||
| He does the whole produced vibe of it, but it is still grabbing and choosing things and then misrepresenting them. | ||
| And there's rhetorical tricks that he uses that Alex doesn't use. | ||
| And vice versa. | ||
| Alex uses screaming and fake crying and stuff like that, which Tucker is probably maybe too proud to do at this point. | ||
| A couple months away from doing at this point. | ||
| Whereas Tucker uses these tricks that Alex doesn't use, which is like... | ||
| Any fair person would say blank. | ||
| You know, like, is it so impossible that blank? | ||
| You know, that kind of leading stuff that Alex would not be able to... | ||
| Really pull that off, because it requires subtlety and smoothness, whereas Alex is a blunt instrument. | ||
| Well, I mean, what I find fascinating about that is that I think the easiest place to assume that you would come to that from if you were Tucker is being like, oh, well, he's trying to appeal to more median class or, like, more moderate people. | ||
| When I feel like what he's doing there is just giving extreme people a way to call themselves fair people. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, he is giving you the excuse to say, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| You are not supporting Russia because you're a far-right lunatic like everybody else who's just going along with what weirdos say. | ||
| You're a fair-minded person. | ||
| And you'd have to be based on blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, there's a number of applications for why this rhetoric would be employed in the way that it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Tucker has these fraudulently presented points, which he then uses to insinuate that when you consider the facts, it's a lot easier to see that Ukraine probably blew up the dam. | ||
| The truth is, when you consider the actual facts, it's not easier to reach that conclusion. | ||
| But, if you only consider the bullshit way Tucker is showing you the selected details... | ||
| It's super easy to reach that conclusion. | ||
| And that's because Tucker isn't interested in exploring the news. | ||
| This is about leading the viewer to that conclusion. | ||
| And like you're saying, justify it in some way that is emotionally acceptable. | ||
| This isn't analysis or commentary. | ||
| It's really just propaganda. | ||
| It's pretty interesting to just dive in and be like, this is this guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is different. | ||
| I mean, now that I'm... | ||
| It's the same, but different. | ||
| Yeah, no, now that I'm listening to it, it is like the idea of watching Alex and Tucker, because they do. | ||
| They don't just watch InfoWars. | ||
| Alex talks about Tucker all the time. | ||
| Everybody knows what Tucker and Alex are saying in that ecosystem. | ||
| They text all the time, apparently? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| There's got to be a feeling of Alex gives you the, like, no, I'm the revolutionary. | ||
| I'm part of the American revolution. | ||
| I'm throwing tea off shit. | ||
| Whereas Tucker gives you that feeling of, like, I'm not crazy. | ||
| This is, of course, what is right to do. | ||
| I'm a fair-minded person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that's a fascinating thing! | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| And I would be lying if I didn't say that a part of what drew me towards giving this a test, seeing if, you know, this is something that's worthwhile, is that you hear a lot of people saying, like, now that he's off Fox, he's gone full Info Wars. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| And such. | ||
| And like... | ||
| Okay, well, I'm maybe one of the people who has the most familiarity with InfoWars in the world. | ||
| Let's see if that is the case. | ||
| Yeah, nobody is more prepared to give you a ruling on that question. | ||
| And so far, I think, based on one episode, I don't know, but based on that, yes and no. | ||
| There are a lot of similarities, and then there's a lot of stuff that's like... | ||
| But I think a lot of things that are those primary differences often come down to... | ||
| Some aesthetic and tactical kind of ideas. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It feels like it depends on what fucking hat you're wearing. | ||
| And neither of these guys wear hats. | ||
| They don't wear good hats. | ||
| Not on air. | ||
| Alex, when he's off air, always wears a 10-gallon hat. | ||
| Oh, that's too big. | ||
| Always wears a cowboy hat. | ||
| That's eight gallons, plenty. | ||
| The Texan! | ||
| Eight gallons are plenty for everybody. | ||
| You don't need ten gallons. | ||
| Well, there's a water crisis. | ||
| Yeah, Tucker wears a two-gallon hat. | ||
| Oh, that's two. | ||
| Two-pint hat. | ||
| So, not only did Ukraine blow up the dam, they also blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. | ||
| Any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up, just as you would assume they blew up Nord Stream, the Russian natural gas pipeline, last fall. | ||
| And in fact, the Ukrainians did do that, as we now know. | ||
| It's not like Vladimir Putin is anxious to wage war on himself. | ||
| Oh, but that's where you're wrong, Mr. and Mrs. cable news consumer. | ||
| Vladimir Putin is exactly that sort of man, the sort of man who'd shoot himself to death in order to annoy you. | ||
| We know this from the American media, which wasted no time this morning in accusing the Russians of sabotaging their own infrastructure. | ||
| So, Tucker can't prove that Ukraine attacked the Nord Stream pipeline. | ||
| That being said, there's a distinct possibility that it is the case that either a group sympathetic to Ukraine or Ukrainian special tactics team did do it. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Tucker is claiming that it's definitively the case, which he can't back up. | ||
| Last month, a bunch of classified documents were leaked on Discord, including one that indicated that the CIA was aware that Ukraine had planned to blow up the pipeline approximately three months before that attack took place. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's entirely possible that this plan was what came to fruition, but it's also possible that it's not. | |
| ... | ||
| 21-year-old man named Jack Teixeira, who has now been arrested for the leak. | ||
| While you shouldn't necessarily throw out a message because it comes from a shitty messenger, it's probably important to be aware that Jack was described by a friend as a proud racist who was preoccupied with the the idea of a coming race war. | ||
| He was a bigot who talked about how the government was a Zionist-occupied government, and he liked to hang out with like-minded young people, so he started a Discord server called Thugshaker Central. | ||
| Jack worked in computer science for the government, and through that he had access to this classified material, which he then posted on his racist Discord server. | ||
| Also in that server, he would laugh while watching ISIS execution videos and express his support about the Christchurch massacre. | ||
| I'm bringing this up because Jack Teixeira is clearly a piece of shit, but that does not necessarily mean that the document that he's leaked is fake. | ||
| What it does mean is that I'm not willing to trust this racist right-wing extremist judgment when it comes to leaking documents that capture the full picture of the available intelligence. | ||
| Someone like this is clearly intensely ideologically motivated, and that makes it very difficult to take on blind faith that there isn't another document that casts doubt on Ukrainian responsibility for the pipeline attack that he ignored or didn't release. | ||
| That is a real difficulty when you have someone like this as the person who's providing these secret materials. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The material itself could be totally real. | ||
| No, their point of view is what limits the value of the... | ||
| Them as a leaker. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, well, you can't... | ||
| Okay, you are a person who is known for, maybe above all else... | ||
| Choosing and picking what things you want to believe are true and share with other people at the exclusion of things that may be completely destructive towards that. | ||
| So, yeah, I don't think I would take you first. | ||
| So, I have some tentative issues with this that, you know, hey, that document... | ||
| I believe it's real and entirely could be indicative of the plan that was carried out, but I suspend a little bit of judgment in terms of making a... | ||
| Definitive conclusion. | ||
| I mean, and also, I have a big, the biggest problem I have with all of these, like, oh, this place has plans to do this thing. | ||
| I bet 50 bucks that some American people have plans to blow up shit. | ||
| I bet every country everywhere has plans to blow up something that if you were like, hey, you shouldn't have plans to blow it up, they'd be like, no, we were just making plans in case. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Some of the context is important. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So, Tucker mocks there that, you know, the idea that Putin would hurt himself just to annoy you or whatever. | ||
| Much like Alex, Tucker used to be a huge opponent of Putin in Russia. | ||
| As with Alex, it would not be a surprise to find him being an adherent of the belief that Putin carried out the apartment bombings back at that point in time, before Tucker became excessively pro-Putin. | ||
| It's really interesting to see Tucker denigrating the cable news watcher here, too, in that clip. | ||
| He's on his first day of his career not being a cable news hack, and all of a sudden he's so above the riffraff. | ||
| It feels like an adolescent who's found a new friend group and is pretending he was I get the motivation here, but it's kind of sad. | ||
| Like, Tucker didn't decide to strike out on his own when he had another choice. | ||
| He's doing this show because he got fired from a cable news hack position where he made millions for years. | ||
| It's not like, oh, the cable news media wants you, the cable news viewer, to believe that Putin wants to annoy you. | ||
| Grow up. | ||
| Listen, person who's watched me on cable news for 20-plus years, watching cable news is stupid! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Way to go. | ||
