 May 40 here I was just talking to a friend said I don't care about the Ukraine war what does it have to do with me and that provoked me into thinking that probably a lot of people in 1914 were saying I don't care about the Archduke Ferdinand well what the heck does that have to do with me well if you're interested in public affairs if you're interested in power if you're interested in knowing how the world works why wouldn't you be interested in the Ukraine war right is it better to spend spend that that's spare time thinking about fantasy sports right apparently that's what a lot of men do there's a good article in New York magazine about how fantasy sports provides you know a form of bonding and companionship for a lot of guys which the guys tend to need they don't tend to get together just for the sake of friendship they need they need reasons to get together whether it's to study religious text or to kill an animal so let's have a look and see what Tucker Carlson has to say good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson's I know it tells you a lot about the priorities of our ruling class that the rest of us are getting yet another lecture about January 6 tonight from our moral inferiors no less an outbreak of mob violence a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards that took place more than a year and a half ago but they've never stopped talking about it in the meantime in the 18 months since January 6th gas prices have doubled drug ods have reached their highest point ever the u.s economy is now careening toward a devastating recession at best and scariest and least noted of all this country has never in its history been closer to a nuclear war yet the other networks cannot be bothered to cover any of that tonight instead they've interrupted their regularly scheduled programming to bring you yet another extended prime time harangue from Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney about Donald Trump and QAnon the whole thing is insulting in fact it's deranged and we're not playing along this is the only hour on an american news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live they are lying and we are not going to help them do it what we will do instead is to try to tell you the truth we've attempted to do that since the day this happened we hated seeing vandalism at the u.s capital a year and a half ago and we said so at the time but we did not think it was an insurrection because it was not an insurrection it was not even close to an insurrection not a single person in the crowd that day was found to be carrying a firearm some insurrection in fact the only person who wound up shot to death was a protester she was a 36 year old military veteran called ashley babbitt babbitt was just over five feet tall she was unarmed she posed no conceivable threat to anyone but capitol police shot her in the neck and never explained why that was justified those are the facts of january 6th but since the very first hours they have been distorted beyond recognition relentlessly culminating with last night last night cbs nightly news told its viewers that insurrectionists at the capital on january 6th quote caused the deaths of five police officers that is a pure lie there is nothing true about it and they know that perfectly well here's reporter bob costa who should be deeply ashamed to say something this dishonest thursday's prime time hearing will take americans back to january 6th when an estimated 2 000 rioters breached the capitol building causing the deaths of five police officers it's hard to believe he said that rioters caused the deaths of five police officers you just heard cbs news tell its viewers that this must be the big lie theory the more bewilderingly false acclaim is the more likely you will be to believe it apparently that's what they're betting on in fact precisely zero police officers were killed by rioters on january 6th not five none not a single one so how'd they get to five well cbs is counting the suicides of local police officers who took place after january 6th in some cases long after january 6th suicide unfortunately is pretty common among cops policing is a tough job as we've noted but in these specific cases the one cbs is referring to the chief of washington dc's police department told the new york times that actually he had no idea if his officers were driven to kill themselves by january 6th cbs just made that up the fifth death that cbs news is referring to is if capitol police officer brian sychnick you will remember his name sychnick's body lay in state at the capital after the media told us he'd been beaten to death by trump voters with a fire extinguisher here's what they told you officer sychnick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher sychnick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher officer brian sychnick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher during the hours long attack. They beat a Capitol Police officer to death with a fire extinguisher. Officer Brian Sicknick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher during the fight. He died at the age of 42 after he was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher. Once again, that's not true. Everything you just heard was completely fabricated. The D.C. medical examiner performed an autopsy and the autopsy report showed that Officer Brian Sicknick had not suffered any kind of blunt force trauma. He was not beaten to death. He died of a stroke in his office later. No one has been charged in Officer Sicknick's death because Officer Sicknick wasn't murdered. They are lying to you that is provable, not a single person you just saw has apologized for lying. Not a single one. And it's not just the news media. Here's Congressman Pete Aguilar of California claiming that officers lost their lives on January 6. These hearings will be a chance for the country to come together to rally around the truth and unite around the rule of law. We owe it to the officers who lost their lives and the officers who were injured to tell that story and to ensure that this never happens again. Let's rally around the truth, he says, as he lies to you. May those words burn your tongue liar? But what did happen exactly on January 6? What's the truth of that day? Well, that's still unknown. From the extensive video we have of January 6, it's clear that some in the crowd, more than a few, were encouraging protesters to breach the Capitol to commit felonies. We're not guessing at that. We've showed you the tape. We have pictures of their faces. In the case of a man called Ray Epps, we know his name. But they've never been charged. Ray Epps was standing in exactly the same place that a lot of people who went to jail were standing. But he wasn't charged. His name was taken off the FBI's most wanted list. Why is that? It doesn't make any sense at all. The January 6 committee will not explain that after a year and millions of dollars and a thousand interviews. They won't tell us. Nor will they tell us how many FBI agents and assets were in the crowd that day and what were they doing there. Why can't we know that? And why are they still hiding thousands of hours of surveillance footage from within the Capitol? If the point of the committee was to get the truth out there, why can't we see the tape? Why did authorities open the doors of the Capitol to rioters and let them walk in, usher them in the doors? That's utterly bizarre. You saw that live. No one's ever explained it. What's the explanation for that? And by the way, whatever happened to the mysterious pipe bomber whose bombs we later learned many months later, Kamala Harris' bodyguards discovered. Kamala Harris told us she was at the Capitol that day, but she wasn't. She was at the DNC with the pipe bomb outside. Her bodyguards found that bomb, but she lied about that. She hid that. Why? That's got to be one of the weirdest stories ever. What does it mean, Liz Cheney? Silence. And of course, above all, they lie about the reason that January 6th happened in the first place. And you know what it is. The entire country watched Joe Biden get what they claimed was 10 million more votes than Barack Obama himself got. Joe Biden got 10 million more votes than Barack Obama got. And a lot of those votes arrived after the election. In a lot of places, voting was stopped in the middle of the night. Why? In the biggest states in the country, voter ID was optional. Why is that okay? A lot of the protesters on January 6th were very upset about that. And they should have been. All of us should be. But the January 6th committee ignored all of that completely. Instead, on the basis of zero evidence, no evidence whatsoever, they blamed the entire riot on white supremacy. Here's Joe Biden. We're confronting the stains of what remains a deep stain on the soul of the nation. Hate and white supremacy. The violent, deadly insurrection on the Capitol nine months ago was about white supremacy in my view. What? There's no evidence for that. None. The people at the Capitol, including the ones who broke the law by entering the Capitol, which is a crime, those people to a person said they were upset because they believed their democracy had been stolen from them. And whether all of their claims are true or not, that's a valid reason to be upset. But rather than reassure the rest of us that actually our democracy is sound, elections are fair and transparent, there's no cheating and we can prove it. Rather than do that, they call half the country names. And not just names, the worst name you can be called, the white supremacist. And then most bewilderingly of all, virtually no Republican in Washington pushed back against any of that. In fact, Lindsey Graham, violence worshiper to the end, said that his only regret was that the Capitol police didn't shoot more Trump voters in the neck and kill them. You've got guns, use them, Graham said. So here you have a sitting U.S. center, a Republican urging police officers to shoot unarmed Americans, many of whom were ushered into the Capitol building by law enforcement. How can people talk like that? For more than a year, they justified rhetoric like Lindsey Graham, shoot more by claiming that January 6th was an insurrection. That's not a word they were used to describe, say, the months-long siege of a courthouse in Portland or the ongoing coordinated effort to intimidate Supreme Court justice at their homes with guns, a story they ignored today. But January 6th was different, they reminded us. It was unique because it was their offices and because it bothered Nancy Pelosi. The president incited an insurrection against Congress to prevent the peaceful transition of power. And then he sat back and watched the insurrection. Insurrection, a violent mob, a white supremacist president who incited a white supremacist insurrection, an insurrection against our government. The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol was an act of insurrection. The insurrection that violated the sanctity of the people's Capitol. This was not a protest, this was an insurrection. It's not protest, it's insurrection. We are not defending and would never defend vandalism, violence, rioting. We disapproved of it when it happened, we disapprove of it now. All right, it's not just this one. But this was not an insurrection. But you know what will get you to insurrection? If you ignore the legitimate concerns of a population, if you brush them aside as if they don't matter, when gas goes to $5 and you say buy an electric car, when cities become so filthy and so dangerous that you can't live there, when the economy becomes so distorted that your own children have no hope of getting married and giving you grandchildren, when you don't care at all about any of that and all you do is talk about yourself, non-stop. You might get an insurrection if you behave like that, speaking of insurrection. So these hearings are going on now. This primetime performance, we're following them, of course, if something noteworthy happens, obviously we will bring it to you immediately. But we're not going to repeat their propaganda unfiltered. So what we are going to do is try to get to the truth. And to do that, we've assembled a bunch of very knowledgeable people who know a lot more than they're telling you on the other channels about what happened on January 6th. We're not going to do panels on the show we never do. You're going to hear from each one individually. We're going to begin tonight with Jason Whitlock, who's been watching How Our Leaders Handle January 6th. He's