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May 10, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
27:10
He's Back ... But Not For Long
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Hello again.
This is Richard, and this is another entry in my journal.
I'm going to talk once again about Tucker Carlson.
So, Tucker has made news once again.
He's back.
We're back was, in fact, the tweet that he released this afternoon, Yet more platitudes on about how the media just isn't fair and you're not getting the truth and things like that.
He did say some true things, to be fair, about the media selecting facts to report on and so on.
And the fact that Twitter as a platform is reactionary.
It's simply commenting on the news.
That is relayed to people via cable news in many cases.
All true.
And he also announced that he will be continuing his show.
That seems to be what he implied, is that he will have a show much like he did for the last four or so years on Fox News.
But he will be doing it on a new platform.
Twitter.
I thought that Twitter had hired him as talent, much like Rumble hired Steven Crowder and Substack paid Matt Taibbi or something like that.
But apparently that isn't quite the case.
So Elon Musk tweeted a...
A few minutes or so afterwards saying that there is no contract with Tucker.
So he is using the Twitter platform just like anyone else will.
And he could get subscribers and monetization and so on.
So that's interesting.
So Twitter isn't quite becoming a content producer, as I thought they might.
A publisher.
They are remaining a platform, but there's no doubt that there were some text exchanged or some behind-the-scenes dealings between Elon and Tucker.
But regardless, he will be on the platform and act like any other creator.
And I think that's really his ultimate problem.
And I don't think Tucker will go very far with this.
And I think he will increasingly fade into irrelevancy, at least with regard to where he was previously.
Now, of course, I'm sure he can produce a lot of shows.
I'm sure these can be successful.
But I don't think he will ever be the figure that he once was.
And I'll explain that a little bit later.
Now, Tucker also did some things today.
He made some news in some other ways.
And he is threatening a lawsuit against Fox News.
He is claiming a couple of things, some of which I think are accurate, some of which I think are a bit dubious.
What is accurate is that Fox is in effect in breach of its contract by posting videos that are meant to demean him.
And it does seem likely...
I don't know for sure, but it seems likely that Fox News was the one who leaked some text messages that might have gone to trial.
I think they were actually suppressed from the trial, but anyway, some text messages, and these include the That's Not How White Men Fight line.
In which Tucker expressed those sentiments, but then also expressed how the fact that rooting on white people vis-a-vis Antifa is actually soul-destroying on some level.
Fox News is likely behind the leaks of some of these behind-the-scenes videos of Tucker just being very casual.
Maybe being a bit blunt or crass on occasion, but not really doing anything all too terrible in my mind.
In fact, those other videos he leaked made him seem, I don't know, relatable or cool or something.
Perhaps you should thank Fox News.
The other thing that he claimed that I find pretty dubious, to be honest, is that firing Tucker was part of the Dominion lawsuit.
So there was some agreement, I don't know if it was on paper or not, that for Fox News to pay Dominion three quarters of a billion dollars, but then not fully admit wrongdoing, which they didn't.
They didn't come out and flatly say, it was all a lie, we knew it was a lie, and we recklessly and maliciously spread a lie.
Fox News did not say that, even though that was implied, I guess, by their massive settlement with Dominion.
Tucker claims that someone on the board told him that he was fired as part of the settlement.
Now, I'm not sure I believe this.
I'm wondering if this were, I don't know.
I just don't fully believe that something like that took place.
Now, it does raise the question of why exactly was Tucker fired?
I think there are many different reasons, some of which might have been the, you know, that's not how white men fight text, some of which might be related to Rupert Murdoch's calling off his marriage.
With, I don't know, which is his third, fourth, fifth wife?
One of those.
Because she was a little bit too Christian-y for his taste, a little bit too wacky, and she was making claims like Tucker Carlson is a sent from God or a messiah of some kind.
It was probably a combination of different factors.
I'm just not sure I believe that Dominion forced him out and that was part of the settlement.
I find that dubious, but we'll find out.
There's also the issue of, is Tucker also breaking the contract?
Now, Tucker could say Fox broke it first, but is Tucker also breaking the contract by starting a new program?
