Actress Ellen Page appears to take on the role of Jussie Smollett, a federal judge demands kids be trans-ed since “gender identity is real,” and Tucker returns to the air!
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Actress Ellen Page, who now goes by Elliot, has a new book out and coincidentally has revealed that she was the target of a transphobic attack sometime last year.
According to Page, a year ago, a hateful stranger approached her in West Hollywood, yelling, quote, I'm going to effing gay bash you, F-A-G-G-O-T.
At which point he chased her into a shop screaming, this is why I need a gun.
Now this incident that we are for some reason only hearing about right now obviously happened a long time ago.
But it is being reported that police have released a sketch of the alleged transphobe and he appears to be two Nigerian bodybuilders from the south side of MAGA country.
News reports have not specified whether or not Ms.
Page was able to hold on to her Subway sandwich during the harrowing attack.
Perhaps that detail is included in the book that she is now hawking.
I'm not saying for certain.
That it didn't happen.
Hollywood has always been weird.
Terrible political leadership has let the crime problem in Hollywood get out of control.
A friend of mine, shortly before we moved out of LA, was threatened on the street by a bum with a crossbow.
Okay, there are freaks out there for sure.
But even more than criminals and bums, Hollywood is filled with fabulists and narcissists.
People with a very tenuous grip on reality.
It just seems unlikely, okay?
The big red flag in Ellen Page's story is that phrase, gay bashing.
No heterosexual uses that phrase.
That is a phrase that is used exclusively by leftists and LGBT positive activists.
It's the biggest sign of a Hollywood imagination run amok.
Unfortunately for us, that Hollyweird imagination has run amok All over our country.
And as is especially clear during Pride Month, large numbers of Americans can no longer tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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Really big news on the presidential campaign front.
Can't wait to get into that.
And on the media front, Tucker is back, baby.
Tucker is back on Twitter.
He's got very interesting things to say about Ukraine, about aliens, about terrorist attacks, so we will get to that in just a moment.
First, though, the Pride Month update, today's Daily Pride Month update, comes from Mayor Pete, who was asked why those mean, nasty conservatives would have the gall to criticize certain aspects of the Rainbow Coalition, the Gestapo, and here is Pete's answer.
Well, our country is at very real risk of backsliding on freedom and equality, but that is exactly why we continue to push.
There has been extraordinary work that's been done just in this presidency, certainly the president being able to sign the Respect for Marriage Act, for example, and if you zoom out to the progress that's been made in the last 10 or 15 years, including the ability of somebody like me to be standing here doing this job, it's extraordinary.
And yet, now you see the attacks on the LGBTQ community, especially on the trans community.
And what they are going through.
And you know, I think it's being done out of a perception that it is politically convenient to target vulnerable groups.
And honestly, I think where it largely comes from is folks who don't want to talk about why they were against the infrastructure law that's building the roads and bridges.
They don't want to talk about why they were against $35 insulin that the president delivered for Medicare recipients.
They don't want to Yeah, that's it, Pete.
That's it.
The Republicans are speaking out against transing little kids, pumping them full of poison, chopping their body parts off, because we're just so afraid of our opposition to an infrastructure law.
Yeah, that's it.
We know that the people are strongly on the side of building some new bridge somewhere, and we've got to run away from our radical opposition to insulin reform by focusing on this really minor issue that no one's really interested in, namely the fact that Democrats are trying to chop kids' genitals off.
That's it.
You hit the nail on the head.
We just don't want to talk about the real hot button issue, paving roads.
Yeah, you got it, Pete.
I don't know.
I think it probably has more to do with the fact that people around this country, especially parents, but just pretty much everybody, realizes that it's probably not a great idea to turn innocent little kids into eunuchs and sterilize them and chop off their body parts.
I think that's probably why.
Can you guys believe how radical the Republicans have become?
The Republicans didn't even want to pursue the particular kind of pharmaceutical insulin reform that I was advocating for.
Whoa, that's some crazy stuff, huh?
Okay, chop chop, get that kid on the operating table, let's go, give me the scalpel!
I don't even know what the insulin reform was.
I don't even know what stupid infrastructure regulation people, judges talking about.
But I'm willing to bet, I am willing to bet every dollar to my name that if you had these three types of legislation before you, regulate the price of a diabetes treatment, build a certain kind of bridge instead of another kind of bridge.
Chop off a child's genitals.
