My Conversation with Tucker Carlson on Addiction, Russia, and Religion
Charlie sits down with the great Tucker Carlson for an exclusive hour long conversation with the most influential media figure in America. The two discuss the addiction crisis gripping America before turning their attention to the establishment conservative institutions that refuse to address the current crises facing the country. Charlie asks Tucker for his opinion on the left's fixation on Russia and how NATO's failure has led to the constant war posture against the Kremlin. Finally, Charlie asks Tucker for his views on religion and Christianity. This is a can't miss episode with one of the most important and deepest thinking voices across the political media landscapes today.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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Tucker Carlson Special Episode00:01:45
Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, a very special episode, an advertiser-free episode.
No advertisers on this episode at all for my private and amazing conversation with Tucker Carlson.
It's about an hour-long conversation.
And it was really interesting and super informative.
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Tucker Carlson is here.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
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The Opioid Crisis Impact00:07:06
That's why we are here.
Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us, again, Tucker Carlson.
You know, I usually drink the French product.
You've got the Italian product, but is it better?
Are you drinking?
Slightly small.
I'm not going to admit that as an American.
I'm very pro-American.
I do drink a French beverage.
No, that's okay.
Because the last time you spoke at Turning Point USA, you had the Perrier on the podium.
I'm not subtle in my product endorsements.
How does it not make you burp every five seconds when you have that?
You know, I quit drinking in 2002 and promptly went to my college roommate's wedding in Italy where everyone was just like loaded the whole time.
And I thought to myself, I probably should find an option here.
And I'd never had sparkling water in my life since I'm just so thoroughly American.
And I started drinking it and I never stopped.
I don't know why, but I really dig it.
Did your life improve when you stopped drinking?
Did my life improve?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I asked because there's so many young people that message us and talk to us.
They say, you know, I'm struggling with this and they don't, it's not even an option to stop.
Well, you know, there are two kinds of people.
I spent the last 20 years talking to people who are quitting drinking, not that I'm any expert on it, but I have done it.
And a lot of, I mean, I think addiction is one of the great issues, certainly in the top two or three issues that the country faces.
People don't talk about it at all.
People are on drugs.
And a lot of those drugs come from physicians.
They've been prescribed, which is, in my view, a crime, but it continues totally unabated or even unquestioned.
And I've watched a lot of people get off a lot of different substances.
And there are really two varieties.
There are people who feel almost immediately liberated by it.
There's a tough period.
If you've been doing something, anything, if you've been, you know, running marathons every year for your life and you stop, you feel an effect.
And that is very true for drinking and the rest of it.
But there are people who, when they quit and they get over that period, feel really liberated by it.
I feel happy on Sunday morning.
I mean, the number of hungover mornings in church I've had is like crazy.
And now I'm not.
And I feel really good.
And your sleep is better.
And I enjoyed it from probably two months in.
See, this is amazing.
My brother, same thing.
We're Scandinavian.
There's a lot of quitting drinking going on.
And then there's another category of people, and I know a number of them who really just don't like it.
They don't like it.
They don't like being sober.
They feel anxious about it.
It doesn't fit them well.
They feel like they can't socialize without it.
My heart goes out to them.
I think it has to do with their essential makeup.
I don't really know what to make of it, but I've known a lot of people like this.
Hunter Biden, who was my neighbor, was like this.
I'm being honest.
A perfectly fine guy, but was never happy being sober, just anxious.
Oh, he did.
Oh, he definitely tried.
Oh, for sure.
He tried.
He had a wonderful wife, really a great person.
And she, you know, she helped him a lot, but he was never happy with it.
I talked to him about it many times.
And I've known a number of people like that.
And people like that will almost certainly drink again.
It's very hard to stop yourself from doing something you really want to do.
I have decided, having watched people for a long time.
It is.
It's very, very hard.
You got to want to, you got to get rid of the desire or else you will do it.
Whatever it is.
You did a monologue on the opioids.
Yes.
Are you comfortable discussing that?
For sure.
I had, you know, I mean, I was not a drug addict or anything, but I grew up in California.
I've certainly been around a lot of different stuff.
I didn't have any experience with opioids.
That wasn't a thing where I grew up.
I don't think it was a thing in American society more broadly, except, you know, shooting heroin in some, you know, ghetto somewhere in the 70s.
That was so far from where I was from that it was, you know, just wasn't even an option.
So I really didn't, other than have my wisdom teeth out, taking one pain pill after an appendectomy, I had no experience of it.
I had back surgery quite unexpectedly a few weeks ago, and they put me on all these drugs.
I don't even take Advil.
I'm very against drugs.
I really, really hate drugs and I mean it.
I don't talk about it too much because I don't want to sound, I don't know.
I just don't talk.
I don't want, you know, just don't talk about it very much, but I really feel that way very strongly in my own life.
And all of a sudden, I'm on these things.
And the first things like three days, the first thing I noticed was my courage evaporated.
I was afraid.
I was instantly afraid.
I was afraid of paranoid or just no, I had just had this back problem.
I had a, I blew up a disc.
And for six weeks, I was in bed all day because I couldn't sit down because of this.
I mean, it's not very interesting at all.
Millions of people have had disc problems.
And you know, myself and you have too.
And getting out of the car today, you're like, oh, my static nerve.
It's true.
You know, people have had it and know what you're talking about.
But it was fine.
I did my show every night.
You know, I was, I was in pain, but it wasn't wrecking my life.
It was certainly taking a lot of my attention.
Sometimes I couldn't sleep, but I read another PG Woodhouse novel.
It's fine.
The second I took the opioid painkiller, my overriding concern became not feeling pain.
It was one of the weirdest things.
Even though biochemically it was.
You know, I don't know enough about it.
Unfortunately, I have to write a long script every day.
So a lot of things fall through the cracks.
My curiosity remains unsatisfied on so many different topics.
And this is one of them.
I haven't taken the time to learn about it.
So I don't know the answer.
I'm sure it's publicly available instantly.
I just haven't, I just don't know what it is.
But I know what happened to me, which is all of a sudden, I became, I became really concerned that I would feel like a lot of pain.
I had been in pain for six weeks.
And it was, you know, anyone who's ever had it will know what it's like.
It's, it's intense, but it's not, it didn't make me deeply unhappy.
I was just suffering and suffering is part of it.
And that's just, you know, that's just, that happens to you from time to time.
And it's okay.
In fact, you learn from it.
The drug completely changed my attitude completely.
And I hated it.
I felt totally diminished.
I felt like I feel like something really important in me had been neutralized or neutered or had died.
And maybe I'm the only one who's had this experience.
I don't think that I am.
I don't think so.
And the insight I had was, which is not a very deep one, but it's meaningful, I believe.
There are millions of people who are in this state every day in this country.
Opioids now have a terrible reputation well earned from the Sacklers and from Purdue Pharma and what they did.
Yes.
