America This Week, May 24, 2024: "Life on Polarized Mars"

And so I'm entering a period now of normalization with this cup of coffee. But the cheeseburger boundary will be the real return to civilization.

Meat on meat, I think a cheeseburger with pastrami and a runny egg on it would be perfect. It's like that Saturday Night Live skit where they have a taco. It's like an ad for Taco Bell. We take a taco and we wrap it in a burrito.

And then we fold a deep dish pizza over it. So I want to go big, but until I satisfy myself that I'm having the ultimate first burger, I'm not going to have it at all. I don't want to piddle aside, kind of choke, run over to Wendy's and get like a double cheese.

That's fantastic, the inside, the taco thing. That reminds me I used to know. A pretty well-known, sort of a quasi celebrity underground chef here in New York, named Kenny Shopson. They made a documentary about him called I Like Killing Flies. Very Eccentric guy, Great cook, huge. And he had a story he used to tell about the poet Joseph Brodsky, who used to come in to his place.

Brodsky would not eat anything that was not inside something else.

So whatever he ate had to be some kind of taco-like contraption. It had to be something wrapped in something which I always thought was interesting, no matter what it was.

It's like he wanted a sealed envelope over his food or something, be able to tell if there was an intact covering or not.

What an accidental segue. NEWSWEEK Yes, lots of stuff happening, some stuff breaking on my side also.

I haven't even had a chance to talk really with you about this. This story about Tucker Carlson having a show is kind of amazing. It seems like a groundbreaking...

When did this happen? Wednesday, Tuesday, Tuesday, right?

Now, what is Newsweek? Walter? First of all?

Perry Ellis, the designer, has been dead for a long, long time, but they licensed his name to create an eternal brand. Newsweek, as far as I know, has been dead for a long, long time. I wrote for time, for quite a while, and then Newsweek later hired me to do something in 2011 or 2012 about Mitt Romney's run for president. And because I'm a former Mormon, they wanted to take the Mormon angle and explore Mormon culture.

The Book of Mormon was on Broadway, and this is how news magazines think Mitt Romney's running for president. The Book of Mormon is on Broadway. There's a Mormon thing happening.

Let's explore this.

Newsweek, at that point, was housed in a temporary vacant floor of an office building down on Wall Street. It had been sold for a dollar, as I remember to a guy who had had a stereo equipment. Fortune who bought it from its former owners because it had collapsed and gone bankrupt for a dollar and then resurrected the mark, the brand with this kind of guerrilla-style staff operating out of a dusty, empty floor in downtown New York City. Since then, I think it's contracted even further, but it still has the August Newsweek reputation. And under that cover, they can do all kinds of things that appear to be legitimate.

We often had the same covers, I remember asking at time, I said, Why do we in Newsweek have the same covers so many weeks of the year? I said, Is there a spy here at time or whatever? and they said, No. That's just how it works, and I was like, how, what works?

And I thought about it for a long time, and I thought either they coordinate or they both key off a third entity. Maybe the New York Times, I don't know, but anyway.

But if they are next to each other, they actually sell more. It's counterintuitive.

You just answered one of the mysteries of politics why do we have two parties when they all do the same thing?

Announces that Tucker has signed a deal with Putin's government to launch a show in Russia.

Just taking off the mask, fulfilling every paranoid accusation against him. He's decided to be not just a tool of Putin, but a dancing, spotlit open tool of Putin. By doing a show there and within an hour of Newsweek publishing this big scoop.

I knew all kinds of people because I know Tucker Carlson, right? And I know a lot of people in common. And that's not. That's not because I travel in exclusive circles. He's a guy who keeps a wide network of contacts in journalism and so on.

Everybody's writing me behind the scenes, going, Oh my God, what has happened here? They were right about him. He is, you know, he is a lapdog of Putin, and now he's a happy, yipping, open lapdog. And this is going to end his career.

And what are we going to do? Said the conservative types and the liberal types were, oh, I knew it all along. And this went on and on all day until we found out that this story was completely made up.

What does it look like now? Tucker Carlson Show aired by Russian State TV. The CEO of the Tucker Carlson network has rejected claims in the Russian state media that the former Fox News anchor had made a deal for shows to appear on on Russian television. The claims appear to have originated with the program Tucker, which is broadcast on Rossiya 24, but comprises old episodes of Carlson shows taken from X, formerly Twitter and YouTube. So basically, it's the same story, except one is an is affirmatively saying something is true.

And the other one leads with the denial, which is pretty interesting, that you can just do that online.

But so that, so that was pretty significant, but also the the number of media outlets that went completely hog wild with this. Sort of as this thing was was coming out of the barn. It's kind of amazing. So here's Vanity Fair. Tucker Carlson comes full circle with show on Russia State TV.

Here we go, New Republic Russian Russian TV has a new propaganda star. Tucker Carlson, right?

So anyway, there there were. There were lots and lots of these stories. And and as we as people dug into it, the the what. What they realized is that they were taking a phenomenon that's probably pretty good. That that, I know, is very common in Russia. I mean, I, I have to tell this story. So, one of the first things I learned about the former Soviet Union came when I took a trip to Uzbekistan, which is a former Soviet Republic. In central Asia. It's sort of in between India and China, I guess.

It's remember the man who would be king Sean Connery. Yeah, yeah. So it's sort of that place where like nobody in the world knows about, so we went to. I went to a city called Bukhara, which is famous because that's where Jews emigrated to.

That was along the Silk Road and they congregated in the city that's sort of Jewish and Muslim at the same time. And we was trying to check into a hotel there. This was probably 1992, and, uh, there was nobody, there was nobody at the desk in the hotel.

