This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," October 3, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST: Good evening and welcome to "Tucker Carlson Tonight." This is the 13th night in a row we have led this show with the Brett Kavanaugh story.
And it looks like after delays and countless twists in the saga, it may finally be coming to a conclusion. The FBI investigation, one that Senator Jeff Flake demanded last Friday, appears to be wrapping up; a final vote could be held this weekend, that's what they're saying.
But what's remarkable is that, after all we have learned, there are still basic questions that remain unanswered, central ones that pertain directly to the core allegations here, the ones that Christine Ford made more than two weeks ago.
Yesterday, for example, Fox News obtained a written declaration from an ex- boyfriend of Christine Ford's. In that declaration, which was made under oath, the ex-boyfriend says that Ford once coached a friend through a polygraph exam to help her get a federal job. If true, that would contradict what Ford told Congress.
The man also says that, during their entire six-year relationship, Ford never mentioned being a victim of sexual assault or of any other kind of trauma. He says that she flew on airplanes many times, including on small prop planes around Hawaii.
You'll recall that her lawyer said she was too afraid to fly to come to Washington. They also said she was a claustrophobic. He claims she was not at all afraid of enclosed spaces. Are these claims true? We don't know. Ford disputes them and there is no evidence to support them independently.
But there's also no evidence you'll remember to support Ford's allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. And that is the point, we need to know more. But we don't know more because nobody is asking these questions and many other questions.
For example, we still haven't seen Ford's therapy notes or the notes on the polygraph exam she says she took. Ford's legal team is only now at the very last moment offering to reveal these, but only if the FBI agrees to interview Christine Ford. Why weren't these notes turned over at the very beginning of all of this?
If the goal is to get to the truth, they would have been of course. Why has Ford apparently told different stories about whether she showed her therapy notes to The Washington Post or simply described their contents to the paper?
That's significant because it bears directly on her credibility and Christine Ford's credibility is literally the only reason to believe that her story is true. So that matters. And there are other obvious unanswered questions.
Here's this one. Ford says the assault defined her entire life. Apparently, she thought about it every day. It defined her academic performance, it affected all of her personal relationships, and yet she says she told not a single other human being about it for fully 30 years.
How can that be? Well, here's an idea. In a Washington Post profile, Ford says that she "came to understand her assault and the significance during a psychotherapy session." What does that mean exactly? Is Ford's story at least in part a recovered memory?
This is a central question, because most psychiatrists consider recovered memories, however sincere, as roughly as reliable as dreams. It's worth getting a clear answer on that, but so far nobody has, because nobody has asked that question. Why is that?
When an adult makes a serious allegation, asking real questions is the only correct response. It's on an attack to ask for follow-ups or probe inconsistencies, it's not victim shaming. In fact, it's patronizing not to.
We don't consider Christine Ford a child. Many of her advocates clearly do; the press obviously does. Instead of gathering facts about this story, they are busy moralizing and lecturing the rest of us about how Brett Kavanaugh's very existence proves that an entire class of people is evil.
Just the other day, Donald Trump Jr. made the point that what he's been watching on television makes him fear for his sons. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP JR., ELDEST CHILD OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So when I see what's going on right now, it's scary.
DAVID MARTOSKO, U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR, DAILYMAIL.COM: Who are you scared most for, your sons or your daughter?
TRUMP JR.: I mean right now; I'd say my sons. I mean I want to bring my daughters up to be tough, but every situation is different, but I would hope that they would act if something terrible like that happened.
But when the other side weaponizes it against men and says 40 years later, we can bring it up and you did something in high school that no one remembers, but it should disqualify you from ever doing anything again, it really diminishes the real claims.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Now, maybe you agree with that, maybe you don't, it's hardly a crazy point though and it might be worth talking about. But no, over on CNN, they took those remarks as a cue to once again attack an entire ethnic group on the basis of ethnicity. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEFFREY TOOBIN, LEGAL ANALYST, CNN: Every night, I cry myself to sleep over the fate of white man in America. White men have no power, I mean it's such garbage, if you sexually assault someone in high school, your life should be ruined. All this whining about the poor plight of white men is ridiculous.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: You're hearing a lot of this filth recently and it's wrong, because racism is always wrong, no matter who it is aimed at. You should not attack people for their immutable characteristics, period. We have made that point consistently again and again over the past two years on this show.
You shouldn't ever reduce people to their skin color, because they're much more than that. You ought to treat people as individuals, unique human beings, not faceless members of a tribe sorted by hue. That's exactly the argument you could have made in 1960 against Bull Connor and if we'd been there, we would have made that argument.
It's the same argument we are making today. It was true then, it is true now, it always will be true. Now, you wouldn't think you'd have to say something that obvious in a developed country, one that literally has a statue of Martin Luther King on the National Mall.
