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Aug. 31, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
01:52:20
Live with Chadwick Moore - Discussing His Book "Tucker" AND MORE! Viva Frei Live
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You know things are getting real when Gadsad puts on his smolder face.
Let's let this play.
Start with a laugh for once and not a gag.
Although technically it is a gag and we're going to be laughing at a gag, but the Justin Trudeau gag is what I meant.
Okay, check this out.
Hi everybody, this is Gadsad.
I'm not sure if I should be honored, delighted, or worried that...
The Ontario College of Psychologists, the governing body of clinical psychologists in Ontario, of which Jordan Peterson was a standing member, I guess, for many years, has asked that he be put through a retraining program to learn because he's a 60-year-old man who's had a long academic career as a professor at Harvard.
I don't know how Gad does these bits without laughing and without smiling.
I know in real life he's actually a very happy, smiley, bubbly person.
I don't know how he suppresses that so that he can deliver this with deadpan comic perfection.
Harvard University of Toronto, been a clinical psychologist for many years, best-selling author, one of the top Canadian authors of all time.
He needs to be taught how to behave properly.
In a non-hurtful way on social media.
That's exactly consistent with the ethos of a free society.
And I learned that when I made a joke about the French-Canadian accent.
You know, the society that I've lived in since 1975, and I'm myself a Francophone, I learned that I can't make those jokes because...
Okay, we're going to have to skip to the good part.
So he's got to give him his rules.
He's got to give Jordan Peterson his rules of re-education.
A great society is if you constantly reject...
All of the values that have made your society a free and enlightened society.
So here are the...
So let me just read you first.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to read the 16 items that will be a fundamental feature of Jordan's social media re-education program.
With each one, I will self-flagellate because one of the things that we agreed with the Ontario College...
I have a question right after he begins the first...
We'll hear one and then we're going to get on with the show.
...is that he needs to show real contrition.
Absolutely.
Real penance.
Absolutely.
A real pathway to redemption.
I love Big Brother.
You can only do that if you feel it.
Feel me?
Alright, here we go.
So I'm delighted to report that I've been assigned to serve as Jordan Peterson's re-education tutor.
I've made it clear to the overlord of darkness that he must publicly proclaim these positions on social media.
Number one, men can get pregnant.
Number two, men can menstruate.
Number three, some women have nine-inch penises.
We know that because a lot of...
Okay, I'm gonna stop there.
And you'll all go watch because it's classic.
My question to Gad, why does he have a whip?
Did he go out and buy it for the shtick?
Or did, for whatever the reason, he have one of those leather whips?
I mean, it's interesting.
I'm curious to know, but maybe not, what Gad Saad is involved in.
Okay, people, we're gonna start off light because we're gonna get heavy and then we're gonna get light again.
Odd timing, by the way, and I actually screwed up a little bit because I initially started this stream for 1 o 'clock, thinking I was going to go 1 to 1.30, cover the madness of the news, 1.30 to however long Chadwick stays with us.
Chadwick Moore, the author of Tucker, journalist, columnist, and has just written the unauthorized, I guess it's authorized, but he had carte blanche biography of Tucker Carlson.
Which I listened to.
The link, the Amazon affiliate link to the book is in the pinned comment.
Someone sent it to me as a gift.
Thank you.
Whoever that was, I got to find out.
And I was like, I can't read it, but I'm going to get the audio book.
And I listened to it while fly fishing, oddly enough, or I guess timely enough.
It's a great book.
So Chadwick is coming on at 1.30.
But then I had reached out to Nick Sortor as well to talk about what's going on in Hawaii.
And then Nick said, I can come on.
I said, let's bump this up 15 minutes so I'll have enough time with you.
So Nick's going to be joining us in a minute or two.
And we're going to talk Hawaii.
Chadwick's going to come in.
We're going to talk Tucker Carlson.
And then we'll see how much time is left in the day and whether or not I just continue going on with the stories of the day, which keep getting worse.
But before we even get into the show, we have a locals community, which is above average.
Now, we are simultaneously streaming on YouTube.
Rumble and Locals.
We will end at one point on YouTube, go over to Rumble and Locals, and then at one point we're going to end on Rumble and have the exclusive after party on Locals where everyone is above average.
So much so that our Locals community came up with, dare I say it, the best merch idea ever.
If you go to VivaFry.com, let me see here, VivaFry.com Wanted for president, it's Trump's mugshot shot glass.
The mugshot shot glass.
And we've got, hold on, let's go here.
We got the shirt as well.
Wanted for president, but you also got the Trump mugshot coffee mug.
So you got the mugshot shot glass, the mugshot coffee mug, and then a shirt.
VivaFry.com and then you can find a bunch of other stuff there.
So we launched it yesterday.
I was supposed to announce it yesterday, but I'm an idiot and totally forgot to.
So there's that.
VivaFry.com for your Wanted for President mugshot.
And I think I'm done trying to have discussions about politics or Twitter exchanges about politics because Twitter is not the format.
It's not the platform for meaningful political discourse.
It's designed for zingers.
It's designed for disingenuous straw man, needles, insults.
Mischaracterizations.
That's what it's designed for.
I had on yesterday Jenna Ellis and Justin Hart, and we had a fun discussion, even if we disagreed with each other.
And now I know exactly where we disagree with each other.
It was a fun discussion.
Real-time, long-format, in-person, ideal, not on Twitter.
It irritates me.
Despite everything, I'm a sensitive man.
I don't like irritating people.
I don't like people getting upset.
And I don't like being misunderstood.
And I don't like fearing that I'm actually misunderstanding exactly what someone else is saying.
Okay, so with that said, I gotta show it one more.
I just, I love it.
I asked my wife to order a couple because it's the, and it's a two ounce shot.
So you get two of those.
And if you do a double, 1.9 ounce wanted for president.
Magnificent.
All right.
So we're going to...
Okay, Sorto's going to be here in a bit.
We're going to talk about Hawaii.
Do we have time for a video beforehand?
I think we do.
At the risk of immediately...
Oh, no, no.
This is what we're going to start with because it's totally unrelated.
Mitch...
Is it Mitch McConnell?
It's sad and it's not funny.
And by the way...
There's no political bias or inconsistency here.
I never thought making fun of Joe Biden's dementia should have been a source of comedy, a source of mockery.
It's a source of medical reality.
And like I said with Fetterman, like I said with Biden, and like I'm saying now with Mitch McConnell, it's not funny.
It's sad.
These people are being exploited.
Political parties should not be exploiting people who are clearly, clearly having serious medical episodes and are clearly medically unfit for the office they're supposed to hold.
This is the second time in as many weeks, I think, that Mitch McConnell has had one of these moments.
And it's scary.
It's scary.
What are my thoughts about what?
Running for re-election.
What are my thoughts about what?
About running for re-election.
That's a...
No blinking.
This looks like...
Did you hear the question, Senator?
Running for re-election in 2026?
Did you hear the question?
Yup, he says.
Alright, I'm sorry, you all are going to need a minute.
You need more than a minute.
This is not a question of making fun of anybody.
At some point, you know, Desiderata, the song, you know, you have to roll and evolve with the evolution of life.
And now he's fine, apparently.
As fine as one can be, apparently.
Somebody else have a question.
Please speak up.
because please speak up because the issue was that he couldn't hear him, right?
That's Madam on the Left.
The issue was not that he just had a heck of a massive episode, whatever that was.
The issue was that he couldn't hear them.
Please speak up.
It's elder abuse, okay?
I'm not saying that as a joke.
It's elder abuse.
That looks like either what they call a mini-stroke, T-I-A, or someone else rightly observed something, the freezing that is associated with Parkinson's disease.
Whatever it is, it's not funny, and it's not a question of having bodies-filled positions so that you can carry out your political will.
It's a question of elder abuse, and families should be coming in to protect these people, not exploit them politically.
All right, Nick Stortor is in the backdrop.
We're going to get started.
There's a surprisingly little on the internet about Nick Sortar.
I wanted to know where he came from, how many siblings he has.
We're going to see if we can find out.
Okay, I'm bringing him in now.
Everybody, let's do this.
Nick, sir, how goes the battle?
How's it going, man?
I thought it was interesting you're talking about Mitch McConnell.
He is my senator, actually, because I am a resident of Kentucky.
And, you know, a lot of people in Kentucky have been trying to get him to retire for a while.
He's been there for a long time, man.
It's astonishing when they show those montage clips of Joe Biden and everything he's been saying in politics for 40 some odd years.
It's some, I don't know, it's insane how long certain people stay in politics and either achieve nothing or achieve total destruction.
But that incident with Mitch McConnell, I mean, it is either a mini stroke or it's...
It's something serious.
So now, I couldn't find much online.
I was looking for controversies.
I discovered you during the East Palestine, and I'm going to tell you, I think you're an absolute madman of the highest order for going down to these places where, like, the air is toxic, the water is toxic, the EPA is not telling us anything, so let me just go down there, breathe the air, have to drink the water, etc.
I won't delve too much into your personal life upbringing.
30,000 foot overview for those who may not know who you are.
How did you become what the internet describes as the accidental journalist?
Yeah, so actually, so by trade, I was a software engineer who was working in real estate.
I was building real estate technologies.
And then, you know, all of a sudden it came along.
It was back in like January.
I started doing Twitter spaces with Mario Knopfel every once in a while.
And, you know, I heard the East Palestine story and I was like, you know what?
This is ridiculous.
This is a travesty.
It's a big cover up.
And the government is screwing these people.
So I decided, OK, yeah, I'm going to go out there.
I'm going to go.
I'm going to try to broadcast this to the world.
I had like, you know, 35,000 followers at the time.
So, I mean, I wasn't a big account.
I didn't expect I was going to be there for like a day or two, in my opinion, you know, just to try to put out a little bit.
I didn't expect the story to get as big as it did.
But once I got there, it was super clear that this was an absolute travesty.
On every level, the government was, the Biden administration was just trying to brush it under the rug, hope it would go away.
Nobody talks about it.
If there are no journalists that are there on the ground, which there were not at the time.
Then what do they have to worry about?
They can just basically curb stomp these people and be good to go.
Now, so hold on.
I think it's you who described yourself as the accidental journalist, but you are as new to this, like when I only discovered you through East Palestine, that was your first foray into independent journalism?
That was it.
That was the first one.
I had never done any sort of journalism before.
At all.
Now, either I'm getting old, and I think it's the case, but you look wildly young.
May I ask how old you are?
I'm 25 years old.
Yeah, you are young.
Okay.
25 years young.
Professional training?
I mean, I know you did for work, but like education, university, what did you study?
So I actually didn't go the university route.
I worked with some people in Louisville.
I won't name drop them right now.
There's a, let's just say he's a pizza man.
Big pizza guy.
He was my mentor.
There's not too many people that you can guess.
You'll probably figure that one out.
A quick Google search will do it.
He mentored me and got me started in the world of business and building something for myself rather than having to rely on going and getting a piece of paper from college.
And, you know, I learned, you know, via experience.
And that's so I've just been implementing that in the field of journalism as well now.
OK, so very cool.
And we'll get into East Palestine, I mean, a bit just to see where it's at right now, but also because it's the perfect segue in that we're seeing the same ammo from the federal government in terms of incompetence to potential cover up.
And I say potential just to weigh my words.
You just up and decide I'm going to East Palestine to see what's happening on the ground myself.
Yeah, absolutely.
I put out a tweet.
Literally, I asked people on Twitter.
I said, should I go to East Palestine, Ohio?
I was like, is this, this, and this is happening?
