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Sept. 24, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
55:03
Tucker Carlson on Charlie Kirk Assassination Fallout, Free Speech, Foreign Policy, and the Reaction to his Kirk Remarks

Tucker Carlson discusses ongoing fallout from Charlie Kirk's assassination, threats to free speech, developments in foreign policy, and the reaction to his comments from Charlie Kirk's memorial service. ------------------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Good evening.
It's Tuesday, September 23rd.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, we don't actually need much of an introduction.
As we've noted before, there really is no such thing as a s slow news cycle in the Trump era, but that has been particularly true over the last two and a half weeks, not only because of Charlie Kirk's murder and all the various fallouts from it, but also a whole variety of other undercovered stories that were happening during the last couple of weeks that has made the last, say, two to three weeks a particularly intense news cycle.
One of the people who has been at the heart of much of it, in part because he was a longtime friend of Chuck uh of Charlie Kirk and has been speaking about his friend, but also because he was involved in a little preposterous controversy that emerged out of the Charlie Kirk memorial, but also we wanted to talk to him about a whole variety of more substantive issues as well is somebody who needs no introduction.
His name is Tucker Carlson, the person who became a much larger and influential figure as a result of the luck of being let go by Fox News and catapulted to independent media, and he is here with us tonight, and we don't want to waste any time.
So I believe Tucker is ready, so we want to just dive right into it without a lot of the fanfare that we normally get at the beginning of the show.
Tucker, good evening.
It's great to see you.
Uh how's it going?
Thanks for joining us.
Oh man, it's always an honor and a great pleasure to see you.
Thank you.
Yeah, I feel the same way.
All right, so uh before we get into the kind of news cycle events I want to discuss with you.
You have a on the Tucker Carlson Network, you have produced a five-part documentary that re-examines some of the questions about the 9-11 attack that have never really been answered, and even some disturbing components of it in terms of cover-up of evidence and the like.
And uh, we want to show a 30-second clip just of the preview to encourage people who are interested to watch it.
I believe it's streaming on Tucker Carlson Networks, and we'll put the links up for those who want to watch it.
But here's a 30-second clip for the I believe I don't know if it's for the whole series or or the first episode, but let's show it anyway.
The official 9-11 commission report, sold to the American public and the world for decades as the definitive account of what happened that day, is a lie.
My name is Mark Rossini.
I'm a former FBI agent.
Before 9-11, there were no sources in Al Qaeda.
And that is the truth.
And no one has ever answered those questions because the House will come tumbling down.
The House will be answered.
Now it's so interesting because since 9-11, there's been this whole series of embarrassing debacles on the part of our power centers, the Iraq war and and the 2008 financial crisis and COVID and Russia Gate and so many more that have really destroyed trust and faith in Americans' institution.
But at the time of 9-11, that really wasn't the case.
I think most people roughly thought the official story offered for how the 9-11 attack happened was more or less accurate.
I think most people in mainstream circles, I would include myself, I think you were among them as well, kind of dismissed people who were on the fringe of saying, no, we need to look at this differently.
The official story doesn't make a lot of sense.
And obviously, you have decided that there are things worth looking at here.
Why is that?
What gave you this kind of impetus to decide that you wanted to delve into this?
Well, just to correct the record, I I didn't dismiss people who had questions about 9-11.
I attacked them savagely as lunatics and as people who were soiling the memory of those killed on 9-11, like a lot of people had a friend killed on 9-11.
Um, and I was really angry and sort of awful to people who asked legitimate questions.
I mean, almost all questions are legitimate as far as I'm concerned, as long as they're offered in good faith.
And I think these were.
So, you know, I had a toning to do for my own behavior.
But I wanted to revisit this for the same reason I think all of us are revisiting a lot of assumptions that we had.
And it's the string of disasters predicated on lies that you just listed.
And none of those disasters has ever been followed by a reckoning.
And that's the most I think it's the most frustrating part.
It's not like I haven't done dumb stuff.
Well, I just admitted it.
and you're a father, you know, your kids routinely do dumb stuff, like about 15 times a day.
But there always has to be a point, and this is the point where you say to the child, you know, please acknowledge what you did.
Maybe there's a punishment, maybe there's not, acknowledging it is itself a punishment.
And the reason you go through that ritual, and it's the most human of all rituals, is to teach the wrongdoer something and to lower the likelihood it'll happen again.