I am willing to bet every material possession that I have, the last one is going to be the most radical.
And that's why.
And that's why it's not just Republicans who are opposed to it.
It's why normal people, centrists, even a number of leftists all around this country, even the feminists, even a lot of people around this country, realize that that is a very, very bad idea.
That seems to be the more likely reason.
And on that point, even as the people are pushing against trancing the kids, the liberal establishment, especially through the judges, are coming in to preserve that sacrament, that sacred right of progressive liberalism.
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The federal judge has just struck down a law in Florida that would ban doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to little kids.
Why did the federal judge strike this down?
He struck it down because he says that gender identity is real.
That's why.
That's the whole reason he struck it down.
The judge says, quote, and his name by the way is Robert Hinkle.
He says, quote, the elephant in the room should be noted at the outset.
Gender identity is real.
The record makes this clear.
What record?
I don't know.
Nobody knows.
He says, despite The defense admissions, there are those who believe that cisgender individuals, that meaning people who understand who they are, properly adhere to their natal sex and that transgender individuals have inappropriately chosen a contrary gender identity, male or female, just as one might choose whether to read Shakespeare or Grisham.
And this is false because gender identity is real.
This is obviously going to be headed for the Supreme Court.
You're seeing a lot of liberal judges go in and overturn laws passed by the representatives of the people.
Duly elected representatives representing the people's will to stop quacks from transing little kids.
The judges come in and say, no, it's unconstitutional not to pump kids full of poison and sterilize them and chop off their body parts.
So this is obviously headed for the Supreme Court.
Not great for us, because even this conservative Supreme Court has affirmed transgenderism.
You saw this especially in the Bostock decision, where Justice Gorsuch, who is a conservative, came in and said that civil rights law that provides protections on the basis of sex Actually, secretly provides protections on the basis of gender identity, which is ironic because if the civil rights law protects gender identity, then it very much does not protect sex.
If the civil rights law says that men have the right to play on a girl's sports team, then it undercuts what the civil rights law was actually intended to do, which was to say that women have the right to their own sports teams separate from men.
Because you can't have both.
And even a conservative on the Supreme Court sided with the transgenderists here.
So this is not great news that it's headed to the Supreme Court, because the court, Just judging by precedent, judging by the Harris Funeral Homes case that says that civil rights law means that a man has the right to wear a mini skirt at a funeral home if he wants to, to express his quote-unquote gender identity.
That's not great news.
It would be really nice if the people could answer this question themselves, wouldn't it?
It would be really nice if the people were able to say, no, we actually don't think that men can become women, and we're going to enshrine that in our law, and we're going to say don't chop up little kids.
But when the people have done that, the liberal establishment has come in through the courts, through the unaccountability of the judiciary, to come in and say, no, actually, never mind.
Somewhere in the Constitution, it says that men have the right to pretend to be women.
And parents and quacks have the right to poison their kids.
Oh, the Civil Rights Law?
Yeah, even though we know for a fact that when the Civil Rights Law was passed, nobody thought that protections on the basis of sex were protections on the basis of gender identity or whatever, because that concept didn't even really exist at the time.
Yeah, well, anyway, now I'm just deciding that's what it is.
Do you see how circular this argument is from the judiciary?
They're saying sex means gender identity because today A significant portion of the people say that sex means gender identity.
Not the majority of the people, certainly, but a decent number of the people, including me, we say that.
And so that's obviously what it must mean for the purposes of the law, even though the law was written 60 years ago.
And so that's what we're going to do.
Gender identity is real.
Why?
Because I say it is.
Okay.
There it is.
All right.
I guess we're just ruled by this dictatorship of some random federal judges.
It would be really nice if the people had a say here, not only for a procedural matter, not just because I think that Vox Populi is Vox Dei, the voice of the people is the voice of God.
I don't really care about the procedure, I want good government.
Whatever just procedure leads me to good government, that's what I want.
If the judges give us good government, then let the judges have the say.
If the people are gonna give us good government, let the people have the say.
If the president's gonna, then okay, let the president have the say.
But the people happen to be right on this.
The people tend to have much more common sense, especially today where our ruling class is entirely liberal.
The people are almost always right when they disagree with the ruling class, and you see that here.
Okay, you're getting some political pushback, even on the right.
The presidential race is heating up.
Some Republicans hate this stuff.
I love it.
Some Republicans are pulling their hair out.
No, why?
Why is this candidate attacking this candidate?