You know, particularly to Kentucky and West Virginia, but to a lot of different states, Northern New England.
But opioids are still very common, but they're not the only prescription drugs.
I mean, benzos as an entire benzodiazepines as an entire class are still widely prescribed.
I would say profligately prescribed and kids take them and kids OD from them all the time.
But even the kids who don't OD or develop dependency on them lose something.
You lose something in your soul when you're on drugs like that.
And no one ever says it.
Why?
I think because it's ubiquitous is the answer.
It's like you see this with a bunch of different things.
Losing Your Soul to Drugs00:15:30
And I certainly don't want to get preachy on the side of the times, whatever.
I mean, look, I'm an Episcopalian.
It's hard for me just because the way I was raised to be like, oh, you shouldn't be doing that.
But the truth is there, you know, the core problems in our society are not like coronavirus or the eastern, you know, border of eastern Ukraine or police brutality, George Floyd's death.
Like, yeah, okay.
These are problems because we overreacted to them.
But in the scope of history, they don't really rate actually.
And I would include Corona in that.
It was our reaction to it that made it this world historic event.
That doesn't mean that there aren't history changing problems right in front of us.
One of them is drug addiction.
Another is the mismanagement of our fiscal policy and the inflation that we're seeing as a result.
But here's what's interesting to me.
These are really obvious problems.
These are problems that will change the course of your country, civilization, history, species, thank you, the drop in testosterone levels.
These are big things and they're ignored.
And my theory is, can't prove it, that they're ignored precisely because they are the big things, that there's something about the human brain that can't actually metabolize the fact there's a meteor streaking toward us.
She's like, shit, I better rearrange the bookshelves or whatever.
I mean, we're all like this.
I'm like this.
I used to have a story due every Friday when I was a magazine writer.
And the pressure was intense back when they printed magazines.
And I would have called Snater like, we have to send this to a printing plant in Pennsylvania.
Like, file your story, buddy.
It's the cover.
And I remember standing up once and literally thinking, should I rearrange the shelves by title or author?
Because I just couldn't deal with the enormity of this, you know, when I was 25, this disaster coming toward me at high speed, which is, I'm going to blow the whole magazine.
I couldn't handle it.
And I feel like as a country, we're there.
But isn't it the responsibility of leaders to look at the media?
Of course.
But if you just, and I'm not, I know I sound like a liberal when I say this, blaming the system rather than the individual, but I think there's some truth in it.
If you design a system that elevates mediocre people on the basis of irrelevant criteria, and by the irrelevant criteria, I don't just mean affirmative action, though that's part of what I mean.
But I mean, like, you know, are you a child of the class into which you're being installed?
Like nepotism, which has always been a factor in every society, I think is all around us and we don't acknowledge it.
And I think it's a huge problem.
So basically we are training people to run the country.
We're doing that through universities, of course, but we're not giving them the skills you need to run a massive, incredibly complex continental country that leads the world like ours.
And so we just have incapable people.
I mean, look at the Secretary of State.
Tony Blinken.
The rock star.
He's like a joke.
He's a joke, actually.
I mean, I'm from Washington.
I mean, I don't get personal or mean or anything.
I don't hate Tony Blinker or anything.
But clearly, this is a guy who's like not prepared to lead our foreign policy at all.
I don't think he's cognitively capable of it.
Don't think he has the experience.
I don't think he has the wisdom.
And it's not just him.
It's like everybody.
Yes.
So the system itself is not producing wise leaders.
It's not producing people who are grounded in physical reality.
It's producing people who, as like a matter of habit, deny nature and people's natural needs and like the imperatives that don't change about the world.
Last thing I'll say, God, now I am getting born.
If you're running a society, like there are a couple of really basic questions that you ask in every society, in every peer in history.
Do I have enough food?
Where does the food come from?
Do I have enough clean water?
Do I have the ability to defend myself from invasion?
Right.
These are the basic things.
Do I have enough energy?
How am I going to keep warm in the winter?
How am I going to make things?
Like the Romans asked themselves these questions.
Every civilization does.
I feel like those are the last questions we ask.
It's all about pregnant flight suits at this point.
And you have to ask, like, what?
How can you run a country and not be like totally fixated on energy, food, and water?
Like, how can you do that?
Because you've gotten so far from people's natural needs and the physical reality of the world around you that you really think that putting gender advisors in marine platoons is like the most pressing duty you have.
And I mean, it's no, it's not.
You got me going, Charlie.
Affluence covers a multitude of sins.
That's it.
It's exactly right.
This is third generation inherited money family blown up to scale.
Take a sip of coffee and then talk about that.
Well, I mean, it's I don't want to interrupt your question.
I mean, I grew up in, you know, I'm very familiar with that world.
So, um, and you notice, and this is information available to anyone who reads People magazine, you know, families lose energy and focus, self-discipline over time if it's too easy.
This is really obvious.
I mean, I, you know, I will admit that this has been a factor in my own family.
So, you know, I'm very familiar with, we're all familiar with this.
We all know of, you know, super impressive, whether you like them or not, but profoundly energetic people who create something that didn't exist before and are rewarded for it.
They're rich people.
No one really resents them.
They did something amazing, you know?
I would even say that of people I don't like whose politics I hate.
I can step back far enough to say, that's pretty impressive you did that.
I hate Google.
Okay.
But, you know, the guys who created it.
I don't know.
Sir Debra.
Yeah.
I mean, I think Google's terrible for our society.
I think it's really wrecked a lot, but I can still sort of respect.
Well, they made Google.
I didn't.
That's impressive.
You've got to wonder like how many second generation people like that are there.
I met a few, two, actually, that I can think of.
I'm not going to name them, but who are really impressive, who took what they were given and turned it into something bigger or turned into something more meaningful or lived really engaged, meaningful lives.
Third generation, it's never existed.
Fourth generation, you're in rehab half the time.
Like we never see you.
You're in Malibu.
So this is something that's universal in families.
Why would those rules of nature be suspended for countries?
I mean, I hope there's a reason.
I hope that we escape the inevitable outcome of generational wealth, but I don't know that we will.
Yeah.
And you're able to worry about gender identity or, you know, North African lesbian poetry when you have the abundance that we're, that we have.
100%.
I mean, they're not worrying about this in Sierra Leone.
They're not worrying about diversity in the.
No.
And I've seen it in my own life.
I mean, I've been through periods where, you know, I really like legitimately didn't have enough money and had to make like massive life changes with children involved because of it.
And that's a huge bummer.
And I mean, nothing, you know, wasn't homeless or anything, but I've definitely run out of money.
And your concerns change.
You're like, hmm, I've got tuition to pay.
I'm getting another job.
And like, that's your whole life.
Like you're doing what it takes.
And there is not super fun all the time, but there's a clarity about it that's really gratifying.
It's like, I've got a really clear mission.
My mission is got four kids.
They're in school.