You have this picture of this massive mushroom cloud that was just engulfing this entire town.
This small town in Ohio only has a few thousand people in it.
And they've been suffering over the past couple of decades because manufacturers have been moving out.
They were one of the largest producers of pottery in the United States, funny enough, in East Palestine, Ohio.
And that manufacturer moved out and a lot of people And so you get down there and...
I mean give us a bit of what you see what you saw you know we've seen the videos of throwing rocks into the rivers and this like oily substance come bubbling to the surface um the cover-up not getting answers do we end up knowing what happened with the water was it clean where'd the smoke go what happened and what's the state of it now so we ended up we put a team together uh yeah and a lot of us met through x funny enough and there were scientists that were willing to come in and spend their own money To take soil samples,
to take water samples.
You know, we've had actually Tucker Carlson's team.
He sent the team in to come and help us broadcast this stuff out.
And we were able to find that the water was super contaminated.
The video that you're referring to where you throw the rock in the water and it disturbs the sediment.
And all that oil.
Those toxic chemicals would come straight up off the bottom.
The EPA was trying to hide that.
We found that by disturbing the water.
And just brushing on top of the water, you weren't getting any of that result.
You had to actually...
That was by accident, actually.
I threw a minnow trap in the water and ended up disturbing the sediment, and that's how we figured it out.
At the risk of asking, maybe not the stupid question, but what will be the defense potentially?
Well, it was like that before.
It was already a polluted river, heavy oils.
I don't know.
Heavy oils might be the wrong term, but stuff goes to the bottom.
Was that a new phenomenon that people were describing?
And setting that question aside, we saw videos of dead deer and all sorts of stuff.
Was that all new that the locals were saying had never occurred before?
Absolutely.
So the lady that was in the video where, you know, I filmed her throwing the rock in the water, she showed me videos of her kids, which, you know, I will say real quick, her kids have not been back to East Palestine since this derailment and the catastrophe that happened back in February, so months and months ago.
And they're not well off by any means.
I mean, they're just lower middle class and such.
She showed me videos of her children playing in that creek, you know, like jumping in it and running around in it.
And you never saw any sort of chemicals coming up from the bottom.
No rainbow sheens.
That was all new.
And so what happened?
You ask the, is it the, I'm saying the ETA.
No, it's the EPA.
EPA, yeah.
The Environmental Protection Agency.
You ask them questions like, what federal agents are down there?
Who's taking questions?
And what is their response when you ask them these obvious questions?
Is it safe to be here?
Yeah, so what's funny is originally, and I say funny, it's because it's like face pump.
You've got to be kidding me.
Why would the EPA not be the first agency to go in?
This is one of the largest environmental disasters in recent U.S. history.
And, you know, EPA officials couldn't even be bothered to go in there.
They basically just told Norfolk Southern, oh yeah, you can take care of it.
You know, the people that created the disaster.
Are now being trusted to, you know, clean up the disaster.
And so we kind of forced the EPA to come in there finally.
And the EPA administrator came in.
He has no qualifications.
He's just another, just to be totally honest with you, he's just somebody that, you know, we had a resident there that was yelling at him, being like, you're a diversity hire.
Again, because he's not good at what he does.
He's not good at answering questions.
I had to force him to let me ask him a question because I wasn't a credentialed journalist or whatever.
I hear that all the time.
It's ridiculous.
That was one of my other questions.
You show up, not credentialed, and you're wet behind the ears and coming from the internet.
So nobody's going to take you seriously until the truth starts reverberating, which it is now.
Then they take you seriously, which might lead to other stuff, which we're going to get to in Lehina.
And the state of the city, the state of the town now, is it basically abandoned?
Well, so there are a lot of residents that have just not come back because they still don't trust.
We're still getting results back from soil samples and water samples where the water is still not clean.
It's still not clean.
And we're talking, there is a, we've done tests as far as 13 miles away.
Because you had this ultra-toxic ash from the explosion that they called a controlled explosion that traveled via wind and ended up in people's backyards, ended up in all these streams, and it's being washed down the streams.
There was quite a large stream that ran directly next to the train tracks.
So when they started dumping all of these chemicals into the water, it was just being carried downstream.
And that's why...
We're doing more tests here next week, hopefully, up to 20 miles away.
But we keep going further and further and further, and we're still getting these just absolutely catastrophic results from these rivers.
And so people are terrified to go back.
They still don't trust their own drinking water.
Well, I mean, especially when you see what happened after 9 /11, where they said the air is fine, everybody can go back, and then people are still dying of cancer.
And we're going to see what happened in Lehane.
I mean, they're not wrong for not trusting.
It's the way to cover up the incompetence.
So you're still covering the East Palestine story, the situation, I should say.
You're testing the river water.
What is the impact on people's drinking water that's coming in through pipes?
Are people involved in testing that?
Yeah, so people are involved in testing that.
So I say people are involved.
It's not our people because we're not allowed to be.
We're not allowed to test the water on our own.
We can test it coming out of the taps.
But even at this point, we want to know if the water is still being contaminated in the treatment facility because this creek that I'm talking about runs, that's where they're drafting the water from.
You know, why are they not letting independent people test the water in the treatment center?
That's beyond me, and that scares a lot of people.
Why not be transparent about it?
If it's fine, if it's clean, let us find out for ourselves.
Let us prove it to the people.
Trust me, I'll tell them.
I want to be the first person to say, the water is clean, go back home, everything is safe.
I can't do that.
All right, that's going to segue us into the disaster.
Arguably, but not arguably, criminal disaster in Lehena.
I'm going to end this on YouTube.
It doesn't change anything from our end.
So everyone hop on over to Rumble in 3, 2, 1. All right, man.
So you have your first encounter with on the street, on the ground reporting in East Palestine.
Then the shit hits the fan in Hawaii.
And you're sitting here.
You say, I'm going to go.
Yeah.
It was overnight.
I decided...
Okay, I'm going to book a ticket out there.
And I'm going to go.
I had no plans in mind.
I had nothing.
There were no...
I hadn't talked to anybody out there for the most part yet.
All I did was I tweeted about it and said, again, should I go?
And I started getting more and more concerned.
Originally, I wasn't going to because the rhetoric in the beginning was Maui is closed.
Don't come to Maui.
And so I was trying to respect that, if that's what the people wanted.
Now, unfortunately, I bought into that narrative in the beginning.
But once I got there, I quickly realized that that narrative did so much more damage to that island than needed to be done, because now you have all these people that are economically displaced.
We're talking 70 to 80 percent of the economy out there is tourism-based.
You have these people working two and three jobs in the tourism industry, and they've been laid off.
Okay?
So they don't have any income.
They're not getting any help from FEMA, clearly.
And that's because they announced, like, don't come to Maui.
Set aside Lahena.
Don't even travel to Maui so tourism dries up overnight.
It's another effective lockdown.
And then the people that live in Lahena, who work in Maui and elsewhere on the island, are out of work.
Population of Lahena was 13,000, give or take?
Do you know offhand?
Yes.
Yeah, it was 13,000.
Now, the thing is, we don't know what the population is now because, well, you know, we don't know how many are dead.
We have no idea.
I was listening to Redacted.
Someone had sent me the Redacted News, and they're, you know, floating the number of potentially 2,000 dead.
Do you have any, like, the most up-to-date assessments from the ground?
Because we sure as hell can't trust a word that's coming from the government.
So it's going to be at a minimum 500 dead once we get closer to the end of this.
The problem is, will the government ever actually say that?
Because how long will they keep people on a missing list?
When it came to 9-11, there were a lot of people on the missing list for years and years and years.
So it might take years for us to actually know.
But now they're saying that this big exclusion zone...
We'll talk about that here in a bit, is 99% searched.
99% searched, but the number is still 115.
When I got to Hawaii two weeks ago, it was 110.
So they're basically saying in that time, they've only found five more cadavers.
The rationale is some of them might be so incinerated there may not be any material left to even identify so they might never be able to confirm the death or at least recover DNA sampleable remains.
Okay actually just practically speaking explain how this works.
You land in Maui and then you try to drive out to Lahaina?
Yeah so originally what I did was I booked a hotel that was about 45 minutes away from Lahaina because I Wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to be in the way.
I didn't want to pull resources from people that needed them out there, such as residents that were displaced that needed a hotel.
And I didn't book a vacation rental or anything.
I went 45 minutes away and booked a hotel, a very cheap hotel that had plenty of vacancy.
And once I went out there, I rented a truck.
And honestly, I rented a pickup truck.
The reason being was because I was hell-bent on getting into that exclusion zone.
I was like, I'll go to jail before I let them, you know, keep me out of that exclusion zone.
Because, you know, they decided they were going to start arresting residents and such.
And I was ready to do that.
So I bought the pickup truck because I wanted to go around it.
And luckily, the next day, they finally opened up the main road that goes around Lahaina.
I never did enter the exclusion zone, but I could get at least close enough to the point where I could put a drone up in the air.
I'm going to publish that video here, hopefully later today.
It's a drone video.
What kind of drone do you have?
The Spark, or do you have a Phantom?
I have a Mavic 2 Pro.
Okay, that's a good one.
It's pretty easy.
I can pack it in a small bag and be fun.
It keeps getting taken away by police, though.
It wouldn't be the first time it would get taken away this time.
And so you're staying far away.
You rent a pickup truck.
You expect to try to get around the exclusion zone.
What is this exclusion zone?
Are there barricades set up so that journalists and civilians can't get back there?
Yeah, no.
Even if you're a resident, you're going to get arrested for going in there.
They've already begun arresting residents.
I published something on that yesterday.
They have put up...
I'm telling you, man, if they were to secure the southern border like that they secure the perimeter of this town, I mean, illegal immigration would no longer be a problem.
It's so rock solid.
There is hardly any gaps in any fences and anywhere there is a gap.
You've got National Guard.
You've got state police that are, you know, if you go in, they're going to know that you go in.
They're going to know very quickly.
And there's no sign of that stopping.
If anything, over the past several days, they've actually put up more fencing and put black sheathing so that you can't even see through.
It's crazy.
How tall is that black sheathing?
I saw the video, but it's tough to...
Is it like 8 feet, 10 feet?
The fence is probably about 8 feet, and it's as tall as the fence is.
It's totally opaque.
I can imagine the Steelman justification is we're searching and rescuing, so we don't want civilians getting in the way.
We don't want journalists hampering our abilities to recover.
But is that still true?
I mean, it's been over two weeks now.
That was the first excuse.
And trust me, the government's out there full of excuses.
I mean, they're not actually good at coming up with them, but they use plenty of them.
Now that they're 99% searched through all the rubble, and they even admit that they've searched 99% of it, what now?
What's the excuse now?
What are we waiting on?
You're still not going to let people go back into their homes?
I'm sorry, if I was a resident, I would do the same thing this other guy did that he got arrested for.
I would absolutely be going in there at this point.
Because, I mean, how long can these people wait?
Especially people that weren't in Lahaina.
At the time, residents of Ohio that weren't there during the fire, they have no idea if there's anything left of their home.
They have no idea if any of their belongings are left there.
I mean, it's crazy.
And honestly, if some of these people have lost or they have missing children and such as well, I would want some closure.
I'd want to go in there and search the rubble myself to be able to find.
You know, out what actually happened.
I forget if it was Jessica Rose or I forget who I had asked, but I said, look, why aren't we seeing videos of screaming parents?
Where are my kids if there are as many missing children as there are?
The quick response to that was the parents are perished as well.
But you're on the ground.
There are presumably some parents who did not die whose children are still missing.
Are there lines?
Are there people shrieking?
