Speaker 1: As I'm sure most of you would guess, I don't typically wait around for the next episode
of Tucker Carlson's Fox News propaganda program, but I actually was curious as to what the program
would look like last night. Over the weekend, as we covered yesterday, there was a horrifying
terrorist mass shooting targeting black people in Buffalo, New York, in which in total ten people
were killed and 13 injured. The 18 year old white domestic born shooter inspired by the ideas of
the great replacement and white birthrates that have been just everywhere on right wing media
over the last few years. The shooter went to Buffalo looking to kill black people and indeed
he killed many black people. And I was waiting to see how his Tucker Carlson going to spin it.
How is Ben SHAPIRO going to spin it? How is Fox News going to spin? And well, we immediately saw,
as we looked at yesterday, Fox News talking about video game violence and continuing to
fearmonger about terrorist immigrants coming over the US-Mexico border. So
we saw the General Fox News approach, but the shooter's manifesto had almost verbatim language
that we saw on the Tucker Carlson program. So the question was, what's Tucker going to say?
And we're going to look at clips. And it was truly a surreal episode in absolutely every
way. How was Tucker going to do it? How is Tucker going to separate himself? How was he going to
minimize while part of it bizarrely included, talking about Rwanda? If you can believe it,
I'm talking about the African country of Rwanda, a completely I can't think of a better term for it.
Kafkaesque episode of the Tucker Carlson Program. So let's start with the first clip in which Tucker
tries to distance himself, as well as Fox News from the Buffalo shooter, who was, of course,
inspired by the conspiracy theories that Tucker and others have been pushing. Take a look at this.
Speaker 2: But what he wrote does not add up to a manifesto. It's not a blueprint for a
new extremist political movement, much less the potential inspiration for a racist revolution.
Anyone who claims that it is is lying or hell. Speaker 1: If you read it, you realize that
that's exactly what it is. It's taking the conspiracy theories that Tucker and others
have been repeating on their programs and saying, Well, the solution is we've got to go and kill
people who aren't white. And that's what he did. Speaker 2: Didn't read it. Instead, again, Ron's
letter is a rambling pastiche of slogans and Internet meme,
some of which flatly contradict one another. The document is not recognizably left wing or right
wing. It's not really political at all. Speaker 1: That's obviously completely
untrue because it aligns with the exact political ideology espoused by those
surrounding Donald Trump and on this so-called populist right, where they sound all about the
middle class. But then the solutions are, well, we've got to do something about these nonwhite
immigrants coming into the country. Speaker 2: The document is crazy. It's
the product of a disease, an organized mind. Speaker 1: And remember, to some degree, we can
say there's something mentally not working with these folks. But as I mentioned before yesterday,
the manifesto is quite cogent and coherent as far as these manifestos go. And writing
this off as simply mental illness doesn't make any sense. And remember, most mentally
ill people never commit any violence. Speaker 2: At one point, Gardner suggests
that Fox News is part of some global conspiracy against him. He writes, Like the mental patient,
he is disjointed, irrational, paranoid. Now that's true. Not that it makes the atrocities
he committed easier to bear. If your daughter was murdered on Saturday in Buffalo, you wouldn't care
why the killer did it or who he voted for. But the truth about Patton Gendron does tell you
a lot about the ruthlessness and dishonesty of our political leadership.
Within minutes of Saturday's shooting before all of the bodies of those ten murdered Americans
have even been identified by their loved ones, professional Democrats had begun a coordinated
campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents. They did it, they said, immediately.
Patron Gendron was the heir to Donald Trump. Speaker 1: Okay, so listen, I am sympathetic to
the fraught nature of immediately making political declarations. That's why often with these cases,
I won't cover it the next day. In this case, it happened on a weekend, so we had time. To the
extent that anybody before we had information made any claims that weren't yet based, in fact
that's wrong. And I would denounce that. I didn't actually see that. But I also didn't pay attention
to the news on the day of. I read about everything after the fact. But the manifesto can be seen
only as an almost verbatim reproduction of the things we've heard from Tucker and from other
right wing media. Now, as I mentioned earlier, at one point, Tucker talked about Rwanda. He. Put up
a quote from 2004 New York Times about Rwanda and the Rwandan genocide. Just completely bizarre,
bizarre stuff. And then another and another moment, Tucker, again focused on that. This
was just a lone mentally ill guy. That's it. Speaker 2: Because a mentally ill teenager
murdered strangers. You cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud. That's
what they're telling you. That's what they've wanted to tell you for a long time. But Saturday's
massacre gives them a pretext, a justification. Speaker 1: So playing on the idea that all of a
sudden now, because of one mentally ill guy, completely disconnected from any political
rhetoric, I mean, other than the fact that the manifesto contains verbatim rhetoric from my
show made me being speaking as Tucker here. What really this is about is about silencing your
political views. Imagine being so depraved or dishonest or ignorant. I don't know which it is
with Tucker to pretend that what this is really about is simply silencing the political speech
of people like Tucker who just want to give their opinions. Now, again, this thing of mentally ill,
when you look at the manifesto, it's articulate, fascist, racist, anti-Semitic hate linked to ideas
that we've seen propagated by Tucker and others, which we will look at again later in the show.
Something is obviously wrong with people who commit these acts of violence.
But the mental illness, the merely mental illness line used to excuse the political reality of these
people's motivations is immoral and or dishonest and may be just ignorant. But
I have a hard time believing that with Tucker, it's ignorance. So a bizarre Tucker Carlson show,
almost as bizarre as what Ben SHAPIRO had to say, which we're going to go to next.