Probably shouldn't have sent them to these stupid private schools, but I did because I live in a city and now I have to pay the tuition.
And that's what I'm doing.
What's my job?
Paying tuition.
And I did that for years and I kind of resented it, but I was also pretty proud of myself that I was able to pull it off.
Give you purpose.
It totally did.
I never had to wonder like, what am I doing today?
I'm paying tuition.
That's what I did yesterday.
It's what I'll do tomorrow.
It's like I have, and if you take a few steps back, like, well, that's pathetic.
That's your mission?
Paying tuition to some stupid Episcopal school that's completely rot the brains of your own children.
Why would you ever send them to a place like that?
Separate conversation.
But when you're in it, it provides a clarity that is at least speaking as a man is a beautiful thing.
The vast majority of men I know who've melted down meltdown after they get what they want.
Getting what you want is the great tragedy.
Totally.
100%.
It's like, I sold the company to private equity for a billion dollars.
And, you know, you have a celebration and Aspen and, you know, all your kids are like doing the calculations.
Well, how much, oh, I'm rich too.
And the whole family's super psyched.
You know what I mean?
What's that look like a year later?
I mean, maybe it looks great.
No, actually, I'm not going to lie.
It doesn't look great.
That's not good.
And I've never seen that.
I've seen it.
And I've never seen it end happily ever.
And I've certainly seen it in people I know well end in like existential crisis.
Like, what, what's the point of this?
You know, I can say the hotel I want.
I can fly to Barbados for the weekend in my plane.
Like, who cares?
Like, that's not actually gratifying.
I mean, by the way, not being poor, not having debt is great.
And that's where I am.
Super happy about it.
But anything over that does not bring you happiness.
And I just, I've been on both sides.
You did a monologue where at the end, you say people are devoid of purpose.
And then you use the word meaning.
Reminded me of Victor Frankl's book, Man Search for Meaning, one of the best books ever, where there's three different types of wills that he organized.
Will the power, very Nietzschean, will the pleasure, and then will to meaning.
Right.
What gives your life meaning?
My life?
Yeah.
Oh, well, I mean, my family.
I mean, it's not even a, not even a, no, it's obvious.
No, it is close.
But we have a generation that's told don't do that.
Oh, no.
I mean, that's the, that's the biggest lie.
Work at Citibank.
You could be a vice president.
Really?
What happens then?
What do I get?
Tax?
A wine problem?
Solitude?
I mean, it's like the biggest lie ever.
Work at Citibank.
You know, really what?
No, you shouldn't have kids.
What you should really do is like get a promotion.
Okay.
And then what happens?
Oh, I'm a corporate cog working for a creepy multinational publicly owned country.
Company doesn't care about me at all.
So what do I have?
Let me just see nothing.
Nothing.
No, I'm not, again, I just want to be super clear.
It's easier for me to say this because I'm not poor, but I'm being as honest as I can be when I say the threshold for happiness is getting rid of debt, getting rid of worry.
You don't want to worry about money.
Materially, yes.
That will make you unhappy.
I've been there.
So I'm not like one of these people like, oh, money doesn't matter.
Oh, it doesn't.
It's very Eastern.
Like, oh, it's just all, you know, that's a total lie.
No, I know, but I've been in debt.
I that's the other extreme.
Telling my wife what our credit card bill was and she bursts into tears.
So like, you know, that's unhappy.
And people are living that.
And I, I deeply sympathize, empathize.
But I'm just telling you on the other end of it, the threshold is paying off your debt and not worrying.
Above that, it's only trinkets.
And I mean that.
And I, I, so I, I, I mean that and I've lived it.
So um, you really have to have something that matters.
I mean, how are you passing your genes on, by the way?
This is like, I guess you're not allowed to say that or something.
The only things that matter are the things that eternally matter.
And I'm not just speaking about what happens after you die, though.
That's that's like one of the, you know, the big questions are: how are your kids?
Are they going to get married and reproduce so that your family continues after you die?
And then what happens after you die?
So, those are the questions.
Okay.
Those are the most basic questions that every civilization has fixated on because they're obvious.
They're right in front of your face.
Like, this ends.
People die.
Your elders die.
Your parents die.
You're like, oh, people die.
This ends.
Whoa, then what happens?
You're like, and then what?
If you can't even have a conversation about that, then like you're an idiot.
Like, you're actually an idiot.
And that's, of course, it also gives rise because those questions don't recede or disappear.
They just sublimate.
So that causes anxiety.
So you look at everyone in New York City freaking out about Omicron, which has killed not one person.
And these are like college-educated people.
They all went to Cornell and tell you they went to Ivy League school.
Cornell's not actually school.
Just so I know, it's an accident.
That's the true thought crime, by the way.
I don't care about any college at all, but I just love saying that because it offends them so much.
Oh, I went to Ivy League.
Really?
Which one?
I bet it was Cornell.
Was it Cornell?
Oh, you went to Cornell.
Okay, right.
And that's in Utica.
It's a key.
I know.
I know.
Call it Utica.
It drives them crazy.
Yeah.
So these are people who have like the essential credentials of our society.
I think they're high-functioning.
I, you know, I certainly know a lot of them.
I have relatives there.
They're not stupid necessarily.
Some of them are, but most are not stupid.
But they believe a cold, which has killed not one person globally.
The only person die of Omicron actually died with Omicron.
Not the same.
So like there's no demonstrated lethality here.
So why are you shutting your life down and canceling Christmas because you're neurotic?
It has nothing to do with Omicron.
It has to do with what's inside you.
And then the question is, well, what is that exactly?
What's inside you?
What are you so neurotic about, Charlie Kirk?
Have you never spent like 15 seconds thinking about what happens after you die, which you inevitably will, like every other living thing?
Oh, shut up.
Well, no wonder they're so neurotic.
You don't have kids.
So when you die, like that's kind of it for you.
Like you have within you, encoded within you in places that you cannot touch or change the desire to pass on.
But speaking of man, to pass on your genes.
You can't, that's not like some desire that you learned on a PBS show.
You were born with that.
Dogs have it.
That's biology.
So if you don't do that, it doesn't mean you're a bad person, but it does give rise to some anxiety.
And if you create a society that discourages that, then like you've got a society that's not serving people.
You've got a society that's driving people crazy.
So crazy that they think Omicron's going to kill them.
Or racism or whatever.
Right.
Or whatever.
You know, it's like sort of plug in your transference vehicle for the bumper sticker on the Prius.
Whatever they said.
But all of it is about this deep, unresolved anxiety within, unfortunately for the rest of us, a lot of the people who are running everything and have all the power.
That's the theology of Greta Thunberg, basically.
Yeah, poor Greta Thunberg.
She's just, I don't mean it to like attack.
I actually think she's a victim.
You're totally right.
She's totally a victim.
Like they're using a child.
It's disgusting.
Right.
To give you their dumb theory.
But it's the world is going to end.
Climate change or whatever.
