Tucker Carlson interviews YouTube journalist Tyler Oliveira about his investigations into ethnic enclaves and welfare dependency
Tucker Carlson interviews independent YouTube journalist Tyler Oliveira, who built a large following through on-the-ground investigative videos.
Summary
Tyler Oliveira, a 26-year-old independent YouTube journalist from Modesto, California, built a large following through on-the-ground investigative videos covering communities across America. He describes how he began doing serious journalism after driving to East Palestine, Ohio to cover the train derailment, and how that evolved into a series of investigations into ethnic enclaves — including Somali communities in Minneapolis, Muslim communities in Dearborn and Hamtramck, Michigan, and ultimately Orthodox Jewish communities in Kiryas Joel, New York and Lakewood, New Jersey. The Kiryas Joel and Lakewood videos triggered an immediate and severe response: his Patreon account was deleted within 24 hours, an advertiser pulled out, and he was removed from two web hosting servers within weeks. He documents what he describes as systematic welfare exploitation by Orthodox Jewish communities, the political power those communities wield over local politicians, and the stark hypocrisy he observed among Republican commentators who praised his Somali videos but attacked the Jewish ones. The conversation broadens into a discussion of identity politics, the disillusionment of Gen Z white men, H-1B visa wage suppression, and what both men see as a failure of the Trump administration to represent the interests of the voters who elected it.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Background: From Modesto to YouTube journalism
Tucker Carlson: Thank you for doing this.
Tyler Oliveira: Thanks for having me.
Tucker Carlson: I was looking through your YouTube numbers, which I don't normally ever do with anybody, but you're huge. I didn't realize how big you were.
Tyler Oliveira: You're flattering me.
Tucker Carlson: Well, it's real. You're a lot bigger than me, I'll tell you that. So, before we get into how you kind of accidentally stepped into this controversy — where are you from? How did you start doing this?
Tyler Oliveira: I'm from Modesto, California. I started doing this —
Tucker Carlson: You say that with such verve and relish.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. Meth, auto theft, and almonds. A small agricultural town in the central valley.
Tucker Carlson: For people who are not familiar with California agriculture, what's an ammon?
Tyler Oliveira: I think it's an almond that has yet to fall from the tree. I actually couldn't be bothered. I'm not fully certain.
Tucker Carlson: It's an almond. Shake the hell out of it, whatever the hell it is. So you're from Modesto.
Tyler Oliveira: I'm from Modesto, California. I went to college for three months, dropped out. I was doing YouTube full-time. Sort of accidentally walked into the field of investigative —
Tucker Carlson: How many kids in your class at UCLA were doing YouTube full-time? Was that like a thing?
Tyler Oliveira: Not that I'm aware of. That was not a major.
Tucker Carlson: That was not a trendy thing. How did you decide to do that?
Tyler Oliveira: I just didn't want to go to college. I wanted to get out of there at any cost. So I was charging those Lime scooters and filming videos and then I just dropped out and left forever.
Tucker Carlson: How long did it take you to support yourself, or feel like you had a real job doing this?
Tyler Oliveira: About a month into it I had enough money to subsist.
Tucker Carlson: Oh, immediately. Amazing. Doing what kind of videos?
Tyler Oliveira: Goofy stuff, Tucker. All sorts of stuff. I sold Big Chungus to GameStop and here I am in front of Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson: You do anything you regret?
Tyler Oliveira: No. I was young. I needed the money. Nothing to take back.
Tucker Carlson: So then how did you wind up doing journalism?
Tyler Oliveira: We were doing a lot of goofy stuff. One day we saw what happened in East Palestine, Ohio — I think about three and a half years ago. There was a train derailment. A bunch of toxic chemicals had leached into the water supply from what I remember. There was kind of a media blackout at the time. I saw what happened on TikTok and I was like, what if we just brought our camera there and asked people questions?
Tucker Carlson: Where were you?
Tyler Oliveira: In Austin, Texas at the time. We drove into Ohio and just started filming people and asking questions, trying to figure out what was going on. And then it sort of evolved into whatever we do now, which comprises basically amateur documentaries and investigative journalism.
Tucker Carlson: Wait, so you don't work for anyone but you?
Tyler Oliveira: No. I'm fully independent, self-funded, always have been, no investors of any kind. Just me and four or five people behind the scenes putting these videos out.
Tucker Carlson: And you're watching TikTok at your place in Austin and you see there's a train derailment in Ohio, so you get in the truck and just drive to Ohio.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly. Yeah. I thought it'd be an interesting video. I thought it'd be informative. And we were trying to mature what we were doing on YouTube, make it a little more serious, because I was becoming 22 years old and I was like, I don't want to do goofy nonsense for my entire life. What if we did something actually useful? So we showed up and people really resonated with it. It was informative and valuable, and there wasn't a ton of news crew there at the time. It was somewhat irrelevant in the news ecosystem, but it was fascinating to me.
Tucker Carlson: I remember your video. So that was it. No one assigned it to you. You just saw it scrolling through TikTok and drove there.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: I think because I'm so much older and have been in the formal media my whole life, it's just amazing that that's how it starts.
Tyler Oliveira: Weird, right?
Tucker Carlson: Well, great, actually. This is what they told us the internet was going to be — before it became all porn and bots and sports gambling. You were going to have citizen journalists and people would find out the truth because you couldn't mediate it.
Tyler Oliveira: Elon Musk sort of put a name to that idea of citizen journalists for me, at least. I never even heard the term. I didn't even know what we were doing was journalism, so to speak. But I feel like that's what it was and what it became.
Tucker Carlson: So when you got into East Palestine, what did you do?
Tyler Oliveira: We just asked people what was going on, tried to gain access into some of these areas that were closed off, asking these federal agents what was going on, and just tried to paint a picture of what the media sort of failed to present to the broader American audience.
Tucker Carlson: That's like the coolest thing you could do. You just see people on the side of the road and say, "Hey, can I talk to you?" And you never got a degree in journalism from Columbia. So how did you know how to do that?
Tyler Oliveira: I'll tell you how we got it. I was driving these vehicles that looked like Minecraft vehicles across America, and we would go to gas stations and always have these funny interviews with random people. And we had this interview with a guy who was telling us about banging his cousin in Alabama. And I was like, what if we took the beauty of that moment and brought it to relevant, important topics in day-to-day life? So we took this gas station interview concept and brought it over to actually important topics in our everyday life. So here we are.
Tucker Carlson: You make the video on East Palestine and it took off.
Tyler Oliveira: It did. Yeah. About three or four million views.
Tucker Carlson: Wow. At 22.
Tyler Oliveira: I think so. Yeah. But for us it was validation that this is something people can use. It's informative and valuable and it fills in where the mainstream media is not interested.
Tucker Carlson: Well, it's objectively validation of that. And it also says something good about the country that people want to know what's happening inside their borders. So then you just pivoted and decided to do more news?
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah, we did a variety of news topics and interesting cultural communities — hard-to-access communities like the pedophile village in Florida. We went over there and started interviewing a bunch of pedophiles, asked them how they ended up there. White supremacists in Arkansas. Black supremacists in Harlem, New York. Just a broad range of interesting people, places, and things — from political to cultural to just wacky stuff.
Tucker Carlson: What drove you?
Tyler Oliveira: Just curiosity. I thought I was good at it. And so — let's go for it.
Tucker Carlson: That's the right motive right there.
From fringe communities to mainstream news: the Somali story
Tucker Carlson: So then you started doing — when I first became aware of you, you moved from the full outliers, like the pedophile community, white supremacists in Arkansas, black supremacists in Harlem — and you started moving closer to the actual news, like what the rest of the news is talking about. And you started interviewing Somali communities.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. I think December of 2025, we put out a video on Somali in Minneapolis. Now, to the local news's credit, they've reported on various forms of fraud for years over there. But there's something about their inability to storytell and package those narratives that it just never took off.
Tucker Carlson: There's a talent gap there.