been learning a lot from it. He joins us now. Jason, thanks so much for coming on. So there's a lot going on in this country. They've decided with the collusion of the news media to command our attention in primetime tonight on this issue. Why? Because the Democrats on the left are desperate. Tucker, I just, I loved your monologue, but it just makes me sad. As a man, I feel like I have failed and we have failed. We're leaving this next generation, a country and a culture that has no respect for truth. That this whole thing is a charade and a lie. You spelled it out very articulately and accurately. There's no respect for truth. There was no insurrection. There was a riot, a small one, that got a little bit out of hand. But to see these people thrown in dungeons and locked up and treated like they're the worst human beings on the planet, it's a joke. It's a joke. And particularly to see this charade tonight, when we have Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court Justice and his family being terrorized at their home, and we're not talking about that, a Supreme Court Justice and his home and his neighborhood being violated the way that it has been with the approval of Jen Psaki and basically the administration. This is a joke, but it speaks to the desperation of the Democrats and the left. They have no policy. They have no solutions. They have no results to stand on. And so they just want to tap into fear and emotion and continue with the false narratives. This thing tonight, this TV show fear factor that they're putting on tonight, reminds me of the guy that's running against Rand Paul and him doing a TV commercial with a new surround his neck. They're just promoting fear. Well, it's interesting you said that because Benny Thompson, who's the chairman of this committee, just gave an opening statement. I want to play you a 20 second clip from what he just said and get your reaction to it. Speaking of fear, here he is. I'm from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I'm reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021. So, you know, why is Benny Thompson invoking the memory of slavery as we talk about a dispute over the last election? Tucker, I live in the South right now. I live in Nashville, Tennessee. I've lived in Rock Hill, South Carolina previously. Again, I don't know what part of the South Benny's from, but I just haven't people. I've not been involved with people trying to justify slavery in my lifetime. I just haven't experienced that. And so again, it's slander. It's slander of the United States. It's slander of a group of people. It is fear. Hey, we have no policies, but hey, we're not racist even though we really are racist. And so keep us in power because this other group of people are all out to get you and they're going to lynch you and they're going to put you back in slavery. There's no truth to it. We're living in a time where I've never, I don't, in the history of America, maybe in the history of the planet, this much hostility to the truth is going to be lethal to not just America, but because of America's place as the leader of this planet. This is dangerous for the entire planet for us to be this hostile to truth. I think that's a really smart and scary point to make. Jason Whitlock, thank you. Thank you. Always looking more deeply at the news. So there are two Republicans on the January 6th committee. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the one and only, Trace Gallagher has rounded up their greatest hits for a little perspective. He joins us tonight. Hey, Trace. Hey Tucker, adding Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to the January 6th committee was Nancy Pelosi's meager attempt to add balance to the panel, you know, seven Democrats, two Republicans. And remember it was Kinzinger who after January 6th was the only Republican to say that then Vice President Mike Pence should invoke the 25th Amendment to get rid of President Trump. And here he is in July 2021 at a January 6th hearing. Watch. Talk about the impact of that day. But you guys want, you guys help, you know, democracies are not defined by our bad days. It is also notable in recent months, Kinzinger has voted with Democrats seven times, though he is not running for reelection. Liz Cheney is in a hotly contested primary, and she appears to be among those who believe the one six committee is an altruistic group seeking only noble ends. Here she is in July of 21 agreeing with how the speaker picked the panel. Today, the speaker objected to two Republican members. She accepted three others. She objected to two, one of whom may well be a material witness to events that led to that day, that led to January 6th. I agree with what the speaker has done. Cheney's dislike of former President Trump has simultaneously resulted in her being shunned by members of her own party and embraced by the New York Times and CNN. Here she is again last July giving Republicans a pep talk. Watch. Very important, especially for us as Republicans to make clear that we aren't the party of white supremacy. That was last year. Last month, she accused her party of enabling white supremacy, though she was scarce on details. Tucker. Trish Gallagher, thanks for that perspective. Appreciate it. So given the unprecedented civil rights and human rights violations that have been justified by the so-called investigation, which has produced more obfuscation than clarity into January 6th, you have to wonder why Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are part of it. And why is Congress holding these hearings now as so many fundamentals in this country already feel like they're beginning to teeter? There's not a single person in this nation who doesn't feel on a gut level that we could face some real problems real soon. But we're still talking about January 6th. Tulsi Gabbard is a former member of Congress from Hawaii, ran for president last cycle. She joins us tonight with her assessment. Congressman, thanks so much. Okay, so if you were to ask me the top 10 problems facing the United States, I would definitely put what happened on January 6th. I'd put that in the top 10, possibly the top five. But I wouldn't definitely wouldn't put it in, say, the top four. Inflation, the war in Ukraine, certainly there have to be other problems with the economy, problems with COVID. I think there are a lot of things much more serious than January 6th right now. But I'd still put it in the top 10, maybe number five. Increasing crime, open borders. The list goes on and on about the very real domestic issues that we face. And frankly, they've... Okay, so I'm also... I like half of what Tucker said and dislike about half. So just because someone's unarmed doesn't mean that they're dangerous. How would you like seven unarmed people making their way into your home or into your business or into your car? None of us want unarmed strangers showing up in our home, on our property, in our workspace, in our vehicles, hanging, surrounding anyone who is precious to us and threatening them. So that these protesters were not armed, doesn't mean they were nothing. So you hear this in the news media, decrying police brutality. Well, an unarmed person can kill you with a punch. So I don't think that being unarmed means that you're not a threat. I think that's absolutely absurd line of argumentation by Tucker. On the other hand, I noticed that those people generally on the center and the left who believe that January 6th represented this severe threat to our democracy. And I don't believe so. I don't believe it was an insurrection. I think it was a riot, but it was far from an insurrection or a coup. Those people, however, who believe that what happened on January 6th and right-wing extremism and Donald Trump are a great threat to democracy, these are the very same people who supported impeachment who wanted to remove Donald Trump from office even though he was legally elected president of the United States. So it seems like their commitment to democracy is rather thin. But if you believe in democracy and you're concerned that Trump is a threat to democracy, how is removing the people's choice for president through impeachment, how is that exactly pro-democracy? So I'm not afraid of these hearings. I don't see anything nefarious about them being televised. If the Democrats overreach, then that will rebound to their disadvantage. I think the more people who see Benny Thompson, the chair of this committee, the more people who see him speech-ifying and testifying and running this thing, I think that's going to be bad for Democrats, that he would compare what happened on January 6th to slavery, that people who support January 6th support slavery is absolutely absurd. We are not born gullible. We did not evolve to be gullible. We were not born yesterday. So I don't think we have to fear these hearings if we're on the right or if we're committed Republicans. And I see nothing wrong with Republicans serving on these committees. Now, I expect the Democrats will try to use these hearings to their advantage and I expect that the two Republicans on the committee will try to use these hearings to their personal advantage. I'm doing this to my advantage. We all act in our personal advantage, but that doesn't mean that people acting in a partisan way or out for their personal advantage are going to be either useful in uncovering the truth or useful in demonstrating how phony and dishonest and misguided they are. So I don't see anything particularly frightening here about these January 6 hearings. I think we can be at ease with what's going on. Okay, I had a really good conversation just before the show started with a friend on Twitter. And he said, why should I still care about Russia and Ukraine? I don't. Right. So most of the things that we talk about as far as public policy or sports, we could have no effect on, right? And most people didn't care about the Archduke Ferdinand and his assassination in 1914, either about led to World War One, which about 35 million people died. So we have a reasonable chance that what's going on in the Ukraine war right now could lead to World War Three. I mean, so what do you care about? You may care about a particular sports team. You might care about Iran. You might care about inflation, right? But you can't do anything about professional sports or Iran or inflation, just like you can't do anything about the Ukraine war. Now, for instance, I get the sense that certain nerds get off on all this deep knowledge of the Russia-Ukraine war. There seems to be no value. Well, how is your knowledge about inflation or about sports or about Iran? How is that adding value to your life? Right. So some people are getting off showing that they don't care about the Russia-Ukraine conflict because they're more rooted in reality. And other people are getting off by showing how much they do care about Ukraine because they're good global citizens or they're concerned about the consequences. And so, sure, I'm sure there's a lot of virtuous signaling in many different directions. But inherently caring about this war, all right, it doesn't have any immediate payoff to your bottom line. But it's a mental workout, right? Just like being interested in baseball or interested in the stock market or interested in inflation or politics in general doesn't have cash value to you. But it's something that many men just tend to naturally care about even though you can do nothing about it. Now, you can argue, I don't think the knowledge about the Ukraine war gives you any edge on any other situation. Well, it's all a workout for the brain. So I learned algebra, geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, calculus, various micro-macro-economic theory when I was at college. It was all a workout for the brain. Almost none of it has any direct benefit. You could say about almost everything you learn in school that doesn't necessarily give you an edge on any situation that you have to deal with in your life. Now, I'll probably spend about 15, maybe 20 minutes a day on the Ukraine war. I like the mental challenge. Just like I like the mental challenge of responding to COVID, I wanted to assess how clearly I was gauging reality versus how other people who I respected were gauging reality and try to find the truth between distant perspectives, respectable perspectives, elite perspectives, mainstream perspectives, Twitter perspectives. I enjoy the challenge of trying to find out the truth. So what's your reaction? Opinion on the new Saudi Gulf Tournament and its impact for Gulf, so 