On Sunday, Charles Murray tweeted about Nick Fuentes’ livestream:
Add another 35 minutes onto my Fuentes Exposure. Reactions:
1. From the beginning through 07:40, I agreed with everything he said, which explains Fuentes' popularity: Many of the problems he excoriates are real.
2. Starting at 7:40, the indictment became indiscriminate. The… https://t.co/lOF9fkocMx— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) November 23, 2025
The topic of the livestream pertained to Tucker Carlson’s dad employment by the CIA, and how Tucker sought to hide this information until a recording came to light purporting otherwise. Apparently this was a big deal, or was it? This is also disputable, as a Google shows he wasn’t employed by the CIA:
“Tucker Carlson’s father, Richard W. Carlson, was a journalist and official who headed the Voice of America under President Ronald Reagan, but there is no public evidence that he was ever in the CIA.”
But anyway, I only heard about this livestream because it was shared by Charles Murray, of all people, for reasons unrelated to Tucker being ‘exposed’. And this was after visiting his page directly, not because I saw it on my timeline. Otherwise,I would not have known. This is in spite of following many related accounts on Twitter, and yet I was still out of the loop.
Everyday we’re bombarded with news and other content. Knowing what can safely be ignored/discarded is useful to prevent information overload. There is too much to keep track of. My ignorance of the latest installment of Fuentes-Tucker drama reminds me of a good heuristic: if something is truly important or matters, you will not only know about it, but it will inescapable. And coverage will last a long time, to the point of being annoying. You won’t have to dig it up on Charles Murray’s account, of all places.
For example, there was considerable media coverage about AI even as early as late 2022 and mid-2023, such as the September 2022 release of DALL-E 2, Eliezer Yudkowsky on various podcasts warning the public about AI risk, and of course, the release of Chat GPT 4.0, the flagship commercial product by Open AI that brought the LLMs to the fore, on March 14, 2023. AI discussion was incessant back then, and now fast-forward two years, it’s the biggest story, and the debate has only intensified. In hindsight, buying Nvidia stock in 2023 would have been a wise move. Seeing so much media coverage indicated AI was not just hype or a fad, but consequential and important.
Of course, it’s possible for important stories to initially be overlooked, but I think this heuristic is still useful. Keeping tabs on everything and trying to separate the consequential from the noise is too time consuming. If I focus my attention on things which are already getting a lot of traction, I can narrow the search.
The reality is, the general public doesn’t care about Tucker’s dad, or the ‘beef’ between the former Fox host and the 20-something livestreamer. Fuentes is an inconsequential character who gets inordinate media coverage by the left in an attempt to divide the MAGA-base. This was the point I made earlier. Tucker is an otherwise anodyne talking head who plays to the public’s distrust of elites. What goes on between them, outside of the insular world of e-drama, is irrelevant to the rest of the world, hence why no one was talking about it much or why the story died so fast.
It’s similar to the latest installment of the ‘Epstein files’, which similarly faded from the public’s attention as fast as it appeared. As it turns out, ‘bubba’ and ‘blow’ can mean many things, and without any useful context or clarity, the story withered and died. This is a recurring theme of Epstein-related coverage, where pent-up suspense dissipates into anticlimactic ambiguity.