We've compiled many of the revelatory documents from the recent Pentagon documents leak and have reproduced them below for the public record. We analyzed several of these documents and their ramifications on Monday's episode of System Update. Watch the full episode on Rumble on the player below.

Note: watch the full episode here:

Good evening. It's Thursday, May 4. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

Tonight, we’ll devote the entire show to examining one of the most important and consequential hoaxes in our current politics, not just in the United States, but in the wider democratic world, namely, this sprawling, multi-headed, extremely well-funded scam that was created in the wake of the 2016 election that calls itself the anti-disinformation industry. We have devoted several shows and I've written several articles to investigate the genesis of this industry, who is funding it and the rotten ways in which it functions. In September 2021, the still somewhat heterodox Harper's produced one of the most comprehensive examinations of this fraudulent industry in an article by Joseph Bernstein, entitled “Bad News. Selling the Story of Disinformation” but the single most important and comprehensive investigation of this fraudulent and deeply menacing industry was published several weeks ago by the journal Tablet, entitled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” In it, the writer Jacob Siegel, devoted 13,000 extremely well-researched words to describe, in his words, “a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole-of-society” effort that aims to seize total control over the Internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.” (Tablet. March 28, 2023). 

We will examine this industry, dissect the key elements of Siegel's groundbreaking article, and then in our interview segment, speak with him about its most important components. 

It is really hard to overstate how consequential and how nefarious this disinformation industry is. It received woefully inadequate attention until the emergence of these articles. It is one of the greatest threats to a free Internet yet manufactured. It is rapidly spreading as a result of the backing of some of the world's most powerful governments and most influential neo-liberal billionaires. And without hyperbole or melodrama, its goal is nothing less than the end of the Internet as one of our last instruments for expressing and organizing meaningful dissent. 

Due to ongoing family commitments, we are unfortunately unable to do our aftershow on Locals tonight, which ordinarily takes place on Thursday. We will do our best to be back on both Tuesday and Thursday of next week. With that, to join our Locals community, simply click the join button and you'll have exclusive access to that. 

As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, it appears 12 hours after the show is first broadcasted, live, here on Rumble. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform to help spread the visibility of the show.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. 

Become a Supporter

In 2016, the neoliberal order suffered two devastating and traumatic defeats, made even more traumatizing because establishment forces did everything possible to stop them, yet failed. First, was the decision by the British people to ratify Brexit and leave the European Union, despite an avalanche of nonstop propaganda about why doing so would be so destructive to their interests. That was followed months later by the obviously shocking election of Donald Trump, against the ultimate establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. Numerous other similar traumas against neoliberal stability in Italy and Scandinavia, in Brazil and elsewhere deeply alarmed Western power centers in ways that cannot be exaggerated. The conclusion they drew from these events was quite simple: allowing the Internet to be free, for ordinary citizens to continue to use it to speak, debate and organize freely was simply no longer tolerable. The consequences of a free Internet had proven, in 2016, to be too unpredictable, too decentralized, and too free to allow it to persist any longer. As a result, there was a very conscious, deliberate and multisector campaign to end what we had all known as a free Internet. 

To accomplish that, some pretext, some justification, was required even in Western Europe and certainly in the United States, we are all too inculcated with the value of free debate and free expression to simply accept a candid admission by Western states and their power centers that they intended to censor the Internet to eliminate dissent – the real motive of what they were doing. 

The pretext that they had long given for creeping censorship, namely the need to stop hate speech, was far too limited and narrow for the much more ambitious goals they adopted for stifling free debate in 2016. What was needed was a term that was at once extremely elastic to the point of being meaningless, yet sufficient to encompass any ideas they wanted to suppress, and the word they invented to justify this new censorship regime was disinformation. Though this tactic had a clear rationale, we must protect the Internet to protect you – or rather, we must censor the Internet to protect you – from the dangers of disinformation, the problems were obvious. What is disinformation? How is it determined? And most importantly of all, who decides what counts and does not count as disinformation? To resolve those problems a fake expertise was invented out of whole cloth. Seemingly overnight, we became inundated with “disinformation experts.” There is no academic institution in the United States that issues degrees in Disinformation. It is a completely false credential, a fake expertise, but it proliferated very quickly with prominent social media stars bestowing themselves with the title of disinformation expert and the newly materialized groups – always with deliberately benign-sounding names but shady, yet substantial funding – suddenly appearing to employ these disinformation experts and to insist that the process for determining what is and is not disinformation was not politicized or ideological, perish the thought, but rather apolitical, scientific and data driven. The bet that they made was that as long as this field could be presented as residing above politics, rather than where it actually resides which is deep within it, enough people would be deceived to accept superior authority, and presto, censorship would no longer be about suppressing political ideas or dissent. No, it was a deeply earnest and scientific endeavor to do nothing more or less benign than protect people, all of you, from damaging falsehoods. Who doesn't want to live in a world where falsehoods are identified and then eliminated? 

Dissecting this fraud of disinformation and the industry that now supports it is not an easy task. There are hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Security State and other Western security agencies, from George Soros and Bill Gates, and Pierre Omidyar – not Boogeymen but the documented funders of these organizations and virtually every corporate media outlet, always seeking ways to maintain their decades-old but finally evaporating stranglehold on the flow of information. These media outlets are now endorsing this fraudulent industry, recognizing the value it presents to equate their narratives with proven truth, and then any critics of their narratives as purveyors of the dreaded disinformation. 

The reporting we have done over the last few years has delved deeper into this industry. The Harper's article, though, that I alluded to at the start, advanced this story by identifying the core fraudulent premises at the heart of the entire project. Let's take a quick look at some of the key points that Harper's article exposed. The title is “Bad News Selling the Story of Disinformation” and here are its key revelations from 2021. 

The Commission on Information Disorder is the latest (and most creepily named) addition to a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia and policy research: Big Disinfo. A kind of EPA for content. It seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of “toxicity” on social media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platform's clumsy, dishonest and half-hearted attempts to halt it. 

As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a higher model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in beliefs or behavior that are bad by, some standards. Otherwise, why care what people read and watch?  

The most comprehensive survey of the field to date, a 2018 scientific literature review titled “Social Media Political Polarization and Political Disinformation,” reveals some gobsmacking deficits. The authors fault disinformation research for failing to explain why opinions change; lacking solid data on the prevalence and reach of disinformation and declining to establish common definitions for the most important terms in the field, including disinformation, misinformation, online propaganda, hyperpartisan news, fake news, clickbait, rumors and conspiracy theories. (Harper’s Magazine. Sept. 2021).

Of course, they don't want to define those terms. It's precisely the lack of definition that bestows the terms and those who wield them with all the power. The article goes on:

The sense prevails that no two people who research disinformation are talking about quite the same thing. This will ring true to anyone who follows the current media discussion around online propaganda. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” are used casually and interchangeably to refer to an enormous range of content, ranging from well-worn scams to viral news aggregation; from foreign-intelligence operations to trolling; from opposition research to harassment. In their crudest use, the terms are simply jargon for “things I disagree with.” 

Attempts to define “disinformation” broadly enough as to rinse it of political perspective or ideology leave us in territory so abstract as to be absurd. As the literature review put it: “Disinformation” is intended to be a broad category describing the types of information that one could encounter online that could possibly lead to misperceptions about the actual state of the world. The term has always been political and belligerent. An even more vexing issue for the disinformation field, though, is the supposedly objective stance media researchers and journalists take toward the information ecosystem to which they themselves belong. Somewhat amazingly, this attempt has taken place alongside an agonizing and overdue questioning within the media of the harm done by unexamined professional standards of objectivity. 

Like journalism, scholarship, and all other forms of knowledge creation, disinformation research reflects the culture, aspirations, and assumptions of its creators. (Harper’s Magazine. Sept. 2021).

It is nothing scientific. It is deeply subjective. 

A quick scan of the institutions that publish most frequently and influentially about disinformation: Harvard University, The New York Times, Stanford University at MIT, NBC, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations etc. That the most prestigious liberal institutions of the pre-digital age are the most invested in fighting disinformation reveals a lot about what they stand to lose or hope to regain. 

Whatever the brilliance of the individual disinformation researchers and reporters, the nature of the project inevitably places them in a regrettably defensive position in the contemporary debate about media representation, objectivity, image-making, and public knowledge. However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don't have special access to the fabric of reality. 

This spring, in light of new reporting and a renewed, bipartisan political effort to investigate the origins of COVID-19, Facebook announced that it would no longer remove posts that claim that the coronavirus was man-made or manufactured. Many disinformation workers who spent months calling for social-media companies to ban such claims on the grounds that they were conspiracy theories have been awkwardly silent as scientists have begun to admit that an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab is an unlikely, but plausible, possibility. (Harper’s Magazine. Sept. 2021).

That was, again, 18 months ago. The possibility of a Wuhan lab has become much more probable. We know that the leading and most elite teams of scientists within the Department of Energy and the FBI both believe it's by far the most likely explanation for the COVID pandemic. But what that Harper's article showed was the core fraud of this industry, the conceit that there are somehow a group of people who have now elevated themselves to reside above political ideology and political agenda, who have somehow become trained, experts, in decreeing what is and is not information to the point where that should be censored off the Internet, when in reality, as the Harper's article so brilliantly demonstrated, there is nothing objective about it, is every bit as politicized and subjective and subject to manipulation as journalism and political debate. It is a fraudulent industry and a fraudulent expertise. 