17 members of the professional, the PGA Professional Gulf Association have been banned because they're going to participate in this Saudi tournament. Don't have any strong opinions. I mean, one guy was paid $100 million to participate. I don't know. How would you turn down playing in some golf tournaments to earn $100 million? I mean, I don't think that I could turn that down. You offered me that much money. Yeah, I'd go play golf or video games or whatever it was. I mean, how can you blame people for taking $100 million to play some golf? Sixth committee did. A lot of them supported the riots in Los Angeles in 1992. Now they're telling you they oppose riots, but we have the evidence they've gone on the record supporting political violence when it suits them. So for example, in 1992, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, now a member of the January 6th committee, was an assistant professor at American University, Washington College of Law. He said he hoped there wouldn't be a quote backlash to the race riots in Los Angeles in 1992. Now 63 people were murdered heavily for their skin color, by the way. There were thousands of injuries. There was a billion dollars in property damage. Reginald Denny was ripped out of his truck and beaten nearly to death on camera, but Jamie Raskin wasn't bothered by any of this at all. What he was worried about was the rioters. People sensed that justice was not done in the verdict that came down in the state criminal court. And I would just hope that President Bush doesn't anticipate or encourage a backlash against the rioting which followed the verdict. Yeah, Reginald Denny. What did Reginald Denny do wrong? He was hauling a load of cinder blocks to the wrong neighborhood and he had the wrong skin color, so they beat him almost, even brain damage. But that's cool. That same year, the chairman of the January 6th committee today, that would be Benny Thompson, decided he couldn't condemn rioting. Instead he said he was worried about injustices against black officials in Los Angeles at the time. Well, the injustice was happening on the streets of LA as the city was torched in race riots room progress, but he couldn't denounce it. Matt Slap is the chairman of CPAC. He joins us tonight. Matt, thanks so much for coming on. So it's a little much for the very same, the precisely the same people who have no problem with real political violence, grandstanding hyperventilating about what happened on January 6th. Why does nobody point this out? Yeah, and why does it have to be shown on your show? I mean, the public records of these elected officials is there for the entire media to see, the hypocrisy of all the times they've taken to the floor and taken to media to say that people like Donald Trump were not legitimately elected presidents, all the times they have not condemned violence. Or in this case, you have the chairman of the committee and this other member from Maryland basically saying, oh, riots are fine if you have a social grievance. Now, why is it okay for Jamie Raskin to go to the floor of the House of Representatives in 2016 and say that Donald Trump was not legitimately elected, that this ranking, this chairman, Benny Thompson, can say that Donald Trump is illegitimate and boy caught his inauguration, but when a retired teacher or a mom or a dad or somebody wants to go to their Capitol and protest what they saw as an election rife with lots of questions and fraudulent voting, somehow that's something untoward with their desire to speak up. Why can't they also speak up? And why did Benny Thompson say that Josh Holly and Ted Cruz should be on the no-fly list for raising legitimate questions about the 2020 election? This two-tiered justice system, this two-tiered idea that if you're a conservative or you're okay, they were doing so well. And then Tucker and his guest just raising bogus arguments about the 2020 election. We have absolutely no evidence that there was massive voter fraud in the 2020 election. So evidence may come to light and I'll change my mind, but as of right now we have absolutely no evidence. And so the objections that Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz were making to the election were not legitimate questions. They were political grandstanding of the most base and dishonest variety. And when you do question the legitimacy of legitimate elections, you are encouraging your followers to break the law. Because if you're telling people the elections may be fixed or are fixed, then you're telling people that they should operate with no moral constraints because the whole system is rigged against them. And Tucker goes on night after night after night about how the whole system is rigged against you when the truth is Americans have a pretty good. America has some problems, but overall compared to the human lot throughout history or what life is like for the overwhelming majority of people alive today, Americans have it really good. So America has problems and some people are suffering in America more than others. So definitely those problems should be addressed. Now I like how Tucker's just going live and Fox's counter-programming completely ad-free. So I think that's awesome that they're doing this ad-free story that was sort of lost today. So a man running for governor of the Republican primary in Michigan, hoping to challenge Gretchen Whitmer by some accounts, the leading candidate in the race was just arrested by the FBI at home. Why? January 6th. This happened today. Fox's Kevin Cork has that story for us tonight. Incredible story indeed, Tucker. Evening to you, Michigan GOP gubernatorial primary candidate Ryan Kelly, as you point out was arrested at 9.30 this morning by the FBI on a misdemeanor charge allegedly for actions taken during the protests at the Capitol back on January 6th, 2021. Critics suggest that since that event happened a year, five months and three days ago, the timing of today's arrest and the search of his home seemed suspicious to put it mildly. And perhaps he's meant to give Democrats something to crow about as they stage their made for TV January 6th committee event tonight. Now, according to a criminal complaint file by the FBI, Kelly was accused of disruptive conduct, injuring public property and entering restrictive space without permission. Although it's important to point out a lot of people were there. Now there is a video apparently that is being shared by the Michigan Democratic Party that shows Kelly allegedly ascending the steps of the Capitol saying, this is war, baby. Now for his part, Mr. Kelly has previously denied that he entered the Capitol building or violated any law. Now his arrest, I should point this out, Tucker. You'll find this interesting. Comes after five other candidates in the primary were disqualified, including former Detroit police chief James Craig. And you'll probably recall this too. There have been several other GOP candidates in other states and jurisdictions who have been dequeued from running because of an issue of filing and the like. Tucker. Amazing. Kevin Quirk, thank you so much. You bet. That's one way to win an election. Let's say you're a completely incompetent, reviled governor of a big state like Michigan that would be Gretchen Wittner specifically, and you think you're going to lose. Just have the FBI arrest the front runner who's running against you. His name is Ryan Kelly. Again, arrested today at home by the FBI. Now he is being accused of encouraging people to enter the Capitol and standing on the Capitol steps. Well, the funny thing is Ray Epps did the same thing. Ray Epps was in exactly the same place and he's on camera repeatedly encouraging people to break the law, but he's on his ranch tonight. Ryan Kelly is in jail. Why is that? Well, it's not for lack of evidence. On January 5th, Ray Epps was caught on video urging protesters, as we said, to enter the Capitol. And we showed you this before. We can't show it enough. Watch this. What is that? Now, we don't actually know the answer, but it's a completely fair question. The January 6th commission has from day one refused to answer it. They've refused to answer it and they attacked anyone who asked, is your conspiracy not really what's the answer? Well, now they're telling us they interviewed Ray Epps and Ray Epps says he wasn't working with the government. Okay, but that doesn't answer the question. Why hasn't he been charged? Why was he taken off the most wanted list? I mean, it's bizarre. And no amount of name calling is going to get us to stop pointing out that it's bizarre because it is. No one has covered the story more closely or more carefully, more factually than Julie Kelly, better than anyone at The New York Times. She's the author of January 6th. The Democrats used the Capitol protest to launch a war on terror against the political right, which they have, and she joins us tonight. Julie, thanks so much for coming on. So to see the man who was apparently the front runner, according to at least one poll in the Michigan Republican primary, arrested by the FBI, I'm not sure what he did. I know it was much less than what Ray Epps did. What is this? What is this? I am truly bothered and confused by this. Well, I'll tell you, Tucker, I read the criminal complaint that was filed today after he was arrested. It appears to me that Ryan Kelly has been under FBI surveillance since the spring of 2020. And here's why. He participated in the anti lockdown rallies in Michigan. Apparently he is head of this conservative, a conservative group that was targeting Gretchen Whitmer and her emergency declaration. In the criminal complaint today, Tucker, they refer to an FBI informant who identified Ryan Kelly in public photos from the Capitol protest. So this FBI informant... I think something that we can learn to read reality more accurately is to give up the idea that people in certain professions are automatically the good guys. So sometimes the right wing is right. Sometimes the left wing is right. We evolve to have two different political orientations to life because there are advantages to each. In some circumstances, it's an advantage to be highly suspicious of outsiders. In other circumstances, it is to your advantage to be welcoming to outsiders. So to be suspicious of outsiders is more of a traditional right wing thing. To be welcoming to outsiders is more of a traditional left wing thing. But the left and right have advantages and depends on the circumstance and depends on the particular manifestation of the left and right about who's right. So the FBI is not always righteous. Police are not always righteous. The accused are not always unrighteous. Sometimes lawyers are right. Sometimes doctors are right. Sometimes the elite are right. Sometimes the people are right. Sometimes the working class is more right than the middle class and the upper class. Sometimes the middle class is more right than the upper class. Sometimes the upper class more right than the working class and the middle class. There's no group of people who's always given truth. And so when we stop putting entire groups of people on a pedestal, whether they're rabbis or Republicans or law enforcement, and just think critically about each situation and what's being said by whom, what's the agenda, what do they have to gain, then I think we can see reality much more clearly. Was working on a domestic terror investigation in Michigan in 2020. Now what is that? That is what we now know is the FBI concocted Whitmer kidnapping hoax. So who is this confidential informant? Why did he ID Ryan Kelly? Also it appears from separate reporting that Ryan Kelly was in touch with one of the 13 men charged in this hoax, not the six men charged federally, the other men who faced state charges. So then this criminal, this FBI informant was hired separately as an informant. Okay, let's get a little bit more So it's pretty obvious at this point that whatever the point of the January commission is, it's not to get to the facts. The first thing they would do if they want to get to the facts is release the thousands of hours of video footage they have and tell us what is the point of the Ray Epps saga and why did the cops open the doors for the protesters, et cetera. So the point is not to get to the truth, it's to hide the truth and to create a print tax for the Democratic Party to declare war against millions of American citizens who oppose their agenda. Liz Cheney is helping them. Here she is just moments ago screeching about disinformation. President Trump ignored the rulings of our nation's courts. He