| All right, buddy. | ||
| So anyway, also... | ||
| So what have you been doing for the past 20 years, Tucker? | ||
| Just a real quick question. | ||
| Follow up with me whenever you have time. | ||
| Backpacking through Europe! | ||
| Cable news viewer is stupid. | ||
| I'm a person who's watched you on cable news for 20 years. | ||
| So what have you been doing for 20 years? | ||
| I was on a sabbatical researching bow ties. | ||
| Ah, that's a really good idea. | ||
| Are they coming back? | ||
| No. | ||
| So Tucker's saying that Russia had no reason to attack themselves, but he's also really comfortable saying that other things are false flags. | ||
| It just feels disingenuous to have false flag within your vocabulary and then be like... | ||
| What kind of fool would false flag themselves? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What kind of moron would engage in false flaggery? | ||
| Obviously, there's false flags that happen all the time. | ||
| And I think that that dynamic that you're playing with there is exactly why it's important to realize that false flag accusations aren't sincere. | ||
| It's a tactical, rhetorical thing that people like Alex and Tucker use to sidestep and excuse and make excuses for. | ||
| The people that they want to support when they do atrocious things. | ||
| Yeah, a false flag accusation might as well be a smoke bomb. | ||
| It might as well be a boom! | ||
| Okay, now we can't see what it is we're exactly talking about. | ||
| I don't feel like I can afford to accept that that's real without limiting my support for the people who are bad that I want to support. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| If I agree with you, I have to change. | ||
| That is what you should say. | ||
| Or, at very least, if I agree with you, I don't have an argument not to change. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| If I agree with you, then I can only either say I am 100% totally fine with murdering innocent people, or I'm going to have to do a lot different with my life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| So, Tucker talks a little bit of shit here. | ||
| And then, I found this to be fascinating, the way that he talks. | ||
| Bill Kristol. | ||
| The man who once told us that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9 /11 immediately denounced Putin as a war criminal and even more savagely compared him to Donald Trump. | ||
| The rest of the pundit class made similar clearly coordinated noises. | ||
| Putin did it! | ||
| Putin did it! | ||
| And their reasoning was simple. | ||
| Putin is evil and evil people do evil things purely for the dark joy of being evil. | ||
| In this specific case, Putin attacked himself, which is the most evil thing you can do, and therefore perfectly in character for a man that evil. | ||
| That was their explanation. | ||
| It feels like he's talking to children. | ||
| Wait. | ||
| Attacking oneself is the... | ||
| Most evil thing you can do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| That's... | ||
| Is that what you were writing down in the notes? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I was just writing down that the idea of a bunch of people agreeing that something happened because that's probably how it happened is coordination. | ||
| Not consensus. | ||
| With the information available, this is the conclusion that we have drawn. | ||
| It's coordinated. | ||
| Oh, we've all talked and this is the story we're going with. | ||
| Sure, man. | ||
| The carrier pigeons go out and tell you. | ||
| These are your lines. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| So I don't know if Bill Kristol actually ever said that Saddam was responsible for 9-11, but I'll stipulate that it is true because I don't really care and I don't have time to read through 100 Bill Kristol transcripts to find his comments. | ||
| Do you know what he said about Bin Laden? | ||
| I can't come up with a Billy Crystal joke. | ||
| He's only mostly dead. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Even if that is a real statement that Bill Crystal made, I would argue that Tucker Carlson's career at Crossfire did way more damage and was way more inaccurate just around the issues related to Saddam Hussein. | ||
| The war in Iraq didn't happen because someone like Crystal said that Saddam did 9-11. | ||
| It was sold to the public largely on the rationale that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| Because he had WMDs and harbored terrorists, we could not just wait and see how things went. | ||
| We needed to take action. | ||
| Tucker sold the war on CNN. | ||
| Tucker argued day in, day out that he didn't support war, but that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and we needed to begrudgingly invade. | ||
| He can try to play this roguish character that's so different from the Republican establishment, but his career was built on being complicit in their greatest blunders. | ||
| Also, on a number of occasions, Tucker came right up to the line of saying that Iraq was directly involved in 9-11. | ||
| For instance, on the September 25, 2002 episode of Crossfire, he said this, Yeah. | ||
| I really love how we don't remember anything. | ||
| Like, we just don't do it. | ||
| Like, as a society, we're just like, yeah, if we talk about that. | ||
| And hold people responsible for it. | ||
| We're gonna have to change. | ||
| I feel like this is the situation that we keep coming up against. | ||
| If I acknowledge that the reality is what it is, I'm going to have to do something different. | ||
| And so I just refuse to acknowledge it. | ||
| But I think a lot of people are willing to recognize those things and want that change. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And just don't... | ||
| We find ourselves in a position where we're disempowered from being able to make that change. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're just trapped! | |
| What are we supposed to do? | ||
| He shouldn't be there! | ||
| What am I supposed to say? | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| So, more startlingly, I think, this is fucking baby talk, what he's doing. | ||
| This is nonsense. | ||
| That legitimately sounds like he's talking to middle schoolers, but what he's saying does somewhat line up with Alex's explanation of the globalists. | ||
| They're evil, they do false flags because they're evil, and they just delight in being evil. | ||
| So it's interesting to see Tucker mock this mentality in what he views as the cable news class who aren't actually saying this, and yet he aligns himself with Alex, who is saying that. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Weird. | |
| Right. | ||
| And just because it's fun. | ||
| Here's a clip of Tucker on C-SPAN from 1999. | ||
| This was back when he worked for Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tucker, you work for Bill Kristol, correct? | |
| I do, happily. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that guy, he's not a Republican. | |
| He's a disgrace. | ||
| Papi Cannon just ripped him yesterday on one of the talk shows. | ||
| Damn, that caller sounds like present-day Tucker time-traveled back to scold himself. | ||
| That is so wild. | ||
| That is so wild. | ||
| I don't like time. | ||
| I don't like its existence. | ||
| I don't like the fact that I've had to experience it. | ||
| I know that four-dimensional space is fucking set in stone. | ||
| There's no changing the future or the past. | ||
| It all happened simultaneously. | ||
| And this disgusts me, sir! | ||
| Yeah, whatever happened, happened. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Or something. | ||
| Except for Tucker is able to time travel and go back and scold his bowtie-wearing ass on C-SPAN. | ||
| That's, oh! | ||
| Yeah, I listened to that and I was like, oh my god, that is such an interesting parallel to the present. | ||
| Yeah, that's fucked up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That really fucks with my head. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you just take the establishment GOP and replace Buchanan with Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's so much... | ||
| I mean, it's just disgusting. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It's just... | ||
| I'm supposed to know... | ||
| Like, here's the problem. | ||
| All right? | ||
| The problem is that fiction lies to us. | ||
| It's not real. | ||
| Because in fiction... | ||
| People grow. | ||
| That's the whole idea. | ||
| That's the whole idea of the hero's journey. | ||
| You meet conflict, you overcome it, you are changed, and then things go on. | ||
| But not in real life. | ||
| There's no hero's journey. | ||
| There's just somebody meets something, and then random shit happens, and then people allow them to keep doing it again. | ||
| Well, think about it as a villain's journey, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No consequences. | ||
| Well, Tucker's laughing at this caller scolding him on C-SPAN. | ||
| And then, over time, through progressive deterioration of his integrity that may or may not have been there in 1999, he ends up becoming that caller, basically. | ||
| Yeah, that is so weird. | ||
| It is. | ||
| That is so weird. | ||
| It is. | ||
| So, no one. | ||
| No one is saying that the damn situation could be Ukraine. | ||
| And that's not true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| A lot of people are saying, we don't know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're saying that. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| And a lot of the news sources that I was reading were like, yeah, Ukraine blames Russia. | ||
| Russia blames Ukraine. | ||
| It's a war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's how it goes. | ||
| It's kind of unclear at this point. | ||
| There's reasons to believe either side could have. | ||
| It's a war. | ||
| But anyway, no one is saying that it's Ukraine. | ||
| No one who's paid to cover these things seem to entertain even the possibility it could have been Ukrainians who did it. | ||
| No chance of that. | ||
| Ukraine, as you may have heard, is led by a man called Zelensky. | ||
| And we can say for a dead certain fact that he was not involved. | ||
| He couldn't have been. | ||
| Zelensky is too decent for terrorism. | ||
