RadixJournal - He's Back ... But Not For Long

00:00:00.000 Hello again. This is Richard, and this is another entry in my journal. I'm going to

00:00:09.160 talk once again about Tucker Carlson. So Tucker has made news once again. He's back. We're

00:00:21.100 back was in fact the tweet that he released this afternoon, and he included a video in

00:00:28.960 which he recited yet more platitudes on about how the media just isn't fair, and you're

00:00:37.240 not getting the truth, and things like that. He did say some true things, to be fair, about

00:00:43.760 the media selecting facts to report on, and so on. And the fact that Twitter as a platform

00:00:54.020 is reactionary. It's simply commenting on the news that is relayed to people via cable

00:01:03.420 news in many cases. All true. And he also announced that he will be continuing his show. That seems

00:01:14.440 to be what he implied, is that he will have a show much like he did for the last four or

00:01:18.640 so years on Fox News. But he will be doing it on a new platform. Twitter. I thought that

00:01:30.780 Twitter had hired him as talent, much like Rumble hired Steven Crowder and Substack paid Matt

00:01:41.240 Taibbi or something like that. But apparently that isn't quite the case. So Elon Musk tweeted

00:01:49.920 a few minutes or so afterwards saying that there is no contract with Tucker. So he is using

00:01:58.600 the Twitter platform just like anyone else will. And he could get subscribers and monetization

00:02:06.680 and so on. So that's interesting. So Twitter isn't quite becoming a content producer, as I thought

00:02:16.320 they might, a publisher. They are remaining a platform, but there's no doubt that there were

00:02:24.840 some, I don't know, text exchanged or some behind the scenes dealings between Elon and Tucker.

00:02:31.460 But regardless, he will be on the platform and act like any other creator. And I think that's

00:02:40.300 really his ultimate problem. And I don't think Tucker will go very far with this. And I think he will

00:02:50.900 increasingly fade into irrelevancy, at least with regard to where he was previously. Now,

00:03:01.460 of course, I'm sure he can produce a lot of shows. I'm sure these can be successful. But I don't

00:03:07.820 think he will ever be the figure that he once was. And I'll explain that a little bit later.

00:03:13.840 Now, Tucker also did some things today. He made some news in some other ways. And he is threatening

00:03:20.260 a lawsuit against Fox News. He is claiming a couple of things, some of which I think are accurate,

00:03:26.420 some of which I think are a bit dubious. What is accurate is that Fox is, in effect, in breach of

00:03:34.180 its contract by posting videos that are meant to demean him. And it does seem likely, I don't know for

00:03:46.700 sure. But it seems likely that Fox News was the one who leaked some text messages that might have gone to

00:03:56.800 trial. I think they were actually suppressed from the trial. But anyway, some text messages, and this

00:04:04.620 is, these include the that's not how white men fight line, in which Tucker expressed those sentiments,

00:04:12.060 but then also expressed how the fact that, you know, rooting on white people vis-a-vis Antifa is

00:04:18.480 actually soul destroying on some level. Fox News is likely behind the leaks of some of these behind

00:04:30.300 the scenes videos of Tucker just being very casual, maybe being a bit blunt or crass on occasion, but not

00:04:40.220 really doing anything all too terrible in my mind. In fact, those other videos he leaked

00:04:45.640 made him seem, I don't know, relatable or cool or something. Perhaps you should thank Fox News.

00:04:53.660 The other thing that he claimed that I find, I find pretty dubious, to be honest, is that firing Tucker

00:05:02.220 was part of the Dominion lawsuit. So there was some agreement, I don't know if it was on paper or not,

00:05:09.080 that for Fox News to pay Dominion three quarters of a billion dollars, but then not fully admit

00:05:18.920 wrongdoing, which they didn't. They didn't come out and flatly say, it was all a lie, we knew it was a

00:05:29.220 lie, and we recklessly and maliciously spread a lie. Fox News did not say that, even though that was

00:05:36.820 implied, I guess, by their massive settlement with Dominion. Tucker claims that someone on the board

00:05:46.860 told him that he was fired as part of the settlement. Now, I'm not sure I believe this.