And we abandoned that ritual completely in this country, and instead the wrongdoers, and we identify a number of them in the in the documentary series, were rewarded for their wrongdoing, and that would include George Tennet at CIA, it would include John Brennan, uh, also at CIA.
It would include the entire CIA, which saw its its funding dramatically increase after allowing this disaster to happen, whether they did it on purpose or not, I I can't say.
There's no question they allowed it.
And to see the worst people, Condi Rice, uh, for example, George W. Bush got re-elected after this, again and again and again and again, um, thrive is too much.
And actually, if that continues over time, your country falls apart because it eliminates not only does it eliminate trust, it also stokes revolutionary levels of resentment.
So you can't actually keep doing that without killing yourself.
Um, and that we're there, and we're at that point now.
And that's part of the reason people are so, I think spun up up with a Charlie Kirk assassination investigation, because this is just the point where there has to be honesty, or else, you know, people could get unruly.
Anyway, I just thought we we should start at the beginning.
I agree with your assessment completely.
9 11 was the beginning of this kind of event.
I mean, you could say that Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination, uh, I would agree with both.
But this was the first time millions of people saw something happen live on television, and then within a decade or two began to reassess like what is it?
Um, so that's the reason, just because I want the country to continue.
You know, it's funny, I I was thinking about uh DJF K assassination, because of course when I was growing up, I thought that case had been solved, like the RFK killing and the you know, it's the iconography that we're taught.
And I remember the first time I went back and looked at the JFK assassination in my early 20s, I was shocked.
Not necessarily because I concluded that the official story was wrong and I knew who did it, but there was so much done as part of the attempt to tell the American people that it was just a single uh gunman that was so blatantly corrupting and should have destroyed trust in the process,
beginning with the fact that obviously the CIA was a suspect, and yet they took the person who was the dominant figure of the CIA for deck for a full decade, and even once he he was fired by by JFK for the Bay of Pigs, uh was uh Alan Daulles was still very closely tied to the CIA, and they made him like the most influential person on the Warden Commission.
So you had like a major suspect with this incredible influence.
And what I want to ask you is, you know, between that kind of thing and all the errors that we've come to learn are in the 9-11 report, if you want to be generous about it, do you think that sometimes governments are actually engaged in some like malicious cover-up where there was some very disruptive and dangerous and evil plot that was behind it, and they're just trying to do their best to hide it and make sure that the culprits are never caught?
Or is it more like we don't really trust the public?
And if we allow too many things that can that might create some suspicions or questions, the public is never gonna believe in, it's almost like patronizingly trying to protect the public from their own inability to grapple with hard questions I think it's a combination of those two things, and a third, which I think actually speaks to good faith, which is, you know, boy, if we admit enough, then all faith will collapse.
And this is a voluntary system, all governments, even dictatorships, continue with the complicity and the acceptance of their populations.
I mean, it's a numbers game.
If people actually rose up against any leader, no matter how totalitarian, they could take him, but they don't, because there is a tacit agreement, and especially in a democracy democratic republic like ours, between the public and the government that, hey, we're doing this because we think it's the right thing.
And if you were to admit that something really big, the moon landing, for example, was fake, that it would shake people's faith to the point where they became nihilistic and the Republic couldn't continue.
I mean, there is that, well, I know there's that concern because I've talked to people about it.
And I think that's a a good reason to lie, but it doesn't justify the lie.
And actually, it simply compounds the damage, and that's exactly what you've seen.
But just to go back to your original question in one sentence, are there retroactive plots to hide incompetence?
Yes, of course, probably the majority of these examples.
Are there malicious plots that are obscured by cover-ups?
I I think I think there are.
You know, I I do actually.
I know there are.
So yeah, you know, you know what's so interesting?
Uh, I remember in real time, the 9-11 Commission was really not considered to be a particularly credible body.
There were all sorts of mainstream voices, like in the Senate and stuff, who were angry about the material that was omitted, the material that was suppressed, the leads weren't followed up upon.
Um and just as an aside, when when you said, you know, people allowed 9-11 to happen.
I remember I debated General Michael Hayden, who was the head of the NSA at the time of the 9-11 attack under the Bush administration.
So his job was basically to, you know, he has the NSA.
The only point of that is to detect ostensibly terrorist attacks on our country, and it was his agency and he was leading it that failed to detect that attack, notwithstanding how many pieces of evidence there were in the system that could have alerted him.