Well, you know, is being a content creator on social media, is that...
Is that something that was in the contract?
I don't know.
It might have been.
Tucker would go on other people's podcasts, but he wasn't actively making content.
He didn't have his own podcast, so we'll see.
Regardless, I think non-compete clauses are, I guess, understandable from a corporation's perspective, but not something I'm too fond of.
I hope Tucker, you know, is a citizen.
He can go out there and speak his truth.
But I ultimately don't think he will be terribly successful at this.
And I think people who claim that he is going to be, you know, bigger than ever and this will free him and all that kind of stuff, I think those people are...
A bit delusional, and they misunderstand the dynamic at play, and in a way, they misunderstand why they themselves liked Tucker.
So, let me explain.
I am fond of using the phrase, a feature, not a bug.
And I invented that phrase.
That's probably what Trump would say.
No, I didn't invent it, but I'm fond of using it.
I use it in particular with Trump, where a lot of liberal types will look at something like, say, the Alvin Bragg lawsuit in New York over hush money payments and say, like, oh, well, no one could vote for him knowing that he's indicted on both misdemeanors and criminal charges.
Well, a criminal charge like that, Trump being arraigned, it's kind of a feature and not a bug of the whole Trump movement in the sense that he can flip that around and say, no, this is part of the great witch hunt against me.
They all hate me.
They want to destroy your favorite president.
All that kind of stuff.
So in a way, the bug is the feature.
And you can go, I think this phrase fits Trump to a T for almost everything about him.
He was popular because he was vulgar, not despite it.
He was popular because he wasn't a politician with an agenda, but because he was actually a reality show star who would go on worldwide wrestling events and make a jackass of himself.
All of those bugs were, in fact...
So that's what I mean by a phrase like this.
And so why am I using that phrase vis-a-vis Tucker and Fox?
So Fox News has a lot of problems.
And in fact, you can look at it and say that it is a dying business that is going to be sunset within, say, my lifetime.
It's probably going to be around another 25 years, but its ultimate business model is not sustainable.
People are moving away from cable in general.
They are cutting the cord.
They're not necessarily even saving money, HBO Max to YouTube, etc.
They're getting on-demand content or subscription-based content from the web.
Surely you've heard about this trend as it is massive.
Fox is live television.
Now, Fox has made little forays into Fox Nation and things like that.
According to Tucker, those weren't particularly successful.
And so you have this ancient audience that is still watching Fox News.
And it's a very real thing.
I mean, I remember going to a man's house.
It was his ranch out in Texas.
And he was one of these right-winger types, and someone connected me with him.
This was many years ago, I think 10 or 12 years ago.
And it's like, oh, this guy will fund.
What you're doing.
And needless to say, he didn't.
We're just going off in completely different directions.
I was not doing what he wanted.
But anyway, I visited with him, and he's a very wealthy guy.
And, you know, Fox News, I can just remember, was playing in the background throughout this large house.
So it was like Fox News was murmuring.
In every room of this large house, almost like sending subliminal messages.
You didn't even quite hear what segment was playing, but it was kind of going on.
You'd hear little bits and pieces or see flashing images.
Boomers love TV.
Boomers grew up on TV.
I think there's a certain authority that boomers give TV due to their childhoods.
And upbringings.
Zoomers are not like that.
Zoomers are much more likely to check out Twitter or Snapchat.
Probably not Twitter as much.
Snapchat, watch a live stream, post their own nonsense somewhere, comment on a website.
I mean, that is what they are about.
and they are certainly much more likely to subscribe to Netflix than Fox News.
Subscribe to Netflix, of course, using their parents'password.
you Bye.
Thank you.
So things are dramatically changing, and Fox has this ancient audience.
So I remember seeing reports of the demographic breakdown of Fox News watchers probably like five years ago, and it was actually shocking.
It was even older than I would have imagined.
All of these shows basically have...
70 and 70-plus audiences.
And Tucker was a little bit different in the sense that he was popular, maybe just simply due to the fact that he isn't too old.