Is there a vocal element of people saying, where the hell are the kids and give us some answers or not as many parents as you would have otherwise thought?
So there are, I have spoken with parents that are missing children, but a lot of them don't, see, this is a, I have covered, you know, multiple disasters since East Palestine and the people of Maui are a little bit different.
It's a very close knit community.
They're very They don't like to—they're very laid-back people.
I know when it comes to children, you're a lot more up in arms over it, but they do what they're told.
They trust their elected officials, and at this point, that's kind of going away a little bit, but they don't want to be on camera.
They don't want to—they're trying to find their child through local channels, right?
They don't believe that blasting this out on— National media in terms of trying to find their children is the way to do it.
There's missing posters around the city.
I posted some of those, you know, for missing children that parents have posted.
And the ones that I've spoken with were ones that were at work at the time.
They were at work.
They were forced to go to work that day, even though the children were out of school because of, you know, a lack of power.
And they weren't able to get home in time.
The road was closed as well.
So even if they worked nearby, they couldn't have gotten to their homes.
So I've been treading lightly on that entire thing just based on the parents' wishes.
If the parents wanted me to really start screaming that to the heavens, I would absolutely do that for them.
And I think they're getting to that point.
I'm still texting one back and forth pretty frequently.
So they're getting more and more fed up.
Parents who have missing children.
Yes.
And a set of grandparents as well.
There are people who are going into the darkest black pill elements, potentialities of, you know, whenever there's a crisis, it's an opportunity for human traffickers, Haiti, earthquake zones.
I had Googled just to look it up, and there was a recent story of a number of people arrested on child sex ring stuff.
And I noticed a few of them were from Lahaina.
Do you have any information on that, any news, any confirmation or dispelling of rumors, or no information whatsoever as to the possibility of that awful potentiality?
I can't dispel any of those rumors because it's hard to, you know, parents don't want to think that way, right?
You know, they really, they're trying to say these are very optimistic people.
And I admire that about them.
And they don't want to think that there was anything nefarious going on here.
But I cannot dispel any sort of rumors about possible trafficking and such.
And I certainly can't get any answers from the government on that stuff.
I mean, they won't even talk.
Look, I went up and I confronted the mayor.
I was very vocal about the children to the mayor, asking him, you know, why is he hiding the amount?
If they have found 115 cadavers, even if they haven't been able to positively identify those 115 dead folks, they still know, and I talked to pathologists about this as well, they can identify, based on cadavers, approximately how old that individual was.
So they know, they have an estimate, some sort of general idea how many children are dead based on what they have found so far, but they're still hiding that information.
They're just waiting on this entire story to go away and hoping that, because that is one thing that everybody in the United States, for the most, the vast, vast majority of people would be up in arms over.
And elected officials have, you know, three goals.
It's to get elected, stay elected, and get elected to higher office.
And so they're trying to maintain that course.
Now, I saw that interview with the mayor where you might have been rowdier or more impassioned than a seasoned CNN journalist who asks the right questions and then gets the right answers.
It was straight up stonewalling.
And then you guys aren't behaving.
I'm putting an end to this interview.
No more questions.
You haven't gotten any more cooperation.
What's the mayor's name?
I keep forgetting his name.
It's Richard Bisson.
You've got no further information from him.
Is he holding daily press conferences or no longer?
Oh, well, they're definitely not holding daily press conferences.
They hold press conferences every once in a while.
But the problem is they handpick who goes into the press conference.
I can't get into the press conference.
They're not going to let any residents ask any questions.
Mayor Bisson doesn't go out in public.
That's why when you saw the video of when I was confronting him, that was such a rare occurrence.
That the media were swarming him, trying to ask him questions, an impromptu press conference.
The guy that was yelling at him before I said anything to him, I don't know if you saw that part.
He was asking about children, saying, yes, you do know about children and such.
That was not a reporter.
That was a resident.
That was a resident of Lahaina.
And he started getting mad at the resident of Lahaina.
And once he started pushing back on it, that's when I jumped in and I started getting on him.
And, you know, he decided I'm going to end the press conference.
Do you hear and see me?
Because my computer froze.
No, I can hear you, but I can't.
You're not moving.
Ah, tabernuch.
So you see that stupid face that I'm making right here?
The same one that I see.
Well, let me wait for my computer to maybe refresh.
Okay, very interesting.
Now, let's get into the other thing.
That video when you were on The War Room with Steve Bannon.
And there was somebody there.
Somebody showed up behind you at 5:45 in the morning while you were doing a live report from the parking lot of the hotel.
Any news on that?
Did you know who that person was?
Have they been identified?
Any other events like that?
No.
There's been multiple people that have contacted me being like, "I know who this guy is." It ends up being different identities every time.
I didn't try to go any...
I had to, and luckily I had donors that were willing to support this.
I was able to hire security that would stay with me when I was going into Lahaina or if I was...
They would stay out in the parking lot overnight at my hotel.
That's how worried people were after seeing that.
I truly appreciate that.
It was a little worrying.
You don't expect to be outside of the parking lot of your hotel at 5.45 in the morning and somebody come up behind you.
I was already paranoid about it, to be honest with you.
I kept, you know, even Steve's producers before we actually started on the show, I kept looking back, looking over my shoulder, looking over my shoulder.
I just felt like something was really off.
I was alone and this guy appeared and I...
I didn't want to get into some sort of confrontation on camera.
I turned back because I had a monitor.
I was able to see myself, so I could also see behind me.
And I could tell whether or not he was trying to advance on me.
And then once he flinched again, that's when I turned around and I actually started engaging with him.
And I picked up my tripod and tried to move away.
But we were live on air.
It's never happened to me before.
If he was actually a resident, I didn't want to be hostile toward him.
There were so many things going through my head at that same time.
It was crazy.
I don't know if we're still on, but Mr. Viva.
I guess he's in Florida.
He's blaming the hurricane for his computer having to reboot here.
He froze up on my end.
I don't know if you guys saw him freeze up as well, but I think it's...
i think i'm still on there here Oh, he said keep going.
So I guess I'll keep going.
So...
All right.
Perfect.
Okay.
Yeah, I was just making sure.
I didn't know if I was still live or not.
Oh, you're still live.
I mean, and you did go.
Watching you while I'm sweating like a pig while my computer reboots.
And I heard everything.
So, except for the fact you have not been able to identify and you still don't know who the person was.
It sounded like someone that you were in touch with via Twitter.
So, the one that I have gotten...
And like I said, I didn't investigate this any further because, honestly, I didn't want to engage with this individual.
I thought that, honestly, there was something clearly maybe a little mentally off, and I didn't want to engage with him any further.
I didn't want to try to reach out to him.
I didn't want to get the police involved.
I didn't want to do anything because I was handled.
I had security.
I was okay.
There was nothing going to happen beyond that point from this guy, at least.
But the guy that I was told this was, his Twitter account or whatever, it was an anonymous Twitter account, and he had messaged me supposedly the night before at about 10 p.m. saying, I'm on Maui.
That's it.
That's all he said.
And keep in mind, I'm getting a ton of messages every single day.
And this guy saying, I'm on Maui.
Even if I saw the message, which I don't think I did, I probably wouldn't have responded to that without more information because there's just too many people that are messaging me at the time.
So if that was truly him and he messaged me after 10 p.m. the night before and I'm doing an interview at 5.45 in the morning, I can't imagine coming to confront me 45 minutes from Lahaina just for that reason.
Well, and this is the thing, once you start witnessing this corruption of the highest order, it can not cause you to have imaginings.
It can just make you, like Alex Jones said, you go into the psychosis of the moment where you're connecting dots that might not be connecting.
The fears you have might not be real, but they might also be real.
Other than that incident, have you noticed any pressure, any anomalies that could not otherwise be easily explained?
I mean, I get a ton of threats.
I didn't get nearly as many threats as I do now as I was, you know, like, say, East Palestine, Ohio and stuff.
Like, that was a big story, right?
I mean, we blew the lid off of that.
But I didn't feel threatened.
I didn't, you know, whether it was government rhetoric that was, you know, against me, the only threat that I ever felt was being probably placed in jail.
And that's going to happen at some point.
I mean, people don't like me, but...
Death threats.
That was something totally new.
I still get them.
Because of the reporting from Hawaii.
Yes, because of the reporting from Hawaii.
It's people that aren't even in Hawaii, at least I can tell.
And keep in mind, this happened the morning after I confronted the mayor.
And I hadn't even published that video yet.
This was before I had published the video.
The mainstream media decided to start attacking me for confronting the mayor in the way that I did.
And they broadcasted it on the evening news the night before.
And then this guy shows up at 5:45 in the morning.
It was just really odd.
And this guy had no idea I was going to do a live hit at 5:45.
I watched it.
I tried to analyze it.
It looked like someone, maybe mentally unwell, but maybe also someone who might be...
Angry that he perceives, you know, independent journalists coming in, taking up resources, like he said.
But either way, it's bizarre and ancillary to the story, but nonetheless, you know, relevant to it.
Are you heading back?
Yes.
Yes, I will be.
When are you going back?
And for how long?
So, I actually don't put a time...
I book one-way flights.
And the reason I do that is because I don't know how long I'll say.
It depends on...
My goal was to keep the story alive.
That was the whole thing with East Palestine as well.
As soon as this stuff goes out of the news, the government goes away.
These people are left hung out to dry.
Sometime this weekend, I would say, I'll be back up.
What's the strategy?
What's the plan?
Just going to walk the earth and see what comes up?
I think one of the biggest things that needs to be hit on is The fact that we still don't have much more information on the children.
I want to know more about this media.
Why are they still excluding media?
And why are they building more barricades to keep media and residents out of Lahaina?
All that's doing is driving conspiracy theories here.
And they have to know that at this point.
The people of Lahaina, by the way, and around Lahaina, they're still not able to drink water, by the way.
Kula, which is probably about 45 minutes away.
From Lahaina, they're still having to drink and shower only with bottled water.
And nobody's talking about that either.
And FEMA, they're not helping.
The media is still there and they're already not helping.
It's just going to get worse.
I want to know why.
Why isn't the federal government helping these people more?
It's insane and I feel terrible for them.
There's a number, I say rumors at this point, but I think they've been confirmed.
Have you heard firsthand residents saying People were sweeping in to make offers to buy up their incinerated properties?
They've been doing that for decades.
They've been doing it for decades.
They've been trying and trying and trying to force these people off of their properties.
There are families that have been there for generations in Lahaina.
They've been offered $10 million for their properties, their small houses and stuff they have there.
And these people aren't wealthy.
They're working two and three jobs.
They refused to sell it.
People were banding together refusing to sell this property.
And then one of the first thing the governor does when this fire happens and it starts getting a lot of media attention, he says, "Oh, well, we're going to go in there and we're going to buy all the property from the residents via eminent domain." And I mean, that is not going over well with these people.
And they're about to absolutely explode over that.
So they're not going to let it happen.
So that rumor is true.
The other rumor, I think now it's well known or well established that the fire was started by these decrepit Hawaii electric power lines that had fallen over because of the wind.
There was argument or discussion, delayed confirmation that they took their time or failed to shut off the power after the power lines went down.
Any info on that?
Yeah, so based on, there is an ongoing now, I mean, the...
The county of Maui government filed a lawsuit against Hawaiian Electric saying that they failed to de-energize their lines when they fell down.
Now, Hawaiian Electric pushed back a couple of days ago saying, no, absolutely not.
We de-energized the lines hours before the fire started spreading.
And while the power lines may have sparked the initial fire, The county government as well as the fire department said that it was 100% contained.
