‘What exactly happened on 9-11’: Tucker Carlson

One sentence in the middle of top rated news personality Tucker Carlson's first episode of his new Twitter show has his fans, and detractors, wondering whether he's flipped his opinion on one of the most significant events in U.S. history. The comment was one of a string of rhetorical questions posed by Carlson about major issues heritage media does not touch.

The media lie. They do. But mostly they just ignore the stories that matter. 

What's happened to the hundreds of billions of US dollars we've sent to Ukraine? No clue. 

Who organized those BLM riots three years ago? No one's gotten to the bottom of that. 

What exactly happened on 9-11? Well, it's still classified. 

How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money? How did he die? How about JFK? And so endlessly on. 

Not only are the media not interested in any of this, they are actively hostile to anybody who is. In journalism, curiosity is the greatest crime. [From 6:16; emphasis added].

Out of public reach

In fact, a great deal of investigative materials on the 9-11 attacks remain classified to this day, more than two decades later, according to United States Senator Bob Menendez.

Tens of thousands of pages of documents from the Department of Justice and other agencies relating to the September 11 attacks currently remain classified even though their contents are critical for a full public understanding of these attacks

Even physical evidence, including potential proof of the presence of incendiary material in the World Trade Center, remains locked away in an odd location, as reported in a 2010 exposé.

Why does 9/11 evidentiary material that would provide clues such as the absence or presence of Super Thermite or other explosive material in the dust from the blasts sit for “safekeeping” in the former Executive Headquarters of a ten-year-defunct Israeli front organization that contracted heavily for the U.S. Defense Department and still has an unfaded sign hanging on the building?

What changed?

Carlson was not worried about what might be found in “still classified” 9-11 documents back in 2008, when he walked out of a political rally he emceed for Ron Paul because former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura raised questions about the 9/11 attacks. 

While attending an event for Michelle Bachman in 2012, Carlson was confronted about the walkout by libertarian activist and radio host Adam Kokesh. Carlson's response:

“I am open to almost any crackpot theory about anything. It’s just, on that subject—come on, you know what I mean? It’s too much. Even for me!”

That same year, Carlson was interviewed by radio host Scott Ledger who challenged Carlson on the government's role in 9-11. Early in that interview, Carlson defended his bona fides as an anti-government libertarian before declaring a void of evidence implicating the government in 9-11.

I'm not defending the US government. I've lived in Washington for 27 years. My dad worked for the US government. I hate US government in a lot of ways. I am a libertarian. I don't defend anything they do. I despise the TSA. I'm not denying the sordid history of some government actions over the years. That's all real.

I'm merely saying a single thing, which is, there's no evidence that the US government, its employees, Americans of any kind, had anything to do with 9/11 other than responding to it. But nineteen hijackers did this. Al Qaeda has taken credit for it . . . There are conspiracies in this world. The government can be bad. But this isn't one of them. [Emphasis added].

Carlson then revealed his frustration with “truthers."  

This is why I'm very frustrated when I deal with truthers because I deal with facts and they don't have any and you don't have any.

Tucker challenged

Ledger responded to Carlson playing audio from a documentary produced by the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth group boasting, “3,000+ architects and engineers [who] are demanding a new investigation of the WTC destruction.”

Ledger asked Carlson to respond to a series of quotes he played of different “experts” from the group speaking about the third building that collapsed on 9-11.

• Building number 7 descended in free fall for the first 100 feet which means that there was absolutely no resistance to the descent whatsoever. 
• NIST has admitted it went into free fall for eight stories and going from motionless to free fall instantly, that's a bothersome part of the puzzle because NIST never explained it.
• We've got a building that came down in its own footprint. So all of the columns really needed to be severed at the same time in order for that structure to fall the way that we saw.
• The symmetry is the smoking gun. 
• The whole building completely comes down in one continuous motion. There couldn't have been any structural resistance. 
• But the likelihood of that failure dragging the entire building in such a fashion that all the columns would fail at the same time is an impossibility.

Tucker responds

Carlson agreed with Ledger that the way in which Building 7 collapsed was highly unusual even before Ledger played those quotes.

These buildings did not collapse in the way you would expect they would have at all . . . If someone on September 10th had said two planes fly into parallel skyscrapers, cause massive fires, what happens next? I don't think one engineer in 100 would have predicted what happened so yeah I buy that completely. It doesn't mean the CIA was behind it.

After listening to the quotes, Carlson continued to insist that the unpredictable collapses do not prove that explosives were placed within the buildings.

[T]here's a massive logical leap, and more important a factual leap, between noting that yes this is weird behavior, which I think everyone agrees with, and suggesting that there were incendiary charges placed in the buildings months before. 

And let me just be really clear Scott, there's no evidence of any kind that that is true. There's none. There's not one person who's ever come forward to say, “I saw someone placing such a charge; I placed such a charge; I have knowledge of such a charge; I sold the incendiary charge to this person.” There's zero evidence

Breach of contract?

Since firing its top rated news host, Fox News has continued paying Carlson's full salary in order to prevent him from moving to another network before the end of his contract in early 2025. Carlson therefore chose Twitter, instead of a network, to get his message out. According to Red Slate, citing Axios, Fox News is challenging even this. 

Broadcasting on Twitter was also assumed to be the only way Carlson could return given his ongoing contract dispute with Fox News. His former employer apparently disagrees, though. According to Axios, which obtained a letter sent from Fox News to Carlson, the former top-rated cable news host is being accused of breach of contract.

The first episode has over 99 million views as of press time and that number is still climbing.