And I remember one time thinking, like, God, that's a really heavy, you know, sort of thing to take to your grave and is going to be the first paragraph in your obituary.
But what they did then was they turned around and they said, oh, because of how many clues we missed, it means that we now need to make sure to expand the surveillance system and remove any safeguards so that the next time, you know, even though it was our fault, we have a much greater system of authoritarian surveillance that will allow us to spy on people and and you know, I guess, protect prevent these kind of future events.
Do you think there's a lot going on there in terms of seizing on these events to kind of justify a whole wide range of authoritarian uh projects that need a kind of version of events offered by the government that may not be true?
Well, there's literally no question, of course.
And every government does that.
I mean, the outbreak of the Second World War allowed the British government to put its political opponents in prison with their wives without charges for the duration of the war.
And like you're not allowed to know that because they were bad.
But, you know, that's totalitarian behavior.
That's what we're supposed to be fighting against.
Every government, Israel after October 7th, the United States after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese internment, and the United States again, and again, every country at war in the wake of a national trauma.
So of course it was seized upon immediately.
What makes this a little bit different and maybe more sinister and more troubling, and I don't have the answer, just to be clear, um, is that within hours, the buildings were still burning.
There were people in Washington discussing and pushing a war against Iraq, which I don't think any smart person ever believed had any connection to 9-11.
There was a lot of reason to believe that having Saddam in power was probably good for the United States as a counterbalance against Iran, as the protector of, you know, millions of Christians.
There are a lot of reasons that Saddam wasn't the worst, and certainly much better than what we got after.
But nevertheless, at the behest of a foreign government, uh Israel, the United States began preparing for war against Iraq immediately after the attacks on 9-11.
Now, I, you know, I'm not saying uh I don't know more than that.
So you can draw your own conclusions, and I'm not suggesting, you know, that they staged 9-11 for that purpose, but I am saying unequivocally they used 9-11 for that purpose.
We know that.
That's not a conspiracy theory.
Um, and it's appalling.
It's disgusting.
And of course, you know as well as anybody that well before 9-11, there were all sorts of growing calls and the you know, usual suspects within Washington to try and demand that we engage in regime change in in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein, that was, you know, the sort of uh great aspiration of of neo-cons, not just in in Washington, but also in Israel, and then 9-11 immediately got seized on uh for that.
All right, let me move to uh all of the issues surrounding Charlie Kirk.
And before I get to the May I just say one lesson.
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
May I see one last thing that I think is important?
So the question about 9-11, the reason people have debated it for 25 years is the question of foreknowledge.
Do people know this was coming?
And And then it's a question of like, did they know it and allow it unintentionally or intentionally, or did they stage it?
I can't answer those questions.
But we conclusively answered the larger question, which is, oh, yeah, there was foreknowledge of it.
There's no question about it.
CIA knew the hijackers were here.
They knew they were terrorists and they were here to commit acts of terror against the United States.
And critically, and this is the fact that somehow blew my mind the most, people bet in the public financial markets, the equity markets, against the airlines involved in 9-11 and the banks in the buildings that were taken down on 9-11.
And they bet big, they shorted them, and they made a lot of money.
This has been sort of known.
What I didn't know is that the US government found the identities of the people who did that, and they withheld them.
And to this day, they've never been revealed.
So this is a publicly traded series of trades.
And in public markets, and we can't know who made those trades.
Whoever made those trades clearly knew 9-11 was coming.
And the government has protected the identity of those people for 24 years.
And I just have to ask what could possibly be the explanation for that.
Yeah, and I think that's the kind of thing that really does destroy faith and trust in American institutions, including when there's an event like this, like, you know, you can include it and say, oh, maybe there were some market fluctuations or people making weird bets as always happened.
No.
But to just simply suppress it and omit it and pretend it didn't happen is exactly the sort of thing that makes people quite legitimately doubt whether or not the story that they're being told is in fact the accurate story.
So I'm glad that you're revisiting that.
All right.
Let me move to Charlie Kirk.
Uh, because there's so much going on in the last two weeks, two and a half weeks, with regard to the fallout from his assassination.
But before I get to the kind of fallout, um I I know Charlie Kirk is somebody you've known for a long time.
He was somebody that you admired.
Uh he was a real friend of yours.
A lot of people I think are claiming friendship with Charlie Kirk.
You're you had a real friendship with him.
