Today, Dan and Jordan explore the very bizarre second episode of Tucker Carlson's Twitter show. This installment sorta revolves around cultural taboos, and Tucker spends a lot of time complaining about how society doesn't like white supremacists enough.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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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. | ||
| I need, I need money. | ||
| Andy and Pam. | ||
| Andy, Andy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's time to pray. | |
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
| Knowledge Fight. | ||
| KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Jordan. | |
| I forgot who I was for a second. | ||
| We're a couple dudes that like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Quick question for you. | ||
| What's your bright spot today, buddy? | ||
| Why don't you go first? | ||
| My bright spot, Dan, is over the weekend I spent Father's Day with my family, my father specifically, as you might expect. | ||
| We had a fantastic time. | ||
| There was some barbecuing. | ||
| There was some smoking of ribs. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| There was plenty of talk. | ||
| My brother, he's trying to build a deck or something, not completely finished, and instead of stairs, he wound up with a ramp. | ||
| Which, my wife slipped and fell down. | ||
| So it's a little bit of a mixed bright spot and dark spot because she really hurt herself. | ||
| Oh man, it hurts so bad. | ||
| I'm very sorry to hear that. | ||
| Yeah, and I got a huge bruise on my hand because I fell immediately after her. | ||
| You are so codependent. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| She fell and then you had to fall. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It was even worse. | ||
| It was comical insofar as she fell outside and then when I went to check on her, because I didn't see any of it happen, I went to check on her and they were like, what happened? | ||
| She fell and I went, what? | ||
| And then fell the exact same way. | ||
| Exact same way. | ||
| It's basically the story of Everest. | ||
| It was a cartoon. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Was there more talk or more meat? | ||
| There was more smoked meat. | ||
| There was plenty. | ||
| They have a membership that shall not be named that gives you large quantities of stuff. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| They made way too much. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How about you? | ||
| What's your right spot? | ||
| Well, we just got a package. | ||
| Indeed, we did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Zip. | |
| Zip in the mailbag. | ||
| And this is so cool. | ||
| We got this from Dave up in Northern Ontario. | ||
| Sent the... | ||
| McDonald's glasses from Batman Forever. | ||
| The set of the four glasses with Batman, Robin, Two-Face, and Riddler. | ||
| And they are, I don't even know what pristine condition would be for McDonald's glasses, but these are in mint condition. | ||
| I'm certain that, like, we have to have talked about it at some point on the show. | ||
| I guarantee we've talked about it. | ||
| But I can't for the life of me remember when. | ||
| But I do, I'm like, I had these. | ||
| Maybe not the whole set. | ||
| But I had some of them when I was a kid. | ||
| Oh no, we opened the package. | ||
| To the point. | ||
| It's such a child memory. | ||
| These are so much smaller than I remember them being. | ||
| I remember them being huge! | ||
| I thought they were mugs! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like the size of a stein! | |
| So there's also a letter along here that I unfortunately found right after I hit play. | ||
| That's why there was also much of me talking straight. | ||
| And so I don't know if it explains when we talked about it, but also just a fantastic cartoon that has been drawn of us here. | ||
| Oh yeah, it's a nice comic strip. | ||
| A comic strip, yeah, not a cartoon. | ||
| I guess that's motion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Dave. | |
| I have many lines, but most of them are essentially, I'm Jordan. | ||
| That's well done. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Our past is coming back to haunt us. | ||
| I mean, honestly, this may be something. | ||
| I think I almost remember us talking about this, like, ten years ago, drinking at, like, 4 a.m., yelling at each other about how great Batman Forever cups were. | ||
| And there was somebody who just overheard us. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Someone at that bar that you took me to where they were playing bingo. | ||
| Yes! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Like, they knew what was coming, and they recorded our conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Right near Fullerton, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have an episode to go over. | ||
| Oh, indeed we do. | ||
| With that, our last episode, the past, and today we're going to be talking about Tucker's second episode of his Twitter show. | ||
| And part of the reason we've got to record these in advance a little bit, because this week I'm working on some housing stuff. | ||
| So, you know, got to knock this out a little bit to give me, you know, free up a little bit of time. | ||
| You're moving on up! | ||
| To the east side. | ||
| Well, I mean, northeast-ish. | ||
| Hey, don't dox me, man. | ||
| But yeah, so I have a bit of that business to take care of and stuff, and it's always a hassle. | ||
| And it will probably be for a little bit, but we'll get to the other side of it and hopefully be able to buffer it with some episodes here and there. | ||
| We've talked about the present day for a fucking week and a half. | ||
| I mean, what I appreciate most about this is that this is us saying that we're going to need to take some time off, so you're only going to get three episodes this week. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they'll be from the past or Tucker's, which is what maybe we would have been doing anyway. | ||
| Self-consciousness is a terrible, terrible thing. | ||
| You're going to enjoy your time here. | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| No, I doubt it. | ||
| You'll get something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So before we get down to business on Tucker's episode two, Taboo Boogaloo. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm trying to give it a title. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For the episode itself. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I'm sticking with Tucker Man and his Twitter. | ||
| Even though I've never seen Tucker Man and his Dream. | ||
| I know it's a movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know what it's about. | |
| Tucker's Twit... | ||
| Twits... | ||
| Tucker. | ||
| No. | ||
| Can't do it. | ||
| Tucker the man in his Twitter is about as good as I think I'm going to do. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's not too bad. | ||
| And I'm a fan of bad titles, as is evidenced in all the things we've ever done. | ||
| Darius Tucker's... | ||
| Letter crime. | ||
| Tucker and the Blowfish. | ||
| I think that's what we're going to go with. | ||
| It's too late now. | ||
| Ah, shoot. | ||
| But it's not too late to say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Oh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, two guys, one hammer. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Next, Quimby in Colorado is still waiting for Dan to sing Tarzan Boy in AJ's voice. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jungle lights, I'm far away from nowhere. | |
| On my own, like Tarzan Boy. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Light night and sleep, I pray across the bar, the monkey business, on a Sunday afternoon. | |
| Sing it. | ||
| Praise. | ||
| Sing it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Next, thank you so much to Jan and Dorden. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, Halcyon, the beautiful unicorn. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| And Dan DeGrandpre. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| And we got a technocrat in the mix, Jordan. | ||
| So thank you so much to Candy and Ansys. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Daddy Shark. | |
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a loser little titty baby. | |
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ! | ||
| I realize that the lyric isn't night and sleep, it's hide and seek. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| I don't know what, I panicked, cold reading this request, trying to remember the lyrics to Tarzan Boy. | ||
| I think you're okay. | ||
| I think people will probably not notice. | ||
| That song, man, that's a banger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| I'll stand by it. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| It's better than its appearance in Ninja Turtles. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And it's better than, it's used as a Jungle Boy wrestler at AEW. | ||
| It's his theme song. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Better than that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Better than all of it. | ||
| Better than all of that. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, from what I can tell, Tucker doesn't give names to his Twitter shows, and so you kind of just jump in and you're like... | ||
| I wonder what this asshole's going to talk about today. | ||
| Okay, so it is just a man who turns the camera on and then shouts for ten minutes and then stops. | ||
| But it's written. | ||
| You can tell it's written. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Because there's a path that you're supposed to be going along. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you never know what you're going to get. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's really, it's like a box of C's candies. | ||
| Except those are labeled, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| My mom and my grandma and my aunt. | ||
| I think that's the full list. | ||
| They loved C's Candies. | ||
| They're always around on holidays and stuff. | ||
| I recently found that you can order bespoke boxes of C's Candies. | ||
| You can specify which ones you want in it. | ||
