Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Nicole Hemmer: Great to be back, Greg.
Hemmer: Sure. That’s a pretty good start because Bongino and Patel are plucked from the world of conservative media and had been, as you were saying, these primary attackers against the deep state. And so when they were put in these key positions at the FBI, there really was a sense in MAGAland that they were going to blow the lid off this whole thing. And people were really excited about it. Maybe a month into the administration, conservative influencers go to the White House [and] Attorney General Pam Bondi gives them these big files that [say] on the front, “Part One of the Secret Epstein Files.” And she continued to promise over the following months that she was going to be delivering more soon, especially because those original files turned out to have nothing in them. They were just all the stuff that was publicly available on the internet.
Sargent: Can you bring us up to date on how this all came to be? What are the Epstein files? And how did the right get so interested in it? I guess this goes way back to the Bush years. Can you take us from there to now?
Now they have someone, right? It’s not just these airy conspiracies. This is actually real. This is somebody who’s facing charges. And then he dies in prison. And that just supercharges the conspiracy because then the question is, He clearly didn’t commit suicide. He had all these powerful people he was about to expose, and now he’s dead. And that has become the center of the pedophilia ring conspiracies on the right that have never let up because that is the core conspiracy of MAGAworld.
Hemmer: Right. And they have this broad sprawling conspiracy about the deep state. But the Epstein stuff is so important because it’s so emotionally charged and it’s so deeply connected to all of these other conspiracies. It is the core conspiracy: If this is true then obviously all of the other conspiracies are true. If you have a deep state that is willing to cover up and even facilitate child rape, then they will do anything, and they’re so clearly and purely evil. And that’s why this Epstein conspiracy is just so important to the right, because it is the Rosetta Stone of all of their other conspiracies and ideas about the state.
Tucker Carlson (audio voiceover): And I think that’s really at the heart of why the Epstein thing is so distressing. The guy was some weird sex freak who was abusing girls. We knew that. But the fact that the U.S. government, the one that I voted for, refused to take my question seriously and instead said, Case closed, shut up, conspiracy theorist, was too much for me. The real question is, Why was he doing this on whose behalf, and where did the money come from? And those are the questions that need to be answered. And I think it’s entirely fair to ask them. And it’s not adequate to say anyone who asked them is somehow desecrating the memory of little girls who died in Texas. [We] are not going to put up with that answer. I don’t care who gives that answer. That is not acceptable.
Hemmer: It is reflective of what’s happening across conservative media and conservative influencer spaces right now. There is this sense that suddenly there are two poles to the MAGAworld. One pole is loyalty to Donald Trump, and the other pole is this Epstein conspiracy. And now those are separate. And Trump has exacerbated that by not just being like, We can agree to disagree, [like with] the way that he handles things like the Covid vaccine, which he gets crosswise with the base about. Instead of just live and let live, he has pretty openly attacked his own base as conspiracy theorists, telling them to shut up, stop asking questions. And man, there is no better way to tee up someone like Tucker Carlson or other conservative influencers who see themselves as the outsiders trying to take on the insiders than saying shut up and stop asking questions. It’s just such a softball. And Tucker just swings at it and knocks it out of the park because it’s such a layup.
Sargent: So you’re monitoring this stuff pretty closely. You just listened to Glenn Beck—better you than me. Now you say that the audience is on the verge of tears over the Epstein scandal and the way the Trump administration is covering it up from their point of view. Where are these audiences with regard to Trump? Are they telling themselves that Trump is at the core of this cover-up as well? That’s where it really breaks down for me in trying to understand what’s going on with these people. How do they square that circle with themselves? Trump is infallible, yet his administration is covering up the Epstein scandal, which is the biggest scandal of the last 50 years in their view. How do you make sense of that?