Um you were clearly, you know, emotionally uh devastated by by what happened to him, as I think any decent person would be.
One of the things that I have noticed that I think is so interesting is that over the last several years, there's been all this right-wing factionalism, these kind of, you know, to to liberals and the left, the right is this gigantic monolith.
But if you actually look at the right, there's huge amounts of very incendiary civil war within the American right, within even the MAGA movement about all kinds of issues that that really get people riled up.
And somehow Charlie Kirk was, I would say, the singular figure capable of completely uniting all of these different factions in a way that caused people to put aside what had often been extremely vitriolic differences and attacks, at least for the moment.
What is it about him that made him, I would say, uniquely capable of having that effect it's interesting.
I actually know the answer to that in a way that I didn't before he was assassinated because I've just because you know a lot of common friends and a lot of questions, and I've seen a lot of text messages um that he sent to various people on issues that were being debated.
And so typically, if you find someone who's conciliatory in the Congress, the speaker is usually the best at this, it's because the person is an oily horse trader who tells different people different things, and so he makes everybody love him.
That is that's the Washington model for you know, the tip O'Neill Ronald Reagan friendship and all that stuff.
Charlie Kirk is the only person I've ever met who could bring opposing sides together by saying the same thing to each side.
And again, I know that because I've seen the text messages.
He was getting bullied on Israel, like in a ridiculous way by donors.
He said to them exactly what he said to me in private.
He said to them in private.
He articulated his views.
Here's the difference.
Here's why he was able to do that, and I've never even come close to doing anything like that.
People who disagree with me tend to hate me.
And that is because he exuded Christian love in dealing with them.
He did not express contempt for people.
He expressed disagreement with their ideas, but he didn't judge them as people.
And by the way, that's a mandate in his religion, my religion too, but I don't follow it apparently.
He did.
He really believed that it was not up to Him to judge the person.
So you could have like a radically different view, and he wouldn't immediately assume you were evil, whereas that is always my assumption.
It's a wrong assumption.
I'm not defending my position.
I'm just saying it's it's remarkable to watch what happens when you stop doing that.
When you give people the benefit of the doubt, even as you oppose their ideas, you de-escalate immediately.
Now, some people will not be deterred.
You know, like true ideologues don't care what you think of them, they'll just keep pushing.
And he experienced a lot of that.
But most people, even ideologues, actually, if they know that you love them, they're able to disagree with you without being mad at you.
I mean, it the secret is that simple.
Do you yeah, I totally get that.
I mean, Charlie's personality, his kind of willingness to deal with people as they are and not impose immediate judgments or insist that any disagreements on a view he cared about generated or was or justified hatred was a big part of it.
I'm wondering though whether the fact that his overarching uh identity, his overarching attribute that defined who he was, and you've talked about this was you know, he had a lot of different political views and a lot of different roles,
but over overarching all of that was the fact that he was someone defined himself by his Christian faith, and often spoke through the prism of that when it came to all sorts of other non non-religious, very secular types of issues.
And it seems to me, maybe maybe I'm wrong about this, but that kind of aggressive, but very, you know, not alienating uh insistence on putting forth this Christian identity is something that most people on the right find appealing and beneficial and necessary, even if there were certain views of Charlie Kirk that they didn't agree with and could have split the movement.
What was the effect of the fact that he was just so overtly Christian, but not in that like you know, aggressive Jimmy Swagger sort of way of being a public moralist, but just somebody who was very clear about the role that their faith played in their politics in terms of how it united everybody on the right.
Well, it allowed him to navigate identity issues in a way that most people can't.
So Charlie Kirk was would always, you know, he was a you know, he's a he's a sincere Christian, so he's not like with the human rights campaign on gay issues at all.
But he sincerely, and I think he had gay people around him really felt this, he loved people, gay, straight, whatever.
He just loved people.
So I think people didn't feel attacked as people.
But on the main issue that splits the right, it doesn't even split the right.
I mean, if you were to poll like the foreign policy views of people who voted for Trump, you would find an overwhelming number believe the United States ought to serve its own interests first and not involve itself in pointless wars.
I mean, that's kind of the core, the that's the core of the base.
But the donor class has very different views on this, and they don't put America's interests first, by and large.
And they do think that we need a whole lot more wars, and they think that for a bunch of different reasons.
I'm trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt here.
