Clayton Morris and Tucker Carlson expose how Fox News, including figures like Mark Levin, weaponized Iraq War propaganda—staged visuals, suppressed dissent (e.g., Napolitano’s cancellation), and 150% revenue spikes—to push U.S. interventions while silencing critics like Carlson for questioning Syria’s chemical attack narrative. They link this pattern to today’s Iran hawkishness, where personalities like Cruz and Graham prioritize Israel over domestic crises—fentanyl, homelessness, or $7–$10 gas risks from Hormuz conflicts—while framing dissent as unpatriotic. The episode reveals media’s role in normalizing endless war, ignoring domestic collapse, and turning audiences into complicit cheerleaders for foreign policy agendas that serve elites over citizens. [Automatically generated summary]
It's not weird when if you look at history, right?
To me, when I started watching over the past few weeks this drumbeat for war, I started seeing it's almost like they went to their shelf and they grabbed their book, their manual.
They got it off.
They dusted it off.
Like, what did we do back in 2002?
What have we done before that successfully worked and pushed people and entire populace along with CNN and MSNBC towards war?
They flipped open the pages.
They skipped the preamble because they already knew what to do.
And they started lining up every show with the same rhetoric.
They started putting up the TVs where they would stand and get up with their big pencils and their fingers on the board.
Here's where they're going to attack.
These are the bases.
Almost giving, like, telegraphing military moves.
It's from the same playbook, so it's not stunning.
I got enraged this weekend watching this coverage.
And almost breathlessly, as soon as there was this announcement that Trump had authorized this bombing of these nuclear sites, it was almost as if the hosts on these shows were grabbing an American flag and anyone who opposed this was unpatriotic.
And this was the most spectacular, amazing American moment in history.
He'll go down, like Reagan and Thatcher, you know, attempting to bring down communism.
Everyone tried to do this for decades.
Trump is the only one that could do it.
I just, you know, one of the hosts, I just got off the phone with Trump a few minutes ago, and he said their entire nuclear program has been decimated.
And to see these networks pushing this coverage, and it's not, you know, just Fox, it's CNN, it's MSNBC, and they're all right back to their playbook because it's so incredibly profitable.
I mean, just like follow the money on all of this.
So if we wind the, I mean, contextually here, I don't know how, you know, much of your audience is aware of like what happened in 2002, 2003.
I'm just trying to be level-headed as much as I can be.
So I'm just going to look at the, I just want to talk about the facts here because I've looked, I was, I studied this very, very closely at the time.
I was infuriated at it by the time when George W. Bush would get up there and tell us, you know why they attack, you know, it's because they hate it, why they hate us?
It's because they hate our freedoms.
I mean, my bullshit meter one, as soon as he said those words, I just wanted to scream at the television back then.
They don't hate us because of our freedoms.
That's just garbage.
Why aren't they going, why aren't they attacking Norway?
Well, I just think it's important to know why people do things.
You can disagree completely, but I think it's important to be honest about other people's motives.
And so I read this and maybe it's all made up or whatever.
Can you trust Osama bin Laden?
No.
But I think, do I like Osama bin Laden?
No, obviously.
But I'm an American, but I think it's important to know why, at least what he said about why he did it.
And the two reasons, there are a number of reasons, but the two big ones were you've got U.S. forces on the Saudi Peninsula, two most holy cities In Islam, Mecca Medina.
But it's crazy to think that countries become so irrational, partly because of training from cable news, that knowing something is considered the same as endorsing it.
Also, what I find so offensive about at least cable news now is maybe it's always been this way.
I think it probably has, but it's incurious.
We can't ask.
We can't ask questions.
And if you ask questions, that's an endorsement of that position.
So like we hit these nuclear targets.
I would never, if I were still on there and I raised the question with a guest, like, how do we know we actually destroyed anything with these nuclear targets?
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Do you think that if you still worked at Fox?
By the way, you were not fired from just for the record.
Yeah.
This is all available online, but people don't know your backstory.
You were not fired from Fox.
You're one of the only people I ever met who left voluntarily.
And then they were actually, I said, well, what if we gave you your own show?
And I said, no, I appreciate that, but thank you.
But they were great.
They were great.
And we parted ways on great terms.