Okay?
Yet they were still blocking the roads.
The police department was still blocking the roads.
That's why so many people got literally incinerated in the middle of the town because they couldn't get out, even though the lines were de-energized.
And so a lot of that blame, most of the blame, in my opinion, is on the government.
It's not even necessarily on Hawaiian Electric.
Maybe they're liable for the first fire, but at this point, based on what we know, it doesn't look like they should be liable for the fact that the government just let it spread all the way through.
You said something.
I just want to bring this up because you said the government has to know that it's spawning conspiracy theories failing to answer the questions.
It's almost funny, but it's tragic.
This is literally the tweet that POTUS just put out.
I'm laser-focused on the recovery and rebuilding efforts in Maui.
Now, I don't believe the theory, but you do know that there are people who say or believe that there were, what do they call them?
High-energy lasers from space.
Directed energy weapons.
Directed energy weapons.
There are people who believe that.
And you have Biden coming out now and saying, I'm laser-focused on Maui.
It can't be on purpose because he doesn't do anything on purpose anymore.
I don't think he's capable of making decisions.
Someone did that.
And it's either a stupid accident because they're so detached and incompetent, or it's like gaslighting rubbing salt in the wounds.
The cause?
Okay, fine.
And then...
Getting to the government incompetence, not sounding the alarms.
This now is confirmed.
They admitted they did not sound the alarms because they were afraid of driving people into the fire.
Yeah, so they initially lied about it.
In the beginning, you had the governor of Hawaii come out and say, Governor Josh Green, a Democrat.
Hawaii is a very, very blue state.
And actually, that might change a little bit after this.
But he said that, oh, well, the sirens didn't work.
That's what he said originally.
Oh, well.
That's our job.
Right.
And then the next day, he said, well, okay, well, some of them didn't work.
And then the third day, the Maui Emergency Management Agency comes out and says, oh, well, we don't have any record of anybody actually trying to activate the sirens.
And that's when the excuse became, well, we don't actually activate sirens unless there's a tsunami because apparently...
The people of Lahaina must be so stupid that they'll run directly into an inferno because they think there might be a tsunami.
Because they said, oh, well, people were trained to run uphill.
Okay, they're not trained to run uphill into an inferno.
And also, if you look on the Hawaiian government's website, it says very specifically that they are all disaster sirens.
Dam breaks, terrorist attacks, wildfires, tsunamis, tornadoes.
Ballistic missiles coming in.
Right.
Yeah.
So Hawaii doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to emergency alerts.
We'll say that much.
Oh, man.
Okay.
And then, I mean, I guess, and is there, what's the latest in the latest breaking?
I mean, it's more of the same, setting up more barricades, more exclusion zones, less transparency.
You say at least 500.
All right, we'll see.
The number 2,000 children on Redacted News, I mean, it sounds outrageously high, just given the population was only 13,000 to begin with.
But instead of who's missing, I'd like to just, you know, is there a number of those who are accounted for?
So, yeah, so it looks like, based on the latest numbers that I saw, there were still over 1,500 children that had not been re-enrolled in schools.
And, you know, because they've been pushing for online schooling and they're actually allowing them to go to other parts of the island to go to school.
And if you look on any of the lists, any of the government lists or even the community lists, and you see names, they list, you know, first and last name, but they don't give you a picture and they also don't give you the age.
You have no idea how old these people are.
So you can go through the lists all you want, but it's really hard to tell.
Nobody is telling us how many children are missing.
Again, if they would just say how many children were missing, all they have to do is try to give us a little bit of information, be a little bit transparent, and a lot of these conspiracy theories, quote-unquote, will go away.
People are worried about the children.
We want to know more about what happened to the kids.
Excellent.
I'm just looking to see if there's any questions that I have not.
Asked you that people want me to ask.
I lost all my windows with my computer.
Freaking shut down.
If there's any question I didn't ask people, get it in the chat in Rumble, and I'll see if it's on Locals.
Where can people find you, Nick?
First of all, how are you liking the independent journalism?
You're young, no kids, you're not married, I guess?
Not married, no.
You can up and go to Hawaii with a one-way ticket, and it's invigorating.
How are you finding this learning experience?
I think it's great.
I think that there's a lot of benefit to going out and being able, especially using the X platform, to be honest with you.
I couldn't do this if I was still using Twitter 1.0.
Because if I was on Twitter 1.0, I would have already been banned, especially over East Palestine, Ohio.
There's no way that I would be able to broadcast this information and get it out without something like X. You know, I think it's good.
We need more of this.
And I really want to help people.
And I'm trying to.
I'm trying to do my best to help people get more involved and go on the ground and cover these disasters.
The more people, the better.
And there's room for a lot of us out there.
And I hope to God, if I can help anybody get involved, I would love to be able to do that.
Now, I got your Twitter link in the pinned comment.
Where can people find you?
Twitter, is it?
No, well, Twitter, and I started doing, you know, I started getting the message out a little bit more on Instagram and TikTok.
Same handle, at Nick Sorter, S-O-R-T-O-R.
Okay.
And we're going to keep doing it.
So thank you for bringing attention to this, man.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
I had Alexa Lavois from Rebel News on, I think it was a couple of weeks ago now.
And then I had Jessica Rose, who is not down there, but she's a PhD and has a lot of connections to Hawaii.
So just to get the latest and to let people know what's going on, because, yeah, it'll fade into the collective memory like East Palestine.
And people forget.
Except this this is going to be I say not to compare disasters.
There's a lot more loss of life in the immediate here that this might.
Right.
Right.
Stay safe, as that patronizing thing goes.
But don't do anything stupid, okay?
Don't do anything stupid with the government.
I know you're an attorney, so I mean, I guess that's where you're supposed to say that.
As an attorney, I would say, don't drive your truck off-road to get to the exclusion zone.
Don't swim across.
And be careful where you fly your drone as well.
And the chat is eager to see the drone footage.
So Nick Sortor, S-O-R-T-O-R, but the link is in there.
Everyone knows where to find you.
Nick, thank you very much.
Thank you, sir.
Alright, have a good one.
Okay, well hopefully that will be the end for the glitches of the day.
Sitting here, I gotta look at that ugly face that I was making.
As I know all of you are sitting there staring at it as well.
I've rebooted, refreshed, and I have fewer windows open now so maybe my computer won't crash.
And I see Chadwick Moore is in the backdrop.
There was a clip I wanted to bring up before bringing Chadwick in.
I don't know that I have it.
Oh, son of a gun.
Oh, it doesn't matter.
I don't have it.
Okay, Chadwick Moore, people.
Columnist, journalist, author.
And this is not all going to be about Tucker, by the way.
I don't know if Chadwick knows this.
This is actually going to be a lot about Chadwick.
Okay, Chadwick, you're good?
You can hear me?
All right, I'm bringing you in.
Three, two, one, sir.
How goes the battle?
Hey, it's going great.
Thanks for having me on.
Great to be with you.
Thank you for coming short notice and accommodating.
I like not having a schedule better because it's very easy to be flexible, but some people...
Thank you for coming on such short notice.
No, I appreciate that about you.
I thought, well, this is going to be really fun.
I like this guy already.
And thank you so much, by the way, for tweeting about the book and all that.
I mean, that really means a lot to me.
It's incredible.
It's incredible, but I'm telling you now, we're going to get into the...
Everything else but the book.
Not everything else.
We're going to get into the book a bit.
First of all, your name is...
I can't help in my head say it with...
I can't not say it with a British accent.
It's possibly the coolest name I've ever heard.
You're born and raised in Tennessee?
Right.
Yes.
Yeah.
I was born in Tennessee.
Yeah.
So the British accent thing is funny because I used to live in London and when I say my name's Chadwick, everyone's like, that's so American.
And here people are like, that's so British.
It is, in fact, a very American name.
It's a very, very Southern working class name, which is kind of in line with like a lot of poor Southerners would give them their children names that they thought sounded, I'm not saying historically, maybe not necessarily my parents, but that they thought sounded sort of highfalutin.
So like Chadwick, you know?
So that's really where the name comes from.
If you ever meet another Chadwick, he's probably Southern.
And it's also a very common Black name.
Contrary to it sounding like I'm from Connecticut, I'm not.
That's an interesting explanation for the name.
I've met a Chad in my life, but I doubt it was short for Chadwick given my cultural upbringing or not very many Jewish kids with the name Chadwick that I've ever met in Montreal.
So Border Race, Tennessee, I won't go too far into your childhood.
I don't know how much you like talking about this, but how many siblings and what got you into doing what you're doing?
Yeah, so I just have an older sister.
She's, you know, one of my best friends in the whole world.
She's awesome.
She lives in Florida now.
And what got me into it was, you know, I went to school for, you know, I always loved English.
And so I went to school, I triple, I double majored in English and journalism, and then also had a studied creative writing.
And, you know, I first wanted to be a fiction writer.
And, you know, I found that I was actually enjoying my nonfiction classes a lot more, and then got out of school and, you know, Moved immediately to New York and was kind of, you know, working in restaurants, things like that, landed some gigs at a publishing company and still trying to write fiction, but then kind of stumbled into journalism and got my first story published in the New York Times, actually, when I was in my early 20s.
And, you know, I just started realizing that, you know, the world is so much more interesting.
Writing about the real world is so much more interesting than making up your own world.
And since then, I've been in journalism.
I was working in liberal media for magazines and newspapers.
And then, you know, was abruptly canceled and fired from all my jobs after Trump was elected president and publicly came out.
I don't hate him, and I'm actually right-leaning politically.
Well, that's what we're going to get into.
So the column that, I won't say put you on the map, but the one that got you some notoriety that got Tucker Carlson's attention was coming out as a conservative.
Yeah, that's right.
That was in February 2017 in the New York Post.
And I basically, I never was public about my political...
Because naively, I thought a journalist was unprofessional to do that.
But after Trump was elected, I saw everyone around me, including all my own colleagues and my bosses and editors, were all just totally losing their minds on social media.
And the year leading up to that, I was kind of thrown into the political world.
A lot of my writing was not...
Overtly political at all.
I was, in fact, not interested in it.
I was more interested in human stories.
I was doing profiles, investigative stories, features, human interest stuff.
And I still love that stuff.
But the year before, in 2016, I was sent to Orlando to report on the Pulse nightclub massacre.
And then that became kind of politically charged.
And then I was sent to profile Milo Yiannopoulos, who was at the height of his powers then.
And then, you know, after everyone was sort of losing their minds after all this stuff, I just decided, like, I got to say something, you know, even if, you know, I'm like a nobody, but I just felt like, you know, anyone who might be listening or care, I don't want them to think that I'm like these people.
So, you know, we're at this column for the New York Post, and the headline was, I'm a gay New Yorker, and I'm coming out conservative.
And I didn't think anyone would really read it.
I was just like...
In fact, I thought it was kind of amusing because I thought the article was so innocent.
It was just sort of me being like, I believe in free speech and I think the left kind of lies.
And then it went totally viral and that was how I got acquainted with Tucker because his team asked me to appear on, I think the article ran on a Saturday and then on Tuesday they asked me to come on his show and talk about it, talk about the reaction.
We've got to get into the reaction, because it's got to be so amazing to write an article, to come out and say, I'm coming out as a conservative.
You had already come out as gay before that, I guess?
Oh, when I was like 15. So yeah.
So you're coming out and you're saying, I'm coming out as a conservative.
And lo and behold, that turned...
And now the conservatives are sitting there saying, gay or not, welcome to the club.
Like, ideologically, we are tolerant.