Tyler Oliveira: And just a medium misunderstanding, I think. They report accurately — in fact, many social media guys often cite their reports. I think they just can't synthesize the information into actual storytelling, into the packaging, and into how these platforms like YouTube work.
Tucker Carlson: You know the ability to tell a story works at dinner, it works on cable television, and it works on YouTube. It's all kind of the same thing. Can you synthesize? I think that's exactly right. You just take the facts and put them into an order that you think is accurate and truthful. You're not misrepresenting it. But it has a narrative structure and an order of importance.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly. But yeah, we've covered tons of topics from all over the country and all over the world. About December of 2025, we did a video on Somali in Minneapolis. A lot of it was focused on more of a demographic shift more so than fraud. Nick Shirley then puts out a video I think a couple weeks later and it really bursts into the mainstream. He covers this daycare fraud and this becomes like the biggest talking point in the GOP. I'm sure you saw it.
Tucker Carlson: Oh yeah, I live here.
Tyler Oliveira: They loved it. It was the perfect story really. We found these learning centers — this blatant situation of people from Somalia who can't even spell the word "learning." It becomes part of the mainstream conversation about these third worlders absorbing welfare benefits, committing fraud on mass, and everyone hates these people.
The demographic replacement angle
Tucker Carlson: Hey, can I just ask you to back up? You said something so interesting parenthetically. You said, "I approached it as a demographic replacement question. They approached it as a fraud question." Tease that out a little bit. Why? You saw it in bigger terms than they did, I think.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. My focus was just — you take Minnesota, which is land of the Vikings, the Scandinavian people, and now it's becoming —
Tucker Carlson: You're speaking to a Carlson here.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly. Now it's home to Somali. The Minnesota Vikings put out a thank-you to their Somali community on Twitter the other day. So for me it was just an interesting case study of a state in the United States of America that has such generous welfare programs and is such a generous people that it inevitably attracts some of the most opportunistic, parasitic — if you will — population of people from a destabilized country in Africa that come here simply because of the benefits they'll receive upon entering. It became a hub for these people opportunistically taking advantage of such generous people.
Tucker Carlson: This is why you've become so big. It's bigger than the Minnesota thing too, right? It's Minnesota, Maine, which has similar demographics — overwhelmingly northern European whites who have no idea what an idyllic place they have, who hate themselves because they've been taught to hate themselves. And so to atone for sins they didn't commit, they import the most destructive parasitic populations they can find, and then sort of revel in the squalor because it's a kind of self-abasement. It's masochism.
Tyler Oliveira: White guilt, right?
Tucker Carlson: A hundred percent. And there's nothing more dangerous to everybody than white guilt, seemingly.
Tyler Oliveira: It's just interesting that you saw it that way.
Because we've also done videos in Dearborn, Michigan. I feel like you see that every day now — Dearborn this, Dearborn that, about the sort of Muslim invasion. We did a video in Hamtramck, Michigan, which was a predominantly Polish working-class town. It eventually elected a Muslim majority in the township council, and they voted to ban the gay flag. For me that was comedic because they basically invited these people in, they become a majority, they consolidate political power, and then vote to deny them the same rights they were afforded.
Tucker Carlson: Or even more meta — white liberalism drew these people in and their first act is to ban white liberalism.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly. Once they achieve — one religion supplants another.
So we were looking for ethnic enclaves doing the same thing as Dearborn, Michigan or Hamtramck or Minneapolis. So I looked up Jewish ethnic enclaves on Google, only to find Kiryas Joel.
Tucker Carlson: Let me ask you to pause right there. That's fascinating. So you're basically interested in exploring the principle — you weren't out to attack Jews or Muslims or Somalis or anyone else. You just wanted to say this is what happens when a country's decency is leveraged against it.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly. Systematic exploitation of generosity by design.
Tucker Carlson: So you still believe in principle. So you must be a legacy American?
Tyler Oliveira: In what respect?
Tucker Carlson: Well, you must be from here if you actually believe in a higher principle.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah, I'm born and raised here. My mom's side goes way back.
Tucker Carlson: May I ask what kind of response did you get to the videos you did on these ethnic enclaves in Michigan and Minnesota?
Tyler Oliveira: Praise and adoration. This is a great talking point. Thank you so much for bringing this up.
Tucker Carlson: Who praised them?
Tyler Oliveira: Republicans. Oh, of course. They loved it. Democrats hated them. Liberal people hated them. Republicans — hurrah, keep going. Expose them all, find even more. Expose all these groups. So I was like, "Okay, sure. I will. Let's keep going."
Tucker Carlson: Because you believe in universally applicable principles. Not just tribal politics.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly. The thing above tribal politics, which is principle — which is what the country is founded on.
Discovering Kiryas Joel
Tucker Carlson: Okay. Now so you were like, okay, we've covered plenty of Islamic ethnic enclaves across America. It would be interesting to find a different group of people that do this.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly. I found this village called Kiryas Joel. Kiryas Joel is an all-Jewish ethnic enclave in upstate New York. At one point they were the poorest town in America, with 40% living beneath the poverty line. They had the highest fertility rates in America — having 7 to 10-plus kids. Extremely high, anomalously high rates of welfare dependency, from Medicaid to SNAP/EBT to Section 8 housing vouchers. So this is definitionally a parasitic, insulated Jewish community I found in upstate New York. To me that was obvious. I had an obligation almost to go there and film a video if I was filming videos in Dearborn or Hamtramck or Minneapolis.
Tucker Carlson: Did you know that that was not allowed?
Tyler Oliveira: I suspected we would unveil some hypocrisy, especially within the GOP and the larger Republican tent.
Tucker Carlson: Really?
Tyler Oliveira: For sure. Come on.
Tucker Carlson: But you suspected it.
Tyler Oliveira: I suspected it. That it was to this degree was a little bit surprising, but at that point it was not fully confirmed. No one had tested it yet. And I wanted to test the line a little bit, because you see so many of these guys on Twitter cosplaying as these hardliner, principle-first guys — America First, weed out all the fraud, weed out all the welfare exploitation. And then when it comes to specific groups, those principles disappear. So for me I was like, I know this is going to happen to some extent. To what extent I didn't know. Let's go there and show this.
Tucker Carlson: Do you think — I'm sorry I keep pulling you off track, but I just want to say once again, I had no idea how big you were on YouTube. The numbers show it. It's not my opinion. They're many times my numbers. I'm very impressed. I just love that you're being rewarded for this. But do you think the fact that you didn't go to college allows your mind to stay a little freer, more supple, less constrained by lies than if you had gone?
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah, maybe I'm a little less conditioned than the average person in my generational cohort. To be fair to my generation, Gen Z — a lot of people agree with me. Gen Z is on the same boat here. I think they're far more principally consistent than a lot of our political representatives and they're all for it.
Tucker Carlson: Well, you know who's not?
Tyler Oliveira: Who?
Tucker Carlson: A lot of these evangelical boomers, seemingly. Israel's a hard line, and anything remotely indicative of Israel or related to Israel in any capacity, including Jews apparently, is off limits. Jesus doesn't seem to be the hard line for them at all, which is a little surprising. You could say whatever you want about —
Tyler Oliveira: We've done videos on corrupt Christian megachurches. We've done videos on Pakistani Muslim rape gangs. What's interesting to note is that most Christians watching the videos we did about corrupt Christian megachurches were highly apologetic for what they viewed as an aberration from true Christianity. They were denouncing what they view as a bastardization of Christianity.
Tucker Carlson: That's how I feel.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly. But what we found after putting this Jewish video out is that there's almost like an immune system response — acidic. Orthodox, secular Jews have each other's back was what I took away from the backlash that followed.
What Kiryas Joel is actually like
Tucker Carlson: So tell us — first of all, what did you find? Kiryas Joel is in New York, outside New York City, 40% below the poverty line at least at one point, highest birth rate in the country. What's it like? What is it?
Tyler Oliveira: It is reminiscent of a European Jewish village you might have seen pre-World War II. That's how they describe themselves. What I saw was a ton of Jews walking to synagogues, praying, and then walking in a hurry to another synagogue to pray some more and study the Talmud some more. That's basically all I saw. People praying and people living off of the welfare system.