| I'm like, this is perfect. | ||
| I feel like that's almost in defiance of the process. | ||
| And thank God it is. | ||
| That's wrong. | ||
| You're supposed to buy a box of chocolates that goes half uneaten. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| You should have little bits of things that have holes in them where you go, oh, this is gross. | ||
| I'm probably going to order a box of C's candies because I can control it now. | ||
| See, that's the problem. | ||
| Now you don't have to work for it. | ||
| The kids, these... | ||
| These days are weak! | ||
| That is not the subject of today's Tucker monologue. | ||
| But maybe you can suss out what he's talking about. | ||
| Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. | ||
| Let's say you wanted to control a country. | ||
| Hi, Tucker! | ||
| How would you start? | ||
| We'd want to make sure you had the complete obedience of everybody inside your borders who was authorized to use deadly force. | ||
| You would start with the military and then federal law enforcement and move your way down ultimately to agencies like the IRS. | ||
| Controlling the guns would be a top priority for you if you ever wanted to go dictatorial, if you wanted to be baby doc. | ||
| But let's say you had deeper ambitions. | ||
| Let's say you wanted the power not simply to control people's behavior, but to control How they think, not just their bodies, but their minds, as a god would. | ||
| In that case, you need to take charge of the society's taboos. | ||
| A taboo is something that by popular consensus is not allowed. | ||
| A taboo may not be illegal, but it doesn't need to be. | ||
| Over time, social prohibitions are more powerful and more enduring than laws. | ||
| Societies are defined by what they will not permit, as are famously religions. | ||
| Muslims don't eat pork, neither do Orthodox Jews. | ||
| Traditional Christians oppose extramarital sex, the Amish avoid electricity, and so on. | ||
| So this is an interesting suggestion as a way to start out an episode. | ||
| Ah, okay. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| You're struggling. | ||
| I'm already frustrated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| Why? | ||
| Because I reject his premise. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, let's say you want to control a country. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Gain a monopoly over the most important resource. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, I think that... | ||
| Or, conversely... | ||
| Create a weather machine. | ||
| Well, I mean, there's that, or like, you know... | ||
| There's a lot of supervillain plans you could come up with. | ||
| No, I'm talking about like the Saudis being complete control of oil. | ||
| Then you will have control of that country, and not just that country, but you will have control of many other countries as well that are dependent on that resource. | ||
| Or at least heavy sway, yes. | ||
| Yeah, I'm talking about hydraulic despotism, Dan. | ||
| If you want to take control of a country, I'm going to tell you a little bit about a book called Dune, alright? | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| Now, if you've got the melange, the spice must flow! | ||
| Who is the worm? | ||
| Oh, do you mean Leto 2? | ||
| God Emperor of Doom? | ||
| Dennis Rodman. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| I think that you're right in a sense. | ||
| You know, like that is a very effective way to hold sway over a country's policy and what have you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no. | ||
| I think he's making a false equivalence. | ||
| I think so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I also think that, you know, you wouldn't be able to have total control, I think almost in any scenario. | ||
| Even if you owned all the police and all the military and controlled all of cultural taboos, I don't think you'd be able to have complete control over people's thoughts and minds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| But I kind of do got to give it up to him a little bit that I think that social norms and cultural, if you want to call it taboos, are things that lead often to law. | ||
| Things like the... | ||
| You know, changing opinions surrounding civil rights led to codification of the Civil Rights Act. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You know, things, it flowed in that direction. | ||
| And so you could kind of argue that, you know, cultural opinions have more of a powerful effect, you know? | ||
| Um, I mean, I suppose, I think that's a question for whether or not we are, I mean, how about we ask it this way? | ||
| Are we governed, or do we govern ourselves, is the question. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| So, if we govern ourselves, then cultural opinions are laws. | ||
| You know, if we are governed, then laws are laws, and cultural opinions are really kind of our own business. | ||
| But now, if it's possible to force cultural norms and taboos on people, then you're back to being governed. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| But, yeah. | ||
| And that... | ||
| This is circular. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| That's the problem with it, is because they come from each other. | ||
| They create each other. | ||
| You know, the laws create the cultural taboos, the cultural taboos create the laws, and so on. | ||
| Yeah, and different cultures have different cultural taboos, you know, within different countries, different places. | ||
| And people being in conversation with each other often affect those cultural taboos. | ||
| I think it's all fluid and constantly ever-changing. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| But also, it's worth noting that Tucker is saying at the end of that clip, it says a lot about what he thinks religions are. | ||
| Yeah, I know, right? | ||
| Just, like, different sets of things you can't do. | ||
| Muslims don't do pork. | ||
| Christians don't have sex. | ||
| Everybody doesn't like electricity. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| I think it's supposed to be about, like, a connection to the divine. | ||
| Oh, no, it's just rules. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| It's rules, Dan. | ||
| It's things that you can't do that I can do. | ||
| And definitely that list of things that Muslims, Christians, everybody does, there's definitely no examples of people in those religions constantly doing those things. | ||
| In fact, more frequently than not. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, we're gonna, you know, talking up here, we have the setup. | ||
| That cultural taboos are more important than law. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Whoever controls those. | ||
| I'm going to go with... | ||
| As go the taboos, go the... | ||
| I'm going to throw this out there. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| I think it's going to be the libs who are causing the problem. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| And also, he does get into some discussion of child abuse and stuff. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So if you're a bit sensitive about those topics, you might want to give it a... | ||
| Give this a pass, because he's going to talk about that for a little bit. | ||
| You don't need Tucker in your life. | ||
| No, you're better off without him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| American society isn't overtly religious, but it's governed by taboos, and it always has been. | ||
| What's interesting is how fast our taboos are changing. | ||
| This is not happening organically. | ||
| What we're allowed to dislike is being dictated to us from above, sometimes by force. | ||
| Until fairly recently? | ||
| attack people on the basis of their race. | ||
| That was the main lesson Until fairly recently? | ||
| of the Second World War, we were told, again and again. | ||
| The one thing we learned from the Nazis is that it's dangerous to reduce human That made sense, but apparently we no longer believe it. | ||
| Punishing people based on their skin color is not only permitted in modern America, it is mandatory. | ||
| Throughout business and government and higher education, as long as the victims are white. | ||
| At one time, that would have been unimaginable. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If there's one thing we learned from the Nazis, please let it be anything but just that. | ||
| There should be... | ||
| I'm not saying that that's not an important thing that we should have learned from the Nazis. | ||
| I think we should have learned it elsewhere. | ||
| I think we should have been there way before. | ||
| Yeah, that's a real weird articulation of a thought. | ||
| The way that that man thinks. | ||
| And here's why it's even more disconcerting to me than with Alex. | ||
| With Alex, it's chaotic, you know, flying through the brain sphere. | ||
| Who knows where it's going to land on the Plinko board, right? | ||
| It could go anywhere. | ||
| Oh, we got $500 this time, you know, that kind of thing. | ||
| Tucker had to have sat down and organized his thoughts. | ||
| Into this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in theory, in collaboration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| With writers or, you know, whatever. | ||
| It's the difference between, like, you know, you see somebody who's just winging a stand-up set. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And, like, maybe things go off the rails a little bit. | ||
| It doesn't really reflect that poorly on you if it wasn't all that funny. | ||
| You know, maybe you win some, you lose some when you're just making it up on the spot. | ||
| Yeah, you're going for it. | ||
| But if you wrote something down. | ||
| That hurts. | ||
| It's a reflection of your effort. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You can value yourself by how much work you put into the words you wrote down. | ||
| And this is... | ||
| That 50 seconds was interesting. | ||
| It says so much. | ||
| Until recently, you couldn't... | ||
| You know, be racist. | ||
| I mean, yeah, there's so many, like, little things. | ||
| I want to dive into each collection of three words in a row and be like, can you unpack a mind that thinks this makes sense? | ||