Meteors coming, asteroid.
We need to.
You're not worry about climate change when you can get the OD deaths under, say, 50,000.
They're over 100 this year.
That's right.
So like, shut up.
Most oppressed generation in American history.
Most suicidal generation in American history.
Mostly.
Alcohol addicted, drug-addicted, least married on the verge of a population.
It's kind of weird that we have the oldest leadership in American history.
Do you think there's any connection?
Except the generic and octogenaries.
What do you mean by that?
That's interesting.
Well, let's see.
Joe Biden's 79.
Tony Fauci turns 81 this week.
He joins Nancy Pelosi, who's also 81.
So those three essentially run the country.
Most powerful Democrats.
And Schumer's like 76 or something.
Yeah.
You've got the most powerful Democrat in Washington.
and you've got the president of the United States and you've got the head of our public health apparatus and they're all in their 80s or about to get there.
That's not normal at all.
And I love and revere old people and I don't even mock Joe Biden's cognitive decline because I feel guilty because he's my elder, terrible president, but he's 79.
So like, don't make fun of him.
I feel that way.
However, when can we stop lying?
That's not a sign of a vigorous, healthy society when you've got 81-year-olds making all the decisions because they have a different perspective.
Generational Respect and Guilt00:03:58
As you move through life, I'm probably closer to the, I'm definitely closer to the end of it than the beginning of it, but I'm, you know, middle-aged.
The back nine tells me.
I'm in the back, back nine.
But I can just tell you, like you're, my kids, my four kids all left and my perspective changed a little bit.
I don't have kids in the house.
Luckily, I have a lot of younger people working for me and I just had kids in the house.
So it's pretty fresh in my memory.
But if I didn't, if it had been 40 years since I had kids in the house and something like Corona shows up, my overriding concern would be not dying of it because I'm 80.
So I don't want to die of it.
And whatever it takes to keep me from dying of it, I would want to do, including like destroying young people who are not at risk for it.
So let's talk.
So let's build this out.
So whenever I say anything like this on the show, I get the nastiest emails from 70 and 80 year olds.
It wouldn't be the opposite.
Shouldn't they be caring more about the future and not themselves?
It's almost, it's very paradoxical.
You know, look, I don't know.
All I know is what's happening.
And again, I say this with, I have a, you know, my favorite relative is 80.
And so I have, I have deep love for older people.
I hope to be one.
And I have, I have reflexive respect for them because I was raised that way.
Period.
However, the facts are that people born, you know, post-war, 46 to 65, that famous generation, you know, took a lot of the spoils.
You're talking about baby boomers.
I am.
Especially late baby boomers.
That's exactly right.
And so that's just true.
Look at the numbers.
So you had this massive runup of wealth post-war as the United States took over the world.
And a wildly disproportionate percentage of that wealth went to that generation who are now aging out of their productive years.
And the people they left behind who are supposed to be moving up into the productive years are much poorer than any generation in the modern era.
And not just materially poor, but every other metric.
But also materially poor.
I mean, if you just want to just do it materially, because that's the easiest thing to measure, like we just use Department of Labor statistics for that.
Like they're much less likely.
I mean, the 30-year-old's living with roommates.
Okay.
And they can't get married and they can't have kids.
So if you don't see that as a crisis, or by the way, as the prelude to some actual turmoil, in addition to the moral imperative that we have to make sure that the next generation thrives, which is our overriding moral imperative.
It's what grandparents are programmed to.
Ask anybody to become a grandparent.
I'm pushing my children very hard to make me one.
Any grandparents like, I can't believe this.
It's so great.
Like grandparents go crazy over grandchildren.
It's like, I'm just learning this.
It's amazing to watch it.
Why do they do that?
Because what they're looking at is their own progeny.
They're looking at their own genes extending beyond their own death.
That's nature, okay, which has been banned, but I don't care.
That's what's so thrilling about it.
So grandparents have a huge role in preparing and protecting and helping the next generation thrive.
So it's not like old people are designed to hurt young people.
That's not what I'm saying.
I agree.
I'm just confused why that's happening then.
It is absolutely happening at such a scale that it's just like, I don't know, there's something about personally, I've always thought that generation had a disproportionate number of loathsome people in it.
And I mean that.
So I was born in 69.
So they were my teachers and they were defined by their narcissism.
That was kind of the overriding quality that stuck to me as a kid sitting in class, listening to them blather on about their time at Woodstock.
Shut up.
Teach me math, which they never did.
But I remember thinking, like, these people talk about themselves too much.
It's not good to talk about yourself all the time at all.
And they always did.
I mean, this has just been my, as an observer of that generation, I've always thought they were disgusting.
Not all of them.
I know a million people I love in that generation, but I always thought most of them are like the worst people I've ever met.
And so it shouldn't, and I really mean that.
And so it shouldn't maybe surprise us that they took all the dough and left everybody else like kind of wondering what the future holds.
Oh, you know, indentured servitude to the Chinese government.
Are We Just Animals00:03:49
Okay, good luck.
It's like, that's how it feels.
I'll be at Pebble Beach.
That's how it feels.
That's how it feels to young people.
Let me as a 52-year-old speak to you as a man in his 20s about how young people feel.
But I hear it.
No, no, you're constantly.
And I try to communicate this to people of that generation.
And they're not totally wrong when they say young people don't want to work and they're lazy, but whatever.
Like, fine, I think there's a part of that.
But we conservatives get it so wrong when they act as if the system is exactly the same as it was in the 1970s was now.
It's grotesquely.
But they act as if, oh, when I was in college, it was easy.
I didn't have to go to debt.
And we just got married and things got better.
It was what I have some problems with this guy, Eric Weinstein would call the ego, the embedded growth obligation.
Yeah.
And baby boomers like, of course, things get better.
They always get better.
But that's so unwise.
I mean, you have an obligation to, you know, wisdom is hard to acquire.
And like the knowledge of things that are eternal.
I work on it every day.
I sit my sauna for an hour every day trying to become wiser.
It doesn't, doesn't work most, most of the time, but you should at least try.
And by wise, it's not just what are the facts.
It's the bigger question, which is what do they mean?
Yes.
And, you know, it's hard to, again, it's very hard to achieve that.
I fail constantly, but it's our duty to try because we owe that to the people who will follow us.
I mean, this really is, I'm very interested in the natural world.
I'm a hunter and a fisherman and an owner of four dogs.
So I spend a lot of time thinking about animals.
I love animals.
I think about animals a lot.
I think we learn a lot from animals.
I think we ignore animals because maybe we learn too much.
The similarities are too profound.
You know, throw them in a giant shed and inject them with crap and kill them in the middle of the night or whatever.
I'm kind of, you know, a little more with Pete on that stuff.
But as a spiritual matter, I'm struck by how much we don't learn from watching them.
Like, how far away from human beings do we really think dogs are?
Like light years?
And you don't mean Darwinian in a Darwinian sense.