What made The Tablet’s article so definitive in terms of the understanding it presented for this industry beyond the reporting I had done, beyond the Harper's article, is that it traced the history, the genesis of where this all came from, and how it was formed, and then where it took hold. We will in our interview segment in just a few minutes, speak with the author of this brilliant and vitally important article, Jacob Siegel, and he will explain a great deal about the work he did in tracing the roots of this industry but I just want to show you a few key segments from the article to set this context for the discussion that I'm about to have with him. Let’s take a look at the article:

In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day, he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy's name synonymous with the politics of the era. 

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts and demagogues. Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and the American political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States. 

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in DC, George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation a “whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.” (Tablet. March 28, 2023).

That is exactly what happened. The Democratic Party after 2016 decided that the reason they lost that election was because the Internet was too free and they implemented a plan that became their top priority. A whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response, to gain control of the Internet by concocting, manufacturing, in partnership with their Never Trump Republican allies, this fraudulent industry called the disinformation industry that would then be used to justify control of the Internet. The article goes on:

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime's aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That's why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden's laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. 

Disinformation, now and for all time is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system. (Tablet. March 28, 2023). 

As I said at the start, the lack of definition, the lack of anything concrete was intended. That's what bestows it with its power. The article goes on: 

The false yet foundational claim that Russia hacked the 2016 election provided a justification – just like the claims about weapons of mass destruction that triggered the Iraq War – to plunge America into a wartime state of exception. With the normal rules of constitutional democracy suspended, a coterie of party operatives and security officials then installed a vast, largely invisible new architecture of social control on the back end of the Internet's biggest platforms. (Tablet. March 28, 2023).

That is exactly what happened. That is the censorship regime that we face. There has been a lot of great work and reporting done none better than this article by Jacob Siegel, who is our guest tonight. And I'm about to show you the interview we conducted with him that I think shines even further light on what this journal called Tablet aptly calls “the hoax of the century,” meaning this fraudulent, fake but deeply nefarious disinformation industry. Here's our interview. 

G. Greenwald: Jacob, first of all, congratulations on writing an article that, at least in some quarters, has received so much attention and praise, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about it. 

Jacob Siegel:  I'm glad to be here. 

G. Greenwald: Sure. So, there are a lot of odd things that have happened in the world of politics. Let's start with the fact that I not only am praising an article in Tablet magazine but encouraging everybody to read it on the grounds that it's one of the most important stories of the year. Something I think would have been unimaginable for me even seven or eight years ago. There's a lot of other weird things like that, including the fact that you're talking to me and that, you know, the favorite operative of liberals is Rick Wilson and they worship the Bush-Cheney spokeswoman, Nicolle Wallace, who comes on their TV every day at 5 o’clock, so where do you fit in into this kind of whirlwind? Just talk a little bit about your post-9/11 trajectory, how you ended up in Afghanistan and just more broadly, your kind of political journey as you see it. 

Jacob Siegel: Yeah, I would say I wound up in the military shortly after 9/11, not with any great political conviction necessarily, but with a strong patriotic sentiment, a sense that if the country was going to war, I should be involved in that, I shouldn't be exempt, somehow, that if other people are going, I should go as well. And, you know, I had volunteered at Ground Zero shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and I just felt like I should be a part of that. And I was deployed to Iraq in 2006, 2007. That was a difficult, then sobering, experience, to say the least. Whatever illusions I'd had about the war, which were probably already gone by then, certainly didn't survive 15 months in Iraq. Then in 2012, I was deployed to Afghanistan and that was quite a different experience. But it was one that allowed for more kind of contemplation and reflection on my part, in no small part because the conditions in Afghanistan where I was, in western Afghanistan, in 2012, as an army intelligence officer, were, you know, less chaotic, less violent than they had been in Iraq during the civil war and surge years in 2006, 2007. And so, there was more opportunity for me to take stock and to think about what was actually happening and to assess what seemed to be a just unbridgeable gap between the official declarations about the war and what I, or for that matter, anybody else, could have observed on the ground. 

I should just make clear that I was nothing special. I didn't have any high-level access to anything. I was a very average – an average battalion-level intelligence officer. So it wasn't that I had any special access, it was just that I had the opportunity to take stock and when I did that, I couldn't reconcile myself to why these enormous lies were being told about the war. It was obvious to me that they were being told, and I couldn't justify that. That being said, I didn't have any grand political awakening at the moment. There was just this sort of creeping disillusionment and reassessment, and I couldn't honestly tell you exactly where it led me or where it wound up. I've always thought of myself primarily as a writer and an observer more than as somebody with very strong political convictions. 

G. Greenwald: You know, it's interesting. I had kind of an eye-opening experience when I worked on both reporting, on WikiLeaks stories and, then, also working with Edward Snowden, whom himself joined the Army after 9/11 and wanted to go fight in the war in Iraq, believing that it was just a noble cause. He broke his legs in basic training, ended up in the CIA and the NSA, and then kind of discovered while he was doing that, that there was a gap between what the government had made people believe it was doing and what it was doing. But also, even as part of that reporting, I so often would hear from people who had been in the military or who worked inside the intelligence community, who were most open to the notion that a lot of these secrets needed to be unveiled, not because they were fans of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden even, but just because they were much more open to the fact that the government lies about the reality because they saw it up close and, say, very militaristic and uber patriotic pundits who say it's never justifiable to criticize what the U.S. government is doing. And in terms of this kind of political change I had referenced in the beginning, to me, it seems like one of the most significant parts of this change is that the people who are very skeptical of and concerned about the behavior of the intelligence community used to be found, I think, primarily on the left, and now they're more often found on the right. And that has kind of… I feel like I'm sort of sitting in the same place and things have swirled around me. 

A big part of your article talks about the role of the intelligence community in building a censorship regime. You even compare some of the things you saw in terms of intelligence activities in Afghanistan and what was being used against the Taliban or al-Qaida, or the entire country, about Afghanistan to what's being done domestically to American citizens on U.S. soil. Has your view of the intelligence community changed in the sense that it became much more skeptical, that you've become more concerned about what they're doing? Or do you think they've just gotten more menacing in terms of our rights – or some combination of both? 

Jacob Siegel:  More the former. My views have certainly changed. I do think that they've gotten more menacing. But to take Assange as an example, you know, my sense of Julian Assange's role in the political process in 2016, let's say, there was a more or less fair and open political contest between Democrats and Republicans, and Assange was a kind of interloper in that political process. And, you know, I might have said the same thing about some of the things you were doing at the time, Glenn, I might have seen them in the same way, because my sense was that already there were referees, there was an officiated contest, there was procedural constitutional democracy and to have people come in from the outside, whether it was Kim Dotcom or Assange, and try and influence the electorate by strategically exposing secrets, as it were, I saw that as a kind of untoward interference. 

What I realize now is that there was not a fairly officiated electoral process and that the people who were keeping the secrets were the Democratic National Committee, the intelligence agencies, and that Assange – and so far, as he was pushing to open up the secrets – was actually acting more in the spirit, let's say, of a truly fair democratic process. But that was a gradual realization for me. There were a number of things, one thing after another, you know, realizing that Adam Schiff was lying over and over again. I couldn't reconcile myself to that after a while. The Russian bounties story, I couldn't reconcile myself to that. I'd always maybe had some skepticism of the, you know, unaccountable power in the intelligence agencies. I was aware of some of that history but once I saw all these things together, you know, the accumulation changed my view. 

G. Greenwald:   One of the things that struck me in the article when I sat down to read it was you began a paragraph devoted to the scandals of Joseph McCarthy and the controversy surrounding what he did, namely, accusing all sorts of people of being covert agents of the Kremlin, claiming that he had secret lists of people whom he could prove to hide allegiances, American citizens, well, allegiances to the Russians. And I recall the very first time I heard the Russiagate narrative presented in May 2016, which was when the Clinton campaign released this very ominous ad with that kind of heavy music and that deep intonation – “What is Donald Trump doing with the Kremlin?” You know, I immediately assumed that everybody remotely affiliated with the left or with liberalism steeped in the evils of McCarthyism would be horrified by this resurrection of this narrative. It was almost verbatim what was used and what was said. And to this very day, anyone who now stands up and questions the proxy war in Ukraine or who dissented from Russiagate was accused of being a Russian agent. Some people on the right still look at that era favorably. I think Ann Coulter wrote a whole book trying to resurrect McCarthy's reputation, but leaving that aside, why did you begin with that example? What is it about that example and what parallels do you see in what's happening now? 