| Well, because you also have, like, even at the beginning, the introduction of the premise that he's saying I disagree with, which is that, like, things are being forced from top down telling you what you can or can't like and dislike. | ||
| It's like, I get it. | ||
| Sometimes by force. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You want to hate certain groups. | ||
| You can. | ||
| We're just going to criticize you for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's legal. | ||
| We're going to be mean to you for your meanness. | ||
| You're a dick and we're going to be a dick to you. | ||
| You're an asshole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know what to tell you. | ||
| These are the things that happen when you're a piece of shit. | ||
| That's not dictated from on high. | ||
| No. | ||
| You are being responded to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that he's just trotting out an old... | ||
| Sort of affirmative action type complaint there. | ||
| I do appreciate that he's already, like, you know, when we were talking about euphemisms and how that's kind of messed with our ability to understand what people actually mean? | ||
| In the same way, Tucker has found such a strident and, like, arrogant way to whine like a little baby. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like, just like, uh, wah, wah, wah. | ||
| That's why you worked with a bow tie. | ||
| I hate to keep going back to that. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| It really does. | ||
| He has a very cherubic, I'm a whiny baby, but you can take me seriously, I guess? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Someone takes me seriously, but I am a cherubic little baby. | ||
| You're a little baby! | ||
| He's a little whiny baby. | ||
| I also jumped the gun with my content warning. | ||
| It's coming a little bit later. | ||
| So we got these norms. | ||
| They're creeping. | ||
| At one time, that would have been unimaginable. | ||
| So are the current behavior of our politicians. | ||
| As recently as the 1992 presidential campaign, adultery was considered disqualifying for anyone seeking higher office. | ||
| Bill Clinton was very nearly derailed in the financial primary by his affair with Jennifer Flowers. | ||
| Clinton went to elaborate lengths to lie about the relationship because he had no choice. | ||
| But he was the last presidential candidate who had to meet this standard. | ||
| By 2008, it was obvious to anybody who was paying attention that Barack Obama had a strange and highly creepy personal life. | ||
| Nobody ever asked him about it. | ||
| By that point, a leader's behavior within his own marriage, the core relationship of his life, have been declared irrelevant. | ||
| It was Barack Obama's business, not yours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Obama had a strange and creepy personal life? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| And no one asked about it? | ||
| No one ever asked a thing about Obama's personal life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are you talking about? | |
| I'm telling you this right now. | ||
| Anything about Obama's personal life. | ||
| No one ever demanded multiple versions of his birth certificate. | ||
| Who would have asked for it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nobody. | |
| Nobody even thought to ask those questions back then. | ||
| Nobody made documentaries claiming that his dad wasn't his dad. | ||
| We were so young back then. | ||
| We didn't know to ask these follow-up questions, Dan. | ||
| We just saw him and we went, oh, we believe you. | ||
| How could we have been so foolish and naive, Dan? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| Dan? | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Dan? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Infidelity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was verboten amongst all politicians in the United States. | ||
| I guess it was in the sense that you just didn't talk about it. | ||
| You didn't talk about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was in the sense that they didn't report on it out of being nice to you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So actually the cultural norm is we just didn't talk about that shit. | ||
| Protect people from the consequences of their actions. | ||
| Yeah, and so maybe if you wanted to say that. | ||
| Yeah, that I think is what he wants. | ||
| Yeah, we didn't hold our leaders to any kind of personal life standards. | ||
| So it's actually a little bit different. | ||
| But also, hey ding dong. | ||
| Weren't you the guy who was super into Trump? | ||
| I mean, I don't, right? | ||
| So, come on. | ||
| Get off that high horse. | ||
| Furthermore, we had a president named Jack Kennedy, my friend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had a president who did the fucking. | ||
| He did, he did. | ||
| And he had a bad back. | ||
| And he still went for it. | ||
| That's how fucking crazy you have to be to be president. | ||
| He was committed. | ||
| He was. | ||
| He was down for it. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So here's where things get messy. | ||
| Our taboos, they're falling apart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Everyone is just, you know, going along with everything or something. | ||
| What decade are we in? | ||
| One by one, with increasing speed, our old taboos have been struck down. | ||
| Those that remain have lost their moral force. | ||
| Stealing. | ||
| Flaunting your wealth. | ||
| I'm sorry? | ||
| Taking marijuana on the street. | ||
| Shameless public hypocrisy. | ||
| Taking other people's money for not working. | ||
| Are you fucking with me? | ||
| All of these things used to be considered unacceptable in America. | ||
| Are you fucking with me? | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| So it probably shouldn't surprise us that the greatest taboo of all is teetering on the edge of acceptability. | ||
| Child molestation. | ||
| A generation ago, talking to someone else's children about sex was widely considered grounds for a thrashing. | ||
| Touching them sexually was effectively a death penalty offense. | ||
| What is happening? | ||
| I think he's fucking with me. | ||
| He might be. | ||
| He's personally fucking with me. | ||
| He literally just said, flaunting your wealth and taking money for not doing work. | ||
| That's bananas. | ||
| I have a point I want to make about that list that he had there. | ||
| Because there's a lot going on in there. | ||
| There is a lot. | ||
| But if you look at that list, he has six examples of these norms. | ||
| And two don't really fit the mold. | ||
| That I would categorize these in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Shameless public hypocrisy isn't really a taboo, because shameless hypocrites just pretend that they aren't shameless hypocrites, and their audiences don't care. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| This has probably always been the case. | ||
| We're just inundated with so much more media now, and social media ends up giving rise to many more invasions of people's privacy, which allows you to see their hypocrisy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you figure you're in the Acropolis, and there's probably a bunch of assholes yelling stuff at you all day. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Or, like, you know, Walter Cronkite. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was he up to? | ||
| Lord knows. | ||
| He could have been anywhere. | ||
| So the other one that doesn't really fit is Striking Women. | ||
| I think, generally speaking, most people still feel pretty negatively towards hitting women. | ||
| Personally, I'm not a fan of anyone getting struck, but what Tucker is talking about here is assault. | ||
| I don't think anyone's making that better. | ||
| I don't recall that being a taboo that we were concerned about. | ||
| We were always like, yes, the law says don't hit. | ||
| I mean, when I was a kid, it was don't hit. | ||
| Right, and I think what he's talking about is, like, domestic violence, maybe. | ||
| Or no, actually, if I had to guess, I'm gonna bet that... | ||
| That what he's trying to signal to is trans women in fighting sports. | ||
| I think it has to be something like that. | ||
| That has to be what it's a signifier for. | ||
| But society still is quite against... | ||
| It's something that they would know a reference to that we do not because we're not that... | ||
| That's the closest I can get with some of their talking points. | ||
| But still, the point remains, it doesn't really fit the mold of the rest of these. | ||
| Because the other ones that he listed, they fall into a particular category that you could call things that society decided to look down upon because they were associated with marginal groups, mostly the poor. | ||
| Stealing has never been taboo in this country as long as you're rich. | ||
| Corporate theft and wage theft have been the order of the day for generations, and if anything, the prevailing attitude towards the rich people who did the stealing was of aspiring to be like them. | ||
| The people who were stigmatized because of stealing were the people who had to steal to survive. | ||
| That was the taboo. | ||
| Needing to steal. | ||
| Flaunting your wealth has also never been taboo so long as you're rich. | ||
| It's only taboo to flaunt your wealth or to be perceived to be if you're a member of a group that society... | ||
| Consider the example of, like, the editorials about millennials needing to stop buying avocado toast. | ||
| If you aren't rich, showing any signs of affluence would typically cause accusations of irresponsibility or even make people suspicious. | ||
| Like Master P said on More to Life from Da Last Dawn, The feds follow me like I'm slinging crack, wasting tax dollars because I'm young, rich, famous, and black. | ||
| The ghetto's got me crazy. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, that is an entirely appropriate use of that reference. | ||
| People society expects to be rich can buy castles, but for people society expects to be poor, you must be a criminal if you're driving a nice car. | ||
| Smoking weed on the street has also probably only been taboo because of the history of how propaganda about the drug was used to malign black and Hispanic populations, and the criminalization of it was a driving force of a drug war that needlessly destroyed countless lives. | ||