Tucker Carlson: Just to be clear, I've got no problem with people praying or following their religion. I support it. It's the living off the taxpayer part that is too much.
Tyler Oliveira: To give them credit, obviously there is some level of communal support. Sometimes they'll rely on in-laws for some initial financial support. But largely, by design, their entire lifestyle is designed to extract and exploit these welfare systems to the maximum degree. It is strategic. It is not happenstance. It is not coincidental. It is by design.
Tucker Carlson: This is the single biggest debate in Israel and has been for over 20 years — there's a huge percentage of the population that lives off the Israeli welfare system, does not serve in the military, and does not add to the economy. And if you talk to any non-religious Jew in Israel, it's like the third sentence out of their mouth is, "I am angry at these people for this." So it's not just here.
Tyler Oliveira: And a lot of Israelis actually contacted me and said, "This is an amazing video. We have the same issue."
Tucker Carlson: Maybe that's the one thing. True.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. It was funny. Israelis were super supportive of it. They're like, "This is great. They're draining the tax system over here." And apparently there's a demographic ticking time bomb taking place over there, because they have similar levels of fertility rates and don't contribute economically the same way. They don't serve in the military, which in Israel is a big deal since everybody — male and female — serves.
Tucker Carlson: And they've had an endless series of wars for 30 years. So you could imagine the bitterness. Your kids are going off to risk their lives, but your neighbors aren't.
Tyler Oliveira: For sure. The resentment. But speaking of resentment, it's the same logic and in the same vein that the average American taxpayer grinding away right now feels when they're working a seven-to-six day — if you account for the commute — and they see where their tax dollars are being spent and they don't feel as if the money they're putting in they ever get to see coming back out to them. And how many ethnic enclaves are they funding to live this totally insulated lifestyle that doesn't benefit them? That was really what the conversation sparked and became.
Tucker Carlson: What was it like as you walked through the community? How were you received?
Tyler Oliveira: Unwelcoming, I would say. Especially with the camera. I think if I was there without the camera, not questioning anything, I would have been tolerated for sure.
Tucker Carlson: For those who haven't seen it, what kind of questions did you ask?
Tyler Oliveira: What do you do for work? How do you afford to have seven to ten kids?
Tucker Carlson: You asked that?
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. "Hey, what do you do for work?" "I study. I study Torah." "Okay. How do you afford seven to ten kids?" "God." And I would be like, "What about the American taxpayer?" And they would say, "That too." I'm like, "Of course that too."
Tucker Carlson: Was there any gratitude that you discerned to the American taxpayer?
Tyler Oliveira: They say, "God bless America." But not for America, really. I didn't feel it.
Tucker Carlson: What about local politicians? They must know this, right?
Tyler Oliveira: Oh, for sure. They're beholden to these people, though. They're beholden to the Jewish voting block that exists in these concentrated Jewish communities in New Jersey and New York. Obviously local politicians are aware of this. Even Donald Trump's aware of this — he put out a tweet saying, "Thank you so much to Lakewood, New Jersey, the Orthodox community in Lakewood, New Jersey," thanking them in 2024. And they're one of the most powerful voting blocks because of their consistency. They always show up and they always vote on behalf of whatever the rabbinical leadership tells them to. If they say you vote for this guy, they consistently show up on behalf of that candidate. There's no partisan loyalty. They'll shift from Democrats to Republicans as long as the benefits outweigh one party over the other. So they're the perfect voting block. No one wants to stop their gravy train for fear of losing their votes. So democracy has been literally hijacked here.
Tucker Carlson: Seemingly in exactly the same way it has been in Lewiston, Maine and Minneapolis, Minnesota by the Somali.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. Seemingly an organized group, a small organized minority can disproportionately impact everything. Could you have these communities without welfare? Actually, you could not — the Jewish community would not, because they're so dedicated to studying full-time, spending so much time praying, etc. Although there are precedents for that being possible, which I always bring up — the Amish community. They're self-sufficient. They're fully reliant on their own sweat and toil. It can be done.
Tucker Carlson: So the Christian community pays for itself.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly.
Tucker Carlson: The Amish are not on welfare?
Tyler Oliveira: No. They are philosophically opposed to taking welfare. They find it shameful, as most people probably should, because it's a safety net to reduce poverty — not a way of life and not a strategy for maintaining a lifestyle of having 7 to 10 kids when you can't afford to otherwise.
Tucker Carlson: Of course not, especially in a country that has no state religion and isn't allowed to support theocracy. Speaking for myself and I think reflecting the Constitution.
Tyler Oliveira: I absolutely think the Orthodox should have a right to any kind of religious practice they want as long as you're not hurting anyone. Same with the Somali, same as the Muslims in Michigan, same as the Amish in Pennsylvania. But the idea that taxpayers would support someone else's religion —
Tucker Carlson: It's not allowed.
Tyler Oliveira: Well, I agree with you. And it's even funnier because for some of these groups there is outward hostility. You take some of these Orthodox Jewish groups — there is in fact hostility. When we were there asking people questions, asking them what they do for a living, how they get their money, how they afford their little society, there is hostility. So as a taxpayer, it's like: we're going to take your money, and if you question it, you're anti-Semitic and we hate you.
Tucker Carlson: What was anti-Semitic about it?
Tyler Oliveira: The ADL said it hearkened back to anti-Semitic stereotypes of them being a drain on society or something like that — when it's all statistically corroborated. I'm not pulling these out of my ass. These are welfare stats I was quoting, and then I would go to the direct source asking these people, "What do you do for a living? How many kids do you have? How do you afford your kids? Are you on welfare?" How is that anti-Semitic? And why do they get their own brand of racism with its own proper noun? That never made sense to me.
Tucker Carlson: I agree. It is odd. How is bigotry against one group different from bigotry against any group? And of course, if you believe in absolute standards, it's not. It's all the same variety of the same thing. But if you believe that only one group should be immune from criticism, then you're not against racism. You're an advocate of racism. You're arguing a kind of supremacy.
Tyler Oliveira: Jewish supremacy.
Tucker Carlson: Or any kind. I mean, if you can attack anyone but white Episcopalian men — everyone else is fair game — what other group can you not discuss?
Tyler Oliveira: I don't know. You can disrespect Christianity without any flack. You can disrespect Islam legally — they might kill you for it. And seemingly with Jews, or at least some of these groups of Jews, the legal affair may begin. You might get deplatformed or pulled off some sites.
The backlash: Patreon deleted, advertisers pull out, web hosts ban him
Tucker Carlson: So what happens? You do this video in New York at Kiryas Joel. What kind of reception does it get?
Tyler Oliveira: The Americans are happy. "Thank you for calling this out." The locals who live in nearby communities — "Thank God someone has finally come and spoken out about this."
Tucker Carlson: The locals have strong feelings about it.
Tyler Oliveira: Oh, they're perpetually grateful to me because no one has ever touched this, because seemingly it's radioactive. If you have any political ambitions, they die overnight if you talk about this. This is a strong voting block and on top of that they're leveraging the generational guilt of the Holocaust. You're anti-Semitic if you oppose any of what they're doing. So I was a hero to the local communities that live nearby.
Tucker Carlson: Just to be clear — the Holocaust was not committed by Americans. We were actually the people who ended it. America did not commit the Holocaust. We lost many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Americans fighting against it. So actually America is the hero in that story. I don't know why any American would feel guilt about something that we gave the lives of our ancestors to stop.
Tyler Oliveira: That's a great point. It's a mechanism that's almost reflexive for a lot of these people to throw out the anti-Semitism and then the conversation's buried. It's a shield to dissuade further argumentation as to why I disagree with a Jewish group's actions. And it's abused, obviously, and its weight seems to no longer exist.
Tucker Carlson: I'd heard that it was abused. Yeah.