Jacob Siegel:  I mean, for exactly the reason you just pointed out, which is that for more than half a century, the Red Scare and McCarthyism was not just one historical episode among many for American liberals, which is, you know, the tradition and the milieu that I grew up in was that kind of Cold War American liberalism and its aftermath is something I'm very familiar with. And McCarthyism was, if not the central moral allegory, then certainly the central moral allegory of the last 50 years, let's say. And it was supposed to have revealed the true face of America and what the American political system was capable of. And all of that was supposed to be in the DNA of American liberalism. And to see all of that abandoned so quickly, to see it abandoned – abandonment is the wrong word – to see precisely the thing that American liberalism had supposedly been against – it had to find itself in opposition to – to see it so quickly and wholeheartedly embraced, seemed to me significant and to signal the kind of epochal change which is that something from the polls had reversed somehow. And north was south and south was north now. And also just the parallels were so striking with the two secret lists in narrative terms – McCarthy with his list, you know, the famous list that he brandished and then never actually produced, and then this Hamilton 68 secret list that they couldn't produce, they couldn't reveal to the public. And so, I found it – I couldn't open it any other way. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, even if people generally support the notion that there was more communist infiltration of the United States in the 1950s than was known or whatever, it's still seemingly a support for the core tenets of McCarthyism because all of that was based on things like secret list and destruction of reputation with no due process and all kinds of excessive abuses of power that we should all object to, no matter what the cause. 

One of the things I think was very important that you did in telling this story was you emphasized the way in which the kind of accelerant, the steroids for all of this stuff – the regime of censorship, the involvement of the security state in our politics – was the obviously shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016, which I think people have forgotten. Almost nobody was expecting and was a huge shock to the system and caused a lot of these previously unthinkable things to just explode in power. But as you note, a lot of these things were a long time in the making well before Trump and you specifically point to the proximity of the Obama White House and Obama himself on the one hand, and Silicon Valley on the other, and the use, for example, of propaganda and disinformation over the Internet by Hillary Clinton's State Department and her use of people who then went on to work for Google, all these kind of, you know, Internet geniuses who thought they had found a real home in the Obama administration. Talk a little bit about how some of these things had their roots not in Trump's election, but back in the things the Obama administration was doing. 

Jacob Siegel: Yeah. So if you look at the Obama administration in that era, the Internet freedom agenda, what you find is that many of the tools of disinformation and the disinformation apparatus had their debut during that period, either as offensive weapons to be used against official enemies of the United States, ISIS in particular, or they were debuted because it was the Hillary Clinton State Department, in particular, that was criticizing other countries for engaging in precisely the kinds of activities that Clinton would later lead others to crusade against disinformation. 

But to begin with, first, there was a very close alignment between the Obama administration and Google in particular. And because of the kind of spectacular nature of the Twitter Files and because of Facebook being such a great and easy target in a lot of ways – you know, Google has skated off in a lot of the analysis of this censorship industrial complex and that's unfortunate because Google really plays a leading role in this. And it begins not in the coercive counter-disinformation register. It begins in this kind of big data political engineering register that the Obama administration embraces wholeheartedly. Assange, we mentioned a moment ago, was writing about this quite early on, talking about Google serving as a kind of shadow State Department for the Obama administration. There was a record-setting personnel exchange between the White House and Google, with a record number of meetings being held between the two. [So, you] see this very close alignment between these powerful tech companies that are effectively private surveillance platforms and the Obama administration, which goes on to become the sort of backbone of this permanent ruling party of the United States. 

G. Greenwald: One of the things that strikes me so much in the TikTok debate – whether to ban TikTok or not – and the kind of other bills to give the government even greater powers to ban platforms when they decide there are similar threats, is that – for a long time – the critique of countries like China and Iran and Russia was that these governments were despotic precisely because they refused to allow American technology platforms such as Google and Facebook to enter their country, or at least operate without a lot of constraints. Their concern was that they would be used to disseminate disinformation, they would destabilize their countries by spreading propaganda, by undermining the health of their citizenry in their country, and they would be called despotic for wanting to ban Google and Facebook, or at least requiring them to submit to a whole bunch of censorship rules in order to operate on their soil. And now, we have the United States leaving aside the merits of the debate over whether to ban TikTok, essentially, saying the same thing, that we can't allow foreign platforms, foreign social media companies to be on our soil because they'll propagandize their citizenry, they'll spread disinformation. I draw that parallel because it seems like there's a similar parallel in terms of some of the things that Hillary Clinton's State Department was doing. I remember she would go around with these two little kids, Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, who were supposedly whizz-kids of Silicon Valley, and the work they were actually doing was designed to allow citizens of those countries to get around the censorship regime that had been imposed by countries like China and Iran and Russia by making the Internet open, by allowing them to use the Internet anonymously to get around with things like VPNs. 

Given all of that, how do you see the similarities between what we have been long condemning in these countries in terms of controlling the Internet, censoring the Internet on the grounds that those countries said they had to protect their citizens from disinformation and foreign propaganda, with what the U.S. government is doing now in terms of what American citizens can and can't hear. 

Jacob Siegel: Well, look, I, I guess I have a somewhat, I don't know, complicated – but my view is that governments have a right to – “right” is a wrong word – governments have the prerogative to regulate communications platforms as corporate entities, let's say […] 

G. Greenwald: The way they regulate the other, the way they regulate banks or oil companies or any other company. 

Jacob Siegel: Precisely – and, in this case, a company or a sector that has monopolistic power over very key resource information which impacts directly political sovereignty. So, you know, I have a basically civil libertarian view of not infringing on speech rights on those platforms but, in terms of the kind of the corporate structure of the platforms themselves, I think there's no reason. The original argument, the original Clinton State Department argument, actually goes back to Bill Clinton. It goes back to the mid-nineties, the first dot-com boom. That argument is that we need totally unrestricted global markets for Internet companies to spread democracy everywhere and unimpeded access to the globe. You know, I think that's the argument that doesn't actually hold up but not that I'm justifying speech restrictions. 

G. Greenwald: Well, what's the zero in on that? I remember after 9/11, the kind of slogan, the motto of the media, and the government, was “9/11 changed everything.” I'm not entirely sure that it actually did. I think it took a lot of things that were already existing and expanded it. I think it's actually more accurate to use that motto about the election of Donald Trump. That actually did change everything or certainly fundamentally transformed things, making a lot of things that were once unthinkable now a reality. 

And you identify the election of Trump and the decision by Democrats and the U.S. security state – and kind of the establishment, more broadly – that was playing with a bunch of different explanations. Originally, they were going to blame WikiLeaks. They wanted to blame the New York Times. They wanted to blame Jim Comey. Then, they kind of landed on blaming Russia, and Russiagate, in turn, ended up being the foundation for so much of what ended up happening that your piece talks about in terms of the dangers of Internet control. Describe why you think Russiagate and Trump’s selection were so fundamental. How is that used to do all of this?  

Jacob Siegel: Yeah, they blamed everybody but the Clinton camp. Right? 

G. Greenwald: The people who actually paid to win that election. 

Jacob Siegel: Paid to win that election, decided not to campaign in the upper Midwest. Yeah. Everybody but them.

So, what Russiagate did, I think, was it both served as this kind of coordinating mechanism that brought these various factions of the ruling party – ruling party might be a bit too strong – but various factions of the most powerful sectors of American society that might have had implicit interests in common but had not been explicitly coordinated prior to that, and it brought them together and it brought them together to oppose Donald Trump. And there was a kind of popular base to the opposition to Donald Trump, which is the resistance that portrayed him as a fascist and portrayed him as a Russian stooge and had that kind of moral dimension. And then there was the fact that Donald Trump was obviously a threat to various deep-seated business interests, defense sector interests – that he was threatening to pull out of NATO, that he was threatening to renegotiate trade terms with China – and so, were these various reasons for Trump's outward displays of, you know, at times, quite ugly nativism that really did inflame people. I don't think this was all purely cynical. I think it could only work as well as it did, in part, because Trump really did inspire a reaction from people that was outsized, that was unlike the reaction we had gotten from other politicians. And that that, together with the way in which he threatened these really core interests of the most powerful sectors of American society, put in place the conditions for coordination between those sectors that had not previously existed. So, there was no reason, for instance, to think that Wall Street and Silicon Valley and NGO staffers and The Washington Post newsroom were all going to be aligned – that they were going to be explicitly aligned, I should say – functionally, operationally aligned, and not simply have implicit affinities with one another. But it was intrinsic to the war against disinformation, intrinsic and essential through the counter disinformation and its notion of a “whole-of-society” effort that these various powerful sectors would be lashed to one another in a common cause, in a national mobilization, very much on the model of what happens in times of war. When there's a war, we drop these divisions between the public and the private sector and we adopt that kind of central planning for the war effort, right? It was quite similar to that. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, this is one of the things – just in terms of illustrating how radical I think your critique was or your history was – you do compare the pretext that was used for the War on Terror or the war in Iraq, kind of the central falsehood about weapons of mass destruction that justified the war in Iraq, some of the fears around al-Qaida that led to a lot of the excesses of the War on Terror to what's taking place now. And so, when you say that there were parts of Trump and his nativism that were genuinely ugly and that were genuinely kind of frightening, I think, to a lot of not just establishment interests, but a lot of people who genuinely were frightened by this kind of new ideology, you know, it's also the case that people were also genuinely frightened by al-Qaida and by 9/11. I lived in Manhattan on 9/11. I remember very well, very vividly, all the sensations of anger and rage and fear and concern because our country was attacked. And the lesson of 9/11 that I really thought we had learned – maybe it's just too rational, maybe there are a lot of people who didn't live through it – was that when you actually feel a valid fear of some threat, it's important that you don't let establishment institutions, the government, the media, whomever, exploit those fears to get you to acquiesce to things that you’ll later regret, either because they were worse than the fear itself or were in some other ways not related to the fear – that you kind of got manipulated into saying yes to the Patriot Act; yes to warrantless surveillance; yes to, you know, torture; yes to process-free detentions, all because we have this genuine fear of al-Qaida. 

