Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Inside Fox News with Katy and Cody

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

We continue the story of Dominion's lawsuit against Fox.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism I'm Ben Bullitt I'm Alex French And I'm Smedley Butler Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when Evil tycoons have too much time on their hands Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows

What's someone who should probably not be allowed out in civil society? My Tucker Carlson! Cody, Katie, guests of Behind the Bastards We've not done a BTB on Tucker Carlson Cody, you basically did You had a massive Some More News episode on the guy It's a big one, yeah Why is Tucker Carlson, I believe?

Yeah That's what it's called We've done like a follow-up or two One of our better titles But, yeah Yeah, he's a guy, man Yeah I would say all you need to really know about Tucker Carlson

Aside from like the Swanson airship and all that kind of stuff And his, what, his son Buckley, I think? Anyway, this is my guy Oh my god Really? His letters to, yeah I've never met a Buckley that we needed in the world And also, you know that he doesn't shorten it to Buck

It's Buckley all the time Wrote a letter to Hunter Biden thanking him for like Helping him his son get into school Anyway, that's one of my favorite Tucker facts When Tucker was working in print journalism He was getting a, he called it a Takeout Hot Dog Is what he called it

My god Yeah, you know, he's literally wearing the bow ties He's writing this, I'm sure So you gotta take out Of course Take out Hot Dog Yeah, the man of the people Yeah, and somebody in the office was basically saying

They need somebody to go on TV To talk about the OJ trial They need an expert in the OJ trial To go and talk about it And their OJ expert can't do it Can you And he was just like, yes And in the book he's like

He didn't know anything about the OJ trial Wasn't following it at all I immediately said yes to get on TV And then he did And that's like the start of his career on television And I think it's just so illustrative of like Who he is And his like his entire career

Is just that moment of like Who's an OJ expert to go on TV Oh, I am, I'll do it After getting a Takeout Hot Dog You know, I am Years ago for the nonfiction book I wrote A Brief History of Ice I talked to one of the two guys

Who coined the Dunning-Kruger effect And I also talked to the author of a paper about I think the title of the paper Was the Evolution of Overconfidence And it was kind of It's part of this body of research Is trying to answer the question And I think people are broadly familiar

With the Dunning-Kruger effect Which is a fairly durable finding In neuroscience That people who are least competent In given tasks tend to overestimate Their own competence the most That's kind of the briefest way of describing it And so there's this question

That people, scientists in this field Have which is like Why, right? Because it does It kind of seems If you're just kind of assuming on its surface That like It would be a bad trade evolutionarily

To be overconfident Because then you'll get yourself in situations That you can't handle And you'll die horribly, right? Right, right But I guess it could be like Psychologically protective You know?

But like that's not I don't know if that's enough, right? There's the point that was made to me As I was trying to like Understand why this still exists Is that if you've got a resource That two different individuals Are competing over, right?

And they're more or less evenly matched Or at least they can't know Whether or not Because right, if you're like Standing next to a guy Who wants to fight Who is roughly your size You have no idea who's going to win or not

Unless you're like, you know They're a black box, right? You don't know who is better At fighting or whatever So if you... The individual that is more confident In their ability to take that resource If they just go for it and grab it

One of two things will happen Either the other individual Will fight back In which case they either win or lose the fight Or the other individual chooses Not to fight and you get the resource And statistically That's a pretty good bet to make

Enough of the time That overconfidence is an extremely common trait Not just among human beings And I think it's also interesting That that is how fascism works, right? They just keep grabbing And until you fight back They're just going to keep taking more and more

Which is why, you know We could talk about certain shootings That have occurred recently In the city of Portland But I think that like Fundamentally, Tucker is a perfect embodiment Of that fact Both in his career

Where it's just like Well, yeah, if you just try to do shit That you're not competent to do And hope that you can bullshit your way through it Sometimes you will And then you make tens of millions of dollars And also if you just keep pushing Further and further as a fascist

And trying to incite more violence Against your enemies And no one stops you Then you get everything you want Which in Tucker's... It's literally fuck around And find out Just like evil

It is really evil It's interesting Because I wonder what he's saying in his texts You know, in 2023 But in 2020 There's a degree of which you can see Like fear in him of what he's doing Which makes sense

Because he doesn't know if it's going to work out For him or not But it does There's a degree to which I find it And maybe he's more confident now I don't know There's a degree to which I find a little bit of it comforting Because it's like

Oh, he knows he could lose Like he doesn't actually know how this is going to work out And he's second guessing himself And his colleagues And maybe that means that there's hope Maybe not, you know It's 2023 It's never a good idea to bet on hope

Because he's in it, right? It doesn't matter how confident he is necessarily Yeah, now, yes So yeah At any rate We are back into the story of how Fox News Handled the election lies Was it well?