Charlie was able to talk to both sides because he was opposed to pointless wars, not because he like hated Raytheon on principle or something, but because he didn't think, and his Christian faith told him this, that it's right to kill innocent people, period.
It's collective punishment is always wrong from a Christian perspective.
You can't kill people who haven't done anything wrong, period, ever.
And he really believed that.
All sincere Christians believe that.
And so it's easier, I think, for neocons to take when he would say to them, you know, I'm not against Jews or Israel.
I I like Jews, I like Israel.
And that was true.
He did too.
I mean, he demonstrably did.
But I don't think that it's a good idea for the United States to get involved in yet another pointless war.
And he said it in a way that they could hear.
I mean, not all of them, by the way, a lot of them, you know, really hassled him.
But the reasonable ones, and there are plenty of reasonable people who disagreed with him and me, they totally got that.
And they didn't take it personally.
Again, I think it's it's not just the way you speak, it's how you feel inside.
People can smell anger and hatred on on other people, like like dogs can smell it.
Like you know, if someone's animated by dislike for you, and he just wasn't.
Yeah, and you could see that in that that gathering that he assembled of young uh turning point people who had very differing views or struggling With the issue of Israel, and it was being designed to say, let's have like a kind of fruitful dialogue on an issue that really has that.
All right.
But let me ask you though, um, you you were referring in the original question I asked you about your 9-11 program, and I think we both did actually, to the fact that you can get these kind of crisis moments like 9-11 and the 2008 financial crisis and COVID and uh, you know, Hunter Biden's laptop and and Russia gate that cause a lot of uh doubt about the reliability of political and media institutions.
And one of the things though that I think happens there is especially when those events generate a huge amount of emotion.
9-11 obviously generated a huge amount of emotion, intense rage and desire for a revenge in the United States.
COVID obviously scared people.
Um you get a lot of these like very intense emotions, and it often can lead people, well-intentioned people, to embrace policy prescriptions or uh kind of political trends out of anger or sadness or some other emotion that comes from the event that's a perfectly human event.
But a lot of times those emotions end up sweeping into our public life policies that we really end up greatly regretting.
Certainly that was true of 9-11, it was true of the Russian invasion of the war in Ukraine, it was definitely true of COVID.
I don't remember anything, at least since 9-11 that has produced the level of intense human emotion as the Charlie Kirk assassination has for reasons I totally understand.
But because of that, are you worried that the government or even the movement of which Charlie Kirk was a part, again, out of emotions that I totally understand, well-intentioned, are heading into an area where they're starting to embrace policies that may be dangerous or excessive or ones that we might come to regret.
Well, not only am I worried, I'm you know, I'm totally committed to to fighting that.
Um which policies do you mean?
Like the hate speech one?
It's just super super simple, right?
There's no such thing as hate speech.
Um, and by the way, if we're doing this in Charlie Kirk's name, I would refer you to the several thousand videos on the internet where he says what I just said, which is just no such thing as hate speech, only speech that you hate.
There is violence, which is a separate category, and it's already illegal and it ought to be illegal.
Um, but we're much lighter, I've noticed on violence than we are on speech.
And why is that?
Because violence doesn't change people's minds.
It can change their behavior in the short term, but it doesn't change history.
What changes history is speaking, ideas, words, and ideas conveyed in words.
And so that's always going to be the threat to people in power.
That's always the first right that they seek to strip from you.
That's why it's enshrined in the Bill of Rights as the First Amendment.
So it's it's it's central to this country.
It's the only country left that has it.
And in our country, we don't believe that we receive that right from the government, but that we were born with it.
It's inalienable, it cannot be taken away.
So you know all this, of course, everyone knows all this, but that doesn't mean it doesn't face threats.
And of course, fear and rage are the enemies of reason of long-term thinking, of preserving your own interests.
I mean, how many times have you been so enraged you you know, kick a door, you know, punch a countertop and hurt yourself?
I mean, people are almost not accountable for their behavior when they're that mad.
And events like this make people that mad, make me that mad.
I mean, I look, I supported the Patriot Act, I think it's hard to believe I did this after 9-11 because I was so mad about 9-11.
Well, that's insane.
So I'm screwing myself and my country because my country was attacked, it doesn't make any sense.
And so ever since then, I have been on guard against this.
It's why people in charge gin up fear, it's why they create fear, it's why they create and encourage racial conflict.
It's why they're encouraging racial conflict now over Israel.
