It was like watching from the tilting deck of the Titanic as the last rowboat pulled away. For conservatives, even civil libertarians and old-fashioned liberals, Tucker Carlson Tonight was a galvanizing strength that helped people break the bonds of the political and cultural forces that are imposing totalitarian edicts on a daily basis. Carlson’s nightly monologue was must-see. He bucked media trends and delivered news and commentary on issues that most overlooked or purposely censored in order to please their corporate masters.
His Fox News show is no more and Rupert Murdoch is a friend to no one.
On May 4th, just after his show was removed from Fox News, he gave a previously scheduled keynote address at a charitable fundraiser in Alabama. Talking about the role of the media as propaganda, he stated that manufactured lies work to enslave people.
“If they can’t even tell you the truth about a communicable disease that’s killing people, they’re actually lying to you about that,” he added. “You can’t believe anything. Well, that’s very bewildering. That’s actually a form of chaos, which is the one condition people can’t handle,” he said.
This chaos, he added, undermines Americans’ belief in the democratic process, sets the stage for further division, and leads to a sort of enslavement of the population, Carlson said. [sic]
“If you can control someone’s brain and get them to say, ‘I really need to wear a mask inside my car alone to protect myself—if you can get someone to that place where he gets in his Subaru and just instinctively puts on a mask with the windows up, then you’ve won,” Carlson said. “You’ve defeated them … in the enslavement of people, taking away their choice, and in so doing their dignity, really their humanity.
“That is the goal, obviously.”
(Here’s a good interview with Victor Davis Hanson on Tucker Carlson’s removal from Fox)
Trumpism
Tucker Carlson’s rise came at just the right time. Despite having control of Congress, the Republicans were struggling to find a voice after eight years of Barrack Obama and with the election of Donald Trump, no one knew what that meant. The Left mocks this, but Trump was the voice of the Forgotten Man and Carlson became the megaphone. Not that he was aligned with Trump, he just added clarity.
Trump questioned everything that U.S. policy had been, both foreign and domestic. The challenges he laid down caused many to question their own past assumptions concerning conservativism in general and politics specifically. For instance, Trump clearly stated that the Iraq war was a huge mistake and our fatherly relationship in NATO had to end.
Carlson readily admitted that Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements made him question the mindless following of the Republican conventional wisdom on the forever wars. He became very outspoken against the policies and proclaimed that he was wrong in his previous Iraqi war support. How refreshing. A media figure admitting that they were wrong.
The Left’s response to Trump—the campaign dirty tricks and continual sabotage of his presidency notwithstanding—was to emerge from under the slimy rock and launch cultural shock troops upon the landscape; Cancel Culture became mainstay lexicon among the combatants. Carlson’s voice has provided a staging area for the counter offensive.
People claim Carlson as the voice of conservative populism. That’s not quite correct. He has made alterations to his beliefs—as have we all—and, while he has argued the conservative perspective for his entire career, he’s not a political conservative.
Many, many, many years ago I remember reading Milton Freidman and his discussion of liberalism. He proclaimed he was a liberal (I think it was in Capitalism and Freedom). In my prehistoric monolithic mind I almost burned the book. I am not a liberal! I’m a conservative!, I whined. Fast forward a couple of decades and, in fact, I am a liberal. If you believe in individual rights and free markets, you too are liberal in the strictness sense. Unfortunately, as the Left always does, they hijack labels in order to make their deviousness more palatable. (So please, stop calling the Left liberals. They are anything but.) From Milton Freidman:
The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights, subject only to the proviso that he not interfere with the freedom of other individuals to do the same.
Tucker Carlson is a liberal if he must be labeled. He said so in the not-so-distant past on a podcast—I’ve lost track of his voluminous interviews—and I agree. Labels are difficult to shed and easily bandied about to serve one’s purpose. It’s been hammered that fascism, for example, is far right. If far right means just a smidgeon to the right of totalitarian socialism, then yes, fascism is on the right. True “far-right” is radical libertarianism, just to be clear.