Now we get to show that we're not the bigots.
And the other people come out and say, holy crap, he came out as conservative.
Excommunicate him.
Was that the immediate response that you got from the left versus the right?
Oh, absolutely.
Completely.
I mean, it was amazing because like...
I didn't travel in Republican circles at all.
Where I'm from, of course, I knew tons of conservatives.
I never hated them or anything.
I never thought they were evil bigots or anything like that.
But my whole world was...
I live in New York City.
My whole world is liberal, creative types, intelligentsia, academic types.
And the smart people, the tolerant, smart people.
And when that happened, it was like...
You know, I had, like, thousands of emails and all these messages on Twitter.
And, like, I never even really used Twitter at the time.
And it was all of these, you know, these people, you know, just like, welcome to the party and all this love and everything.
I'm like, this is sort of amazing.
And, you know, at the meantime, I was getting, you know, a couple days later, actually, like, right after I appeared on Tucker the very next day.
Fired from my job as editor-at-large for Out Magazine and The Advocate, which are the two big gay magazines.
I guess now they're probably trans magazines, but at the time they were gay magazines.
And fired from my job.
I was writing for the New York Times at the time also, blacklisted from them.
Totally, like, lost 100% of my friends.
Like, every single one of them, which was sort of amazing.
But, yeah, it was, like, the love fest coming from the right and, like, welcome to the party.
And then from the left, it was, you know, of course, the intolerance, hatred, and vilification that characterizes them, despite...
Despite what they want to say.
I once ironically said in response to someone's tweet on Twitter, "Oh, more evidence of the loving, tolerant left." And then the person replied to me and said, "Only the right calls us that." And I was like, "Thank you for proving my point, you dumbass." And they said, "They only call us that to make fun of us." Like, "Thank you for missing the point and proving my point." Right, exactly.
Back it up a little bit, actually.
Personal life is none of my business, but I like to ask a lot of questions about it.
You say you came out at 15, but you presumably knew beforehand.
You're growing up in Tennessee, which, if American movies teaches me anything, might not be the most stereotyping, might not be the most place where you'd want to come out as being gay in the first place.
Growing up...
Conservative household?
Religious household?
Were your parents before and after the coming out?
Were they equally tolerant?
Did it shock them?
Did they care?
What's it like growing up in Tennessee?
And, you know, subsidiarily, are all the stereotypes that we think we know on the coasts from movies inaccurate stereotypes of the heartland?
Oh, right.
Completely.
Well, so at that time when I was 15, we'd moved to Illinois, but downstate Illinois.
So very, very red, you know, basically southern.
And, you know, not Chicago, Illinois.
And, you know, it was, so my household was, my parents divorced that same year, but my mom's, like, lifelong Democrat, my dad's lifelong Republican, you know, so, you know, weirdly enough, my dad was kind of, like, way more chill about it.
I mean, they're both great, and they both love me, and they've always been super supportive, but it's funny, because he, you know, my mom was like, her response was like, well, I just donated money to the human rights campaign, which is kind of sweet, even though, you know, today I absolutely hate that organization, but she was just trying to make a gesture.
And my dad's response was something along the lines of, you know, he's just like, he's like this, you know, big tough guy played football and, you know, he's a farmer and he hunts and all this stuff.
And I was most like afraid for him to find out because he's a conservative.
And my sister had told him before I did.
And so he was actually, it was when he was driving me to college my freshman year.
And he said, he was like, well, your sister told me something about you.
And I was like, oh God, here we go.
And he said, she told me that you're gay.
And I'm like, yeah.
And he's like, well, I guess I'm going to have to tell her boyfriends what I tell your boyfriends.
If you hurt my effing son, I'm going to cut your balls off.
And I was like, that's like the sweetest thing you could possibly say.
That's great.
So, you know, it was wonderful.
I mean, this was so I'm 40 years old now.
So whatever year this was, even in red middle America, I was like totally celebrated.
You know, I came out in high school and, you know.
You know, fast forward to being 33 years old in New York City and coming out as conservative and you're completely vilified and ostracized.
First of all, that anecdote is amazing.
It's going to be in a movie if it hasn't already been in one.
And so you go to New York and you start working as a journalist in the deepest of deep blues.
When you start off in journalism, what year is it, give or take?
Oh, let's see.
I moved here in 2000.
I think I had my first story published in 2008 or 2009, maybe.
I don't come from money or anything.
I didn't go to an Ivy League school.
For a huge part of my life, I was freelancing for the New York Times.
I was writing these stories.
At the same time, I was working in restaurants on the side.
I was working at a tea factory at one point, packaging tea.
I was doing anything to scrape by.
Be a writer, you know, and try to make it.
But, you know, writing was absolutely not paying the bills.
I think probably by the time I was 30, I was mostly writing full-time, like late 20s.
And then I guess still even doing side jobs.
But, you know, I immediately, as soon as I got here, like I, you know, I was working in a restaurant, but like hustling, trying to meet people, sending out, you know, just blind pitching editors.
And then I got that break with that first story in the Times.
But still, it was like...
You know, a long slog.
I mean, it takes a long time, I think, before, if you don't, if you don't, if you're fed into somewhere like the New York Times because you went to Columbia or Harvard or Yale, then, you know, it takes a really long time to do that hustle and get your footing.
I mean, that's one thing I learned that I wish I would have learned.
One thing I found out on my own that I wish I would have learned in journalism school was the nepotism that's in this industry and how, you know, if I were to go back and teach at my alma mater, I'd be like, none of you have a chance in hell unless you have a recognizable last name.
You know, if you want to work for the big boys.
So, you know, that was...
I wouldn't change the second of it.
I mean, it was a wonderful experience.
But, you know, man, it was...
Looking back, it was hard.
Well, that's it.
And do you remember the moment where it became...
It was when you got your first contract of a job where it became self-sustainable, where you didn't have to bust the side gigs in order to do what you love?
Yeah, that was...
And even then, you know, there's not, like, a lot of money.
You still have, like, roommates and you're still, like, you know, hustling.
But, yeah, it was probably...
I don't even know what year that would have been.
Like, in my late 20s or something when I, you know, got contracted at...
Out in the Advocate, so at least I had this stable thing.
And I'm doing what I love.
I never really cared about gay whatever.
I just don't care.
But it was cool because it was a wonderful life because I could just travel anywhere and do anything I wanted.
I had so much freedom to write anything I wanted.
These were long magazine pieces.
And all I have to do is just find some gay angle.
So I'm like, okay, great.
I want to go to LA.
What's some gay angle and some story I can write there?
So it was a cool experience.
Great.
And even though, like, that's not really my forte, like, gay media, I was still, like, extremely grateful to have it.
And at the same time, I could freelance for other places, like The Times and Playboy and some other places where I worked for.
Well, actually, we're going to get into the firing because that I need, I have many questions on.
But before we even get there, when is it, you talked about the Pulse shooting.
And I, in retrospect now, I mean, I was sort of more aware at the time, but the framing of the Pulse shooting.
Was wildly different than the reality of the Pulse shooting, as is the case oftentimes with a lot of these stories.
The initial narrative, either deliberately or accidentally, covers up the true story behind it, which might not be quite as favorable to the initial narrative.
That one was, started off as an outright hate crime against the gay community, a shooting at a gay club, and then there was a bit more of nuance to it when the shooter became known and the shooter's, I think...
I'm not misremembering that the shooter had some...
Was part of the community.
Had some internal demons, had gone to this place, and it was not as clearly a far-right attack on the gay community as initially reported.
I'm not misremembering anything about that story, am I?
Even at the time, I didn't know this.
When I was reporting on it, I remember my editors were trying to push this anti-gun narrative in my reporting, and I'm like...
I was like, I think this is a terrorist attack.
I think it's radical Islam.
I don't think guns are the issue.
He's like, no, no, no.
I think we really need to talk about guns.
And I'm just like, no, I'm not doing that.
I mean, what we know now, and I only found this out a couple years ago, was that the club wasn't targeted because it was gay.
In fact, he didn't even know it was a gay bar.
He just wanted to target a nightclub.
He tried to go to one nightclub before and determined it wasn't...
It would be a bad target and then just found this one.
So now we know that.
I mean, at the time there were rumors that he had some affairs with people.
I don't know if they were true or not.
I remember sort of reporting on them, like same-sex rumors.
But what we knew from the trial of his wife, I think what we found out was that it was an Islamic terrorist attack against the West and he just wanted to target a nightclub.
So that's what we know now.
And we don't need to get into the depths of that story, but...
It's interesting.
You say, is it your editor?
Is the word the editor-in-chief who says, this is the angle, go with it, and you say, no?
Yeah, well, you know, you're sort of like, because I was doing the cover story for one of the magazines, and I was doing lots of stuff for the website, and, you know, you're talking to your editor and stuff, and you're saying, this is what I did say and found out, and, you know, you're just kind of like working through a story.
And he would, I just remember him sort of bringing up guns a lot, and I'm just, and I was talking more about terrorism, Islamic terrorism.
And he's like, well, maybe you need to look more into the gun issue.
And I'm like, well, maybe if more people had guns in that club, then this would have ended very differently.
But when I was there, I mean, it was heartbreaking being there.
It was the first time I was kind of thrown into that kind of breaking news.
And I was on a plane like the very next morning after it happened.
And like, oh man, it affected me so much because I was just talking, I was hearing these stories and talking to these people who were inside the club and people watching their friends and boyfriends get gunned down in front of them.
And it was...
Just like really, really heartbreaking.
And then to sort of see the level at which it was being, the story was being twisted by a lot of people in media was, you know, another eye-opening experience of many I'd had along the way of just like, I think the media is lying about stuff or I think they have an agenda.
I don't think there is, you know.
That was where I was getting with this.
Was the Pulse, was that story the first time you really started to discover it?
Or had you noticed this framing sort of dishonest spin that we now, No, it's modus operandi.
Was that the first time you started seeing it or did you start seeing it a little earlier on?
The biggest moment when I really started seeing it was in late 2013, November 2013, I went to Russia to write a story about gay rights in Russia because it was a huge story at the time because...
Russia was getting ready to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Soki.
And that whole summer, there have been all these stories about, like, how, you know, Vladimir Putin's, like, sending gays to concentration camps.
And I'm like, well, this is fascinating.
I want to go and be on the ground because none of these reporters for The New York Times or The New Yorker or anywhere are actually in Russia, and none of them are gay.
So, like, I want to go there and, like, see what the hell is going on.
So I finally got permission for months of...
Pestering my editor to send me to Russia.
And that was the first time that I...
Because at the time, I was so naive and I really respected a lot of mainstream media and I really was aspiring to that.
And I felt that these people were smart and being honest.
And when I got there, I just realized that none of the things they were talking about were happening.
Even so-called gay rights activists, which isn't really a thing in Russia, when I was talking to them, at least at the time it wasn't, probably still isn't.
You know, they were even laughing at the West coverage and they were like, you know, I just, I was only there for maybe two weeks, but I...
That's a long, two weeks is a long time.
It's a decent amount of time, yeah.
If it's an existential risk to your life when you're there.
I remember one of the stories, there was a bunch of topless ladies who were protesting.
They got locked up and I think that had to do with the same.
So you get down there and what you see on the ground in Russia is nothing like what the media is saying it is.
Absolutely.
And it was a bigger, like, I just realized, at first, you know, the age-old question, is it stupidity, or is it, you know, are they being sinister?
Yeah.
And the first, I mean, I just sort of realized, even only being there for like two weeks, that anyone writing about Russia and the West, especially about this issue, had zero cultural context.