And that was it.
So, you know, and I felt like while I was there, I was I was able to, I would get, I think I would get side eyes from people, but when I would question like the military industrial complex, like, I'm sorry, like, why are we spending, this at the time was like $600 billion a year on a military industrial complex budget?
And all of these like a Boeing, Northrop Grumman, they build factories in everyone's backyard.
So all the members of the House of Representatives, every member of the Senate has like, oh, I've got Boeing in my backyard.
Oh, that's, that's interesting because that's intentional that there's all of these military production facilities in your backyard.
So it's always in your backyard.
And I just became furious about, I've always been furious about that.
I've always had a problem with that.
And so occasionally I would ask those questions of guests on the show and I could tell like it was not a favorable question to be asking about the military industrial.
And you knew there's a, there's a lot of unsaid things, right?
So I don't exactly, you know, and I don't know where it comes from, maybe the top.
I don't know.
I work the morning, so I was kind of in and out of there and I didn't really have like a lot of interaction with like suits, you know, I wasn't one of those types of people.
But you knew that when you were given sort of like, this is what we're covering on the show today, I don't see anything on here about $800 billion, like in a defense budget, or I don't see anything in here on our show.
We've got a four-hour show, but we can't ask questions about did we actually hit nuclear weapons, or did we actually hit, is there anything in Fordo when we hit it?
I don't see it, you know, I don't see any of that in here.
So you knew what sort of the agenda would be for the day.
They don't care if you get up there and you're like, I think, you know, whatever, some controversial racial opinion or they'd be like, ah, that's a little hot.
Maybe not.
Don't go there.
You express, you know, an opinion about our foreign policy that they don't like.
Well, you knew Roger Ailes used to watch our show religiously on the weekend because he was home.
And the joke was, well, if you own a network or you run a network, what do you do on the weekend once you wake up and have coffee?
You watch your shows.
So it was a joke that he would watch our Fox and Friends weekend show more than just about any other show on the network because it was Saturday morning.
He was waking up with coffee.
So he would call into the booth all the time about a graphic being wrong.
He was very, very cautious.
But no one ever told me what to say or anything.
There was one time where I criticized Mark Zuckerberg and I called him a scumbag on the air.
I thought that was like, that's kind of like, that's how you talk.
You know, I'm sorry.
No, we have moms and with their children.
When you use the word scumbag, I'm like, okay, got it.
I'll refrain from calling Zuckerberg a scumbag.
But I mean, it makes sense to me.
I never hit that red line in that way because, as you pointed out, you're being guided a certain way.
So all of the segments, for those of your viewers that don't understand, like, you know, you have a card, you'd have like a packet, you know, of maybe like 10 articles regarding the segment you're about to do.
And every segment's like four minutes long.
So you and I can talk for two hours.
Every segment is like four minutes long.
Then you've got a commercial break and you might have two guests during that time.
So you have a debate and always the other person's always sort of sort of set up for failure to begin with anyway, but and you're sort of guided in what their, what their positions are.
You know that John Smith, he believes this and, you know, Sarah, whatever, knows that believes this.
And you kind of go from there.
If you deviate from that, that's when you have problems.
So that's you're, you're guided through the whole day like that.
And that's why this weekend, when we were watching this coverage, I was not surprised as they would sort of hand off coverage from show to show to show to show.
They were kind of pro Black Lives Matter, actually, if I'm being totally honest, but I was completely opposed to it from day one just because I thought it was irrational and destructive and stupid.
But it's the same impulse.
It's like this hysteria sweeps over America, fanned by the media, Fox being a big part of that, the biggest media.
And anyone who disagrees is just written off as a hater.
Like they go right to motive.
Oh, you must be taking money from a foreign power.
You must hate this or that group.
There's no like even attempt to engage with what you're saying.
We're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe country.
Walk through Oakland or Philadelphia.
Yeah, good luck.
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What's so hilarious, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised because they always accuse you of being exactly the way that they themselves are, is anyone who asks questions or disagrees is woke now?
Have you noticed this?
The woke, right?
So you're like, I'm not sure that we should have a war with Iran right now.
And like, it seemed like there are a lot of problems here.
And like, people I know are dying of drug ODs.