No, they shouldn't do that.
They should all get along.
That's not what primaries are for.
Primaries are when really thick-skinned, really ambitious people just rip each other to shreds.
And the benefit of this is not only that it is extremely entertaining, but that it's going to toughen up the eventual nominee so that the attacks from the real opposition, the Democrats, will not be as effective come the general election.
So Nikki Haley is kicking this off.
She is attacking Ron DeSantis over this issue of gender identity and the rainbow movement.
She's attacking him for turning on Disney.
Here you have DeSantis, who accepted $50,000 in political contributions from Disney.
He went and put their executives and their lobbyists on prominent boards throughout Florida.
And he went and basically gave the highest corporate subsidies in Florida history to Disney.
But because they went and criticized him, now he's going to spend taxpayer dollars on a lawsuit.
It's just like all this Vendetta stuff.
We've been down that road again.
We can't go down that.
Businesses were my partners in South Carolina.
We didn't always get along.
And I, you know, luckily South Carolina is very anti-woke.
But when you have a company like that, don't bring the citizen's taxpayer dollars into it.
Pick up the phone, deal with it, settle it the way you should.
And I just think he's being hypocritical.
I like Nikki Haley a lot, personally, she's a very nice lady.
This was an ill-advised attack on DeSantis, because the attack ends up making DeSantis look good.
She's saying DeSantis received a lot of campaign contributions, DeSantis worked very nicely with Disney and put Disney on certain boards and gave them some influence, but then when Disney opposed the Elected representatives representing their people and the law that they passed to stop transing the kids, then DeSantis turned on Disney.
So her attack is that DeSantis is not totally bought and paid for by his donors, specifically Disney, which ends up making DeSantis look good.
I think the point she was trying to make is that DeSantis is showboating here, or he's disrupting business in a way that is not conducive to the flourishing of the state, or is just nationally self-serving but doesn't serve Florida.
I don't know.
I don't know, because she didn't make that point.
Instead, she says, hey, DeSantis will take donations from people, but then not just do whatever they say.
If I were running the Haley campaign right now, I would retire that line of attack.
I don't think that is gonna work very well.
But it is attack season, so the attacks are all gonna come out.
And the attacks are gonna come out against DeSantis.
They're not gonna come out really against Trump.
You're seeing attacks from Vivek Ramaswamy against DeSantis.
You're seeing Nikki Haley attack Ron DeSantis.
There's one candidate who is attacking Trump.
Brand new candidate in the race who we'll get to in one second.
But the attacks are going to come against DeSantis because Trump is so far ahead in the polls right now that if you just try to attack Trump, then he's going to nuke you from outer space and your campaign's going to be dead in the cradle.
You gotta go after DeSantis to weaken DeSantis so that it ceases to be a two-man race and it becomes a gigantic candidate versus all of the other guys.
Then they can all turn on Trump, which if 2016 is any indication, will probably occur once it's too late, which is why Trump likely right now will receive the nomination.
But the one candidate who is attacking Trump right now.
He's the new candidate in the race.
He's the dark horse that a lot of you have made fun of me for suggesting could have a moment in the campaign.
It's the croissants, baby.
It's the croissants for short.
It is Governor Christie.
You might have forgotten about him, but he's popping back up.
And he's officially filed paperwork to run, so he hasn't made a formal announcement.
But as far as the government is concerned, he's a candidate for president.
He said he's gonna run as the chief Trump antagonist.
He said, I am running my campaign just to attack Trump, which is a big deal.
Because while a lot of politicians in the Republican Party have bad blood with Trump going back a long way, Christie and Trump used to be buddies.
Chris Christie was an advisor to Trump.
During the 2020 debate prep for Trump and Biden, Chris Christie was Trump's sparring partner.
Which tells you two things.
One, Christie was pretty close to Trump.
And two, Christie's a pretty good debater.
He's the guy that Trump World picked to be the toughest challenger to prepare Trump for that debate.
And now, things have changed in the last few years.
Christie is really going after Trump, specifically going after Trump's family.
Let me tell you something, everybody.
The grift from this family is breathtaking.
It's breathtaking.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis?
$2 billion from the Saudis?
You think it's because he's some kind of investing genius?
Or do you think it's because he was sitting next to the President of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis?
That's your money.
Okay.
That's your money he stole and gave it to his family.
You know what that makes us?
A banana republic.
That's what it makes us.
So he may get 30% again.