The debate over Israel is about the United States and another country and how they should get along and interact.
It's not about all Jews, of course, but there are vested interests whose goal is control, that probably nothing even to do with Israel in some cases, but who have an interest in making Americans mad at each other on the basis of immutable characteristics because it gins up the highest level of fear and then makes them very easy to control.
So, oh yeah, I'm so aware of this.
I've experienced it as I just said, and the announcement by the attorney general, like days after Charlie was murdered that we're gonna need hate speech laws.
You know, I'm not even gonna guess as to why she said that.
All I know, and I said this at the time last week, is that that's completely unacceptable.
And if things begin to move in that direction and the people moving them won't respond to reason, then we need mass civil disobedience in order to stop it.
Because once they can tell you what to say, there's nothing they can't tell you.
Right.
And that is totalitarianism.
Right.
Period.
And you're a very we're very, very reliable, thankfully, uh consistent defender of free speech and and uh someone who will object immediately to efforts by the government to encroach it with things like you know, Pam Bondi saying something so painfully wrong and dumb uh that you have free speech and then you have hate speech.
I don't think a seventh grader uh has trouble understanding why that's wrong, let alone someone who went to law school.
But I'm talking, and a lot of conservatives to their credit actually got angry about that as well.
I guess what I'm talking about are the more uh as yet ill-defined, but still very visceral demands for crackdowns on NGOs and left-wing groups and ideology and things of this nature, including targeting groups and factions that haven't yet been tied to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, except in some like vague way that oh, they say things that then inspire them.
How do you feel about the Muslim sort of thing?
Again.
How do I feel about blaming it on the Muslims?
Yeah, or blame or blaming like left-wing NGOs or or you know, trying to infiltrate like left-wing social movement groups that had no discernible connection to the Charlie Kirk uh killing.
I mean, look, uh I am totally opposed and have always been totally opposed to handing out government money to any social pressure group or any interest group, and billions and billions and billions go every year to partisan mostly on the left, but not exclusively on the left, but go to partisan groups with non-American agendas, um, which is to say agendas that don't serve the population, they serve a tiny sliver of the population every year.
And I hate it.
I absolutely hate it.
No money should go to groups like that.
Like if you've got a good idea or you've got a good cause, I don't care what it is, saving the baby harp seals or ending global warming or whatever you think is a good cause, you can raise money for it by yourself, resettling Haitians in my neighborhood through Catholic charities, and Catholic charities can pay for that.
I mean, there's no reason that taxpayers should be forced to pay for things they don't want to pay for, except the base.
I mean, do you know what I mean?
Like you should go very, very easy on that.
Yes, I think it's fair to say we need roads, we're gonna have to ask you to pay for them.
But pay for somebody else's political agenda, I'm totally opposed to that, no matter who's getting the money.
So if this is an opportunity to shut that down, I'm for it.
Not giving people money is not the same as abridging free speech.
No one has a right to my tax dollars.
So there's that.
Uh the the gray area that I am uncomfortable with is like encouraging people to be stripped of their ability to speak.
Is that censorship?
I don't know, but I live through that a lot, a lot.
I've been fired so much, I've had so many pressure campaigns against me.
I don't like it.
I just don't like it.
I would much rather is that censorship?
I don't know, but I'm not into it because I've been the victim of it.
So I think the appropriate response is to say, here is why what I think you're saying is insane or destructive.
And here's what I believe.
I mean, I I do think actually it's incumbent on us, especially when you have power to articulate what you believe, to explain why you're doing this, explain what the path forward is, explain why you're right and they're wrong.
Like that at least has to be a first step.
And if you're not even doing that, um, then you know, I don't trust you.
I think that's malicious.
Does uh I don't know if I'm explaining myself very well.
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I don't like the mod justice stuff, I don't like the mass hysteria stuff at all.
Yeah, I just want to push a little bit more on that though.
And I don't mean push you in the sense that uh you you answered it and it wasn't to my satisfaction.
We didn't really get into it.
But go ahead.
Uh the uh I think there's a generalized uh sense, and again, I've seen this many times before, not just in the Charlie Kirk killing, that the people who are responsible for not just Charlie Kirk's assassination, but other types of political violence are not the people who pulled the trigger,
but the people who have been spouting political rhetoric that can demonize a lot of people who then are in danger, calling Them Nazis or fascists, people who are spouting very radical left-wing ideology about Charlie Kirk and the MAGA movement that then can cause violence, and that there's some sense that those people, through their dangerous rhetoric, have a kind of blood on their hands.