ignored his own campaign leadership, his White House staff, many Republican state officials. He ignored the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. President Trump invested millions of dollars of campaign funds purposely spreading false information. Running ads he knew were false and convincing millions of Americans that the election was corrupt and that he was the true president. As you will see this misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th. She is off on another planet and you know smart person not an evil person. Why is Liz Cheney abetting the destruction of America's civil liberties and our sacred norms are being destroyed on the basis of this investigation? Why is she participating in this? Sean Davis has been watching this closely. He's co-founder and CEO of the Federalist and we're happy to have him tonight. Sean thanks so much for coming in. What a sad moment this is and what a strange moment. What do you make of this? Yeah I kind of feel like we are watching something akin to the dissolution of the Republic. I mean we have people who spent the last four years with their Russia hoax trying to overthrow the president. They concocted another hoax to make sure Supreme Court justice they didn't like didn't get confirmed. Then you had the whole COVID thing which they used as a pretext to just do a massive roll up of power. Then we have the election and now they have this committee which they're using really is a pretext to just criminalize opposition to anything they're doing. It wasn't enough for them to beat Trump. It wasn't enough for them to throw him off of Twitter and ban him from social media. It's apparently not enough for them to go and arrest his top White House advisors. So Fox is counter-programming these hearings by going commercial free. So we're 43 minutes into Tucker Carlson show zero commercials. While they're getting on planes and putting them in shackles what they really want to do is criminalize the things that you do that I do that everyone watching does when they oppose Democrat policies. I mean this is kind of an existential threat to how our Republic works. If you can't speak out against things, if you can't go vote the way you want about things, if you don't get to run for office without them coming and arresting you, we really don't have a Republic anymore. It's a really frightening thing to watch and they're treating it like it's just like a show business. It's I think this all the time. So they control everything. Democrats now control everything, you know, both branches of Congress, the executive, the corporations, the medias, everything. And yet any dissent is intolerable to them. Like the, you know, one guy stands up, Joe Rogan, well, I'm not sure that that's right. Bam, let's destroy him. Like what impulses? That's a totalitarian impulse, isn't it? It is. And it's an interesting dynamic that you see that the more they control, the more they hate the people that they can't control. Because when there's a cacophony of voices, it's too much to deal with. But when you're just one person speaking out, when you're the lone voice speaking out, when you're the only outlet people have, they hate you even more and they're even more determined to crush you. So this isn't going to get better as they get more power. It's not like they're going to somehow be sated with the power and control they have. They're just going to hate the dissenters more and more and want to crush them. God, that's so smart and deep and true. That's why when they won in 2020, they got angrier. It was the one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. Sean Davis, thanks so much. Great to see you tonight. Thank you. So not only are these people sinister, they're also kind of neurotic and pathetic. They're telling us about the terrors of January 6th. But in reality, we just trying to have fragile and narcissistic they actually are. They can't bring themselves to denounce real and present threats of violence in our nation cities. They're everywhere. One of the people who's chronicled them closely is Michael Tracy, who was an actual independent journalist. His work is on Substack and we highly recommend it. But he's been following this since the first day and we're interested in his views on it. Michael Tracy, thanks a lot for coming on. What do you make of this? On that very first day, Chuck Schumer stood up and said something pretty incredible. He said that January 6th, 2021 will go down an infamy just like Pearl Harbor went down an infamy. So he likened the magnitude of January 6th immediately to Pearl Harbor. So already this process of mythmaking was underway hours after Congress reconvened and they evaded that momentary trauma of having their legislative business interrupted for a couple hours. That's what we were told was tantamount to Pearl Harbor. I remember that very well. You were one of the very few who pointed it out. Isn't it the role, the legitimate role of the news media to add a little bit of perspective? Maybe you don't editorialize, but I don't know, 3,000 people killed on December 7th, 1941. Ashley Babbitt killed on January 6th like Pearl Harbor. Why nobody pushed back against that? Well, because most of the media probably would only push back from the standpoint of saying that Pearl Harbor isn't an extreme enough of a comparison. They might have to invent some, you know, alien invasion or something to liken January 6th to given how emotionally traumatized they were by the whole experience. You know, it's interesting that Democrats continue to focus so intellectually on this issue because who were the purported victims of January 6th? Who are the people that they're claiming really suffered the most? Well, mainly it's the politicians and journalists who are in the Capitol that day. And those happen to be two of the most despised groups in America. And yet, Democrats have now apparently calculated that keeping this front and center is going to benefit them in the midterms. And, you know, there is a certain political logic to that, perhaps, however warped. Because if you notice a lot of progressives and people maybe who are aligned with Bernie Sanders or kind of had to be cajoled in supporting Joe Biden in 2020, they're becoming a little bit disillusioned because the Democrats really aren't delivering much of anything legislatively. And so Adam Schiff and company want to keep this show going until fall because that'll enable them to pressure potentially weary Democratic base voters by saying, look, whatever gripes you might have about how we've governed, you must support Democrats. You must vote to re-empower Democrats because if you don't, that will empower the existentially threatening Republicans. And so therefore it's your solemn duty to vote as always for Democrats because the country will collapse. We will all face this world cataclysmic destruction if the Democrats are not in power. That's basically what it boils down to. And before I forget, because this is something that was very interesting, and I recalled it as you were talking about the civil liberties component of January 6, last summer I covered the plea hearing of one of the defendants of January 6. The first defendant was Paul Hodgkins who pleaded guilty to a felony charge, the first defendant who was sentenced related to January 6. And when the Department of Justice was arguing for an even harsher sentence for this individual who had committed no violent crime, the government readily conceded that this individual did not do anything that entailed physical violence. But nevertheless, the DOJ wanted him imprisoned for a harsher sentence because they claimed he was responsible for inflicting emotional injury on whom? On the politicians who were assembled in the Capitol that day. So the federal law enforcement apparatus had to invent this new paradigm of what supposedly constitutes an injury in order to keep nonviolent offenders in federal prison for longer. Now, I don't remember anybody really ever talking about that. I happened to notice it because I looked at the documents, but there are so many other civil liberties implications to this story that are just totally ignored. So I'm glad at least someone is beginning to talk about them. It's unbelievable. Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham, shoot more Trump voters. Michael Tracy, I appreciate your reporting always. Thank you. Nice. So we should tell you, and as we said at the top, this is the only hour on American television that is not broadcasting unfiltered propaganda into the homes of unsuspecting viewers. On the screen, you see eight boxes, those are eight different TV channels, taking the Nancy Pelosi feed unfiltered. Now, if at any time in your life you've ever made fun of totalitarian regimes that, you know, broadcast lies into the homes of the population that they can't turn off, take a look at that. That's happening right now. Meanwhile, gas is over five bucks. Inflation is higher than it's been in the lifetime of most Americans. Violent crime is making cities impossible to live in and more than 100,000 Americans OD'd on drugs last year. Why isn't there a prime time hearing about any of that? Charlie Hurt is the opinion editor of The Washington Times. He joins us tonight. Charlie, great to see you. Okay. So let's have a look at some other stories where we keep an eye on the hearing. So Christopher Roofer made some predictable points, lessons from the Washington Post meltdown. He says, the heart of wokeness is envy. The domain of wokeness is intra. He meant intra-elite competition. So being work is a way to out-compete your fellow elites. The incentives of work is the privilege to adopt victim identities. The results of wokeness are personal neuroticism and institutional dysfunction. So these all feel good if you're on the right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But come on, let's get real. Lessons from democracy. Lessons from nationalism. The heart of democracy and of nationalism is envy. Once you establish freedom and democracy and establish a nation, then people will try to out-compete other people, right? The heart of democracy is envy. The heart of freedom is envy. Once you allow people the freedom to make their lives, they're going to envy those who make better lives than they do. So the domain of freedom is intra-elite competition. In an era of freedom, we're all savagely competing. In a traditional society, in a non-free society, you don't need to compete because your path in life is already set. The incentives of wokeness lead the privilege to adopt victim identities. Well, the incentives of freedom lead the privilege to adopt victim identities if that will work. The incentives of freedom lead people to adopt all sorts of absurd identities if they think they'll help them get ahead. This is one of the downsides of freedom. The results of freedom are personal neuroticism and institutional dysfunction. Okay, when you have freedom, you have a more uncertain identity and you have the burden of freedom of trying to build an identity all on your own without having one just handed to you. This leads to absurdly high levels of mental illness, neuroticism. So it's not just something that happens among the work. This happens widespread in democracies, wherever there's freedom. What's going on with Israel? Look at female Zionist soldier, says she's an officer in an elite unit. A friend tells her she has a room on her leg. Very impressive. This will keep England. This will keep Israel safe. Okay. Now, I was just reading an excellent article in New York Magazine about a guy in his 30s who's realized, hey, it's time for me to give up on my fantasy sports league. So the guys in my generation are hooked on fantasy sports. Is that really a bad thing? So it says this summer I reached a grudging conclusion about myself. I've been playing fantasy sports for too long. He was aged 34 and he'd been playing fantasy sports intensely for 12 years. Now, as he was giving up fantasy sports, he realized that he wasn't going to be have to stay in touch with his friends anymore. Why was he in fantasy sports? Because he wanted to be with his friends and fantasy sports is where his male friends were. So how is this elaborate contest of fantasy sports? How has it become so crucial to keep in regular contact with the people you love when you're a guy? So the author tells a fellow soccer parent about that he's giving up fantasy sports. He's writing a story about fantasy sports and she says, oh, fantasy sports. Is that when you make a fake sports team and play fake games