Talking about this document I remember it was well Yeah, well is a good way to describe it Okay, good So while Murdoch I don't expect nothing less Sorry, go ahead No, no, no

While Murdoch apparently went to pretty great lengths To curry favor with the Trump campaign During the election He does not seem to have Appeared to have wanted to push the stolen election line After November 2nd But within Fox News itself Murdoch had a serious problem

He had hired a stable of hosts who were Let's say Either crazy assholes Or evil enough that All they cared about was their bottom line And they saw this as the best way to do it There's also a degree of like fear of Trump That they all have

Internal discussion And these people could not be entirely controlled, right? Rupert Murdoch has a lot of power He does not have absolute control over Sean Hannity Or Tucker Carlson Or Judge Jeanine Or any of these other people Because they were all multi-million dollar businesses

They have a lot of leverage, you know Although, wasn't it Tucker Carlson at one point Say on some radio show He was Rupert Murdoch's bitch Wait, did he? Yeah, yeah He's ruling it right now

That was more back in his shock days, though, wasn't it? Right, right Right now he's like Making it I just like that popped into my head Yeah, yeah, I mean A little bit, I mean Because it definitely

The depiction you get from these internal comms Is not one in which he's fully Murdoch's bitch Although it's also one in which You know, I don't know I was actually kind of surprised by how Comparatively toothless it seems like Murdoch was Maybe just because of how much Fox is a talent-driven business

But yeah, there's internal discussions That Dominion posted Between Fox executives that are just like This parade of worries Particularly that Sean Hannity Is not, like, controllable Yeah They went so far

And they did take some actions to try and mitigate this Judge Jeanine Perot's November 7th show was cancelled Because as Fox executive David Clark said Her guests are all going to say the election is being stolen And if she pushes back at all, it will just be token And then it's like token dot dot dot And then, like, two sentences are redacted

So I don't know what the fuck else they were saying About Judge Jeanine Oh, I wish I knew I know, there's some tantalizing redactions here And then we get to this lovely bit Quote As Fox producer Justin Wells described They took her off because she was being crazy

Optics are bad, but she is crazy So he's like, the optics of us questioning The election lies, conspiracy theory are bad But also this bitch is nuts This is a situation you find When you hire people you know are inflammatory Just to be inflammatory, it's Pandora's box They've opened Pandora's box and they can't control them

No, they cannot So these mild attempts at responsibility did not extend To letting the network call the election for Biden first They waited until all of the other networks had finished Viewers revolted Rupert Murdoch complained to Suzanne Scott that the company was Quote, getting creamed by CNN Guess our viewers don't want to watch it

Now, this is the point at which Chuck R. Carlson Yeah, I fucking love that It's so funny, it's just like, yeah, they don't like the results They couldn't, sorry, Quote Yeah, it is remarkable And at this point, Tucker Carlson, who'd kind of started out On like broadly speaking team reason Like angry at the election conspiracies, takes a turn

Carlson texted his producer, do the executives understand How much credibility and trust we've lost with our audience We're playing with fire for real An alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us Yeah, they know exactly what's going on Yeah, they know exactly like the shit that they're in Yeah, they're in a bad way, bad situation, yo The freaks we spawned might overtake us

Yeah, it's very, very funny On November 8th, the day after the election was called Maria Bartiromo had Sidney Powell on again To talk about Dominion's software Which she alleged had an algorithm That had stolen the election from Trump Bartiromo knew ahead of time that Powell was going to spread Conspiracy theories about the company

Because Powell had sent her a document the day before titled Election Fraud Info Now, this is the core of all of the information about The Dominion and Smartmatic or whatever Like this is the actual nut of data that Sidney Powell has That all of her claims are based on, right? So basically everything that Fox is going to magnify About the election conspiracy comes from this document

That Powell has been sent from an anonymous source Titled Election Fraud Info Now, for one thing, Powell describes this anonymous source As pretty whack-a-doodle, right? Like, and what does that mean exactly? I bet you're wondering, what is from Sidney Powell? What does the sentence or the statement pretty whack-a-doodle mean? Here's how the motion describes the Election Fraud Info document

In addition to promoting lies about Dominion, the cinder claimed That Justice Scalia was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp during a week-long human-hunting expedition And that former Fox News CEO, Roger Ailes, who died in 2017 And Rupert Murdoch secretly huddled most days to determine How best to portray Mr. Trump as badly as possible The author continued, who am I and how do I know all of this? I had the strangest dream since I was a little girl

I was internally decapitated Oh, Cody, you gotta hear this I was internally decapitated, and yet I live The wind tells me I'm a ghost, but I don't believe it What? That's right, you don't believe it This is the source Yeah, this is it

For all of this This is the source that three or four billion dollars in lawsuits Are based around And another point in this email This anonymous source claims to be able to Time travel in a semi-conscious state Which is also, I think that just means dreaming Yeah

That is fucking incredible To know where it all comes to It's not even Sydney making stuff up Or just pretending to be a black box She shares this email with Fox hosts So that she can inform them what she's going to bring up So they know that the source of a lot of these election claims Is an internally decapitated woman who the wind tells us a ghost

And can time travel in a semi-conscious state Yeah, in a semi-conscious state, very impressive Very Very interesting info Yeah, I mean, Cody, I don't think any of your sources Can time travel in a semi-conscious state, so I hope she includes all this in her resume Future ones

Cover letters, which is applying to jobs It is seedy I can time travel in a semi-conscious state Interestingly, our friend David Bell puts that on his resume as well Oh, that's true, he does That is true, he can I'm wondering, did David Bell write this letter? No, he was never internally decapitated