00:05:55.040 I'm wondering if this were, I don't know. I just don't fully believe that something like that took

00:06:06.260 place. Now, it does raise the question of why exactly was Tucker fired. I think there are many

00:06:12.080 different reasons, some of which might have been the, you know, that's not how white men fight

00:06:17.500 text, some of which might, might be, might be related to Rupert Murdoch's calling off his marriage

00:06:30.700 with, I don't know, which is his third, fourth, fifth wife, one of those, because she was a little 0.89

00:06:39.360 bit too Christian-y for his taste, a little bit too wacky, and she was making claims like Tucker Carlson

00:06:45.200 is a sent from God or a messiah of some kind. It was probably a combination of different factors.

00:06:55.280 I'm just not sure I believe that Dominion forced him out, and that was part of the settlement. I find

00:07:00.580 that dubious, but we'll find out. There's also the issue of, is Tucker also breaking the contract?

00:07:08.380 Now, Tucker could say Fox broke it first, but is Tucker also breaking the contract?

00:07:13.140 By starting a new program. Well, you know, is being a content creator on social media, is,

00:07:22.140 is that, is that something that was in the contract? I don't know, it might have been.

00:07:26.480 Tucker would go on other people's podcasts, but he wasn't actively making content. He didn't have

00:07:34.780 his own podcasts say, so we'll see. Regardless, I, you know, I think non-compete clauses are, I guess,

00:07:45.100 understandable from a corporation's perspective, but not, not something I'm too fond of. I hope Tucker,

00:07:53.180 you know, he's a citizen. He can go out there and speak his truth. But I ultimately don't think he will

00:07:59.820 be terribly successful at this. And I, I think people who claim that he is going to be, you know,

00:08:11.380 bigger than ever, and this will free him and all that kind of stuff. I, I think those people are

00:08:18.900 a bit delusional and they misunderstand the dynamic at place. And in a way they misunderstand why they

00:08:26.360 themselves liked Tucker. So let me explain. I am fond of using the phrase, a feature, not a bug.

00:08:35.800 And I, I invented that phrase. That's probably what Trump would say. No, I didn't invent it,

00:08:43.900 but I'm fond of using it. And, you know, I, I use it in particular with Trump where, you know,

00:08:50.840 a lot of liberal types will look at something like say the Alvin Bragg, um, lawsuit in New York

00:09:01.720 over hush money payments and say like, Oh, well, no one could vote for him knowing that he's indicted

00:09:11.580 on, uh, both misdemeanors and criminal charges. Well, they, that, that kind of a, a, a, a criminal

00:09:23.860 charge like that Trump being arraigned, it's kind of a feature and not a bug of the whole Trump

00:09:29.920 movement in the sense that he can flip that around and say, no, this is part of the, this is part of

00:09:35.440 the great witch hunt against me. They all hate me. They want to destroy your favorite president,

00:09:41.160 all that kind of stuff. So in a way, the bug is the feature and you can go, I think this phrase

00:09:50.280 fits Trump to a T, uh, for almost everything about him. He was popular because he was vulgar,

00:09:57.900 not despite it. He was popular because he wasn't a politician with an agenda, but because he was

00:10:04.260 actually a reality show star who would go on worldwide wrestling events and make a jackass of

00:10:13.000 himself. All of those bugs were in fact features. So that's what I mean by a phrase like this. And

00:10:20.680 so why am I using that phrase vis-a-vis Tucker and Fox? So Fox news has a lot of problems. And in fact,

00:10:32.340 you can look at it and say that it is a dying business that is going to be sunset within say my

00:10:40.700 lifetime. It's probably going to be around another 25 years, but it's ultimate business model is not

00:10:53.140 sustainable. People are moving away from cable in general. They are cutting the cord. They're not

00:11:03.800 necessarily even saving money, but they are moving to Netflix, to HBO Max, to YouTube, uh, et cetera. They're

00:11:16.900 getting on-demand content or subscription based content from the web. Surely you've heard about this trend

00:11:26.860 as it is massive. Fox is live television. Now Fox has made little forays into Fox nation and things like

00:11:36.140 that. According to Tucker, those weren't particularly successful. And so you have this ancient audience that