against each other? Yes. So fantasy sports are an organized contest where people draft real life athletes into made up teams that battle for primacy. Part of a bigger fantasy league and points are tallied. And yeah, if this sounds like nerdy stuff, it is. It's the game of thrones kind where everyone's doing it and you know, it's making someone lots of money. So the global market of fantasy sports is expected to grow to $26 billion by the end of the year. One in five American adults participates and 81% of participants are men between the ages of 18 and 34. So these are the peak friendship collecting years, right? And so fantasy sports or going to synagogue or hanging out on live streams, these are all ways to be with friends. So a tiny number of Jews go to synagogue to talk to God, but most Jews go to synagogue to talk to their friends. And there are a lot of articles and studies that say men have no friends. Well, one of the ways that men maintain friendships is through fantasy sports. Loneliness can kill you. We've heard that from a lot of studies. Loneliness can shorten your life has side effects, including cardiovascular disease, stroke and suicide. Loneliness is as much of a health risk for men as smoking or being overweight increases cancer risk. So fantasy sports are a way that many young men stay in touch is probably the only reason I'm still in touch with many of these guys says one block. So many of these guys don't have much in common, just like I would be in touch with a lot of people if we weren't regularly showing up to show together if we weren't regularly showing up to doven together or to study tour together or to observe Jewish holidays or Jewish Sabbath together or to volunteer together for some Jewish cause. So you have many elites insisting that health and longevity for men depends on cultivating close relationships. Well, for many men, the easiest way to cultivate close relationships is by fantasy sports. Now I think there's a much better way and that's to participate in organized religion or to participate in a 12 step community or to participate in some form of volunteering or a book club or an intellectual activity like live streaming. Right. So following closely the Ukraine versus Russia war, I think that's probably a better use of time than fantasy sports. But will you stay as connected with the people who are most important to you if you decide to divert yourself to Ukraine versus Russia rather than fantasy sports? I'm not sure about that. Here's more from Tucker Carlson. I mean, if you take three steps back, what we're really watching is members of Congress talking about themselves again. Yeah, absolutely because the alternative is for them to have to talk about policies. And if they talk about policies, they have to talk about their and it's not just their failures of you know, all the failures we see right in front of us, you know, gas prices, crime, an open border, fentanyl deaths, you can go through the list is endless. And if anybody got out of Washington, any of these people got out of Washington and talked to normal people, they would realize that American people are very, very concerned about a lot of things. This is not one of them. But then you step back even farther and you look at the just the cavalcade of lies that the Democrat politicians have made in their promises to get elected over ever since even before Joe Biden became came to Washington, whether it's solving health care problems for poor people, ending poverty or providing public education to people. They failed on all of these fronts. And the reason they and I call this the third failed impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump. The reason they have to talk about this stuff is because they can't talk about those other issues. They have to distract everybody from it. But then it's even crazier than that because when you get to the issue of security and you start thinking about what people, you know, whose businesses were destroyed in these riots that Democrats supported in the year running up to the election and you think about the security, think about the parents whose children that they fear for their children going into an elementary school today and Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the White House. Okay. A terrific article here in The Atlantic by Jennifer Senior. It's your friends who break your heart. The older we get, the more we need our friends and the harder it is to keep them. So it's a lot easier to maintain relationship with family. I could I've gone 10 years without seeing my brother, but when we got together in person again, we just picked right up. So family relationships don't tend to need as much tending, but maintaining friendships takes work. It takes effort. And so this is in The Atlantic. It's your friends who break your heart. Written by Jennifer Senior. It is an insolent cliche, almost, to note that our culture lacks the proper script for ending friendships. We have no rituals to observe, no paperwork to do, no boilerplate dialogue to crib from. Yet when Alisa Albert and Rebecca Wolfe were in the final throws of their friendship, they managed entirely by accident to leave behind just such a script. The problem was that it read like an Edward Albee play, tart, unsparing, fluorescent with rage. I met Alisa one evening in 2008 after an old friend's book reading. She was such mesmerizing company that I rushed out to buy her debut novel, The Book of Dahlia, which had been published a few months earlier. I was instantly struck by how unafraid of darkness and emotional chaos she was. The same articulate fury suffused after birth, her follow-up. Her next book, Human Blues, Her Monster, as she likes to say, comes out in July. Rebecca is someone I knew only by reputation until recently. She's the founding editor of the literary magazine Fence, a haven for genre-resistant writing and writers that's now almost 25 years old. She's also the author of a novel and four poetry collections, including Manderley, selected by the National Poetry Series. She has a fifth coming out in the fall. The two women became close more than a decade ago, spotting in each other the same traits that dazzled outsiders, talent, charisma, saber-tooth smarts. To Rebecca, Alisa was impossibly vibrant in a way that only a 30-year-old can be to someone who is 41. To Alisa, Rebecca was a glamorous and reassuring role model, a woman who, through some miracle of alchemy, had successfully combined motherhood, marriage, and a creative life. It would be hard to overstate how much that mattered to Alisa. She was a new mother, all alone in a new city, Albany, where her husband was a tenured professor. Albany, how does one find friends in Albany? Yet here was Rebecca, the center of a lush social network, a pollinating bee showing up on campus at Fence's office every day. The two entered an intense loop of contact. They took a class in New York City together, they sometimes joked about running away together, and eventually they decided to write a book together, a collection of their email and text correspondence about a topic with undeniably broad appeal, how to live in the world and be okay. They called this project, The Wellness Letters. I read the manuscript in one gulp. Their exchanges have real swing to them, a screwball quality with a punk twist on page one. R. Anything you haven't done? E. Affair, acid, shroom, second child, death, ayahuasca. R. Bucket list. E. Efforts at wellness. R. I just started writing something called Trying to Stay Off My Meds. E. You are a strong woman. But over time, resentments flicker into view. Deep fissures in their belief systems begin to show. They start writing past each other, not hearing each other at all. By the end, the two women have taken every difficult truth they've ever learned about the other and fashioned it into a club. The final paragraphs are a mess of blood and bone and gray gut. I also had similar nasty experiences with Lisa Albert. I was essentially set up with her by another Jewish writer or professor at Columbia, I think, of creative writing. Said, oh, you should talk to Lisa Albert. So I interviewed Lisa Albert and I post the interview and she responds, it's pretty inappropriate to post the text and link to my actual New York Times wedding announcement. I'm not sure what your motive is that does it deepen any understanding of my writing, blurring the line between a writer's personal life and their work as a disservice to all. Thanks. Also, I'm sure you intend to proofread, but there are typos everywhere. I'd love to see you pose it to a male writer, various questions, if only for a true realization of its absurdity. Oh, so I asked what was more important, writing a book or marriage and family, if only for a true realization of its absurdity. Oh, and Rick's friend is still spelled Rick's best Lisa. So I respond wedding announcement. You made it the whole template of your essay in the book, guilt. So it's an obvious journalistic choice. It's one of the first results of your name in Google blurring the line. You've written many autobiographical essays. This is a line you blurred long ago. So she responds, first of all, my essay in the modern Jewish guy, girl's guide to guilt is a piece of narrative nonfiction, not journalism. There is a significant difference and one I would hope a professional writer would understand intimately. Out of respect for him, I changed my ex-husband's name to Jonathan in that essay. What wishes to Google me, of course, one quite easily finds that wedding announcement, which contains multiple details about not only my parents myself, but also my ex-in-laws. I'm still unclear on what it has to do with your interviewing me on my debut collection of short stories. Surely I don't need to get into the definition of short story versus essay versus journalist. I mean, this is a very difficult woman. I spoke to you on my dear friend, Binnie's recommendation. So there's Binnie Kirshenbaum. I certainly hope that wasn't an error in my judgment. I'm getting a rather unpleasant sense that you might be aiming for some sort of tempest in a teapot here. I do hope I'm mistaken. I respond, I'll be happy to correct any errors in my piece and to add context or additions to your remarks if you want. But I'm not going to withdraw citations and quotes of other people's pieces on you or by you. And she goes off on me. So this is Lisa Albert. And she ended up threatening me with legal action for quoting the New York Times right up of her marriage. And then she writes in Juicy about a novel. This is from 2008. The German Bride is that rare thing, a historical novel that unfolds organically, which is perhaps why the New York Times couldn't quite figure out how to properly essentialize the title and opening of the Times Review, a pretty goddamn idiotic and offensive, given that Joanna Hirschhorn's novel has nothing to do whatsoever with Yiddish culture. So whenever I read the word offensive being thrown about as a weapon, I figure the writer is a thin-skinned nanny. And what kind of person uses the word essentialize? So this is the lovely and charming Lisa Albert who's being written about here by Jennifer Sr. in the Atlantic February 9, 2022. In real time, Alisa and Rebecca enact on the page something that almost all of us have gone through, the painful dissolution of a friendship. The specifics of their disagreements may be unique to them, but the broad outlines have the ring and shape of the familiar. The wellness letters are almost impossible to read without seeing the corpse of one of your own doomed friendships floating by. Alisa complains about failures and reciprocity. Rebecca implies that Alisa is being insensitive, too quick to judge others. Alisa implies that Rebecca is being too self-involved, too needy. Rebecca implies, now you're too quick to judge me. Alisa ultimately suggests that Rebecca's unhappiness is at least partly of her own unlovely making. To which Rebecca, more or less replies, who on earth would choose to be this unhappy? To which Alisa basically says, well, should that be an excuse for being a myopic and inconsiderate friend? E. The truth is that I am wary of you. R. When you say that you are wary of me, it reminds me of something. Oh yes, it's when I told you that I was wary of you, wary of your clear pattern of forming mutually idolatrous relationships with women who you cast in a particular role in your life only to later castigate. Their feelings were too hot to contain. What started as a deliberate, thoughtful meditation about wellness ended as an inadvertent