That's right, that's right He would have shared that No, he sends me a CAT scan of his neck every single week So I can confirm he has not been internally decapitated So, Bartarimo, Jesus, what a stupid last name Was aware of the email and stated in her deposition That she knew that it was nonsense But at no point on air did she mention that this email

Was the source of Powell's claims about Dominion Which had aired on Fox to millions of viewers As Tucker Carlson texted that night The software shit is absurd Half our viewers have seen the Maria clip Not wrong The most interesting stuff in here to me Is this behind-the-scenes glimpse at how Tucker communicates

When he thinks he has a reasonable expectation of privacy Because he seems equally preoccupied with how dumb the conspiracy is As he is with lambasting his colleagues For not adequately furthering the conspiracy theory He's pissed about both He's angry that this conspiracy is taking off And he's even angrier when his colleagues don't back it up on the air What a weird position for a giant asshole to be in

It's a bad, it's a bad, sticky one That would be his position though, wouldn't it? Of course, because there's no personal responsibility There's nothing like, be angry about everybody, the options But what are the options here? There are no breaks on this ride he's on He wants the drivers to guide it a little better Yeah, it's good stuff

That's so interesting He's definitely not stopping On November 9th, Carlson told Suzanne Scott, Fox's CEO, directly I've never seen a reaction like this to any media company Kills me to watch it Scott took that message down the line Attacking her colleagues for having the arrogance to call Arizona She expressed that it was astonishing that a top executive had signed off on the Arizona call

Given that every executive's first job was to, quote, protect the brand Oh, that's their first job Oh yeah, it's your shit not reporting the news, Katie No, definitely isn't that I'm gonna continue from the motion And on that day, day one, as Scott termed it Fox executives made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back Scott and Lachlan Murdoch exchanged texts about the plan going forward

Scott, viewers going through the five stages of grief It's a question of trust, the AZ call was damaging But we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them Murdoch, yes, but needs constant rebuilding without any missteps Scott, yes, today is day one and it's a process Oh, so fun Pretending they respect their audience is very funny Yeah, and that respecting their audience means embracing the lie their audience thinks

Yeah, exactly, easing them off the lie maybe We've got to respect our audience That's so funny I think one of the things I find really compelling here is that like The most honest any of them seems is when they are distraught that the audience is losing trust in them And so it's like, I think they do feel bad that they didn't embrace the audience's insane conspiracy enough That like, oh, we let them down They expected us to be as batshit as they are and we really fell down on the job there

Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah Feeling upset that they can't, that they're in this situation and they can't, yeah Yeah, that they failed their audience Yeah, we should have gone in harder at the outset So we're not struggling right now We should have been dumber and faster I do say that a lot myself But you know who's as dumb and as fast as it's possible to be

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Supreme! What would you do if a secret cabal Of the most powerful folks in the United States told you Hey, let's start a coup Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler Was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism I'm Ben Bullock And I'm Alex French

In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic And occasionally ridiculous Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century We've tracked down exclusive historical records We've interviewed the world's foremost experts We're also bringing you cinematic, historical Recreations of moments left out of your history books I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads Or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans This is Let's Start a Coup Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows Ah, we are back

On November 9th, Neil Cavuto cut away from a White House press conference Where Kaylee McEnany made unsubstantiated claims about election fraud Neil told viewers that he could not in good conscience air her claims Unless she had evidence to back them up Which is honestly more of a principled stand Than I think any of us ever expected from Neil Cavuto Absolutely surprising Yeah, shocking

The brand team at Fox panicked Raj Shah, who headed the brand team Notified senior leadership that Cavuto represented a brand threat Tied in with all this, and with Tucker's reaction Was an ever-present fear of Newsmax What's built over into the course of November Fox execs and talent seem to see Newsmax as a mortal threat to their continued profitability Which is funny, because didn't it just get dropped from like...

What is it? Was it Newsmax or the One News? Yeah, Direct TV just dropped Newsmax Because it didn't get enough people watching it Well... It's interesting Yeah, maybe Fox was... I don't know, it may have just been that like in the moment

Newsmax was experiencing a surge But it clearly didn't last They're not doing well right now Which is very funny also Fuck all of those people Quote Prior to November 8th, Fox executive David Clark Testified that Newsmax was not a credible media outlet

Because, quote Their hosts were extremely one-sided Ignored the facts They did not seem to care about telling the truth They seemed to invest truly in conspiracy theories versus fact Yeah, I mean, that'll do it Wow, imagine a news agency being like that, David Fucked up, huh?

On November 10th, Scott pointed out to senior Fox executives A note from analyst Kyle Goodwin on Newsmax's ride Fox executive Porter Berry responded Just pulled up Newsmax's show and they're hitting Cavuto They're just whacking us Smart on their part Lauren Peterson added They definitely have a strategy across all shows

To try and target and steal our viewers And this is also really compelling to me Just because like at number one, obviously at no point Is even ideology a primary concern Like the concern is the competition, right? Like it's pure business And there's almost this like I can respect the degree to which they're good at fucking us over

Yeah, we would do that too We would do that too And it's a shame to us that we weren't smart enough to do it faster, right? Yeah Fox executives talk about Newsmax The rest of us talk about Fox Which is one of the most entertaining things in the document Fox president Jay Wallace describes Newsmax as truly an alternative universe