I'm not sure.
Maybe he'll get more.
Maybe he'll get less.
But let me tell you what he'll know in 2024 that he had no idea of in 2016.
He's in for a fight to get it.
Okay.
That's not very persuasive.
What do you mean?
Trump didn't know he was in for a fight in 2016?
There was a brutal presidential race and there were a bazillion people running.
But, Christie has a point, which is that in 2016, everybody reserved their fire.
Well, the people who attacked Trump got nuked immediately.
And then the candidates who were trying to come in number two, they were maybe trying to wait until the very end to edge him out.
They held their fire until it was too late.
You saw this especially with the Cruz campaign, you saw it with the Rubio campaign.
So now Christie's coming out there and saying, look at this grift from this family.
Now, it's tough for Christie because Christie was very close to Trump and he helped Trump for a long time, including up through the 2020 election.
So now is Christie running a Liz Cheney kind of campaign?
I've seen the light.
I used to do lots of terrible, corrupt stuff with those awful Republicans, but now I've seen the light.
No, he's not quite running that.
He's not quite running on how close he was to Trump, but he's not quite running on being an outsider in Trump world.
The message is a little bit confused.
And so he's gonna get in the race now.
And what complicates this even further is the only thing Christie can do in this race is help Trump.
He can't, he can't really hurt Trump.
There is not one single Trump voter who is going to vote for Christie over Trump.
Unless they throw Trump in the gulag or something and Trump's not available for a campaign.
So Christie, even as he targets all of his attacks on Trump, he's still running in the anti-Trump lane.
Christie is still the alternative.
He is an alternative that is more acceptable to the establishment because his policies are a little more liberal, significantly more liberal than Trump's.
But he's got that fight.
And so it's, in a way, it's a kind of a smart campaign pitch, which is, I'm the guy who can take on Trump.
Christie is dealing with the political reality that this is Trump's nomination right now.
Look at the polls.
This is his to lose.
And so, okay, the only guy who's gonna have a shot is gonna be the guy who explicitly says he's gonna take on Trump.
That is where he's running.
And I know you doubt me.
He could have a moment.
He could have a moment.
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If you're looking for something interesting to watch, check out the series What We Saw, hosted by storyteller Bill Whittle.
Season one is focused on Apollo 11.
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So you got Haley attacking DeSantis, Christie attacking Trump.
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So you got Haley attacking DeSantis, Christie attacking Trump.
Now Rubio, Rubio's not even running for president.
He's attacking Christie.
Rubio is furious because Christie's pitch is, hey, I destroyed Rubio's campaign.
I'm going to do it to Trump this time.
And you remember, there was that great clip, I didn't pull it today, I should have it, but a lot of people have been Googling it over the last 24 hours, where Christie and Rubio were on a debate stage.
Rubio gave some canned 30-second speech about how, we need to dispel what this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing.
He knows exactly what he's doing, and he goes on, and it was some rehearsed line.
And Christie made fun of him for it, and he said, that's the thing that's wrong with Washington.
He says, that thing, the canned 30-second speech, it's so stupid, it's ridiculous.
And it really flustered Rubio, and so Rubio sputtered for a little bit, and then, you He repeated the line.
He didn't know what else to say, so he repeated the line, and Christie just demolished him for it.
He said, there it is.
There's the line again.
Okay, here you go.
Proves my point.
It was devastating.
It was devastating.
So Rubio, out of nowhere, Tweets out, any political reporter commentator claiming Christie ended my campaign in 2016 is lazy or dumb.
New Hampshire debates sucked because instead of hitting back when attacked like I wanted to, I listened to advice about pivoting and not punching down on Chris Christie, who was at 7% and about to drop out.
But it didn't end my campaign.
After New Hampshire, I finished second in South Carolina and Nevada, won three primaries, almost won Virginia on Super Tuesday, finished with the third most delegates behind the Trump's historic campaign, and was reelected twice by 8 and 17 points.
Okay.
Marco, it's alright.
It's all right, okay, this is not, I like Marco Rubio, but this is a weak sauce, man.
His defense is one, I didn't follow my instincts and I listened to whatever the consultants told me.
So don't blame me, it's the consultant's fault.
Okay, come on, that's not, that doesn't make you look good.
It's not convincing anybody.
In fact, all this tweet is making people do is go look up this very embarrassing moment for Marco Rubio.
And there's a political lesson here for all of us.