Shut up, racist.
You're woke.
It's like, wait, what?
Or people who are clearly working on behalf of a foreign country accuse you of working on behalf of a foreign country.
So they have now taken the moral high ground to tell me that I'm part of the woke right because I don't want us to intervene in a foreign.
So I guess by that measure, then George Washington is a member of the woke right in his farewell address telling the nation we shouldn't intervene in foreign affairs of other countries.
But he said, most people now, it's sort of a soft, his exact wording, Glenn, don't be mad at me, but it was like, he'll admit it, that we're now, it's like an insidious, we'd be, like a sort of soft anti-Semitism that people are now, they just, without really consciously being aware of it, they've become anti-Semitic.
But we've been so heavily programmed by the mainstream media with wall-to-wall coverage.
You're not getting any perspective from the Middle East.
You're not getting any perspective from Iran.
You're not getting any perspective from that side of it.
All of the guests that you'll have on television are all pro-Israel.
And this is right out of that same playbook from 2002.
So if you look at the data on this, I find this fascinating.
And again, this is where I'm trying not to be emotional, but I'm trying to just look at the data after 2002.
And I came at this from like a personal perspective and not to talk about me, but like my, my brother was in the first Gulf War and he went in with the Navy SEALs before anyone else.
He was in Baghdad.
So he was there basically directing Tomahawk missile attacks at himself.
You know, he could fly right over his head, essentially.
So we would send like care packages and things like that.
But of course, we were all told at the time, tie a yellow ribbon around your tree.
You remember the black and white images of Wolf Blitzer with a little helmet on, you know, talking about how great this was to, you know, to stop Saddam Hussein.
Well, you know, William Randolph Hearst made us sure that we couldn't know the truth.
I mean, we want to go back even further into history with the media narratives being how everything is being framed.
I mean, we look at Remember the Maine, the reason we went to war with Spain, you know, front pages of the Hearst Papers, the New York Journal at the time, I think.
And after 9-11, these networks, all of the major news networks started the drumbeat for war.
CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS News.
They started their nightly newscasts every night, would have guests just about, they were all pro-war.
Go take out Saddam Hussein.
I think when they did the analysis, the FAIR, the FAIR report at the time, looked at just the nightly newscasts.
393 of their guests out of those three of them, just three of them were anti-war and like moderately anti-war.
That's wild.
Not like you or me on there.
It's like, eh, maybe we shouldn't.
Only three of them.
And that was just the nightly newscasts, like the shows that most people don't even watch anyway, you know, the 630 nightly newscasts, the Tom Brokhall era.
But then Colin Powell, you know, goes before Congress and he holds up that fake anthrax vial and pushes us to war in Iraq and says that he has mobile biological weapons labs.
We can't really find them.
So they're mobile.
We got to go in there.
It's a threat to the region, of course.
It's a threat to Israel.
The network, the cable news channels then, that was when they did the really exhaustive study of the cable news channels.
And I found this fascinating that I think it was like 1,600, I might be off by like a few, but it's like 1,600 guests they analyzed during that time after Colin Powell sat before Congress and essentially lied, I think unknowingly lied that this was a threat.
1,600 of the guests, there were like 67% of the guests were pro-war across CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, all of the networks, all of the networks.
The Britt Hume show on Fox, the Wolf Blitzer show on CNN, almost overwhelmingly all pro-war.
MSNBC at the time then fired Phil Donahue, canceled his show because he was very much in the Jojnapolitano, like, maybe we shouldn't be going to war.
So MSNBC fired him, canceled his show, and replaced it with a show called Count Down Iraq.
Count Down Iraq.
So they fired Phil Donahue, who was vehemently anti-war, and he was asking questions about this.
Why are we doing this?
Why should we be doing this?
This seems like it's a boondoggle.
It's a lie.
Maybe we should be questioning this, allowing the weapons inspectors to do this.
Oh, and by the way, at the time, when all of the networks were pushing this narrative, they did a study and 61% of Americans supported delaying any kind of attack.
Let the weapons inspectors do their jobs.
Like, we don't want to go to war.
So even with all of that propaganda that was being pushed by these networks, 61% of Americans still said, no, we shouldn't involve ourselves in this, which by the way, I think if you looked at those numbers, would be very similar to like what Trump got in this last election with like, do we support, probably way higher.
