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1) Short thread: I generally agree, but a caveat I’ll add, having gone on Tucker Carlson, is that the choice isn’t really about whether you’ll be ‘good at it’ or ‘handle it’ so much as what you’re willing to lose, because the interview is the easy part. The hard part comes after.
2) When I went on Tucker—first time on live primetime TV—I stuttered a bit at one point, but overall I was my normal self, i.e. does this guy even have a pulse?, and I could tell that irritated him even as it was easily spun by his media people. But as soon as the mic cut off...
3) My phone was blowing up with thousands of completely batshit slurs, insults, sexual fantasies, Nazi images, and—I can’t put too fine a point on this—so was the PRESIDENT OF MY COLLEGE’S PHONE. Sooo many people tried to get me fired and make me seem beyond the pale.
4) For months I was getting calls and threats. The Fox media machine knows they do this. They put out a Bat[shit] Signal and people come for you. It’s pretty terrible and it changed my impression of what ‘discourse’ and ‘debate’ mean in the 21c. So...
5) You can be an ace debater with ice in your veins, but honestly you shouldn’t go on Fox unless you’re positioned to handle straight-up violent and death threats, attempts to ruin you and get you fired, cynical smear tactics all over the media, late-night phone calls, defamation
6) And these blue check marks or whatever don’t come with a PR team, a legal team, a publicist, etc. And believe me, I had to bring lawyers into it and put my real work aside to do my own anti-slander PR, e.g. here: link.medium.com/v3ShbAgyJU /end
