Tucker Carlson: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, that was essentially it. So in 2004, that’s 20 years ago, Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire, a show you hosted. That was kind of a memorable moment. Can you tell the saga of that as you remember it? I mean, for me, as I was saying to you before about how it takes a long time to digest and process and understand what happens to you, or at least it does for me, I didn’t understand that as a particularly significant moment while it was happening. I just got off a plane from Hawaii. I mean, I was out of it as usual, and I was very literal as usual. So from my perspective, his criticism of me, to the extent I remember it, was that I was a partisan. Well, he had two critiques. One that Crossfire was stupid, which it certainly was. In fact, I’d already given my notice and I was moving on to another company by that point. Crossfire was stupid. Crossfire didn’t help. Crossfire framed everything as Republican versus Democrat, whatever. It was not helpful to the public discourse. I couldn’t agree more, and that’s why I left. So that was part of his critique, fair. I’m not sure I would’ve admitted it at the time because I worked there and it’s sort of hard to admit you’re engaged in an enterprise that’s fundamentally worthless, which it was. But his other point was that I was somehow a partisan or a mindless partisan, which is definitely not true. It is true of him. He is a mindless partisan, but I’m not. I really haven’t been since I got back from Baghdad at the beginning of the Iraq War, and I realized that the Republican party, which I’d voted for my whole life to that point, and had supported in general, was pushing this really horrible thing that was going to hurt the United States, which in time it really did. The Iraq War really hurt the United States. I realized that I had been on the wrong side of that. I said so publicly immediately from Baghdad, I said that to the New York Times and I really meant it. I mean it now. So to call me partisan, you can call me stupid, you can call me wrong, I certainly had been wrong, but partisan, I just didn’t think it was a meaningful… I mean, that’s just not true. It’s the opposite of true. So I didn’t really take it seriously at all, and I never thought much of him. So I was like, “Whatever. Some buffoon jumping around on my show grandstanding.” By the way, that happened right at the moment that YouTube began. I think that was one of the first big YouTube, it was one of the first big YouTube videos. So it had a virality that, if that’s a word, it went everywhere in a way that didn’t used to happen in cable news. I mean, by that point, that was 20 years ago as you point out, I’ve been in cable news for nine years. So before 2004, we would say something on television and then it would be lost. People could claim they heard it, but you’d have to go to I think the University of Tennessee at Knoxville archives to get it. ore 2004, we would say something on television and then it would be lost. People could claim they heard it, but you’d have to go to I think the University of Tennessee at Knoxville archives to get it. Suddenly everything we said would live forever on the internet, which is good, by the way. That’s not bad. But it was a big change for me, and I just couldn’t believe how widely that was discussed at the time, because I thought he was not an interesting person, I think he’s obviously a very unhappy person. I just didn’t take him seriously then and I don’t now. But so anyway, that was it. It was a smaller thing in my life at the time than other people imagined.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.