| Now, you see him on television, and it's true you might form a different impression. | ||
| Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians. | ||
| A friend to BlackRock. | ||
| But don't believe your own eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Damn. | |
| A friend to BlackRock! | ||
| So, like I said, every news article that I've seen about the damn situation has said that Ukraine points the finger at Russia and that Russia blames Ukraine and that no one knows for sure. | ||
| Further, all of the mainstream media outlets have covered the leaked document that came from the racist Discord server that showed Ukrainian planning involving attacking the pipeline. | ||
| And Tucker's only primary source that he's... | ||
| Brought up at all that had to do... | ||
| The only primary source at all, but it also was to do with that Ukrainian military figure considering flooding the dam at the end of 2022 came from the Washington Post. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, what are you even talking about? | ||
| All you people paid to cover this dumb thing that are so stupid? | ||
| Anyways, the Washington Post. | ||
| I rely on their coverage. | ||
| The mainstream media isn't all marching in lockstep saying that Putin did this, but people like Tucker and Alex like to create that image for their audience because, you know, it's a cheap trick that they can use to make themselves seem like iconoclastic voices, like the only ones brave enough to think for themselves while everyone else is a sheep on autopilot. | ||
| Again, you've been working for cable news for 20-plus years. | ||
| Yeah, bow tie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Tucker is using some interesting language to describe Zelensky there, and it's not language that was made. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Like Andrew Anglin, the guy who runs the Daily Stormer. | ||
| Somebody who looks... | ||
| Rat-faced. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And persecutes Christians. | ||
| So Andrew Anglin wrote a review of Tucker's first episode, and he said, quote, I did like that he called him a rat-like persecutor of Christians. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Tucker was playing to his Nazi audience, and they heard him loud and clear. | ||
| Yeah, that one wasn't hard to miss. | ||
| That one wasn't hard to miss. | ||
| That's the most anti-Semitic thing I've heard. | ||
| Recently. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Pretty, pretty, pretty over. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so he's allowed to do that. | ||
| Yeah, apparently. | ||
| On Twitter it flies. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I mean, it doesn't stop there either, really. | ||
| Actually, Mr. Zelensky is a very good man. | ||
| The best, really. | ||
| As George W. Bush once noted, he is our generation's Winston Churchill. | ||
| Of all the people in the world, our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend in the black suit is uniquely incapable of blowing up a dam. | ||
| I'm sorry? | ||
| He's literally a living saint, a man in whom there is no sin. | ||
| That's pretty grim stuff. | ||
| It's really hard to listen to Tucker's smug baby talk media criticism and not feel condescended to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I find it difficult to believe that anyone could really listen to or watch this shit unless they were already in pretty deep in believing him. | ||
| Like, if you're actively listening to what he's saying, this would be annoying and insulting to the point where I would just turn it off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, dude, people not get that he's being very mean to them? | |
| He's a dick! | ||
| He's an asshole! | ||
| Like, this is not the way you talk to a human being that you're an equal to. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's for fucking sure. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It is very, very patronizing. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| And people choose to be patronized to in an almost comforting way. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| I could see it being somewhat comforting if that's what you're looking for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fascinating. | |
| Fascinating. | ||
| Some more fun attacks on Zelensky there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Interestingly, in Andrew Anglin's review, he also says this. | ||
| Quote, he used my shifty and dead-eyed line. | ||
| Not only is Anglin happy about Tucker calling Ukraine's Jewish president shifty and dead-eyed, he's taking credit for being where Tucker got it from. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So along with that Washington Post article, it looks like we found a second primary source Tucker is working from, the Nazi head of the Daily Stormer. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So that's fun. | ||
| People should be real not happy with Tucker. | ||
| Real not happy. | ||
| Well, you know, everyone except for the Nazi folk. | ||
| It seems that way, yeah. | ||
| It seems like he's got the Nazi folk on lockdown. | ||
| They should be thrilled. | ||
| On knockdown. | ||
| So, Tucker plays a short clip of Zelensky talking to Lindsey Graham. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And they're talking essentially about how... | ||
| You know, they've killed Russian soldiers, and Lindsey Graham makes a joke about, you know, it's the best money we've ever spent, or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure, sure. | |
| About the investment in defending Ukraine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's a little tacky, perhaps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| From Lindsey Graham? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Tucker has some interesting perspective. | ||
| See, there's nothing dark here. | ||
| Just two middle-aged guys celebrating the killing of a population. | ||
| They don't seem like the kind of people who'd enjoy flooding villages or starting a famine. | ||
| And in any case, who cares if they are? | ||
| It's really not your business. | ||
| Your job is to support Ukraine. | ||
| Watch Nikki Haley, a Republican candidate for president, explain this principle on CNN. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A win for Ukraine is a win for all of us. | |
| And for them to sit there and say that this is a territorial dispute. | ||
| That's just not the case, to say that we should stay neutral. | ||
| It is in the best interest of America. | ||
| It's in the best interest of our national security for Ukraine to win. | ||
| We have to see this through. | ||
| We have to finish it. | ||
| See? | ||
| It's very easy to understand. | ||
| It is vitally important for you to support Ukraine because it's necessary for Ukraine to be supported by you. | ||
| Your support is mandatory until it's finished, whatever it is. | ||
| And whatever that means. | ||
| So shut up and support Ukraine, or else you're in trouble. | ||
| Nikki Haley didn't say that. | ||
| I didn't hear her say that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| If I had heard her say that, I would have let you know. | ||
| Yeah, she was saying that it's in the U.S.'s national interest for Ukraine to come out victorious. | ||
| Tucker isn't responding to what she said. | ||
| He's responding to what it feels like she said, if you only watch trash shows like Tucker's. | ||
| And that's intentional. | ||
| So Zelensky and Lindsey Graham being happy about Russian soldiers dying is fucked up in some ways, but... | ||
| It's not really impossible to understand. | ||
| Does Tucker think that Putin is solemnly lighting a candle and saying a devout prayer for every Ukrainian soldier his troops kill? | ||
| You'd hope that everyone would constantly stay aware of people's humanity, but it's a war. | ||
| It's a war where Zelensky's country was invaded. | ||
| You can understand someone in that position not being the most precious about lives. | ||
| None of what they said makes it any more or less likely that they blew up the dam, but this is a fun game for Tucker, because... | ||
| It's a shortcut for him to present Zelensky as a bad person, so then he can say, doesn't it seem like he's the sort of person who would blow up that dam? | ||
| Even if you buy the premise that he's a bad person, it doesn't follow that this indicates that he's willing to blow up a dam to blame somebody else. | ||
| I think the simplest thing about this that is being distracted away from by Tucker is the idea that there are militaries and countries involved. | ||
| Popularity contest between do you like Putin or do you like Zelensky? | ||
| Or this sweaty guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Who do you pass a note to in eighth grade? | ||
| You know, like, it's that fucking shit. | ||
| As opposed to being like... | ||
| It is sort of retreating to almost like a gossipy level. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It's removing the reality of fucking... | ||
| Not just that. | ||
| Not just that. | ||
| But I want to say this to Tucker right away. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| The only thing that they do not let Zelensky do is have any say in any of the war shit. | ||
| He's there to get money. | ||
| That's what he's for. | ||
| And he's great at it. | ||
| He's a comedian and an actor. | ||
| He does not know anything about military tactics, so of course they don't. | ||
| Let me take a step back and say, in addition to that, he's also very effective at raising the morale of the country. | ||
| He is a great leader in that respect. | ||
| If you wanted a president... | ||
| For this, with what kind of training? | ||
| It wouldn't be, like, a great military leader or a great administrator. | ||
| It'd be somebody who can fucking rally people, and they nailed it! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, um... | ||
| The game that Tucker is playing there with the, he's a bad person, so maybe he would blow up a dam. | ||
| Alex engages in that kind of thing a lot. | ||
| There's a whole genre of conspiracy theory where the person making the claim has no evidence of anything, but to make the narrative stick, you just hang it on insinuations that aren't the bad guys capable of doing this bad thing? | ||
| And so that's one of the things I'm trying to focus on as I was going through this is the similarities and differences between Alex and this. | ||