You just mean.
Not at all.
I mean that they're living things.
They're mammals that have highly evolved systems of communicating with one another.
They have highly evolved hierarchies.
Their behavior is not simple at all.
And the more you watch it, the more you're struck by it.
Like, wait a second, that's a dog.
Why are they doing that?
They're just a dog.
Like he literally eats dog food off the floor.
So like, why should I care what they do?
Watch them for a week and you're like, well, wait a second.
You know, these dogs like have very intense feelings about certain things.
The hierarchies of dogs are fascinating.
The rules they create for each other are fascinating.
So you watch all of this stuff and you're like, that's kind of what we do.
It's not exactly the same, but it's the same idea.
So then you realize, oh, we're animals too.
And we're the animals put in charge of all the other animals, in my opinion, as a Christian.
But it doesn't mean we're not animals.
We are.
Therefore, we are bound by roughly the same, or at least a set of natural rules.
Laws of nature.
Yes, that is real.
Yes.
And in my opinion, the science-y, I'm trying to use profanity in your show, but it's science, it's science.
You're throwing science at people don't understand.
There is no science.
There's a method that's exactly right.
Okay.
There's no book of science.
You moron.
Who gave you a degree from Cornell?
But anyway, A lot of this stuff seems like an elaborate attempt, perhaps not conscious, to keep us from considering that we are animals, that we do exist in nature, that we are bound by some limits that nature imposes.
It doesn't even need to be God-based, but these are just the rules.
Like if you stay out overnight below zero, you're going to die.
Like, I don't know what to say.
That's the rule.
You can't transition out of that.
You can't identify as someone who lives through exposure.
This is the issue no one wants to talk about.
Yeah, I know.
Journalism and Power Dynamics00:15:44
Where the ruling class believes in the malleable man.
Because they think they're God.
That's why they love abortion.
Their girls don't get abortions.
They don't actually love abortion.
They love the power over life and death.
That's why they love wars, especially the ones that are no cost to them.
If you're Anthony Blinken, if you're Tony Blinken and you're like a frustrated pop musician who wound up somehow as Secretary of State and you've never achieved anything in your life, the one thing that you can do, the one way you can exert power, how?
Killing people.
You're the Secretary of State.
You can force a war.
No, I'm saying, this is how they think.
So there's like a big coping mechanism or it's like these, look, one of the basic desires, as you noted, is to exert power over your environment.
Hey, world, I was here.
You know, my life meant something.
I am an individual in a sea of billions, yet still significant.
So in order to signal that, you know, you wave your arms, you exert power over something.
Like, I can drink this Pellegrino.
Like, I am a man.
I am not an animal.
I am a man.
So the higher up you go, the greater the desire is.
And that's whether they're in the first place to exert power, is people going to journalism, to exert power.
The more overriding your desire is.
And I would say most of the time, it's because you're compensating for this deep emptiness within.
You have a barren personal life most of the time.
You're not actually deriving fulfillment at home.
Your kids don't love you.
Your wife has contempt for you.
So you go to work and you're like, well, damn, you know, like, what can I add?
Invade Iran.
I'm not joking.
I'm not joking.
I'm not taking it as a person.
I'm not sure if I'm going to live my whole life around these people.
Like I, you look around, you're like, oh, wow, that person has a really sad personal life.
Oh, so does that one?
Oh, there's Mitch McConnell.
That's the saddest of all.
And, or whatever, you know, all these people.
And then it approaches like 90% of our political leaders have these sad, barren personal lives.
You're like, what are the odds of that?
If I picked, you know, 535 people out of the phone book, what percentage would have sad, barren, personal lives?
Maybe 40%, half, or whatever.
In a bad year, 60%?
Probably not 95%.
So like, how did we get to a political class where everybody has a sad, barren personal life?
And you finally conclude after 35 years there, as I did, maybe there's a connection between their sad, barren personal lives and the fact they are where they are.
Maybe they're compensating for what they don't have by exerting power over the people.
Oh, now I'm very much a sub-genius.
So it took me decades to figure this out.
But once I did, it explained pretty much everything.
So we're all just pawns in there, massive coping.
I mean, I'm actually not like, ask anybody who lives there, what percentage of members of Congress go home to like some happy spouse and well-adjusted children.
I mean, there are, I'm sure there is one, you know, I'm sure there are some.
It's not the majority.
It's not a third.
It's less than that.
So like Josh Hawley.
I think Josh Hawley seems like a total, I don't know anything about his personal personal life.
I sure liked him.
I sure like him.
I can think of a couple of people who I think like are close to their spouses.
But like if you were to take a cross-section of people who install drywall, you know what I mean?
Most don't speak, even speak English, you know, but you just like went home with them.
Like, are their kids like to see them?
Are their ladies happy?
They're home.
Yeah, kind of actually.
You know, probably pretty cheerful families.
Maybe, you know, too much beer drinking or whatever, bad tattoos, but ultimately, pretty happy scene.
You know, I don't think you see that in the home of the average senator.
In fact, I know you don't.
And you see a lot of deception, a lot of weirdness, a lot of secret lives.
It's like, what is this?
Did all the weirdos go into politics?
And the answer is, yeah, they did.
They were gravitated towards it.
Yeah, they gravitated towards it.
And journalism too.
Talk about that.
When I was a kid, my dad, you know, was a journalist and hadn't graduated high school, joined the Marine Corps.
I didn't grow up in poverty or anything, but he didn't graduate high school and he joined the Marine Corps.
So like that, that's where he was from in New England.
But he was very smart and read a book a day.
And it was just, you know, he was a native intellectual and he wound up thriving in journalism.
And there were a lot of people like that.
You know, guys got out of the military and they were smart, but they didn't know what to do.
And they're like, oh, it'd be kind of interesting to cover murders.
Like, that's what my dad did.
And so you had a lot of sort of, it was, it was a great cross-section of America.
He had some rich kids, like Otis Chandler's kid worked at the LA Times or whatever with my dad.
But then my dad was there.
And now, but the idea of it, the idea of it, the whole purpose of it wasn't to exert influence over American society and like get this person elected, crush that person.
I do think Watergate and anyone, I came, of course, after Watergate, 20 years after Watergate, but I know a lot of guys who covered Watergate and they all say everything changed because that's when the Washington Post figured out it could take down a president without relitigating Watergate and whether Nixon should have been destroyed by it.
That's what happened.
The Washington Post unseated the sitting president who had just won a year before in the biggest landslide in American history in 1972.
Only lost one state.
Yeah.
And they took him out.
So whether he deserved it or not, I mean, again, that's a separate conversation, but that's pretty heady.
So one day you're just like some douchey metro reporter called Carl Bernstein, who really is like an idiot.
It's super like uninteresting.
Well, he's an idiot.
Woodward's not an idiot, I would say.
It's a whole separate thing there, but Woodward's not dumb.
But Carl Bernstein's like dumb.