00:11:45.900 that is still watching Fox news. And it's a very real thing. I mean, I, I remember going

00:11:52.880 to a man's house. It was his ranch out in Texas. And, uh, he was one of these right winger types and

00:12:01.900 someone connected me with him. This was many years ago, I think 10 or 12 years ago. And it's like,

00:12:05.860 Oh, this guy will fund what you're doing. And, uh, needless to say, he didn't, um,

00:12:11.600 we're just going off in completely different directions. I was not doing what he wanted,

00:12:16.900 but anyway, I visited with him and he was very wealthy guy. And you know, Fox news, I can just

00:12:25.280 remember was, was playing in the background throughout this large house. So it was like Fox

00:12:31.840 news was murmuring in every room of this large house, almost like sending subliminal messages.

00:12:39.140 You, you didn't even quite hear what segment was playing, but it was kind of going on. You'd hear

00:12:43.800 little bits and pieces or see flashing images there. Boomers love TV. Boomers grew up on TV.

00:12:55.000 Uh, I think there's a certain authority that boomers give TV due to their childhoods and upbringings.

00:13:05.360 Zoomers are not like that. Zoomers are much more likely to check out Twitter or Snapchat, 0.95

00:13:13.300 probably not Twitter as much Snapchat, watch a live stream, uh, post their own, you know,

00:13:21.440 nonsense somewhere comment on a website. I mean that, that is what they are about. And they are

00:13:27.180 certainly much more likely to subscribe to Netflix than Fox news, subscribe to Netflix, of course,

00:13:33.100 using their parents, uh, password. So things are dramatically changing and Fox has this ancient

00:13:43.640 audience. So I remember seeing reports of the demographic background, uh, breakdown of Fox news

00:13:50.600 watchers, uh, probably like five years ago. And it was actually shocking. It was even, uh, older than I

00:13:58.800 would have imagined. All of these shows basically have 70 and 70 plus audiences.

00:14:08.400 And Tucker was a little bit different in the sense that he was popular, maybe just simply due to the

00:14:15.740 fact that he isn't too old. He's in his fifties. He kind of, I don't know, seems maybe even a little

00:14:21.740 bit younger than that, but he was attracting more of that coveted. I forgot what it is like 25 to 55

00:14:28.860 audience, basically, um, people who are in the prime of their careers and who are more likely to buy

00:14:35.480 expensive stuff. So advertisers like them now Fox didn't really need that demographic because the way

00:14:45.060 Fox seceded was through carriage fees. So effectively, you know, I have not subscribed to cable news or

00:14:53.580 cable in general for well over a decade. I mean, we, good Lord, we might be going on 20 years at this

00:14:59.120 point. I think we are. Um, and you, whenever you subscribe to cable and you know, it's, it's like

00:15:07.320 this now, it was like this 20 years ago, you would choose these packages. So do you want the basic

00:15:12.800 package or do you want the package with HBO or do you want this other package with national geographic or

00:15:20.300 what have you? And they would advertise kind of the top channels in that package. Well, in the,

00:15:27.480 the basic passage package, or maybe the step up, there was Fox news. And so you were in effect paying

00:15:35.660 for Fox news, even if you hated Fox news and these carriage fees were the basis of Fox news revenue.

00:15:46.380 Well, I think in a way that business model almost makes it worse in the sense of the long-term trajectory

00:15:56.020 of something like Fox. Now it makes it better in the sense that you can have a 70 plus audience and

00:16:01.580 still get charged these carriage fees because that 70 plus audience, they want to subscribe to cable.