Uh, and there was nobody on the street and we couldn't figure out what was going on. And then I finally went into a back room and I found a whole bunch of people crowded around a television watching this.

Anyway.

So this was a Mexican soap opera called The Rich also Cry, uh, in Russian.

Then they started to get a little bit more serious about copyright law. But then after, uh, the invasion of Ukraine and there were, you know, Russian television was was taken off the air in America, there was some return fire in Russia. They kind of started putting out mock versions of their own, um, I believe, like fast food restaurants, American fast food restaurants, knockoffs, uh, in Russia, because why not, you know? Uh? And from from their point of view, and they, there is Tucker Carlson airing on, uh, Russian television.

I can freely find it on the Russian version of Google Yandex. Uh, but does that mean that he struck a deal with them? um?

You know, have done a deal with the with with John Yang because, uh, you can find somebody in North Korea who saw it.

I mean, it's ridiculous, right? Um, but, uh, the the funny thing about that is that the only. The only scene that the Russians went absolutely nuts for was the one where Han Solo doesn't know whether he's going to help Leah or not. And Luke says, Well, she has money, and Han says, How much?

And he's and Luke says a lot, uh, and he says, how much is that? and he goes just a lot, and he goes well. I can imagine a lot, they went bananas at that line, because they can imagine a lot, too.

But anyway, um, the the idea that you just take this, this little piece of information and turn it into a big thing is is kind of amazing. But you know, it happens and people just sort of move on. They don't, they don't even make a notation in their stories about it. Uh, so I don't. I guess it's sort of a new, a new thing. Like, for instance, the the. The update at the bottom of the Newsweek story just says This article has been updated with a statement to Newsweek from Dean Thompson. Uh, Dean Thompson is head of programming and production operations at the Tucker Carlton Carlson Network.

Uh, your, your update, even online used to have to say a previous version of this story had this up in it. Um, you know, like, you had to inform your audience that you previously made an error and tell them what the error was in the story, right? I mean, isn't that basic?

Wait, I thought, I thought that they, I thought that they were in the business of ferreting out uh rumors and, uh, you know, about high profile situations and correcting them. And or at least suppressing their circulation. Did they suppress the circulation of the Vanity Fair story and the Newsweek Story and the New Republic Story? And all the other stories? That were built on the backs of this completely false assertion that Tucker Carlson had made a deal? That distributed show in Russia.

The they will argue to the end, the bitter end that something is a is legitimately reported. Um, you know, they they were at the time, it seemed right. That's another excuse that we've heard, right?

Uh, and they don't include this in the in the basket of things that, um, that, you know, we would call missing disinformation. So, for instance, this week on Racket We, we started publishing, um, the results of freedom of information requests after the Twitter files. We sent out hundreds of these things to research institutions and government agencies. Mainly because we were trying to figure out how much money federal money was being spent on the censorship thing. And one of the institutions that did send us responses we got about 20 so far was the University of Washington. And there's all this play back and forth, uh, between one of the main figures at UW, Kate Starboard, uh. And people like Clint Watts, who was the face of Hamilton, 68, and Renee D'Aresta, who was at Stanford. Uh, after she was at a company called New Knowledge, which was also involved with Hamilton, 68. And that crazy project Alabama thing where they were faking Russian accounts, uh, and having them follow the Senate candidate, Roy Moore.

And you know, I, I asked her, is that how come stuff like this doesn't appear? You know, it doesn't classify as disinformation. You're, you're like, working with these people, well, why doesn't that bother you? And no answer. Um, her answer with regard to Renee was, Um, that was in two, that it was basically that that was before I met Renee.

So right, but I mean, I think that's a tell, don't you think?

So they want to be arbiters of truth, but they have no truth. Discovery process. Right, right, uh, the truth discovery process that doesn't exist, uh, is supplanted by a wrong think discovery process which does exist, which does exist. And it's much easier and is much easier. And in this way, heavy, uh uh, heavy ideological, um, um, heavy ideological influence helps along this project. Because it immediately, it immediately sorts every piece of information into helpful or unhelpful, whereas sorting it into true or untrue is far beyond their capacity.

You know, they don't have doctors, so they can't say true or untrue on Covid. They don't have, uh, you know, election specialists, so they can't say true or untrue. They don't have Hunter Biden investigators, so they can't say true or untrue. But they can figure out what's helpful or unhelpful, and that's all they do.

Um, and so the reason that they don't write about something, or, you know, discover the truth, or even comment on something like this affair, you know? And the reason it seems preposterous for me to even bring it up is that we all know in our heart that Tucker Carlson is far fair game. You know that this is that this is a political effort, and it is not meant to discover, you know, false rumors. It's meant to discipline wrong. Think that's all it does. And and there and there are continued protests about this are just absurd.

And that's, um, and that's actually, I mean, that that's a good segue into into a story that, uh, well, let me just back up for a minute, uh, for a moment and talk about. You know, what you just said is is really important. Like, the process of actually determining whether a thing is true, even in the very, very narrow newspaper sense of a fact being true, is really hard, right? I mean, we all know that you have to kind of leave things vague until until you know, right? Like with this Tucker story, it's theoretically possible that there was some kind of deal concluded, but there's no evidence of that, right?

So you can't say that one way or the other.

I mean, in fact, it still could, because their their, their corrections make it seem that they're sort of they went two steps forward and half a step back. Um, because now it's like, Yeah, but it's up there. Oh, maybe he didn't make a deal. Well, details, details, right?

Um.

Yeah.