| Smoking tobacco on the street isn't taboo, and yet you're theoretically causing harm to the people around you. | ||
| Caffeine is no less of a drug, and you can drink coffee on the street. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Marijuana was seen as the drug of the lower classes, dangerous classes, not like the aristocratic cocaine, and that legacy lived on through that taboo. | ||
| Yeah, in the same way that crack is not cocaine, and yet, and yet. | ||
| Taking other people's money for not working is Tucker's way of saying accepting social assistance. | ||
| Again, this is only an issue when you're poor. | ||
| If you need help and accept that help, you take on a stigma. | ||
| When you're a big corporation or a rich asshole and you profit from subsidies or government largesse, you don't take on any of that stigma. | ||
| If you're a landowner who takes a paycheck from the government for not using your land to grow crops like a friend of mine from my childhood's dad did, you don't get scolded for taking other people's money for not working. | ||
| Society doesn't have a taboo against taking public money for not working. | ||
| It has a taboo against being in a position where you need help. | ||
| And stigmatizing that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Tucker is guilty of all of those simultaneously. | ||
| And most especially the taking money for not working thing. | ||
| He's still getting paid by Fox News! | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| We'll see on that one. | ||
| I know, but that's fucking spitting in your face. | ||
| Taking money for not working. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In theory. | |
| Yeah, that's, come on. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| But largely, that list is just a mess. | ||
| Four of the examples are really only things that are conditionally taboo, and the other two things are hitting women and being a hypocrite. | ||
| No one really cares if someone's a hypocrite, and hitting women's still very much not. | ||
| The other four are examples of things where it's becoming less stigmatized to be in a marginalized class and to do the thing that rich people have been doing all along. | ||
| The issue with the way Tucker is using this list is that he tries to transpose this diminishing of these taboos onto the idea that child molestation is a taboo that's falling. | ||
| This is ridiculous and pretty offensive on its face. | ||
| The argument fails in a bunch of ways, but what's important here is to track the argument that Tucker is making and how it flows. | ||
| Here he's set up an establishing point, which is that society's taboos are eroding their moral force, and that means that child molestation will soon lose its status as unacceptable as. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That's sort of the... | ||
| The base which this house is going to be built on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And by the way, when I said house right there, I want to point this out. | ||
| I knew that house was Holmes. | ||
| Sherlock Holmes. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| I understood that. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| I've gotten some feedback on this. | ||
| I don't need this. | ||
| My disagreement was with who was Watson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I get it. | |
| I understand Wilson's name is close to Watson. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So you probably will have no ability to predict where this train of argumentation leads. | ||
| Because it's... | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Serpentine comes to mind. | ||
| I'm gonna go with... | ||
| I want to say this is going to somehow be something to do with TV. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Not really. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Dang. | ||
| No. | ||
| But here we go. | ||
| When Jeffrey Dahmer was bludgeoned to death in the bathroom of a Wisconsin prison in 1994, the Milwaukee district attorney had to caution the public not to turn Dahmer's killer into a folk hero. | ||
| Jeffrey Dahmer had molested and murdered children. | ||
| People felt justified in celebrating his death. | ||
| 25 years later, that standard had changed dramatically in the state of Wisconsin, as in the rest of the country. | ||
| In the summer of 2020, during the BLM riots in Kenosha, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse defended his life from a convicted child molester called Joseph Rosenbaum. | ||
| Rosenbaum was trying to kill Rittenhouse, so Rittenhouse shot him in self-defense. | ||
| But it was Joseph Rosenbaum whom the media cast as the victim of the story. | ||
| Kyle Rittenhouse, meanwhile, an underage boy fending off violence from a child molester, was denounced as the villain. | ||
| Ultimately, he was indicted for murder. | ||
| One of the things that this tells us... | ||
| I did not see that coming. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I was not expecting for- Listen, we've heard them associate child molestation with literally everybody at this point. | ||
| I still was not expecting them to somehow be like, see, Rittenhouse is not a murderer. | ||
| That was just out of my mind. | ||
| That's out of my mind. | ||
| I did not see that coming. | ||
| I guess his complaint is that people didn't celebrate the death of one of the guys that he killed. | ||
| I suppose. | ||
| What? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| So, Tucker conveniently leaves off there that Rittenhouse was acquitted of that charge, and that he's made a bunch of money off his killings and has generally faced minimal consequences. | ||
| No! | ||
| Before we get into any of that clip, let's keep track of this argument. | ||
| In this section, Tucker is trying to provide evidence for his conclusion that child molestation is no longer taboo. | ||
| The evidence is that people wanted to make Jeffrey Dahmer's killer a folk hero, and people were mad at Kyle Rittenhouse. | ||
| That's not good evidence. | ||
| For one thing, Dahmer did a whole lot more than molest children. | ||
| He ate them. | ||
| He did eat people. | ||
| Eating people is a bit of a... | ||
| I would argue that's a bigger taboo than most. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was killed in prison, and it's always a good policy for officials to not condone murders taking place in custody for human rights issues, among other things. | ||
| Plus, you have to remember that anyone who would be in jail at the same place as Jeffrey Dahmer probably isn't a great person to uphold as a folk hero, since they almost certainly would be a murderer themselves prior to the murder of Dahmer. | ||
| Oh, come on! | ||
| The person who killed Dahmer may have killed him because of his crimes, but he also killed another inmate at the same time, so it might have just been... | ||
| violent flare-up that we're attributing to Dahmer's crimes so that we can have narrative satisfaction of feeling like Dahmer got what he deserved. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The other guy this inmate killed was just in jail for killing his wife, so who knows? | |
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Big gap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The situation doesn't really track well to this, and Tucker's argument really only works if you assume that Dahmer was killed in jail because of his crimes, and that Rittenhouse killed Rosenbaum because of his past crimes. | ||
| Otherwise the crimes become kind of superfluous. | ||
| only one way of looking at this, which I think is what Tucker is doing. | ||
| There's one other way, which is to say that you can post hoc justify any violence committed against someone if their past is bad enough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Joseph Rosenbaum had done This is absurd. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, because here's his argument, though, and I'm going to personalize it, and it might seem extreme, but if I shot and killed Tucker, right, and then he's dead, I murdered him, but what if we find out that Tucker had molested a kid in the past? | ||
| Then I'm fine. | ||
| I'm a hero. | ||
| According to the way that he's... | ||
| Yeah, and I don't have to know this. | ||
| I do not have to know this in advance whatsoever. | ||
| If I go and murder somebody, doesn't matter. | ||
| As long as I think in their past, or even if I don't care. | ||
| As long as we find out later in their past, then I'm a hero. | ||
| Well, the thing is, the veneer of self-defense and stuff comes into it too, so you'd have to somehow have Tucker coming at you. | ||
| Well, he could be unarmed, because Rosenbaum was unarmed. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So there could be that. | ||
| No, what his past was, I can recontextualize him even looking at me as something by way of saying that, oh, see, the way that Tucker looked at me reminded me of the way he looked at the kid that he molested 20 years ago, so it's totally fine that I shot him. | ||
| I mean, it's a mess, and even if you accept this argument that, like, Rittenhouse was shooting him in self-defense, it's a little bit... | ||
| I'm going to say a lot of a bit of a dramatic overstatement to say that he was defending his life or describing Rittenhouse as, quote, an underage boy fending off violence from a child molester. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, that's absurd. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tucker is intentionally distorting the situation in order to suit his premise that child molestation is no longer taboo. | ||
| Because society thinks it's not cool to kill an unarmed person at a protest and that people deserve moral consideration regardless of past crimes, that means that the powers that be are fine with child molesters. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| I will say that it is hard to imagine this type of insanity, right? | ||
| Compared to what we've been doing for so long. | ||
| This is a weird, weird type of insanity. | ||
| Yeah, it's not to say that it's more insane. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| But it's different. | ||
| It's a flavor of insanity that I think is easy to maybe let go unnoticed because it seems so much more innocuous. | ||