I worked for him briefly.
I can vouch for that.
And he's a metro reporter, like covering Maryland politics, I think, on the metro deck.
Like lost dogs.
Yeah, you know, city council meetings in Silver Spring.
Yeah.
And the next thing you know, like Carl Bernstein is being portrayed by some famous actor, Dustin Hoffman, and he's like taking down the president.
He's marrying Nora Efren.
And you're like, wow.
That's kind of, you know, you want to exert some power over American society, become a newspaper reporter.
Well, that totally changed the profile of newspaper reporters like forever.
So instead of going to go become a general, they became bureaucrats of the world.
100%.
Or, you know, worming your way through, I mean, during the New Deal, all these ambitious, in some cases, really bad people wound up in the, in the Roosevelt administration because it was huge.
It was growing.
And if you were a smart, you know, it was the Depression, you're a smart, ambitious person.
Maybe that's a place that you can get your vision of America enacted.
And a lot of people with very similar attitudes wound up in journalism after Watergate.
And all of a sudden you wake up one morning.
I get in in 91, August of 91, and have never left.
But during that time, just those 30 years, the composition of the business has changed completely.
Like there's no one who's not like that.
They're all from the same, all from the same world.
Now, I am also from that world, just to be blunt about it.
You know, I am.
I am also from that world.
I mean, I went to private school and all that.
So it's not like I like stood out or something, but my attitudes were always very different.
Like I'm not, if I wanted to be a politician, I guess I probably could because I live in Washington.
I could work my way up to the Treasury Department or something like that and become undersecretary of whatever.
That was my goal, but I don't want that.
You know, I want an interesting life.
That's why I went into it.
But these people went into it because they wanted to exert power.
That's a theological problem.
Well, it's scary.
It's scary.
I mean, it's totally scary.
And that's what the media have this disproportionate power, which I guess redounds to my benefits since I'm in it, but I still don't like it.
In a democracy, you know, you shouldn't have elections determined by what the New York Times thinks.
Like, how is that Democrat?
Small D Democratic.
It's not.
Like the election should be determined by the votes.
And the point of the media during an election is to put, I mean, people have their views, their biases.
I get it.
It's fine.
You have an op-ed page, but it's to get as much information in the hands of voters as possible in the belief that it's their country and they have a right to pick their leaders.
So you just inform them and then they'll decide.
You shouldn't be withholding information from people or beating them over the head or calling them names if they don't like your candidate.
Like, what is this?
Like, what is this?
And I guess the one advantage of being, you know, older than 30 is I remember when it wasn't like that, when the media were very liberal and they hated George H.W. Bush and whatever, who cares?
But they weren't like putting the thumb on the scale and preventing the release of documents that might hurt their candidate.
Like, that's just crazy that that were leaking privileged documents from Project Veritas they got from it's beyond belief.
And then it just kind of just kind of happens.
And whatever.
I mean, I could go on for hours.
Last thing I'll say: if you're in journalism and you find yourself sucking up to the people in power to the detriment of the people without power, you have lost the thread.
You've inverted your duty.
You should be on the side of people who have no voice.
That's the whole point of the business is to be the stand-in for the public and to say, hey, you know, answer the freaking question, pal.
Like we elected you to do this.
Like, what?
You don't get to either, you know what I mean?
Like, how dare you?
I'm here on behalf of voters.
So answer the question.
Like, that's the posture.
It's missing on both sides.
What?
It's totally missing.
It's totally missing.
And I thought that this morning when I was on the plane, I, a buddy of mine, who you know texted me this thing about Brett Kavnaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
And I was like, could it really be that they're that bad?
You know, maybe we should have dug in a little deeper.
I probably should have.
I was so taken by Amy Coney Barrett's, I'll admit it, you know, style and life story.
And she seemed like such a decent person and all those kids.
And I'm a sucker for that.
And, but maybe we should have taken one more time to find out what she believes.
Because if she's for vax mandates, like, how the hell did she wind up at the Supreme Court with massive conservative support?
That's grotesque.
That's grotesque.
She's shameful that she would be for that.
Like, how did that happen?
So if that turns out to be true, and Brett Kavanaugh, I'll be totally honest.
I thought I got completely shafted.
I never liked the guy.
It's something about him I didn't like.
I was like, I would not be friends with that guy.
Whatever.
It doesn't matter.
He was unfairly treated.
I defended him.
Amy Coney Barrett, I was like, I like her.
But if both of them turn out to be for vax mandates, then I think conservative media, including me, very much including me, need to ask, like, were we as aggressive as we should have been on behalf of our viewers when we vetted these people?
Or do we make it all about how the left is crazy?
Well, of course, the left's crazy.
They're dangerous.
They're literally dangerous.
I'd leave my house.
Trust me, they're dangerous.
I get my fair share of death threats.
I know you do.
I just walked in your building and they're like, the police are here at Charlie's place.
I get it.
So that's true.
And everybody knows it, but that's not the whole story.
Just because the left is dangerous and insane, comma, which they are, comma, doesn't mean that we don't have an obligation to ask, like, okay, so Amy Coney Barrett has all these kids.
She seems like a sterling person.
Doubtless she is.
She's a Christian.
That's important to me.
But like, if there's a vax mandate, how will she rule on that?
Maybe I should have asked that question.
Probably should have.
And she was confirmed during the virus.
Is that true?
Well, think about it.
It was 2020.
Ruth Beter Ginsburg passed away on September 30th or so, 2020.
So it would have been an appropriate question, right?
Yeah.
We're Kavanaugh, who wouldn't even thought about it.
Daily share just rattle your brain.
Like, I don't, I, my wife told me it's going to be 2022.
So I'm just so cut off.
Not 1984.
Yeah.
To me, it's Saturday.
That's that's as far ahead as I can go.
So two more topics I'm going to go through, if that's okay.
Get me.
Russia.
Russia.
Look, I'm going to need to check with my handovers of the crime lineman before we continue this conversation.
It's all so stupid.
I mean, I moved to Washington at 15 to Georgetown.
My dad worked for the government.
He left journalism, went to work for the government, prosecuting the Cold War.
So, you know, I studied Soviet history.
I literally, what day is it, Saturday?
Thursday, finished another book.
on the Bolshevik Revolution.
I'm really interested in the subject.
Oh, I love it.
It's really interesting.
The lead up to it.
Oh, yeah.
Lenin being released from prison.
40 years.
Since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, which was like a big deal in my house, I've been interested in the Soviet Union and I still am.
I'll be Kulak soon.
Exactly.
So, but it's not like, you know, the right was soft on the Russians.
I'll remind you that it was the U.S. government under Franklin Roosevelt that armed Joseph Stalin in 1941 under Lendlease.
We literally armed the Soviet army, okay?
Against the National Socialist Workers.
Yeah, against the Nazis.
Nazis are bad.
I'm not.
No, no, no, for sure.