| Totally. | ||
|
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|
And that is a big thing in Alex's world. | |
| You know, Klaus Schwab's a bad guy, so of course he would want you to be imprisoned in your apartment and eat bugs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No, I know! | ||
| It is like, oh, so the... | ||
| To me, what I'm hearing is the focus is like, let's take extremely complicated events, boil them down to a popularity contest, and then you choose which one you like more. | ||
| Guess who I'm going to tell you to choose? | ||
| Putin. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Maybe a little bit of that. | ||
| But the popularity contest is also presented as also, it's not just these popular, this is also right. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think I need to see a bit more of this before I can really have a feel for Tucker, but there's... | ||
| Reductive is a good way to put it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Reductive for sure. | ||
| So we got another pot kettle situation with Tucker's comments about Nikki Haley, too. | ||
| Back when he was a bow tie wearing little boy, Tucker spent a fair amount of his time scolding people who didn't support the war in Iraq and had a position that it was mandatory. | ||
| For instance, here's Tucker from a January 21st, 2003 episode of Crossfire. | ||
| Quote, France's foreign minister has been swaggering around the UN lately, boasting that his country will never support American war plans, regardless of the evidence against Saddam Hussein. | ||
| Asked about our so-called allies' reluctance to stand up to evil dictators, a clearly frustrated President Bush told reporters, surely our friends have learned lessons from the past. | ||
| On the other hand, maybe they haven't. | ||
| As one by one, its former colonies have descended into chaos and misery, France has looked away. | ||
| When a war broke out in the middle of Europe during the 1990s, France yawned. | ||
| When the United States, which twice saved France from a German-speaking future, attempts to disarm one of the world's most dangerous lunatics, France howls. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Let's invade Iraq just to annoy France. | ||
| What a child. | ||
| How has he gotten away with this shtick for so long? | ||
| He's a little whiny baby. | ||
| There's something to that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| On that same episode, Tucker was talking to an anti-war activist and made the point that there was a whole lot of wars going on in the world, but they were focused on the war in Iraq, saying, quote, I must say, the anti-war movement seems like an anti-America movement to me. | ||
| We've been there before. | ||
| Tucker's political position was that the war in Iraq was in the U.S.'s best interest, so he went about deriding people who didn't agree with him. | ||
| What Nikki Haley said wasn't even as explicit or extreme as the line that Tucker took in the past, but he appears to be responding essentially to what he would say, as opposed to what Haley did say. | ||
| Yeah, I'm interested to see Tucker essentially call everybody... | ||
| years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seems like a lot of this. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So hypocrisy doesn't matter. | |
| And I'm not trying to score points off that or anything. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| But there's a dynamic that I think is pretty worth noting there. | ||
| Tucker's response to Haley's comments don't really make sense based on her actual comments. | ||
| She didn't say that it was mandatory to support Ukraine and didn't say you needed to support them because they needed your support. | ||
| Tucker's commentary is far more suited to be the response to something that he would say. | ||
| He is and has been the sort of commentator who would say the thing that he's attributing to Haley, and so he's responding in kind. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's kind of a weird dynamic there that's very similar to Alex's, like... | |
| The globalist plans are what I would do. | ||
| Right, right, right, exactly. | ||
| That kind of projection of your own shittiness onto the mind of the person you're commenting on. | ||
| If I was trying to sell this war, I would sell it like this, the way that I did. | ||
| And look, I don't know everything that Nikki Haley has ever said, but if she's saying that it's mandatory to support the war, then the clip that he plays should be demonstrative of that. | ||
| Because that's the claim that he's making, and then he's playing that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was not. | ||
| It's almost as though he did that on purpose. | ||
| To prime you for, you know. | ||
| Yeah, so you would hear that as her saying that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So Nikki Haley's comment was not, you must support Ukraine because Ukraine needs your support. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's the way that we're moving forward. | ||
| We're moving forward as though she did say that despite the fact that she hadn't and he hasn't proved it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And now Tucker wants to sound really smart. | ||
| And unfortunately, he has run up against someone who knows what he's talking about. | ||
| Back when they still taught logic, statements like this were known as tautologies. | ||
| Oh, I wouldn't do that, buddy. | ||
| Something is true because it is. | ||
| The more you repeat it, the truer it becomes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| It's a self-reinforcing reality. | ||
| There was a time when tautologies were considered illegitimate arguments, not to mention hilariously stupid. | ||
| Only dumb people talk like that. | ||
| Now everybody in power talks like that. | ||
| Diversity is our strength. | ||
| Trans women are women. | ||
| Zelensky is Churchill. | ||
| It's all self-evidently true. | ||
| Doesn't need an explanation, and don't ask questions. | ||
| Tucker does not understand what he's talking about. | ||
| But this strikes me as a piece of evidence that someone working on his staff probably likes to watch online debate streamers. | ||
| Tautology is one of the terms that you might hear thrown around by these debate folks, along with some names of fallacies, but they don't usually use them correctly. | ||
| No, that's usually why they are saying them. | ||
| Because they didn't take any classes on these things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Because they know that if they yell those words, it ends the conversation. | ||
| Read a Wikipedia article about stuff. | ||
| I know what a tautology is. | ||
| So in the area of logic, a tautology is a statement that must be true because it has to be. | ||
| For instance, A equals A is a tautology because the thing must be the same as itself. | ||
| Another really elementary one is either A equals B or A does not equal B, because the disjunction or is satisfied if one of the elements is true, and A equals B and A does not equal B contain all possible states of being. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Either they are the same or they are not. | |
| A tautology is essentially a structure of a statement that has no possible way of being false. | ||
| When you're talking about logic, tautologies aren't bad arguments. | ||
| They're just a term that describes formulations of sentences that can never be false. | ||
| And when we're talking about how something can never be false, it's important to understand that this is using the word false in the logic sense. | ||
| Sentences have truth values, inasmuch as they can be true or false based on their structure. | ||
| For instance, if you have the sentence A and B, the truth value of the sentence is determined by the truth value of AND. | ||
| For the conjunction AND to be true, both A and B must be true. | ||
| So if A and B are true, the sentence A and B is true. | ||
| And if A is true and B is false, then the sentence A and B is false. | ||
| When you get into different types of grammar within the sentences, different rules apply for truth values. | ||
| For instance, if you have the disjunction, like A or B, that sentence will be true if A is true, if B is true, or if both are true. | ||
| The only way it can be false is if both are false. | ||
| If you're dealing with an if-then statement, like if A then B, that will be true in every case except for the instance where A is true and B is false. | ||
| Because of the relationship of how if-then, and, and-or work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All of these sentence constructions are not tautologies, because there are instances where they can be false. | ||
| What Tucker is talking about is not the logic meaning of tautology. | ||
| He's talking about the rhetoric version. | ||
| This is a term that's thrown around to deride someone using somewhat self-present. | ||
| is pretending Nikki Haley said. | ||
| She didn't say that you need to support Ukraine because they need your support, but Tucker claimed that's what she said, most likely because he wanted to do this little fake smart guy shtick about tautologies. | ||
| Because that sentence would be more or less a rhetorical redundancy. | ||
| The problem here runs a little bit deeper, though. | ||
| The statements that he mocks at the end of the clip are not tautologies in the logic sense, nor in the rhetoric sense. | ||
| They are just sentiments that he doesn't like. | ||
| Diversity is our strength is a bit slogany, but it's not a tautology. | ||
| It's not even really something you could translate into the logical form, because it's just a statement. | ||
| It wouldn't be an if-A-then-B kind of thing. | ||
| It would just be represented by A. There's no comparative... | ||
| There's no grammar within it. | ||
| It's just A, and that can be true or false, thus it's not a tautology. | ||
| It also isn't a tautology in the rhetorical sense, because it's not redundant. | ||
| Our strength is our strength. | ||
| Would be a rhetorical tautology. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Trans women are women is not a tautology. | ||
| Again, it's just a statement that he doesn't like. | ||
| It's slightly verbally redundant, and the word woman appears twice, but it's not really a rhetorical tautology because of the context of those words. | ||