That can't be ignored He then adds in a message to Suzanne Scott That he is trying to get everyone to comprehend We are on war footing And again, that's also From the point I'm making about like ideology Doesn't seem to come into it with these people They're not at war with the Biden White House or Democrats

They're at war with other right-wing media that might steal their thunder Yeah, who's outfoxing them It's very interesting I'm proud of you, Cody You know what? Let's get on a call with the t-shirt people real quick Yeah, let's go and print one of those The t-shirt people Everything that Fox does next is influenced by this feeling of being at war with Newsmax

This is what causes Tucker to make common cause with Sean Hannity In order to push the false claim that Dominion was the core of some grand fraud The express purpose of backing this conspiracy theory was to bring viewers back from Newsmax Hannity told Carlson and Ingram on November 12th in one week in one debate that destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable Tucker responded, it's vandalism The hosts also discussed the possibility of competition to Fox emerging Hannity told them, serious money with serious distribution could be a real problem IMHO, they need to address, but what I don't know

Tucker, that could happen So, yeah Feel that fear, folks Yeah, feel that fear, it is nice to know that he can be afraid It's a little brain bug moment there Putting your hand on the goop stick that Tucker Carlson uses to suck the brains out of your aunts and uncles Yeah, it's afraid, it's afraid Normally, I feel a little bit of empathy when an unlikable character, when you realize that they're afraid

You humanize them, nah, not this guy, be afraid I would not feel empathy if Tucker Carlson's asshole got sucked out of his backside by one of those sucker things in a swimming pool In a grain silo or something Yeah, or a grain silo, yeah Let's grain silo the fucker Did you guys grow up with that at your local pool? That there was like, oh, yeah, a kid got their whole, all their guts sucked up And then like a Palinuk short story, right?

Was it a Palinuk short story? I think he ended up doing a short story about that urban legend, which I think was an urban legend Yeah, I would definitely say, Cody, if there's a short story about getting your guts sucked out of your butt through a swimming pool, Chuck Palinuk wrote it It would be Chuck Palinuk for sure Literally called guts, actually Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Beautiful Okay

But for the record, I would think it was funny if that happened to Tucker So, yeah That same day, Laura Ingram's producer Tommy Firth texted a Fox executive responsible for overseeing her show He complained, this dominion shit is going to give me a fucking aneurysm As many times as I've told Laura it's BS, she sees shit posters and Trump tweeting about it The next sentence or so is redacted, but the Fox executive responds, this is the Bill Gates microchip angle to voter fraud The next day he messages Firth again, asking, how's it going with the kooks? Oh, wow

So they're both being like, oh yeah, Laura's, you know, she's watching these shit posters, she's tweeting about nonsense But the executive's like, yeah, you know, this is something we can work with, it's this Bill Gates microchip angle, but applied to voter fraud Yeah, we can make it work Yeah, how's it going? Are the crazy people biting? This feels, you're not done telling this story, but this all feels really damning It's very damning and evil It feels like people should be locked up Like, we have fun, we make our jokes, but like, honestly, the real life repercussions of this shit

Families destroyed, people killed themselves over this, there was just another like, suicide of an entire family over this shit Like, this has destroyed so many lives, like, I don't know, these people, like, money is not enough I don't see, on a moral level, I don't see any argument as to why a lot of this shouldn't be criminally liable But none of it is, obviously, or ever will be, because it's fine to do this It's not fine to like, yell at the Atlanta police after they shoot a guy, then you get charged with domestic terrorism, but this is cool Yeah So, also on November 12th, Lou Dobbs took to the airways with Rudy Giuliani as guest After Giuliani repeated his litany of false allegations against Dominion, Dobbs said on air, it's stunning

They have no ability to audit meaningfully the votes that are cast because the servers are somewhere else This looks to me like it is the in-game to a four and a half year-long effort to overthrow the President of the United States While Dobbs dug that hole deeper, Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson were in a group text thread together And, boy, that sounds like the worst group text I could imagine I want only that You want that? I want to see it all Every breaking news story that happens, I want to see just everything

I don't want to be on that thread in any way, but I would love to read it, for sure Yeah, I don't know, I'd like to be on there, be like, hey guys, you know, it's Friday I got some beers The liver of a child that was drowned to death in amaretto You guys want to come over, you know, have some brews, eat a little bit I assume when Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson hang out together They eat like the human equivalent of an orderlon That's the only thing that...

They don't even hide their shame from God, though Tucker knows he's more powerful So, yeah, while Dobbs dug that hole deeper, Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson are in their group chat And Carlson shares a tweet by Fox reporter Jackie Heinrich And Jackie was one of the, like, three or four people at Fox who had a shred of integrity And Trump tweeted about Dominion, like, sharing the Sidney Powell conspiracy And Jackie Heinrich fact-checked it She noted, there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes

Carlson shares this and tells Hannity, please get her fired, seriously, what the fuck? I'm actually shocked, it needs to stop immediately, like tonight It's measurably hurting the company, the stock price is down, not a joke Tucker then adds, I just went crazy on mead over it Hannity responds that he had already sent to Cezanne with a really? He then added, I'm three strikes, wall is shit debate, election night a disaster Now this BS? Nope, not gonna fly, did I mention Cavuto? They're so pissed, they're so pissed