But it's like, wait, we armed.
Okay.
You can be against the Nazis, and I'm glad that we were, without arming Joseph Stalin and then kind of conveniently forgetting about it.
So if you're the party that armed Joseph Stalin in 1941, so 1941 was three years after the last of the big show trials.
He killed like 90% of the Soviet office corps.
General Tukhachevsky.
Completely.
Yeah.
Every Zanoviev, Kamenev, like, you know, all the old Bolsheviks.
This was all going on in public as covered by Walter Dravanti of the New York Times on a public surprise for it.
The Ukraine famine, all this stuff.
This was all general.
This was known.
This was publicly known.
A lot of people wrote about it, including Orwell, but also American Steinbeck.
If at that point you decided, you know, I'm an idea.
Let's arm Joseph Stalin with tanks and airplanes and not in a small way, in a huge way, okay?
Then at some point, shouldn't you apologize for that?
What month was that in 41?
I'm asking.
It was early 41st.
That was before we got in.
I was saying before we entered.
Oh, absolutely.
It was the end of our neutrality.
And by the way, I'm not arguing against war in Europe.
I'm certainly not arguing for the Nazis.
My God, of course not.
What I'm arguing against is arming Joseph Stalin.
Okay.
So like, that's insane that we did that.
Most people have no idea that we did that.
If there's a great justification for it, let me know what that might be.
It is a total atrocity.
And so it's just so funny for that political party to be like, oh, yeah, we're against Russia.
What?
Okay, just be quiet.
It's not about, yeah, okay.
Everyone's complicated feelings about Russia, very much including me.
I'm hardly pro-Russia.
I've never even been to Russia.
What I'm for is America.
And the question that we have to ask first, second, and third before any foreign policy question is resolved is, how does this benefit our core national interest?
That's all I'm saying.
So is defending the border between Eastern Ukraine and Russia an essential American interest valuable, essential enough that, say, we might sacrifice American lives, including my 24-year-old son.
And the answer, of course, is what?
Stop smoking weed, dude.
No, that's crazy.
I don't care how many lobbying dollars Ukraine is throwing into Washington.
That's insane.
And anyone who suggested, including all these dumb Republicans, like that moron from Mississippi, whose name I can- Roger Wicker.
Roger Wicker.
God, that guy's dumb.
Or just re-emphasize what he said.
He said, we have to use, we might have to get to a place.
Nuclear weapons?
Against Russia.
We're going to get 2 million foreign nationals over our southern border this year.
And no one cares.
Roger Wicker doesn't seem to care.
2 million.
So that's a full blown infant.
2 million?
I mean, that's multiple.
That's Denver plus Boston plus Chattanooga.
Plus two Montanas.
Thank you.
It's a math guy.
Rescuing me.
You're totally right.
It's two Montanas.
It's two mains, main and a half.
Yeah, so here's the point: you're telling me at exactly the moment that's going on.
It's not an overstatement, it's not some right-wing Fox News talking point to say we don't have a southern border.
We don't, we literally demonstrably don't.
You're telling me that Ukraine's eastern border with Russia, without even getting into the history of it and like how many Russians there, I don't even care.
NATO Expansion Concerns00:03:24
Kind of how Ukraine's like kind of a made-up country, but whatever.
Whatever.
I mean, you know, I want everyone to live in harmony.
I'm totally opposed to wars.
I've seen two of them.
I'm against them.
I'm not even going to get into that and take Russia's side.
I'm taking America's side.
How is that more important than our own border?
And if you're suggesting that it is, you know, talking to you now, Congress senator from Iowa, Joni Ernst.
Oh, what a nice person.
I mean, I think Joni Ernst is so nice.
Every time we see Johnny Ernst, I'm like, Johnny Ernst, how you know, Senator, great to see you.
I watched Joni Ernst.
She has no idea.
She can find Ukraine on a map and she's like, oh, really, it's the most important thing.
And I'm like, I just felt so sorry for her because she is such a nice person.
I think she's pretty conservative in ways that I am, that I like, but she's living in a world where these people talk to each other all the time and they're like, no, really, the border of Eastern border, Ukraine, Roger Wicker, who was like nothing else going on in his life.
You know, he gets to pretend he's an expert on Ukraine.
Oh, do you speak Ukrainian now, Roger Wicker?
You big, you big Russia file.
You know a lot about Russia.
Do you really tell me?
These are idiots, but they talk to each other.
They think they have secret esoteric knowledge from their dumb briefings in the Senate committee and they convince themselves that they know much more than you do.
And the next thing you know, poor, you know, Joni Ernst, who again is just such a nice person, comes out of the meeting and she's like, well, yeah, actually, no, no, no.
And she's repeating what she just heard.
And it's also humiliating, but it's also totally disconnected from the actual concerns of Americans.
So you have to wonder, like, how long does this continue exactly?
I mean, I think for quite a while.
Don't ask me more questions, man.
I just can't, I can't decelerate.
I'll just ask one more question about the Russia thing.
Is it just Soviet muscle memory?
Is that what it is?
I think it's like some of these guys got so hung up.
You know, there's a whole infrastructure that is being supported.
And I didn't want to get into that.
Brookings and all of that.
No.
I mean, what's NATO?
North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It was 46 or 49 after the war.
Yeah, it was post-war, but I think it was, I think it was 49, but whatever.
My memory's slipping.
Oh, age.
But of course, it was created.
It was an alliance between the ally Western Europe to keep the Soviets from invading Western Europe, which was an actual concern.
That's why we kept our troops in Germany and England at Great Britain now.
And we were worried about that for 40 years, you know, from 1945 until really 1991, when it August, when it really all like fully collapsed.
And so that was worth having.
I think NATO did a completely solid job.
They were one of our main instruments in the Cold War, which we won.
Great.
But rather than acknowledging victory and redeploying to like the next new thing, because there is always a next new thing, turned out to be China.
I don't know if that was obvious in 91, but it certainly shortly thereafter became obvious.
We never did.
And we didn't because like NATO junkets and NATO positions are an ambassador to NATO.
You expanded NATO 100%.
Well, that's the other thing.
And organizations after a certain point of scale exist to perpetuate themselves.
And they kind of act like organisms in the natural world.
You know, they repel invasion, they protect their borders.
You know, the amoeba kind of scoots along looking for sustenance.
And that's just the nature of organizations, nature of human organizations.
And God, you see it in Washington and you certainly see it in NATO and all these other post-war institutions that are not serving really any purpose.
What's the purpose of NATO?
Faith Traditions Turning Hollow00:02:57
To sustain itself.
You know, you could have done this interview in half the time.
Thank you.
Because you sum things up much more crisply than I'm capable of, but to sustain itself.
Thank you.
So the last thing, because I don't want to work you too hard before you have to speak to our students.
Christianity on your life, impact you had in your life.
We have a lot of listeners of faith, a lot of pastors we deal with.