But we do have to say that we have no choice, and for the crime of arguing against racism, we are denounced by the Left as, yes, racists. Well that's insane. In fact, it's Orwellian, it's the mirror image of the truth.
But there is a reason that they are saying it. Our elites stoke race hatred in order to divide this country against itself. People are easier to control when they are divided into tribes sorted by color, it is that simple. It is also that evil, just like the racism they are peddling to you. We will never endorse that against any group at any time, period.
Francey Hakes is a former DOJ National Coordinator for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction; she joins us tonight.
Francey, thanks for coming on. Now, I know that you have worked in this field for so long and that's why I wanted a reality check from you on some of these outstanding questions. And I want to say the obvious at the outset, I'm not impugning anyone's character or story.
But I think it's fair to ask the most basic question, which is, is this a recovered memory or not? Are you aware that anyone has asked that question of Christine Ford?
FRANCEY HAKES, FORMER NATIONAL COORDINATOR FOR CHILD EXPLOITATION PREVENTION AND INTERDICTION, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE: Tucker, one of the things that disturbed me the most about the hearing last week were the questions that weren't asked by Rachel Mitchell.
CARLSON: Yes.
HAKES: And that included anything about Dr. Ford's memories, the memories of the event, the memories of the events surrounding the event, the memories of giving information and paperwork to The Washington Post, what happened at her polygraph.
It appeared to me that there were some memory questions asked that left a whole lot of other questions in limbo. We never got anything that would have helped us with the question of her memory and how it came about. You're so right about that.
CARLSON: So would it be an attack on a witness, on someone who says she's been a victim of a crime to say, you say that this memory became significant to you in the course of a psychotherapy session 30 years after the fact.
Did you remember all the details of it for the 30 preceding years, and if so, why did you not -- if it defined your life, why did you not say anything to anyone else? Would that do you be an attack on her or would it be a legitimate question?
HAKES: Well, Tucker, if you look at Twitter, any question of someone who alleges she's been assaulted is an attack. But I've put five-year-old little girls on the witness stand, who had to face withering cross- examination from men, about whether or not they were telling the truth, how much they remembered, testing their memory at every turn, testing their credibility, five-year-olds.
So if they can do it, Dr. Ford can do it and should have done it.
CARLSON: So what does it tell you, and boy that must have been -- I definitely wouldn't want to do that, though I agree with you it has to be done because due process demands it. But what does it tell you about how Christine Ford's advocates feel about her that they believe that she cannot withstand and shouldn't have to withstand basic questions about her story?
HAKES: I mean I don't know Dr. Ford. If I was Dr. Ford, I'd be insulted at someone saying I'm not tough enough to stand up and take questions about something that was seared into my memory and that I feel like I haven't gotten justice for.
I mean I'm not kidding about having put up five-year-old little girls who have said I want to testify, I want to tell the truth, I want him to go to jail, and they make that decision for themselves.
To say that a grown woman can't make that kind of decision for herself insults all women. I'm insulted.
CARLSON: I agree with that. I mean, if you're going to - right, I agree with that completely. Francey Hakes, thank you very much.
HAKES: Thanks Tucker.
CARLSON: Well, I have some news for you tonight. A man was just arrested for making threats against Republican Senators. Apparently he worked for a well-known Democratic lawmaker. We'll have much more on that unfolding story after the break, and of course more on Brett Kavanaugh to come. It's one of the many themes discussed in my new book Ship of Fools which just came out yesterday. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: This is a Fox News Alert, a Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill has been arrested for allegedly publishing the private information of US Senators. During the Brett Kavanaugh hearing last week, private phone numbers and home addresses of Republican Senators were posted online.
It was apparently an effort to promote harassment, intimidation, who knows what else, against those lawmakers. Now, authorities believe they have arrested the man who did it. He is called Jackson Cosko. He's an intern for Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas.
Cosko also previously worked for Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. He's been charged with burglary, witness tampering, making threats, and identity theft in relation to these actions. We will of course continue to follow this story.
Senator Lindsey Graham, as you know, has emerged really out of nowhere as one of Brett Kavanaugh's most aggressive defenders. He continued that defense today at The Atlantic Festival, named after the ludicrous magazine that sponsors it, and he was booed for what he said. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: I'm the first person to say I want to hear from Dr. Ford. I thought she was handled respectfully. I thought Kavanaugh was treated like crap.
(AUDIENCE BOOS)
Yes, well boo yourself. Here's what I--
JEFFREY GOLDBERG, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, THE ATLANTIC: All right. I'm going to ask you - I'm going to ask you to please be respectful of this conversation so we can have the conversation, thank you.