And so, when it comes to even what you might describe as valid concerns about Trump, why do you think that that lesson – and it wasn't just for 9/11, but prior historical events as well – wasn't kind of in place enough? Why was everybody – not everybody, but so many people, so many institutions – so easily manipulated by fear of this singular individual to radically change their views on almost every major political question and really get to the point that Sam Harris said that everything – lying, censoring and even disinformation – is justified in the name of stopping Trump because he's such a singular threat. 

Jacob Siegel:  Just to put a finer point on what Sam Harris said – that it was okay and he would turn and look the other way if there were dead children in a basement if that's what was on Hunter Biden’s laptops because that's how significant the Trump threat was – look, I don't think that societies learn lessons. Individuals learn lessons. So, I understand where you're coming from but I think that's a kind of hopeful position that isn't borne out and that certainly that unaccountable bureaucracies don't learn the lessons. And they exist in no small part to not learn lessons. And the not learning of lessons becomes a core function and a kind of a primary drive of the bureaucracies to avoid at all costs the learning of lessons, lest those lessons point to the needlessness or the excesses of the bureaucracy itself. So, I've sort of given up on this on this hope that there are collective lessons to be learned in that way. There are only carefully guarded institutions that are transparent enough and locally controlled enough that people can actually have influence and impact over them and that can preserve lessons in that way. But to the question of why people responded to Trump in this sort of apocalyptic register – leave aside for a moment why, let's say, the defense establishment or why Wall Street responded to him that way because I think that's maybe easier to understand. They saw him as a threat […] 

G. Greenwald: A genuine threat, a rational, genuine threat to their interests. 

Jacob Siegel: That's right. Why did so many normal people respond to him that way? And I think tens of millions of normal people did. There are two answers. One is that he seemed to play on these very suppressed and things that people were very uncomfortable with, that they wanted to have overcome – that we had somehow moved beyond the kind of crassness and racism and nativism that Trump represented. Something like that. The best way I could put it is that he was an embarrassment. And there are few things worse in life than an embarrassment. It's like when you think about what you're really afraid of, it's not being kidnaped by al-Qaida and tortured to death. You're really afraid of being embarrassed at a party or something like that – and Trump was a kind of hideous, unavoidable embarrassment who also sort of pointed the embarrassment back at those people by saying to them, “Oh, your niceties are foolish, you're the fool.” And so that was really difficult. 

The other part of it, which became more significant over the years and really can't be discounted, is that the secrecy regime that we're talking about and that the intelligence bureaucracies propagated – and not just the intelligence bureaucracies, other federal bureaucracies also which use secrecy as a form of regulatory power, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out many years ago. That secrecy, that culture of secrecy and that culture of sort of selective information operations being used to manipulate the public drives people crazy. It is not compatible with reason and self-government. It makes people suspicious of their neighbors, suspicious of their own shadows. It makes them believe in monsters that don't exist. So, all of those things together, I think, produced this kind of singular, totally outsized reaction that Trump inspired. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, these tactics have been time-tested over many decades and have been very effectively deployed often in other countries, as you point out, and now are kind of being directed at our own population. And I think that's, for me at least, one of the most significant changes in what you're describing.

 There are a couple of other questions that I want to ask you about. One paragraph, in particular, was very striking to me, both in terms of how extreme the terminology that you used is as well as kind of how it goes to the core of the matter. You wrote:

To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps:  America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. (Jacob Siegel. March 28, 2023). 

That’s some pretty extreme steps that you claim the establishment is undertaking to make America less free and less safe. What kind of concrete examples did you have in mind when you're pointing to things like silencing dissent and taking away the right of rabble-rousers or people a little too far outside establishment constraints to be able to speak or even exercise basic foundational rights in the Constitution? 

Jacob Siegel: I mean, there are just dozens of examples of not fringe publications, not fringe figures, but people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who is saying that, you know, what democracy really needs is to censor free speech, saying that Elon Musk's called – I'm going to mess up the quote and it deserves to be read precisely because it's so insane – but basically Reich says something along the lines that Elon Musk promising to turn Twitter into a real free speech platform fulfills the dream of Pol Pot and Stalin and every other dictator. I quote from an essay in the New York Times Magazine by a Yale graduate and writer, named Emily Bazelon, all about how disinformation and the infodemic, which was another one of these pseudoscientific terms trotted out during the COVID pandemic to conflate and erase the boundaries between disease on the one hand and war and speech, and to just erase all of these essential boundaries but, Bazelon’s argument is that free speech is essentially the American version of free speech, it is obsolete and has become dangerous and is empowering radicals. And this is an argument that's made over and over and over again by people in publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic Magazine and by, you know, high-level Democratic Party officials. It becomes the conventional wisdom. So, you know, I appreciate you calling it extreme, and I understand why it sounds extreme in that context. I have to give great credit to my editor at Tablet for never asking me to pull a single punch on any of this. And, you know, I didn't write anything to be extreme. It's not in my nature to write […] 

G. Greenwald: You're generally pretty moderate in your right away and in your rhetoric, which is why I think this piece was striking. And to be clear, at the end of the day, what's extreme is not what you're saying, but what the people whose behavior you're describing are actually doing. There's no way to describe what they're doing without using extreme language because it really is so extreme when you have the establishment and the key institutions of authority, now explicitly, essentially arguing that we can no longer tolerate a free Internet or even free speech because the dangers of it outweigh the dangers of curbing it. That, by nature, is kind of extreme. 

Let me ask you just a little bit about that notion, though, about free speech and censorship in this prevailing mentality. I always find that it's obviously a lot easier for people to defend free speech when it comes to censorship of ideas with which they agree, or the silencing of people whom they vaguely regard as allies. Elon Musk ran into this when he was banging the table and saying he was going to usher in absolute free speech and when someone asked him what that meant, he said that means allowing all speech except that which is illegal under Supreme Court precedent and Brandenburg and all that, even though he recognizes he's not bound by that, that's for the government. He kind of said that's going to be my guiding principles. And then, months after he took over, he's banning people like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, not because they've said anything even arguably illegal, but because those ideas are really offensive to maybe him or to advertisers or to others. He specifically said he would ban Alex Jones because Alex Jones, his comments about Sandy Hook, really struck him personally as offensive because he had a baby who died. So, I'm wondering, where do you draw that line when you're defending free speech – when you're kind of ringing about the dangers of censorship – do you see cases like, say, Kanye West or Nick Fuentes being banned or Alex Jones being banned? There are a lot of examples of, say, Palestinian activists being banned, critics of Israel being banned. Are those issues that are concerning to you as well? Where do you draw those lines? 

[00:56:09] Jacob Siegel:  I mean, the kind of operative question to me is, is there a collusion between the state and the corporation involved in the banning? You know, I think that's a bright red line. So, what would I personally advise Elon Musk to do with Twitter? I would say allow for more sort of local community-based moderation. Seems to me an approach that might work rather than trying to have – I don't think this model of centralization, vertical centralization, is good, personally. But, you know, I start to get outside of my depth with some of this stuff and I can be persuaded to take different views. 

In general, I think the more speech, the better. I think that where there is a case for banning private platforms, it's best when it's done at the most local possible level and most dangerous when it's done in a kind of top-down manner, and especially when it's done at the whim of a single owner. You know, Elon Musk having a personal connection to Sandy Hook is compelling for Elon Musk, but it's a very bad precedent for policy at a company that controls the core political speech rights of tens of millions of voters. That being said if there is no direct connection with the government – and let's pretend for a second that that's possible, and I don't actually think that that is possible because I think whoever owns Twitter, whether it's somebody like Musk who's done something incredible by disclosing this stuff with the Twitter files or somebody else who's more willing to go along with the dictates of the FBI, let's say – whoever owns it, it still functions as a surveillance platform in some way, still collecting user data on the backend. And we don't know how these decisions are being made and they're still fundamentally opaque. But, you know, if you can say that there is no direct coordination with the government and then not try and parse that too closely for the moment, I think, you know, it's the platforms having some kind of speech guidelines is a reasonable and probably a necessary thing for them to do, to maintain the kind of communities or user bases that are going to allow them to grow. But, you know, this is something where I don’t get into policy prescription stuff. It's not my strong […] 

G. Greenwald: Right. The focus of the article is on the role the government is playing in imposing this regime. 

We're just getting out of time, so just going to pick a couple of questions that I absolutely have to ask you. One of which is you devoted an entire section of the article – you had 13 parts or chapters – to the case of how the media and Big Tech treated the question of Hunter Biden's laptop. It's amazing that liberals have been trained the minute you even mention the phrase Hunter Biden's laptop, they've automatically been conditioned to believe you're talking about something trivial. Why did you decide to devote an entire chapter to that episode and you emphasize the importance of it when doing so, what importance do you see in it? 