People ask me all the time, what's Tucker's faith?
You know, just as shortly as you want or as long as you want.
I would say my faith, my faith is, if I had to sum it up, profound but peasant-like.
So I grew up in a very specific faith tradition, which, you know, was impressive in my view for, you know, the faith of my ancestors for a long time and then very rapidly became a hollowed out, a husk, and then a parody of itself.
The Episcopal Church in the United States, the builders of the National Cathedral in Washington.
A lot of founders were Anglican.
Oh, of course.
Of George Washington being one of them.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's the Church of England in the United States.
So, but I grew up in it.
And, you know, one of the rules in the Episcopal Church is you're not allowed to talk about it.
It's kind of the mafia.
You can't talk.
You know, you go to church, but you can't talk about what you think.
So, but one of the, and then there's always drama in the church.
So like the church completely collapsed while I was a member of it and became this kind of repellent, you know, actively anti-Christian organization.
And I mean, I watched it happen.
I was there.
And I had relatives in it and everything.
So as a result, maybe of that, I mean, since you asked about my own personal faith, I really became kind of anti-theology.
Like Episcopalians by their nature spend a lot of time arguing about theology.
What do you mean by that?
Look, it's, I think there are people who are naturally suited for theological debates.
I think they're objectively important.
I'm glad that there are people who are thinking about and debating, you know, what the theology is.
I mean that in a, you know, the reason of God is what theology is.
Yeah, transubstantiation.
Like people mock that debate, but when it took place, it was, it was absolutely real debate.
Yes, of course.
People died over the debate.
So, um, and I don't begrudge them their passions on that.
I'm not suited for that.
I am.
I'm right there with you, by the way.
I get kind of bored by all that back.
Yeah.
So I just asked about the big thing.
I'm a simple man.
I pray in my sauna every day, go through all my kids.
I go through all my dogs, Meg and Dave, Brookie and Alice, and, you know, all my relatives and people I love.
And my prayers are very simple, but I think they work, actually.
I'm married to a woman who's much more systematic about it.
And, you know, if I go through periods in my life that were rocky, you know, I am totally convinced that that made the difference.
Her, you know, writing in her nooseleaf prayer journal every night, and which, you know, 30 years ago when I first married, I was like, really?
It's like, can you turn a light out?
Now I'm like, you know, have you written in your prayers?
David Frum's Deep Thoughts00:03:14
Yeah.
We have so many people in our orbit, in our personal family orbit who we love, and life is so precarious.
And as you get older, you really understand how precarious it is when like, you know, people get weird diseases at early ages or die of this, that, or the other thing.
The chaos of life.
You really do see it.
You really see it in a way that you don't see it when you're 22.
I didn't anyway.
And so as I get older, you know, I think my faith is greatly deepened.
The last thing I'll say is there's clearly something supernatural going on here.
Of course there is.
I'm the last person to as an Anglican Tucker.
I'm like, Episcopalian.
I'm the last person to explain what it is.
Is there a spiritual war going on, Tucker?
Well, let me put it this way.
So I'm kind of, you know, I'm an inductive reasoner.
So like, just look around and you're like, okay, these are the things that we notice.
And then let's work back from that to why they might be happening.
And I've had no problem doing that for like 25 years, 28 years.
That's why you were a crime reporter.
100%.
It's like a super fun job.
It's like you start with the body.
I can picture a body now.
Why she got in the car?
That's why there's the 100%.
This guy actually stole a TV, was killed naked.
Quite a crime scene, I will say.
But anyway, so my job is to figure out like, how do we get to the naked dead guy and the blood on the walls?
Like, what happened?
And it was, and it's sad, of course, we acknowledge that, but also interesting.
Super interesting.
Using that very basic way of understanding the world has stopped working in the last two years because you're seeing people do things that are not only counterproductive to the interests of the society, they're counterproductive to their own interests.
Diabolical.
Well, so you can't say like, oh, people are doing this because I hear people say, like, this vaccine stuff is evil.
I believe that.
But I hope you say, well, it's because the Pfizer stock price.
Well, yeah, I mean, sure.
But that's not the whole answer.
I'm sorry.
It's not.
That's not why people are going on social media and being like, you must take the vax or we're going to kill you.
David Frum's like, anyone who doesn't get the vacc should be killed, basically.
They should be triaged.
Quietly triage.
That was the worst part of it.
The quiet part of it.
So you have to, I hear David Frum phrase.
Because you wanted to do it in the shadows.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
David Frum's a lot smarter than I. He's a warmonger.
For sure.
But I'm just saying as a person, David Frum has an IQ much higher than mine.
I mean, I worked with David Frum, you know, for a number of years.
Like I've sat in a drill meeting with David From every week.
David Frum is really smart.
No joke.
I mean, I'm not a fan, but he is really smart.
So you have to ask yourself, why would David Frum be calling for, quote, quietly triaging American citizens with the facts?
Like, that doesn't even make sense.
That's so dark.
There's no justification for that.
It's coming from a man who absolutely, absolutely has the capacity to know better than that.
He's not a Philistine at all.
He's a cultured person.
Why is he saying that?
And below David Frum, who's at the very top of the, in my opinion, the high, the IQ pyramid, he's, I can't understand.
The guy's really smart, in my opinion.
You go down like that, where you get to like the middlebrow people and then the dumb people.
And they're just like, let's just murder them.
And you have to ask, like, why are people saying that?
Are they getting something out of it?
No, they're not getting anything out of it.
Does society benefit?
No.
Does it make sense?
No.
So there's no actual motive for this.
And I could name many other examples.
Defon the police.
How's that going to work, Dumbo?
Questioning Cultured Elites00:01:25
Yes.
It's only a gender transition for nine-year-olds.
Thank you.
So it's only going to destroy.
And so if you see this force at work from which no one is benefiting, really, whose only purpose is destruction, maybe you're not looking at a human force.
Maybe you're looking at something that's like can't be explained with reason or conventional motives of the kind I'm used to assassinating in Washington.
Oh, he's getting paid by the lobbyist.
That's why he's doing that.
That's not what's going on here.
There's something much deeper going on here.
And I have no idea what it is because, again, I'm an Episcopalian, but I will say.
You're getting in the evangelical world here, Tucker.
You're really?
You're getting no idea how far that is from where I'm from.
But yes, true.
You're coming into our orbit here.
I hope you.
I'm going to have to give up the nicotine before you let me come in.
Yeah, exactly.
But drug tests do every week.
You better believe it.
In fact, I'm going to have one.
Just think about it.
I'm just making this.
This is there's a spiritual dimension to this.
Of course there is.
Of course there is.
You don't have to even be a Christian to recognize.
I am one, but like you don't have to be.
So that's where I am.
Tucker, this is great.
Thanks so much.
Thank you, Charlie.
You bet.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support our show, it's charliekirk.com slash support.
Thanks so much, everybody.
God bless.
Talk to you soon.
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