Is this satisfying? Yeah, it does feel good a little bit I can just see him Yeah Now Hannity next texts Suzanne Scott, who reached out to Fox's SVP of corporate communications, Irina Briganti Quote, Sean texted me, he's standing down on responding, but not happy about this And doesn't understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in news She, Heinrich, has serious nerve doing this

And if it gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted By the next morning, Heinrich had deleted her fact-checking tweet So I guess, look, again, Heinrich had a little bit of, what do you say? Courage or whatever A little bit But not so much that when her bosses yell at her, she doesn't delete the tweet Oh yeah, as soon as Tucky shows up Yeah, yeah

Winding little texts I don't know, maybe one thing you could take from that is that like, if you get caught telling the truth in right wing media There's not like a job open for you in normal media Whereas if you get caught lying in mainstream media Oh yeah, you got a long career at it Exactly Yeah, I was putting myself, trying to put myself in that position And it's like, yeah, I could see how you get intimidated

I would like to think I wouldn't because I would make those series of choices where I was working at this place But, you know Yeah, you know, there's this term you hear because of Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil And she was talking about like Holocaust perpetrators, but it gets used a lot I think it, I prefer to think of things a little differently, which is that like, it's not that evil is banal It's that the vast majority of evil is perpetuated so that people can pay their mortgage And that's what's going on here And that's even what's going on with like, like Tucker doesn't have a mortgage or whatever

But it's very much just about the bottom line, right? Like if the money for Tucker had been in being a liberal or left wing media personality He would have been just as fine doing that, he doesn't care Like, yeah While this is going on, Dominion representatives are frantically contacting Fox News to try and correct these false allegations In the first like two months that followed the election, they sent 3,600 messages to Fox representatives Fox executive David Clark tells a colleague on November 14th, I have it tattooed on my body at this point LOL super aware that we're, we're, we're lying criminally about a corporation

LMAO, yeah LOL Hope they don't sue us for $1.6 billion Tee hee hee Kissy face, yeah One fun thing I learned reading this is that Fox does in fact have its own fact checking department Now, that's an astonishing thing to hear if you have watched a lot of Fox News You know what they call themselves?

Tucking losers No, no, what do they call themselves? The brain room Shut up I mean don't shut up, but oh no The brain room Yeah, incredible, love it What facts are they checking?

They'll check the facts so that they know Can we report the opposite? I would love to answer that question for you, but as soon as the motion notes that Fox's fact checking department is called the brain room The next two full paragraphs are redacted What? Reckless redactions Again, there's some, there's some juicy shit that's black barred in this It's the funniest place to put redaction

It's, it's, it's really, there is a degree of comedic timing from some of these dominion lawyers Some of it's like intriguing, something like, wow, what are you saying there? It's like, no, no, no, the brain room is soft The brain room? Yeah, we can't talk about what happens in the brain room So immediately after Stays in the brain room So immediately after those two full paragraphs of redaction comes this paragraph

Fox continued to broadcast its lies about dominion as it nervously eyed Newsmax In a November 16th email, Rupert Murdoch told Scott to read a Wall Street journal piece about Newsmax Telling her, these people should be watched if skeptically Trump will concede eventually And we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can We don't want to antagonize Trump further But Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt Everything at stake here

It's so funny The paragraph Yeah, what a hard time So the paragraph that follows this is also redacted And immediately after all that redaction comes this line Carlson told his producer Alex Pfeiffer that night Sidney Powell is lying, fucking bitch It's so good

Having a rough one, huh buddy? Let me out He continues to complain about this regularly up to November 18th When he tells Laura Ingram that Powell is crazy and Ingram responds Sidney is a complete nut, no one will work with her Ditto Rudy Carlson responds Holy shit, check this out, Carlson responds

It's unbelievably offensive to me Our viewers are good people and they believe it Why do they believe it, Tucker? Why do they believe it, Tucker Carlson? Why do these good people believe it? Let's take it a step further, man Yeah, it's so... There's almost like a schizophrenic quality to reading through this

Because there's this mix of Carlson responding The way a regular person should This is unbelievably offensive, it's fucked up But also like, you're doing it, Tucker Yeah, it's like, look what they're making me do kind of stuff Like, look at the situation I'm in and what I have to do But I respect the audience so much, they're such good people But I have to

No, they respect what the audience means for his bottom line But again, it's just not surprising in any way, but you know An inability, a psychologically incapable of seeing any accountability No, absolutely not Nightmare to be married to Tucker, you're doing it, you're doing it Yeah, Tucker, the lies have come from inside the you The false coming from inside you

This is entirely your fault, Tucker Carlson But you know what's not, what isn't Tucker Carlson's fault The joys of cooking pre-prepped meals That are delivered straight to yours Hello, friend I bet I can make it, we could find a case for how that's his fault No, you know, he actually, this is very exciting Delivered straight to your door

Very exciting We've got a couple of sponsors, we've got a food box company And a mattress company sponsoring us And as a result, we're now offering our listeners for a limited time A mattress completely stuffed with tacos A taco mattress Unrefrigerated, no preservatives It'll, just a larger quantity of food than you can eat