Jacob Siegel: What could possibly be less trivial than 49 senior U.S. intelligence officials and the FBI lying openly to the American public and pressuring these social media platforms to censor reporting, weeks before a presidential election, and censoring the second oldest newspaper in the United States? I mean, I can't think of a more direct, more brazen assault, not only on freedom of speech. We're talking about what people think voting is. What do they think their voting rights and their political sovereignty are? You know, if you're kept in the dark and spun around and then, released at the last second and presented with two false choices and allowed to pick one, that's not exactly self-government. And so, I look at the way in which people have been – sort of the liberals in particular – have been conditioned to sort of yawn and parrot the AOC line about how this is still a half-baked story or whatever, as a reflexive response that also demonstrates the power of this sort of memetic propagation of attitudes that in a sense is the flipside of censorship. So, if censorship exists to eliminate certain forms of information […] 

G. Greenwald: Disinformation. Disinformation. You mean if censorship exists to elaborate disinformation... 

Jacob Siegel:  Well, what they call disinformation. I call it information.

G. Greenwald: Okay. Okay. Yeah, Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which is what this case illustrates, right, is that the people who claim to be fighting against disinformation were the ones who spread it as they did in so many other cases. 

Jacob Siegel: But the flipside of that is that there's also a powerful way to create a kind of conformity of opinion on critical issues like the Biden laptop, for instance, where you have first, you know, the press all falls in line. Virtually the entire press establishment falls in line. It becomes verboten to talk about this. And how does this work? Again, through kind of embarrassment, you know, you're mocked. If you take this seriously, you're scorned by your peers and your colleagues. You're conditioned to treat this as if it's no big deal and anybody who says otherwise is a right-wing fanatic but I think that it's as big a deal as one can find. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah. I recently said on one of my shows that not only will likely talk about the Hunter Biden laptop story until the day I die, but I'll probably request there be something about it on my tombstone because it's not only so gargantuan but what infuriates me the most, aside from the fact that the people who constantly claim to be the warriors against disinformation are the ones who spread those lies, as they so often did in the COVID case and so many others, including examples you mentioned, is that, even though we now have the definitive proof from the media institutions, they tell us to trust that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic all along and was never Russian disinformation. Not a single media outlet that spread that lie has gone back in the wake of this new evidence and confronted what they did or even explained it, let alone retracted it. And the same thing happened in the story that you mentioned in your article where Jeff Gerth, who was at the belly of the beast. In the main, you cannot get more mainstream media than him, he worked for 30 years at The New York Times and then went to ProPublica and he was writing in Columbia Journalism Review, the most mainstream journalism outlet, a media criticism. He wrote a four-part indictment of the media's lies and recklessness in Russiagate, and not a single target or object of his critique even bothered to acknowledge it, just like they did with the Hunter Biden story. 

And so, I want to ask you, in terms of the repercussions of your story, which is this opus about, you know, touching every major institution of American political life, is it the case, as I perceive now, the only people who have really talked about it and acknowledged it is people who were already concerned about it in the first place. And given this kind of ability that these media outlets have to silo off any information that's negative – they don't care that they got caught lying in the hundred batting cages because they know their audience doesn't care if they confront it or apologize for it, they probably want them not to. What hope is there to be able to reform these institutions, if you have any? 

Jacob Siegel:  I don't have too much hope to reform these institutions. I am afraid that I think some of them are probably too far gone. But maybe we just need new institutions. I think that this has become the overriding institutional imperative, precisely to never face up to the failures, and that creates this escalating cycle where, by refusing to face up to these failures, you then double down on the idea that it's everybody else's fault. So, you lock yourself into a fraudulent analytical framework because you won't acknowledge what you've done wrong. You blame other people, you declare them extremists or conspiracy theorists, which is itself an error and specious and fraudulent. So now, you've made another error, by refusing to confront your original error, you've not doubled down on another error. Meanwhile, trust in the media plummets as a result. How do you metabolize trust in the media? You say it's due to disinformation and domestic extremism, and so then you have to go get more disinformation and domestic extremism orders, and this sort of goes on in perpetuity. There are still great reporters and almost all are there. […]

G. Greenwald:  For sure. For sure.

Jacob Siegel:  Doing very good. Right? 

G. Greenwald: These are institutional critiques.

Jacob Siegel: But as institutions and, you know, maybe – I just don't know enough – maybe, in a longer cycle, I would be able to see how they would escape from this. It's difficult for me to see, frankly. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I agree completely. I think they're largely irredeemable. I think their business model kind of depends on this polarization, which is why, for me, the only solution is, as you said, kind of constructing new institutions. But that depends upon the ability to do so with the free Internet. And I think censorship has become not only a way of kind of shielding their disinformation but also preventing competitors from emerging, because anyone who wants to compete, not just compete with them in a business sense. We have lots of new media outlets that kind of click into the same narrative. But anyone that wants to present an alternative way of seeing the world is instantly labeled “sewers of disinformation” and then a kind of censorship regime is unleashed against it precisely to prevent that from merging. I think that's the thing that they fear most, knowing how widely they're hated. 

Jacob Siegel: And, you know, the great example of this is something you wrote about Glenn. It's what happened with Parler right after January 6. That's an incredible story because it shows the way that these interests converge. Parler emerges right after the Capitol riot. I forget the statistic you had in your piece, but it was […] 

G. Greenwald: The number one most downloaded app in the Apple Play Store and in Google Play Store more than Instagram, more than TikTok, they all migrated there when they saw Trump being censored from Big Tech. 

Jacob Siegel:  And shutting down this fast-growing new number one is both something that the established tech companies want, and it's something the intelligence agencies want, and it's something the Democratic Party wants, and it's something that the press wants because they have been yoked together into this kind of monolithic entity with a shared set of core existential interests. And, if you push hard enough on that, you'll see the divisions but it's incredible and difficult to pull apart once you recognize the independence of the press and the kind of imperatives of the security agencies are at this point very difficult to pull apart. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, absolutely. It's a merger of major parts of both the public and the private sector. Public and private power which, ironically, is one of the academic definitions of fascism, as they claim that they're fighting fascism. But you're absolutely right. It's a consortium of institutions aligned, at least to a very large extent. And I actually think, at the end of the day, what your article does better than anything is illustrating the way in which they are actually working in collaboration toward a common goal. So, I really want to thank you for that article. I think it was incredibly illuminating. I'm going to badger everybody and on every platform to go read it. It’s worthwhile. And I also appreciate your taking the time to talk to us tonight. Thanks so much. 

Jacob Siegel: It was great being here. Thank you for having me. Great. 

G. Greenwald: Have a nice evening. 

So that concludes our show for this evening. For those of you who have been watching on our Local's platform, every Tuesday and Thursday, we have our live aftershow where we take your questions and respond to your feedback. To be able to be a part of that, simply join our Locals community where you also have exclusive written journalism that we post there and all kinds of community features as well as exclusive access to the transcripts for every show that we post within 24 hours of each show appearing. 

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Have a great evening, everybody.

Note: watch the full episode here:

Good evening. It's Wednesday, May 3rd. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. eastern. Exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

 Tonight, it was shocking enough when Fox News, with no warning whatsoever, unceremoniously announced last Monday that its top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, would no longer appear on the network, despite the fact that Carlson had cultivated millions of fans over the six years he hosted the 8 p.m. show and despite the fact that Carlson led them to six consecutive years of ratings win, Fox made no effort to explain to his loyal viewers why the show's last day was to be the Friday night show before the announcement was made, just no effort at all to accommodate or express the slightest interest in the anger and confusion of their loyal audience. But Fox's strange behavior has now become contemptible. While Tucker released a two-minute video last week that contained not a single word of criticism for Fox or his colleagues or any of its executives, Fox has been launching a vicious, one-sided, and seemingly still escalating war, with the apparent goal of permanently destroying Tucker Carlson's character and reputation. 

Just today, The New York Times published an article that purported to describe the thought process of Fox's board of directors, which includes, among others, former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and it also contained a leaked text that was designed, obviously, to make Tucker look like a racist – a narrative that the Fox leakers aggressively cultivated, using The New York Times as their partners, as one of the reasons why they decided to fire him. What is Fox's goal in this one-sided war of character destruction, and why are they seemingly indifferent, even eager to permanently alienate Carlson's most loyal viewers, especially as they watch their prime time ratings decline rapidly since Carlson's unexplained departure, especially among younger viewers? We’ll examine this strange and increasingly disturbing episode. 