I'm not just beating up on Rubio.
The political lesson is don't try to fight yesterday's battles.
Yesterday's battles are over and you either won or you lost.
And if you lost, then you're not going to win by rehashing a loss.
People are just going to be reminded that you lost.
And if you won, You actually can lose somewhat by rehashing it.
If you're going to reopen that issue and reopen that victory, then people are going to analyze it again.
Maybe because political circumstances have changed, they're going to re-examine, maybe change their perception of what you've done.
You can't win.
You've got to fight today's battles.
You've got to fight on today's terms.
You definitely don't want to remind people.
For people in politics, for anyone who's got any kind of an ego, who's got any kind of a sense of pride or, you know, wounded dignity or something, those moments where we screw up, where you said the wrong thing, you did the wrong thing, you just, oh, you feel queasy, you've got so much regret, they stick with you forever.
And you think that if you just keep bringing them up, you can fix it.
You can't.
Just move on.
Don't make people Google the worst moment of your political career.
Now, speaking of battles and presidential candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy is going on the offense here.
He's not merely attacking the other candidates.
Vivek was on ABC News.
He was asked by Martha Raddatz to explain his position on Ukraine.
And Vivek went a long way to differentiate himself from the rest of the field.
You do not believe that Russia taking over Ukraine would be bad for our national interest?
I do not think it is a top foreign policy priority for us.
I don't think it is preferable for Russia to be able to invade a sovereign country that it's its neighbor.
But I think the job of the U.S.
president is to look after American interests.
And what I think the number one threat to the U.S.
military is right now, our top military threat, is the Sino-Russian alliance.
I think that by fighting further in Russia, by further arming Ukraine, we are driving Russia into China's hands.
And that Sino-Russian alliance is the top threat we've faced.
And what I've said is I would end this war in return for pulling Putin out of that treaty with China.
How do you do this?
No one tells Vladimir Putin what to do.
What I think we need to do is end the Ukraine war on peaceful terms that, yes, do make some major concessions to Russia, including freezing the current lines of control in a Korean War-style armistice agreement.
Which Ukraine really wouldn't want to do.
Which Ukraine wouldn't want to do, and also a permanent commitment not to allow Ukraine to enter NATO.
But in return, Russia has to leave its treaty and its joint military agreement with China.
That better advances American interests and actually further deters China from going after Taiwan.
It's a great plan.
It's a great plan, and it is the best specific plan that anybody in the race has laid out in the Ukraine war.
Now, some people might not convict.
The only way they could not convict for this answer is either if they're total war hawks who just want NATO expand to expand around the world and just want to conquer Ukraine, that some people, the establishment areas will do that.
The other criticism would be, well, you've shown your strategy, you've given up your plan.
Okay, yeah, that's true.
All right, I guess it would be better to play close to the vest, but this is a presidential campaign.
You gotta tell people what you're gonna do, okay?
And Vivek's plan here is very, very good.
It's a very, very good one.
DeSantis' answer on this question was, hey, we'll see what happens by 2025.
Yeah, we'll see, we'll deal with it then.
So he's just brushing it off.
Trump's answer was, I'm going to end the war on day one, which is a better answer than DeSantis' answer, saying we want the war to come to an end.
So he's signaling here some of what Vivek is talking about, maybe exactly what Vivek is talking about.
Trump just doesn't want to give the details here.
Okay.
Why are Trump and DeSantis playing it so safe?
They're playing it safe because Ukraine is a wedge issue on the right.
The base base, the real, the conservatives of the They want it to come to an end.
They see Ukraine as a buffer state.
They don't want NATO to expand.
They don't want Ukraine to join NATO, certainly.
They don't want to have to fight a world war with a nuclear former superpower over a territory that's been contested for 1,000 years.
So the base base, the Tucker audience, I don't know, you guys, the base base.
Is with the vague on this, and I imagine with Trump, and maybe with DeSantis too, he's just not being specific.
The sort of base, the kind of more normie GOP voter, is reflexively anti-Putin, hates Putin, Putin's the worst guy in the world, still views the world largely through the lens of the Cold War.
He wants Ukraine to win, doesn't want Russia to get a single inch of territory, doesn't have any specific ideas for exactly how to wind this war down, but hates the idea of us giving in in any way to Vladimir Putin.
So even if their instincts are not exactly realistic or practicable without entering into a major war between the US and Russia, which we were able to avoid for the whole Cold War, but now who knows, maybe things are dicier because we have weaker leadership.