Like they're responsible for the person who went and shot Charlie Kirk because their ideology and their toxic rhetoric that's been injected into our system for so long creates this kind of violent ethos.
And I have to say the reason I found it ironic is because I'll just give you two quick examples on that.
I remember in the 1990s, there was a spate of killing of abortion doctors.
And Bill O'Reilly, you know, is a very vocal uh pro-life uh pundit and always has been.
He used to go on his Fox shows and rail against abortion is murder, and he would show abortion clinics and abortion doctors where a lot of these abortions were taking place.
Late-term abortions, ones that he thought were particularly offensive, you know, reporting on them.
And several of those doctors, I think at least one, but several of these types of doctors went uh were murdered by people who believe that what they were doing is murder.
And there was this big effort to blame Bill O'Reilly, as though if you go on air and you condemn abortion as murder, you're then responsible if somebody listens to you and goes and kills an abortion doctor because they now believe that that abortion doctor is engaged in murder.
And a very similar thing happened in 2022 when there was that white supremacist massacre in Buffalo, where that crazy guy went in and shot 10 black people and that uh Buffalo supermarket and left a manifesto talking about the great replacement theory.
And I remember huge amounts of Democrats in the media tried to blame you by saying that you advocate the great replacement theory and therefore and he does too, therefore you're to blame.
In reality, you didn't advocate the theory that he advocated.
He had nothing to do with anything that you did.
But the but let's assume that that you had, let's assume that he he really did have similar views to yours.
I always thought it was very dangerous to try and you know eliminate this line that says there's a crucial line between expressing political views but not advocating violence or engaged in violence, and people who actually go and pick up a gun in the name of that cause and and murder someone, and you can't start breaching that line.
What do you think of that?
Well, uh, I can give you an even better example.
On the day he was murdered, 11 days ago, Charlie Kirk was blamed on video by dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of ex-accounts that I saw myself for his own murder because he had defended the second amendment, the right to bear arms.
And they said this is what you get when you defend the right of people to have guns.
You get shot to death with a gun.
So Charlie Kirk was blamed for his own murder, uh, using that reasoning.
So, and of course, I I and you and everyone else in our business is always blamed for acts of violence because you know, our words set the table for it or whatever.
And I always push back against that.
I'm gonna push back against it now.
Uh, you know, if you're advocating violence, I don't know to what extent the Brandenburg versus Ohio decision of, you know, which is the basic framework of free speech in the United States since 1967, whether that, you know, where that falls on that line.
Like, is that a crime?
Is that not a crime?
It's unacceptable as far as I'm concerned.
I hate violence, uh, it's immoral, and it's illegal in most cases, and we should call that out and and do what we can to stop it.
Short of that, that's the line for me is violence.
But if you're saying something that I don't like, you're defending a constitutional right like Charlie was that's not the same as murdering somebody.
And we're liars if we say that it is.
And again, we're adopting the worst style of liberal thinking, which I hate, sloppy, mean, power-obsessed, everything about it I dislike.
So yeah, I completely agree with you.
But again, Charlie Kirk himself was the victim of that kind of thinking, which we should keep in mind.
And and some of the best statements about why that kind of thinking is so dangerous, including when there was that young Israeli couple who was murdered, and a lot of people said, Oh, all these free Palestine people have blood on their hands because they're constantly demonizing Israel, so of course they inspired someone to go was Charlie Kirk saying, This is an insane theory.
We cannot accept this.
Words are not violence, words are words, and it was very, very elegant.
All right, let me ask you this.
Uh I was in London.
But can I say none of them, none of that is sincere?
All of that is an attempt to set the groundwork for censorship.
They don't believe that.
They don't care actually what you think.
They want control over you.
And so they are building a case to take away your right to speak.
That's what that is.
We should never mistake that for a sincere reaction.
Absolutely.
All right.
So, Tucker, uh, over the last week, I was in Malaysia.
I I went to some event, I gave a speech there, and I was traveling back home on Sunday, and I was watching live uh portions of the Charlie Kirk Memorial, and I happened to catch a few speeches, one of which was yours, and I wasn't to your speech, and I, you know, it was kind of half-left listening.
I was listening to other people's as well.
And I heard your speech, and I know you know how you speak.