| I think in language and delivery. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of the aesthetics of it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You can kind of ignore... | ||
| Superficially, it seems like a TV broadcast like you would otherwise see. | ||
| And so that can kind of hypnotize you into avoiding that these are completely unrelated, insane connections. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, these are unrelated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's benonkers. | ||
| The messaging is absurd and dangerous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then what is being said doesn't track. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is crazy. | ||
| So he has another reason here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| One of the things that this tells us is that people who run our country no longer see child molesters as the worst among us. | ||
| Why? | ||
| It's never been more obvious than it was yesterday when the Wall Street Journal ran a long expose about kiddie porn on Instagram. | ||
| Instagram, the journal found, quote, Okay, so it's meta. | ||
| and connects them to content sellers. | ||
| So it's a private corporation. | ||
| In one instance, the paper discovered that Instagram was recommending the phrase incest toddlers Right, private corporation. | ||
| By the way, no one at Instagram denied that any of this had happened. | ||
| Nor did Mark Zuckerberg, who controls the company. | ||
| The journal story was accurate. | ||
| It was all pretty shocking. | ||
| But not as shocking as what happened next, which was effectively nothing at all. | ||
| So we talked about this story when Alex covered it, but now we're seeing some of the concrete topical overlaps between Alex and the most important man in the world. | ||
| As we follow this argument, Tucker is now asserting that the powers that be don't view child molesters as the worst of the worst because the Wall Street Journal reported on this Instagram stuff and nothing was done. | ||
| But that's not entirely true. | ||
| In the wake of this revelation, Meta set up a specific task force to address this and provide more human-based moderation, as well as blocking certain search terms and hashtags. | ||
| That's definitely not enough, and it's probably a fundamental problem with social media sites as a whole. | ||
| They're so large and so many users with only so much moderation capability that people who want to do horrific shit will probably continue to find ways to get around those rules. | ||
| Even if that is the case, that's Yeah. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| I don't know how much faith we can have in that as a private company. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And because... | |
| Too restrictive of a way to... | ||
| Let's say, for instance, they wanted to try and cut down on all this stuff by requiring a social security number, like Twitter did with the verification or something. | ||
| That is going to cut down on your user base, which cuts into your overhead. | ||
| So trying to fully safeguard this stuff, things that they could do... | ||
| Unfortunately, run into their bottom line. | ||
| So they'll do things that'll try to help, and ideally, hopefully, will help. | ||
| But as long as the motivation and their primary reason to exist is financial, they can never really actually solve the problem. | ||
| Yes, you have understood exactly why capitalism is an issue. | ||
| Market forces determined that there will be this child exploitation material on Instagram. | ||
| Or at least it'll always be, like, a real risk. | ||
| Well, I mean, it will be there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, Market Forks is determined. | ||
| That's what we've decided is an acceptable way to describe things. | ||
| And it's, um, yeah, it's bad, but I don't think that this means anything about prevailing social attitudes towards it. | ||
| I mean, honestly, if he would like to have a conversation about that... | ||
| And changing the idea of a structure that allows this implicitly, in fact encourages it in many forms, then we can talk about that. | ||
| But I don't think that he really wants to dismantle the entirety of the economic system. | ||
| But that's just me. | ||
| Well, I mean, I look forward to you and Tucker sitting down with Rogan and debating this out. | ||
| I think it'll be interesting to see if he wants to dismantle the entire state. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So here we take another bit of a pivot. | ||
| Like, you can see this is moving all over the place. | ||
| And here's, this was jarring. | ||
| Of course, everybody at Instagram, in fact, everyone everywhere in authority, will still claim to think that child molestation is bad. | ||
| But the tone has changed unmistakably. | ||
| When they say it's bad, they mean it in a kind of abstract way. | ||
| Bad like a civil war in Central Africa is bad. | ||
| You wouldn't prefer it, but there are reasons it happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| persons, because honestly, who can judge? | ||
| These people are a sexual minority, so pause before you attack them. | ||
| And in any case, it's not like pedophiles are barging into the Capitol building to sit in Nancy Pelosi's chair or asking uncomfortable questions about the last election. | ||
| What is happening? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| So here's where you start to see Tucker getting to kind of maybe what he actually has feelings about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is about extreme right-wingers being the new child molesters in terms of being the worst people in society. | ||
| This is exactly the argument you would expect from someone who takes the abuse and exploitation of children very seriously. | ||
| Most people aren't into the use of the term minor attracted person, and one of the higher profile people who have promoted its use got a lot of shit over it. | ||
| That was Dr. Alan Walker of Old Dominion University, who was put on administrative leave and then resigned due to the fallout. | ||
| There is a conversation that people have surrounding harm reduction that says that there's a difference between someone who's attracted to underage persons and doesn't act on it, and someone who does act on it. | ||
| There's a sign of that discussion that contends that you can't really control who you're attracted to so someone doesn't choose that attraction but they can choose to act or not. | ||
| This school of thought argues that people who choose not to act on that attraction should be treated differently than those who offend and that by doing so it might be possible to minimize the harm that's actually done in the real world. | ||
| Part of that different treatment may be something like coming up with a different term. | ||
| I'm not sure where I come down on this necessarily because I haven't done enough looking into it to feel confident either way, but I do know that there's a very concerted effort on the part of the right-wing media to use terms like minor attracted person to argue that society is trying to mainstream child exploitation and that it's being adopted by the LGBTQ plus community. | ||
| This is obviously just a means to target, marginalize, and slander the LGBTQ plus community. | ||
| That's the use that Tucker has for it in this narrative, and it's entirely disconnected from any desire to minimize harm that's done to children. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The pivot to talking about the 2020 election deniers and January 6 rioters is incredibly forced, because it has to be. | |
| This is kind of the destination that Tucker was aiming towards, and he didn't really have a sensible path, so he had to go... | ||
| I mean, I don't know if I have anything more to say about the specifics of what Tucker said than that... | ||
| If Tucker, a professed Christian, says to me that pausing and thinking before hating is a bad idea, I hope he reads a book. | ||
| Because there's this really famous thing about where it's like, hey, before you hate somebody with violence and kill them, stop and pause for a second. | ||
| I've heard that before. | ||
| I'm just saying. | ||
| It rings a vague bell in my head. | ||
| It's familiar in some way, and for him to denigrate that as a thought process so viciously seems kind of indicative of something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So here's where we're, like, rolling down the hill, and this is where you trip and start going, you know. | ||
| Uh-oh, now we're going too fast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| Now we're Chris Farley in Black Sheep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And in any case, it's not like pedophiles are barging into the Capitol building to sit in Nancy Pelosi's chair. | ||
| We're asking uncomfortable questions about the last election. | ||
| For miscreants like that, no punishment is too harsh. | ||
| So far this month, the FBI's Washington field office has issued 11 press releases. | ||
| 10 out of 11 have been about January 6th. | ||
| Keep in mind that January 6th happened more than two and a half years ago. | ||
| That's practically a forever ago! | ||
| They've got much more important things to do, like finding white supremacists. | ||
| White supremacists are America's new child molesters. | ||
| We've got zero tolerance for white supremacists because no one threatens the life of this country more than they do. | ||
| Here's Joe Biden once again making that very clear last month. | ||
| So Tucker should have waited a few days because there's so many more press releases about convictions and guilty pleas and arrests for January 6th defendants. | ||
| He could have bumped that number up to at least 24. You can see a bit of the form of the narrative that's taking shape here. | ||
| Society doesn't hate pedophiles enough anymore because people who stormed the Capitol are being arrested and charged. | ||
| The FBI isn't taking child abuse seriously because they're focused on white supremacists. | ||
| Obviously, this is stupid on its face because people can care about two things at the same time. | ||
| I'm not sure what Tucker would want the FBI's Washington office to do. | ||
| Would he be satisfied if some of those Instagram users were arrested also? | ||
| Or does this require Zuckerberg getting indicted? | ||