It's like they were writing about, you know, New Jersey.
And like, you're not.
You're writing about an Eastern country with like a very complicated...
History and past and an extremely different culture from anywhere in the West.
So you can't, number one, you can't view them through this lens of like civil rights, you know?
And you can't, like, you know, at one point there was some photo that anytime they did this story about gay rights in Russia, there's this photo of this man who was like, he was on the ground bleeding and there was cops standing over him and a rainbow flag behind him.
And the implication was he'd gotten beaten up by the police for being gay.
And even gay rights activists, who are all Western, who I was talking to there, were like, yeah, that guy's not even gay.
He's not even Russian.
And he punched a cop first.
And, like, we know him.
You know?
It's like that photo.
And, like, these are people who, you know, are probably super liberal saying this to me.
So just looking at this lens, I'm like, wait, this country, if you want to talk about something like gay rights, which is so foreign to any Russian, you have to look at it through a lens of America in 1950, and no one's being locked up and sent to camps, but also it's just so foreign to them, the whole concept of it.
And it's just viewed as homosexuality, it's just viewed as this bourgeois Western thing that does not apply to Russia.
Now, of course, there are gay people and gay clubs in Russia, etc.
It was just sort of that, you know, going back and reading these like Western credentialed journalists from the New Yorker, New York Times writing with authority on this.
And I'm like, yeah, but you haven't been there.
And like, I'm, you know, I'm hanging out with these people and I'm hanging out with the owner of the largest gay club in Moscow.
And like, I'm getting like this, this big cultural lens.
And that's sort of the story I wrote was just this, you know, this, how you, how to view Russia through this context.
And I think it was received pretty well, but that was the first time that like.
I really was like, wait a minute, these people who I think are so much smarter than me and so much better than me and have way more credentials than me are absolutely stupid.
They have no idea what they're talking about.
And from then on is when I just started looking, and I was very young at the time, but I started looking at the media with a completely different lens.
2015, 2016 comes around, and then that was just full force because they just were no longer trying to hide their lies.
And it was just astounding to watch.
That was my, is the expression watershed moment.
I may be using that expression wrong.
That was my opening moment was 2016.
I still didn't get very vocal about anything for a couple of years because it's still like, even today I find discussing politics to be irritating because it just, it's always the same crap.
It's either it goes in a back and forth tit for tat or you're discussing with people who are of open mind and there's very few of them and generally speaking they sort of agree on the substantive stuff.
2015, 2016, Trump gets elected, the world goes batshit crazy.
When did your article come out in the context of this?
Was it 2017?
The New York Post article?
Yeah, it was February 2017.
It was right after the inauguration because what inspired me was watching the pink hat wearers and watching Madonna want to blow up the White House and whatever.
And I was just like, I cannot anymore.
I cannot stay silent.
These people are totally insane.
So it was watching footage of the inauguration that was the final straw for me.
How does it work?
You write the article.
Do you submit it to the editor or do you...
Oh, you submit it to the New York Post and they decide to run it.
They let you know that they're going to run it and you know like D-Day is coming?
So someone at the...
I'd written for the New York Post before, but nothing political.
And I think I wrote, like, some pieces about, like, houseplants and stuff, like, really silly, like, home stuff, which I kind of love that stuff.
And so I'd been, like, kind of tweeting a little bit or something about, like, about my feelings.
And he's like, hey, do you want to do a story for the New York Post?
And I just thought, like, yeah, sure, why not?
And then, you know, so that's how it happens.
But, you know, I didn't know when it was going to run.
And I had, like, I was never on Twitter.
And then, you know, I looked at my phone and I had, like...
You know, a million notifications.
I was like, oh, I guess that post story ran.
And then that was that.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
You had already been, it wasn't like, it didn't come as a shock because you already knew, I guess you were feeling out the, call it ideological intolerance from the tolerance side, and you sort of got sensitive to the fact that the other side is not the demon, but the degree to which it exploded still surprised you?
Yeah, because just before that, in September, the previous September, I had done this profile of Milo Yiannopoulos, who I barely knew who he was.
But I knew he was colorful and weird enough and interesting that it would be a great profile.
It wasn't even my idea to write about him.
It was my editor's.
And I went to London to profile him.
And when that story came out, I had so many people attacking me and attacking the magazine.
And I was like...
I mean, that was the first time I'd been sort of canceled on the receiving end of the liberal mob.
And I was just totally floored because I'm like, this article was so fair.
I treated Milo in no way different than I would have treated anyone.
And I profiled celebrities and stuff before that, like Nick Jonas and people.
And I was so shocked by that because I found Milo to be so fascinating.
And another example that I thought I was well prepared when I went in to...
To meet him.
And I realized I totally wasn't as soon as he opened his mouth because everything I was reading about him was from liberal media that was treating him like this sort of idiot and this clown when I realized this guy is like incredibly smart and really hilarious and really charming.
And also, you know, really important at that time.
And so that was the first time that the mob came for me.
But I was really surprised at how little it bothered me, you know, and I was just sort of like, well, I think all these people are totally wrong.
But being sort of outside the bubble and looking in like that, you know, I think prepared me for then what would happen when I decided to just go full scorched earth and say, screw you people, I'm not one of you.
Well, how quickly after the publication of the article do you get fired?
So it was that we had, it was, the article was published and then everyone was silent.
And then I was on Tucker that Tuesday.
And I think it was the Tucker interview that really did it.
The following, the very next day, Wednesday, we had an editorial meeting and I had been working on like a half dozen stories sort of tangentially.
And one of the big ones was I was supposed to profile the new, I can't remember his name now, Angelo or something, the new head of the ACLU.
And so someone in the editorial meeting was like, what about Chadwick's ACLU story?
And the editor-in-chief just kind of, we'll talk about that later.
And so I was like totally boxed out of the meeting and nobody was talking about my stories.
I'm like, oh, I think I know what's going on here.
And then that night, my editor called me and just like, you know, we have to let you go.
And then he started screaming, like, why could you do this to me?
And I'm like, what do I do?
What are you talking about?
Okay, no, hold on.
I got to ask a question.
So the editor calls you up at night.
He knows that he's firing you.
I mean, is he crying when he calls you up?
Is he laughing?
Is he frothing with rage?
How long does the conversation last?
And then what the heck?
Why would you do this to us?
You got to elaborate on that.
Yeah, so Aaron Hicklin was his name, and I really liked him.
And he's, like, liberal.
He's older than me, maybe, like, 10 years older than me, maybe a little bit older.
But of that generation of liberal that, you know, he's a British guy, like, classical liberal, I could always tell, at least in my opinion, he was kind of fed up with, like, the wokies in the office, you know, like the little woke millennial, or, yeah, I guess there were millennials at the time who were, you know, whatever.
And he always had my back.
And when the Milo story came out, he totally had my back.
And actually, he called me and he said, whoever the parent company was, that magazine gets passed around, like, I don't know.
But he called me the night before the Milo article ran, and he said, so-and-so wants to pull the article.
And I told them that I would quit if they did.
So I was like, that's pretty cool.
Like, that was awesome.
And I knew he was super liberal, but he respected, he was an old-school journalist who respected good reporting.
And so I know he didn't want to fire me.
I know it wasn't his decision.
And again, I really liked him as a person.
And it was someone above him, whatever company owned the magazine.
I don't even know.
It's interesting.
He says in September with the Milo pulling that article, I'll quit if you do it.
But this time around, he doesn't say I'll quit if you make me fire him.
It's like nobody stands up.
Unless he took this one more personally than he took the Milo article.
I don't know about that.
But is he screaming on the phone?
Is he raising his voice in anger?
Oh, he sounded...
Well, it's funny.
It's just a couple weeks before that, I had coffee with him.
And he wanted to meet me for coffee.
And they were downsizing, so I thought he was going to fire me.
This was before the New York Post article.
And then after the meeting, I told him that.
I said, I thought you were going to get rid of me.
And he gave me a hug when we were leaving.
And he's like, no, as long as I'm at this magazine, you always have a job here.
Because he, like, totally loved my writing, and that was sweet.
But apparently not!
Apparently it was a bridge too far.
So in the phone call, he sounded really flustered and upset, and he was very rushed.
Well, I'm sorry, I have to get rid of you.
And I think you know why.
Funny enough, I couldn't assume that.
I think you know why.
I guess it's on-demand.
What do they call it?
Not on-demand work.
At will.
At will employment.
So they can fire you when they want.
How long had you been there for?
I started writing for them in...
Probably, like, 2011 or 2010, maybe?
This is years that you've known them.
The better part of a half decade.
And the excuse is, you know why.
Not necessarily even the article, but you fraternized with Tucker Carlson.
Right, yeah, yeah.
I mean, not only did you come out as conservative, now you're on Fox News, of all places.
You know, the Death Star that got this horrible man elected president.
I think it was probably, yeah, going on Fox News.
And that was the first time that you had met Tucker Carlson.
That's right, yeah.
It was remote, so I was at the Fox News studio here in New York, and he was in Washington at the time, but that was my first exposure.
My first time on Fox, only my third time on TV, and first time being exposed to him.
And I kind of knew who he was, but not that well.
I didn't really know much about him at the time.
I was just sort of familiar with his face.
I don't think even I was that aware at the time that Tucker Carlson was like the red line where if you cross it, you have literally fraternized with the devil.
Right.
That was the first time.
And obviously it wasn't the last time because it became the beginning of another half decade long or decade long relationship.
You're on.
You tell your story.
It's like a three minute piece.
It's a short, short hit.
Yeah, yeah.
Super short hit.
Yeah.
And after you get fired, how quickly are you back on with Tucker?
I was back on.
I think it was about two or three months.
I think it was that April I was back on for the second time because I had given a speech in Portland, Oregon at Portland State University and liberals, students showed up to protest and there was video of them acting crazy and deranged.
So then I was back on Tucker to talk about that experience.
And then from then they just kept calling me and asking me back on just for my opinion on things happening in the news.
And then I was a guest for...
Basically the whole run of the show since then, even on the last episode, April 21st, which we didn't know was going to be the last episode, but I was a guest on that one too.
I mean, when they fire you, I don't know, you know, you say you don't come from money, and I understand that.
Do you have money saved up?
Are you panicking?
What do you do to find work?
And how does the next several months of your life look after being spontaneously fired for having come out as conservative?
Oh, I had nothing, because, you know, I didn't make any money, you know, and I had no savings whatsoever.
Yeah, it was super tough, but I couldn't let people know that because that would be like they won.
I write about this in the book.
I was getting evicted.
I had no money.
I had to borrow money from my parents for the first time ever in my life to pay my rent.
And it was super hard, and I didn't know what the hell I was going to do.
But the only thing that kept me going was I know I didn't do anything wrong.
And I knew I was right about this.
Even if people disagreed with my politics, I knew what I believed.
And I would never regret standing up for that.
You know, there can be no downside for that.
But it was really, really hard for several months.
And then I just started getting jobs and sort of laying on my feet.
And, you know, I had some people come in and hire me for this or that.
And then, you know, it definitely got much better and way better than it ever was before.
If someone says, was it the right decision?
It says, well, it depends on what...
Point in time you ask me, because net positive after 10 years is not necessarily net positive after one year.
And not that the net positive is even the motivation behind it, but above and beyond everything else, it tends to, as you say in the book, being honest, tends to work out better, make you a more complete person and be more fulfilling.
And by the way, I should add this.
I'm not going to spoil the book.
I had known a lot about Tucker Carlson already.
I learned a few things about Tucker from the book, but what I did like especially was infusing your stories into the narrative of Tucker Carlson because it's interesting.