That base probably won't like Vivek's answer.
And so it's a wedge issue.
So why is Vivek being specific here?
Because Trump, and to a lesser degree DeSantis, are way up in the polls.
So they don't need to get specific foreign policy is usually not the determining factor of presidential campaigns.
And so they kind of want to avoid it.
The Vague is running an insurgent campaign at a left field.
No one knew this guy was going to run in 2024.
So he doesn't have the luxury of waiting on this.
And I think not only is his view right, I think politically it's wise for him to make this argument.
Yeah, it's high risk, but there can be some real reward here, too.
This is actually exactly what Trump did in 2016.
Trump in 2016, on that debate stage, was asked about the Iraq War.
And all the Republicans were asked about the Iraq War, and they knew public opinion had turned against the Iraq War, but a lot of them still wanted to defend it because they had been defending the Iraq War for 15 years at that point.
And Trump comes out and he says, oh, the Iraq War was a mistake.
George Bush made a dumb policy, foreign policy error, and we're paying for it now.
He gasps in the room, you can't upend the GOP line on Iraq.
Yeah, well, I did anyway, cuz I'm not even really a Republican that much.
I'm just Donald Trump, and I do whatever the hell I want.
You can't say that, but a lot of people agreed with Trump's position, including in the GOP base, and he was rewarded for that.
I think you could see a similar kind of political reward for Vivek here, for getting specific on Ukraine.
Now, speaking of Ukraine war skeptics.
Tucker's back, baby.
Tucker on Twitter, available to stream now.
I lost count of how many views it has.
Tucker on Twitter has got like a bazillion views.
A hugely successful launch.
The episode is about 10 to 11 minutes, and I thought, well, wait, he's not doing his whole 30-minute show?
Or I guess it was an hour-long show on Fox.
But then I remembered that when it's on cable news, half of that is commercials, so you're actually not losing too much Tucker content.
It was an excellent first episode, and he went even further than he would on cable.
It was a similar kind of show, but he went even further because now he's not constrained by the rules of one of these big establishment news corporations.
The Russians are dying.
It's the best money we've ever spent, Graham says.
A smile spreads across his thin, quivering lips as he forms the words.
He looks like a starving man contemplating a breakfast buffet.
The aroma of death has aroused Lindsey Graham.
Thanks so much, replies Zelensky.
He feels the same way.
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.
In any case, who cares if they are?
It's really not your business.
Your job is to support Ukraine.
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.
Who organized those BLM riots three years ago?
No one's gotten to the bottom of that.
What exactly happened on 9-11?
Well, it's still classified.
How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money?
How did he die?
How about JFK?
And so endlessly on.
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.
Great stuff.
One, Tucker's writers, and Tucker himself is a writer, he's a very talented writer himself, they're just phenomenal.
That bit about Lindsey Graham's quivering lip as he thought about the war in Ukraine is so mean, so vivid, so really good stuff.
And then, Tucker's beginning to answer one of the big questions about the future of his show, which is, Does Tucker work without the constraints of cable news?
Part of what made the Tucker Show so great was that he was saying it on cable news.
Cable news which had been so milquetoast and reined in and a lot of these hosts, even the conservative ones, just kind of towed the uniparty liberal line.
And Tucker comes out and he contradicts it.
A lot of people on Fox News even, but throughout the cable news, they wouldn't invite really conservative people on the air.
Oh no, the real conservatives, they're going to be blacklisted.
And then Tucker comes on, he says, yeah, no, forget about that.
We're going to have all these guys on.
I'm going to have whoever I want on the show.
Well, the question was, does that work when you take away the constraints?
And the answer, I think, is yes.
Tucker is doing the same kind of show, but going further.
Talking about aliens, talking about foreign policy, talking about 9-11, raising questions about 9-11, raising questions about the JFK assassination, and saying, I'm going to go further, I'm going to push further than I previously could before.
It's just a way forward.
If this works, Tucker leans in and adapts himself to the media, which he obviously is doing, this could be a real death blow for the establishment, long-standing legacy media.
We're now premiering movies on Twitter that get a bazillion views, like we did with What Is A Woman last week.
We're now premiering presidential campaigns on Twitter.
Not the smoothest rollout ever, but impressive that it happened.
RFK Jr.
now, Democrat presidential candidate, using Twitter to advance his campaign for a town hall.