00:16:06.960 They might not be in the market for a new car. They might not want to buy the latest fashion trend

00:16:12.880 or whatever, but they definitely want to watch the tube and they want to have Fox news murmuring in the

00:16:20.220 background of their house at all times. And of course they might very well buy pillows. Uh, so much of the

00:16:27.480 advertisement on Fox was for, uh, adult diapers, reverse mortgages and pillows. So you could, you know,

00:16:38.020 drift off to sleep and maybe not wake up anyway, that's the audience. Now, as I mentioned, these kinds of

00:16:49.980 things can be features and they can be bugs. Now, let me ask a few rhetorical questions. You know, is Tucker a

00:17:00.600 really brilliant journalist? Well, yes and no. He actually was pretty good at long form journalism back in the

00:17:10.000 day. He did write that kind of thing for the weekly standard among other places when he was kind of a young neocon 0.82

00:17:15.980 of sorts, uh, supporting the Iraq war, by the way. Um, he's also a good presenter. So if you look at some

00:17:25.360 of these people who have replaced him, they really can't get a hit in the big leagues. You know, they,

00:17:34.000 they just can't quite do what he can do. He is smart and better at all of this kind of stuff.

00:17:41.060 So he doesn't have really any great competition from, uh, I don't know. I can't even name the names.

00:17:48.700 I think, uh, Kaylee McInerney is, is hosting now. There was some other guy, a conservative black guy

00:17:54.960 from Texas who I think was not doing very well at all. So Brian Killamide, no charisma, although

00:18:02.440 competent. I mean, they just don't really have what Tucker has. So he's good. But as

00:18:11.660 one content creator among many, he's really not that great. And I think so much of Tucker's success

00:18:23.820 from the perspective of say right-wing Twitter, which love Tucker and Tucker loved them. I mean,

00:18:31.260 he would pander to them. In fact, Tucker was powerful because he was on Fox news. He wasn't

00:18:38.740 powerful, say in spite of the fact that he was on Fox and he was, you know, on this neocon boomer 0.51

00:18:44.920 channel. He was popular because of that. And you have to understand that dynamic. So Tucker was a

00:18:53.040 gen X figure. He was kind of a boomer whisperer, even maybe even a silent gen whisperer, knowing Fox's

00:18:59.400 audience. And so much of the love for him wasn't really exactly what he said. You could get that

00:19:09.640 elsewhere. It was the fact that Tucker was saying it and he was saying it to boomers. In this way,

00:19:18.880 he was red-pilling the normies, which is this long-term fantasy of right-wingers in general and

00:19:27.680 the dissident right in particular. We don't want to scare anyone with highfalutin theory.

00:19:38.160 We don't want to scare anyone with crazy gas chamber memes being posted on 4chan. We don't want

00:19:48.400 to scare anyone with anything a little bit too nuanced or complicated, but we want to kind of

00:19:57.460 slowly red-pill them, slowly move the Overton window rightward. So yeah, Tucker kind of

00:20:06.160 misrepresents or twists the Great Replacement theory because he's talking about election

00:20:16.400 integrity and, you know, blacks being the main victim of the Great Replacement, all that kind 0.98

00:20:24.840 of stuff. Yeah. But, you know, he's kind of shifting the Overton window forward. He's red-pilling

00:20:31.540 the normies. That is what the dissident right wanted. That's why they love Tucker. And that's

00:20:37.340 why, again, Tucker loved them, because he could play to them in that fashion as a boomer whisperer.

00:20:46.560 Tucker, on his own, isn't really doing that. And he might very well get a ton of views. For instance,

00:20:54.360 he got millions of views in these brief and platitudinous videos that he posted.

00:21:01.760 But what is that, really? Lots of people are getting millions of views. And I'm going to use

00:21:09.100 an example that just came to mind. But you know what I'm talking about. There are countless other

00:21:17.960 examples. If you ever go to YouTube trending and things like that, or look at some of these massive

00:21:24.260 videos that are getting millions upon millions of views, that is much larger audiences than those

00:21:32.280 people who watch Anderson Cooper or Tucker Carlson on cable news. There are videos about, you know,

00:21:40.200 Spider-Man or videos unboxing or some crazy videos of what's it like to go in a bubble bounce or

00:21:49.800 whatever. It's just, you know, strange pimple popping videos. I mean, I could go on. It's just this 0.81

00:21:57.500 crazy, inane sludge.