Others are like, I know I should trust Donald Trump, but he has let somebody like Pam Bondi, the attorney general, make all of these mistakes and hide all of this material from us. And he’s not stopping it. And in fact, he’s going on Truth Social and defending her. I don’t know what to do with this. And this is, in fact, where people like Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly are with their audiences. They’re like, Look, we’re not attacking Donald Trump, but how do we make sense of this? And then you have people like Charlie Kirk, like Scott Adams—the Dilbert-cartoonist-turned-influencer—who say, Look, this is the way government works. We voted for Donald Trump. We have put our trust in him. He has earned our trust. He took a bullet for us. How dare you question him? That’s the range of reactions. And the person who is able to reconcile those different groups is the person who is going to come out of this stronger.
Hemmer: It is a response that shows that Trump is in an unusual position, that his back is against the wall [with] his base and he’s throwing everything he can, trying every trick in the book in order to try to redirect them. And one of the reasons it’s not working is precisely what you were saying, which is there are a significant percentage of MAGA voters who are deep into the Epstein conspiracy. Because again, it’s like the legitimate edge of the QAnon conspiracies and the Pizzagate conspiracies. They know what the documents look like. They’ve charted where the different planes go and who they think is on the client list and all of these different things. They’re parsing every single word Pam Bondi has ever said about Epstein. They are parsing every single word that Trump has said about Epstein and about his partner, Maxwell. They are so closely following this that that kind of reflexive, I don’t know, Obama made up the Epstein files, is something that just doesn’t fly within these conspiracy circles.
Sargent: I’m going to guess it’s mostly going to be the latter. Just to sum this up, you have been following right-wing media for many years. You wrote a great book about it, Messengers of the Right. And nobody knows better than you that for the last 50 years or so, what the right has done is fed its own masses lies and conspiracy theories of the most ludicrous nature. Where does this fit into that 50-year story? It strikes me that there’s something qualitatively different happening here with the absolute contempt that Trump is showing to these audiences on this stuff and the challenge that this poses for right-wing media who had spent years telling their masses to take this seriously.
This is an opportunity for Tucker Carlson. Now I’m not one of those people who think that Carlson is going to run for president or anything, but I do think that he is positioning himself to be the leader to the right of Donald Trump. He looks a lot in this sense like Pat Buchanan, who looked at the Reagan administration and said, The biggest vacuum in American politics right now is to the right of Ronald Reagan. Tucker Carlson looks at contemporary politics and he says, Ah, the opening for me is to the right of Donald Trump. And he leans in much more heavily to the antisemitic parts of these conspiracy theories. He leans in even more heavily into some of the racist aspects of Trump’s policies. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there is more room to the right on that, but there is more room to the right on that. He is reconstituting in many ways what we called the alt-right back in the 2010s, which is this more overtly, virulently racist and antisemitic and conspiratorial right. And he is positioning himself as the leader of that part of the MAGA movement and is claiming ownership of it.
Sargent: Just to go over that 50 years of history; it’s longer than 50 now, I guess. We’re talking about going back to the 1960s and the Birchers and to the ’50s and McCarthy. There’s always this constituency on the right that’s available for these people who want to take the conspiracy theories to the next level. Can you just quickly walk us through those different iterations over the years right up to the present?
Sargent: And of course, Nicole, if I could just jump in and point out that those are the same people who said that the Clintons were killing people.
Sargent: Right. So just to wrap this up, very deeply embedded in the structure of these conspiracy theories at their most virulent is this idea that there’s this massive enemy within that’s corroded its way through all the ranks all the way to the very top. That was what was behind the Eisenhower stuff, behind the Bircher stuff, all the way up through the Clintons as you mentioned. And so in a way, the Epstein matter is so potent for the right for precisely that reason. This was the moment when the conspiracy theorists had their own people in the government to finally reveal all this to be the real truth. And that’s what’s being betrayed. Isn’t that what’s happening here?
Sargent: That really sums it up so perfectly. My God, it’s hard to see how this resolves itself, but maybe Trump will just keep telling people what to think and they’ll fall into line. Nicole Hemmer, it’s an enormous pleasure to talk to you as always. Thanks so much for coming on.
Hemmer: Thanks so much for having me back.
Hence then, the article about transcript tucker carlson s harsh new takedown of trump rattles maga was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Tucker Carlson’s Harsh New Takedown of Trump Rattles MAGA )
Also on site :