chronicle of a friendship gone terribly awry. The wellness letters, 18 months of electrifying correspondence, now sit mute on their laptops. I first read the wellness letters in December 2019 with a different project in mind for them. The pandemic forced me to set it aside, but two years later my mind kept returning to those letters for reasons that at this point have also become a cliche. I was undergoing a great pandemic friendship reckoning, along with pretty much everyone else. All of those hours in isolation had amounted to one long spin of the centrifuge, separating the thickest friendships from the thinnest. The ambient threat of death and loss made me realize that if I wanted to renew or intensify my bonds with the people I loved most, the time was now. Right now. But truth be told, I'd already been mulling this subject for quite some time. When you're in middle age, which I am, mid-middle age to be precise, I'm now 52, you start to realize how very much you need your friends. They're the flora and fauna in a life that hasn't had much diversity, because you've been so busy, so relentlessly, stupidly busy with middle-aged things, kids, house, spouse, or some modern-day version of Zorba's full catastrophe. Then one day you look up and discover that the ambition monkey has fallen off your back, the children into whom you've pumped thousands of kilowatt hours are no longer partial to your company, your partner may or may not still be by your side, and what them remains. With any luck? Your friends. According to Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, I've aged out of the friendship collecting business, which tends to peek in the tumbleweed stage of life, when you're still young enough to spend Saturday evenings with random strangers and Sunday mornings nursing hangovers at brunch. Instead, I should be in the friendship enjoying business, luxuriating in the relationships that survived as I put down roots. And I am luxuriating in them. But those friendships are awfully hard one. With midlife comes a number of significant upheavals and changes, ones that prove too much from any friendships to withstand. By middle age, some of the dearest people in your life have gently faded away. You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics, even when you share the same politics. Political obsessions are a big under discussed friendship enter in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age. You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. Envy, dear God, it's the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames. These life changes and upheavals don't just consume your friends' time and attention, they often reveal unseemly, characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn't imagined possible. Those are brutal. And I've still left out three of the most common and dramatic friendship disruptors, moving, divorce and death, though only the last is irremediable. Okay, so we all want to impose certain templates on reality. We all have visions of how reality should be. And so we don't really pay attention to the messy complexity that's all around us. Number one, the world's far more dangerous place than we really want to admit. Two, other people are far less predictable than would make us happy to understand. Number three, we are far less predictable than would make us happy to understand. So what is inherent in all human connection is the possibility of betrayal because betrayal is simply a hyperbolic way of expressing that other people don't have the same priorities that we expected. So it's particularly useless to be burning friendships for the sake of political causes over which you're not likely to have much effect. So we need the left, just as we need the right, you know, we need the elites and the middle class and the upper class and the lower class. We don't know where wisdom and truth is going to come from next. Here's more from this Jennifer Sr. essay in the Atlantic. Happy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade even under the best of circumstance. Okay, and there are lots of reasons to take what happened January 6th seriously. All right, we need these hearings. We need an investigation. We need media attention. Now, I don't think it's number one, number two, or even the number three most important issue facing us, but it's in the top 10. And so we can learn something by listening to the conventional critique of what happened on January 6th without automatically bowing down to it. It says, the real aberration is keeping them. In 2009, the Dutch sociologist Gerald Molenhorst published an attention grabber of a study that basically showed we replace half of our social network over the course of seven years, a reality we both do and don't into it. R. I'm worried once we wrap up our dialogue, our friendship will be useless, therefore done. E. Nope, we are deeply in dialogue for long run, I think, unless you want to not be. Does our friendship feel useless? R. No, I want to be friends forever. E. Then we will be. R. Were friendships always so fragile? I suspect not, but we now- E. So for me, most of my friendships are context dependent, all right? If I wasn't going to certain groups, if I wasn't going to certain synagogues, if I wasn't participating in certain volunteer activities, if I wasn't going to certain places and doing certain things, I would not be seeing most of the people who I regard as friends. So I was making my living as a writer from 1997 to 2007, so most of the social events I was going to were writer gatherings. Then after 2007, I saw I was not going to be able to keep making my living as a writer, and so I largely dropped out of writing social circles, and I lost most of my social life and probably most of my friends when I changed profession. So incredibly painful, but I find bonds made within Orthodox Judaism tend to be more lasting because you're being brought together regularly for prayer, for Torah study, for holidays, for the Sabbath. That seems to be a pretty good place to put down friendships. E. Now live in an era of radical individual freedoms. All of us may begin at the same starting line as young adults, but as soon as the gun goes off, we're all running in different directions. There's little synchrony to our lives. We have kids at different rates, or not at all. We pair off at different rates, or not at all. We move for love, for work, for opportunity, and adventure, and more affordable real estate, and healthier lifestyles, and better weather. Yet it's precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much. E. So a question in the chat, what is Mark Abner doing these days? I'm not sure, a very brave man. So Mark Abner was willing to go up against the conventional wisdom, to go up against Hollywood. Very ballsy, very brave man. I also had these issues with gambling addiction. So I'm not sure what exactly has happened to Mark Abner. Very smart, very intense, very edgy guy. So really enjoyed Mark Abner and respected a lot of his reporting, but a guy filled with demons. Just like I knew Mark Abner in many common circles with Andrew Breitbart. So Andrew Breitbart, someone that I spent a lot of time with between 2002 and 2008. And again, someone very intense, had many of the symptoms of an addict. I don't know what his addiction was, or if he even was an addict, but certainly an adrenaline junkie. So one of the things about the news business and reporting is that it's so easy to just get absolutely hooked on adrenaline. I've found that. And if you're an addict, like I have an addictive tendency, then I'm just seeing, well, just, oh, seeing three helicopters just go by. So I assume that's related to Joe Biden. So you don't often see three helicopters go, so looking out the window here in Los Angeles, three helicopters going by, I assume that's related to Joe Biden. But yeah, when you get addicted to journalism, you get addicted to adrenaline. If you're addicted to adrenaline, not a good thing for someone with addictive tendencies. And so I've been watching this really healthy TV show. It's called Home Before Dark. It's about a nine year old, nine year old girl journalist. So it's a nice show to watch. It's also good for you. So I find a lot of the most praised dramas are not good for me. I can't take them. They're too intense. They're just too dark. And after I've gone through a hard day and then I've done a show, I want to relax. So I'm enjoying this Apple TV series Home Before Dark. I also like the show Tehran, which is pretty intense. Prooting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us, parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow rotarians. It's not wholly natural, this business of making our own tribes. And it hardly seems conducive to human thriving. The percentage of Americans who say they don't have a single close friend has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life. Wow. I've just seen five helicopters go by. Okay. I don't think I remember seeing that many helicopters go by. I mean, five. What the heck's going on? This has to... Yeah, they're flying low in Los Angeles. So this is from yesterday, but there's something going on here in LA. A whole bunch of helicopters flying pretty low. So yeah, what's... So is it just Joe Biden in town for the summit of the Americas? But let's have a look. Helicopters, LA. Yeah, why are five Osprey helicopters flying in formation 1,000 feet up in LA? Yeah, four really big military style helicopters just flew ahead in East LA. So I wonder what they're looking for or who they're looking for. It's all for President Biden, I guess, but pretty loud and disruptive. Let's see if there are any more good videos. I guess not. Okay, let's get back to this essay on friendship. One could argue that modern life conspires against friendship, even as it requires the bonds of friendship all the more. When I was younger, my friends had as much a hand in authoring my personality as any other force in my life. They advised me on what to read, how to dress, where to eat. But these days, many are showing me how to think, how to live. It gets trickier as you age, living. More bad things happen. Your parents, if you're lucky enough to still have them, have lives so different from your own that you're looking horizontally to your own cohort for cues. And you're dreading the days when an older generation will no longer be there for you, when you'll have to rely on another ecosystem altogether for support. Yet for the past decade or so, I've had a tacit, mutual understanding with many of the people I love most, particularly fellow working parents. Look, life's crazy. The office has loaded me up like a pack animal. We'll catch up when we catch up. Love you in the meantime. This happens to suit a rotten tendency of mine, which is to work rather than play. I could give you all sorts of therapized reasons for why I do this, but honestly, at my age, it's embarrassing. There comes a point when you have to wake up in the morning and decide that it doesn't matter how you got to whatever sorry cul-de-sac you're circling. You just have to find a way out. I think of Nora Ephron, whose death caught virtually all of her friends by surprise. Had they known, they all said afterward, had they only known that she was ill, they'd have savored the dinners they were having, and they certainly wouldn't have taken for granted that more of them would stretch forever into the future. Her sudden disappearance from the world revealed the fragility of our bonds, and how presumptuous we all are, how careless, how naive. But shouldn't this fragility always be top of mind? Surely the pandemic has taught us that. I mean, how long can we all keep this poking dead? When I began writing this story, my friend Nina warned me, do not make this an occasion to rake through your own history and beat yourself up over the state of your own friendships, which is something that only a dear friend, armed with protective instincts and a spidey sense about her friends' self-lacerating tendencies, would say. Fair enough. But it's hard to write a story about friendship in midlife without thinking about the friends you've lost. When friendship exists in the background, it's unremarkable but generally uncomplicated, wrote B.D. McClay, an essayist and critic in Lapham's Quarterly last spring. But when friendship becomes the plot, then the only story to tell is about how the friendship ended. Friendship is the plot of this article, so naturally I'm going to write at least a little about those I've lost and my regrets, the choices I've made, the time I have and have not invested. On the positive side of the ledger, I am a loyal friend, I am an empathetic friend, I seldom, if ever, judge, tell me you murdered your mother and I'll say, gee, you must have been really mad at her. I am quick to remind my friends of their virtues, telling them that they are beautiful, they are brilliant, they are superstars, I spend money on them, I often express my love. On the negative side, I'm oversensitive to slights and minor humiliations, which means I'm wrongly inclined to see them as intentional rather than pedestrian acts of thoughtlessness, and I get easily overwhelmed, engulfed. Okay, Jennifer's seen you there with an essay in the Atlantic. Let's get back to Dr. Fawcett. This fall could be earned, but really by default. What would happen then to the January 6th committee? Well, Ned Ryan has some ideas. He's CEO of American Majority, joins us tonight. Hey, Ned, so what, I hadn't thought about this. This is an interesting question. What would happen to the committee if Republicans take over? Well, first of all, Tucker, I have to make this point, put a point on this. This is a show trial in the truest Soviet sense of the word, and nobody, the good guys have never conducted show trials in the history of the world. And they're meant for two purposes, one to silence dissent and the other to cover up. And Nancy Pelosi has no interest in actually getting to the truth of the matter in this. So what Kevin McCarthy needs to do tomorrow is hold a press conference in which he announces that when Republicans take the majority back, he will continue the January 6th committee chaired by Congressman Jim Banks. That reformed committee will then go and try and find all 14,000 hours of surveillance footage, make them public, also find out how many confidential informants and undercover agents, FBI agents were in the crowd that day, understand why Trump's request for 20,000 National Guard troops was rejected and what was Nancy Pelosi's role in that? But also, Tucker, why did the DOJ and the FBI feel compelled to have what are essentially FBI commandos deployed to Quantico with kill to shoot, shoot to kill authority, who were then deployed into DC on January 6th? And what happened to the Pipe Bomber at the RNC and the DNC? I mean, Tucker, the left likes to sanctimoniously lecture us that democracy dies in darkness, which it does when you don't have the truth and facts, but also dies in duplicity. When the left is colluding with bureaucrats to silence and attack political opposition, but also duplicitous in the aspect of equal justice. And to me, this is a very dangerous place where we are as a nation, as Sean Davis just referred to, if you don't have rule of law and equal application of justice, it throws everything into the absurd. And so I think Kevin McCarthy and Republican leadership need to stand up tomorrow and say, we are going to continue this. And it is our solemn commitment to the American people that they will finally get to the truth and facts of what took place on January 6th. No more lying, declassified. Let's start with the Kennedy assassination. Just declassified. Notice the two people they hate and want to kill is Assange and Ed Snowden. Why? Spilled the secrets. Ned Ryan, great to see you tonight. Thank you so much. Thank you, Tucker. So it's hard really to overstate the failure of Republican office holders to protect their voters and to protect the country and to maintain our norms and keep civil liberties in place, make America different and better than the rest of the world. That was their job and they failed. Shoot more Trump voters, says Lindsey Graham. So the hope is this November, five months from now, the Republicans will elect better people who actually care about their own voters, who care about the country, not just themselves. At the very top of that list, from our perspective, is Joe Kent. He's a former member of the Army Special Forces. He's running for Congress in the state of Washington. And he joins us tonight. Joe, thanks so much for coming on. So, you know, it almost makes you sick just to keep repeating it, but none of this would be happening to you. Okay, I wonder what Darren Beatty might have to say. Well, we've gone without a commercial break for almost 57 minutes. And to wrap up tonight, we're going to go to Darren Beatty, our friend who runs Revolver News and has done amazing reporting on January 6th. Darren, thanks so much for joining us. What do you make? What do you make of this? You've been following this since the day it happened. It culminates tonight, your view. My view is it's important to keep in mind what the stakes are. The stakes are the repurposing and reconfiguration of the national security apparatus against American people. Incidentally, the Department of Homeland Security has spearheaded this. And amongst his other duties, Chairman Benny Thompson is none other than the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in Congress as well. He's the DHS's stooge in Congress when the DHS is conducting the Patriot Purge that you've spoken of so well. And so there's a reason that people like us, when we talk about federal involvement in January 6th, it's met with the most vicious and hostile response from the regime imaginable. But no matter how dark and uncomfortable these truths are, the American people need to learn about them for themselves. I encourage everyone, if you're skeptical, if you're not, if you know someone who's skeptical, go to revolver.news right now, read our report, and challenge others to do so as well, and tell them to look you in the eye and say that the feds weren't involved in this. It's a clear hoax. We know what's happened, but there's unfinished business, and we need to expose the feds for what they've done. Because as I've said on your show before, until we bring the national security state to heel, our politics will be nothing but fake and performative. And I think people feel that they are even now. It's, I will say, breathtakingly audacious of a committee who stated purpose is to get to the truth, not to answer even the most basic questions. If you sat through this entire thing and didn't learn why the cops opened the doors to the rioters, like, what's the point? No, it's ridiculous. There are five or six absolutely decisive questions that get to the core, the beating heart of what really happened that day, and the committee will explore none of those questions. And in fact, the committee's purpose, other than just to grandstand and distract, is to obfuscate and obscure and silence those questions from being asked. Yeah. It's just remarkable how many people are going along with this, and it's absolutely shameful. You are not one of them. Jeremy, I appreciate your coming on tonight. Thank you so much. Thank you. So we don't often spend an Okay, so Jennifer senior is out with an interesting essay on Steve Bannon. It came out a few days ago, but it's worth a read. It's called American Rasputin. Steve Bannon is still scheming, and he is still a threat to democracy. American Rasputin, written by Jennifer senior. I sometimes look at the long ribbons of texts I've gotten from Steve Bannon and wonder whether they couldn't tell the whole story all on their own. There are certainly enough of them. He says he has five phones, two encrypted, and he's forever pecking away, issuing pronunciation mentos with incontinent abandon. So Jay Rosen is a left wing journalism professor at NYU. And she quotes from this Jennifer, he quotes from this Jennifer senior feature. There is no plan about Steve Bannon. The plan is to leave a smoldering crater where our institutions once were. Those are the best sentences from the Atlantic's feature, what Steve Bannon is up to these days. David Pinson responds, if you unironically use the phrase threat to democracy to describe a podcast that you're implicitly saying that your democracy is dumb and gullible, if that's the case, why are you in favor of democracy? So I wanted to email Jennifer senior and find out what is this democracy that she says is in great peril. What's her definition of democracy? But Jennifer senior makes it impossible unless you've got some kind of special connection to contact her. If I have media inquiries about her stories appearing in the Atlantic, when I go to her website, Jennifer senior.net, she refers me to all these people like Jeffrey Goldberg, he complains when bloggers would write about him without actually contacting him. Well, I read into him said I was a blogger wanted had a had a question and he immediately blew me off. He said I should contact his publicist. Right. So this is fairly common behavior here with people at the Atlantic. If I have media inquiries about her book, then I can contact someone at Harper Collins. If I have speaking engagements, I can contact someone from the American Program Bureau. If I have inquiries about dramatic rights, I can contact her agents. But what if I just want to ask her, what's her definition of democracy? She says Steve Bannon is a threat to democracy. Well, how so? What's her definition of democracy? She never gives us a definition for democracy. So what exactly is the threat? So democracy in its purest meaning is majority rule. So how is Jennifer senior a threat to majority rule? And so she talks about Steve Bannon's fuming over the failure to act on an interpretation, the 1887 electoral count act, one that would have allowed vice president to refuse to accept states electoral votes. It's a dangerous interpretation. Okay, it's dangerous to whom, Jennifer? Dangerous to whom? Oh, to all of us? I don't feel endangered by it. I don't think it's a good idea either. But I don't think Steve Bannon has any hope in hell of making it real. To embrace it, we give our democracy the means to die by its own hand. Really? Okay. So if we don't follow a certain formulation of the bureaucratic rules about how we count votes, we would be giving our democracy the means to die by its own hand. I mean, this creepy formulation, our democracy, if Steve Bannon talked about, we're fighting to take back our country, she'd give this all sorts of negative racial interpretation. So the right likes to talk about taking back our country. And the left likes to talk about our democracy. I mean, it's such a weird creepy possessive. What the heck is our democracy? Democrats insisting our democracy is under attack ever since Donald Trump won in 2016. Trump wins and our democracy is under attack. This is an excellent essay and first thing. So this urgent warning has been underlined and put in board since the January 6, 2021 riots. Guys, our democracy is under attack. But the more I hear this phrase, the more I'm puzzled, it's an odd formulation, our democracy, why append the possessive? The answer is evident. Those responsible for our governing consensus are exasperated by an increasingly indocile and intractable public that will not accept their authority. So we've got all these extremism experts warning that the capital riot proves the most urgent threat to American safety and security is from our country's own citizens who are Republican. They're a threat to our democracy. And what makes the threat especially pernicious is that it comes not from the fringe but from the mainstream. This is weird. So the notion of mainstream threats to democracy, one presumes that a democracy reflects mainstream views. Isn't that the first principle of a democracy that the majority rules? But here you've got this extremism expert saying the most urgent threat to American safety comes from people holding mainstream views. So whatever democracy means for her and people like Jennifer Senior, it's clearly not the rule of the people. It's clearly not the majoritarian perspective. Their idea of democracy is a compliant people, answerable to a well-funded and powerful elite. Where the people are united, there's not much room for pluralism and the elite can't rule. The elite can only rule through pluralism where you divide up the American people or any nation's people into different competing groups. Then the elite can make alliances with various competing groups. So right now the elite make an alliance with the upper class and the lower class. That's the high low against the middle winning formula for the Democrats. The Republicans by and large represent the middle class. So the stronger the people, the weaker the elite and the less pluralism you have. The more pluralism, the weaker the people. When the people have a sense of coherence, then they have power and the elite don't get to rule over them quite so easily. But