GRAHAM: But, that's right, I have nothing -- I really believe that Brett Kavanaugh is not a gang rapist, a sexual predator, or a stumbling bumbling drunk. I really believe that and I don't care whether you believe it or not.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Lou Dobbs hosts Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox Business. He joins us tonight. So, Lou, if you're attending The Atlantic conference, you consider yourself like an erudite person. This is not a cross-section of America.
LOU DOBBS, FOX BUSINESS HOST, LOU DOBBS TONIGHT: Oh no.
CARLSON: These are people with HBS degrees who worked at McKinsey, they're way better than you and much smarter.
DOBBS: Absolutely.
CARLSON: And yet their response is boo.
DOBBS: And that's a very large plug just the - the fact is that they - - these people who were booing Lindsey Graham, they think of themselves as the literati.
CARLSON: Yes.
DOBBS: In fact they're more gutty than literati.
(LAUGHTER)
And further truth is, they are ill-mannered sops and many of them just outright ideological hacks. So, I have no idea how they got the idea that this was some sort of festival, unless they're celebrating their inadequacy to chronicle our times and to enlarge our minds. It is a farce.
CARLSON: Do you think if creepy porn lawyer had been up there on the stage- -
DOBBS: Oh it would have been perfect.
CARLSON: Sit close together and the whole thing, do you think they would have booed him?
DOBBS: I don't think they would at all. I think they couldn't have resisted a standing ovation. They could have -- then the excitement in the room would have verged on the obscene and vulgar.
CARLSON: So what's so interesting is, I've -- you see a lot of revolutions, you read about them, they're almost always waged on behalf of the working class. Have you ever seen a revolution like this one waged against the working class?
DOBBS: I haven't, I haven't even read such a revolution. And these people are not revolutionaries, they're far too orthodox, they're far too mediocre in their own--
CARLSON: Good point.
DOBBS: --imaginings. And frankly, they can't escape themselves and their base crass and yes vulgar obsessions. These are people completely consumed by grievance, by identity and group to the point that they have lost any sense of individual responsibility or individual right.
There are authoritarian to the point of being not socialist, communist. They want to be Marxist, they want to be fascist, and by the way their desires are coming true. What they are doing is ignoring truth, ignoring values, ignoring any sort of fidelity to decency.
And what they have become is frankly unspeakably ugly and awful and threatening to the very Republic.
CARLSON: How did so many unimpressive small-minded people make so much money and get so much -- somebody needs to study this. We're unfortunately out of time, will you write a book on that, because I will read every word of it?
DOBBS: Will you let me have all of the advance on it and everything?
(LAUGHTER)
CARLSON: No, I don't think there's a market for it, I buy it.
DOBBS: I'll take up the assignment. Thanks so much, appreciate it.
CARLSON: Great to see you, Lou. Thank you.
DOBBS: Great to see you, Tucker.
CARLSON: Hillary Clinton yesterday indicated that, regardless of his guilt or innocence Brett Kavanaugh disqualified himself because of his temperament. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES: We have not seen anything quite like that for a long time. Justice Thomas vigorously defended himself, as some of us can remember, and it was a very painful, difficult time for Anita Hill and for many of us watching.
It very much felt like and in fact it probably was the denial of the legitimacy of women's stories. In this case, though, the performance, the behavior was -- it was quite out of bounds.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Keep in mind that is the very same crowd you just saw a boo Lindsey Graham. It'll be worth remembering how Hillary Clinton herself behaved when she appeared before the Senate. Here's a reminder.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON: The fact is we have four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Because it's really about temperament? Richard Goodstein is a former adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton. And despite his bad opinions, a great guy, and we're glad to have him. Richard, thank you very much.
RICHARD GOODSTEIN, FORMER ADVISOR TO HILLARY CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL CONSULTANT: And I was in the audience, just for the record, when Lindsey Graham spoke today at The Atlantic, just at the end of the booing - I was not booing.
CARLSON: Really? Well, you must have a Harvard degree, I'm very impressed. You probably do actually. But let me ask you, so Hillary Clinton, when she called Monica Lewinsky a narcissistic loony tune, and I'm quoting now, was she belittling all women when she said that?
GOODSTEIN: Well I mean that's not a quote, that was a report.
CARLSON: It is a quote.
GOODSTEIN: Look, what she was trying to say in The Atlantic interview yesterday is that unlike the 11.5 hours that she submitted to testimony and kept her calm on the big noisy hearings on the House side, where Trey Gowdy concluded she had done nothing wrong. Brett Kavanaugh, after less than 15 minutes, totally fell apart.
And again, is that the behavior that we want to see in a Supreme Court Justice? That's really the only point that she was making.
CARLSON: Yes.
(CROSSTALK)
You accuse someone of a sex crime with no evidence, his family's completely under attack, he'll never work again, people are calling for his impeachment before he even gets on the court. That's totally cool. Imagine if you really didn't do it or believed you didn't do it, how would you -- I'm surprised he was as calm as he -- honestly like how would you respond? Sincere question.
GOODSTEIN: As far as the evidence is concerned, the evidence is Mark Judge's girlfriend at least in the papers was reported to have said that he confessed to her behavior like this. She said this to a therapist and I heard your earlier guest--
CARLSON: Wait, confessed that Mark Judge did that? So Mark Judge has now been nominated for the court or--
GOODSTEIN: No.
CARLSON: --are we going to bring him up on -- why are we attacking Mark Judge exactly?
GOODSTEIN: No, no.
CARLSON: What does he have to do with anything?
GOODSTEIN: But what we want is somebody who is unimpeachable, not unindictable.
CARLSON: Who is not friends with Mark Judge? Like what is Mark judge, so Mark Judge's girlfriend--
GOODSTEIN: Yes.
CARLSON: --Elizabeth Rasor, I think her name is, from Maine says that Mark Judge at one point told her during their six year relationship that he had done something bad in high school, OK. What does that have to do with Brett Kavanaugh exactly?
GOODSTEIN: Well it may be evidence and we'll find out what Mark Judge says, if we ever get a look at this FBI interview, that he may have actually been there. And he--
CARLSON: Mark Judge already said under oath that he wasn't, that this didn't happen.
GOODSTEIN: Well, his lawyer submitted a letter, less objective--
CARLSON: It was a sworn statement. I mean he could be brought upon perjury charges.
GOODSTEIN: --well, less objective to cross-examination. That was the flaw in Rachel Mitchell's report, is that she was basically opining she never talked about Kavanaugh's testimony, she never spoke openly to Ford separately. So let the FBI kind of get the facts out and then we'll see whether any of these stories hold up or not.
CARLSON: All right.
GOODSTEIN: What the President said last night was debatable.
CARLSON: OK, right, and maybe we should throw Mark Judge in prison because his former girlfriend said he said something uglier. I mean I think that's the standard now. As it gets to explain less, if you feel it in your heart, it's true because America actually has gone crazy.
I only have a US passport so I'm here to the end, I'm going to keep fighting against this, but a lot of us are going to leave. Really quickly-- GOODSTEIN: Yes.
CARLSON: --do you think, and I hate going into like the deep dark past, not 37 years ago, but like 20 years ago, but do you think Hillary should apologize for directing the smear campaign against her husband's former girlfriends, which she did?
GOODSTEIN: I think there were people in the Clinton White House who hung on to the notion that Monica Lewinsky was making things up. I never heard Hillary Clinton say that publicly, and everybody who was kind of a public defender of Bill Clinton's never said that.
And all I'm saying is let's - Brett Kavanaugh said that--
(CROSSTALK)
CARLSON: Wait, I covered it, I was there for all of it, and Sidney Blumenthal was--
(CROSSTALK)
GOODSTEIN: Exactly, and never publicly.
CARLSON: Yes.
GOODSTEIN: He never actually went on the air and said those crazy things.
CARLSON: Well, he said it to me actually, directly to me on the telephone the day that it broke, she's a stalker.
So this was being directed by Hillary, there's no debate about it, a lot of books are written on this, people who work for Hillary have said it. Look I'm not saying she should go to hell for it or go to prison, but shouldn't she apologize at least for that?
GOODSTEIN: I got bad news for your audience. Hillary Clinton is not running for President.
CARLSON: Well, she must as a person.
(CROSSTALK)
Shouldn't she say, I'm sorry you know what, I felt my husband was under attack, I attacked his girlfriends, I shouldn't have, I should have believed all women.
GOODSTEIN: She did.
CARLSON: She never said that.
GOODSTEIN: She talked about a vast right-wing conspiracy, which I think the record shows, and Brett Kavanaugh was part of it. Why did he have that--
(CROSSTALK)
(LAUGHTER)
GOODSTEIN: No listen, Tucker.
CARLSON: I'm sorry, but I think we are out of time.
GOODSTEIN: Why did Brett Kavanaugh have a prurient interest in Bill Clinton's-- (CROSSTALK)
(LAUGHTER)
--doesn't that kind of trade up here?
CARLSON: This is too crazy.
GOODSTEIN: Just asking.
CARLSON: Right, that was an excellent point. Richard great to see you tonight, thank you very much, good try, good try.
GOODSTEIN: Thank you.
CARLSON: Democrats have not proven any of these allegations against Kavanaugh, so we're not saying he must step aside simply for being accused. That's a brand new standard in the country that you grew up in. Are you comfortable with it, we're going to ask Alan Dershowitz if he is? That's next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. CORY BOOKER (D), NEW JERSEY: This is not a partisan moment, this is a moral moment in our country. Ultimately, not whether he's innocent or guilty, this is not a trial, but ultimately have enough questions been raised then we should not move on to another candidate.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: That was Senator Spartacus in New Jersey saying, as you just heard, it doesn't really matter if Brett Kavanaugh is innocent or if he's guilty. Democrats have spent so long attacking him without tangible evidence that really it's his obligation to just submit and let his career and reputation and family be destroyed for the good of the country. It's a moral question.
Alan Dershowitz is a retired Harvard Law professor. He's the author of the best-selling The Case Against Impeaching Trump. He is a reality check on first principles and he joins us tonight. Do you think, Professor, that that's a fine standard? It doesn't matter whether he's innocent or guilty, he should just submit.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: Well, it sounds very familiar. When I was in college, that's what they said about people who are accused of being communists.
CARLSON: Yes.
DERSHOWITZ: It doesn't matter if he or her is guilty. If somebody is accusing of you being a communist and you angrily responded and said you're not, then you don't have the temperament to have the job, and it's just a job interview if you're getting fired for being a Professor after 40 years, and what's the difference if you're innocent or guilty.
Somebody has said you're a communist. This goes all the way back to the inquisition, when they would call you in first and make you testify and then they present the evidence.
Look, once you're accused the most heinous crime imaginable, it turns into a trial, where you have due process.
CARLSON: Yes.
DERSHOWITZ: Where the burden of proof is on the other side, where the evidence has to be clear and convincing. In America, we don't allow people to destroy other people's reputations and careers based on an inference of guilt the way the ACLU now says. The ACLU says we should presume guilt, not presume innocent.
CARLSON: After a hundred years of defending due process, that's exactly what they're saying. So you are liberal, you have lived your life in a liberal world, you go to Martha's Vineyard, you know liberals. Do any of them ever say, "Look, I don't agree with Kavanaugh, I hate Trump, but I agree with you that due process is worth preserving." Are there liberals who feel that way?
DERSHOWITZ: I found very, very few of them. For example, today, 700 law professors signed a letter. They asked me to sign that, I refused and I wrote a dissent, saying he now no longer has the judicial temperament.
Well, can you imagine if this were a liberal who had been appointed by a liberal President who had been accused and would act similarly, I don't think a single one of those professors would have signed that letter.
They all fail the shoe on the other foot test. Senator Booker, who I like and know, is just dead wrong. This is all about partisanship. If the opposite was happening, and if it was the Democrats who were putting up candidate, everybody would behave in the opposite way. And so it is partisanship and I think the framers of our Constitution never intended the confirmation process to look anything like this.
CARLSON: I agree and I hope that I would be honest enough to say so. I mean we defended our Al Franken on this show, whom I don't like personally and I hate his politics, but I think he got shafted for the same reason.
DERSHOWITZ: We defended him too.
CARLSON: Yes, he deserves to be defended. You wrote or you were quoted in a recent piece saying that Julie Swetnick's lawyer may have a legal obligation to withdraw her previous statement. What did you mean?
DERSHOWITZ: Yes, I've done some research now on it and there are ethical and bar rules that say that, when you submit an affidavit, even to Congress, and you later learn that there are things in the affidavit that are false, you have a continuing obligation to withdraw the affidavit.
You cannot allow an affidavit to remain on the record.
CARLSON: Right.
DERSHOWITZ: If you have information suggesting it's false, and any reasonable lawyer hearing her on television says you can't any longer accept what's in that affidavit, she has to be investigated independently of the background check, criminally investigated to see if she deliberately and willfully, with or without the aid of anybody else, made a decision just to frame somebody for something that he had nothing to do with.
The evidence seems to suggest they never knew each other, they were years apart, they were operating in different circles. It wouldn't surprise me if an FBI investigation proved they never met each other. And if that turns out to be the fact, she belongs in a court of law, being prosecuted with a presumption of innocence--
CARLSON: Yes.
DERSHOWITZ: --defender . But if the evidence shows that she committed perjury, prison.
CARLSON: Wow.
DERSHOWITZ: You know why, because-- CARLSON: I do know why.
DERSHOWITZ: --it's important to protect people against being raped, but it's so important to protect people against being deliberately and willfully, falsely accused of rape. That is a very, very serious crime and we tend not to pay as much attention to false -- deliberately false. I'm not talking about people make--
CARLSON: Oh I understand.
DERSHOWITZ: (inaudible). But deliberately false frame-ups of rape have to be taken seriously.
CARLSON: And they're not, I happen to know.
Alan Dershowitz, Professor thank you very much.
DERSHOWITZ: Thank you.
CARLSON: Great to see you.
Free speech is evaporating in this country after 240 years. The biggest threat turns out not to be the government, but instead corporations, schools and especially the online mob. What happened and more importantly, how can you say what you really think in the face of all of this? David Portnoy of Barstool Sports is managing to do that. He joins us next to discuss how.
We are interested in what happened to free speech and why the people who once defended it now attack it, there's a long and detailed chapter on that in our new book, Ship the Fools, just came out. Hope you read it.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Previously on this show, we've told you how employees at Google discussed altering search results to undermine the White House's immigration policies. At the time, Google said it has never changed search results for political reasons and it never will.
We knew it was untrue then, now we can prove that it is untrue. This show has obtained internal Google emails in which an employee discusses editing YouTube's search results to suppress videos based on their political content.
Here's one example. Last March, Google engineer Dong Jiao sent an email saying the company wanted to, "demote low authoritative content on controversial queries to fight against fake news." This was not hypothetical. He said the company had already succeeded in suppressing unwanted videos, videos for searches like Hillary, and we're flattered here, Tucker.
It's not clear which videos were suppressed because of Google won't admit it or tell us, but the email does indicate that Alex Jones and Infowars were a major target of this. Google says their efforts are not political and meant to fight conspiracy theories, though for the record we have never endorsed any kind of conspiracy through on this show and never would.
And by the way, how does Google define a conspiracy theory. They haven't told us that either, or why a superpower global monopoly ought to be making that decision in the first place since they have a Congressional exemption in which they promised not to.
They promised to be a conduit through which information flows and not a news site that edits it. Congress might want to rethink that agreement.
Well, it's no speech - secret, rather, that free speech is evaporating in this country. Even if the government is still prevented from punishing your speech, you're more than likely than ever to be suspended from school, fired from your job, or banned from social media for saying something that descends from the consensus or the simply makes a few people feel bad.
Dave Portnoy is at the very center of this. You may know him as El Presidente. He's the founder of Barstool Sports, the beating heart of it. Barstool Sports is not a political site, but it has faced repeated demands that it be censored, so we want to talk to him about what that is like.
Dave, thanks a lot for coming on.
DAVE PORTNOY, FOUNDER, BARSTOOL SPORTS: Thanks for having me.
CARLSON: You're not a political site, I wouldn't say you're a conservative. I think you're probably liberal, I'm not going to ask you.
PORTNOY: I don't know what your politics are.
CARLSON: But you're not a political guy, but you have been the target of repeated demands for censorship. Have they increased in the last few years? If so, why and what do you do?
PORTNOY: Yes, they have increased non-stop. We just keep trying to be us now. There's -- where we've grown, we're probably over 100 people now in the company. There's differing views, because the more I talk, the more I tell the truth, the more people may come at us from different angles.
But my philosophy and how I started the company is I will just always tell it as I see it, I won't be dictated to by outside forces. But it's definitely increased, it's definitely been a major increase in the last two years on how people attack us basically.
CARLSON: So what don't they like? Since you're not a political site, I know a lot of our viewers frequent Barstool Sports, they know you're not pushing a political agenda. So why are people mad at you, what triggers them?
PORTNOY: It's tough to say. A lot of it, they view us as sexist, they view us as sexist site, and we have in the past well in a Sports Illustrated we picture girls in bikinis at different times. It's a men's culture website, amongst other things. We considered ourselves a comedy site.
And then the narrative starts to build. A lot of the people who comment now really have no idea who we are. They hear, they see something linked on Twitter, they see somebody maybe comments about an article, and then when I react to them or talk to them or go any deeper, they literally have no clue what we do.
They're just saying this cycle -- this vicious cycle basically on social media and it all just feeds on itself. But they don't know our history, they don't know me, they don't know what we've been doing for 15 years.
CARLSON: It seems like it's a war on humor itself, like there's something about jokes that makes a certain kind of person really angry.
PORTNOY: Yes, it's hard to say, they just fulfill on each other. Social media, I think a lot of it is social media has just given people a voice that they can exert pressure on advertisers and do different things.
And if they don't like something you said or they think a joke isn't funny, or they take something literally, I've always explained it this way. For us, it would be if somebody went to a comedy show and they didn't have a ticket, they didn't know who the comedian was, they walked into the room, they heard a joke, then they walked out in the street and said, "Hey, you'll never believe what this guy's saying."
But they give no context of how the joke was told, where they saw it, that's what happens a lot of times with people like us, and I think a lot of people know comedian doesn't--
CARLSON: So the irony and maybe -- and actually the reason I want to talk to you more than any other is that you have not bowed before the online mob, begged and scraped for forgiveness. You continue to do what you think is right, which is telling the truth and you have thrived.
PORTNOY: Yes, and at some level, I've benefitted since I started the company in - I ran it myself with other employees, buddies at the top, until two years ago when we sold half of it to a group of investors, The Chernin Group, who have stood behind what we did.
And I would rather, this may sound crazy, I'd rather go down with the ship than give in to these people, I just can't do it, because I know who I am, I know my character, I know the character of the people that we hire.
I will not let people who have no idea what we do, no idea how hard we've work, no idea how long we did it. We out-worked, out-hustled, out-blogged everybody else that we did.
I'm not going to let somebody who has no idea what we do make stuff up about us, pull stuff out of context, and make me change what I do. I will not do it.
CARLSON: Brave people win in the end and you're living proof of it. Thank you very much.
PORTNOY: Thanks for having me.
CARLSON: I'm kind of inspired.
PORTNOY: I'm fired up myself.
(LAUGHTER)
CARLSON: Good for you, El Presidente.
Well The View is supposed to be a chatty inoffensive daytime talk show, but it's not anymore. It's kind of getting a little nutty actually. We're going to tell you what happened most recently on that program after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Donald Trump Jr. recently noted the Kavanaugh saga has made him worried about his own sons. He's not the only one who feels that way. Well, on The View, Whoopi Goldberg says that if he has that fear, it must be because his sons are future rapists. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WHOOPI GOLDBERG, AMERICAN ACTRESS: You only worry about this for your child, if you think your child has these tendencies. If your child is not someone who's assaulting people, it shouldn't be a concern for you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Don Jr.'s eldest son, by the way, is not even ten years old. But that's not surprising, what you just heard. The View has recently warped from a breezy daytime show into a font of deranged propaganda, not an overstatement.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOY BEHAR, CO-HOST, THE VIEW: These white men, old by the way, are not protecting women. They're protecting a man who is probably guilty.
GOLDBERG: I have to tell you. As a woman, I think you're trying to take my rights away.
BEHAR: That's right.
GOLDBERG: Get out of my behind, get out of my vagina, get out.
(APPLAUSE)
BEHAR: So it's almost like they're worried that all white people are going to lose all their power. Pretty soon, we'll be like South Africa apartheid, where ten percent of white people were running the country.
GOLDBERG: You know what's hard--
JEANINE PIRRO, HOST OF JUSTICE WITH JUDGE JEANINE, FOX NEWS CHANNEL: What's horrible is we--
GOLDBERG: --when the President of United States whips up people to beat the hell out of people. Say good bye.
PIRRO: --formed sanctuary cities.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The President has started this war against the media. These are the acts in my opinion of a dictator.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Joy Behar, Caryn Johnson, acting under her stage name Whoopi Goldberg, and the rest.
Ann Coulter is a columnist, a great one, author of the book, Resistance is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind, and possibly a View watcher, who knows. She joins us tonight.
What do you make of this, this is not The View that you remember, is it?
ANN COULTER, CONSERVATIVE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I can't say I was ever a huge View watcher.
(LAUGHTER)
But I've liked it, I do think the Left has lost its mind over Trump. I think it's worth pointing out, I'm listening to this hate speech from the Left on Kavanaugh. Senators Collins and Murkowski and Flake, they're so touchy about, oh with the loss of civility under Donald Trump and he's so indecent, we want to respect our institutions.
If you want to respect the institutions, then vote to confirm Kavanaugh and end this mob attack on obviously a very respectable and perhaps the most impressive judge who's ever been nominated for the Supreme Court.
CARLSON: But it's where it is coming from, so you remember a couple of weeks ago, all of us were informed by our superiors that we needed to hate Alex Jones, who runs a website, because it was a threat to our democracy.
This is the ABC broadcast network, this is one of the oldest and biggest broadcast networks, and you have one of their main anchors accusing someone's nine-year-old son of being a potential rapist. Has no one noticed?
COULTER: Well I liked that Whoopi mentioned of criminal tendencies and I'm thinking this idea of criminal tendencies is something we should start working into the criminal law. We're definitely going back to stop and frisk. If we're allowed to consider criminal tendencies--
CARLSON: Oh that's right.
COULTER: --this is so contrary.
CARLSON: Well, first of all, shame on you for thinking through the implications of what Whoopi Goldberg says.
(LAUGHTER)
COULTER: Not to say the more obvious point of, I mean this idea that well you only need to worry about this if you're a criminal, why do we have to get warrants to search somebody's house then.
No, there are rules for these things, and the basic rule is that there should be evidence. I mean one of the things like have--
CARLSON: What, evidence, you're an extremist Ann Coulter, I can't believe we're giving you a platform. Evidence?
COULTER: One of the things I keep hearing people say is how credible the doctor, she is not a doctor, only an MD is a doctor -- Dr. Ford was how credible, how credible they act as if this is a case of we're all just going to sit home in our living rooms and watch this and well she seems credible to me.
But, Meryl Streep was credible in Sophie's Choice. She wasn't at Auschwitz, she hasn't committed suicide, no we're not talking about just judging someone's performance. That's why we have evidence and wow the evidence is overwhelmingly against Christine Blasey Ford, not a licensed psychologist.
I do think the tide seems to have turned because I am a hate watcher, I mostly watch MSNBC and CNN, and I noticed since these latest -- the ex- boyfriend of Dr. Ford, isn't Dr. Ford, has come out and said I lived with her for six years, she never talked about sexual assault, she flew all the time, she's not afraid of closed spaces, oh yes, and she stole $600 from me.
Suddenly they're talking about Russia again.
(LAUGHTER)
CARLSON: I'm so glad that you watch that and keep us current. Boy, I never missed your column. Ann Coulter, thank you for coming.
COULTER: Thank you.
CARLSON: Great to see you.
Well, we have new evidence tonight that academia literally is a joke. We couldn't make this up if we tried, we wish we had actually, because it's so good.
(LAUGHTER)
By the way, Ship of Fools out this week. If you want to know why academia has become a joke and why your tax dollars should stop supporting it, the answer is inside.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Modern academia is widely seen as a joke. If you have got kids in college, you know it is. Now, we have proof that in fact it really is. Three academics spent ten months writing bogus articles in fields like gender studies and fat studies and getting them accepted in top journals.
One paper rewrote a chapter from Mein Kampf from a feminist perspective. Another discussed rape culture in dog parks and declared one of the best papers in the history of feminist geography.
Now the hoax has been exposed. Are the (inaudible) experts rethinking their careers? Of course, not. Instead the consensus is, the paper's authors will be the ones whose careers will suffer, amazing.
Time now for The Friend Zone, where we bring one of our friends in the building onto the show. I'm not the only one with a book out this week. Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy and his wife Kathy have a book of their own at the top of the charts at Amazon, it's called The Happy Cookbook, available right now.
Steve Doocy joins us. Thank you, Steve, for coming on. I've seen all the recipes in this, it looked delicious.
STEVE DOOCY, CO-HOST OF FOX & FRIENDS, FOX NEWS CHANNEL: Yes, you have.
CARLSON: But you wrote, what I didn't know until I talked to Kathy about it was that this book was written for a specific reason.
DOOCY: Tucker, absolutely. My wife Kathy and I were going to go down to Florida. We were going to get some new sunglasses. She went in to see the eye doctor. He took a look in her eye and said, there's something back there. We ended up going to Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia and they said, you've got ocular melanoma, a very aggressive rare form of eye cancer.
And Dr. Carol Shields was there, came in and said, you know what, we caught it early, I'm going to save your life. And while she was being treated with a radiation patch in the back of her eye, one night she was lying in bed thinking, I got to get my affairs in order.
What happens if this does not work?
CARLSON: Yes.
DOOCY: Who's going to take care of my kids? Who's going to cook my kids' favorite foods? Because you are thinking, what can I do, I can write down my recipes. Because so many recipes, in our lives, our moms didn't write down for us. And she wanted to make sure that our children had the foods that they grew up eating in that kitchen when they grew up, and they would always have a taste of home.
CARLSON: That is a really heavy story.
DOOCY: It is a heavy story.
CARLSON: And a beautiful story in a lot of ways. What of all of these recipes do you think about when you are hungry?
DOOCY: Actually I had it today.
(LAUGHTER)
Because of the book roll out, I had the pot roast that my mom used to make when I was a kid. And on my birthday, Kathy will make it. She will say, you want your mom's pot roast, right? And I'll say, absolutely, and she makes it with a cream of onion soup and Lipton soup, mixes it together and cooks it all day.
When I walk in the house, I'm back, I'm five years old and my mom is in the kitchen over by the avocado dishwasher and Elvis is on the radio, and all is perfect in our life. And you know what, here are a lot of people who have stories like that, and this book is flying off the shelves because I think it has struck a chord with people.
There are foods that make you happy.
CARLSON: Yes.
DOOCY: And the sooner you can have one, the sooner you have a flashback, because it triggers the nostalgia department in your brain.
CARLSON: I know all five Doocys, including your wife Kathy I saw yesterday, and they are a lot healthier than most people. So obviously this works. It's a great book and I would recommend it strongly. Steve, great to see you.
DOOCY: Thank you, Tucker.
CARLSON: We are back tomorrow to defeat lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink. Sean Hannity, right now.
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