He's in his 50s.
He kind of, I don't know, seems maybe even a little bit younger than that.
But he was attracting more of that coveted, I forgot what it is, like 25 to 55 audience.
Basically...
People who are in the prime of their careers and who are more likely to buy expensive stuff.
So advertisers like them.
Now, Fox didn't really need that demographic because the way Fox seceded was through carriage fees.
So effectively, I have not subscribed to cable news or cable in general for well over a decade.
I mean, good Lord, we might be going on 20 years at this point.
I think we are.
And whenever you subscribe to cable, and it's like this now, it was like this 20 years ago, you would choose these packages.
So do you want the basic package, or do you want the package with HBO, or do you want this other package with National Geographic, or what have you?
And they would advertise kind of the top channels in that package.
Well, in the basic package, or maybe the step up, there was Fox News.
And so you were, in effect, paying for Fox News, even if you hated Fox News.
And these carriage fees were the basis of Fox News revenue.
That business model almost makes it worse in the sense of the long-term trajectory of something like Fox.
Now, it makes it better in the sense that you can have a 70-plus audience and still charge these carriage fees because that 70-plus audience, they want to subscribe to cable.
They might not be in the market for a new car.
They might not want to buy the latest fashion trend or whatever, but they definitely want to watch the tube.
And they want to have Fox News murmuring in the background of their house at all times.
And of course, they might very well buy pillows.
So much of the advertisement on Fox was for adult diapers, reverse mortgages, and pillows.
So you could, you know, drift off to sleep and maybe not wake up.
Anyway, that's the audience.
As I mentioned, these kinds of things can be features and they can be bugs.
Now, let me ask a few rhetorical questions.
Is Tucker a really brilliant journalist?
Well, yes and no.
He actually was pretty good at long-form journalism back in the day.
He did write that kind of thing for the Weekly Standard, among other places, when he was kind of a young neocon of sorts, supporting the Iraq War, by the way.
you He's also a good presenter.
So if you look at some of these people who have replaced him, they really can't get a hit in the big leagues.
They just can't quite do what he can do.
He is smart and better at all of this kind of stuff.
So he doesn't have really any great competition from...
I don't know.
I can't even name the names.
I think Kaylee McInerney is hosting now.
There was some other guy, a conservative black guy from Texas, who I think was not doing very well at all.
So Brian Kilameade, no charisma, although competent.
I mean, they just don't really have what Tucker has.
So he's good.
But as one content creator among many, He's really not that great.
And I think so much of Tucker's success from the perspective of, say, right-wing Twitter, which loved Tucker and Tucker loved them.
I mean, he would pander to them, in fact.
Tucker was powerful because he was on Fox News.
He wasn't...
Powerful say in spite of the fact that he was on Fox and he was on this neocon boomer channel.
He was popular because of that.
And you have to understand that dynamic.
So Tucker was a Gen X figure who was kind of a boomer whisperer.
Maybe even a silent Gen whisperer knowing Fox's audience.
And so much of the love for him wasn't really exactly what he said.
You could get that elsewhere.
It was the fact that Tucker was saying it, and he was saying it to boomers.
In this way, he was red-pilling the normies, which is this long-term fantasy of right-wingers in general and the dissident right in particular.
We don't want to scare anyone.
With highfalutin theory.
We don't want to scare anyone with crazy gas chamber memes being posted on 4chan.
We don't want to scare anyone with anything a little bit too nuanced or complicated.
But we want to kind of slowly red pill them.
Slowly move the Overton window rightward.
So, yeah, Tucker kind of misrepresents or twists the Great Replacement theory because he's talking about election integrity and, you know, blacks being the main victim of the Great Replacement, all that kind of stuff.
But, you know, he's kind of shifting the Overton window.
He's red-pilling the normies.
That is what the dissident right wanted.
That's why they love Tucker.
And that's why, again, Tucker loved them, because he could play to them in that fashion as a boomer whisperer.
Tucker, on his own, isn't really doing that.
And he might very well get a ton of views.
For instance, he got millions of views in these...
