6th, and new insights about donald trump s indictments for efforts to overthrow the 2020 election, just to start. in network of lies, stelter writes, with or without carlson, fox is the black widow at the center of the web of lies that perverts american politics. i spoke to brian stelter and asked him why tucker carlson was fired from fox, was it the racism, his gross behavior to others, or something else. a list of 10 or 20 reasons he was eventually canned. i devote many chapters of the book because it s a mystery, and tucker has been promoting conspiracy theories why he was fired, blaming dominion for it. i think the reality is this was a bad breakup, like a relationship that goes sour when one side has 20 reasons to dump the other side and the other side doesn t see it coming. this was building for a long time. lachlan and rupert murdoch decided it wasn t worth it
Okay. but we have had it. we have had it with them. so that s first greg gutfeld and then jesse waters. what did you learn in doing the research for this book? is it a bottom up thing? is this the audience craves this and so fox serves it, or are they engineering this kind of sort of necrophilic attitude toward american culture and divisiveness? are they engineering it or taking in what their audience wants? in the roger ailes era, it was top down. now, as you said, it is bottom up. it s driven by the audience. the audience is charge which is a scary prospect sometimes. i love our viewers, i agree with your banter. jesse waters has taken over as the fox primetime extremist. they think they re, quote, respecting the audience. that s the quote that comes up time and time again. they think they re respecting the audience by giving the audience what they want, but that s disrespectful and it hurt the gop. look at what happened to the
Off-year elections on tuesday. fox is sometimes hurting the republican party that it thinks it s helping. that s an interesting dynamic going into 2024. the book, network of lies, the epic story of fox news. we love looks so we re going to sell it and hold it up here. please, everyone, read it. brian stelter, you re one of the best out there doing the thing. up next, rachel maddow joins me on her fascinating new book, prequel, which traces the fight to preserve democracy back to world war ii. stay with us. we come from a long line of cowboys. when i see all of us out here on this ranch,
Related to governing, history, or world events. he s a traitor and a malignancy in our nation and represents a clear and present danger to our democracy and the rule of law. i began our conversation by asking karl to tul us more about trump s right-hand man, mcintee. he is somebody who was there at the very beginning of the trump campaign in 2016. in fact, way back the very first book i wrote, front row at the trump show, i talked about walking into an empty trump campaign headquarters in trump tower because they only had a handful of people working there, and the first person i met was john mcintee, who very earnest, young, he had just left a job on the desk at fox news. and so he was there at the inception. and he was a former quarterback at the university of connecticut and somebody trump liked for a lot of reasons, i think partly because he looked the part. good looking young guy, a little taller than most of the other staffers. by the end of the trump presidency, he was actually
Here. you talk about everything from book bans, things we re seeing now, book bans, saying there s dirty things in the books. we have to root out the wickedness in the books corrupting the minds of children. that happened then, as now. politicians using their power in order to foment a revolution against the government. the idea of overthrowing roosevelt, the idea of it s all it all happened before. political pressure on the justice department to stop investigations and prosecutions of people involved in that kind of violence. yes, i mean, there s i mean, one of these dixiecrat anti-semite pro-fascist members of congress, a senator from north carolina, wanted to build a wall to keep out jewish refugees. he said we re going to build a wall that nobody can scale. thank you, rachel maddow, author of prequel, an american fight against fascism. coming up, harry dunn joins me to discuss the chaos on capitol hill and his new book, which recounts his work as a