| I don't know what would be the condition wherein he'd be like, alright, this complaint has been satisfied. | ||
| This is like, this is... | ||
| Like, I feel like we're in 1867, and Lincoln's been dead a couple of years, and Andrew Johns is like, come on! | ||
| Come on, what are we doing with the Reconstruction? | ||
| Slavery was forever ago! | ||
| Ah, we move on! | ||
| Everybody, come on, stop blaming slave owners for all this. | ||
| Oh, there's a problem. | ||
| What, are they as bad as pedophiles? | ||
| What do they own, slave children? | ||
| Oh, shit, oh, fuck, I mean, no, everybody move on! | ||
| What's the slavery equivalent of, like, how do you paraphrase it or sort of dress it up the same way as, just wanted to sit at Nancy Pelosi's desk? | ||
| Yes, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It's a big deal. | ||
| We wanted to have people do stuff for them without payment. | ||
| It's like they were just asking people for favors all the time without their ability to say no! | ||
| They were just aggressively opposed to the minimum wage. | ||
| They were worried about everybody's housing situation, so they had to make sure they kept him in the same place! | ||
| Sure. | ||
| At all times! | ||
| You can also tell here that Tucker's a shithead, because he's using an arbitrary cutoff date that allows him to make this argument. | ||
| A bunch of J6 resolutions happened at the same time, but if you look just a little harder, you'll find a press release about an arrest that happened on May 10th that very well may have been someone who's using Instagram to distribute child exploitation material. | ||
| It was probably a different app, but the And Tucker should go and check out the press releases from the other FBI field offices. | ||
| Or maybe I should just play some dumbass games like him and complain that three out of the three press releases from the Las Vegas office this month have been about child exploitation arrests. | ||
| Suspiciously, no January 6th arrests in Las Vegas. | ||
| That actually is kind of suspicious. | ||
| I bet there are some people hanging out! | ||
| As if there's one field office. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| No, this is a very small country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What an asshole. | |
| It's just such dumb shit he's trying to pass off. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's a testament to the ability to sell. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, this is a sell kind of... | ||
| You know, like, if my material's weak on stage, I gotta sell it, you know? | ||
| It's like, if I want to get my laughs and I don't have the strongest stuff, I have to perform way, way harder. | ||
| And he has got nothing. | ||
| Let me give you another stand-up metaphor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| This is not like someone selling really hard. | ||
| This is like... | ||
| Somebody who isn't really great at stand-up who's coming in and getting a headlining spot because they're on a show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Or something like that. | ||
| So you're saying it's Dustin Diamond. | ||
| I think Tucker Carlson is the Dustin Diamond. | ||
| He actually did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| I remember when Piven came and headlined The Last Factory. | ||
| That's what I'm thinking of. | ||
| One of my early friends actually opened for him on the road for a long, long time. | ||
| He would go to casinos, buddy! | ||
| That could not have been pleasant. | ||
| Nothing like a good Dustin Diamond casino gig. | ||
| Yeah, no fun. | ||
| It turned out great. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| So now we've gotten to white supremacy. | ||
| We've shifted over to that. | ||
| And he introduces this Biden clip. | ||
| Here's Joe Biden once again making that very clear last month. | ||
| To stand up against the poison of white supremacy as I did my inaugural address to a single out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And I'm not saying this because I'm at a black HBCU. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I say wherever I go. | |
| That seems redundant. | ||
| Pardon the feedback, but you heard the point. | ||
| White supremacy is the most dangerous threat to the American homeland. | ||
| Joe Biden just told us that. | ||
| It's more dangerous than the threat of nuclear war with Russia. | ||
| It's more dangerous than the threat of the Mexican drug cartels, who've already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and are now in control of swaths of our southwestern states. | ||
| Are they coming for the government? | ||
| White supremacy is that bad, Joe Biden says. | ||
| In fact, it's worse. | ||
| Is the cartel coming for the government? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| Can anyone in authority actually define white supremacy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| What is it? | ||
| Is white supremacy liking white people too much? | ||
| If so, that's to put those of us with white children in a pretty tough spot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Or is white supremacy something much more obviously bad, like trying to expel all non-whites from America and creating some kind of ethnostate? | ||
| If that's Joe Biden's definition, what exactly is the scope of this threat? | ||
| How many people are currently working on this American white ethnostate project? | ||
| Oh my god, so many. | ||
| Our guess is not very many and precisely zero. | ||
| But we can't say for sure because no one has showed us the numbers. | ||
| How did we get here? | ||
| Tucker, you are working on it now! | ||
| This is you working on it! | ||
| So white supremacy is probably a bigger real-world issue than nuclear war with Russia, seeing as that seems pretty unlikely, whereas white supremacy is something that definitely exists. | ||
| It also seems like a bigger problem than these drug cartels that apparently control large swaths of the country and have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. | ||
| I'm guessing Tucker means that these deaths happen because... | ||
| Not through murders, but he's vague enough that the image is terrifying. | ||
| It does seem that way. | ||
| And as to the question of defining white supremacy and white nationalism, Tucker should just ask his staff. | ||
| They definitely know. | ||
| He could ask his old buddy and former head writer Blake Neff, who had to resign after his racist message board posts were revealed, including some weird instances where things posted on the forum mirrored things that would show up on Tucker's show. | ||
| The former editor of his site, The Daily Caller, named Scott Greer, got busted posting racist articles. | ||
| for Richard Spencer's outlet under a pen name. | ||
| They used to publish the writing of Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally. | ||
| I think if Tucker is looking for some clarity on exactly what white nationalists and racists want and are about, he has access to a lot more primary sources than most people. | ||
| We've certainly gone far afield from what seemed like the top of this piece, which was the erosion of taboos in America leading to child molestation being normalized as evidenced by people being mad at Kyle Rittenhouse on the fact that there have been more January 6th related FBI press releases this month. | ||
| This is a pretty poorly constructed monologue, I have to say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I never really watched his TV show, so I don't really know if this is better or worse. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| I might have to watch some of his shows to see if, like, the standard has gone far down. | ||
| But if it was this bad when it was on TV... | ||
| I don't know what people think. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| How about this? | ||
| How about this? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe you're telling on yourself a little bit based upon who you want to be compared to. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, maybe if I say something like, hey, listen, I'm an asshole, but I'm not as bad as somebody who fucking takes all day at the self-checkout line with 50 items, right? | ||
| Kind of have an idea of where I place myself in society. | ||
| You know, if you say, well, at least I'm not a pedophile. | ||
| I think you're kind of saying a lot. | ||
| I think you're kind of saying a lot more than maybe you think you're saying. | ||
| But he doesn't consider himself to be a part of the group that is labeled white supremacists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| White nationalists. | ||
| I think he does. | ||
| I think he does. | ||
| I think he's presenting he doesn't. | ||
| I think through his actions he reveals that maybe he thinks he does. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| But he would not present things that way. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| No, this is a ride. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So the issue here that he's coming to is, you know, got this white nationalist, white supremacist terms that Biden's throwing around, but we don't have any definitions for these things. | ||
| We need definitions for crimes. | ||
| How many people are currently working on this American white ethnostate project? | ||
| And what are the chances they're going to pull it off? | ||
| Our guess is not very many and precisely zero. | ||
| But we can't say for sure because no one has showed us the numbers. | ||
| These are not rhetorical questions. | ||
| When the president of the United States describes something as the worst possible crime Americans can commit, you have a right to know what that crime is. | ||
| You used to have that right. | ||
| Under our pre-revolutionary legal code before George Floyd, questions were easy to answer. | ||
| A crime was defined as something that an elected legislator had explicitly banned, usually an act that hurts somebody else. | ||
| In America, crimes were described precisely with words in English and then preserved in books, which you could read your What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you ever wondered whether you were committing a crime, you could just look it up. | |
| You could know for sure whether you were a criminal. | ||
| Now you can't. | ||
| Needless to say, that's the point. | ||