| Zelensky as Churchill is not even close to a tautology in either sense of the word. | ||
| Tucker is using this word to describe beliefs he doesn't like, and I think what he's trying to say is that these are statements that he feels people throw around baselessly. | ||
| They're statements that are just supposed to be true on their face, no evidence required. | ||
| But I don't think that people who believe those three statements believe them for no reason. | ||
| Tucker is acting like they do, but they don't. | ||
| I could very easily explain why I believe the first two. | ||
| Like, I could. | ||
| It wouldn't be difficult, and I'd be happy to if Tucker wants. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Someone else can take the Zelensky-Churchill one, though. | ||
| I'm not going to field that. | ||
| That's not my business. | ||
| I'll take two of the three. | ||
| It's unfortunate that whoever wrote this monologue for Tucker didn't actually study any of this stuff, because it's a little bit embarrassing when you try to be condescending and you're talking about stuff wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Back when they taught logic. | ||
| Now that... | ||
| Is what we share in common with Alex. | ||
| It is very frustrating to be condescended to by somebody who is talking bullshit out of the side of their face. | ||
| But in situations like this, I kind of enjoy it. | ||
| I mean, I feel bad for people who don't understand what he's talking about, but for me, I'm like, oh. | ||
| That's embarrassing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's so... | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| It's so... | ||
| It's such one of those signs of like, if you're using a $10 word, it's because you don't know what you're fucking talking about. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's just one of those. | ||
| It's just one of those words. | ||
| It seems strange to me, the need to inject that word. | ||
| Or concept into this, because it's shoehorned in in a way that is very unnecessary. | ||
| Oh no, it might as well be a I'm wearing a genius hat superiority complex level of like, oh, see, I thought that we all had moved on past tautologies, but now everybody's throwing tautologies left and right. | ||
| You've got a tautology, you've got a tautology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everybody just won't stop tautologizing all the time. | |
| And you're like, actually, you sound like an idiot. | ||
| I don't know if... | ||
| There's, like, another colloquial use of that term that he's evoking or something, but it definitely doesn't match with... | ||
| Colloquial use of tautology. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| In the Northeast, they say tautology for all kinds of stuff, you know? | ||
| That's what they call Coca-Cola. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| It's like, bless your heart in Texas, you know? | ||
| It doesn't mean what you think it means. | ||
| So, the U.S., very uninformed, it turns out. | ||
| By this point, it's possible that American citizens are the least informed people in the world. | ||
| Your average yak herder in Tajikistan knows who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. | ||
| It's obvious. | ||
| Does he think some skinny dude in a dress is actually a girl? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| That idea would never occur to him. | ||
| You've got to be lied to at full volume over a period of years in order to reach conclusions like that. | ||
| And, of course, we have been. | ||
| The media lie. | ||
| They do. | ||
| But mostly they just ignore the stories that matter. | ||
| What's happened to the hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars we've sent to Ukraine? | ||
| No clue. | ||
| So there's another commonality with Alex, just throwing random transphobic ideas in that are unnecessary. | ||
| Yep, just throw it in there. | ||
| So the American public very well may be poorly informed, particularly about things that are going on in other countries, but I'm not sure where it ranks internationally. | ||
| What I can say, however, is that Tucker Carlson viewers are almost certainly less informed than the average American. | ||
| There was a famous survey that was done about a decade back that found that Fox News viewers were the least informed about current events in politics, while Daily Show and NPR viewers were the highest. | ||
| And just last year, a survey found that Fox watchers were vastly more likely to believe misinformation about climate issues than people who got news from other sources. | ||
| Why do they think that is? | ||
| I would guess it's because their business model is not informing the audience. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That would make sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you think they're doing it on purpose? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that Tucker's following along with that here. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that sounds right. | ||
| I suspect Tucker chose Yak Herder in Tajikistan because Yak and Tajikistan are funny words. | ||
| They're fun to say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not sure he really should defend his transphobia by pointing to Tajikistan, though, since that country is headed by an authoritarian dictator who's been in office since Tucker was wearing bow ties. | ||
| 1994. | ||
| He's been in office since 1994. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's really easy to find out where the money is going that we sent to Ukraine. | |
| You can find plenty of mainstream media outlets reporting on this. | ||
| Tucker is pretending that it's some kind of a mystery because it's another shortcut to making himself look legitimate and like a bold truth teller as opposed to a bigot dum-dum talking to his audience like they're in grade school. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the funny part about that, of course, is that if he were talking about the Iraq War, he would be able to totally legitimately be like... | ||
| Nobody knows where this hundreds of millions of dollars went. | ||
| But instead, he was like, I love the Iraq War! | ||
| The irony. | ||
| The irony is astounding. | ||
| I almost guarantee that I could find... | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| From Crossfire. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I would bet a million dollars you could find to like, where is America putting all this money? | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| I spent so long reading transcripts of Crossfire episodes. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And... | ||
| I didn't want to do more. | ||
| Yeah, no, reasonable. | ||
| Reasonable. | ||
| Nobody blames you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| CNN has, like, the big archive of them, and I was going through it, and there were a couple that I was like, oh, this could be pretty fucking interesting, and then I clicked on it, and I'm like, oh, it's a Novak episode. | ||
| Has CNN ever apologized? | ||
| I don't think they have. | ||
| Maybe not formally. | ||
| I really think they should. | ||
| We need to get Begala. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They won't. | |
| We need to get... | ||
| Nobody will apologize for the hell that they have wrought upon us. | ||
| They'll all just act like, no, that's part of business. | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| I don't know if they're responsible for Tucker. | ||
| I think they are now. | ||
| He worked for Bill Kristol before that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bill Kristol's responsible. | |
| So look, man, they're not covering the big stories. | ||
| Like, where's that money going in Ukraine? | ||
| First of all, they are. | ||
| And second, like... | ||
| I never fully understand media criticism that is shaped like this. | ||
| Like, why won't they tell you all the information all the time? | ||
| Is there not a responsibility on the part of some of your audience to seek information as opposed to it being delivered to you? | ||
| I feel like... | ||
| I feel like, again, this is an infantilization of the audience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, if the demand of delivering you all the information all the time is not met, then they've failed you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is dumb. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, because it is an eternal thing that you can say, there will never be all the information. | ||
| All the information doesn't exist. | ||
| You cannot get all the information from any source about anything. | ||
| No. | ||
| Period. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| So you can always be like, well, they're not telling you everything. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Yes, obviously. | ||
| Because if you told me everything, my brain would explode. | ||
| And you wouldn't read everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Tell me the stuff that I need to know. | ||
| The problem is nobody is quite sure what you need to know. | ||
| And that gray area is where Tucker works. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he also is adept at telling you... | ||
| Or not telling you things that he thinks you don't need to know. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, we don't need to tell you all of that stuff. | ||
| That would be really important context for you loving Putin. | ||
| So now hear me out on this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The media does not cover the big stories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is... | |
| And in media, you're punished for being curious, like Tucker was about Dominion machines. | ||
| But he's getting this information from the media. | ||
| Come again? | ||
| I mean, he's telling us information that he learned from the media that he is saying doesn't report on it. | ||
| Do Nazi blogs count as the media? | ||
| Fair point. | ||
| So look, this is where everything gets real weird. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Not only are the media not interested in any of this, they are actively hostile to anybody who is. | ||
| In journalism, curiosity is the gravest crime. | ||
| Yesterday, for example, a former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft. | ||