I obviously knew nothing about you before reading the book, or very little, and I liked the Tucker childhood stuff.
I think I had been familiar with most of it, but some of the anecdotes were fantastic.
So you end up on Tucker.
He invites you back periodically.
You're building your brand.
You're building your base.
What are you doing at this point leading up to how you got into the rights to do the book?
To this book?
Well, so then Monica Crowley, who's a wonderful person, set me up with The Spectator.
She was good friends with the editor there, and I started writing for them.
I mean, I love The Spectator.
They're great.
They kind of let me do anything I want.
So that was sort of like a big break for me.
Just started doing, I was doing some writing for Breitbart, some other places like that.
Doing some behind the scenes, you know, editor stuff for other people.
And then, so we started working on this book about Tucker like a year and a half ago, early last spring, spring 2022.
And, you know, my publisher called me up, this editor, my editor, Harry Stein.
I'd worked with him on like one, he used to edit some.
And he just emailed me up and called me for lunch one day.
And he's like, I want you to write for me.
I met him for lunch.
And I just loved him as a human being.
He's an old school journalist.
And we sat and talked for hours over this lunch, just telling stories and just really adored this guy.
So I wrote one story for him.
The website collapsed or whatever.
But he called me up and said, well, I'm working for All Seasons Press now as editorial director.
And we want to do a book about Tucker Carlson.
And we want you to write it.
And I was totally like, I'm flattered and honored, but didn't know if Tucker would necessarily be into it.
So I called him up, and at first he was like, oh, you know, I don't, he's like, I don't read anything about myself.
You know that, right?
And he's like, I don't really like this kind of attention.
And I said, yeah, that's fine.
I didn't think he would be into it.
I was like, well, I thought it might be kind of weird because I'm like a guest on your show.
Like, should I be writing a book about you?
And I said, okay, well, you know, well, thanks anyway.
And he's like, well, you know what?
You know, you're a really good writer.
And he started like remembering columns I'd written.
I didn't know he read my columns for The Spectator.
And then he sort of like talked himself into it over the course of the conversation.
And he's like, yeah, great.
Okay, well, you know, let's do it and blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, I was on my way to Maine to see him a couple weeks after that.
And then, you know, he would connect me with his wife in group chats, you know, whenever I wanted to come and hang out with him.
So that's sort of how it got off the ground.
I mean, Tucker's never asked to see a word of the book.
He, you know, totally Trusted me, which was a great honor, but also very scary.
You don't want to let down someone like that.
But that's sort of how the book got off the ground.
That's fantastic.
The editor, they say this is the idea.
Practically speaking, what sort of parameters do they set?
Do they say it can't be more than, I don't know, however many words goes into a 150-page book?
Do they say limit, time frame, budget?
How does that work for someone who's never had any experience with that?
So, you know, you sign a contract and then you have a deadline to deliver a manuscript, which is super short.
It was January 31st.
So this was, you know, less than a year to do that.
And then you're just off to the races and, you know, contractually the book needs to be at least, you know, this many thousand, I think it was at least 60,000 words.
We ended up, we ended up actually cutting a lot.
The book could have been a lot longer, but we, why wouldn't it be more?
Brief, and I wanted to, you know, have more of that energy to it.
So we ended up cutting a lot of stuff.
I just remember telling myself, if I can pull this off, like, I don't know how I'm going to pull this off, but if I can actually do this by January 31st, I didn't by January 31st.
I was two months late in living my manuscript, but it ended up being fine, which is kind of normal for, you know, for these kind of contracts.
But then, of course, I had submitted the manuscript in March, and I had a phone call scheduled with Tucker.
On the day his show was taken off the air, because we were editing the manuscript and I had five questions to ask him, typed up, "Did I get this right?
Can you explain this more?" And then, of course, his show was taken off the air.
And then we pushed back publication, added two new chapters, updated it, and then I got to talk to Tucker a couple more times to make it more relevant.
But that was the journey of start to finish getting it published.
Now, I don't know if these are industry terms, unauthorized biography, authorized biography.
This is definitely, my wife said it's not an autobiography because Tucker didn't write it.
This is an authorized biography or an unauthorized biography?
So it can technically be either one.
I say independent biography, but authorized biography can mean either the source just agreed to it and gave you permission and let you into their life, which is what happened.
Or it can mean that the subject...
He wanted a book written about himself, selected a writer, appointed this person, and had a lot of editorial control about what's in the book.
So that was obviously not the case.
So I say independent biography just to make that distinction, but authorized can mean either one of those things.
So to sort of convey the editorial independence, I say independent biography.
Now I want to get into this, whatever did not make it past the cutting floor if there were any hard decisions, but in making this book, writing this book, Not what type of access did you have to Tucker, but what is it like?
Do you tail him around indefinitely?
Do you have, like, say, I'm going to come with you for a weekend and see what's going on?
How does it work in terms of actual one-on-one time or following around time so that you can get a feel for who Tucker really is and not necessarily who the media says he is or what you see on TV?
Yeah, so there's tons of, you know, I had to talk to a lot of other people, too.
So, like, when I'm not with Tucker, I'm, you know, I'm still working seven days a week on this, talking and going to meet his father and getting to know, you know, kids you went to high school with and things like that.
With Tucker himself, it was probably, you know, the longest I spent with him was a week at his home in Florida when I stayed in his house.
Other than that, I could just go back and forth.
You know, I went to Maine and went after that long.
But it was a lot of...
You know, like I'm staying in his house and just following him around.
Of course, give him some privacy.
It's not like I'm nipping at his heels all the time.
But, you know, I think the best moments were just waking up in the morning and going into the kitchen and out he comes in his boxer shorts with a cup of coffee and we're just like sitting there just chatting for two or three hours about anything, recorder going, getting all on tape.
You know, that was really kind of the best part.
And then, of course, then I'd follow him around before he's doing that day.
Go into the studio with him, kind of sit there and just watch the show being done, and then go to dinner afterwards, maybe.
His producer, Justin Wells, is with him most of the time down there, so getting to know Justin really well.
Yeah, that's sort of what it's like.
I like that kind of just, yeah, let me just hang out and not necessarily want to sit down and grill you over an interview.
I just kind of want to watch you and observe you, and that's what I hope to capture in the book.
It certainly does.
It's the anecdotes.
I'm trying to think of now the expression about what he said in the book, what you said in the book, Chadwick, about telling the truth, lying being destructive and telling the truth being constructive.
And I forget how you said it, but it resonated in that there's a liberation in telling the truth where whatever you feel about Tucker Carlson, and I think it's been his revelation recently, is getting past the deceit of having to pull narratives as opposed to just speak The truth, not your truth.
Maybe if you remember the line, you'll refresh my memory.
But were there any stories with anything you had to cut that you would have otherwise really wanted to include in the book?
The first one that pops to my mind was this funny story about Laura Bush's plastic surgery.
And I can't remember why.
I think my editor's like, well, this is a little distracting, but I thought it was so hilarious.
And in fact, I think in future editions, I'm going to sneak it back in there.
Laura Bush is...
W's wife.
The second W's wife.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I did put a story about them having dinner together, and then there's a funny line about her plastic surgery that they cut out.
There are a few, like, kind of...
What was the line, and what was the...
May I ask you what the plastic surgery was?
I have...
I can imagine, but I'm not sure that I should.
No, whoever they were having dinner with...
Okay, let me see if I can get the exact line right.
Whoever they were having dinner with...
Tucker and his wife and George W. Bush and his wife and then the people who hosted them.
It was when they were leaving.
The funny line too was these people were hosting them but really highfalutin.
He was saying how they really looked down on the Bushes for that unfortunate stint in public service is how they described his presidency.
It was something like when they were getting ready to leave, Laura Bush was getting into the back of the SUV and the wife said loud enough for her to hear, What's wrong with her face?
Couldn't the plastic surgeon finish the job?
Something hilarious like that.
You know what?
You might have been better off not including that in the book.
I thought it was hilarious.
I still don't understand.
I have no judgment for people that decide to do it.
I just don't understand why people decide to do it because I have yet to see an example.
And maybe I don't see the examples because the people who do it properly, you don't notice it.
But for the amount of time it goes wrong and my love of my childhood, Meg Ryan.
It hurts me.
And I don't know why people continue to do it.
And then you get stuck into the black hole of continuing to do it and fixing the problems.
And then it's just a disaster.
Well, yeah.
Or you're Joe Biden and people think you're not the same person.
Simon Cowell.
Do you remember when everyone was complaining sexism because people were saying Madonna didn't look good?
I was like, I remember when they were like, who the hell is Simon Cowell?
What did he do?
It's not about sex.
It's about destroying your face and trying to look young forever.
Yeah.
So that's a good...
Okay, interesting.
And what other one can you think of offhand?
Oh, offhand.
Not to put you on the spot.
Yeah, I'm kind of put on the spot now.
I'd have to think about it.
Okay, forget it.
There were a couple things that the lawyers wouldn't let us put in.
And that related to Dominion, I presume.
I related to some of that stuff.
But I'm kind of fighting to get it into the next edition, and I think we will.
So, yeah, but I can't really talk about that, I guess.
Well, that, and it's interesting because I sort of knew this.
Tucker Carlson is still under contract with Fox.
They're paying him not to work, which I presume means that he cannot get paid to do what he's doing.
He would be doing it otherwise, but he's still under contract.
So they didn't terminate him.
They just cut his show.
I think you've elaborated on the context in as much as you can, Chadwick, without getting yourself sued.
Do you have any understanding?
Well, I guess you do have insider knowledge.
Any insights as to why they fired Tucker?
Or, sorry, didn't fire him.
Why they paid him to shut up?
Yeah.
And while they're paying him to be quiet, well, unsuccessfully.
But, well, it's ideological.
Like, in my opinion, there's no arguing that it's not ideological.
It absolutely is.
Fox has still not given him a reason.
The closest Fox has come was to go to the New York Times, because I guess they're good friends, and to say to them that the reason he was fired was because of a...
It pisses me off because this is the one where he says white men don't fight like that.
In the context of him reflecting on wishing ill on an Antifa boy that was getting beaten by a mob and him saying, from his own perspective, white men don't fight like that.
And he was trying to sensitize his producer to not become the monster that you're battling.
And then the New York Times took that one line and made him look racist.
Oh my goodness.
And I also just say framing it that way is a racist framing.
Anybody who thinks that that's what he meant to say, themselves think that other races, if that's what he was even going for and not talking about himself, fight like that.
You're okay.
So they claim that.
A private text message was racist, which is why they fired him.
Yeah.
Was the risk or the theory that that was going to come to light in the context of the Dominion lawsuit or had it already come to light?
So, okay, now you're making me remember that.
So those messages were part of...
The only reason why Tucker's messages were a part of discovery in the Dominion lawsuit was that...
And this is so funny because so many liberals don't know what they're talking about or maybe even other people believe that...
He was fired because of...
The Dominion settlement.
Yeah, well, defaming Dominion.
But in fact, the reason why Dominion, his private messages were a part of discovery was because Dominion was trying to prove that reasonable people at Fox, like Tucker Carlson, did not believe that the voting machines were rigged, which, of course, Tucker didn't.
And he pushed back against it on air.
Yeah, you've got to stop.
I was going to say stop either just to add that caveat.
Tucker was the only one...
Railing against Sidney Powell for never delivering the Kraken, for calling her crazy, crackpot, whatever.
He was the only one at Fox not towing the Dominion vote-flipping German server line.
And so that's interesting.