Donald Trump awakened the classical liberals and made it possible for those of us who truly believe in what our constitution promises to go forth and retake what has been lost. Tucker Carlson has built a bridge between the civil libertarian left and the classical liberals on the right. This is a unique opportunity for a reawakened America to take shape regardless the dysfunction and destruction the Left has wrought.
Fox Nation
Tucker Carlson’s following exploded overnight and Fox took advantage by giving him outlets on their streaming service, Fox Nation. Upon their betrayal, the mass exodus from Fox began. On the night of his dismissal, so many people canceled their service that if you were late to the party, you weren’t allowed to cancel through the Fox Nation portal; the wounds were cutting deep and they applied a tourniquet.
We had two subscriptions: one my wife had signed-up for years ago and one on cable so we could easily watch on TV. I canceled the cable subscription and logged onto Fox Nation directly to cancel the other. That’s where I experienced the inability to cancel. And so, I began digging through the absolutely inane functionality of the streaming service and found where they had buried Carlson’s shows. I had already watched in excess of a third of them over the preceding years so I dug even deeper through the contributions of his long form interviews late into the night and decided I would watch everything Tucker that I wanted before canceling. The three years of his Tucker Carlson Today offerings are prolific; there are at least a couple of hundred long-format interviews he conducted with wide ranging guests that were extremely interesting. I’m still wading through the ones I hadn’t watched but am definitely towards the end. The service will be canceled by the end of the month.
Watching these interviews—as well as interviews of Carlson from other outlets—brought him into focus. He is who he claims to be; no one can fake it for hundreds of hours.
His most influential interview he conducted—at least to me—served as the clarion call to arms. It was his very first Tucker Carlson Today episode.
It was short, 30 minutes compared to most being an hour long. He interviewed Douglas Murray, a conservative intellectual and writer from the U.K. I had never heard of him and I began the program with a great deal of trepidation. From the opening minutes till the end I was captivated. For those of us clutching our pearls over the never-ending assault from the Left, Murray delivered a masterpiece on how to just say no. I encourage you to watch the episode on YouTube. I have also included a transcript of the show, a project I started so as to be able to quote from it in the future. It is past my “begging for subscriptions” link at the end. You should read it if you can.
A True Journalist
Beyond his television career, Carlson began as a print journalist and if you have the inclination, you should read The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism. It is a compendium of articles written and published in various magazines and newspapers. The first is an article of his exploits in West Africa with Al Sharpton—who was probably still masquerading as the Good Year blimp—which paints the good reverend in a favorable light. That’s the thing about Carlson, he doesn’t burn down people just because they are on the opposite side of the argument. He burns them down when they are liars, are pompous, are smug, and/or mindless robots deeply rooted in groupthink, regardless their political and cultural predilections—something he reminded us with his nightly sign off.
I haven’t read Ship of Fools but plan on doing so.
If you have watched any of his long format interviews, you will know that he can extract deeper thoughts from a variety of individuals: Kid Rock to Jordon Peterson, Ted Nugent to Curtis Yarvin, Kirstie Alley to Zuby, and Jon Voight to Russell Brand. It is ironic that his last interview was of Elon Musk, the slayer of censorship—at least for now.
Twitter & Musk
Carlson announced that his near-future plans include broadcasting on Twitter. The rumors had been that he was teaming up with Elon Musk but I hope this isn’t the final product. Since he’s still under contract with Fox, using Twitter must be a fine line he’s walking to keep from being in breach. My hope is that this is the first step in breaking free from Fox News in order to set up shop somewhere where he will be more accessible to the Baby Boomer (technology-challenged at best) audience. The most fascinating aspect of the Tucker phenomenon is that he attracted more young independent and Democratic voters than any of the comical Leftists shrills on competing media outlets.
And so, this long winding road on all things Tucker should, I hope, convince you that he is beyond just a TV host that get people’s blood boiling. He is a journalist, in the strictest sense of the profession, and he wields integrity. I’m sincerely looking forward to him returning soon.
Tucker Carlson Today (3/29/21) Douglas Murray interview. (Note: any errors in the below transcript would be mine.)
Tucker Carlson: Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of “Tucker Carlson Today” here on Fox Nation. We’re grateful to be doing this, grateful to have more time. We could be outside the normal limits of five-minute segments, and get more deeply into the subjects that are completely changing the world, and of interest to you and to us. We had a broad range of possibilities for the first person to talk to, as we begin this new show, this new series. But really in the end, there was only one choice. The one person we know who has crystal clarity on what’s happening, not just in this country, but in the world—someone who’s watched it and chronicled it for years now. His name is Douglass Murray. He’s a Brit. He’s the associate editor of “The Spectator” in London. He's the author of the fantastic book, “The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity.” And we are really pleased to have Douglas Murray join us here on set. Douglas, thanks so much.
Douglas Murray: It’s a great pleasure.
TC: So there are a million places to start. There are so many things happening. I want to look a little more deeply into one story, into several facets of a story, in the news today, because I think it might tell us what’s happening more broadly. And it’s a story of a woman called Amanda Gorman, who is a poet. She’s 23. When she was 22, she gave the inaugural poem and President’s—President Biden’s inauguration. The key thing to know about Amanda Gorman is that she is the representative of an oppressed group. That is the way we are introduced to her in every profile. Amanda Gorman, in addition to being called Amanda, is the product of the most expensive private school in Los Angeles, $42,000 a year for 13 years, Harvard College for four years, a semester abroad in Spain, all paid for by others. No student debt. In what sense is she oppressed?
DM: Well, obviously the age we live in has a strange value system. Many of us grew up in societies where we admired people who are brave or heroic, who strove to show people the way to be brave in their lives. In our own lifetimes, this has changed. Now, if you want to be a leaders, you have to show that you are an oppressed minority. You have to show suffering. You have to show beleaguerment, that everything’s been done against you. People are not to admire heroism but to admire suffering. And so we have created a suffering Olympics, where even very, very privileged people wish people not to recognize their privilege but rather, to think of them being downtrodden. And this is just this era’s passport to elite success.
TC: It does seem like, sometimes, the most privileged spend the most time telling us that they’re oppressed. That’s what’s so bewildering as you watch this.
DM: Yes, and, uh, of course it’s an impossible game because we could point out that this is nonsense. We could just say, I don’t recognize your—your right to claim victimhood. You seem not to me to be a victim. But then there are the clever little things you can do as a part of that. You can say if—you can say back to that, well I’m part of X oppressed group. So even though I might have been lucky in my life, I’m part of a group that can give me the passport to elite success by being oppressed. There are other ones like this. People can say, oh, I’ve got mental health, as if everybody else doesn’t have any mental health issues. You can do various things like this. But the point is to show yourself to be the most oppressed person so that you win. So that you win. Then you can tell everyone else what to do. And Amanda Gorman has this, uh, an extra—to an extraordinary extent, it’s almost as if it’s—it—the whole thing of her doing this alleged poem—just this list of banalities, really, at the inauguration, it was almost just, I dare you. I dare you to criticize this work. There were people—there were people who criticized her poem who immediately lambasted for criticizing. How dare you criticize the poem? Amanda Gorman by any normal measure has, as you pointed out, had a much luckier life than almost anybody in America. But if you point out that—even you don’t like a poem, it doesn’t seem to rhyme, doesn’t seem to scan, doesn’t seem to be memorable, you’re doing that against somebody you’re not meant to criticize, because the person you’re criticizing can claim oppression. This is an irreducible game. I mean we can all play it. It’s just that I think decent people wouldn’t and shouldn’t.
TC: What does it do to the art? And if you care about—I actually like poetry, and I think it’s—it’s interesting, it’s important, it’s difficult to write, if you tell a population, this is beauty, this is art, when it’s so obviously not, what does that do to art?
DM: Well, our age has decided that beauty isn’t very important. It’s decided that political banality is of utmost importance, that your life will find meaning if you demonstrate, and wave placards, and much more. I think this is a horrible view of life. It’s a radical left view of life that thinks that you’ll find meaning by protesting and yelling. These people forget that actually, I think, nobody on their deathbeds looks back at their life and thinks, I wish I’d attended that protest. I wish I’d made more placards. Wouldn’t have been good? Uh, no. Most people on their deathbeds regret they didn’t spend more times with loved ones.
Um, so the whole sense of what’s important in our society has changed radically in an ugly direction. It makes everything political. It wants to politicize everything. It wants to politicize art. It wants to politicize poetry. All—all of the things that were meaningful in our lives have been picked up and spun through this cycle of politics. And it—it’s boring. It’s ugly. And I think that it’s the job of any sensible person to say, I—I refute this. I refuse to join in this game. I refuse to have this vision of life. I have a better vision of life and how it should be lived, and we should assert that.
TC: I want to get into that in much greater detail. But let me ask you one last question about this Amanda Gorman story. And by the way, I’m not attacking Amanda Gorman who I don’t know. And I always admire young people who are successful, in almost no matter what they do. However, there was a story in The New York Times yesterday [3/28/21] about a new controversy surrounding her work. And it’s this—foreign publishers. Her poem is apparently about to drop 150,000 copies, I think by Viking [Press], and it is being translated into other languages, Dutch among them. And the Dutch publisher hired a Dutch translator to translate the poem into Dutch, but the Dutch translator was white, and was fired for that. Only a Black person can translate a Black person’s poem. What does that tell you about where we’re going?
DM: I think that didn’t the Dutch translator, it was—they were thought to be perfect for the job because the Dutch translator is a they/them person. Had come out as, um, as non-binary, or—or look at me, as I say. The translator has come out as they/them, and so therefore should be perfect to do the translation. Except that, then, it turned out that the translator was White. Now, if that’s the road we’re heading down, this is a dark, dark road. You can—you can play racial equality but the only alternative is racial supremacy. Racial supremacy runs if you believe that one group actually ruins things by even being. And this current form of racial supremacy that’s running rife across America asserts not just that Black people and White people are equal, it now says—it’s now moved to the next stage, which is to say, actually, White people spoil everything. They wreck things. They—they can’t even be a translator in Dutch of a Black person’s poem because they will ruin it. Uh, there are several problems about this. One is, it’s just flat out racist. Another is that it pretends that there is experience that cannot be understood across racial group lines. As if a White person—is if—by the way, there’s nothing tricky complex about Amanda Gorman’s poem. I mean, it’s not as if there are sort of subtleties about that—that need to be teased out. Most of it can be translated by a high school student who knew—who was proficient in a couple of languages. Now, what this says is that the thought of a Black writer is—is of a kind that a White translator couldn’t appreciate. Well in that case, White people and Black people can’t understand each other. Where do you think that will go? You know this is the darkest road and it’s being—we are led along it by people who pretend to be anti-racists. And they’re not. They’re racists. They’re racists. They happen to have come along this time under the guise of anti-racism, but they’re racists. If they think that White people or Black people cannot understand each other, and we cannot speak across boundaries, then there’s nothing left but war, hatred, oppression, bigotry, and much more. And I think that anyone, Black, White, and other color should say, no, we’re not doing that. We’re sitting this one out. In fact, we’re going to do more than sit this one out. We’re going to fight back at that. We’re not going to play that game. We know where it leads, even if you don’t. So I very much hope that people realize what these so-called anti-racists are doing, the walls that they’re building, the divisions that they are embedding and forcing on a new generation of Americans. And I hope that more and more Americans just step away from that, opt out of it, and call it out.
TC: How’d you do that?
DM: Everyone can do it in their own lives. And my experience is that—is that—that people shouldn’t expect the cavalry to come save them. I think the discovery of the middle age, apart from anything else, is that the calvary is you.
TC: The cavalry, it’s you.
DM: That is true. It’s uh—it’s at first, it’s a hilarious thought. Secondly, it’s a slightly depressing thought. Thirdly, it’s a worrying thought. But, nevertheless, it’s the case. You are the people who get us out of this. No one else does it for you.
TC: So, in practical terms, that would mean, if you have children in a school whose curriculum has changed dramatically since the death of George Floyd, and you find your kids being subjected to this, you stand up and say no.
DM: Yes, and also have confidence—intellectual confidence, moral confidence, to say no. We knew until yesterday this wasn’t the case. The death of George Floyd doesn’t demand a rewrite of American history. It doesn’t demand that there should be a rewrite of American education. It does not make America, the country, which its detractors and defamer, principally from within America, not pretend it is. They have no right to do this. They have no right to make Americans forget their own history or rewrite their own history or lie about the history. They have no right to make Americans feel disdain for their ancestor. They have no right to do all of these things. And I think the American public, and everyone in their individual way, can say no. I know something that we all knew until yesterday, and I will not be made to forget it. That can be rejecting racism even when it comes under the guise of anti-racism. Or it can come in just saying no when it comes into your own life. When stupid, stupid people tell everyone else to educate themselves when the least educated people in your society lecture the most educated and tell you to be smarter, have some confidence. Say no, I’m not listening to this. I don’t need to. I don’t need to be talked down to in these terms. I’m not a bad person. I’m not a bad person because of my skin color, and I don’t think anyone else is, either. People just need to have a bit more moral confidence in America. Where—where did it all go? When did you lose it?
TC: I think this every day. What do you think the answer is?
DM: Oh, I think that for America, for a generation or more, has had an elite that doesn’t like the country, doesn’t feel that you’re very good. That’s not unusual. I’m—I’m from a continent where there have been an awful lot of people who’ve taken that view. It’s very hard for a society to do well if most of the people were in a position of power and authority, basically distrust the public. But the saving grace of it is the public, is the people who hold onto truths that their elites disdain, who remember things that people in power have forgotten, who hold onto truths, that has seen this country through the past. I think it can see it through again. But you need—you need not be bullied. You need not to be bullied by people who pretend to know more, and almost never do. Not—not be bullied by people who say, well, I’ve got an MA in genderqueer theory, and so I know about this. Have the confidence to turn around and say—say with all due respect, I don’t think that means you know anything.
Um, if somebody says, well I’ve—I’ve studies post, uh, racial, um—bi-racial politics at several liberal arts colleges, and I’ve made myself completely unemployable, then don’t say, gosh, please tell me more about how I should live my life. Um, just—just have the confidence to know that you’re a good country that’s been a force for good in the world. You’ve made mistakes, as all countries and societies have, but so what? Who’s doing the judging here exactly? You have to work out the difference in people who are critics and people who are enemies. A critic, really—a real critic wants you to improve, an enemy wants you gone. And you in America seem to have lost the ability to differentiate between these two things. Somebody says they want to pull the whole thing down, don’t listen to them. Somebody says they would like you to slightly improve, then it might be that they’ve got a point. But if they want to pull down the whole damn thing, get them out of your way as fast as you can.
TC: How do you tell the difference between a critic and an enemy up front?
DM: Oh, you can tell immediately. And we all do in our personal lives. If somebody said to you as an individual at a party or so, that you just had no redeeming features at all. You know? Didn’t like your look, didn’t like your clothes, didn’t like your family, didn’t like your friends, didn’t like where you lived, didn’t like your neighbor, didn’t like your neighbors, went on and on like this. Would you, at any stage, think, hmm, I must listen to this interesting person? Or would you think, what a you-know-what, what a nasty piece of work, how can I get away from the situation as soon as possible and make sure I never, ever encounter this person again? We would do that in our lives, so why can’t we do it as a nation? Why can’t we recognize that when people say there’s nothing good about America, they’re not a critic who wants to improve you. When they say, pull down capitalism, let’s decolonize everything. All those other things that people have come up with now to try to intimidate Americans, why don’t you realize, if these people like nothing about your past, nothing about your present and have a future vision for your country, which is a nightmare, but you should treat them like the person who says to you, as a person, you have nothing good about yourself. Ignore them. Move on. Find something better to do. Find better friends. Find better critics. Find better people to listen to. And say it out loud.
TC: Say it out loud?
DM: Oh, yeah, don’t keep it to yourself. There’s so many—so many bad things happen simply because people are intimidated. I don’t think—I don’t think we need to be intimidated. I don’t think Americans need to be intimidated. They don’t need to be intimidated by these race hucksters, and—and these oppression-mongers and these—these elites and these, and much more. We don’t—we—they don’t need—the American people don’t need to be intimidated by this. The American people have been proud. They’ve got a lot to be proud of. They’ve done an immense amount of good in the world, historically and now. The number one country in the world, in economic terms. And among other things, you should simply turn around and say, who—who do you want to be the top dog by the way? And that’s the question I’ve often asked during my career. If you don’t like the American, uh—hegemony, to use one of their favorite watchwords, what’s the one that you like most? I mean, let’s say, would it be better if it was the French hegemon. I mean, it’s not likely. But let’s take one that’s quite likely. Would you prefer the Chinese order in the world? You know, you who go on and on about human rights, would you like it if the country that was most important and strong in the world was the Chinese? What do you think they would say when you came at them with your human rights? I can tell you what they’d say. They’d say, how interesting. So—so don’t make out as if this is the worst situation. Don’t make out as if the American situation, with America being the most powerful society in the world, is the worst situation imaginable. Just work out what any of the other options would be. And have some humility about that. And not just humility, but gratitude. I mean, I say this quite a lot, but where did gratitude go in the last generation? Oh, this society isn’t exactly what I wanted. I don’t get to do everything I want. Everything isn’t always offered to me. By the way, that of course, to go back to the thing with Amanda Gorman, that’s an impossible to play a game, because you could have been given so much in your life, and you can still play the resentment game if you’ve been brought up to believe that resentment is the most important factor in our lives. But how about gratitude? How about the amazing, amazing fact that we live in a society which, basically, has law and order. We have a court system. There’s a justice system. The police may get things wrong but are not institutionally corrupt. They don’t go and just shake down people at their houses every day. I’ve been to plenty of countries in my life where that is the case. Where to get the most basic thing, you have to bribe a public official. America doesn’t have that. That’s pretty good just to start with. People care when you talk about rights being infringed. That’s pretty good to start with. I’ve been to plenty if countries in the world where you can talk about your rights being infringed, your life being taken away, nobody would give a damn. There’s a pretty good place to start with America. There’s a lot to feel grateful for in this society, even before you get into material wealth. So where’s the damn gratitude? When did that disappear?
TC: Are we the victims of our own affluence, do you think?
DM: No. it’s—it’s not just affluent—affluence. You can be affluent and not have these views that now run rife in America. It’s a form of moral obesity in Society. People have become—they just imbibe, imbibe, imbibe, and they never think they owe anything back. They never think they owe anything to anyone else. There’s a deep problem in America, and it needs to be addressed. You need to solve it. And everyone tends to say, well, it can be solved by education. Well, it can only be if the education is good. And education in America, frankly, today is rotten. It’s rotten from the school system to the college system. You pump out people from colleges who are more stupid than when they leave than when they went in. Parents remortgage their homes to make their children more reprehensible, by sending them away to college for years. You send people away and educate them to hate their country more. You give bursaries to people who come out the other side of it, disdaining the country more than they did when they went in. Something’s gone wrong. It’s badly, badly wrong. But everything that has gone wrong can be righted. You just have to want to right it.
TC: And you have to say it out loud so you know what it is. I—I wonder, does it take as you suggested a second ago, a—a kind of—a decision by a lot of people to stop participating in a system that’s destroying them and their families? Why haven’t we seen that yet? And are you confident there will come a point where people will peacefully and respect—respectfully, civilly, but still firmly, say no? No mas.
DM: It may happen, it may not. I mean, nothing’s written, is it? Nothing is inevitable. Everything hinges on brave individuals. Brave individuals, that doesn’t—I don’t mean famous people or anything like that. I mean—I mean, brave individuals. Brave Americans, brave people who just speak up in their lives. And I think that if enough people did that, something would happen. But you know, good people tend not to organize. That’s one of the things I’ve learned. People with bad ideas are very good at organizing. They’re very good at making placards. They’re very good at cohering. They’re very good shouting the same banality over and over again. Good people don’t do that because they tend to believe that communications matters. But in fact shouting the same thing over and over again is an insult to the listener. It presupposes your listener should be beaten down rather than engaged in the dialogue, in persuasion. So a lot of Americans are just silent because they’re not going to organize and have their voice heard in a mass demonstration or a protest. But perhaps more important than that is just how people make their voice heard in their lives. Nothing saddened me more in recent years than hearing from American friends how hard it is just to be at a dinner table with relatives and friends these days. How hard it is to talk now in America. That’s my experience. I was in America in many states before the election. I found that Americans couldn’t even talk over a dinner table together anymore. I think it was P.J. O’Rourke who said some way, you know, everyone always wants to save the world, but no one will help mom do the dishes. But how about more Americans learn how to speak to each other again, rather than learning how to shout at other people in the street? That would be a start, wouldn’t it?
TC: People are afraid.
DM: They are, but I think that the—the fear is—is overstated. My experience always is that people say, oh, I’m worried about saying this thing. I don’t know if I should do this. And I’ve always said, you know, you have two options in your life. One is to say the truth as you see it, and the other is to grow to despise yourself more and more. So if you don’t want to despise yourself—more…
TC: Can you repeat that? It’s just—because I want that to be on refrigerator magnets across the—do you know what refrigerator magnets are? I don’t know if you have—
DM: I personally don’t have any.
TC: I don’t either. But I—what you just said, that’s such a wonderful explanation.
DM: And I mean it… You—you either have—you either speak the truth as you see it, or you grow to despise yourself. And you can see the result of that in people who—who—who hollow themselves out. They become cores of human beings because they never spoke. They never really trusted themselves or the people around them to say things honestly. But being truthful is—is something that’s worth doing. It’s worth doing for yourself and it’s worth doing for your society. It’s—it’s worth saying, I’m not going along with that. All—all of the history of dissidents in countries that have real oppression problems, all of them have been solved by, at least, on the way to being solved by just individuals. Not famous individuals, but by people who became famous because they said no. I’m not going along with the lie. I’m not going to do that. There are some remarkable people across history—some of these names remembered and some of these names were only remembered in societies which they’re from. But—but history is filled with people who just said no, I’m not going along with that. And they turned out to be right, even if they were the one person in the million. But the oddity of this age is that it’s not about one person in a million. It’s about millions and millions of Americans who know what is being fed to them in untrue, and he still fears speaking. And that is a big problem. But it also is clearly an answer, that if every—it doesn’t require people to take many, many leaps forward and do wildly heroic acts of self-immolation. It just requires every American to step up a bit. Just to step up a bit. And if that happened, if everyone just did that small step, being a bit more honest, saying no, I will not be browbeaten, I will not be intimidated, I will not be told to educate myself by the ill-educated. If everyone did that a bit more, it could get a bit better.
TC: Where do you get the courage or the resolve to tell the truth?
DM: Well, several things. I mean, one is, I just really don’t like lies. And all my life, I’ve, um, I’ve just hated it when somebody says, you’ve got to agree to this thing which I know not to be true, and I—I haven’t been very good at agreeing to things that I don’t think are true. The other thing is this—it’s not as bad as people think. I quite often get people saying to me, we know it must be hard for you saying it’s—I did not, you know. I have had down moments but broadly speaking, I’ve had a great time. I get to say what I think. I annoy all of the right people. I can point at things that are ludicrous and laugh at them. I can laugh at ludicrous people. When people who are clearly ridiculous say, how dare you ridicule me? I think, why not? Um I—there’s nothing I’d rather do. So, so I think too much emphasis is made on the beleaguerment of people who—who say what they think, and who go against the flow, and who against consensus, I think that’s overdone. I think it needs to be stressed. Actually no. I mean the water’s a lot warmer than—than you’re told. It’s—it’s not the case that there’s this sort of terrible road of suffering which you must go down if—if you—if you reject the race-baiters, and you reject the identity—politics identarian, and you do all these things. It’s not the case that there’s just a veil of suffering. If you actually go down this road, actually, your life will be better. You’ll—you’ll make better friends. You’ll meet wonderful people. You’ll meet heroic people from an amazing range of backgrounds and—and identities, and—and much more. You’ll—you’ll be able to enjoy yourself. You’ll be able to laugh. You’ll be able to tell the truth as you see it. You’ll be able to write well. You’ll be able to do whole load of things, whatever you want to do. And—and your life will be better. If you set off down the road of telling the truth, your life will immeasurably improve, and it will get better and better all the time. And if you say, well, I’m worried about losing these friends. Lose these friends. For God’s sake, lose them as fast as you can. Drop them. Drop them because they clearly don’t want you—they don’t want you to do well. They clearly don’t want you to do well. The sort of people who say, hmm, I have a problem with that. You should have a problem with people who say that. You should want them out. People—the people who pretend that they know better than you should live your life, get rid of these people. Move on from them. Clear them away. You’re going to have a much better time if you do. And the people who say, oh, you’ve got to educate yourself. Ask them where the capitol of any major country is. Just give them a test. You know? Ask them the—ask them anything. Anything. Ask them if they’ve ever read a long book. Try them, see if they can spell. Do—do something like that before agreeing that those people have the right to rearrange your brain and your life. Have some self-respect, America, come on.
TC: I—I was—I’ll be totally blunt. I was feeling pretty down this morning. It’s Monday morning, all, you know there’s just—there’s just too much. And that was an answer to prayer, that conversation. That was just one—that was genuinely inspiring. I’m so glad that you came. It’s a great pleasure Douglas, thank you.
DM: Thank you.
TC: “Tucker Carlson Today” is the name of the show on every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And of course, we’ll continue coming to you every weeknight at 8:00PM, Eastern, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on the Fox News Channel. We’ll see you then.
<END>
Thank you for your kind words, Rebecca!
Tucker is a perfect example of what journalistic integrity looks like. If others in the media were to understand this, our nation would not be in decline.
Thank you for a very thoughtful and informative short history ofTucker Carlson, a man many id us had come to trust to the exclusion of almost any other media personality. I think your analysis of his value and his own positions are born out by the size and composition of his audience and the damage to Fox News his departure has caused. In our house, two octogenarians felt betrayed and bereft; we have cancelled every Fox show we were recording and have not watched one minute of any Fox offering since. Newsmax gets a little of our attention now, but our reason for getting Dish TV was Fox News, then headed by Bill O’Reilly, and while we missed him when he was gone, it did not have the meaning or effect of Carlson’s empty spot in our evening, the only program where we never missed an episode.
Thank you again for this piece. You have earned our respect and we will look for more commentary from you.