| The point of the exercise is that you're going to be Uh-huh. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| You could be accused at any time in everything you have taken from you. | ||
| This sounds a lot like Tucker complaining about the idea that being a racist or a white nationalist could be considered a thought crime. | ||
| We've already seen him support the idea of punishing people for thought crimes, though, so that's weird. | ||
| Is he broken? | ||
| I feel like he got broken somewhere here. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He was just repeating weird stuff. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| I'm just like, you used to be able to look at laws. | ||
| Before the revolution of George Floyd. | ||
| Laws used to be elected officials saying no to things. | ||
| Things used to be things that had names, and names used to be things that you had. | ||
| So I guess, you know, just like being racist and white nationalist, those aren't crimes. | ||
| So, you know, there's acts that you'd have to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| There are acts that you take that are then crimes, and they can be based on you being... | ||
| You know, racist or whatever. | ||
| You know, it's the actions that you take. | ||
| That's, you know, you can be racist all you want. | ||
| The government's not going to stop you from that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's all nonsense. | ||
| Tucker's just painfully feigning ignorance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| He knows what Biden was saying. | ||
| He's just pretending it's so incomprehensible to make the audience think that the people pointing out racist trends in America, including Tucker's own show, are just making completely baseless and confusing arguments. | ||
| Like, it's cute, but it's transparent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Yeah, no, this is like if he was doing this in a conversation without a TV crew, you could just be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, stop. | ||
| Just stop. | ||
| Just, nope. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| I can't imagine him going about his daily life with this. | ||
| Poor level of processing information. | ||
| Yeah, like how could you justify buying something if you... | ||
| Oh, right, okay. | ||
| So, oh, so it's $5, eh? | ||
| That's just because of bullshit. | ||
| What are you trying to do? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like something is $4.99 and you get caught up in your head about how it's actually $5, but you're trying to trick me with the $4.99. | ||
| Oh, you're stealing a penny from yourself. | ||
| That's not a good business strategy. | ||
| Next thing you know, you're burning down the store. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, you can't think this... | ||
| Poorly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So there's these crimes that you don't know. | ||
| But you used to know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You used to know. | |
| Back in the good old days. | ||
| Of a few years ago. | ||
| In the good old days. | ||
| Back when you used to know what the crimes were and you could find out. | ||
| Dan, do you remember? | ||
| Do you remember those years before George Floyd when we used to go around being like, wait, am I going to commit a crime? | ||
| I better look it up in the code. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| I can't now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't even know. | ||
| And Tucker has an example. | ||
| When no one's willing to define the offense, you can't be sure whether or not you're committing it. | ||
| You could be accused at any time in everything you have taken from you. | ||
| You live in fear. | ||
| Remember this guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Emmanuel Cafferty was driving near a Black Lives Matter protest in Poway in his SDG&E truck when he says he noticed somebody following him and trying to get his attention. | |
| Later, that person posted a picture of him making what some believed is a white supremacy symbol. | ||
| On Twitter, Cafferty says he had no idea about any white power symbols and was just cracking his knuckles outside his window when the picture was taken of him. | ||
| Later that day, he says he was notified by SDG&E that he would be suspended pending an investigation, and a few days later, he was fired. | ||
| What that man did was so offensive, as you just saw, that local news had to blur the photograph of his hand. | ||
| He was fired from his job. | ||
| His life was destroyed for cracking his knuckles. | ||
| He didn't know cracking his knuckles was racist in his defense, but then nobody did until the day that poor Emanuel Cafferty was unwise enough to crack them. | ||
| When a crime has no definition, anyone can be guilty of it. | ||
| It's hard to relax in a country like that. | ||
| Relax. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You would get a D in elementary school for that kind of shit. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That is really bad. | ||
| It's pretty... | ||
| So the case of Emanuel Cafferty is pretty interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Most of the basic details that are given here align with what I can find. | ||
| You know, he was driving past a protest in his SDG&E truck, and someone took a picture of him flashing what appeared to be an OK sign. | ||
| And this picture was posted on Twitter with the SDG&E logo. | ||
| Doesn't feel right. | ||
| Yeah, it's not a good... | ||
| And they were tagged on Twitter. | ||
| So SDG&E suspended him and put him under review, and then he was fired. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This seems like a really unfortunate case of people being a little overzealous and calling this guy out, and that's no good. | ||
| But I have two points that I want to bring up. | ||
| One, this isn't a crime. | ||
| Two, I suspect that Cafferty's termination didn't come about because of this tweet. | ||
| I obviously have no way of knowing for sure, but if I had to guess, I would assume that in the course of SDG&E's investigation of his employment, they found cause that merited termination. | ||
| Here's the basis for my suspicion. | ||
| The first point is that there was a massive outcry about this case, and not just from the normal right-wing shithead cancel culture crowd. | ||
| The Atlantic wrote about it, and Cafferty was featured on an episode of Monica Lewinsky's series, 15 Minutes of Shame. | ||
| The person who tweeted this picture came forward and said that they misinterpreted it, even. | ||
| Okay, so everybody... | ||
| Everybody... | ||
| Pre-empted Tucker's bullshit by going, hey guys, maybe we went a little bit too far. | ||
| Yeah, Monica Lewinsky even did. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So Tucker is scooped by Monica Lewinsky. | ||
| Quite, quite a bit. | ||
| Another issue that I come to on this claim is that Cafferty, you know, they say Cafferty was just cracking his knuckles in the picture, but this is what it says in the Atlantic article about that day. | ||
| Quote, Cafferty told me a few days ago the other driver began to act even more strangely. | ||
| He flashed what looked to Cafferty like an okay hand gesture and started cussing him out. | ||
| When the light turned green, Cafferty drove off, hoping to put an end to this disconcerting encounter. | ||
| But when Cafferty reached another red light, the man, now holding a cell phone camera, was there again. | ||
| Do it! | ||
| Do it! | ||
| He shouted. | ||
| Unsure what to do, Cafferty copied the gesture the other driver kept. | ||
| So that's what it says in the Atlantic. | ||
| On the GoFundMe, his family set up... | ||
| Before you go any further... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But continue. | ||
| On the GoFundMe that his family set up and in that news article, it says, quote, On June 3rd, a stranger posted a picture of Emanuel Cafferty on social media and falsely accused him of displaying a white power hand gesture in his company truck. | ||
| Emmanuel had his arm extended out the window and was merely stretching his fingers, unaware of any such hand gesture. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There are wildly different accounts of what happened that are coming from him. | ||
| The same guy. | ||
| And I don't think that he was doing a white power hand gesture necessarily. | ||
| Like, I don't have any reason to think that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But something that doesn't match up about... | ||
| Like, the details of this. | ||
| You can't tell more than one story in a short period of time on our show. | ||
| You can if the details are fairly close. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| I was cracking my knuckles or just relaxing my fingers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then also there's the story of I was being harassed by someone who was yelling at me to do an okay sign. | ||
| You can't do that one. | ||
| That's so far apart that one's a lie. | ||
| Yeah, once you did the... | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| It was somebody else. | ||
| Once you did that, now I'm out. | ||
| One of these stories has to be a lie. | ||
| And he's tailing it. | ||
| And I don't know what to think about that, but I still don't necessarily think that there's any reason to believe he was, you know, being racist. | ||
| Oh, I mean, I believe he's lying about one thing. | ||
| Something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there was a groundswell and near universal desire for him to get his job back, but SDG&E did not go for it. | ||
| And then Cafferty filed two lawsuits, one against SDG&E and the other against the guy who tweeted the picture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| On October 26th of last year, Cafferty himself filed to dismiss the case against the tweeter with prejudice. | ||
| meaning that it's not an action he can reintroduce. | ||
| His suit against SDG&E for defamation went the exact same route, except that he requested it be dismissed with prejudice on June 1st, 2023, only two weeks ago. | ||
| There are some other possibilities of what could be going on. | ||
| It's imaginable that Cafferty realized that he would have a very difficult time proving defamation claims, but he may be still intending to pursue an unjust termination case against SDG&E. | ||