| The Pentagon has spent decades studying these otherworldly remains Okay, that's what the former intel officer revealed, and it was clear he was telling the truth. | ||
| In other words, UFOs are actually real, and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. | ||
| Now we know. | ||
| In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell. | ||
| I'm sorry, what? | ||
| But in our country, it doesn't. | ||
| So, you couldn't have guessed that was where we're going. | ||
| I did not expect to hear that one... | ||
| Pivot to UFOs? | ||
| Excuse me, everybody, the movie Independence Day, 100% a documentary. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's exactly how it worked. | ||
| Area 51, you go underground, there's aliens, Will Smith. | ||
| Independence Day is coming up, so Will Smith is brought up. | ||
| And someone, maybe more than one person, pointed out that on our last episode during the Wonk shoutouts, I did not recognize the Fresh Prince. | ||
| And I have to say, weirdly, that was not a show that flew in our household. | ||
| Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was one of the restricted list. | ||
| It was the Simpsons, the Faces of Death movies, and fucking Fresh Prince. | ||
| So many of the shows that were like, you can't watch those, had to do with family systems that my parents thought were dysfunctional. | ||
| Married with children, or any of that stuff. | ||
| And I was like, is Fresh Prince really that... | ||
| Like a dysfunctional family system. | ||
| I'm like, is that a race thing? | ||
| And it's not, because we watch Family Matters all the time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, but I don't know why. | ||
| So they were just like a nuclear family only. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Because, I mean, the thing is, Will Smith is from a troubled area. | ||
| West Philadelphia. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then he goes to live with his... | ||
| Bel-Air. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| With his family. | ||
| But it's a very... | ||
| Close-knit family unit, there are a lot of really important moments for growth. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| I suspect, I was thinking about this, and I think it might have been a situation where my parents heard the song, Parents Just Don't Understand, and they're parents. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And they were like, well, if we don't, then we don't. | ||
| And we refuse to share. | ||
| And we will not allow you to watch this man who maligns parents. | ||
| Unfortunately, we don't understand. | ||
| And it also might have been, I don't know, might have just been like something that seemed too cool or something. | ||
| Fresh Prince. | ||
| I think what's funny about that is that you instinctively got the meter, though. | ||
| Like, when you read the Fresh Prince, you did it in time. | ||
| It was kind of interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And let's be totally clear. | ||
| I am a Will Smith cinematic fan. | ||
| His television work, I don't know all that much about. | ||
| Well, what are you going to do? | ||
| But you talked to me about Wild Wild West. | ||
| You talked to me about Bagger Vance. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Struggling to bring it up. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| Just acknowledging that movie exists is kind of racist now. | ||
| I feel like we all just agreed to pretend that movie didn't exist. | ||
| What was that? | ||
| Seven pounds? | ||
| Was that him? | ||
| Was that the name of the movie? | ||
| No, wasn't it Seven Grams? | ||
| No, it was 21 Grams. | ||
| 21 Grams. | ||
| That was a different movie. | ||
| The heart transplant one. | ||
| Seven pounds is a heart? | ||
| Is that how much? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I am legend. | ||
| I know he wasn't in Independence Day 2. That's true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Tucker's complaining that you're punished if you're curious in journalism, but then he immediately, unquestioningly accepts the word of a guy who's talking about UFOs and aliens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That doesn't seem like what a curious person would do. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| That seems very painfully uncurious. | ||
| I just, I get it, and he's from the Air Force and all that stuff, and I get that they have all that stuff, but come on, man. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| So that's about a guy named David Grush who's made these claims, but I've heard these claims before, and they were bogus. | ||
| This could be something, but also Grush himself hasn't seen anything. | ||
| He's reporting things he's heard. | ||
| He has, at best, secondhand information, which Tucker is just accepting as gospel, and like, oh, aliens are here. | ||
| And we have their crafts. | ||
| It's such a dumb way for him to try and score points on the media by implying that they don't talk about the important stories and call you a kook if you're curious about this real shit. | ||
| First of all, every news outlet ran stories on this. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| It was the guy who came out and said that UFOs were real and the government fucking had them. | ||
| Of course they're going to run a story on that. | ||
| I don't know what more coverage Tucker could possibly want here. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| There's no evidence, so it's kind of a dead end at this point about where more coverage is going to go. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| It's just a guy who's talking some shit about how he heard some shit. | ||
| I don't feel like they are. | ||
| Here's my feeling, alright? | ||
| In general... | ||
| With what I know about space. | ||
| Because I'm a big fan of space. | ||
| I've read about it. | ||
| I've seen it in the past. | ||
| I've looked at it a few times. | ||
| Yeah, it's up there. | ||
| And down there. | ||
| It's both. | ||
| That's the cool thing about it. | ||
| So it's like Zelda. | ||
| Is that a lot of people, a lot of the time, whenever people like Tucker are like, well, we've got evidence that people made stuff from off this planet and it landed here and we've got the people who flew those ships. | ||
| They generally don't understand quite how hard it is to travel through space. | ||
| Like, it's really hard. | ||
| Like, really hard. | ||
| Yeah, see, what people don't understand is that you think it's just like air, but in space, it's molasses. | ||
| And no one can hear you scream. | ||
| And that's pretty much most of what you do. | ||
| I do appreciate that it is very difficult. | ||
| No, but it's really... | ||
| I mean, there's more words, but I need to try and express this to you. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Really difficult. | ||
| Also, let's take a step back. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Tucker is mad that there isn't coverage of this. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But he's accepted that there are aliens and that we have UFOs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why isn't he freaking out? | ||
| I would freak the fuck out. | ||
| If you have internalized that to be true. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Why are you doing a show on Twitter? | ||
| Oh, I mean, just the idea of just being like, see? | ||
| End of segment. | ||
| Like, that's what you've got for me? | ||
| Yeah, why are you mad about Ukraine? | ||
| We need to go... | ||
| There's space people! | ||
| There's space people! | ||
|
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|
Yes! | |
| There's space people! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It seems dishonest. | ||
| If there were an alien craft that was capable of making it to this planet and it landed, either one, we would have no idea what we were looking at, or two, we would instantly understand how to travel through space. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| And I think that his behavior implies that he is not as convinced by this evidence as he's pretending to be. | ||
| So, look, man, why wasn't it on the front page? | ||
| We need front page coverage. | ||
| In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell, the story of the millennium. | ||
| But in our country, it doesn't. | ||
| The Whistleblower's account ran on a technology website called The Debrief, which you've probably never heard of. | ||
| The Washington Post had that story, but decided not to run it. | ||
| The New York Times, meanwhile, just pretended it never happened. | ||
| On the front page of the New York Times website this morning, there were five stories about Ukraine, as well as four stories apiece about Donald Trump, trans people, and climate change, the usual lineup. | ||
| There was nothing at all about how an alien species is flying hypersonic aircraft over our cities. | ||
| Not one word. | ||
| Yeah, for good reason. | ||
| So if you're wondering why our country seems so dysfunctional... | ||
| This is a big part of the reason. | ||
| Because we're not talking about aliens on the front page. | ||
| Alright, next part. | ||
| Next part. | ||
| Again, aliens. | ||
| Not country specific. | ||
| Not important to a country. | ||
| Countries don't exist for aliens. | ||
| If an alien lands, all the countries want to know. | ||
| If this were the case... | ||
| Countries become a lot less meaningful if we have aliens. | ||
| If there are aliens... | ||
| National borders seem silly. | ||
| At the very least, France should be... | ||
| The EU should be like, hey... | ||
| If you guys have aliens, we need to talk about it, right? | ||
| Like, why are you making it, oh, in a real country, this would be bombshell news. | ||
| No, if it were real, it's bombshell news to everybody immediately. | ||
| Yeah, why aren't you complaining about the Guardian? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah! | ||
| Der Spiegel should be, front page, oh my god, Germans hate aliens! | ||
| Like, it should be insane! | ||
| The front page of Der Spiegel had all these articles about Trump. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| You don't get what it is if you think that it's real. | ||
| But again, this is all just belying the insincerity of the point that he's making. | ||