Stuffed in a mattress that you have to cut open to get the food out Does this benefit you in any way? Does it do nothing but cause problems for you? Yes, of course, just like Fox News So, use promo code I would like a pile of rancid tacos stuck inside my mattress And, yeah, we'll be back in a minute This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, occult murder

The men who aren't caves Say the Lord works in mysterious ways A brand new, immersive fiction podcast No, he ain't got nothing on the devil Part psychological thriller, part supernatural horror The truth? Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts Sometimes it's hidden to the lore

Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthigge from Twilight I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave But only one returned This is the exact spot where we found the bodies, Julie The Mental Walk Caves M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K A production of I Heart Radio, Blumhouse Television, and Psychopia Pictures

Every minute I remain in Mental Walk County The thick of the fog gets Listen to the Mental Walk Caves now on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts What's up y'all, this is Questlove And you know, at QLS I get to hang out with my friends Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme like the nerd out and do deep dives

With musicians and actors and politicians and journalists We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives That you have never heard I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys And their works I love QLS because of the QLS Team Supreme They're like a second family to me You're a fan of deep diving and music, everything

All monacking your musical history And learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought Then you're a lot like me But you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme One of the things I love the most about this show Is that we get to learn from the masters I look at being on this show as my graduate Program in music

Listen to Questlove Supreme on the I Heart Radio app At the podcast or wherever you get your podcasts Supreme! What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you Hey, let's start a coup Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler Was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism I'm Ben Bullock

And I'm Alex French In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic And occasionally ridiculous Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century We've tracked down exclusive historical records We've interviewed the world's foremost experts We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads Or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows So, on November 18th, SVP of Primetime Programming and Analytics

Ron Mitchell sends a message to Underlings R.E. Newsmax The lack of any meaningful editorial guidance may be a positive for them, at least in the short term For example, last night on Stitchfield at 8 p.m. The show sourced websites like Gateway Pundit while talking about voter fraud This type of conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled FNC Fox News Corporation viewers looking for Mitchell concluded that viewers are watching less Fox News and suggested fixes

Do not ever give viewers a reason to turn us off Every topic and guest must perform No unforced errors in content Example, abruptly turning away from a Trump campaign press conference Yeah Dad's gonna run a news network Give them the slop that they want Feed the piggies

Gobble, gobble Keep fucking people's relatives up This is it To have them ruin, bring down a society to its knees It sure is So, um, yeah, following this guidance on November 19th Fox broadcast the entirety of a press conference With Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell

Now, you guys probably all remember this as Press conference where Rudy's hair melted off of his face I do, I remember that What an incredible moment for this country Made up It's AI art, it was a lie, it didn't happen I want to be like frozen so that a thousand years from now I can help journalists make a documentary about America

And I want to cut straight from like The battlefield at Gettysburg, thousands of corpses A nation fighting with its past in order to like Finally write like the evil at the center of its existence And cut immediately from that To like Rudy Giuliani with his hair melting off Just leaking from his skull Nothing else is important, we can cut the rest of

American history between those moments From Gettysburg to Sidney Powell and Giuliani The two most pivotal points in American history Absolutely no questions Yeah, um, I have A little detour at Four Seasons Total Landscaping Sure, we can throw that in there too Yeah, yeah, I think we might even be like

Morally obligated to have a little detour Into Four Seasons Total Landscaping Okay, I'm going to play a little segment From that clip Because I know a lot of people enjoyed Rudy's head melting But I think fewer people actually like Actually listen to some of the claims being made This is a particularly powerful moment

From that press conference And I'm going to play it in just a second Outrageous situation now I don't think most Americans know But our ballots get calculated Many of them outside the United States And are completely open to hanging Completely open to change

And it's being done by a company That specializes in voter fraud Oh, let's try that too Oh, he does not look well Also, Sidney Powell is very tall Yeah, and wearing a leopard print sweater Real school armor bags Interesting choice

We are really feeling We are uncovering more by the day Massive influence of communist money Oh, she did it Let's start, Ruby Reference of our elections here in the United States The Dominion Voting Systems Smartmatic Technology Software

And the software that goes in Other computerized voting systems here as well In just a minute Were created in Venezuela At the direction of Hugo Chavez To make sure he never lost an election Oh, my God I do love the way she says Venezuela too

Yeah The crude oil leaking from his brain Really distracted from the things that she said Which it should not have Yeah, it really should have Maybe we could talk about afterwards Maybe it was a tactic, maybe it was planned Yeah

Ruby is much more cunning than we give him credit for He has, you know, some species of lizards Can shoot blood out of their eyes To, like, distract an attacker Ruby is able to do that to the entire nation With his head oil Developed over millions of years And distracted himself with a symbiote

Do my little trick This is how Rudy's Giuliani Wished to survive at the fringes of the world For the last 65 million years Since the death of the rest of their race I consider Rudy to be the same species as the dinosaurs In the original Mario movie You know, the one with Bob Hoskins

Oh, my goodness You could just put Rudy in that movie Oh, yeah Immediately, the same way he dresses You sure he wasn't in that movie? Not entirely No, no, we just don't know So while this beautiful, beautiful scene was unfolding

Rupert Murdoch sent out an email with the subject Watching Giuliani exclamation point The text of that email Real, really crazy stuff And damaging... If only you had the power to stop this, Rupert Murdoch It's like watching a train crash And also, you have the Superman-like ability