Now Tucker Carlson, biggest cable news host ever, coming to Twitter.
Getting bazillions and bazillions of views.
If this succeeds, every sign says that it has, the media landscape has fundamentally changed and changed for the better.
Great, we've got to talk to each other about it.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Edgar Hoods, who says, he says this of my observation yesterday, that with DeSantis running as Trump 2.0, with DeSantis running as the more competent Trump or the more effective Trump, he's going to have an uphill battle because even if he's right, Many people will still prefer Trump, even if DeSantis is more effective, even if DeSantis is smarter and more precise and all the things.
Let's say it's all true.
Many people are still going to prefer Trump.
And Edgar Hoods says, it's like the taste test with Coke and Pepsi.
People like Pepsi when they're blindfolded, but they like Coke better when they can see it.
I think that's true.
If you close your eyes and said, hey, what would you think about an executive?
A politician who's in an executive role who bans the porn from libraries and fires Soros prosecutors and fires the weird pro-COVID lockdown health apparatchiks and replaces them with people who are going to take the side of tradition and reason and freedom and all the rest of it.
What do you think of someone who's going to take on the administrative state or all of the rest of the things DeSantis is focused on?
Close your eyes, you say, okay, I prefer that guy.
But then you open your eyes, and you say, nah, I'm with Trump.
And I'm just telling you, I know there are gonna be people who like DeSantis who say, well, why, they shouldn't pick Trump.
And I know there are gonna be people who like Trump who say, nah, DeSantis, he's not really that good.
Only when you close your eyes do you think he's that good.
I'm just describing to you the phenomenon, and the Coke-Pepsi analogy is a very good one.
Maybe Pepsi is better than Coke, and maybe it's not.
Many people are going to say Pepsi is better than Coke when they don't know which one they're drinking.
But when they open their eyes and they just look at it and they're presented with those two things, people are going to pick Coke.
It's the original.
That's what you're seeing in the polls right now.
And so if DeSantis or any other candidate wants to turn that dynamic around, they've got to differentiate themselves a little bit more.
A little bit more than Pepsi has from Coca-Cola.
Now, speaking of the media, Something very, very telling about this whole point with the way movies are being released now, presidential campaigns being released, Tucker Carlson's new show.
There's a UC Davis study out.
The UC Davis study asks, can movie reviews predict box office success?
And you would think from that question, the question is, if the critics like a movie, does that mean that the movie is going to do well, necessarily?
And if the critics pan a movie, does that mean that the movie is really dead?
No, it doesn't.
Actually, the opposite is true.
So what the survey found was that positive reviews signal that a film will flop, and negative reviews signal that a film will be a hit.
This published by UC Davis just a few days ago.
What does this tell you?
This tells you about a lot more than just movies.
This tells you One, we are living increasingly in a totalitarian state.
Not just an authoritarian state where the governors, the rulers have a little bit of a heavy hand, a totalitarian state where the ideology of the state seeps heavy-handedly into everything, into art, into all forms of education, into all sorts of public rituals, into the language we're allowed to use, into the thoughts that we're allowed to have.
That's totalitarian.
It's when it's a total state.
There would be a distinction here you could see between Communist Soviet Union and Francisco Franco's Spain.
Francisco Franco was an authoritarian ruler, but he basically tolerated diversity.
He tolerated people doing pretty much what they wanted to do, but they couldn't insist upon it in public.
They couldn't make a big show about it.
They couldn't go out there and march against his regime.
He would suppress that kind of stuff.
But he didn't send the thought police into your home to tell you that you got to use certain pronouns, okay?
He actually had a looser hand than that.
Whereas the Soviet Union would encourage people to rat on their neighbors, rat on their family.
The communist totalitarian states really insist upon the ideology at every single level all of the time.
That's more of the society we're living in now.
Because the ideology of the state is not just coming from the congressmen or the politicians.
It's coming from the movie reviewers.
It's coming from the mainstream media broadcasters.
It's coming from the teachers.
It's coming from the sports.
It's coming from ESPN.
It's just everywhere, okay?
But the people know that it's BS.
The people oppose it.
When the people see that the establishment likes something, they assume it's bad, and they won't go see it.
When the people see that the establishment hates something, the people will go see it.
They will like it.
You see it on Rotten Tomatoes.
The way you know a movie is going to be really, really good is when it has a very low critic score and then it will have a high audience score.