You probably know these numbers better than I do.
Like what percentage of Americans right now want us to be involved in these forever wars?
Oh, and by the way, you're not allowed to say forever wars anymore because now you're, if you say that, you're unpatriotic.
You're, you're part of like the Thomas Massey, you know, isolationists.
You know, come on, because I can't stand, I can't stand when people attack him or call him that he's somehow not make America great again because he stands in the way of a massive multi-trillion dollar debt time bomb that he that we're going to pass in Congress, that he talks about that or that says we shouldn't bomb other countries.
I mean, you could say, well, you know, there are a million different plausible arguments you can make for and against any potential action, you know.
But you can't say that Thomas Massey is thoughtless.
You can't say that he's acting on behalf of somebody else.
He's totally transparent about what he believes and why.
And he's totally sincere.
And he's saying what he believes is true.
And in a decent society, in a Christian society, that has to matter.
Just because you're sincere doesn't mean you're right, of course.
But we have to take that into consideration when we assess you as a person, that you're sincere.
You're not being paid to say this.
You're not being paid for some hidden reason.
You're saying this because you really believe it.
Like that's meaningful.
That has to be meaningful or else we've lost our decency.
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What happened to the United States of America where pubs across Philadelphia were filled with people just sitting there having friendly debates over politics, you know, having a hard cider at nine in the morning, you know, like our founding fathers did?
Maybe we need to bring back hard cider, but that's what they did.
That was their breakfast drink.
You know, John Adams sitting there just having a conversation with Thomas Jefferson.
I understand that Trump is annoyed, understandably, that Massey's like criticizing his bill.
Trump thinks the bill is really important and Massey's just totally against it.
And you can't win Massey's vote because he really means it.
I think this is what the president's thinking is my sense.
And that annoys him because he really feels like he has to get this bill through.
Okay.
That's a fair debate.
I get it.
I get both sides.
But to accuse him, for anyone to accuse Massey of having evil motives is really dark and says much more about the accuser than the accused, I would say.
So I spoke to an FBI agent who told me, he said, you know, when we want to leak information, you know, we push it out to the Washington Post or we push it out to intelligence agencies want to push and leak stories or plant stories.
We go to the New York Times, we go to the Washington Post, et cetera.
And of course, it used to be, you know, back in the day, you know, they were embedded inside of newsrooms, right?
So you had them inside the CBS newsroom and all of that.
And now they just give them the information and then they run with it.
They don't question it at all.
So Curveball, this has always been fascinating to me.
It's, you know, Colin Powell gets up there and holds up this vial and it's been kept from him that this guy, Curveball, was a defector from Iraq.
He defects to Germany and starts talking all kinds of shit about Saddam Hussein.
And shouldn't the incurious media be asking questions of these people?
But they go along with it because it's part of, you know, I don't know who's feeding them these sort of like deep state talking points that they need to carry on with this.
But to me, they're an extension of the Pentagon.
I mean, when you have like Fox News has like an office in the Pentagon.
Jennifer Griffin is even by the standards of Pentagon employees.
I guess she's not technically an employee of the Pentagon.
She's a shill, obviously, for the deepest of the deep states, but she's like a parody.
She's like a parody.
It's like the whole thing.
She had this amazing tweet yesterday.
I guess the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, our former colleague, said something about, you know, referring to the pilots of the B-2s who dropped the bunker busters in Iran, said something like, good work, boys.
I think something like that.
And Jennifer Griffin immediately comes back and goes, breaking news.
Actually, one of the pilots was a female, a woman.
And like, so all of a sudden, Fox News is like celebrating the diversity of the bomber pilots.
It's like, there was this meme years ago, several years ago, making fun of the left.
And it was like, you know, someone getting bombed in some, you know, benighted country and by the U.S. or by NATO.
And it was like, but, you know, at least the pilots are gay.
And all of a sudden, Fox is like, no, actually, we should celebrate now because one of the B-2 pilots was a woman.
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He was embedded in Ukraine and he's like, we know this massive offensive is coming.
Here's this and this.
Being fed information directly from the deep state.
These guys.