the elite have an investment in pushing pluralism because you then weaken and divide up the people so the people can't stand up to the elite. So these extremism experts, they want complex social control apparatus like they have in China, right? Ministries of education, labor, health, human services, youth and family, social services, culture and the arts, given decision making authority grants to experts in education, social work and mental health to build democratic resilience in the mainstream so that citizens become more likely to recognize and resist propaganda, disinformation and conspiracy theories. Remember this is all coming from the mainstream, from the majority. So citizens become more powerful to recognize and resist what the majority wants. And this is democracy, right? This is democracy to resist what mainstream Americans want. So you hear all these Joe Biden speeches there filled with these faux outbursts of rage that he's sick of this stuff. His patience is wearing thin guys. Their left, their patience with the people has grown even thinner. They want to unleash 100 official narratives to try to limit the power of the people, carve up Americans into more and more pluralistic groups so that the elites can have more power and make more effective alliances. So misinformation, malinformation essentially means information that's harmful to the ruling elites and to the ruling regime. Now, I appreciate there are many good counter, counters what I just said. So I am all about listening to the left, right? I think the left often has valuable things to say. I appreciate left wing and centrist critiques and I appreciate this essay by Jennifer senior on American Rasputin Steve Bennett still scheming and he's still a threat to our democracy guys after midnight during commercial breaks for his show, War Room. Sometimes while the broadcast is still live, you can discern much of Bennett's mad character and contradictions in these exchanges, the chaos and the focus, the pugnacity and the enthusiasm, the transparency and the industrial grade bullshit. Also the mania, logomania, arrhythmomania, monomania, he'd likely cop to all of these, especially that last one. He's the first to say that one of the features of his show is wash, rinse, repeat, garden variety, hypermania with a generous assist from Espresso's. And last of all, perhaps above all else, straight up megalomania. So I'm not a huge Steve Bannon fan. I mean, I find his show is just schlock. I mean, Steve Bennett confessed in 2018 that his strategy is flooding the zone with shit. And that's by and large the quality of his show. It's schlock, which even those who profess affection for the man can see, though it appears to be a problem only for those who believe, as I do, that he's attempting to insert a lit bomb into the mouth of American democracy. Uh oh. March 28th, 9 49 a.m. I'm taking out Murkowski today and forcing her to vote no on Judge Jackson. He's talking about the Senate confirmation vote on Katanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court nomination and uncertainty about whether Lisa Murkowski, the senior Republican Senator from Alaska will vote yes. I tell him I'll be interested to see if Murkowski responds. After today, she's a no. Murkowski did not vote no. I sent him a New York Times story on April 4th to tweak him. Wasn't your show supposed to flip her? I asked. Please. Goalposts. They're always movable. This is a huge issue that I'm about to make toxic. Stand by. And so it went that day. The work before us is to weaponize this vote. Twice he used this word weaponize in talking about his plan to flip Senate seats in Nevada and Arizona, adding, I can clearly see how to win. There were times when my text interactions with Bannon felt like one prolonged Turing test. There were times when he almost resembled a regular human. He would talk about missing his father who died in January at 100 and how strange it was to be in his childhood home alone. Just sat in the family room for hours. He would fret about his weight and express pleasure when a newspaper used a photo that did not for once make him look God awful like some deranged in cell by way of Maury Sendak. I'm impressed by my photo. Interesting, I wrote. Why? Can you see the photo? Yep. You don't like it? I've never seen it before now. I want to know why you like it. I don't look so COVID-19 unkempt. Does this mean you have actual feelings? Of course it doesn't. But it still pleases you to look nice. Stop. One day he called my colleague Ann Applebaum a fucking clown. He had previously referred to her work as brilliant, but something she'd just said about Hunter Biden's laptop didn't agree with him. Later, while reflecting on this comment, I asked him, who's been his most worthy intellectual sparring partner so far? You've watched the debates. I destroy folks, except I always pull back to not be obnoxious. Did he care to name names? Henry Levy in Athens. Blood on the floor. Bernard Henri Levy, he meant the famous French intellectual. Biggest disappointment of my life. Made him eat this. He sent me a picture of Levy's book, The Empire and the Five Kings. I watched that debate. This was not at all my impression, but winning is certainly an all-consuming preoccupation for Bannon, just as it is for his former boss. Winning debates, winning elections, in France, in Hungary, in South Texas, where Hispanic voters are migrating into the R column with impressive speed. One night, as I was reading in bed, I heard the ping of my phone. Bannon had sent me a story from a Rio Grande Valley website, reporting that Republican turnout at early voting polls was up, up, up. Kaboom. And good night. It was 11.37 p.m., never too late to own the libs. One of the surest ways to get under Bannon's skin is to call War Room a podcast. It is not a podcast he is always telling me. It is a TV show with tons of visual components that listeners- Yeah, so if people are always getting under your skin, then it's an issue with you. So I'm not immune from this. All right, people get under my skin at times, but it's always an issue with me. There's some part of reality that I'm not willing to accept. So I don't enjoy it when people ask me, oh, do you still blog? Well, you know, what are you doing these days? Are you still doing that podcast? All right. I don't enjoy that. Like, I want to ask them, oh, are you still with your wife? Or are you still working as a doctor or lawyer or dentist or whatever? But if you truly get upset about something like that, then there's just a large swath of reality about yourself in your own endeavors that you're refusing to accept. So when I was blogging at the height of my powers, people would often say, oh, you're not as powerful as you once were, or your blog's not as good as it used to be, or there's been nothing good on your blog for weeks. And to the extent that bothered me, it would be because it reflected something true that I didn't want to accept. So yeah, if she's getting under Steve Bannon's skin by simply asking him about his podcast, yeah, there's probably quite a bit about reality that he's having a hard time accepting. There's only myths, the charts explaining economics, the montages of news clips that form his cold opens, the live shots of his correspondence. He broadcasts from the ground floor of a Washington, D.C. townhouse, and there are cameras, bright lights, a backdrop that devoted viewers know well, a fireplace mantle displaying a gold-framed picture of Jesus and a black and white poster. Okay, and Chad says that the Atlantic is deep state. Yeah, it's funded by Steve Jobs, wealthy widow. There's a lot of great stuff on it. The deep state isn't always wrong. And the deep state, on the other hand, isn't always competent. So sometimes they're just idiots, just like I am often an idiot and you're often an idiot. So it's not like they're this group of people who are just super competent, who are just running the world. People are just trying to do the best they can, whether they're elites, whether they're deep state, if they're plebs, people are just trying to do the best they can. And sometimes wisdom resides with the people. And sometimes wisdom resides with the deep state. Sometimes the deep state is right and the people are wrong. Sometimes the people are right and the deep state is wrong. There's no group, there's no institution, there's no political or religious or cultural orientation that always has the high ground, that is always true and righteous. So we have to try to be open to perspectives different from our own. Saying there are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences. Stephen K. Bannon. But since January 8th, 2021, when YouTube pulled his show for spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, viewing War Room has become harder to do. It's still available in the far-right online ecosphere and it's streamable on various TV platforms, including Channel 240 of Pluto TV. But that seems like its own sad metaphor. War Room as a small, demoted, planetoid, available mainly in the icier regions of the broadcast cosmos. The whole operation has an amusing shoestring quality to it. The audio occasionally cuts out or sounds like it's bubbling through a fish tank. Two of Bannon's phones buzz throughout the show. The segment openers aren't always ready when he needs them. It's a bit like Father Coughlin stumbled into Wayne and Garth's basement. Bannon started War Room in October 2019, initially to fight Donald Trump's first impeachment. In January 2020, the show morphed into War Room pandemic. But over time, the show became a guided tour through Bannon's gallery of obsessions, the stolen election, the Biden family syndicate, the invaders at the southern border, the evil Chinese Communist Party, the stolen election, draconian COVID mandates, the folly of modern monetary theory, the stolen election. But Bannon is more than just a broadcaster. He's a televangelist, an Iago, a canny political operative with activist machinations. With almost every episode, he hopes to transform his audience into an army of the right. So Steve Bannon successfully ran Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. He did a great job there. He's done a solid job with his podcast. He has an enormous audience. He did a solid job when he was running Breitbart. So he's a man with certain strengths and glaring weaknesses. So in certain situations, like Bannon can shine. In certain situations, I can shine. In certain situations, you can shine. But often, we then get delusions because in certain situations, we shine and we think, oh, we can just translate that success to all sorts of other spheres of life, and it doesn't work out that well. The key is the situation. And knowing which situations we're likely to shine in, which situations are likely to predispose us to saying and doing things that we will regret, and which situations we'll struggle in and where we have to learn just to be a worker among workers rather than being the star. So Bannon had his time in the spotlight. I've had my time in the spotlight. You've had your time in the spotlight, but nobody gets to live in that blessed state of hyper-competency and mastery forever. Life is a spiral staircase. We're always moving in and out of four different states. One is mastery, where we're really good at what we're doing. But mastery leads to grandiosity, where we have an exaggerated sense of our own importance. And then we get humiliated when we start living in grandiosity, which leads to feeling small in a big world that nobody really cares about us. And then periodically, we will become reduced to helplessness. And we never get to graduate from being vulnerable to these states. One thing you can always do is work on your mastery, but at any moment, we can be reduced to absolute helplessness. We never get to graduate to a state where without vulnerability, where helplessness just cannot happen to us. Helplessness can strike at any time, as can the feeling of being small and lost in a big world. Loneliness, no matter how many friends and activities and commitments and volunteering you have, loneliness can still stalk up upon you. We never get to be immune from loneliness. And we never get to be immune from feeling grandiose, having a vastly exaggerated sense of our own importance. But whatever we get into that, we will always get humiliated when we get out of touch with reality. So humility simply means accepting reality. When you refuse to accept reality, you will get humiliated, which is a wonderful opportunity to reset. That's it. Bye-bye.