And now, because Rotten Tomatoes has messed around even with how the audience score works, now even the audience score isn't totally reliable.
So that's one thing that it tells you.
That's the most important thing that that study tells you.
The second thing that the study tells you is that movies are a dead industry.
They're effectively a dead industry at this point.
The studios are churning out all the same crap.
The Oscars don't reward movies that people like.
The Oscars only reward movies about, like, 15-year-old gay cowboys or whatever that nobody's gonna go see.
And the critics are in on it.
The critics are part of the film industry.
The studios are part of it.
The distributors are part of it.
The actors are part of it.
The writers are part of it.
And it's just kind of dead.
And it's been dying for a long time.
And so if movies or just premium content generally, meaning miniseries, extended series, middle ground kind of shows, if that's going to have a future, it's not going to have a future in Hollywood.
The future of that is going to be outside of Hollywood, maybe places like Tennessee or maybe elsewhere.
This is true of politics, too.
This is another reason why Trump is doing well in the polls.
I think, I fear.
That people who like DeSantis for the nominee in 2024, they think I'm being too nice to Trump.
Probably the people who support Trump think I'm being too nice to DeSantis and the other candidates.
I'm just calling them like I see them, okay?
I'm describing what I'm seeing, and what I'm seeing here is that Trump is dominating in the polls, and he is gaining in the polls.
And he's gaining even after his chief primary opponent Ron DeSantis announces.
He's gaining because of the phenomenon that you're seeing in the UC Davis movie review study.
Because of the phenomenon that you're seeing in Tucker Carlson getting a bazillion views when he debuts his cable news show on Twitter.
It's because Negative reviews from the elites is taken as a positive by the people.
And the candidate that the liberal establishment hates the most is Trump.
Maybe they fear other candidates more.
Maybe they think that DeSantis would be more effective.
Maybe they, I don't know, they're helping Donald Trump become the nominee by giving him so much media coverage.
Okay, sure, whatever.
I think we all have to admit, they hate this guy.
They hate him.
They've hated him for so long.
Because of the way he talks, and the way he is, and he's so boorish, and he doesn't behave like a nice, fancy, sophisticated person, and he's threatening major entrenched interests on trade and foreign policy.
And they're gonna try to stop him, and they're gonna try to cheat to stop him, and they're gonna change all the election laws to stop him, and they're gonna shut down the world to stop him, and they're gonna throw him in jail if they have to, to stop him.
And if they can't get him in jail in New York, they're gonna get him in jail in D.C.
If they can't get him in D.C., they're gonna get him in Georgia, or Florida, or wherever else.
They just freaking hate this guy, and everybody knows it.
They hate him more than they hate the other people, and that's why the people right now are supporting him more.
They're supporting him more than Biden, even in important swing states.
Right now, Trump is leading Biden in Nevada.
Trump is leading Biden 48 to 47, so it's fairly close, but that's according to McLaughlin & Associates, a very reliable poll firm.
That's according to former Congressman Lee Zeldin's Leadership America Needs PAC.
So it's not just, well, okay, Trump can win the primary, but he can't win the general, at least not according to these polls.
And it's not even just national polls, you're seeing this in important states that Trump's gotta win.
What about with the independents?
Well, Trump can't win independents.
Well, according to another survey just came out from The Economist and YouGov, more independents prefer Trump than Biden, by a lot.
36% Trump, 26% Biden.
It's a 10-point gap among independents.
We always hear about the suburban housewife or whatever.
We always hear about the moderate voter.
Well, according to this poll, at least, and maybe it's not because of anything Trump has done.
Maybe it's just because of what a screw-up Joe Biden is.
But regardless, people are viewing Trump as the likely nominee, and they seem to be Supporting him more than Biden.
That's the state of the race.
And it's just, I'm so glad that we're finally out of the kind of dull season where it's just a little attack here, a little lob here, a little jab there.
No.
We are getting into real, brutal, bare-knuckle politics.
If you don't get a kick out of that sort of thing.
Why do you pay attention to the news?
If you don't get a kick out of that sort of thing, get another hobby.
Go play ukulele or something.
You can play ukulele anyway.
It's a fun hobby to pick up regardless.
But if you like politics, you gotta like this stuff.
This is what politics is.
Speaking of politics, rehashing old battles, my producers have reminded me of one of the all-time great political interviews.
That would be Hillary Clinton on Between Two Ferns.
Which we will be delving into, all of the important details of this, of this great political interview.