So they're all an extension, CNN and all these.
They're all an extension of the intelligence community being fed this information and given these sources.
So they can never say a negative thing about them because then you cut off your sources.
You know, Jennifer Griffin, as this was all unfolding, and it was clear to me that there are a lot of questions about what was actually in those nuclear sites because a week earlier, Israel had struck two of them.
So do you think that Iran just kind of hung out and just like got a broom out and cleaned some stuff up and just put like the pictures back up on the wall?
No, they were empty.
And Fordo, by all accounts, was empty as well.
So what exactly did we hit?
And then this information was coming out almost in real time, but I was watching the network news coverage and there was no sort of walking it back.
So you can't question like, why are we in Libya in the first place?
Why did we go in and, you know, just because, you know, Qaddafi wanted to make his own country prosperous?
We can't have that in the Middle East in the same way that we couldn't have Iran nationalizing their own oil in the 1950s, right?
It's the same thing.
So you can't ask that question.
And so it just speaks to the military-industrial complex control, the UNIPARTY that operates in Washington, D.C., that fully is an operational at the media networks as well.
Don't question why we're in Libya.
Just focus on the Hillary Clinton piece of what happened in Benghazi.
Don't question what's going on in Syria.
Just focus on Assad as a madman and he's going to kill.
And if you look at it with this like broader brush, that we're, we can't have dissent when you're trying to, when you're trying to do the bidding of a foreign country.
I mean, Israel absolutely wanted us to take out Assad.
They've been wanting the same thing with Libya.
And if you go back to Netanyahu, who's sitting there in front of Congress, telling us about Iraq, that Saddam Hussein 100% has weapons of mass destruction.
100%, there's no doubt in my mind he has weapons of mass destruction.
You need to go in there.
By the way, it's a risk to America.
So this is always the, you know, the story, which is it's a risk to America if you don't go and bomb Iran.
It's a risk to America.
We're defending freedom together.
And the same with Syria, that Syria is going to launch attacks, which, by the way, Syria was one of the most peaceful countries in the world.
Damascus, a beautiful country, a beautiful city, one of the most peaceful countries in the world.
Look it up.
But when you want to take care of your own people and you want to sort of de-westernize, that's a huge threat.
In the same way that Iran wanting to nationalize its own oil and kick British petroleum out of its country, we're going to keep our own oil.
I mean, look what it did to Norway in the late 70s.
Norway became one of the richest and wealthiest countries in the world.
Well, Ted Cruz said to you in your interview with him, the very first thing out of his mouth, the very first reason he wanted to become a part of the United States Congress is because he wanted to see how he could serve Israel.
Yeah, the problem with that is once you start saying that stuff out loud, I mean, you know, it's not good.
People are, you know, once you see how things actually operate, it radicalizes people.
And as a true temperamental moderate, let me say, I don't want that.
I don't want a country full of angry people.
You know what I mean?
But people like Ted Cruz, who just sort of admits that the U.S. is not his main interest in life, but he is a United States senator representing one of our biggest states, that radicalizes people.
I mean, why wouldn't it?
I just don't want that.
I want everyone to be kind of happy and I want people to be pissed off and writing crazy shit on X and which they're now doing.
If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, I think the odds are unacceptably high that we would find out with a mushroom cloud over New York City or Los Angeles or Tel Aviv and Israel.
Israel is doing an enormous favor to the United States right now.
By the way, that same person, Mark Levin, who was a totally minor player in Fox World up until recently, I can tell you firsthand, suggested today that we send nuclear weapons to Ukraine, too.
But I should just make it clear, in the last clip that we played, he said, intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads are meant for you.
They're going to kill you, the mullahs.
Iran doesn't have intercontinental ballistic missiles.
It doesn't have nuclear warheads.
Like all of this is, it's deranged.
And the point is to scare old people into obedience.
And let me say one last thing: that everyone on that list, so we've got Hannity Cruz, Barry Weiss, Lindsey Graham, Kaylee McEniny, Mark Levin, Levin.
Of those people, Hannity's, I think, a genuine friend of Trump's.
I think Hannity really likes Trump.
And I just want to say again, I really like Sean Hannity personally.
Got no problem with Sean Hannity at all, personally.