| It's bullshit! | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| So look, they didn't cover aliens. | ||
| And that means that our media is like the Soviet Union. | ||
| There was nothing at all about how an alien species is flying hypersonic aircraft over our cities. | ||
| Not one word. | ||
| So if you're wondering why our country seems so dysfunctional... | ||
| This is a big part of the reason. | ||
| Nobody knows what's happening. | ||
| A small group of people control access to all relevant information. | ||
| And the rest of us don't know. | ||
| We're allowed to yap all we want about racism. | ||
| But go ahead and talk about something that really matters. | ||
|
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Like aliens. | |
| And see what happens. | ||
| If you keep it up, be quiet. | ||
| Trust us. | ||
| That's how they maintain control. | ||
| When Western tourists first started traveling in large numbers to the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, they found that many Russians had a completely warped understanding of the United States. | ||
| They thought that Americans lived in grinding poverty in a state of perpetual race war and were desperate to flee to the freedom and prosperity of the Eastern Bloc. | ||
| They thought this because that's what they had been told. | ||
| They had no way to know otherwise. | ||
| The few Russians who understood what was really going on in the rest of the world This is incoherent. | ||
| Apparently because the New York Times didn't cover this UFO guy on their front page, we're subject to a crushing centrally controlled media like there was in the USSR. | ||
| This is idiotic. | ||
| But while we're on the subject of that story Tucker is telling about the people in the USSR, let's examine that for a second. | ||
| He's saying that when Americans went over to Russia, Russian people had a misconception about Americans based on the media that they'd taken in that characterized them in a certain way for political reasons. | ||
| That's interesting, because that's exactly what Tucker and Alex do. | ||
| Would it surprise their audience to learn that blue cities aren't constantly on fire, they aren't swallowed up by a perpetual race war, and our streets aren't actually covered with feces and needles? | ||
| It might surprise them. | ||
| Like those Russians were surprised. | ||
| I'm going to throw this out there. | ||
| It kind of feels even like Tucker and Alex say things like, you know, this country is filled with poor, struggling people who are always on the verge of a race war. | ||
| I feel like that's exactly what they say. | ||
|
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|
Yep. | |
| So what do we do with that? | ||
| I mean, do you look at this and say... | ||
| How? | ||
| How do you get... | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| There should be, at the very least... | ||
| Listen, I get it. | ||
| You can lie. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| We're never going to get past truth or freedom of speech, whatever. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I say there should be penalties. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Dunk tank. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I'm fine with penalties for this type of shit. | ||
| You can't... | ||
| Like that Nikki Haley thing. | ||
| If we have shit from you 25 years ago doing this, you get a penalty. | ||
| Well, unless... | ||
| That shit from you 25 years ago, you have really wrestled with and owned up to and shown growth from. | ||
| Because people can. | ||
| They can grow. | ||
| Sure! | ||
| And there is the potential for even Tucker Carlson, back when he was working for the Weekly Standard or on Crossfire, to recognize, like, hey, there's some... | ||
| I engage with media and the attention that I try and accrue. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| He has not done that. | ||
| And that's part of the reason why these things from 25 years ago are still fairly relevant. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And I feel like that's where we're getting into the issue here. | ||
| I actually think, what I would say, what I want to say, is with the Nikki Haley thing, as opposed to the punishment, like the dunk tank, let's say. | ||
| That's not because of things you said 25 years ago. | ||
| It's because you are saying that she said something and then playing a clip of her saying something else. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If you do that, dunk tank. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm fine with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then while you're in the dunk tank, we can bring up the things you said 25 years ago so you can think about it while you're underwater. | ||
| Do you know, here's the problem with the 25 years people can grow and change and all that stuff, is generally speaking... | ||
| If nothing changes for them, they won't grow and change. | ||
| So for a Tucker... | ||
| Why would he grow and change? | ||
| He's only ever been richer and more famous as time has gone on. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But humans are somewhat unpredictable creatures. | ||
| Sometimes it can involve life circumstances. | ||
| It can involve learning. | ||
| It can involve a relationship that you have with somebody that opens your eyes to a lot of stuff. | ||
| Money and success are not necessarily the only things that motivate a change. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Look, the reality is that he hasn't done any of that requisite change that you would need to understand what he said in context. | ||
| The reality is dunk tank. | ||
| Dunk tank. | ||
|
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|
Dunk tank. | |
| Yes. | ||
| I would say so. | ||
| But the thing of these people in the Soviet Union are being fed all this bullshit that they couldn't see outside of. | ||
| The fact that he and Alex do that is really... | ||
| Annoying. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And those Russians thought that Americans wanted to flee to the USSR. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But with people like Alex and Tucker, it's even funnier and worse. | ||
| Alex and Tucker and all these other right-wing shitheads, like the Hannity's and what have you, they pretend that they want to flee the big cities themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And they don't. | ||
| No! | ||
| They're great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We love living here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's absurd. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I will be the first to admit that I say that I want to flee the big city, but it's not for political reasons. | ||
| I just want a tree. | ||
| I don't want a bigger yard where I can maybe keep a funny animal. | ||
| Like, maybe I get a camel. | ||
| Oh, a camel would be great. | ||
| I mean, not a camel. | ||
| You get a llama. | ||
| You can't have a camel in Illinois. | ||
| Watch me. | ||
| You can have a llama in Illinois. | ||
| Watch me. | ||
| I'll dress it up like a llama. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it'll be any of the wiser. | |
| But yeah, it's exploitative. | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| I mean, again, penalty. | ||
| If you're a propagandist, fine, that's what you do. | ||
| But you can't call out other propaganda. | ||
| It's just wrong. | ||
| It's just wrong. | ||
| You should have to pretend like everybody's telling the truth all the time. | ||
| Otherwise, you sound crazy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, what's your... | ||
| How about Snake in a Can? | ||
| Snake in a Can for that one? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Are we only doing clown-based punishments? | ||
| Okay, then in that case... | ||
| Buzzer handshake. | ||
| Giant hand from Jackass. | ||
| You go back to that one periodically. | ||
| I think you've suggested that a couple times. | ||
| I know, but I mean, it's just... | ||
| Sometimes you just... | ||
| It is funny. | ||
| It's just right. | ||
| It's just right. | ||
| So here's the dismount. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Already. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's only like a 10-minute episode. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| And we've been going for almost an hour and a half. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Here's where Tucker leaves us. | ||
| The U.S. government has managed to classify more than a billion so-called public documents. | ||
| So at this point, we can't possibly know what our leaders are doing. | ||
| We're not allowed to know. | ||
| By definition, that is not a democracy. | ||
| What? | ||
| It's fine with the media. | ||
| What? | ||
| Security is a powerful tool of control. | ||
| Stop asking how we got so rich. | ||
| Here's another story about racism. | ||
| Go eat each other. | ||
| That's the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| That's how most of us now live here in the United States. | ||
| Manipulated by lies, silenced by taboos. | ||
| It is unhealthy and it's dehumanizing, and we're tired of it. | ||
| As of today, we've come to Twitter, which we hope will be the shortwave radio under the blankets. | ||
| We're told there are no gatekeepers here. | ||
| If that turns out to be false, we'll leave. | ||
| But in the meantime, we are grateful to be here. | ||
| We'll be back with much more very soon. | ||
| So, yeah, he fancies himself the shortwave under the blankets, which gave the people living in the USSR, the select few gave them an accurate presentation of what's going on in the world. | ||
| Meanwhile, in reality, he's the media that's lying about what the Americans are actually, the conditions Americans are actually living in. | ||
| He's the polar opposite of the thing that he's metaphorically positioning himself as. | ||
| And that's not too surprising, but it is a metaphor. | ||
| And that is something that Alex can't handle. | ||
| It requires too much forethought to end on a bow. | ||
| Like, he put a bow on it. | ||
| You know, it's a shitty bow, and the present sucks, but it is at least wrapped. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, here's what's fun. | ||
| Here's what's fun, I think, I like about... | ||
| Tucker and Alex together, alright? | ||
| It is so much like a great example of the... | ||