Then, a drone attack last night appears to have targeted the Kremlin, where video footage captured explosions near the government buildings in Moscow, including the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin was unhurt in the attack, but Russia is unsurprisingly vowing aggressive and escalatory retaliation against Ukraine, whom they naturally blame for the attack. While Kyiv denies any involvement, Ukrainian elements, including their postal service, were seen officially celebrating the attack. And as is true for the U.S. and NATO regarding the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline, Ukraine is obviously going to be the most likely suspect in the eyes of the Russians. All of this once again raises the question, why is the United States so eager, so willing to incur the vastly increasing risks of this extremely dangerous war? For what interests and for whose? 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. We are available on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms. We post the episodes 12 hours after they are first broadcast here, live, on Rumble. You can follow us there. Find us,  rate us, and review us, that helps the visibility of the show.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. 

One of the most unexplained, bizarre and unexpected developments in cable news took place last week when Fox, in a very cursory statement, unceremoniously announced that the Tucker Carlson program, which was not only the highest-rated program currently on Fox but the highest-rated program in the history of cable news – the history of the medium – as of Friday night before, would no longer appear on the program. It was terminated. Fox was done with Tucker Carlson and his program. They added insult to injury by issuing the most stinting and ungenerous statement possible, the stingiest words imaginable, essentially saying we thank Tucker for his service to our network and wish him luck in his future endeavors. No attempt at all to explain to the millions of people that Fox has spent tons of money cultivating over the years to watch Tucker’s show. Why it is that their favorite host, the person whom they most trust, has just simply disappeared from the Fox airwaves? No respect for the viewers, nothing but contempt for them – actually, just announced in a short note that he was gone and then asked Brian Kilmeade, the host of “Fox & Friends”, who was in a very difficult position, to guest-host the show Monday evening. And they gave him about 12 seconds at the start of the show for him to say, essentially, “You probably heard Fox and Tucker have parted ways and Tucker's a friend of mine and always will be. And now on to the news.” 

So, the entire episode has been shrouded in mystery because Fox has said nothing about why this has happened and Tucker issued a two-minute video in which he essentially vowed that he will continue to always tell the truth. He said that if you do tell the truth, you pay a price, you will end up suffering, which is absolutely true. But there wasn't a single hint of criticism of any Fox executive or Fox News itself in that video. Almost immediately following that video, Fox began leaking to the media that it had compiled a dossier on Tucker that it was prepared to unleash a nuclear war arsenal against him if Tucker goes nuclear on Fox. And that makes sense. 

When I left The Intercept, I not only announced I was leaving, but I condemned them in very vehement terms because I felt an obligation to my readers not just to announce in a cursory note that I was leaving but, given the media outlet was founded on my name and I had been defending it since 2013, I felt an obligation to explain what I thought had gone so wrong inside that institution that I felt compelled to leave. And as a result, The Intercept then turned around and attacked me and my character and made allegations against me, which I completely expected and thought was fair – if I was going to attack them, I thought it was totally expected that they would attack me back. And they did. And I never minded and I thought that was fine. But in this case, Tucker left or was fired and didn't utter a word of criticism. He didn't tell his audience not to watch Fox. He didn't tell his audience or anybody else that this was Fox selling out or trying to appease liberal public opinion. He just issued a two-minute video after three days of silence, basically saying, I'm not going anywhere, I'll let you know what it is that I'm doing. That was it. And ever since, there has been an avalanche of leaks clearly coming from the highest levels of Fox News that are not designed to shed light on why Fox fired Tucker. They're designed to destroy Tucker Carlson's character and reputation forever by branding him a white supremacist, a racist, a misogynist, and a liar. And to do so, they are partnering with the very liberal media outlets that have been most bent on Fox's destruction for years, starting with The New York Times. 

So, let's look today at this incredibly new escalation, this significant escalation, and Fox's attack on the person who until about two weeks ago, by all appearances, has been somebody beloved by the Murdoch family, because he made them so much money and because Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's son who runs Fox, believed that Tucker was a very respectable face for the network. I have tried doing a lot of reporting on finding out the real reason why Fox fired Tucker. I obviously know a lot of people at Fox. I know Tucker well. He's become a friend of mine over the years. I know other people at Fox who are at Fox, who have been at Fox. Nobody knows the real reason. People can speculate, there are little clues here and there but the real story of why Fox decided to fire its top-rated host and risk what has happened and what everyone knew happened, which is a radical decline in their ratings and prime time – maybe they'll recover, maybe they won't – is a story that no one seems to know. And it is amazing to watch this war now being waged on Tucker's character by the people for whom he has loyally worked for the last six years. So, let's look at what they did today. 

Here is The New York Times article. The headline is “Carlson's Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: It's Not How White Men Fight.”  You can tell from the headline that The New York Times is reporting not to have gotten a hold of attacks that makes Tucker look bad, although they did. That could have come from anywhere. That could have come from a lower-level Fox person. It could have come from someone inside Dominion's law firm or Fox's law firm or – who knows – when there's litigation of this kind between Dominion and Fox and emails are flying around, anyone can get access to emails and link them. It's impossible to say for sure who did it. What is so amazing about this New York Times article is it is purporting to describe insight into how the Fox board of directors viewed this text and the thought process that led them to fire Tucker, which could have only come from the board of directors itself. No one else will have the ability to convince The New York Times to publish claims about what the Fox board of directors is thinking other than people on the board of directors of Fox or at the highest levels of Fox News – Fox Management Suzanne Scott or Lachlan Murdoch himself, or someone on the board. That is where this story came from. That is what is so amazing about it. It is confirmation that Fox is on this warpath against him. There is the subheading “The discovery of the text message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Tucker Carlson's firing.” It's a story by three different New York Times reporters – Jeremy Peters, Michael Schmidt, and Jim Rutenberg. Let's take a look at what it says. 

A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race. 

The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson's firing. The text alarmed the Fox board […] (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

How would they know that that text alarmed the Fox board unless someone on the Fox board told The New York Times? This is what alarmed us. 

The text alarmed the Fox board, which saw the message a day before Fox was set to defend itself against Dominion before a jury. The board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial when Mr. Carlson was on the stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise broader questions about the company […] (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

Let me just stop here and explain why this makes no sense to me. So first of all, it is far from clear why a private text that we're about to show you that Tucker Carlson wrote, that was intended to be private, where he actually talks about him watching a video of three white Trump supporters ganging up on an Antifa protester and beating him to a pulp and the feelings that he had watching that, including the fact that he was at first biting himself, rooting for the Antifa person to have the crap kicked out of him. And then he realizes that's not how he wants to go through life, feeling that that's not a humanitarian sensation, that even this Antifa person, despite hating his politics and maybe even him, has a family, has a mother, has a father, has siblings who all of whom would be in deep mourning and grief if he were actually killed. And he said to himself by succumbing to these temptations, I will be as bad as him. He also said in there that ganging up on people this way is a dishonorable thing to do. It's not how white people fight. That's what made the text so inflammatory. Why would this text possibly be admissible in a lawsuit that Dominion brought against Fox claiming defamation regarding Fox allegations by some host or the airing of some claims that Dominion voting machines were used to defraud the election? It's extremely unlikely that this text would be admissible. The idea that they fear that this text would emerge as part of the trial is extremely unbelievable to me. But even if it were the case that they feared that this email might emerge during the trial, they settled the lawsuit with Dominion. There was no trial and they fired him after that. So, when they fired him, there was no concern that this would emerge as part of the trial. This version makes no sense. Maybe they feared this would come out in some other way but, ironically, it came out because someone at Fox clearly gave it to The New York Times. And why would you do that? Again, you can only get that if the board went to the New York Times and said, “Let us tell you why we decided to fire Tucker because we discovered he's an unreconstructed racist. We didn't know that before. We only learned it in the past couple of weeks. When we learned it, we decided to fire him.” That's what Fox is saying to the public about Tucker Carlson through The New York Times. 

The day after the discovery, the board told Fox executives it was bringing in an outside law firm to conduct an investigation into Mr. Carlson's conduct. The text message added to a growing number of internal issues involving Mr. Carlson that led the company's leadership to conclude he was more of a problem than an asset and had to go, according to several people with knowledge of the decision […] (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

Again, those are people inside Fox at high levels of Fox News. This leak would not be happening without the authorization of Lachlan Murdoch and Suzanne Scott and the highest levels of Fox. Why – If you're going to leak this – do you go to the New York Times to do it? 

In other messages, [Tucker] had referred to women – including a senior Fox executive – in crude and misogynistic terms. The message about the fight also played a role in the company's decision to settle with Dominion for $787.5 million, the highest known payout in a defamation case. 

The text message came to the attention of Fox's board of directors and even some senior executives only last month, on the Sunday before the trial was set to begin, according to two people with knowledge of Fox's internal deliberations. At the time, Fox negotiators were entering discussions about an out-of-court settlement ahead of the swearing-in of what was shaping up to be a diverse jury. 

The next day, the board told Fox's leadership about its plan to have the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz to investigate Mr. Carlson. That disclosure set up the possibility that there could be a continuing investigation into what was behind Mr. Carlson's messages at the same time as a trial, and as he was serving as its top host in prime time. 

Fox has not commented about Mr. Carlson's ouster last week beyond an initial statement announcing that they agreed to “part ways” and thanking “him for his service.” It did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday on the contents of Mr. Carlson's redacted message. (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

Look at this lie. This is the game they play. “Fox has not commented about Mr. Carlson's ouster last week beyond that initial statement.” Everything I just read you was Fox commenting, just doing it, in the slimiest way possible, anonymously, into the New York Times but, of course, everything that I just read to you came from Fox. It's borderline lying to say that ‘Fox hasn't commented on this’, ‘Fox wouldn't comment when asked’ when they know that all of this came from Fox. 

It remains unclear how the text escaped more notice earlier, given that the Fox legal team was aware of it and other offensive text written by Mr. Carlson. Fox's lawyers had produced attacks as part of the discovery process and were involved in the redactions. Mr. Carlson had even been asked about it during a deposition, according to several people who have read the unredacted transcripts of his deposition. (The New York Times. May 2, 2023).

So, the whole timeline doesn't make sense either. This text was produced as part of the litigation many, many, many months ago. The way that documents get produced in litigation is that the principles – people like Tucker Carlson, or anyone involved in the lawsuit who are required to turn over information, go through their emails, and turn them over to Fox's lawyers; Fox's lawyers go through them, read through them carefully, decide which are privileged, which ones are it, and which ones need to be turned over and then turn them over – so, of course, Fox News's lawyers have seen this. And if it's true that it was going to be used by Dominion and, again, according to the New York Times article, Dominion's lawyers asked Tucker about it in his deposition many months ago, it strains credulity beyond all breaking points that Fox only learned about this within the last ten days, and that was the reason for his firing. It makes absolutely no sense – beyond the fact that how long now have people like The New York Times and liberal media outlets been accusing every Fox News personality of being a racist and a white supremacist, going back to Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck or Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. Everyone who works at Fox is instantly and inherently referred to as a white supremacist. Now, suddenly, they're so worried about that. I believe we have the text itself, which we need to show you. It's pretty much what I described, but I nonetheless want to go over and read it to you. It's the text that just became public today. It's the reason Fox is saying – or a major reason Fox is saying – why they fired Tucker Carlson. It seems like Fox not only talked to The New York Times, but also The Washington Post. They have an article as well. There you see the headlines. “Tucker Carlson's Text on How “White Men Fight” Alarmed Fox Board Members. The lawsuit, a countermove against John Paul Mac Isaac escalates the legal battle.” And here again, you see: 

But in the most startling passage, Carlson asserted flatly that” jumping a guy like that is obvious is dishonorable. It's not how white men fight. 

After seeing the message, the board alerted Fox executives that it planned to retain a law firm to investigate Carlson's behavior, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. (The Washington Post. May 2, 2023).

 

People inside Fox – of the highest levels – also spoke to The Washington Post to give them the same story about how this email or how this text played a crucial role in the decision-making process. Now, listen to the other reason The Washington Post says Fox fired Tucker. 

The Washington Post reported last week that network co-founder Rupert Murdoch had also grown concerned about Carlson's increasingly far-right commentary, including his disparagement of U.S. support for Ukraine, and that executives had noted that his harsh critiques of Fox management and his private communications, including some sexist and vulgar language aimed at a female executive. (The Washington Post. May 2, 2023).

Is opposing U.S. proxy wars fought through the CIA and Raytheon now a “far-right” position? And if it is true that part of the reason Rupert Murdoch wanted Tucker Carlson off the air was that he was one of the only people in media with a show vocally opposing the war in Ukraine – Laura Ingraham has put guests on and questioned it and so did Jesse Watters, but nowhere near, with the level of vitriol and devotion that Tucker has. It's been a crusade of his, from the start, to keep the U.S. out of this war. So first of all, when did it become right-wing to oppose U.S. proxy wars? There are left-wing leaders all over the world, like here in Brazil, Lula da Silva, and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, who also oppose what the U.S. is doing in Ukraine, and many others. How is that a far-right position? And beyond that, even if it were, since when does Rupert Murdoch care about having his media outlets air far-right views? That's what they do. That's what they're for – from the New York Post to the Daily Mail to every other right-wing tabloid. 

I do believe – and there was a report from the new start-up Semafor that I believe we showed you, or maybe we didn’t, so I'll tell you about it. It's a new start-up by Ben Smith, who is the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed and used to work at Politico, then he became the media columnist for The New York Times. He now has a startup journalistic outlet called Semafor, it has people like Dave Weigel, who was The Washington Post’s political reporter, and many other experienced reporters. And several days ago, they reported that, shortly before Fox and the Murdochs fired Tucker, they had a call with President Zelenskyy that included Zelenskyy's concerns or anger about Tucker's views on the war in Ukraine and Semafor strongly implied that there was a causal connection between the Murdochs calling Zelenskyy on the one hand and the decision to fire Tucker on the other. They didn't really have the reporting to prove that connection or to assert it explicitly but they clearly implied it. And here's The Washington Post strongly suggesting the same: part of why Rupert Murdoch wanted Tucker off the air was because of his opposition to the U.S. role in Ukraine. 

So, even if you're somebody who's in doubt about the role of the U.S. in the war in Ukraine or even if you're somebody who supports the U.S. role, isn’t this extremely disturbing? There was one person in all of the media, corporate media, who was a vocal, continuous, devoted critic of the Biden administration's war policy. That person is now off the air. That show no longer exists and, according to reporting from The Washington Post and Semafor, especially The Washington Post, at least in part, his opposition to Biden's war policies in Ukraine is part of why he got fired. Is it not incredibly concerning that we cannot, in our corporate media, accommodate dissent to U.S. foreign policy, especially when it comes to a war that Joe Biden himself has said has brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962? 

Many of you probably don't remember this, but in 2002 and 2003, when there was a very repressive atmosphere for dissent over the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq, there was only one person on all of cable news who had a show who was vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq. The Fox hosts were in favor. People on CNN were in favor. There was one person, on MSNBC, who was as adamantly opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, as Tucker Carlson has been to the U.S. role in Ukraine. His name was Phil Donahue, the longtime daytime talk show host who was known as kind of a left-liberal. He was given his own MSNBC show. It was the beginning of MSNBC's growth. He didn't have a very big audience, but it was bigger than everybody else's on MSNBC, it was the highest-rated MSNBC host, and he was fired in the middle of 2002, or early 2003. And a memo surfaced very shortly after saying the reason he got fired was because MSNBC did not want to be associated with his opposition to the war. It was too inflammatory at the time, and I remember very well I was reading blogs at this point, getting ready to start writing myself, this was a cause of extreme outrage among American progressives and liberals, and the left, that we can't have one host of one TV show who's opposed to this war. We need a 24-hour drumbeat in favor of the invasion of Iraq. No debate or dissent can be permitted? That is the same as what happened here. Where are those voices angrily objecting? Even if you hate Tucker Carlson and everything else he stands for that. What Fox really seems to have done, at least in part, is remove Tucker Carlson from the air because of his heterodox view that conflicts with the majority of Republican establishment lawmakers who support Joe Biden's war policy, including Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, the two Republican leaders of the House and Senate. At least in part, that seems to have been the motive for Rupert Murdoch removing Tucker from the air. That is incredibly disturbing for anyone who values dissent and free media. 

Let me put Tucker's text on the air. I'm going to read the whole thing to you. I think if we're going to talk about it, we should see it. So, this is from January 7, 2021. Here's the text printed by The New York Times. There's no text before it. There's no indication to whom he's speaking or to what he's responding. It says, 

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It's not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn't good for me. I'm becoming something I don't want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is? (Tucker Carlson. Jan 7, 2021).

Overall, this is a very kind of thoughtful, contemplative, humanistic pondering on his part. That's the sort of thing we want people to do. We have these human impulses – part of it is our instinct, part of it is our primitive I.D. – and we expect people to evaluate what's taking place inside of our brains and decide whether or not those are positive impulses and to restrain them and we decide that they're not as he did. Obviously, the problematic part of this post is when he says that ganging up three against one or four against one is not how white people fight. Presumably, it's how other racial groups fight – Latinos, Black people or Muslims, or whoever – but it's not how white people fight. 

If you ask me, looking at this text in isolation, what I think of that sentence, I will tell you without the slightest hesitation that I find it problematic in the extreme. One of the reasons I've always defended Tucker – and one of the reasons I will still always defend Tucker – is that I do believe that his prism is free of racial analysis. He judges people by individuals and not by their race. And obviously, this is inconsistent with that. He's making a statement about how white people fight versus how black people and Latinos fight. So, do I like this comment? I do not like this comment. What I will, though, say is that I believe that you can go through everybody's private text – these are private texts – where people are speaking freely to friends or colleagues in a rushed way, not being the slightest bit careful, and you can find problematic things in what everybody has said in private, at some point, if you go through enough of their texts for enough time – and even worse when you decontextualized a passage. So, you have no idea what the tenor of this conversation was, whether there was humor involved, what he was responding to whom, what the subtext was – it's very difficult to evaluate on its own. Evaluating on its own makes it problematic. There is no doubt about it. That's why Fox gave it to The New York Times because they knew how this would make Tucker look. But to take the facts that Tucker provided to Fox's lawyers, assuming that they were his lawyers, too, and to now start leaking them selectively as part of a war to destroy Tucker Carlson is despicable. I assume Tucker will answer this and explain what he meant in due course – I have no doubt that he will – but to start leaking things like this, torn out of their context, without any opportunity for him to explain himself – because he's constrained in all sorts of ways as he negotiates how he's leaving – I find it reprehensible what Fox is doing to Tucker. 