To stop any object in motion With a moment's notice It's the trolley problem, but there's one track Yeah, it's the trolley problem, but you're God Yeah, it's very funny White House correspondent Kristen Fisher Did at least fact-check some of the claims Made during this press conference

Her boss, Brian Boyton, called her And told her emphatically that he and his bosses Were unhappy with her and that she, quote Needed to do a better job of, and this is a quote Respecting our audience Fisher texted a colleague about being punished For doing my job shortly thereafter Real lion's eating faces party moment

Oh no! I like that this is their phrase That's the way they're respecting our audience I know we've covered this, but yeah Lied to our audience It's very fun, it's also like You get these people like Kristen Fisher Who is like, well, it's good that you were doing your job

As a journalist, but also like You did work at Fox Like you did choose to work there Yeah, this isn't the first thing Yeah Like a first questionable move Yeah, you didn't have a long career there Without any kind of moral qualms

This is just like, happened to be The time that there were a bunch of depositions Maybe this is the only bad thing they've ever done Maybe this is the only bad thing they've ever done That's possible, Dodie We don't know, we just can't know So the fact that there was regular spirited resistance Within Fox to the increasingly unhinged Dominion conspiracy

Is very compelling to me At one point, Fox anchored Dana Perino comments That Dominion would probably be able to sue Over the comments made in that press conference This prompt CEO, Suzanne Scott To send an email saying You can't give the crazies an inch right now They are looking for and blowing up all appearances

Of disrespect to the audience Scott separately noted The audience feels like we crapped on them And we have damaged their trust and belief in us We can fix this, but we cannot smirk At our viewers any longer I'm not positive What is being argued for here

She's saying like We can't give the crazies at Fox an inch right now They're looking for Any opportunity to like Blow shit up, but also The audience feels like We're shitting on them when we correct this stuff And that's damaged their trust

So we have to, it's again They're being pulled Exactly It's this impossible situation because you're evil Like You're evil, but you don't want to be Your choices and the scenario that you've created That you know is bad

But you also need in order to continue The crew of the Hindenburg Got themselves into an impossible situation When they exploded We don't want to explode And yet we love this explosive thing What an impossible situation We don't respect the explosion

Yeah We're not respecting the audience If we don't explode properly The audience being Hydrogen So internally Fox executives like Ron Mitchell Laughed at the clowns

Rudy and Sidney who had put us in a terrible place He even asked a colleague jokingly If Sidney was going to mention the International crime conspiracy To steal the election featuring Jero, Chavez, Antifa, Cuba and China It's noted in the conversation That silly as these allegations are

They put Fox in an awkward place Where we're going to need to thread the needle You're actually not in an awkward place You don't have to be It's okay You don't have to do this Yeah, nobody's making you do this You can help, you can make things better

On November 20th Dominion sins Fox's general council A cease and desist The state has fretted over how reckless it was To keep giving Powell air But she continued to guest regularly On Fox prime time shows Including Dobbs and Hannity that same day

This continued into December On December 2nd, Bill Salmon Fox's DC editor messaged a colleague It's remarkable how weak ratings Make good journalists do bad things It's good stuff I quibble with that Some of the bad journalists at Fox

Were expressing a fear of where the recklessness might lead Suzanne Scott said Privately, I had a number of conversations with Sean Where he wanted the president to accept the results And Hannity had understood that Joe Biden Legitimately won the election for Some time He admits this in his deposition too

On November 19th, after the Giuliani-Powell press conference Carlson very carefully Tried to thread his own needle On one hand, he said publicly on his show that What Powell was describing would amount to The single greatest crime in American history But she never set us any evidence Despite a lot of requests

On the other, however, he did not say What he believed privately, that she was lying Instead, he closed by saying Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon With details on exactly how this happened And precisely who did it We are certainly hopeful that she will And this is the

Most minimal pushback you can get on this Still too much for Fox viewers The motion citing internal Fox communications Notes that there was a massive Viewer backlash to Carlson on this Which caused him to mobilize With Raj Shah from the brand team Shah messaged a number of executives

Including Lackland Murdoch and Suzanne Scott About this, but we don't know precisely What was said because the next full page Or so is redacted Again Super curious as to what was said there When the black bars end, we come to this Shah also texted with producer Alex Pfeiffer

On November 22nd, Shah wrote Shit is so crazy right now So many people openly denying the obvious That Powell was clearly full of it Pfeiffer, she is a fucking nutcase Now, November 22nd Is the day that Trump finally disavows Powell Noting that she did not represent his campaign

This appears to have been on the behest Of Tucker Carlson, who messaged Ingram That day that dealing with Powell Totally wrecked, he spells it R-E-C-K-E-D My weekend This is Tucker Wow, I had to try to make the White House disavow her

Which they obviously should have done long before Ingram responds No serious lawyer could believe what they were saying Carlson replies But they said nothing in public Pretty disgusting Oh, it's disgusting that they didn't say it In public

Oh It's also interesting because the White House Does disavow Powell after this Carlson, that's just kind of evidence Of the whole that he does have January 6th Came as a surprise To everyone involved at Fox