| They've stood by their decision, though, and I can't find any evidence of other suits being filed, so I'm not sure what... | ||
| To really think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| It's a weird situation. | ||
| Like, I don't know of any reason or evidence to suggest that he was making a racist hand gesture when he was photographed, and all indications point to it being really inappropriate that this person tweeted what they did. | ||
| Having said that, I don't know enough about this case to say that this is the ultimate reason he got fired. | ||
| In the case that it was an employer trying to cover their ass by firing someone, then I would be on Cafferty's side. | ||
| In the case that there was grounds for his termination and that thing only came to light because of this incident, I think that sucks and it's bad luck, but I don't know what to do. | ||
| I'll say this. | ||
| I wouldn't base an entire moral philosophy around dealing with what happens in this particular situation and then claim that it's all because people hate white people now. | ||
| I think that, yeah, the hunt for white supremacists is so extreme that this guy lost his job a couple years ago. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, this is unfortunate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| True. | ||
| I don't think it's worth upending all of the... | ||
| But it also doesn't satisfy the argument that's being made. | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
| And also, as we're listening to this as part of Tucker's presentation, at the end of the day, this isn't an issue involving a crime at all. | ||
| At most, there was an act of defamation by this Twitter poster, which would have been resolved through a lawsuit, which was filed and then voluntarily dismissed with prejudice by Cafferty. | ||
| You know, like, there is no crime. | ||
| Yeah, what I find interesting is that a through-line here, and I don't know if this is on purpose or not, but a through-line here is that the government should be more oppressive. | ||
| The through-line is that all of these private companies, the powers that be... | ||
| Are the ones doing everything and that the government needs to do more to stop them. | ||
| Or the government isn't doing enough so everybody else needs to... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, enact harsh social taboos. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, it is very much... | ||
| It's almost the definition of regressive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, pushing things backwards. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, this is legitimately, like... | ||
| Women, they shouldn't be outside. | ||
| What are they doing outside? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nah, that's the taboo of seeing a woman outside. | |
| Why did we lose that taboo? | ||
| I am not going to go back to arguing about whether or not women can wear tank tops. | ||
| That's not happening. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| It's not happening. | ||
| Give it six months. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| So, we come to the dismount here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Tucker wraps up his argument, his point. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| I don't even know what to make of any of this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's hard to relax in a country like that. | ||
| The old system was better. | ||
| Government operated on the basis of laws, not amorphous moral terror. | ||
| Politicians couldn't refuse you of something Fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The legal code was straightforward. | |
| Child molestation was a crime. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Having unfashionable opinions was not. | |
| What? | ||
| We wrote books since then! | ||
| We wrote books since then! | ||
| Don't let them rationalize away your intuitive moral sense. | ||
| Cling to your taboos like your life depends on them, because it does. | ||
| Cherish and protect them like family heirlooms. | ||
| That's exactly what they are. | ||
| Great news! | ||
| What Tucker is describing as the old system is still in place. | ||
| Trial molestation is still a crime, and it's still not a crime to have unfashionable opinions, if that's how he wants to describe being a white supremacist. | ||
| Further, the government isn't accusing people of anything. | ||
| This is coming straight off of him talking about Cafferty, and the government isn't involved in that story at all. | ||
| Biden brought up in a speech that white supremacy was a threat to our country, but I assure you he wasn't talking about your private beliefs and microaggressions. | ||
| The culmination of this monologue, the go-home message, Seems to be a bit weird. | ||
| On the one hand, Tucker is saying that our country should be governed by taboos which grow and evolve with the times. | ||
| But simultaneously, he's saying to the audience that they need to hold fast to their taboos as if their life depended on it, steadfastly refusing to change from the innate wisdom about right and wrong that they had from birth. | ||
| Those seem to be at odds with each other. | ||
| Those messages don't coexist well. | ||
| This is a completely... | ||
| I mean, his closing is in complete disagreement with his opening. | ||
| Well, and his closing is in complete disagreement with his closing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yes, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I don't know what he means. | ||
| I mean, I think... | ||
| I know intuitively what he means. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| He means you hate people and don't let anybody tell you to stop. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I get what you're saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I'm furious that you have to say it differently because this is excruciatingly bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just get to, I hate people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I should be allowed to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And no one should be mean to me about it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if people hate me, it's because they're filled with hate. | ||
| But I hate because I'm a good person. | ||
| Take a page out of the Dennis Leary playbook and just do it. | ||
| I'm an asshole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just do it. | |
| This is exhausting and silly. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Think about how much effort you have to put in to trying to justify just being a hateful piece of shit. | ||
| And this is what you came out with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's an interesting experience to listen to it, because you know how you were surprised along a lot of the ways the road twisted? | ||
| Wild. | ||
| I was as well. | ||
| I have an unfair advantage of having heard this before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, but the first time I heard it, I was like, I can't believe that this is where we're going. | ||
| This is, but Will, I can make neither hide nor hair of it. | ||
| Does this make sense to other people and we're crazy? | ||
| Like, am I crazy? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I feel... | ||
| Because honestly, when we started listening to Alex, he makes more sense to me than this does. | ||
| Just because it's like, oh yeah, he's... | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| He's doing fantasy stuff. | ||
| That's familiarity, though. | ||
| Well, yeah, you're right. | ||
| Eventually it'll be the same with Tucker if we keep doing this. | ||
| Probably, but it's so... | ||
| Jarring! | ||
| It is. | ||
| And when you say it doesn't make sense, that's not what you mean. | ||
| Like, it's not that it doesn't make sense. | ||
| The messaging makes sense, and, like, I get the point that he's trying to make, and I get the ways that he's using, like, some poorly designed rhetoric tricks in order to pursue his points. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What doesn't make sense is trying to follow the logic that he's using to get to those points. | ||
| I feel like he is speaking a different language that I kind of understand. | ||
| I feel like I speak Portuguese and he speaks Spanish. | ||
| And I'm like, I get enough to know what you're saying. | ||
| I get enough to know what you're saying. | ||
| But when you put all those words together, if you were speaking the language correctly... | ||
| They don't mean what you say they mean. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You have to be using those words to mean different things than what they mean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it kind of feels a little bit like, if I could put this into just sort of a logic construction, it kind of comes off as like, if A, then B. Right. | ||
| If B, then C. If C, then D. Pickle, therefore ham sandwich. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| That is a great way of describing it. | ||
| You're like, okay, you've given me four completely unrelated things saying that three of them are related to each other, I guess? | ||
| And then you've said pickle and sandwich. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| You are mad that people don't like white supremacists. | ||
| I think you're more mad that you can't think good. | ||
| Maybe episode three will be better. | ||
| Well, I know he's not mad at the crew yet. | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, God, I can't wait for his hat-to-throwing episode. | ||
| Oh, that'll be great. | ||
| So, I guess we'll be back, and we'll check in on him, see what else Tucker has to offer, see what Alex has to offer, but until then, what a ride. | ||
| What a ride. | ||
| We'll be back, but we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do, it's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yep, we're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter, it's at knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| Yep, we'll be back, but until then, I'm Neo, I'm Leo, I'm DZX, Clark, skip, skip, boop. | ||
| I wish I remembered the tune to Masterpiece, More to Life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And now here comes the sex robots. | |
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |