t once, right? Now this is the reason that I like Bill Clinton. Yeah, I'm far less party-bound than maybe my reputation would suggest. I like Bill Clinton because he was freaking brilliant and I didn't care who he banged on the side any more than I care what Trump did or did not do with Stormy Daniels. Completely irrelevant. Give me smart. Give me capable. I'm good.

So good job for Vivek making things just better. No matter what happens, I think he made things better and it looks like that'll continue.

I would like to announce a death. I know that's a bummer, but sometimes things die and it should be, I think we should take a moment of silence for it. But here's what happened. You've probably heard this quote: it must be true because I saw the video with my own eyes. Well, that absurd belief was born around 1951 with the advent of video and it had a long life, but in recent years it started struggling with a bad illness and it finally died yesterday, February 6, 2023. R.I.P. Rest in peace: it must be true because I saw the video with my own eyes.

Yes, that's how all hoaxes are created, making you think there's no other interpretation than the one you saw in the video. If you learn nothing this year, learn that all video is a lie. All of it. All video is a lie every time. Even if it's not edited wrong, it's still focusing your visual persuasion on one point, almost always to the exclusion of whatever the other point of view is. Because if you're looking at it, you're believing it. If you're hearing it, you're like, ah, concept, concept. Retreat to my team views. I didn't hear what you said. But a video is establishing the argument, right?

All video lies. All video lies all the time. It can't do anything else. I don't even know if there's a possibility for it to not lie. I mean, think about it. It's always going to focus you on one thing at the exclusion or at least the diminishment of the other things. It's always a lie, at least in part. So yes, we're talking about Tucker Carlson got a hold of the January 6 footage and his take, and most of the people who are looking at it from the right, their take seems to be that proves the January 6 videos that the so-called select January 6 committee showed to the world to build their case were a disgusting lie.

And although not illegal, because I believe Congress — and people do a fact check on me — I believe Congress is allowed, in terms of it being legal, they're legally allowed to lie to you as much as they want. Are they not? Legally, am I right? Yeah, there's no law against it. It's actually so. So we watched Congress frame a bunch of American citizens. You might call them patriots and I wouldn't argue with that. We saw our own Congress frame them because they have this apparently some kind of loophole where they can destroy lives by lying in public in a way that an ordinary citizen couldn't possibly do the same thing.

Now like I say, it's not illegal. But if it were illegal, what would the penalty be? Pretty serious jail time, wouldn't it? Now I don't think there's any practical way to make it illegal, so I understand why it's not illegal, because everybody's lying all the time. Like you couldn't even have a government if you went to jail for lying. Everybody'd be in jail. So I get why it's not illegal. But if it were illegal, this would have been 25 years in jail, right? Allowing what, dozens or hundreds — how many people went to jail for effectively trespassing? A lot, right?

If you send dozens or hundreds of your own citizens to jail and you know you're lying or at least you know you're showing things out of context, it should be like 25 years, shouldn't it? Does anybody disagree with that? It's hard for me to think of anything worse than that that's not actually murder or rape or something, right? Pedophilia, I suppose. There are a few things that are worse, but it's one of the worst things I've ever seen. One of the worst things I've ever seen. Unless — does anybody have the suspicion that you just went from one misleading set of videos to another?

Did anybody say to themselves, how do I know that Tucker's videos are giving me the right story? How quickly did you buy into the narrative that the other narrative was completely wrong and that it was all a big ol' op? Pretty quickly, right? Pretty quickly. Because that's what agreed with your preconceived notions, didn't it? Didn't it? Yeah, you kind of expected that you'd see that the narrative had been false, so you saw what you expected. How much should you trust your own, let's say, rational senses if you see something that totally agrees with what you thought was going to be true? You want to be a little bit cautious.

Here's the thing I'd like to see. I'd like to see somebody who does not agree with Tucker Carlson about anything have access to the whole catalog. Give them a little time and then give them a full hearing. This is the sort of thing where you need to hear the other side. So now Tucker's shown a counterpoint to the January 6 people and I think that was a huge service. Would you agree? I think what Tucker Carlson is doing — somebody said it, maybe Cernovich said it — that it's maybe one of the most useful, important things anybody ever did in journalism. It's like right at the top of important things in my opinion.

So what Tucker's doing is real good work, real good work. But you as a smart consumer — and I'll bet Tucker wouldn't disagree with this. I'll bet if you were sitting here he'd say yeah, that's true — which is until you hear what other people say if they also have access to the full catalog of the videos, just see if they can come up with a narrative that makes his narrative weaker. I don't know if they can.

Let me tell you how every hoax was done that fooled other people. All right, here's how those hoaxes were done. Here's a video or a series of videos. Here's the video. How could you possibly interpret this any other way, right? That's how all the hoaxes are done. I can't imagine any other way to interpret this video. There's only one way to interpret this video. As long as they can get you to not imagine any other way to interpret it, you won't. You probably just won't imagine that there's any other possibility.

But I would say imagine there might be. I kind of trust Tucker on this story. So my, if I had to guess, I don't think anybody will be able to refute his narrative in any important way. Like there's always ways to pick at the edges of anything, but I don't think anybody's going to take the heart out of his narrative. But that's exactly what you say before you get fooled. I can't imagine anybody doing that, right? So I'm actually describing myself in the same blind spot I'm warning you not to be in. It's almost impossible to avoid it.

All right, so let's talk about some of the details. So it looks like the Horn Guy, the QAnon Shaman — they call him the QAnon Shaman — the videos of him are so clearly indicating he needs to be released from prison like right now. Like right now. Now if somebody else has other video that shows something we didn't see, maybe. But he was actually hanging out in a friendly way with a number of guards or law enforcement. One of them opened a door for him. It seemed like they enjoyed him. I mean they weren't smiling or anything but it looked like they were either amused, certainly not threatened. Certainly not threatened. It was just a guy in a fun outfit walking through a hallway and they opened a door for him and they were walking with him at one point.

Yeah, when you see that video, again it's impossible to imagine that what that one person was doing was in any way a four-year criminal sentence. Like I'm not entirely sure what he got convicted of but wasn't it something like protesting or interfering with official proceedings or something? Yeah. And as somebody said, I think it was Tom Fitton said on his spaces, there can be things that are technically illegal that are not appropriate to prosecute. Would you agree that the world is full of things that are technically illegal but you do not get a better world by prosecuting them?

Now here's a perfect example of that. Did he do things that were technically illegal? Probably. Is anything he did worth prosecuting in the sense that it would make the world a better place? Would it prevent him from doing it in the future? I don't think that's a risk. Would it prevent anyone else from doing something similar in the future? If it did, I don't think it was worth putting him in jail. So you could be technically breaking a law and still the right thing is not to prosecute. There are probably infinite examples like that.

All right. So the general tone of Tucker's narrative I guess is that the evidence shows something like patriotic protesters who clearly were not looking to hurt anybody. Everybody agrees there were dangerous people there who definitely had some bad ideas. All of those people are condemned. If they go to jail, I don't care. But that wasn't the character of the crowd and it wasn't the point of it. It certainly wasn't an insurrection. So the insurrection narrative is dissolving and Tucker Carlson gets to be right again.

And every time he's right about this I'll tell you what I'm talking about. Every time he's right about this it pisses me off because for maybe a few years I would just shake my head when I heard him say it because it just sounded so just like team play narrative stuff. And you'd always say that whatever the Democrats are accusing you of you can be sure that's what they're doing themselves. Here it is. Here it is. That they were literally trying to do something just incredibly disreputable. It wasn't illegal but certainly unethical, certainly unwise, certainly bad for the country. It wasn't exactly what they're accusing people of but the accusations did seem like a cover-up for their own behavior in a way.

So I mean I hated when Tucker keeps being right about that over and over again. Poor Josh Hawley, who there was one video of him seemingly skipping fast or running or something which the Democrats used to say that guy, he encouraged things and then he ran away like a coward. Like a coward. Now I didn't see the video when I was listening to it but apparently that was debunked. When you see the greater context apparently it doesn't look weird or cowardly if you see the context. Surprise, surprise. A hoax. It was a hoax within a hoax.

So the first hoax being that it was an insurrection. Obviously it was a protest, not an insurrection. Second hoax within a hoax within the hoax was that Hawley was running like a — I think that's what people said. I only use that word because I think that was actually a congressperson who used that word. And then that turned out to be a Rupar edit, as we call it, where you cut out the context. Have we ever seen this before? Is this the first time we've seen a hoax and then a hoax within the hoax? Have we gone to hoax squared? It's sort of like the Russian egg of hoaxes. Oh, what's inside here? Oh, lovely. But what's inside here? Oh, another hoax. But wait, what's inside here? Oh, and repeat.

All right, so what do you do about all that? What do you do about any of it? Do you think anybody will pay either politically or legally or lawsuits? I don't even think you'd sue them, right? I think Congress is exempt from being sued as far as I know.

So here's a sort of a side issue. Again Mike Cernovich is going hard at Trump for having the opportunity to preemptively pardon the non-violent January 6ers before he left office and he didn't do it, which sort of properly points out needs some explaining. Now that's my take. My take is it needs some explaining because again I haven't heard Trump's argument. Can you imagine any argument that Trump would make that would make you happy? Like what in the world could Trump say that would make you satisfied having not pardoned those people before he left? You can't think of one, right? You can't even think of one.

All right, suppose he had one. Suppose he had a good reason that's not obvious because I don't see any reason. I mean the only reasons that are obvious would be something like cowardice or not caring. Those would be the obvious ones. But what if there's another reason? Don't you think there could be some other explanation that's just not obvious? Let me give you one. All right, I'm going to give you an explanation that I'm not saying is the accurate one. All I'm doing is stretching your imagination a little bit, right? This is just an imagination stretcher, not a claim of truth.

Imagine being Trump and you're being accused of running an insurrection. It looks like Trump had a private army. Do you remember what people were saying? It's Trump's private army and all the MAGA people basically are insurrectionists and they don't love the country, they're definitely not patriots, they're all criminals and they're running a coup. And then he pardoned some. Think about it. Just put yourself in Trump's shoes. He's got to make a decision that's good for himself but also not damage the country. Not damage the country.

If you put me in that position and you say Scott, the ethical thing to do, the moral thing to do is to pardon those innocent people right away, would you agree that the ethical and moral thing to do was to pardon those innocent people before he left office? I would. That would be the moral and ethical thing to do. However, would it be good for the country? Would it be good for the country? Because it would confirm the false narrative that he had formed a private army. Because if he just says I'm going to ignore the law, I'm going to ignore the legal process — now keep in mind he also didn't know how long they would be held or what they would be charged with exactly, right?

Do you think that Trump knew that today they'd still be in jail for basically nothing that matters? Nothing that matters. No, he couldn't have known how bad it would be. But even still I'm going to agree hard with Cernovich. This is a ha