At least based on what the Discovery Documents suggest It seems to have done something to set up A sense of stakes for guys like Carlson But he was still too afraid of losing His audience to reverse course Late on January 6th, Carlson texted With Pfeiffer that Trump is, quote,

A demonic force, a destroyer But he's not going to destroy us On January 6th, Carlson invited his leading Sponsor, Mike Lindell, on the show Where Lindell spouted these same conspiracies On air after previewing them for Carlson's staff During a pre-interview And again, this dichotomy

Between the almost panicked awareness Of how much trouble they're getting into By defaming Dominion and inciting An insurrection It exists on every level of decision-making At Fox, and the last quote I'm going to read You from this motion is this On January 5th, Rupert Murdoch told

It's been suggested our primetime three Should independently or together say something like The election is over and Joe Biden won And that such a statement would go a long way To stop the Trump myth that the election is stolen Scott forwarded the email to Cooper Stating, I told Rupert privately That they are all there. We need to be careful

About how using the shows and pissing off the viewers But they know how to navigate They did not know how to navigate And in fact refused to But it's interesting that They were aware As this suggests that Murdoch is aware We do have some sort of duty

To use our reach to try and quash this Might be seen as like Evidence of Guilt Yeah, I mean They're not unaware Yeah It's interesting what lines they

But again, you're saying like they didn't do it Yeah, they didn't do it The line is like Considering doing something Yeah, I guess Anyway, that's where we are folks That was A real treat

It was a treat, wasn't it? I'm so honored you invited us I loved it I felt good about it. Do you feel good? I feel great about it I don't feel great about it It's gonna change a lot of people's minds That's the thing, right?

That's what pisses me off most about it It's like, oh, here it is People who run and are the main Faces on Fox That they are liars and they are lying to their audience And they are Doing it out of a pure cowardly Venal desire for money and fame

And care nothing about The degree to which they mislead people Really, and it will never matter Because facts, it's impossible To convince anyone with facts You put this in front of a person who watch The tiny little morsel Well, Tucker, here he is

Saying that he needs evidence for it So he did push back That's the game that they Try to play And sometimes exceed that You can see people running cover for them already Of like, well, no, he did He said it

Without acknowledging Anything else It's this thing where I shouldn't say It doesn't matter at all I just had this very shocking Midterm upset where Maybe

We're coming to ahead Of how much they can get away with I guess we'll know after 2024 But I do know that The people in my own life Who have been listening to Watching Fox religiously for years

This won't stop them This will not have any impact And they're not dumb people Or are they bad people They have gotten Bored into their reality tunnel Like Digging into this, acknowledging the degree to which

They've just been manipulated For their viewership Would be, I think, psychically painful So why? Why would you do it? It's hard to accept every... We see it all the time People that still are on the queue train You know, like having a hard time accepting The facts

But also I would imagine that there's a lot of people Who straight up Don't even know this story Like Fox News viewers That won't get this information Because it's not like this is going to be a Breaking news segment on Fox News

You know Yeah I want to read more of their texts I know, maybe their redacted parts Yeah, I would like some of that too There's a lot of very enticing pieces But what's more enticing Is y'all's plugables

Oh, that's very true You start, Cody Check us out on youtube.com Slash the search bar And type in some more news For our video channel We do videos and stuff It's a podcast too, if you like podcasts

Speaking of podcasts, we also have another podcast In that same podcast feed Called Even More News You go to that feed, you'll see both of them in there The audio of the youtube show Another one will be us chatting With each other And people about the news

Also, we have a patreon Dot com Some more news God, you guys Really are a well-oiled gazelle Yeah, we are, we get that a lot We get the oil from Rudy's skull That's

Where we need to invade next Is Rudy Giuliani's forehead Yeah Send the 10th mountain division in there Get it out Get it all that fuel It really, really helps out right now But this has been fun though

Somebody needs to cut Like, I don't know, use an AI or something To cut him into X files Whenever there's one of the aliens that have the black oil Coming out of there Somebody make Rudy Into an alien super soldier On like season 6 of the X files

I feel like someone will Yeah, yeah, I could always Thank you in advance Finally, we'll all get to live our dream Of seeing Rudy's star opposite David Duchovny Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media The Manowal Caves

I say the Lord works in mysterious ways A brand new immersive fiction podcast Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker And Eddie Gethegge from Twilight Every minute I remain in Manowal County The thick of the fog gets Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys

Entered a Tennessee cave But only one returned This is the exact spot where we found the bodies Julian The Manowal Caves MANTAWAUK Listen to The Manowal Caves now On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts Or wherever you listen to podcasts

What's up y'all This is Questlove and you know At QLS I get to hang out with my friends Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo Umpink Bill And we, you know, at QLS Like to nerd out and do deep dives With musicians and actors

And politicians and creatives People that we feel really deserve that attention We learn, we laugh, we fall down With rabbit holes Listen to QLS On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts Or wherever you get your podcasts What would you do

If the secret cabal of the most powerful folks In the United States told you, hey Let's start a coup Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between The U.S. and fascism I'm Ben Bolland, I'm Alex French And I'm Smedley Butler

Join us for this sordid tale of ambition Treason and what happens when evil Tycoons have too much time on their hands Listen to Let's Start a Coup On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts Or wherever you find your favorite shows