Tyler Oliveira: I mean, I think so. And to clarify — I'm an equal opportunity offender, so to speak. I'll talk to any of these groups of people and have plenty of critical questions for all of them. Not just Jewish people. I didn't wake up one day and say, "Let's go piss off some Jews." This is a perfect example of an ethnic enclave that exploits the welfare system and let's go check it out, just like I would a Muslim group.
Tucker Carlson: Just as you did. So you get big numbers. The audience likes it. The neighbors are grateful for it. A bunch of Israelis say, "Hey, we love this because we've lived it." Where does the criticism come from?
Tyler Oliveira: Republican demagoguery. Some politicians, Republican politicians, the Republican Party at large is as opposed to it really. The left can get behind it. A lot of the right can get behind it, but also a lot of the right is disgusted by it. "How dare he engage in anti-Semitism?" The ADL says it hearkens back to age-old anti-Semitic tropes. I don't even know what to say. It's just laughable.
Tucker Carlson: Did any of the people who praised your Somali exposé attack this?
Tyler Oliveira: Yes.
Tucker Carlson: Same people?
Tyler Oliveira: Yes. I would give names, but their names are probably too irrelevant to invoke here at this table. But certainly hypocrisy. You would think even secular Jewish communities would be like, "Hey, thanks for pointing this out. We appreciate that" — which some of them did, of course. But largely there was a tribal mentality of, "Why are you attacking these poor innocent Jews who just want to mind their own business?"
Tucker Carlson: That's great — go mind your own business. Not on my dime. I pay taxes.
Tyler Oliveira: Oh, I agree. Quit taking money out of my wallet. If you want to go live in the woods, do it. Work hard enough to buy your own property and go do it. I shouldn't have to subsidize your lifestyle. It's that simple. Beyond that, there's no beef, there's no frustration, there's no hatred. It's just — any honest person sees exactly the point you're making and it's pretty hard to disagree with it.
Tucker Carlson: Well, yeah. I mean, if you think this is okay, is it okay to have some Christian Nazi group or whatever?
Tyler Oliveira: And to that point — there's that all-white community that's trying to start up in the Ozarks in Arkansas. They're going to get sued into oblivion just for existing, for violating the Fair Housing Act, for discriminating against non-whites. For those who don't know, it's a group in the Ozarks that's trying to build an all-white town. That's illegal.
Tucker Carlson: With tax money?
Tyler Oliveira: No, self-funded. So the beauty of Kiryas Joel to me was: we're essentially going to de facto violate the Fair Housing Act, de facto segregate ourselves from secular society with secular taxpayer dollars. And if you don't like it, you're anti-Semitic. That was my takeaway.
Tucker Carlson: Well, that's what's happening. And white people can't do it.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. I mean —
Tucker Carlson: I think Blacks tried to do it in downtown Philadelphia in the mid-'80s and they got firebombed by the mayor.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. They literally got blown up with a bomb. Look, I've never been for racial separatism, but I also believe in freedom of association. Do whatever you want.
Tucker Carlson: I think actually you should be able to do that. I don't really have a problem with segregating. That's fine. Why would you not want to live next to people that look like you, worship the same God, pray like you, raise their children the same way?
Tyler Oliveira: But why can they only do it? That's all.
Lakewood, New Jersey: the school system and political takeover
Tucker Carlson: So what were the consequences for you? So immediately —
Tyler Oliveira: Obviously the sponsor pulled out of our video. I can talk about Muslims, Christians, pimps, prostitutes, any group you can imagine, but this was the radioactive topic.
Tucker Carlson: Wait, you had an advertiser in the video?
Tyler Oliveira: Typically they do not ask me for the topic of the video. For this video — I've never been asked before — I put out a tweet saying, "Have you ever heard of Kiryas Joel?" and I broke down some of the statistics regarding their welfare use. I'm not going to name the company, but one of the correspondents on behalf of the company saw it and wanted to clarify that it would not be about the Orthodox Jews. And then when I said, "Yeah, it is," they pulled out. Obviously they have the right to spend their money how they please. It's just funny and it goes to show which groups you cannot talk about.
Tucker Carlson: I think it's counterproductive. Obviously it's not good for anyone in the end. But I also think it's a violation of the core idea of America. And it leads to resentment. And it sort of proves their points — you have special privileges. "No, I don't." You can't talk about us. Shut up. Okay, so you do have special privileges.
Tyler Oliveira: Well, I agree with you. So after that video, so many residents from New Jersey reached out to me and said, "Hey, we have the same thing going on here in Lakewood, New Jersey and surrounding towns. Please come here and take a look." Lakewood, I think, is the most populous Jewish town besides Brooklyn, New York in the United States. Massive Orthodox Jewish community. And many of the towns have been turned over, so to speak. Non-Jewish towns have become predominantly Jewish towns in the last two decades — from my understanding, especially in the early 2000s — and it has been perpetrated through pretty aggressive methods.
Tucker Carlson: Really.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. We're talking about the consolidation of political dominance from the township board to the planning board to the zoning board to the school board. And the heritage residents in these areas — their argument is they've made it so uncomfortable for us that we've either left, if we've had the financial means to leave. And those who are left behind send their kids to a dismantled, depleted, and pillaged public school system that's been destroyed inadvertently by the presence of these Orthodox Jews.
Tucker Carlson: Well, how has it destroyed the school system?
Tyler Oliveira: In New Jersey, the state funding formula for schools is a derivative of public school attendance. So if I had 5,000 public school attendees, that would be multiplied by x to determine the amount of money my school gets. What happens is when Orthodox Jewish communities come in, they overwhelm these school districts with Jewish students who go to yeshivas. They do not attend the public school system. Yet simultaneously, those schools have an obligation to fund private transportation and special education for these private schools. So what ends up happening is a large piece of the pie ends up getting allocated towards these private schools in the form of gender-segregated busing and exorbitant costs for special education within the Jewish community.
Tucker Carlson: Wait, the state pays for gender segregation?
Tyler Oliveira: Gender-segregated busing. Yeah. The state pays for that.
Tucker Carlson: You can't even get states to have gender-segregated bathrooms, but they're paying for gender-segregated busing.
Tyler Oliveira: They argue it's a violation of their freedom to religiously express themselves.
Tucker Carlson: What about Title IX? There's no federal law — well, that's amazing. Some would argue it's a violation of the establishment clause.
Tyler Oliveira: I'm okay with gender segregation. I don't have a problem with it at all. In fact I think it's good in some ways. But the idea that the government could pay for it — I thought the official position of the government at every level was that gender segregation is always bad, including in the bathroom. But no, it's okay when the yeshivas do it.
Tucker Carlson: Because they're a religious organization.
Tyler Oliveira: Which is a different conversation, but religious freedoms in this country have gone too far or have been weaponized by bad actors.
Tucker Carlson: There seems to be less religious freedom for some people but a lot more for others.
Tyler Oliveira: And this is not the only instance of this exact same behavior. The blueprint was made in East Ramapo in Monsey, New York. Not too far away. Basically Orthodox Jews came into this community of mostly Black and brown working-class poor people, bought a bunch of real estate, established their presence, voted themselves into positions of power in the school board, the zoning board, the planning board, the city council. They voted to defund after-school activities for the kids in the public schools, to increase the amount of funding for these yeshivas. And then they would consolidate the public schools — meaning they would close down some of the public schools as the funding went down and the public student enrollment went down as people left. They would consolidate them and then sell them off at a discounted price to these yeshivas.
Tucker Carlson: Wait, so they actually took over the physical plant of the buildings?
Tyler Oliveira: They bought the schools at discounted rates. Below market rates, arguably. It's brutal, right? So the lesson for nearby towns was: we don't really have any upside for these people to move in if the state funding formula is designed in such a way that the quality of our kids' public education will go down, and they will elect themselves into political power and basically be aggressive and unreasonable neighbors to live by.
Tucker Carlson: That's an amazing story. So you get calls from people saying what you covered in New York is happening at an even bigger scale here in Lakewood. What's Lakewood like?
Tyler Oliveira: Some would describe it as Little Jerusalem, Israel 2.0. I've never been to Israel. The climate's fundamentally different. But it is densely populated — I think two-thirds of the population is Orthodox Jews. The driving's terrible. And they run the show down there.
Tucker Carlson: And you went?
Tyler Oliveira: I went to Lakewood. I went to Monsey, New York. I went to the nearby town of Jackson Township. We went all over.
Tucker Carlson: What experience did you have?
Tyler Oliveira: Oh, I was the boogeyman. A lot of these people had seen the video in Kiryas Joel and they were afraid for me to come down to Lakewood. There were group chats where they would disseminate Yiddish posters basically saying do not talk to anyone with a camera. Do not let anyone in our synagogues. Play Disney music so he gets a copyright claim on his videos. I was the devil after that video in Kiryas Joel came out in other Orthodox Jewish communities, because I also put out a tweet saying I'm going to come down — let me know if you have any tips. I'm coming.
Tucker Carlson: Wow. So what happened when you got there? Did they want to talk to you?
Tyler Oliveira: Of course. Yeah. Despite being told not to talk to me, a lot of Jewish people did come up to me. Their main point was: the law is written in such a way that we deserve to receive these welfare benefits. We qualify legally and therefore it's okay and good. And if you have a problem with that, go move to a different country.
Tucker Carlson: Go move to a different country.
Tyler Oliveira: Sure. I mean, obviously not all of them thought that way. There were a few friendly encounters, but mostly it was pretty confrontational and unwelcoming. They were frustrated that I was there. Their justification was: if the law is written in such a way, we are justified in doing it. The law was somehow supreme over what I would argue to be morals or ethics. In my opinion, this is a bad thing to exploit or take advantage of. But for them, it's not coincidental. It's by design. It's systemic exploitation of a system. They're fully aware of all of its loopholes. They understand the law in such a way that allows them to exploit it in every degree.
Tucker Carlson: I think what you're seeing is a clash of worldviews. I understand both, by the way. One is a legalistic worldview — this is the law and we're within the bounds of the law, which is totally defensible. And the other is, well, there's a higher law having to do with ethics and decency. And you see this repeatedly in the New Testament when Jesus heals on the Sabbath. There's a particularly memorable scene where he heals a guy who's been crippled for 38 years at the pool of Bethesda and the guy gets up and picks up his mat and starts walking, and the Pharisees are just on him. The guy hasn't walked in 38 years. "No, you're holding your mat on the Sabbath. It's against the law." And Jesus is like, "No, you're missing the point. He can walk after 38 years." There's a higher calling here. I think you're kind of seeing that — law versus ethics and morality.
Tyler Oliveira: Almost. In my opinion, the way I view what welfare was designed for — which was to help indigence, poverty, a single mom with some kids she can't afford — there are things that we're allowed to do that we don't do because we restrain ourselves.
Tucker Carlson: I agree.
Tyler Oliveira: I can scream the F-word at a grandmother. There's no law against it. But I don't, because that's disgusting.
Tucker Carlson: I think so. You could probably get on welfare right now.
Tyler Oliveira: I'm sure a lot of people could and don't, due to this concept of shame — which is seemingly not universal. We let all of these groups of people from all over the world, including Jewish people, including sub-Saharan Africans, whoever it may be, into the United States, because apparently we have this obligation of being a melting pot, whatever that means, however new that concept is. And we're surprised when we learn that we have different worldviews, different values, different gods, different interpretations of reality that guide our actions. Thus the divide — because the heritage residents in a city like Lakewood are saying, "Yeah, we know you can legally qualify, but we're tired of paying for your lifestyle. Please stop." And they're saying, "The law says I can, therefore I will. Anti-Semitism." If you don't like it, leave your country.
Tucker Carlson: Despite their whole lifestyle being contingent on being subsidized by the welfare that is paid for by secular tax dollars.
Tyler Oliveira: You can't be mad at the person that funds your entire way of life. I think that's disingenuous and a little ungrateful.
Tucker Carlson: It's the definition of it. Do local politicians weigh in on this?
Tyler Oliveira: They didn't weigh in on it directly when I put my video out. But all local politicians cave to these guys. The voting block is too immensely valuable for anyone to shut this down, to cap the amount of benefits they receive to two or three kids. No one wants to take away their gravy train because they want the votes. The votes in exchange for them being able to live however they want, teach their kids however they want, exhaust the welfare system however they please, and not prosecute seemingly any wrongdoers.
Shamrim, police intimidation, and the mechanics of suppression
Tucker Carlson: Did you have any hostile exchanges? Did you feel threatened?
Tyler Oliveira: I want to emphasize that I had no fear of being physically harmed in these communities. Unlike Minneapolis — I did fear the Somali communities attacking me or shooting me. That's a real fear. Showing up to Kiryas Joel or Lakewood, that's not a real fear. There's no fear of physical harm. I walk without security there. That's not a real concern.
Tucker Carlson: Whereas you feel threatened in the Somali community.
Tyler Oliveira: Sure. Or some of these crime-ridden predominantly Black cities — in Jackson, Mississippi or Kensington, Philadelphia, I might fear getting shot. That's not a concern here. But we were intimidated by the local police and, most interestingly, their own internal police. They have this thing called Shomrim. It's a volunteer community patrol, but the de facto function is law enforcement within the community. We had this Shomrim volunteer police equivalent basically show up to us and say, "I'm going to let everyone know that they don't have to answer your questions and we're going to follow you." Keep in mind that these people drive cars with red and blue lights. They look like undercover police vehicles.
Tucker Carlson: How is that legal?
Tyler Oliveira: I don't think it is, Tucker, but they do it. They're blasting through red lights with what appear to be undercover police cars, and this is a volunteer civilian patrol squad. Now, they receive some element of federal funds, township funds. My tax dollars somehow end up funding Shomrim, a volunteer police squad in New Jersey.
Tucker Carlson: The religious police. Like in Saudi Arabia or Iran. If a Muslim group did that —
Tyler Oliveira: I'd be outraged too. And technically they're a volunteer civilian patrol squad, but they function as an intimidating force to stop you from doing things, to enforce the law. And often they've been accused of breaching what they can actually do legally. I think they beat some gay Black guy to blindness once in Crown Heights. There have been several instances of people saying, "They're not cops. Why are they acting like cops?"
Tucker Carlson: They ran over a kid in Crown Heights in the '80s and caused one of the biggest riots in New York.
Tyler Oliveira: The Crown Heights riots. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: Where their EMS — their volunteer EMS — didn't take the kid, but they took the Jewish guy, and the kid died.
Tyler Oliveira: That's correct. Well, that was the claim. I wasn't there.
Tucker Carlson: I wasn't there either. And everyone lies about everything. And ethnic conflict is incredibly hard to decipher because as soon as it gets tribal, everyone lies on behalf of the tribe. That was certainly the account that history has recorded.
Tyler Oliveira: And why wouldn't they have an in-group preferential bias? They do, and any person does obviously.
Tucker Carlson: Whites don't — with the exception of post-George Floyd. I'm pretty sure they ran a study where whites were less inclined to shoot a Black guy. Much less obviously. Your whole life is going to get torn to shreds. And whites have just had it beaten out of them.
Tyler Oliveira: We had rabbis telling us we couldn't be in the parking lot for the Kosher West supermarket. "Get out of here." People whispering in each other's ears, "Don't talk to him." There's seemingly this upper management rabbinical class telling the plebs not to talk to this guy. He's trouble. There would be a lot of people excited to come up to me and tell a joke. A guy comes up and says, "Do you know how much money we make?" That was his response. I'm like, "Come on, man. Just show your humanity. Talk to me. I'm here to talk. I'm not a scary guy. We're not rolling with 10 security guards. It's me and like a cameraman or two in the distance. I'm walking alone for the most part." And I have a group of 10 to 20 of these Orthodox Jews arguing with me as to how they're entitled to welfare, how it was seemingly promised to them.
They had their own internal police force. The cops themselves were pulling me over without probable cause. I would say, "Hey, officer, I know you're doing your job. Why am I being pulled over?" They would say, "You're a suspicious person." I would say, "What's suspicious about me?" "You were filming." Okay, we were filming on the sidewalk. "Give me your IDs." They can't articulate probable cause. We suspect that one of the high-ranking local officials called the police and told them to give us a hard time. That's speculative. I don't know.
Tucker Carlson: What country is this again?
Tyler Oliveira: The United States of America. Yeah. It's easy to forget, right? So yeah, it was hostile. It was unwelcoming. They thought I was there to do a hit piece. But I was there to talk to them.
Tucker Carlson: You're allowed to do a hit piece if you want in your own country.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. And part of my position was — first of all, it wasn't a hit piece. It was fair in my opinion. But also, I don't have to show up to show the positive sides of whatever community. That's for Joe Schmo to do. I'm here to jump into the heart of darkness and ask the hard questions, and if people get pissed off, then so be it.
Tucker Carlson: So did you get the same picture you got at Kiryas Joel — that this is a community supported by welfare?
Tyler Oliveira: The economics are a little bit different. They're a little more well off financially. But basically at any given time you can expect half of the population that's 16 and up to be unemployed. Keep in mind, Tucker, that in a place like Kiryas Joel, the median age is less than 16 years old. So what that really means is half the population is children and half of the adult population is unemployed and not seeking employment — whether it be religious study, child-rearing for the women. They have no intention of getting a job and financially contributing.
Tucker Carlson: So how did that video do?
Tyler Oliveira: That one went nuclear. Republicans were pissed. Good-faith Republicans in my opinion drew comparisons to the Somali situation and said, "What's the difference between the Jews here using the welfare in systematically exploitative ways and the Somali? What's the difference?" Bad-faith Republicans, hypocritical Republicans, were saying, "They're using the system as intended. They don't cause any violent crime. Leave them alone. You're not allowed to talk about this."
Tucker Carlson: Why don't they leave us alone? That's the right of a taxpayer.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. Go fund yourself and no one would have an issue. That's really the crux.
Tucker Carlson: I support it. I like eccentric, self-sufficient religious communities. I don't want to bother any one of them.
Tyler Oliveira: But part of the secondary argument is their intrusion into the community — and the word I used was "invasion" — has led to the inadvertent destruction of the public school system for the secular, or goyim, population in these towns. Basically as more Jews move in, it is unavoidable that your public school quality will go to hell. Your kids will have a lesser quality of education. So it's either get out now while you can and sell your house to the Orthodox Jew who's moving in, or be the last one holding the bag as your town goes to hell.
Tucker Carlson: Kind of upsetting.
Tyler Oliveira: Kind of, right? So this video goes bonkers on the internet. Within less than 24 hours, my Patreon is deleted mysteriously.
Tucker Carlson: What's Patreon?
Tucker Carlson: Why?
Tyler Oliveira: They cited some vague terms of service violation. The way the terms of service is written is in such a manner that they can take you down.
Tucker Carlson: But that's your business. That's the engine of your business.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. A large part of how we're funded. Obviously it's their business. It is what it is. I was naive.
Tucker Carlson: Did they ever explain?
Tyler Oliveira: No. They cited I think it was for bullying or something like that. I think they might have selected a video that they could easily argue was the case in their eyes in such a way that their terms of service is written. But no, we were deplatformed basically overnight from Patreon.
Tucker Carlson: But you'd done controversial videos before. You've done videos that could easily be seen as bullying if that is your parameter for hate. Give me an example.
Tyler Oliveira: We're the biggest bullies. We've critiqued corrupt mega pastors like Benny Hinn. I ran up on the guy's stage and said he's a snake oil salesman. I got tackled.
Tucker Carlson: Benny Hinn — he was a friend of Paula White's, I think. Paula White, the Christian Zionist in the administration.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. Wow. You didn't get pulled off?
Tucker Carlson: No.
Tyler Oliveira: So you actually kind of hassled Benny Hinn full-blown?
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, we interrupted his service. I jumped on stage.
Tyler Oliveira: Did you do anything like that in a synagogue in Lakewood or Kiryas Joel?
Tucker Carlson: We just walked into the synagogues and talked. We didn't interrupt the cantor or anything. No dramatic stuff.
Tyler Oliveira: So you're way tougher on the Christian preacher than you were on the Orthodox.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Not by design necessarily, but to be fair — absolutely nothing happened. No problem.
Tyler Oliveira: What else might have been read as bullying? If I'm a bully, then we've bullied pedophiles. Pat myself on the back for that one. We've just critiqued and asked critical questions to every group — Muslims, Christians, pimps, prostitutes, criminal gangsters, murderers, Black supremacists, white supremacists. No issue on Patreon.
Tucker Carlson: What's interesting is it used to be not that long ago, back in George Floyd times, that you couldn't say anything about Black Lives Matter. Do you remember that?
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: I grew up in those times. So that's gone apparently. This is the new untouchable group — seemingly Jews at large, unrelated to how they feel about Israel and what's going on in the Middle East. Are you familiar with the proposed anti-Semitism protection laws in Florida?
Tyler Oliveira: I'm not a lawyer. I don't have an encyclopedic breakdown of what it is, but basically laws that are designed in such a manner that if you criticize exactly what I found in Kiryas Joel, that would be criminal. If you accuse a Jewish person of having dual loyalty, or them causing problems in the Middle East, or whatever it is — there are like 12 different bullet points that amend your ability to freely discuss what's going on in the Middle East or here in the United States of America. Which is funny to me, because there are in fact people who do have dual loyalty. I mean, you're not allowed to tell Americans what they have to believe. Period.
Tucker Carlson: And if you back up your demand with guns, using our government to prevent us from saying what we think is true, then that's grounds for — we had a revolution over something smaller than that.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah, but who's going to go out with guns and fight back at this point? You have the surveillance state, you're going to get arrested immediately. Is revolution really possible?
Tucker Carlson: If they can make people take the vax, then probably they can make them do anything. We failed the compliance test. You're right. But you would think that people would hold on to their core freedom, which is the right to say what you think is true. Period.
Tyler Oliveira: You would think a lot of things, Tucker.
Tucker Carlson: No, I know. So Patreon — that's crazy. You lost an advertiser and you lost Patreon overnight.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. And that money, the amount of money that was allocated for me to receive on a monthly basis just disappeared, refunded to my supporters. But luckily we're big enough to where we took it like a champ. It is what it is. We made our own website. We fully host that. And then I got banned from the website servers, not once, but twice.
Tucker Carlson: What? Seriously?
Tyler Oliveira: Seriously. I couldn't host my website — for hate speech or something along those lines.
Tucker Carlson: The web host — that's just whoever owns the servers.
Tyler Oliveira: Exactly. Just the servers. Hetzner and Vultr took me off.
Tucker Carlson: That's crazy. It's just something you never would have thought of.
Tyler Oliveira: Absolutely not. That's why I made the website in the first place. I was like, I'll just make my own. And then we got taken off the hosting.
Tucker Carlson: Did they explain it?
Tyler Oliveira: They cited ban circumvention — basically that I circumvented a previous ban from another platform, which in this case would be Patreon, I guess — and then hate speech or something along those lines.
Tucker Carlson: How long did this take to happen?
Tyler Oliveira: I maybe lasted a week for the first one, maybe a week and a half for the second. Patreon within 24 hours, then about a week on one website server, then another week on the next.
Tucker Carlson: And there's no appeal or argument or anything?
Tyler Oliveira: No. "We're kicking you off. You're out of here, buddy." No reinstatement from any of them.
Tucker Carlson: So what did you do?
Tyler Oliveira: I have a new web host server right now. Are you worried about YouTube?
Tucker Carlson: I feel as if YouTube's doing an okay job at moderating. They're letting us have this conversation. Those videos have almost 9 million views. I've got to give them kudos. I spent many years attacking YouTube and maybe I will again. But I got fired almost exactly three years ago and YouTube has been a stalwart partner. I never thought I would say that. I wouldn't lie about it. It's not like I owe them money. I could exist without them, but I just have to be honest.
Tyler Oliveira: I would say largely I could not exist without them, but they've treated me with fairness.
Tucker Carlson: That's kind of shocking. If you get to the point where you're sitting here complimenting Google for their commitment to free speech, things are bad. Things have been bad. But we should be grateful for our blessings. And so far, YouTube has been a blessing. I can't believe I'm saying that. I feel like a sellout, but it's just true.
Tyler Oliveira: I know.
Tucker Carlson: So in the end you replaced the income. How?
Tyler Oliveira: People just rally behind the cause. I used AI to code a new website and then we hosted it on a web host server.
Tucker Carlson: You made your own?
Tyler Oliveira: Made my own. Yeah. Like the next day at like 2:00 in the morning I was just clacking away on it.
Tucker Carlson: No way.
Tyler Oliveira: I swear. Yeah. That's the story.
Tucker Carlson: You built your own Patreon?
Tyler Oliveira: We built a Patreon clone basically.
Tucker Carlson: In 24 hours?
Tyler Oliveira: Maybe a couple days. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: That's incredible. And it actually works?
Tyler Oliveira: Surprisingly, it's not that sophisticated to host a video. It's not a complicated product.
Tucker Carlson: So you have survived.
Tyler Oliveira: We've survived and thrived. Yeah.
The broader pattern: who can and cannot be criticized
Tucker Carlson: What are the lessons you're drawing from this?
Tyler Oliveira: Seemingly there are a lot of powerful Jewish people who own significant media enterprises, websites, that seem to bend the knee to what they view to be anti-Semitic dialogue. What's interesting though is — I don't know a lot about it, I'll be totally blunt — I've always liked the Orthodox just on principle. I loved them during COVID because they wouldn't stop their weddings.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, they threw a middle finger. I love that. I was constantly complimenting them from my heart.
Tyler Oliveira: I think they're great if they did it on their own dime.
Tucker Carlson: I totally agree. I didn't even know about it. I mean, they're nice people. If I wasn't there with the camera asking critical questions, they're nice enough. What's interesting is every time I've ever complimented the Orthodox — I like their style, I like the beaver hats and all that, the garb is badass — the people who've pushed back against me are secular Jews. There's always been terrible tension in Israel, but here also. I've had a lot of friends who are basically secular Jewish express real hostility toward the Orthodox. I was in Borough Park, Brooklyn once for a story years ago, 30 years ago, and I came back to my newsroom and I was like, "I like those guys," and they were all — the people I know who are secular Jews — like, "They're disgusting. They're horrible." There was tension between those two groups. That's what I've always noticed.
Tyler Oliveira: What was fascinating is that despite their internal differences, they do show up for each other. I had a lot of secular Jews frustrated and pissed off about the videos. But the Israelis kind of loved it. They're like, "Thank you for calling this out. We have the same thing here in Israel. They won't enlist."
Tucker Carlson: Whatever you think about the Israelis, I've known a bunch of them I liked personally. They have fewer hang-ups about this kind of stuff. They're much more direct. They're straightforward people.
Tyler Oliveira: So what is this going to change about how I progress? Hell no. This was the most radioactive thing we could have done at this point. No bars held. We'll continue to show up with the same critical lens we would apply to any other group.
Tucker Carlson: Did it affect any friendships?
Tyler Oliveira: No, not that I'm aware of.
Tucker Carlson: That's good. That's a true loss if that happens to you.
Tyler Oliveira: That would be sad, but ultimately I would see that as their loss. We're on a mission here to hold everyone accountable to the same standards. If that's the thing that breaks our friendship, then come on, get out of here.
Tucker Carlson: I agree with that. Do you worry that if this can happen to you — I didn't realize this stuff was still happening. I thought Trump was fixing all this stuff. I thought this was a relic of the Biden years.
Tyler Oliveira: There was a guy who made a similar video — almost a brand new channel, maybe 2,000 subscribers on YouTube, a very small channel. He put out a video there in Lakewood about a week or two before we finished ours. And he got dogpiled by the Orthodox Jewish community. They mass-disliked it and ultimately algorithmically killed the video. It never got to take off. My takeaway was: if we were not the size we were on YouTube, I don't think we could comfortably even talk about a lot of these things. We have the track record for treating everyone equally. We have the size to bully this into conversation — that was my takeaway.
Tucker Carlson: For people who don't know what you mean about dogpiling a video out of existence, can you explain the mechanics?
Tyler Oliveira: This is somewhat speculative on my end, but I think there's data out there that suggests that when a video from the get-go is mass-disliked — for instance, if you had 10,000 people click this video, dislike it, and watch it for one second — the algorithm would disincentivize the proliferation of this video to new viewers. So you have a guy with 100 subscribers who puts out a video critical of a group like the Orthodox Jews, and it gets 10,000 dislikes and they watch it for five seconds and leave a negative comment. YouTube's going to see that as: this video does not resonate with the initial sample size and we will not continue to share this video. His video will never get any traction because of that initial suppression. But you've reached a scale where that just doesn't work anymore.
Tucker Carlson: Has it hurt your business?
Tyler Oliveira: Yes, I think so. Sponsors won't touch topics like that. We've had sponsors even ask to pull out sponsorships from videos we filmed three years ago that have nothing to do with these topics. We filmed a video in a cancer belt in Louisiana about companies like Monsanto — a bunch of people getting cancer way earlier than they should due to their exposure to toxic chemicals. Videos totally unrelated to this Orthodox Jewish topic. They've asked to get pulled out from those videos. So I've cut them out of the videos on YouTube retroactively. Three-year-old videos, because of the frustration of what this video represents. There's no clarity beyond, "Take this out. We have a legal clause that allows us to do so."
Gen Z, identity politics, and the political abandonment of young white men
Tucker Carlson: You said you grew up during George Floyd. You're 26. That was six years ago. So your whole adult life has been one witch hunt after another. It's just been pure identity politics from the minute you left high school.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. There is no world that I can recall without this identity politics. There is no non-tribal politics that I can conceive of.
Tucker Carlson: But you belong to the only group that's not allowed to have a tribe. So that must be very strange for you.
Tyler Oliveira: Yes. Yeah. I can't conceive of a world where this was not the case. And I imagine you grew up in a time where most people looked the same for the most part.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. They worshipped the same God. And what they wanted was what was best for the economy — national security and a thriving economy. I think because it was overwhelmingly white and Christian, the country that I grew up in, the Christian whites really went out of their way to make non-Christian whites feel comfortable. That was like a huge emphasis. There are some people who aren't like us and we need to do whatever we can to de-emphasize the differences and to make them feel included. That whole worldview, I think, is dying as the group that did it becomes a minority. But there was no sense in which discrimination was acceptable at all, even in private. People didn't ever say, "Damn those Jews" or "Damn those Blacks." I never heard one person talk like that ever.
Tyler Oliveira: And now that's pretty mainstream.
Tucker Carlson: Now people say it and I don't believe you're lying. I don't care what you think. I was there and nobody ever talked that way. Even as a kid, maybe in elementary school, there truly might have been a color-blind element to life. And then beyond high school for me, everything's been this identity politics.
How do you think this ends?
Tyler Oliveira: Balkanization of America for sure, right? We're already seeing it. If you can afford to, you'll insulate yourself from crime-ridden inner cities. That's why Bozeman all of a sudden tripled in value. If you have the money, you'll leave these areas that are becoming crime-ridden. And if you don't, you'll be left behind as seemingly these activist judges release the same repeat offenders — these murderous people who are apparently too mentally insane to be institutionalized, but mentally sane enough to be let back on the streets.
Tucker Carlson: There are probably whites who are getting a little paranoid. If you're the only non-protected group and every other group thinks as a group except you, and you're not allowed to think as a group, and a lot of groups hate you but there's no one to defend you — you can see why Elon Musk recently tweeted that we're moving towards South Africa and the whites are screwed.
Tyler Oliveira: That's a great analogy, right? A whole city like Jackson, Mississippi.
Tucker Carlson: I spent a summer in Jackson in the late '80s in a Black neighborhood and it was great and the Black people were super nice and there was no crime aimed at me. I was in Jackson, Mississippi in the summer of 1989 in a Black neighborhood for like three weeks and I went to the 7-Eleven at night to buy cigarettes and call my girlfriend on the pay phone and not one person bothered me. I was the only pale face in the zip code. So that did exist. I was there.
Tyler Oliveira: I think you'd be unwise to show up to Detroit or Philadelphia or Jackson, Mississippi now. And what gets rich too, Tucker, is a lot of people will make it a red-blue state issue. There are some messed-up cities all across America that deal with the same issues and it's not on the lines of red or blue, Democrat or Republican. It exists all over.
So I don't know. I think if you — the American dream right now is seemingly to make enough money to insulate yourself from the chaos unfolding in major cities. To get out of the major city, to go buy a nice house in the suburbs, and to be left alone. That seems to be the modern American dream. And for a lot of people coming to the US, it seems to be to make as much money as possible, send as much as you can back home, then show up to a mega mansion in Bengaluru, India after you're done exploiting the United States. That's what it seems like the dream is for a lot of these people coming here.
Tucker Carlson: So that leaves one group totally unprotected — seemingly white people, by every measure. I have noticed, just in conversations, concern bordering on paranoia among people I've been talking to. Pretty moderate, normal Bush, Romney, McCain, now Trump voters — just Republicans. Not a white supremacist among them at all. It's like normal whites who are like, "I think we're going to get necklaced at some point." That group is probably the least likely to hold any in-group racial preference. These are not people who've ever thought of themselves as white at all. They're not from Alpena, Arkansas. These are people from like Long Beach. They've never had the need to think that way.
But those people, at least in the past couple of months, are like, "Man, we're in trouble." Have you heard anyone say that?
Tyler Oliveira: I only speak to Gen Z, you know.
Tucker Carlson: How do they feel?
Tyler Oliveira: Gen Z feels hopeless, demoralized. Without opportunity. The college degree is seemingly useless. The bachelor's degree means nothing. They have to compete with a globalized labor force. There's what — human quantitative easing at play, where we're ensuring infinite jobs to compete against our college graduates. Yet Trump's out there saying our college graduates are lazy and incompetent and not sufficient to fill these jobs, despite us holding what are arguably the best universities on the planet.
Tucker Carlson: Well, you guys noticed when he said that.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. And that's such a slap in the face. What's the point? What are we even voting for? Who represents my generation's interests? Someone will have to, otherwise that energy has to be funneled somewhere.
Tucker Carlson: So Trump did say something like that.
Tyler Oliveira: I think something along those exact lines. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: And people in your generation heard it. They caught that.
Tyler Oliveira: Well, yeah. These are the same people who don't have a job several years out of college. Who can't get a job with their degree. Who are competing with infinite H-1B Indians — guys who have 20 years experience from India who are taking their job. And we're using these H-1Bs as a wage suppression mechanism. Why are we not paying these H-1Bs above market rate if they're such rare, irreplaceable talent? It seems to only be a wage suppression mechanism. So our generation's getting replaced by foreigners — not seemingly, actually, literally. Enclaves of foreigners. They know the game though. They understand that politics is zero-sum. They need to elect their own, protect their own interests. And that's what I think my generation is maybe waking up to.
Tucker Carlson: Completely different country. Completely different. And I wouldn't be in touch with it if I didn't have so many children and so many employees and other reasons. But in general, yeah. Politics was like gay and woke for the longest time until the white guy in his 20s was forced to confront himself with: either we develop some in-group racial preference or we're going to go extinct.
What's just so interesting is that I've noticed that this administration, which I think was elected to end identity politics, has engaged in the most aggressive identity politics — but only on behalf of 2% of the population. And so every single tweet from every person I know in the administration is like, "Harvard's real problem is that it's discriminated against Jews." Meanwhile, it's like 20% Jewish with a Jewish president. And the one group that is provably unrepresented is high SAT-scoring, high-IQ Christian white kids.
Tyler Oliveira: And not only are they not ignoring that, but they're making a mockery of it and pointing their finger at that exact same group and accusing them of the sin — and it is a sin — of anti-Semitism. And it's like, are you begging for revolution? Is that what you want?
Tucker Carlson: It's mocking people who are being destroyed for who they are. And you know that's true and you're ignoring it on purpose on behalf of people who — whatever. Anyway.
Tyler Oliveira: There's not a talent deficiency within this ethnic group, right?
Tucker Carlson: It's almost too much, though. It's a kind of humiliation that I don't understand why you would ever do that to somebody.
Tyler Oliveira: So you can't be surprised when there's an epidemic of incels and hopeless young men who are opting out of the dating market, who are opting out of — eventually you give up, I'm sure, if you apply to 10,000 jobs and you're algorithmically filtered out of consideration for a job.
Tucker Carlson: I don't think there's been any attempt to fix any of that.
Tyler Oliveira: I don't think so at all. I think the answer we've been given is: you're not talented enough. You're lazy. We don't need you. Here's an Indian. And we're going to sue Harvard for discriminating against Jews. And the real problem is not the rapist pedophiles in power — it's Harvard discriminating against Jews. Give me a break. Pam Bondi tweeted that out. I was like, "Come on, Pam. Lock in. Let's focus here, Pam."
Tucker Carlson: No, I think this isn't just negligence. It's hate. It's obviously hate. So where does that leave the group that you're talking about, which voted for Trump by the way overwhelmingly?
Tyler Oliveira: Bag holders.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. And then — you know Nick Fuentes. At some point there's going to be someone who is not just about himself, who actually wants to build a political movement that is way more radical than the Republican Party, and that person is going to be huge among your generation. Is that a fair assessment?
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. I mean, I don't know all of Fuentes's beliefs, for example, but I think he's right that young men are disaffected.
Tucker Carlson: I'm not attacking Fuentes. I'm just saying Fuentes is only about Fuentes, or whatever he ultimately talks about. He's not unavoidable, you know. But he makes points that are true.
Tyler Oliveira: Absolutely.
Tucker Carlson: A lot of them ring true for me. That's why I interviewed him. And I don't agree with a lot of it — I told him I didn't. But in general, his critique that whites are shafted, that this Israel relationship is really sick, and that everyone who voted for Trump is seemingly not getting anything —
Tyler Oliveira: I agree with all of that. So that's all real.
Tucker Carlson: My only point is people look at Fuentes and they're like, "Oh, you're the scariest thing that could happen." Absolutely not.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. I don't know where it goes. The energy has to go somewhere. This is like Newton's third law — I only went to high school, you tell me, Tucker. The energy must be diverted elsewhere. And a lot of young men are pissed off. I think for a lot of young men though, they will just hibernate and decay in their parents' homes. That is reality. There will be a eugenics effect — white men getting litigated or filtered out of participation in society. There will be an extinction event for sure. That's inevitable. But some of them might try to do something a bit more bold and revolutionary. How does something like that even come into existence with the surveillance state?
Can democracy even be the means by which my generation uplifts their quality of life? Is that a possibility? Because the Republicans clearly don't care. The Democrats don't care. Is there a third-party alternative? What does that look like? I'm not sure. But the two current options are insufficient.
Tucker Carlson: You're making me emotional.
Tyler Oliveira: Really?
Tucker Carlson: Because what you're saying is true.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah. And I think of myself as a pretty reasonable guy. I was politically illiterate in many ways. I didn't think about this stuff. I was making goofy YouTube videos in my early 20s. It was only till I was about 22 years old that I even realized all this stuff was going on. I didn't even think really about the George Floyd stuff that much. But now it's unavoidable. People say, "Why are you making everything so political?" And now it's unavoidable. You have to consider the reality and the consequences of how your everyday life is being affected by these things. So unfortunately, everyday people have a political opinion on everything right now. And I think that's a tragedy more than a win.
Tucker Carlson: It's not a win at all.
Tyler Oliveira: No.
Tucker Carlson: Well, I'm subscribing to you. Thank you. That was awesome.
Tyler Oliveira: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Tucker Carlson: I appreciate it.
Tyler Oliveira: For sure.