00:22:00.980 And so, Tucker getting, you know, like, a million watches on a Twitter platform isn't that big of a 0.69

00:22:13.280 deal, really. Because he no longer has that dynamic of, I'm whispering to the boomers. He's simply one 0.99

00:22:22.680 among many other content creators. And we can look at some examples of big people who left Fox News,

00:22:30.960 and became one among many journalists and basically faded from relevance. It's not that

00:22:38.160 they're bad. It's just they're ultimately not that great. Bill O'Reilly comes to mind. So Bill O'Reilly

00:22:44.240 was pushed out in 2017. He was actually replaced by Tucker. He was absolutely unquestionably the most

00:22:53.980 dominant force in cable news for well over a decade. He was hugely powerful during the George W. Bush

00:23:02.640 administration. He was a kingmaker of sorts in the GOP. And as Tucker himself said in some of these

00:23:09.120 interviews, he could kind of present himself as, oh, just an average guy. You know, I'm just, I'm speaking

00:23:13.320 for the peeps here. But everyone knew what he was really aligned with. Well, he had a very embarrassing

00:23:23.300 situation on his hands of being accused of sexual harassment and unwanted messages and photos and

00:23:30.380 just general grossness. Fox didn't want to deal with all these, you know, impending lawsuits and the

00:23:38.880 embarrassment at all. They just cut loose. Well, Bill O'Reilly is still around. And I've no doubt

00:23:44.360 that he gets a lot of views on his YouTube channel. But he is totally irrelevant. No one really talks

00:23:51.740 about Bill O'Reilly. It's not that Bill O'Reilly is dumb or incompetent. It's just that he's one among 0.99

00:23:58.380 many. And he doesn't really have a unique voice. Megan Kelly, similar to Bill O'Reilly, engaged in some

00:24:07.780 race baiting activities. Again, similar to Tucker Carlson. She was infamous for claiming demand or 1.00

00:24:14.200 asserting, demanding that everyone listen, that Santa Claus is in fact white. She was a big figure,

00:24:22.220 not quite the figure that Bill O'Reilly and Tucker was. It's an interesting story just to go off on a

00:24:31.140 little bit of a tangent here. So Megan Kelly in the Trump years was thought of as this kind of,

00:24:40.680 you know, liberal bitch who hated Trump because she went after him during a Fox News debate, 1.00

00:24:47.740 which she co-hosted or moderated. That was, I think people have short memories about this. 0.99

00:24:57.300 After Trump won the Republican nomination, and certainly after he became president, Fox News did

00:25:03.240 become Trump TV in effect. I mean, it was all Trump all the time and everything that Trump could ever do

00:25:11.180 was good. It was his propaganda network. Before that, it was not. It was anti-Trump,

00:25:18.380 if anything, and pro-Cruz. A lot of these people who became Trump sycophants started out as Trump

00:25:24.520 haters. Michelle Malkin comes to mind. Many people who Trump appointed to his administration come to

00:25:30.880 mind. John Bolton, et cetera, et cetera. So it was, Fox was never Trump. And then it was wildly

00:25:39.040 pro-Trump. And then it's kind of was never Trump there again for a little bit. But anyway,

00:25:45.720 Megan Kelly has a show on YouTube. It's one among many. It's really not that great. It's kind of like

00:25:52.660 a nicer version, a pretty face and a female voice of Matt Walsh tier stuff. Again, she's not bad. 0.74

00:26:06.380 She's not really relevant because you can get this stuff elsewhere. And she's not that insightful.

00:26:16.140 She doesn't really have a niche. She's just a right of center conservative who's going to talk 1.00

00:26:23.400 about the transgender issue a little bit and so on. I mean, you can find this anywhere. It's not 1.00

00:26:29.040 really unique and differentiated. And I don't think Tucker will be either. Because again,

00:26:35.900 the feature is a bug. What made Tucker fascinating and what made people want to talk about him

00:26:43.820 on the distant right, but also the left is this notion that he's red pilling the normies,

00:26:49.360 that he's reaching these boomers and silent gen people via the platform. Tucker on his own,

00:26:56.480 not too interesting. So I ultimately predict he'll probably be pretty successful with the Twitter

00:27:03.660 show. But I don't think he'll ever have the relevance that he once had. All right, I'll talk to you guys

00:27:13.280 later.

RadixJournal - May 10, 2023

He's Back ... But Not For Long

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