| People think that if you graduated college it's more blah blah blah or whatever it is. | ||
| This is such a clear version of like, Tucker was better at school. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| He's not smarter than Alex. | ||
| He's not etc. | ||
| or anything along those lines. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| He was better at doing the things at school. | ||
| Well, he probably also had access to school that would be more pleasant. | ||
| Alex went to Austin Community College and probably didn't see it as a foray into anything that was going to be useful for him, whereas Tucker went to all these elite private schools. | ||
| There was a path there. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| If Alex was in that situation... | ||
| I could see him probably continuing through school. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's not the point. | ||
| The point that I'm making is that he is using the superficial trappings of education to say what is meaningfully nothing more than what Alex says. | ||
| From a content perspective, from a number of the tricks that Alex uses are identical. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so it is one of those exemplars of the way that we treat appearance over substance. | ||
| Because Tucker is better able at saying the same exact thing as Alex in a way that is defensible, or I mean like... | ||
| Better? | ||
| Or more educated? | ||
| Or any number of different, like, superficial differences? | ||
| People allow him to get away with so much more shit. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| And also, maybe that is also a function of the privilege and social class. | ||
| Yeah, ain't that the truth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And the decades of media involvement and connections and such that he has. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But Alex doesn't. | ||
| And it's just wild that he's lived down the bow tie. | ||
| I come back to that a bit because it's silly. | ||
| It should have ended. | ||
| I thought it was going to end. | ||
| It would end somebody now. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I think. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The memes would never end. | ||
| Yeah, that's probably true. | ||
| I mean, I genuinely thought he was going to go away. | ||
| I really did think all the way back when. | ||
| I thought it was going to be... | ||
| In like 2004? | ||
| I mean, yeah, in like 2005, 2006, after that whole thing. | ||
| I thought he was just going to be dropped, you know? | ||
| I thought they were just going to let it go. | ||
| And then he got stronger. | ||
| Terrifying. | ||
| It took a while. | ||
| It did take a while. | ||
| It did take a while. | ||
| So I think that I have an interest in covering more of these. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that, especially since it's a new thing that he's starting, it does somewhat make sense. | ||
| To monitor and track this thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd be interested in people's perspective on it, see what they think. | ||
| I'd like to hear your thoughts when you think about it a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I lost my thought. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| I guess this show is dumb more than I thought. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that the baby talk is... | ||
| The way he's talking down to the audience is pretty... | ||
| It's obscene. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it is like pornographic in its excess. | ||
| I was listening to that and I was like, I'd just turn this off. | ||
| I would not put up with this from a commentator. | ||
| How dare you, sir? | ||
| How dare you speak to me like that? | ||
| Even if I agreed with the things he was saying, I would find it really obnoxious. | ||
| You are talking to me in a really fucked up way. | ||
| I don't appreciate this. | ||
| Oh, and the other thought that I had was the... | ||
| Things that he's saying are potentially more explicit in terms of their connections to, you know, neo-Nazi-ish white supremacist stuff, like the ways that he was describing Zelensky, for example. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| They're more explicit, and I think that may be a function of the fact that he has to prepare. | ||
| He has to write these things out, whereas Alex is just running off the cuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he'll say some things that are real fucked up and what have you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he's often talking a mile a minute, and by the time he said them, he's on to something else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas this is very intentional, and very much like a... | ||
| This is a choice to call him rat-like oppressor of Christians. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, if you wrote something down in advance, that is a little bit more meaningful than if you're just throwing shit at the top of your brain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have some wonder... | ||
| I do wonder if this will last. | ||
| The show? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| Like, I don't know if it's financially viable. | ||
| I don't know if he's gonna be able to satisfy the people he wants to reach. | ||
| I know that that Andrew Anglin review was not super complimentary as a whole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he was like, yeah, he's saying all this stuff that's right about Zelensky and Ukraine, and then he gets into UFOs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fucking idiot. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| Whatever, yeah. | ||
| So, like, there is a desire up from that Nazi base to see him go mask off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And probably isn't going to do that. | ||
| Who knows to what extent. | ||
| Elon Musk and Twitter will allow him to push whatever envelope there is. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| It seems like a temporary stopgap or whatever until he can launch something else that he can make a ton of money on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, if you're... | |
| Now is not the time to hitch your wagon to Twitter's future. | ||
| No, but from what I understand, the reason that he would do this... | ||
| Is because he feels that this is not breaking his non-compete clause. | ||
| Because Twitter isn't a competitor to Fox News. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So that is, like, the way you get around it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you do this while you're in your non-compete to keep people aware of you, to keep your audience engaged. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then as soon as that period is over, you go work for The Blaze or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Maybe not The Blaze. | ||
| He's not gonna do, like, a sub-stack or something. | ||
| That's not gonna happen. | ||
| I mean, I guess he doesn't... | ||
| He's not a writer. | ||
| Well, he has the Daily Caller, but I don't think he owns that. | ||
| I think he might have sold it. | ||
| Or he has some stake in it. | ||
| No, he's going to have to... | ||
| I'm going to say this. | ||
| He's going to have to do his own thing. | ||
| And he's going to have to do it for a lot longer than ten minutes. | ||
| And that's going to be the worst part of it. | ||
| People are not... | ||
| It seems like it would be so easy to continue to do his show. | ||
| There are so many young aspiring bigots who are capable and know tech and would be able to get him up and running. | ||
| Yeah, I just don't understand why he wouldn't just be like, okay, fine, I'm making my show and I'll just put it out on something. | ||
| Just make your thing, man. | ||
| Maybe that would be violating the non-compete. | ||
| But then it would seem like Twitter would be, too. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm interested to see how it plays out from just a, like, what-are-you-going-to-do standpoint. | ||
| But this isn't sustainable on its own. | ||
| So we'll see what happens under the covers with the shortwave in the future. | ||
| But, you know, only... | ||
| Only if we feel like it. | ||
| It seems like we feel like it. | ||
| I mean, I expected you to have a much worse time with this. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| This is doable. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, that's good. | ||
| I think there's something valuable to be had in this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it adds to the conversation that we have. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think the ecosystem that this exists in now has to be viewed as in conversation with itself, you know? | ||
| I don't think we can live in a space where we can act like InfoWars is its own universe anymore. | ||
| This is all in conversation with itself. | ||
| To me, there's no separation anymore. | ||
| Fox News is InfoWars, is this, is that, because they're all communicating with each other and adjusting themselves based around their equilibrium with each other. | ||
| They're all part of the same thing. | ||
| So anything that we talk about now, we're also talking about InfoWars. | ||
| Yeah, it's relationship to, it's connections, it's subtle differences. | ||
| But there are only so many things that fit within the purview of what we do. | ||
| And I do think that this somewhat does still fit. | ||
| Covering something that's on Fox News doesn't quite feel... | ||
| For one, because it's mostly a visual medium, this might as well be audio. | ||
| I mean, it's Twitter. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Anyway, we'll be back. | ||
| See how Alex is dealing with the indictments. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| Much like Tucker. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh! | |
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Nobody's on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledgefight. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| I've made peace with scatting. | ||
| Oh, you know what? | ||
| And now here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
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Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |