Charlie is joined by the legendary Tucker Carlson for an exclusive, long-form conversation about the ideas and values that underlie our current political moment. From debt and inflation, to family, relationships, life, death, and addiction, Tucker and Charlie engage in a deeply personal discussion that peels away the superficial aspects of politics, economics, and culture to explore the most important things in life, and why our current political and media landscapes are designed to ignore almost all of it. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hey, everybody.
Super special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
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Without any further ado, a pretty legendary conversation with the legend himself, Tucker Carlson.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Tucker, welcome to the Charlie Show.
Thanks for having me.
I wanted to start by saying, I think it was two years ago you were here last.
Yes.
And I made a conversation.
I made a mistake, I should say, to say I wanted to talk with you on stage about all these different topics and issues.
And I wanted to start by just saying you have had more impact on the way I view the news cycle and how I view what's happening in our country than anyone else.
Thank you.
It's an amazing honor to have you on this program.
I'm honored to be here.
So you and I were kind of talking before this about what's really happening in this country.
And I think one of the most important shows you did recently was on a Friday evening, about a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, when you talked about inflation and what it means for normal people in our country.
We talk about this a lot on our podcasts and our program, that the creation of money, it's not a mistake, it's a tactic that is actually being used to try and temporarily satisfy our addiction to debt.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Well, it's interesting.
I'm not an, obviously, I'm a talk show host, not an economist.
And so I was a little slow to pick up on this.
But if you take three steps back and take the kind of big picture view, it becomes clear what's going on.
So obviously, if you devalue a currency by printing too much of it, its value will fall, right?
So our Fed policy abets inflation.
That's accelerated dramatically because of modern monetary theory, which is the idea that you can basically, with no real consequences, ignore your balance sheet and just continue to print money.
And I've always thought it was a weird theory, a bizarre theory, until recently when I realized that, yes, it will cause inflation.
The people pushing it know that, and they're doing it because they're going to benefit from it.
So I would think of it this way.
If you borrow $100,000 from the bank and you don't pay it back, they take your house away.
If you borrow $100 million from the bank and you don't pay it back, they call you and say, let's have lunch.
Because at that point, the balance of power has changed, right?
So at a certain point, well, that's exactly right, because you take the institution with you.
So Under this current system, the richest people are the ones whose wealth derives from debt.
And so this policy, almost by definition, is going to help them.
And in fact, it is for a very simple and obvious reason.
Inflation helps people who owe money because if the value of the money falls, so does the cost of repaying it.
Our entire economy is basically built on debt.
Right.
So who does this screw?
Who does it disadvantage?
It disadvantages anybody who has followed the rules as were laid out at the beginning of time, which is, you know, be responsible with your money.
Don't buy things you can't afford.
Save.
The people who followed those instructions have been hurt by our monetary policy, and they're about to get a lot more hurt because the value of the money they saved will decline.
Whereas the people who are living entirely on credit, and I don't mean the guy who bought the extra bass boat, I mean the guy, you know, who's really, whose whole business is leverage, those people will benefit.
And that's a small group relative to the first group.
So anyone living on fixed income, anyone living on savings, those people are about to get a lot poorer.
The people who are facing insurmountable debt will ultimately find it surmountable because of inflation.
So like it's, it's not that complex, really.
Well, but what I have found so interesting is that you're one of the only people talking about this.
And it might be one of the biggest thing actually.
I think it's super interesting.
And it's interesting.
It's also, it impacts every single kind of facet of life.
You were warning years ago, and I didn't take this seriously, honestly, when you said this a couple years ago, that a small group of people are getting way too powerful.
They're getting rich at other people's expense.
And now we have seen this year, Jeff Bezos is wealthier than any other person ever to exist in the history of the planet, nearing $200 billion.
We have seen the billionaires have had a great year.
Yes.
Like the best year ever.
And you've been warning against this, and it seems as if it's only intensified in this last calendar year.
And inflation actually benefits those people, of course.
They're only going to get wealthier.
They can actually afford to buy hedges against what inflation will actually mean when we have 6% or 7% inflation.
And I think we already have inflation.
I just think the way we calculate it is completely total not.
I mean, the things that actually matter to you, your house, tuition for your kids, food, you know, the big expenditures.
Healthcare.
Healthcare.
And needless to say, thank you, healthcare.
Those things are becoming way more expensive.
In fact, way outpacing the so-called inflation rate.
So yeah, it tells you everything.
I would say the theme for the year is the big have benefited, the smaller being crushed.
I mean, that really is true.
On every level, from the sort of micro level, downtown Chicago, independent businesses are going under, big national, international retailers are managing to hang in there.
Amazon is thriving.
Independent booksellers are gone, right?
All the way up to the geopolitical level.
What nation is pulling ahead of all others?
The world's biggest nation, China.
So that really is kind of the lesson that in a moment of tumult and reordering, only the big are benefiting from this.
And it's scary, actually.
You know, like, what do you do in the face of that?
So we do have some things we can do.
And you're calling early for a breakup of the tech companies.
Yes.
And it seems as if this is actually gaining steam.
Yes.
Whereas a couple years ago, people would say, why would we need to break up these wonderful companies that are just doing such a great job for us?
And we just start with the surveillance capitalism companies, right?
Which are basically data companies who spy on all of us and we are the product.
Google and Facebook.
Yes.
And they have become so incredibly wealthy and powerful that they basically are the government.
They're more powerful than our own government.
Of course they are.
Not accountable.
Not at all.
Right.
And vote them out.
We don't have a Bill of Rights.
We don't have any way.
So, for example, this conversation we're having right now, and we put it up on YouTube, if we say something wrong or so that some guy in pajamas and Menlo Park doesn't like and they just make it disappear, I have no recourse I can take over at all.
And so you're at complete and total mercy of these tech companies.
Can you talk about kind of how big of a threat they actually pose?
And it's the most basic of all threats.
I mean, having control over information kind of makes the difference at every level over time.
So if you don't know about something, if you don't have the capacity to understand something, even to think about something, then, you know, I can control you, right?
I mean, that's why the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights protects the press because power over information is that central.
And Google is the most powerful company in the history of the world.
There's never been a company as well.
Way more powerful than Standard Oil ever.
Way more powerful than the U.S. government.
So, yeah, look, we should declare war on bigness without getting into the rat hole of the details where I spend my life, but I would say we should be philosophically opposed to concentrations of wealth and power this profound.
The fact that Google is as big and powerful as it is, same with Facebook, is itself an argument against Google and Facebook.
Like, it's just too much.
We should be against big countries.
This country is 350 million people.
It shouldn't get any bigger, right?
I mean, and at the same time, we should turn our attention to what really matters, which are the small things, like your own life, which we've all put on hold for the sake of these macro questions.
I mean, one of the problems with an election year is everyone thinks in national or global terms, like in terms of trends and whatever.
And it's very easy to forget that what actually matters and what you will contemplate on your deathbed is how you ordered your own life.
Are you married?
Do you have descendants?
Does anyone care that you're dying?
Like, these are the most basic questions, and they've been completely ignored.
So, my advice to anybody, to my own, I have a ton of children, and I always tell them this.
All that matters is whether you get married, have a successful marriage, and have children, and behave honorably.
Like, that's it.
That's all that matters.
That's the most kind of micro concern you can have, and yet it's the most profound.
So, I think if you're a whatever it is, you know, whatever the category is, conservative, you know, traditional, liberal, libertarian, or anybody who's not fully with the current program, your main concern ought to be, you know, do I have a happy personal life?
Am I connected to someone for life?
Am I having children?
Do I have any sense of what happens when I die?
Like, don't neglect those things.
And so, do you think I completely agree, but it seems as if the Republican Party is doing their best not to embrace that?
And so, they're just pure corporate shills.
I mean, their values are the values of corporate America.
I mean, one of the my challenges, I hope in 2021 is to clean up my vocabulary, sweep away the words that are not precisely descriptive and, in fact, counterproductive.
And one of them is left and liberal, right and conservative.
I mean, those terms just, they had a great deal of meaning when I was growing up during the Cold War.
It was a war between left and right, collectivist versus freedom, you know, market capitalism versus communism.
No, what we're fighting now is man versus the behemoth.
It's the individual versus corporate power, period.
And almost everything that I find repulsive about modern American society, starting and beginning with the pollution and distortion of gender roles and abortion, which are the things I find most destructive because it's tampering with the very formula, with the recipe for a successful civilization.
Where does that come from?
It doesn't come from the left.
It doesn't come from, who's that guy they're always quoting who wrote the book, Rules for Radicals?
Solinsky, whatever.
He didn't think this up.
This is being promoted by big corporations who see human beings as widgets and see human relationships as impediment to corporate success.
So, like, why do you think big business funds BLM and Planned Parenthood?
BLM calling for the destruction of the nuclear family.
What's that about?
What does that have to do with black empowerment?
Actually, it doesn't empower any individual.
The family is the definition of empowerment.
When things go to, where do you go?
Your family.
I have got my kids living with me right now because American society is collapsing.
It's like the greatest thing that's ever happened.
They all come home.
The family is the fortress against the world.
That's true.
So if you want to empower people, you strengthen their families.
Why are they trying to disempower our families?
Because families get in the way of obedience to the corporation.
So a lot of big corporations are offering for free to freeze the eggs of their female employees.
What does that tell you?
Is that compassion?
No.
What they're saying is, give up your child bearing years for us.
By the way, we have no loyalty.
We don't care about you at all in exchange for the promise that maybe someday you can have a personal life.
It's so dystopian.
It's so grotesque.
Saul Linsky didn't think that up.
Apple did.
Do you see what I'm saying?
So the real threat that we face now, I mean, the left, I'm not, you know, I don't like the left, and I've spent my whole life arguing against the left, but I know the left.
I know, you know, because I grew up with them.
They don't make their beds, okay?
They're disorganized people.
They couldn't pull off a five-year-old's birthday party.
Corporate America is pretty efficient.
Like efficiency.
They work weekends.
They work weekends.
Efficiency is its core value.
And it's efficiency, corporate efficiency that we should be afraid of.
And so what I think, if I could just say it's phenomenal, but this is the struggle right now on the right or whatever, the conservative America.
And what I've found is that the people that would oppose you in what you're saying, which in a different time I might have because I was completely steeped in Hayek and Milton Friedman, who I still have appreciation for me too.
And I think they had somebody.
Tons of insights, but there was almost a dogmatic, quasi-religious undertone in the conservative movement.
Thou shalt never speak ill of anything ever in the economy if it has to do with the corporation or free market capitalism.
Like that was one of the commandments of the conservative movement.
And if you said it amazingly, instantaneously, you're a Marxist.
Well, no, actually, I can make some points about being a Marxist.
And I think you pioneered that in a lot of different ways.
But anyone who would disagree with what you're saying, I question how could they come to that conclusion?
Is it because they're being funded or is it because...
Well, they maybe haven't thought about it or they don't have.
I mean, look, I can't, you know, other people's motives are very hard to assess.
I can describe my own, and they're very simple.
Anybody who threatens my family or the structure from which I've derived the overwhelming majority of the satisfaction and joy in my life, that's my family, my wife and children.
I would include my dogs.
Anybody who threatens that or makes it harder for my children to form something like that is my enemy.
And I mean enemy.
I really mean that.
That is the most basic threat.
You can increase my tax rate from 50% to 60%.
I won't like it.
But if you make it impossible for my kids to get married, I'm at war with you because you're threatening, well, first of all, my ability to pass on my genes.
Like, this is the most basic, this is the most basic human drive is to pass on your genes, is to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
I would just say one thing.
I've been so obsessed with this, and I've actually been meaning to write a book on it, but I just, I've been too scattered to do it.
But what you're really seeing is a war against nature.
The things that you are forbidden to say are almost always the most basic and obvious things connected to the natural order.
In other words, rules that we didn't make, but that we encountered when we arrived here on earth.
Okay?
Like biological sex or, you know, pick one.
They hate the acknowledgement that there are forces larger than their own authority because it diminishes their authority.
They can't, that's why they can't stand when you're like, well, that's just the way it naturally is.
That's how we were born.
What?
No, we control that.
And yet, if you start ignoring the natural order, nature itself, if you hate nature, you can't win in the end.
It's a Tower of Babel situation.
Do you know what I mean?
You can't actually beat reality ultimately.
And yet, that's the basis of everything for them.
So why is it so offensive to say out loud, like, oh, I don't know, like before you destroy the patriarchy, tell me why it existed since the beginning of recorded time.
Was there some reason for that?
Was it just pure meanness?
Did every society, like in the history of man, decide to come up with the same structure just to like oppress people because they got off on oppressing people?
I mean, maybe.
Kind of hard to believe that they, you know, sprouted all over the earth in pretty much the same way with some exceptions, but not really many.
Maybe there's something innate about that.
And maybe before we destroy it, we should consider the consequences of destroying it.
And of course, the consequences are on display right now, which is like total atomization, alienation, spike in suicide rate, drug addiction, no one gets married.
It's like super depressing and dystopian.
Who's the beneficiary of that?
Anyone who seeks to control you.
It's very hard to control people who have a loyalty that's greater to something than you.
And when you have a family, your loyalty is not even in question.
My loyalty is to my family.
Period.
That's so much bigger than any idea, any ideology.
Like, you screw with my kids, I'll shoot you, period.
Every parent feels that way.
So they have to destroy that in order to make certain that you're an obedient little worker serf, which is exactly the plan.
Now, if I sound crazy, it's only because maybe I am crazy.
But that's true.
But you're making sense.
And what I find interesting is that we're entering this post-political moment where you mentioned this when we were kind of chatting earlier.
Glenn Greenwald and myself and you, we're all kind of agreeing on the same sort of problems all the time.
Yeah.
Where if you actually believe in freedom of speech, family formation, Western civilization, you could call it, then we're all allies against this kind of corporatist America that we're all living in.
Yes.
And that's global, too.
But here's where I think the conservative movement went wrong is for the last decade, especially is, and you saw this in kind of what Mitt Romney said in 2012 when he's running for president, when he said, corporations are people, my friend, almost this kind of corporate idolatry that existed, that the corporate masters are on our team and they're always going to be kind of looking out for us.
And the Boston Consulting Group guy said that?
Yeah, the Bank Capital people.
Oh, Bank Capital, right?
Yeah.
Sure, I thought it was McKinsey.
You know, they all kind of all blend together.
They've all been to Wuhan many times.
The shipping our jobs and many other things overseas.
But the issue, what you're talking about is a return to actual conservatism, which is faith first, then family, duty to country, and not necessarily this kind of overindulgent, like we need more piles of plastic from China, stuff we're never going to use.
We're going to put in our garage to get people to take away and put in these storage units mentality that has infected us the last couple decades.
It doesn't make you happy.
It doesn't make you happy.
What makes you happy are your relationships.
It's really, it's really simple.
There's actually a lot of social science in this.
People have studied what makes people happy.
And it's worth listening to people who've lived longer lives.
Like, what made you happy?
You know, you're really successful.
I know a lot of successful people.
I've never met one who said, you know, getting super rich made me happy.
I'm not against being super rich, but I've never met one person who said that brought joy to my life.
Not one, not one.
And I know a ton.
No, what makes you happy is the familiar things, your family, a place.
I mean, that's something else that we have lost is a sense of place.
Like, I'm from here.
You know, these are my people.
That's where my parents are buried.
Like, that's a basic human desire.
I've spent my whole life in this little town in Maine in the summertime.
And I've watched the economy go from sort of teetering to non-existent.
And I've seen all the attendant social ills that follow, right?
When men don't have jobs, specifically men, people don't get married, and the social fabric unravels.
What's been so interesting is coming from a city to this place every year for 50 years, I used to think, well, why don't they move?
Like, there's no opportunity here.
And I remember asking someone, a good friend of mine who I grew up with, they're like, why don't people move?
He's like, well, because they're from here.
This is where they're from.
I don't know.
Your family's been here for 300 years.
You know, the cemetery's got all your relatives in it.
Like, what do you mean?
Why don't they move?
This is where they're from.
And I was like, yeah, but I don't know.
Aren't you supposed to sort of be flexible with the movement of global capital?
And they're like, well, yeah, but I'm from here.
Thinking, that's not a very articulate answer, but it doesn't make it a less true answer.
In fact, it makes it a more profound answer.
It speaks to what people really want, which is to be from somewhere.
That rootedness is a real thing.
It's the real things that we're ignoring.
None of the real things ever get airtime.
It's so interesting.
The addiction thing, I mean, it don't even get me going, but like as someone who, you know, is now sober, I've thought a lot about it personally.
But you watch the whole country get addicted to things, like real things too, not just nicotine, which I'm still proudly addicted to, but like opioids or something where there's no kind of happy endgame.
And this happens on a mass scale and hundreds of thousands of people die and nobody says anything about it.
Not just like, well, why did the Sacklers pump this garbage into West Virginia?
But the more basic question, why did the people of West Virginia take it?
Who's getting on opioids?
Like there's no kind of success story you can look at and be like, you know, my neighbor did opioids and it really improved his life.
No, he died.
So they're doing it anyway.
Why are they doing that?
And it's because their most basic needs, which are not food and shelter, but like some deeper needs, are being not just unmet, but completely ignored.
So once you start meditating on that for a moment, you're like, the way we structure this whole deal is off.
It's not actually helping anyone at all.
And I think one of the main drivers, and you mentioned this, is the hyper-feminization of our country.
And someone who wrote a great book about this is Elizabeth Warren.
I can't believe I'm saying this.
Two income tracks.
Yeah.
And it was, she was talking about how sending both the mother and the father by almost mandatory decree into the workforce is going to actually make people less free.
And poorer, by the way, and more worried about money.
So you get on, I mean, I grew up in a world, again, I'm 51, so I'm not, you know, 81, but I grew up in a country where it was very normal for people, middle class, not just rich people, middle class people, to raise their own children.
Like you didn't axiomatically automatically hire someone from a third world country to raise your children.
Like you did it yourself.
And it was overwhelmingly women who did it because most cases, not all, but most cases, they kind of wanted to.
My ladies still want to.
And if you ask, there are a ton of surveys on this: would you prefer to raise your own kids?
Maybe not through high school or something.
At some point, they go to school and you don't need to, you know, wipe their butts or whatever.
But like when, you know, from birth to four, do you want to be there for your own kids?
Like the overwhelming majority of women want that.
They actually want that.
That's what they really want.
Not to go work.
To go be a partner in some law firm in Manhattan or something.
But America tells my daughters, I have three daughters, like the highest level of attainment, not just materially, but spiritually, is to work at some creepy investment bank that doesn't know your last name or care if you die.
That's the most important thing you could do to serve global capital.
In fact, I believe Sheryl Sandberg wrote a whole book on this called Lean In.
The most important thing you can do to self-actualize is to work for some creepy multinational doing something pointless.
And if you do that and give up the promise and your biological imperatives, the promise of a family and children, I don't know, you win.
And every living human being knows that's not a win, it's a loss.
And if that happened to your kids, you would weep.
And so would they, by the way.
And yet no one ever challenges it.
And I don't know why.
And by the way, just to be totally clear, I'm not even an evangelical.
I'm like a lapsed Episcopalian.
So I'm not, and I'm very pro-evangelical, but I'm not coming at it.
I didn't grow up in a cult.
I grew up in La Jolla, California in a non-churchgoing Episcopalian family.
So like, I'm coming at this from just a secular, just like, look around, you know, what's going on point of view.
Even though I am, you know, a Christian.
But I, anyway, that's the point.
You don't need to be from some, you know, out-of-step sect to believe this.
You just have to be human and acknowledge what people actually want as opposed to what a very small group of super unhappy people are telling you you should want.
What I think the danger is, though, is now the multi-trillion dollar corporations have found a partner that they've been looking for for many decades, which is the social woke activists.
And they both want the same thing.
And they didn't realize it until recently.
So the multi-trillion dollar corporations used to do deals with the Republicans.
The problem with the Republicans is they actually represent all the family people.
Right.
And so there was always kind of incongruency with the multi-trillion dollar corporations and the Republicans because the corporations were kind of saying, wait, why is it that all of your daughters are getting married when they're 23?
Why don't they come work for us?
And there was always this kind of, it kind of just buttressed up against that.
And it was never really sorted out.
Because of Trump, largely, by the way, because of the reaction to Trump, all of a sudden there's been this realignment politically where the SJW kind of social disintegrationist nihilists, if you will, who have theological beliefs towards the world, they have found these corporations that actually have shared interests.
Well, for sure.
And one fuels the other.
I mean, they're in symbiosis.
And again, I'm not a super genius at all.
I probably have 110 IQ or 105 or something.
I'm like, it takes me a while to figure stuff out, but I'm paid to watch.
So I started to notice, like, okay, there's all these angry leftists in the street.
What do we know about leftists?
Well, they hate capitalism.
We hate capitalism.
We're socialism.
Okay.
Okay.
That's a perspective.
So obviously you're going to attack the capitalists, right?
Who are the capitalists?
Well, they're the big companies.
They're literally controlling capital.
And yet they got a pass.
Huh, that's kind of weird.
Why are you blowing up the liquor store on your street or the pizza shop?
Why aren't you going after the Apple store and Apple itself and Jeff Bezos?
They're the capitalist.
No, it didn't touch them.
Then they're like, oh, we're against law enforcement.
Okay, then I'm sure you're going to go after the FBI, aren't you?
Because it's the biggest law enforcement agency in the United States.
And by the way, commit a lot of abuses.
No.
We're going after some working class guy making 55 grand to walk through poor neighborhoods and risk his life.
He's the villain.
Really?
Aren't you kind of missing the point there a little bit?
Like, I can actually get on board with like, let's pull back from law enforcement a little bit.
I don't think the post office needs a million rounds of nine millimeter every year.
Okay.
Like I can kind of get on board with that.
No.
It was after the little guy, the beat cop.
So then I'm thinking, well, wait a second, you're missing it.
You're missing it.
If you don't attack capitalism, go after Apple.
And they're like, I can't hear you.
The real problem is restaurants.
And you're like, huh, maybe what's actually going on bears no resemblance to what they say is going on.
Maybe this is a power grab by the most powerful using the disaffected and the losers in Antifa.
I mean, they're all sort of demonstrably losers, but who cares about them?
It's not about them.
It's not about some unhappy girl with blue hair who's smashing car windows.
It's about the people paying for her to do it.
And they're the people she claims to hate, but is in fact allied with.
Because they have shared objectives.
And bingo.
And shared hatred of traditional America.
Yeah, I mean, they're just basically, they're just the shock troops for global capitalism.
God, I sound crazy, but I mean it.
No, you're making sense.
So I guess where President Trump, who I consider to be a friend, he didn't actually capitalize on this strongly enough.
And I sent endless memos to the White House and to the campaign, you know, people that I knew as many that would listen to me, is Joe Biden is the corporate candidate.
Yes.
You have an opportunity to be the not corporate candidate.
And I don't think that framing was actually ever successfully made.
I don't think that argument was ever made where he is funded by the most wealthy people on the planet.
He's going to go win the wealthiest counties.
I'm actually representing normal people.
I think that even with all the fraud and all that, we can get into it.
I think that that would have been a multi-point boost for him, even with his amazing support that he already was able to have.
Of course.
Because it's true.
And it helps when you tell the truth.
It's just like, right.
There are a lot of reasons.
I couldn't agree with that analysis more.
There were people on the campaign who decided Joe Biden is ahead in the polls because he's got control of the critical retired rap star vote.
And we need to win as many retired rap stars as we possibly can and do pressers with them.
Okay, fine.
By the way, I'm not against winning over retired rap stars or whatever.
But they missed thematically the whole point of it.
There's been this massive realignment.
Middle class people now, after 100 years of being represented by one party, have no home.
Why don't you take them and put them under your wing and protect them from the forces who seek to destroy them?
It's not hard.
Offer your voters something real, which is protection from the bad guys, and it's not hard to identify them.
And they will be so excited that you will win.
And one of the things that normal people really appreciate, normal people being a euphemism for those who can't afford bodyguards, is the ability to go to the grocery store without getting raped.
They're into it.
Okay, let me just say that.
The biggest landslide in American history was 1972, Richard Nixon, a guy who had a fraction of the charm of Donald Trump, who had a fraction of the intuitive understanding of voters of Donald Trump.
And he still won more electoral votes than anybody has ever won.
And he had only one real issue, which is law and order.
The crazies are trying to make the world dangerous.
I'm going to protect you.
It's not hard.
You had a year where the crazies were making measurably America more dangerous, which means a crappier place to live for normal people.
And you didn't run on that because you had people in your campaign who were like so guilty about their own pampered upbringings and how they got into prestigious colleges fraudulently or whatever.
They were working out their own interior guilt trips on the country because that's what they do.
They feel bad about their unearned privilege.
So they're like, oh, we can't say anything about the destruction of American society because I feel guilty that, you know, whatever, my dad paid to get me to Ivy League school.
So you just can't say anything.
And it's like, no, reframe your head a little bit.
You're here to represent actual people who have real concerns, not BS, you know, symbolic concerns.
It's something symbolic about what's happening right now.
There is an actual measurable degradation of the quality of life for middle-class people.
It's measurable.
And like, fix that, and you win.
And I think Trump understood that.
And I think that he was undercut at every turn by people who didn't.
And I think the framing very well could have been: Joe Biden is the representation of every institution that has betrayed you and funded by others.
And he did that kind of brilliantly in 2016 with Hillary Clinton.
And Joe Biden was actually a bolder manifestation of that.
I mean, Joe Biden didn't even pretend to be supported by grassroots Americans or by middle-income earners.
It was, I'm going to take as much money as I possibly can raise in my Zoom fundraisers, and we're going to lock the country down again.
Well, yeah, he ran a campaign through a Chinese software product that's being used.
I mean, like, it was a Zoom campaign.
That's like a metaphor for everything.
And there is no Joe Biden.
I mean, Joe Biden doesn't sort of exist as an independent force.
He's just purely a puppet for larger forces, obviously.
He's despised by a lot of the people around him.
It was just so clear what was going on and so dark, so cynical and dystopian and scary.
You know, it makes the hair on your arms go up just to describe it.
And nobody was willing to really say what was going on.
Part of the sad thing for me, I think there, I think there was voter fraud.
I think macro there was massive voter fraud in that the tech companies shut down one side completely.
I mean, that's putting a thumb on the scale if they're, I mean, that's fraud.
They rigged the election, but out in the open.
And I'm willing to entertain any other possibilities.
But I do think the sad thing about that conversation, which is an important conversation, is that to some extent it does distract us from what we are arguing.
Like, what do we believe?
Like, what's the point of having a political party?
You've got the Republican Party.
What does it stand for?
Let's have that conversation, shall we?
And we haven't because the very people who would like to keep the party unchanged are distracting us with things that are relevant, but they're not the whole conversation.
Like, why didn't anybody in the Republican Party go after Google?
It's a serious question.
Like, you can't have a democracy where a company that's wholly aligned with one side is shutting down conversation in the middle of a presidential campaign.
You can't have a democracy under those circumstances.
The Republicans were being disadvantaged by it.
Why aren't they saying that?
And they're not saying it.
They're like, three of them are saying it.
Like, that's kind of a mystery to me.
And I would like to have that conversation.
Well, NetPAC, which is Google's PAC, has funded a lot of Republicans throughout the years.
Oh, I'm very aware.
And you see it in the behavior.
And the chamber is very powerful.
Well, yeah, the chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, who's a senator who shall remain nameless from Utah, Mike Lee, basically, and he didn't do it alone, but he did it with others for sure.
But made certain, he protected Google basically for the past four years.
When, you know, that's in, that's basically a direct attack on the interests of his voters.
And I don't know how he's been allowed to get away with that.
I've mentioned it a couple of times.
He doesn't like it when I do.
He's complained about it.
I think he's a nice person.
I think he's right about a lot of other things.
Mike Lee's very smart, definitely smarter than I am.
But on that one issue, which is not a small issue, it's the central issue.
He betrayed his voters, in my opinion.
Do you think he was resorting to ideology over what was right for his voters?
You know, it's such a great question.
I do think that.
And I've heard a lot of people say, so I know a lot of people who share my view, of course, because they text me all the time, and they're like, Mike Lee's been bought off by Google.
I don't think that's right.
I don't think that's right.
I think Mike Lee is an honest guy, actually.
And I know Mike, and I unagree with him on this issue.
He's very smart, and he's extremely principled.
And I hope he hears me say that because I mean it.
He's really smart.
Like he'd be a good Supreme Court justice, I think.
But he is a libertarian on this question.
And in his view, the most dangerous thing you can do is interfere in the workings of a market.
Now, I would argue this isn't really a market in the sense that market capitalism was explained to me as a child, or Hayek wrote about it.
This isn't a free market.
It's a corporatist-controlled market.
And they don't believe in markets anyway.
This is a monopoly.
It's antithetical to markets.
It's the opposite of a market.
It's shutting down a market for the benefit of one company.
And you think Sergey Brin is reading F.A. Hayek, like in pursuit of markets at night?
You think these guys are like capitalists?
They don't have a market.
They have a monopoly.
Market capitalists hate monopolies because they make market capitalism impossible.
Right.
Of course.
I think, with respect to Mike Lee, who I do think should answer for the crimes he's committed, but I do think that he did that because he sincerely believes the greatest.
I mean, I just think he's got a philosophical difference.
Yeah, and I think, though, that if I were to explain it for him, which I wouldn't agree with this, I think he would say it's my ideology.
Yes, I agree.
And I think it's really dangerous, too, though.
It's both admirable because I don't think he's sleazy.
I don't think he's like getting paid under the table or whatever.
And a couple of his staff went to work at Google, and all these people were telling me, oh, it's an inside deal.
It's like, I know Mike Lee.
I don't think that's a good idea.
That doesn't strike me.
I agree.
No, I think he's got a sincere ideological difference.
And I just sincerely disagree.
And that's kind of how.
But I think that if you allow ideology to be the only kind of compass of which you navigate public policy, then we're no different than leftists then.
Well, try to raise your kids like that.
I mean, life is impossible to predict.
It's impossible to fully understand.
My father always says when I was little, I grew up with my dad and my brother.
He would always say, he's a very wise man.
He would say, the root of all wisdom is knowing what you are.
Meditate on that.
Meditate on your shortcomings, your failings, your inability to perceive what's going to happen next.
Your lack of wisdom.
The more cognizant of that you are, the wiser you will be.
Always factor in the unknown into all of your decisions.
The rule of unintended consequences.
I mean, this is what every parent, I hope, would tell a kid.
Ideology doesn't allow room for that because it has the answers already.
So in real life, you know, you get leukemia and die and you don't kind of expect to and you forgot to buy insurance or, you know, one of your kids gets addicted to drugs.
And like, I don't know, what's the kind of roadmap for that?
Well, there isn't one.
You have to kind of take it on a case-by-case basis.
And hopefully you're informed by your deeper values, which should be deeper than ideology, like love and compassion.
And like, I love this child.
Like, what's the best thing to do?
I don't know.
No book can tell me that, you know?
Well, and precisely.
Alexander Solshenitsyn famously said towards the end of the Gulag Archipelago, all of this was thanks to ideology.
Yes.
And if you only allow ideology to steer you in a certain direction, then we know where that goes.
I mean, we know the body can.
I completely agree with that.
I completely, and I believe principles are essential, and I try to have them, and I try not to violate them.
But I also think you should, you just need to approach life with humility.
You'll get it in the end anyway.
You know, when you're suffocating on your own, you know what I mean?
Like, you're probably going to die terrified and alone.
And at that point, you know, all your arrogance will have drained away.
But in the meantime, it's just so important to remember how much you don't know.
It's important to be in awe of the world around you, which you did not create.
And that's why I think nature is so essential.
Nature is basically God giving the finger to ideology.
You know, it's like, you think you know how it works?
I don't think you do because you didn't create the Sawtooth Mountains or whatever.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, this is so much bigger than you.
Stare at the night sky.
And ideology is basically a lie that tells you, it's the theory of everything you come up with when you're getting high freshman, you're in college.
You missed all that blessings.
I did.
But most people are like, yeah, we figured it out.
We got the whole idea.
Like, only children believe that.
Adults come to understand, like, I don't really know.
And when someone tells me, I don't really know, but I want to do the right thing, that's the guy I trust.
Yes.
And Trump was so unbelievably successful because he was inherently an anti-ideological candidate.
Oh, gosh, yes.
I was slow to get that because I was very ideological.
I still am.
I always have been.
No, I was too.
Oh, totally.
I grew up in the conservative movement that in some ways you were kind of creating and part of.
Well, so did I.
I grew up in it too.
I grew up doing my dad worked for the government during the Cold War.
That was all ideology.
Totally.
I mean, I was a Russian studies major.
I mean, to the extent I studied, but I was really super interested.
I read the Gulag Archipelago and I did it because I had an ideology and I wanted to understand the other, its competing ideology.
And I am by my nature ideological and in my head and all this stuff.
So it was a huge change for me.
And I'm just so grateful for it.
You should measure, this is a biblical principle, measure ideas and intentions by their results, by their fruit.
Like that's the whole thing.
Does it work or not?
I don't know.
Are your kids happy?
And if they're not, like, maybe it didn't work.
Well, and that's one of the main issues is that you have an entire political party that is hiding behind ideology, Republicans, and there are some things that aren't going well.
And they say, but no, but the principle, free trade works.
Don't you understand?
It's so amazing.
And that's one of the problems that we have with our country is.
It's totally right.
It's totally right.
People are interchangeable widgets.
And it doesn't matter whether the person is male or female or intersex or one of the other 72 gender categories.
They're all the same.
And that is such a violation of what is true fundamentally, a truth that we didn't create and can't change, that it will never work.
And so one of the things that reassures me as I look at a society that's gone completely off the rails is that it can't endure because nothing that's this untrue can persist.
Like ultimately, it will collapse.
And I don't root for the collapse of anything or any society.
I'm a preserver, not a destroyer, I hope.
But I just, it makes me feel better.
When Facebook tells me there are 72 gender categories, I'm like, it doesn't bother me that much because it's like there actually aren't there two.
And ultimately, nature is going to win because you can't beat nature.
You just can't.
Period.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to get hurt along the way to finding that out.
It is a doctrinaire kind of social reconstructionism to try to redefine nature.
But it doesn't work.
I mean, the Soviets tried it.
Robespierre tried it.
I mean, every revolution.
You know how smart the people in Menlo Park are, right?
Like they, they really think they've gotten it figured out.
But they're not because, I mean, I think they're all smarter than I am in like an abstract way.
Facetiously, of course.
But like this, every revolution is the same.
You know, well, whatever.
Don't get me wrong.
But the point is, that fighting against natural imperatives, things that are true, whether you want them to be true or not.
And there are a lot of things that are true that I wish were not true.
I mean, I love drinking.
I wish I could drink.
I can't, so I don't.
I do think there's something inherent about that.
People who can't drink are generally, it's a genetic thing.
I think it is in my case.
I wish I could change that, but I can't.
And that's just, that's just, I wish, do you know what I mean?
I wasn't left-handed or not dyslexic or a lot of things about myself.
I was born with that.
I can't change and like okay, but I don't spend any time worrying about it because you just roll with it.
You have to accept reality as it is.
You can't change the weather.
There's something very deep going on with the climate stuff which I find hilarious but also threatening.
Like earth worship yeah no, but I I'm more of an earth worship, like I actually love nature, I spend, I try to, I live, I mean, I'm outside all day long that's, I've organized my life to be outside.
Okay, that's how strongly I feel about nature.
I love trees.
You know I have all these weird tics about nature.
They're the opposite.
They think they're in charge of nature.
So actually we have climate cycles that not only are they well known, they formed the earth.
I live in a place in Maine on a glacial lake.
A glacier is a chunk of ice formed by climate change that cut a trench through the mountains, in fact, created the mountains in a lot of cases, into which water flowed when it melted, and now that's the lake I live on.
So that's Climate change, there's a physical, there's physical evidence of its existence going back to the cooling of the earth.
It's clearly happening again now, but we imagine A, we're responsible for it, and B, we can control it.
You'd really have to be some sort of like crazed narcissist to believe that.
It's like, yeah, climate always changes.
Like, what do you think?
We had an ice age, buddy.
That's such a good point.
It's such a good point.
But these people who really do think the galaxy, you know, centers on them, that they're the sun in our solar system, like they're like, oh no, we did this.
Yes.
Really?
It's just, it tells you so much.
Like, in the end, it's about narcissism.
It's about I'm the center of the universe.
There is no God.
I am God.
And anything that suggests I'm not must be squelched immediately.
So I kind of want to end on that note.
And this is something you've said before in your speeches that I've heard you say, which is the true framing of what we're going through in our country is a theological debate, a worship of God or a worship of man.
Who's actually in charge?
And can you talk about your faith, how important it is to you?
And because what we have in our country more than anything else is people that have been told almost evangelistically to believe in secular, nihilistic, hedonistic self-indulgence.
And by the time they get 19 or 20, they are the most miserable generation in American history.
Yeah.
Can you talk about your own personal faith?
I mean, my eyes also have to be aware of that.
I am an Episcopalian.
Actually, after 51 years, I switched and became a Methodist two months ago.
I'm not sure how different it is, but at least not the Episcopal Church, which I've really come to despise.
The Church of my ancestors, but I hate it.
Anyway, so I am the last person you want to have a theological discussion with.
I'm not deeply grounded in theology.
I've read the New Testament and the Old Testament in their entirety, but I'm not a theologian at all.
And in fact, the older I get, the less interested in theology I am and the more interested I am in the basics.
And the basics to me are these: one, you're not in control.
You can't, you didn't control when you were born.
You're not going to control when you die.
You can't extend your life a single day.
That was true when Jesus said it.
It's true now.
So recognizing the limits of your own control is the essence of everything.
Okay.
It is the essence of wisdom.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is, if you don't recognize that and you imagine that you're in charge of everything, you will be humiliated, proved wrong, and super unhappy in the meantime.
And the third thing is, the only unchanging fact of life is its end, is death.
And I just think it's amazing we've constructed this entire society, you know, that considers everything fair inquiry or didn't until recently.
And that's the one topic nobody ever talks about.
Everybody on earth will die.
No one acknowledges that.
And increasingly, you're not even really allowed to talk about what might happen after.
Now, I don't have a super clear sight picture of what happens after.
I believe in God.
I think I'm positive there is an afterlife.
Its nature is murky to me.
But I believe that.
It's clearly true.
But I just, I can't believe that you could have a society, the West more broadly, that's at its core secular, which is another way of saying ignores the key fact of life, which is death.
And then I'm thinking, well, how can that work?
How can you have a study like that?
Well, we've never had one.
That's the truth.
There's never been a secular society at scale in human history till after the Second World War.
And that's only been 80 years.
We've never had it.
And maybe the reason you've never had it is because it absolutely doesn't work.
And this is not a pitch for the Episcopal Church or the Methodist Church or even Christianity.
It's an acknowledgement that you need to have meaning.
And meaning is not vacation.
And it's not, do you know what I mean?
Like truffle pasta, much as I love it.
Meaning is the answer to the most basic question: what happens when you die?
That's it.
It's right there.
That's the question.
And if you don't even bring that question up, you can't persist.
People will go insane and they'll become incredibly neurotic.
And that's what I noticed, how neurotic everybody is.
People are totally freaky.
Last thing I'll say: I was a fearful flyer from, I grew up in California, went to boarding school on the East Coast, so I had to fly all the time across the country.
And I started to get freaked out by flying.
I was on a couple bad flights, whatever.
That was 1983.
Almost 20 years, I was really afraid of flying.
I used to get super loaded on planes, just really drunk on planes.
And I would always smoke back when you could smoke on planes, even as a child.
And then 2001, 9-11 happens.
I go over, I'm in the news business, I go over to the Middle East.
I'm in a commercial air air, crash.
The plane I was in crashed.
And it crashed in a kind of slow-motion way where we knew it was crashing for like, I don't know, 20 minutes.
So it was like the most terrifying possible experience a fearful flyer could have.
It was like ridiculous.
Pakistan International Airways.
And anyway, whatever, I survived, of course, obviously.
But that changed my life.
I came home, I quit drinking, I had a fourth child.
My life just totally changed because of that one event.
But the main thing that happened in addition to those two things was I stopped being afraid to fly.
And the reason I stopped being afraid to fly was I had been forced to face for 20 minutes, like the thought, really the certainty I was going to die.
Like I thought we were going to die.
Like everyone on the plane thought we were going to die.
It was like, you can imagine.
And I didn't die.
And then I realized what I was afraid about on the plane was dying.
It wasn't the turbulence or whatever, being trapped in this aluminum tube.
It was the idea of dying.
And once that was clarified for me and I focused on it directly, what I'm really afraid of is dying.
And all neurosis comes from that fear.
Of course, that's what it is.
It's the fear of dying.
Once I focused on that directly, it went away.
And I would just get on planes and be like, am I ready to die?
I don't want to die.
I've got all these kids and I really like my life and all this stuff.
But like at some point, I will.
And once I address that directly in my head, every time I get on a flight, am I ready to go?
And even now, I like text all four kids, text my wife, can't text the dogs, but I would.
And it just goes away.
I'm like, I'm ready.
I am.
I'm ready to die.
So, in a small, very small bore way, that's what's going on with society at large.
If you have hundreds of millions of people who've never addressed directly the core fact of their life, which is imminent and fast-approaching death, of course, they're completely freaked out and superstitious and neurotic and weird and irrational and just like hopped up, right?
And it's the opposite.
They tell people, young people at age 15, there is no God.
Don't even try to pursue him.
There's no beauty, no truth.
All there is is a power struggle.
That's going to create a pretty screwed up generation very quickly.
For sure, but it's also pretending that their core fear isn't real or displacing that with like fake fears.
No, all of your fears come from, in the end, the certain knowledge that all of us is born with that we're going to die, that there's a time limit on this, on this adventure.
So just address that directly.
You're going to die.
It's, I will say, I have all these children, and one of them was like born feeling that way.
It's just so interesting.
When she turned like five, she said to me, I'm so sad.
I turned five.
I was like, why are you sad?
You're five.
Like, who doesn't want to be five?
That's like, that's the best.
Are you kidding?
No mortgage, get to play all day, endless Fig Newtons.
Like, that's just a good thing, five.
And she goes, because I don't want it to end.
And I was like, want what?
Freaky, deep spiritual child.
And she goes, my life.
Every birthday means I'm closer to the end.
And I'm like, whoa, man.
I don't know whose kid this is.
But that child, in a way, has always been the calmest because she like acknowledges that that's the er fear.
Probably shouldn't be saying this out loud, but I just have been thinking about it a lot.
We can.
No, no, no, I don't care.
I don't care.
I hope she's not watching.
That is really the true root of everything we're going through in this guy.
It's the root of all fear.
I mean, the basic things are the only things that matter.
Are you in an intimate relationship with another person?
Do you have love in your life?
Is there some measure of stability?
Have you reckoned with the unchangeable facts of life?
And the most basic is death.
Have you reckoned with that at all?
Or are you anesthetized to the point where you don't think of it?
Are you distracted by the digital garbage to the point it never enters your mind?
I mean, that's the state for most people.
It's certainly been the case for me for a lot of my life.
I'm not judging or anything.
I'm just saying it doesn't work because at some level, you know, it's true.
It's like a horror movie.
You know, he's waiting in the closet for you.
You just know.
So you don't want to go back into the house, but you have to.
And that makes you super neurotic.
Like, this is Freud in a sentence.
You're going to die.
You're upset about it.
Proceed from there.
I swear I should be a therapist because all the conversations would be like, what do you think happens when you die?
What?
People are so in the town that I grew up in, which is an affluent beach town.
You could do anything.
You could say anything.
This was like the liberal 70s.
If you wanted to become like a transgender nun or marry one or, you know, I mean, we had some weird stuff going on in my town.
It was totally cool.
Nobody judged.
But if you were going to die, well, that's disgusting.
And that's offensive.
And we don't talk about that here.
You just, no one died.
You just got in your 450 SLC and drove to Palm Springs and like no one saw you again and no one ever talked about it.
Death was like the one taboo.
And I remember even noticing it as a kid, like nobody ever dies in La Jolla.
And I do think, again, over time, that makes you unwise and unhappy.
And you try to do things while you live that would not be good for future generations or rooted in morality.
Well, sure.
I mean, that's a whole separate conversation.
If you have a place run by people who don't have their own children, like you get a different time horizon.
You know, there are a lot of things that I do or wouldn't do that I would change very much if I didn't have kids.
I mean, honestly, I'm just being, I'm just being honest.
I've got all these kids.
Like they're going to long outlive me, I hope.
And so that adds a completely different perspective.
And I hope that you are fruitful and multiply and you'll see, but it's like, it's crazy.
It just changes your perspective like completely, like completely.
I mean, I'm still a selfish jerk, but I mean, oh my gosh, before I had children, it was like insane.
Well, Tucker, you got to go address all of our thousands of students.
Last piece of advice for young people?
Get married.
Get married and have a ton of kids.
I mean, get married when you're too young, have more kids than you can afford.
Take a job you're not qualified for.
Live boldly.
Stop getting high.
Stop doing anything that blurs your vision or makes time go faster.
You're going to die before you know it.
Don't waste a second.
That's the sin is living thoughtlessly and wasting time.
It's the one thing you can't get back.
I've wasted a lot of money in my life.
Oh my gosh.
I don't care.
I don't regret any of it.
Every room service meal was worth it.
It was fine.
But any time that I wasted is really bitter for me because it's finite.
And so live as fully as you can.
And you can't control all this stuff that's going on.
You can't control what Google does.
And honestly, they're going to win.
Like the powers that be will win, at least in the short term.
Ultimately, they'll all blow up.
But like, we're powerless and hated.
I think this myself all the time.
Are they going to crush me?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
But in the meantime, you know, I want to experience my life as fully as I possibly can.
And I think that starts with having like a ton of kids, like way more than is like Mormon levels of kids.
I mean that.
Tucker Carlson wisdom, everybody.
Tucker, thank you.
Don't give a barn burner.
Thanks so much.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your questions.
As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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