And he likes Trump.
I don't know Kaylee McEnany, what she thinks of Trump, but Ted Cruz, Barry Weiss, Lindsey Graham, and Mark Levin hate Donald Trump.
They're all never Trumpers.
Well, I mean, one of them, Ted Cruz, ran against him.
Is Hannity, I mean, I think Ted Cruz, I don't know whose show he was on during that, but is Hannity going to question?
Like, I saw Mark Levin go on a tirade the other day on Hannity's show, and then Hannity basically jumped in and supported that tirade, praising Trump as maybe, you know, that decades of presidents had the opportunity to attack and didn't do it.
It took Donald Trump, like, you know, God, basically, to attack and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities.
But I didn't see any dissenting voices on this at all.
And the idea of Barry Weiss saying that this is a threat to America.
And that's the beauty of now we're hearing about now there's sleeper cells.
So I spoke to a CIA agent, a former CIA agent a couple of months ago, and he said, my biggest fear is that they will use, he said, this is the CIA plan.
This is what we do.
So we use a dumb Muslim.
We'll get a dumb Muslim who's easily brainwashable and we'll have them carry out an attack as a catalyst for us to go into war, go into war in Iran.
So we will use a Patsy, and that will be the catalyst.
Do you see what they did in Wayne, Michigan?
Did you see what they did?
There was carrying out this attack.
By the way, these accounts, as soon as we attacked the nuclear sites, almost immediately there were videos being surfaced and flooded on social media about Islamists running towards subways in New York City.
I don't think he's I think he's so bought and paid for by the military industrial complex, how much money he's made from the military industrial complex.
Like if somebody sent you $10 million to say that, you know, Firestone tires are better than Bridgestone tires, assuming they're not the same company, which I think they may be, but whatever.
You know what I mean?
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You'd be like, okay, I'm for Firestone now, $10 million.
But if someone sent you $10 million or $100 million or $10 billion to say something was untrue that you knew would get people killed, you want $10 billion, but you'd be like, oh, I don't know.
But these people are soulless, and they're not going to ask these tough questions.
They're not going to challenge this.
As you and I talked about last night, I'm thinking of that Upton Sinclair quote where he said, it's hard to convince a man of something he's paid not to see.
Yeah, yeah.
It's, you know, if you're paying, if you're on the salary, if he's being paid to not see it, if your whole salary relies on knowing something or not knowing something, you know, it's difficult.
So all these, you know, different anchors on these different television, they want the prestige of being on TV and having people like put makeup on them and all of that.
And they rely on that contract.
They rely on that salary.
And then if they don't have that, they go off and try to do things like what Don Lemon did or whatever.
And if you're part of that machine, no one wants to watch your stuff.
You know, because, well, for 10 years, you were a liar.
So now you're going to go off and do an independent show and now and now we're going to watch you and trust you.
Like you were lying for money for so many years, pushing a narrative, and now you're going to go off, we're not going to watch it.
It's the same argument that they used in 2002, that it's an existential threat to the United States of America, that Saddam Hussein is going to use intercontinental ballistic missiles.
He's going to gather a warhead with anthrax.
He's going to shoot, you know, he's going to shoot it into some mall somewhere.
So that's the fear, right?
They're playing on our fear that we are going to be attacked by Iran.
And they don't have an intercontinental ballistic missile to hit us.
Just don't let the facts get in the way.
They actually don't have a nuclear warhead.
They don't have the re-entry mechanism to even make that happen.
But we need to be fearful of it.
Like, I don't wake up fearful of Iran in the morning.
If they hate our freedoms, why aren't they attacking Norway right now?
Why would they attack us?
If we get the hell out of there, maybe we wouldn't have these problems.
If we wouldn't build these bases in their backyard, if we wouldn't meddle in trying to decapitate their leadership and overthrow and install a pro-Western government and tell them to open McDonald's.
But we can't.
We seem like we're so addicted to doing it.
And we thought under Trump that this would be a realignment.
So when they start an hour of a broadcast and say, Trump just carried out the most magnificent attack in American history on nuclear sites, Trump's sitting there watching it.
It's very difficult to get someone to understand something or care if their entire salary depends on them not caring.
