 I am very happy to report that the feud between Fox News and Tucker Carlson has now escalated into a full blown war that will almost certainly result in a lengthy and messy court battle. So in other words, we have some good news today. Whenever the fascies fight each other, that's just genuinely a good thing to see. Now he was fired from Fox News back in April for reportedly sending, we'll call them sussy text messages to a producer. He has since launched his own show on Twitter, stupidly named Tucker on Twitter, which is very creative. But that put him in direct violation of the non-compete that he signed with Fox News. That is in effect until the end of 2024. Now his first episode, which premiered on June 6th, apparently got over 100 million views, which is doubtful, but more on that in a moment. However, since he released this show, well, he defied his non-compete and Fox News is deciding to take action, and they have reportedly, according to Axios, sent him a cease and desist. Axios explains Fox News has sent a cease and desist letter to Tucker Carlson as he ramps up a competing series on Twitter that drew a combined 169 nice million viewers for its first two episodes Axios has learned. The contract battle between Fox and its former top host, who was taken off the air in April after the network's historic Dominion settlement, has mighty repercussions for the conservative media ecosystem. The cease and desist letter has not for publication and bold at the top. Fox is continuing to pay Carlson and maintains that his contract keeps his content exclusive to Fox through December 31st of 2024. Carlson is making a First Amendment argument for posting on Twitter and asserts that Fox has committed material breaches of his contract. Now if Tucker Carlson can prove that Fox News is a material breach of that contract, then perhaps he could be let out of that. So I don't know he may be legally in the right, it's hard to say given the nature of Tucker's work, but as legal nature explains, many states seek to limit the enforceability of non-compete agreements because they are seen as overly severe restrictions on competition. These agreements can make it near impossible for employees to find more work after being let go. Non-compete agreements often prevent employees from working in the same industry as their former companies. If they have spent their entire careers developing their expertise and skills in that particular industry, then such employees will be effectively foreclosed from finding any comparable work on similar pay. Also, many states have policies of limiting these agreements to only certain types of professions. This is because such states view these professionals as vitally important to their state and want to ensure that those specific professionals are able to freely find work and change employers when needed. So legally speaking, this is a little bit tricky because Tucker's attorneys are basically saying that he is a really important vital, if you will, voice in American politics and he should be able to use his platform to comment on issues of public interest. But I'm not necessarily sure that a judge is going to compare the field of political commentary, especially the white supremacist brand, to other vitally important fields where you're dealing with engineering and valuable things that actually make a real contribution to the economy and to society. But generally speaking, I will say that I am vehemently against non-compete clauses because they are exploitative and anti-worker. One of my friends had to sign one when he worked for a bakery. And if I'm remembering correctly, he couldn't work for another bakery in the entire state of Oregon for two years after signing that non-compete clause. So generally speaking, these things are bad, but Tucker Carlson isn't necessarily in a similar situation as an average worker in the United States, right? This is somebody who is a political commentator who makes millions of dollars to just talk for a living. But as a matter of principle, yes, I am against non-compete clauses. But having said that though, I'm not going to shed a single tear for a fascist like Tucker Carlson, although it will be interesting to see how this plays out legally because if his attorneys are actually trying to make a First Amendment argument, that's not going to bode well for Tucker Carlson because this is not the government who is silencing Tucker Carlson. Fox News is silencing Tucker Carlson. But either way, this is going to get ugly and lines are going to be drawn. And after Fox News already faced a tremendous amount of backlash for firing Tucker Carlson in the first place, they are only going to turn off more people by going after Tucker Carlson legally. I think the best course of action for Fox News, at least strategically speaking, if I cared about them, would be for them to just let this go. But they're not going to let this go because they feel as if Tucker Carlson is now direct competition. Part of that may be because of the numbers that he's putting up. But let's get to that. So there's this claim that Tucker Carlson is putting up Mr. Beast numbers on Twitter, and it probably seems a little bit suspicious to you, right? His first two episodes got to combine 169 million views. Even with Twitter's algorithm boosting this show that much, that doesn't really pass the smell test, right? It seems a little bit suspicious. And that's because it is suspicious. As MediaEd explains, Musk has made a big push to show off the tweet view metric of posts on his platform, adding it to the interface. Now you can see how many people have viewed each tweet on the site. Last month, he hid the video view metric, which showed how many people watched a video on Twitter. Even the video view metric was pretty flimsy. According to Twitter, if you watch a video for two seconds with only half the video player in view, you count as one video view, which is absurd, by the way. The tweet view metric is even less valuable. It merely counts how many people view the tweet. So if you scrolled past Carlson's video on Twitter, you counted as one of the 114 million. Anyone who has logged into Twitter who views a tweet counts as a view, Twitter says, if you scrolled past the tweet multiple times, you counted more than once. Presumably a small fraction of that big number watched even part of the clip. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on the video's metrics. Let's compare that to cable news. When Musk's boosters mocked the 3.5 million that Carlson used to draw on his Nightly Fox News show, they are referring to a metric from Nielsen that measures the average concurrent viewers of a program. If an average of 3.5 million people watched an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, the peak of concurrence is even higher, and the total viewership would be millions more. So Twitter essentially is counting impressions as views, which is insane. Now as somebody who is in indie media and I have a vested interest in making sure that we overtake traditional media, we have to be accurate. And counting views by impressions just, it's so disingenuous. But let's compare the way that YouTube accounts views. So each time a viewer intentionally initiates the playing of a video on their device and watches for at least 30 seconds, that counts as a view. And that's the way that it should be. However, Elon Musk, he wants to attract creators and advertisers to the platform. So he's making it seem like there's a lot of eyeballs and everybody's watching these videos on Twitter, but in actuality, that's just not true. So no, Tucker Carlson is not getting close to 170 million views on Twitter. And it's nonsensical to think that he would have an even bigger platform on social media than he had on Fox News. That doesn't make sense. And even though this narrative is very beneficial to Elon Musk, at least in the short term, long term, this could land him in legal hot water as well, because if he's misleading advertisers about the number of views that are before ads, that could be bad. And we've seen this play out before because Facebook was actually sued for knowingly inflating video view counts, which drove up the price of ads, obviously, which was a big no-no. Now, if Elon Musk is knowingly doing the same thing, which it seems like that is indeed the case, then it could come back to bite him in the ass as well. So this entire ordeal could end up hurting Elon Musk potentially, could also hurt Tucker Carlson in court if Fox News can use those inflated numbers to prove that he is real competition to Fox News. But at the same time, well, this could make Fox News even more unpopular among their far-right base because they're choosing to go after Tucker Carlson. So this lawsuit, this legal battle could hurt Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Fox News, albeit in different ways, but it still could hurt them nonetheless. So we don't know how this is gonna play out, but it is very much going to be entertaining, and I for one am going to enjoy the ride. Thoroughly. Excuse me, sir. Sorry. S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s. schauen colors. VIGINA!