The consequences of all of this are predictable, and I want to show them to you. Tucker was not just the most-watched host on cable news, but the highest-rated host among even young Democrats who watch cable. He had a much younger and more diverse audience than almost anyone in cable – and the largest audience. The cable news audience itself is very old, its audience. If you look at, for example, MSNBC or CNN's ratings, their overall audiences might be 800,000 or 900,000 for a show on MSNBC, and 400,000 - 500,000 for CNN. But if you look at the only people who matter in cable news economics, which is what's called the demo, people who are between 25 and 54 are the ones who are most desired by advertisers because they're the ones who are consumers. Maybe 10% of the overall audience is under 55. So, Anderson Cooper will have 500,000-600,000 people watching, but he'll have 80,000 people under the age of 55. Chris Hayes will have an audience of a million people, but barely 100,000 of them – 10% – will be under 55. They're all old. Cable news is dying as a medium. Tucker was one of the few, the only one really keeping it afloat with his extremely large and loyal audience that was far younger and more diverse than almost any other show on cable in history. And yet here is the ratings for Friday night, April 28. 

Friday night is always a little bit aberrational because people watch less, but it's comparative. So here you see someone on Twitter analyzing the ratings that came out that Friday night. So, four or five days after Tucker’s show is off the air and he says:

Holy Christ, young people have abandoned Fox News in prime time with Hannity now below 100,000 in the demo. And Tucker's all-time slot losing more than 70% of its young audience. Catastrophic.(@a_newsman May 1, 2023).

And he's absolutely right. So here you look at the cable ratings for people who are 25 to 54, which is the demographic that matters the most. The number one show is “The Five”, which is on at 5 p.m. That is not a prime time. A show that had 240,000 people under the age of 54. The next show is “Gutfeld!”. It's on at 11 p.m. That is also not prime time. He had 154,000 people watching under the age of 54. That was followed by a “Special Report with Brett Bayer”, also not a prime time show, at 6 p.m., 150,000. “America's Newsroom” with Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer. He's been on Fox forever. He used to be on CNN. That's a 9 a.m. show. That's also not a prime time show. Then, “America Reports” with Smith and Roberts at 2 p.m. Do you see? There are no prime time shows in the top five or six outnumbered at noon. “The Faulkner Focus” at 11 a.m., “Fox and Friends” at 8 a.m., “America's Newsroom” with Perino and Hemmer at 10 a.m. MSNBC is a 4:00 p.m. show with Nicolle Wallace beating every Fox prime-time show in the demo since Tucker left. Then there's Neil Cavuto, “Fox and Friend,” and only at number 13 you finally get to Jesse Watters, at 7 p.m. He had 116,000 people under the age of 54 watching. Then you have to go down to... it was a disaster for Fox! America Reports with Smith and Roberts. That's Tucker's old slot. It comes in at number 16 with 111,000 people, barely ahead of “Erin Burnett.” And then afternoon MSNBC shows including Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, “Morning Joe” and only then, it’s number 26, you get Sean Hannity who has under 100,000 people watching, under the age of 54, and the “Laura Ingraham Show”, at 28, at 10 p.m., also at 91,000.  

Again, Fox has slightly recovered from these ratings in the last week, but it is hard to overstate what a huge collapse this is for the demo. Almost always Tucker would be number one, followed by Hannity, “The Five”, “Gutfeld!”, Laura Ingraham, all occupying the top four or five. It seems like a huge portion of Fox's young audience departed when they realized the Tucker show was no longer on the air. So, what is the strategy here? Attacking the person whom these people obviously trust so much that they won't watch Fox without him, perhaps they want to destroy his reputation so that he can't ever again host a show that will compete with Fox? Perhaps it's that they want to win back his audience by making Tucker so radioactive that no one wants to have anything to do with him anymore. They'll pry away his loyal fans from him by convincing everyone he's an unreconstructed racist and a misogynist that, even to Fox, it's a bridge too far. Maybe they want to destroy his credibility so that if he does criticize Fox, the criticisms will be less significant. Whatever it is, they are out to destroy his reputation. And there's only so long Tucker is going to sit by silently and allow them to do that. They seem to be provoking on purpose some kind of a response, which I presume will be forthcoming, but this is despicable behavior by Fox. It just is. To have someone who works for you for six years with great success, who was a loyal employee by every report and the minute he’s out the door because you fired him under very bizarre circumstances, you not only try to destroy his reputation, but you go to The New York Times to do it.  

Somebody has also been leaking to Media Matters videos of Tucker that they think are embarrassing. I'll just show you a couple of these. These may not even be high-level Fox people doing it, but you can see a couple of these that Media Matters got a hold of and is now reveling in. Here's one. 

Tucker Carlson (on the phone): Nobody is going to watch it on Fox Nation. Nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks. I’d really like to just dump the whole thing on YouTube. […] Anyway, that’s just my view. I’m just frustrated with…it’s hard to use that site. I don’t know why they are not fixing it. It’s driving me insane. They are making like lifetime movies but they don’t work on the infrastructure of the site? Like WHAT? It’s crazy and it’s driving me crazy. We’re doing all this extra work and no one can find it? It’s unbelievable, actually. I don’t know who runs that site […] (Video. Leaked audios of T. Carlson. Media Matters. May 3, 2023)

Well, I hope Media Matters has cleared a space on the shelf for the Pulitzer they're going to win for obtaining this incriminating footage. 

There's another one of somebody inside Fox. Obviously, this one is a tape from Fox News when he's in front of the camera when the show isn’t on but the cameras are rolling – leaking to Media Matters of all people, not The New York Times and The Washington Post, this time to Media Matters. 

Inappropriate Tucker Comments (BTS) - Media Matters

So, I have to say, I mean, I am incredibly disturbed by this. I think this is really despicable behavior. There are people who host Fox shows whom I respect. I've been on a lot of those shows many times. I've been on Laura Ingraham many times, I've been on Jesse Watters not quite as many, but a lot. I've been on Howie Kurtz’s Sunday show quite a bit. Several others as well. I've never been on Sean Hannity’s show. He invited me on a couple of times, maybe five years ago, but never again. That's not a show that really aligns with what I do. I don't want to revel in Fox's demise. I don't want to hope for them to fail. I think they serve an important function of airing at least some dissent within the corporate media to what is otherwise a lockstep neoliberal consensus on economic policy, foreign policy, the culture war, and everything else. But I don't know whether I would accept an invitation to go on Fox right now, given their corporate behavior concerning the person who has done more to build up Fox and I think has performed a more important function in media than almost anybody else on television if not anybody else on television over the last six years. The space that he's created for dissent, for a different kind of way of looking at politics, for critiquing the GOP establishment from within and the Democratic establishment, in showing how they're a uniparty, for reporting on the abuses of the U.S. security state in a way that has almost never been done before in corporate television – to take this person who has built a huge audience of people who previously were not open to those ideas, an opening to them, and not just trying to justify why they fired him, but trying to destroy him permanently, forever using all the standard tropes that the liberal media typically uses against Fox and everybody else that they dislike is the behavior I find unforgivable. Unforgivable. And whether that means I'll go on Fox at some point or not, I don't know. But this has left a disgusting taste in my mouth. I think they ought to stop this immediately, and I think they're going to jeopardize their audience that is going to watch them do this. They're going to keep the 75 and 80 and 85-year-old hardcore Republicans who have been watching Fox for 30 years and always will. They're going to have that. I just showed you how small that audience can be. But I don't think they're going to be able to recover the audience that Tucker brought in when people see what it is that they do to those who are most loyal to them.

Become a Supporter

We'll see what Tucker does. I have high hopes that his next step will fortify the part of the media I think is most important, the part where I am currently, the independent part, the part where there are no corporate constraints, where there is no Rupert Murdoch to pull the plug if you get too critical of Joe Biden's war policy. I hope – I have very high hopes – that Tucker will come to a place like this – if not this place. But I do believe that Fox needed Tucker more than Tucker needed Fox and that whatever he does, he will thrive. But he will forever have this cloud hanging over his head. And I don't think this is anywhere near the end of what they intend to unleash on him. And I can't think of a justifiable reason for doing this. Not even one that is remotely within the realm of what is ethically justifiable. It is despicable what Fox has done to Tucker and the people with whom they've chosen to do it. And I guess that's all I have to say about that, other than I hope to see Tucker back on the air. I hope to see him defending himself from these attacks, explaining things like that text. And I expect we'll be hearing from him shortly because it's unsustainable to sit by while you get pummeled by your old employer through The New York Times and every other media outlet that has long hated you and remain silent. They've kind of forced his hand into not only responding, but I think responding in kind. And we'll see where that leads. My guess is the audience will end up siding with Tucker and not with Fox. That's certainly where my loyalties would lie.

So, we're going to move now to a second story, which is the latest developments in the increasingly dangerous war in Ukraine.