So his entire salary, the money that he makes from all of these lobbying groups, all the military-industrial complex funds his mania, his wanting to decapitate Putin,
regime change in Russia, regime change in Iran, doing the bidding of all of these, you know, all of these all of these foreign countries, doing the bidding of military industrial complex, which stands to make a lot of money.
Wouldn't it be amazing if we could that trillion, like you brought up a great point the other day, but that trillion dollar budget that we now have for the military industrial complex.
Like, why do we not have the material to protect ourselves?
I really am angry at the people who abandoned their own country who are in positions of responsibility in their nation, the nation of their birth, and just abandoned it.
I look on them as I view a father who abandoned his family with true contempt.
So these, I guess, I mean, I have opinions on everything you said, but I don't want to keep repeating myself like an old person.
But I guess I would just say we have a lot of problems, like real, real problems, not just inflation or GDP or like actual systemic problems to steal a term that they love.
And, you know, anything that diverts attention from that, it seems really bad.
I remember when I graduated from HBS and went to the New York Fed just for five years as an internship and thinking I could make this a career, but I instead went into cable news.
So if you think about right now, what would devastate the United States of America?
Is it an intercontinental ballistic missile?
No, no.
What would devastate the United States of America would be $5 gasoline?
So have we thought about that?
Because when I heard them come out on TV the other night say, we've thought through every possible scenario as an attack against us after we launched these attacks on these nuclear sites.
We've gamed out everything were their words.
We've gamed out everything.
Did you game out that the Iranian parliament just voted to close the Straits of Hormuz?
Did you figure that part of it out?
Because I remember in 2022, under Biden, when gas hit $5.01, you had people filling up the flatbed of their truck with tarps, with gasoline, because they were in panic mode.
Biden literally emptied the strategic oil reserves as a response.
Inflation went over 9%.
The CPI number went over 9%, which is the consumer price index, which means how much are people paying for their groceries?
How much gas prices are included in the CPI number?
$5.
Closing the Straits of Hormuz could put oil or gas prices in the United States between $7 and $10.
Have we thought about how everything that we're doing right now, the lights on, the food that we get on our tables, would be affected by this in a massive way?
I mean, the only silver lining is that also China relies on the Straits of Hormuz in a very large way.
So both of us worked in television our whole lives were, well, you left voluntarily because you're smarter than I am, but I was expelled like a hairball from the system.
That this idea that people are going to pay for a cable subscription in order to get their CNN or Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity, like that's dying.
And that audience is dying with him.
I don't know if you've ever watched Fox in the afternoon.
It's all ads for hip replacement or like don't fall out of your shower stalls because you're elderly.
So they know their audience.
They know it's aging out.
The joke back when I was at Fox was that, oh, CBS's audience is like 90. It was like 75 at the time, but I'm just being exaggerating.
So now those people are in their 90s.
That audience is not getting any younger.
Again, I don't know anybody watching right now who's buying a cable box when they go to Xfinity or Comcast and they're starting out.
They're like a young couple.
They're in their 20s.
They want to have children.
They don't even know what a cable box is.
So they're going now, maybe with like the, you know, they'll buy a phonograph, but not a cable box.
And a lot of this is like shifted over to like YouTube TV and things like that, you know, things.
So, I mean, there'll be people that'll still flip through, but I think it's those era of like those massive salaries and everyone's kind of, I think that era is gone.
Yeah, and you and I know this to be true, which is that I think even Roger Ailes told us that the reason Fox and Friends in the morning would do so well is because the people at night would leave their TV on, set to that channel, and they'd wake up and it was the first thing would click on to that show.
And then they leave it on all day.
I've heard from so many viewers over the years that are like, oh, my parents would just turn it on and they would leave it run all day.
It's just kind of like a noise in the background.
So every hour, doesn't matter what panel show it is with four people sitting there on a couch or one person hosting a show.
When 80% of your guests are pro-war and the entire narrative all day is about how Trump is amazing and carried out the most spectacular Attack on America, you know, on in the Middle East since we've since Normandy, then they're just sucking that in.
That Barnes and Noble the other day, I met an old gentleman, lovely guy, and I was in the history section, and he just started chatting, and we just started chatting and talking to my wife.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
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