So internally, Dominion's saying, look, Tucker, the smartest guy at Fox, knew this was bullshit, and nonetheless, the other people were going, and they got these text messages, which, okay, interesting.
And so Fox gets this and says, but the timing of the firing also was very specific.
Six days later.
Six days after the settlement, it was very shortly after he basically said Fox is bending the knee to big pharma advertisers.
It was relatively shortly there.
And shortly after he said the CIA killed JFK.
Yes.
And he was continuing his investigation into J6.
And then, of course, the war in Ukraine.
He's the only voice in mainstream media who is questioning that and pointing out...
How money is being laundered and calling Zelensky a thug, which he believes he is.
And so it's six days after.
So what my sources told me, which I'm out there publicly saying, and this is not news because other people had reported this before I even said it.
But my sources had told me that it was a condition in the Dominion settlement.
Dominion has obviously denied this.
Fox News has denied this.
But that's what I heard.
I have no reason.
I believe that these people would know what's going on.
If that's not the case, then it's the fact that, first of all, I could very much easily see the Murdoch's Fox management, Paul Ryan, someone on the board, or one of these companies with a controlling interest in Fox would see it to be very convenient to get rid of him right after the Dominion suit.
Number one, because they realize they can keep him silent.
The next election.
They don't want Trump to be the nominee.
They don't like Trumpism.
And Tucker Carlson, of course, the biggest megaphone for Trumpism in mainstream media and on the network.
But secondly, they could use that as a tool to get everyone else in the network online, in line, which is like very much from what I understand, like how Fox management works.
So they get the two for one deal of shutting him up and getting him off the air.
And the other benefit for them is to scare put the fear of God into everyone else on the network.
That they better shut up, get in line.
And that's obviously what's happened.
And they axed a bunt.
They axed, and is in the ax sense, a lot.
It was Bongino was contemporaneously with Tucker.
Tucker, I don't want to forget anybody as though they're less important.
I do forget who the others were, however.
Who else did they cut at the same time?
I think Bongino's situation was different.
I think it was a contract negotiation.
That didn't renew?
Yeah, and he was sort of battling with them and decided to say, screw you.
But Tucker's entire, this is another reason why, to me, I believe it's absolutely ideological, is that his entire production team was let go, which is completely, in one fell swoop, which is not normal.
I mean, this is the highest performing team of producers in cable news history.
At Fox, you're not hired to work for a show.
You're not hired to work for a show.
You're hired to work for the network.
So if your show gets taken off the air, you just get moved on to another show.
Instead, they knew that Tucker's team was super, super close.
They knew people were leaking stuff, especially to me, but it wasn't any...
Well, funny enough, it wasn't anyone who worked on Tucker's show, and I'm still talking to people who still work at Fox who send me stuff, and none of them worked on Tucker's show.
So they knew that his team was very close, and I think that they wanted to purge any Tucker loyalists, and so they completely fired everyone, and that's not normally how that would go down.
How many people were on his production team?
Because he had to have at least, what, a half dozen?
A dozen?
There were about 25 people for the three shows because he had the two Fox Nation shows and then the nightly show.
So nine of them quit immediately after he was let go.
And then the rest of them were all fired on mid-July.
July 16th or something like that, I think it was.
That's actually incredible.
They were fired and not paid to shut up.
They were fired, cut, no more salary.
You guys go and...
Fend for yourselves.
Yeah, well, and they found out that they were losing their jobs in a press release, that they were given the two-week notice.
So if you recall, before Fox launched its new primetime lineup, it was just a reshuffle, they had this weird fill-in show called Fox News Tonight that was filling the 8 o 'clock slot.
So Fox had a press release that they were firing.
All of the remaining Tucker team members on July 16th, whatever day it was that Jesse Waters was going to take over.
So that's how they found out.
And not only that, they then were told, you know, they have to keep working for two weeks if they want to get their severance.
Which they did.
That is provocation.
That is to say, hey, you're fired.
Work for two weeks.
And by the way, if you do anything retaliatory, we will crush you.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How sick is that?
And then that night, there was some HR person waiting outside the control room when the show ended that night to frog march them out of the building and take their badges and whatnot and their cell phones.
So that's how I went down for a steam night.
And they were great people.
I mean, they were really wonderful.
I had nothing but...
Excellent experiences working with them even, you know, before we started working on this book.
The obvious question I've asked anybody who ever writes a book, how do you, I mean, you have a deadline, so you know when it's got to be done, but how do you know when it's done?
It's a great question.
And a follow-up, just to add a little neuroses if you're not already neurotic enough.
Do you ever read and say, gosh darn it, why didn't I write this that way?
Oh, of course.
I mean, I think, yeah, that's why you can't reread it too much, but it's definitely, yeah, reread it all the time and like, Should have done this or that.
But I'm really, you know, my editor Harry is amazing and he was like amazing guidance for this book.
I mean, the way it started out was completely different than what it ended up being.
And I think it was, I don't know, it's kind of a weird use of, I mean, once the show was taken off the air, I mean, I guess maybe we didn't really know how, I can't even remember now how it ended initially, but...
I think we were still working on the ending at the time.
Because we were still editing and still trying to decide what the perfect ending was.
And then this happened.
And I'm like, well, here you go.
Here's how it ends.
I mean, in a weird way, it's kind of like the perfect...
The best ending is a new beginning because it is the best ending.
And this is the first chapter of the next book of his life.
Yeah, that's exactly...
That's totally it.
And that's what I realized after the shock settled in.
Uh, about a show being taken off.
I was like, well, this is, this is really, this is like the Tucker Carlson origin story.
It's not when he started at Fox.
It's not when he became number one.
It's when he got kicked off from Fox because now he's, you know, completely going to be completely unbound.
Um, and yeah, it ends with a new beginning.
That's, that's, that's the ending.
I mean, yeah.
Phenomenal.
Now, um, I was not going to ask, I didn't want to ask all these questions.
Tell me about Tucker and I'm not going to.
The question was this, and I think I may have just forgotten it.
Uh, Oh, for goodness sake.
Oh, Tucker running for president.
Yeah.
Now, everybody's got to ask you, was there anything that he indicated at any point in time in your meetings to indicate whether directly or implicitly that you think he might think about that?
He would never do that.
I mean, maybe I'll be wrong one day, but number one reason he would never do that is he would never subject his family to that level of scrutiny.
Like, protecting his family is the most important thing in the world to him.
So that's the top reason he would never do it.
Number two, close second, is he doesn't have that gene.
I don't think he has that ego that says, I deserve to lead you and make laws for you.
It's just totally absent from him.
And I think his position is better as a journalist and as an observer and an interviewer than as a politician.
I think he's far more in a better place there.
He appreciates that place.
I think he enjoys that and doesn't necessarily want to be mired in politics in Washington and all that.
That is, I believe, a perfect answer that I think is definitive now that this is the next question.
And it'll be the last one on Tucker.
Do you have a few minutes to come over to Locals afterwards?
It'll change nothing here.
Do you have another 15 minutes?
Sure, yeah.
Okay, awesome.
This is the last question here.
Then we're going to end on Rumble and we're going to go over to Locals and I'm going to see if I missed any questions that are specific for you here.
Am I projecting?
Or, based on your knowledge, you've known him for years, you spent intimate time with him, does Tucker look a little more distressed and doom-pilled in the last, say, couple weeks than you've ever known throughout your relationship with him?
Hmm.
I don't know.
I mean, I thought, at least initially, he was seeming very happy.
I think, if anything, he's probably...
Feeling a little wayward without the structure that he's of this corporate life and this extremely daily routine.
I think that could possibly be driving him a little crazy.
In the conversations I've had with him recently, which is mostly just some texting and not political or any means, he seems happy and great.
But maybe what we're seeing is he's freed a bit to maybe explore.
The darker side of the world that maybe felt like he couldn't explore as thoroughly on Fox.
Because we're seeing some really, you know, I'm thinking of the recent interview.
Yeah, the Obama sex story.
I was like, did he just say that?
Do I get to repeat this?
Do I get to clip this online?
Am I going to get in trouble?
Like, am I going to get a secret service on the front door?
Yeah.
Because, yeah, definitely not what's the word I'm looking for.
Untethered.
I don't know if that's the right word.
Unleashed, not unleashed.
He's unhindered.
I would imagine by the Fox Reigns.
But just listening to him talk about, you know, bringing up the assassination of Trump.
He's saying it out loud.
I know everybody thinks it.
And if people have sufficient neuroses, nobody even wants to think it for fear of putting that out in the cosmos.
Talking about war with Russia.
I'm wondering whether or not with his insights, with his experience, with his connections, you know, the reality of the world in which we live is actually much more dire than even the cynics out there like me.
I mean, only he's been around this world for so long and he's been such a, you know, a member of Washington elite circles for his entire adult life up until, you know, Trump got elected when he was sort of excommunicated.
He's a class traitor now.
He's certainly bringing up some really scary scenarios and I hope none of them come to fruition.
But, you know, again, he's the only person saying what everyone's thinking.
I don't know.
I understand the fear of putting that out into the ether and not wanting to be out there, but at the same time, we're all thinking it.
I had a friend who was a psychologist and worked on cognitive behavioral therapy.
One of the therapy sessions that they do is they say, think of the worst thing that you could possibly think of and write it down.
And for the life of me, I still will never do it, even though it's totally irrational and totally superstitious.
But for anybody who's not thinking that in terms of the prospect of the world, the political world in which we live, seeing the depths to which the world has already gone.
This will be the last question here, and then I'm going to end it on Rumble, and we'll carry on live on Locals, and I'll see if there's any questions there for you specifically.
Tucker has felt the wrath of Fox.
He's felt the wrath of the world.
I know that you have, to some extent, throughout your life experience, you know, culminating perhaps with that article coming out as a conservative.
It's the worst thing that you can possibly do.
Have you been taking a shitload of flack now since the book?
Have even your haters started to say, well, maybe you have a point, maybe...
Have even your haters and detractors potentially started to come around?
Or is it more of the same from them in general?
I don't really, I don't know.
I don't really see a lot of that, to be honest, like at all.
It's funny.
I have had a couple of friends, one in particular, old friends from, you know, 2016 era, 2017, when they all left, actually come around and being like...
Yeah, I think you're right about everything.
Actually, I drank shit with one of them not too long ago.
My first book was about DEI in the workplace.
He was a bartender his whole life and he just got a corporate job.
He was like, actually, I read your DEI book now that I work in a corporation and you're totally right.
These people are crazy and I'm going to vote Republican.
How good does that feel?
It feels great, but not even like, you know, I guess.
Yeah, I guess it feels fine.
I mean, it's nice.
It's nice to reconnect, and I don't really hold any anger or vengeance, but I don't know if, you know...
Can't trust you.
It's like a dog that's bitten.
You might be able to pet them, and they might be beautiful dogs, but you can never trust them all with your kids.
No, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
It's nice to see you again, but you're still not going to get a Christmas card.
Yeah, exactly.
Amazing.
Okay, so here's what we're going to do.
Everybody on Rumble.
I'm going to end it on Rumble.
It changes nothing from our end.
I'm just going to go end live stream.
Come on over to Viva Barnes Law.
That's Twitter.
I don't even know.
Hold on.
I don't know what tweet that is.
Let me not send that.
I know I've got a few more questions.
See, all of my windows shut down when my computer crashed.
Whatever, people.
You know where it is.
It's vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
See you there.
I'm going to end this on Rumble.
Thank you all for being here if you're not going to come over.
And locals, I'm coming.
Hold on a second.
End the stream now, and we're good.
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