Brief and platitudinous videos that he posted.
But what is that, really?
Lots of people are getting millions of views.
And I'm going to use an example that just came to mind.
But you know what I'm talking about.
There are countless other examples.
If you ever go to YouTube trending and things like that, or look at some of these massive videos that are getting millions upon millions of views, that is much larger audiences than those people who watch Anderson Cooper or Tucker Carlson on cable news.
There are videos about, you know...
Spider-Man or videos unboxing or some crazy videos of what's it like to go in a bubble bounce or whatever.
It's just, you know, strange pimple-popping videos.
I mean, I could go on.
It's just this crazy, inane sludge.
And so Tucker getting, you know, like a million watches on a Twitter platform isn't that big of a deal, really, because he no longer has that dynamic of I'm whispering to the boomer.
He's simply one among many other content creators.
And we can look at some examples of big people who left Fox News and became one among many.
Journalists and basically faded from relevance.
It's not that they're bad.
It's just they're ultimately not that great.
Bill O 'Reilly comes to mind.
So Bill O 'Reilly was pushed out in 2017.
He was actually replaced by Tucker.
He was...
He was absolutely, unquestionably the most dominant force in cable news for well over a decade.
He was hugely powerful during the George W. Bush administration.
He was a kingmaker of sorts in the GOP.
And as Tucker himself said in some of these interviews, he could kind of present himself as, oh, just an average guy.
You know, I'm speaking for the peeps here.
But everyone knew what he was really aligned with.
Well, he had a very embarrassing situation on his hands of being accused of sexual harassment and unwanted messages and photos and just general grossness.
Fox didn't want to deal with all these, you know...
Impending lawsuits and the embarrassment at all.
They just cut loose.
Well, Bill O 'Reilly's still around.
And I have no doubt that he gets a lot of views on his YouTube channel.
But he is totally irrelevant.
No one really talks about Bill O 'Reilly.
It's not that Bill O 'Reilly's dumb or incompetent.
It's just that he's one among many.
And he doesn't really have a unique voice.
Megyn Kelly.
Similar to Bill O 'Reilly, engaged in some race-baiting activities.
Again, similar to Tucker Carlson.
She was infamous for claiming, asserting, demanding that everyone listen, that Santa Claus is in fact white.
She was a big figure, not quite the figure that Bill O 'Reilly and Tucker was.
It's an interesting story, just to go off on a little bit of a tangent here.
Megyn Kelly, in the Trump years, was thought of as this kind of liberal bitch who hated Trump because she went after him during a Fox News debate, which she co-hosted or moderated.
I think people have short memories about this.
After Trump won the Republican nomination...
And certainly after he became president, Fox News did become Trump TV, in effect.
I mean, it was all Trump all the time, and everything that Trump could ever do was good.
It was his propaganda network.
Before that, it was not.
It was anti-Trump, if anything, and pro-Cruz.
A lot of these people who became Trump sycophants...
It started out as Trump haters.
Michelle Malkin comes to mind.
Many people who Trump appointed to his administration come to mind.
John Bolton, etc.
So Fox was never Trump.
And then it was wildly pro-Trump.
And then it kind of was never Trump there again for a little bit.
But anyway.
Megyn Kelly has a show on YouTube.
It's one among many.
It's really not that great.
It's kind of like a nicer version, a pretty face and a female voice of Matt Walsh-tier stuff.
Again, she's not bad.
She's not really relevant because you can get this stuff elsewhere.
She's not that insightful.
She doesn't really have a niche.
She's just a right-of-center conservative who's going to talk about the transgender issue a little bit and so on.
I mean, you can find this anywhere.
It's not really unique and differentiated.
And I don't think Tucker will be either.
Because, again, the feature is a bug.
What made Tucker fascinating and what made people want to talk about him...
On the distant right, but also the left, is this notion that he's red-pilling the normies, that he's reaching these boomers and silent-gen people via the platform.
Tucker on his own?
Not too interesting.
So, I ultimately predict he'll probably be pretty successful with the Twitter show, but I don't think he'll ever have the relevance that he once had.
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