I've heard many of your speeches before, and I really didn't even pay much attention.
I didn't think there was anything in it that was particularly surprising or or in the slightest bit controversial, it just never occurred to me.
Um I I mean I really didn't.
I like turned it off and I went, I and then I went to the next speech, and I was like, okay, next speech.
And then I woke up the next day once I got back home, and there was this extremely coordinated onslaught, not by a lot of the usual suspects, but by a much higher level of uh campaign at the highest levels of the Israeli government,
uh parts of the American government, a lot of these uh advocacy groups, as well as very pro-Israel factions within the American right in the Republican Party who went on a full-fledged jihad a war to claim that this passage in your speech was not just offensive,
but was one of the worst blood libs ever uttered in a public setting since World War II, and that not only that, but it intended to imply that Israel was behind the killing of Charlie Kirk.
And after I saw this, I thought it was crazy because I watched the speech.
And I went back and watched the speech, and then I thought it was even crazier because I didn't understand remotely, even what this I know I'm around the politicalists for a long time.
I understand how people can make bad faith leaps at try and you know ungenerously distort somebody who's their political enemy.
In this case, I didn't even understand the attempt.
So let me just quickly show for the audience who hasn't seen it, it's just a minute long, what it is that you said that became the source of this insane, like uh, you know, campaign to try and demonize you in a way that you haven't even been demonized before.
And then let me ask you what your understanding of this passage was.
Let's play that.
Ultimately, he was a Christian evangelist, and it actually reminds me of my favorite story ever.
So it's about 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, and Jesus shows up and he starts talking about the people in power, and he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people, and they hate it, and they just go bonkers, they hate it, and they become obsessed with making him stop.
This guy's got to stop talking.
We've got to shut this guy up.
And I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around and eating hummus, thinking about what do we do about this guy telling the truth about us.
We must make him stop talking.
And there's always one guy with the bright idea, and I could just hear him say, I've got an idea, why don't we just kill him?
That'll shut him up.
That'll fix the problem.
It doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way.
Everything is inverted.
All right, so we covered the insane reaction to that uh excerpt on last night's show and showed some of the insane organizational statements and condemnations, people calling you a neo-Nazi the most uh dangerous anti-Semite ever to appear in American history.
And again, these weren't just internet trolls.
This was a very coordinated effort.
What was that passage?
What did it mean?
That's the Christian uh gospel.
That's the story of Jesus.
That's the kind of cliff notes of the of the New Testament.
So Jesus uh, you know, basically tells the truth about the authorities, the religious authorities.
Um, Jesus is, of course, a Jew, all his apostles are Jews, everyone in the story is a Jew for the record.
And um, but he tells the truth about the people in power.
They try to shut him up, they end up torturing him to death to kill him, and then with the hope that that will be the end, and of course, it becomes the world's biggest religion.
Uh so uh I I was laughing because I'm I'm speaking by the way to a mostly Christian audience who was very familiar with this, and I'm laughing because of course you can't shut up the truth.
And that that was that's the only point I was making.
But what's so interesting about the reaction is that I had no idea it would get that reaction, and I had intentionally, you know, there'd been a lot of drama about me speaking at turning point events, and I really love Charlie's for real, as I've said that, and his wife.
And so I uh I brought my wife and I said to her that morning, I was like, man, I'm not gonna do anything relating to politics at all.
I'm only gonna talk about the Christian message because I don't want to be divisive at a funeral.
And I don't honestly think you should be talking about politics at a funeral.
It's deeper than that, it's more important than that.
So I wanted to be respectful and I wanted to talk about the thing that Charlie cared about most.
And then you get this reaction, and I wasn't on Twitter, but I kept getting texts from people, like, oh, they're so mad at you about the hummus or something.
Since what is hummus Jew?
It's an Arab food.
I mean, the whole thing is so bonkers.
Um, and I love hummus, by the way.
And every time I'm in an Arab country, I eat Hamas.
Uh I guess my point is it takes a certain kind of mindset to see that as an attack on Jews.
So the two groups that immediately assumed I was attacking Jews were anti-Semites and Zionists.
Both of them reached the same conclusion, like instantly.
Oh, he's talking about the Jews.
And it just points up a deep truth that we should remember, which is that anti-Semites and Zionists see the world through the same lens.
Both of them think everything is about Jews, you know, for different reasons.
And that's just not my worldview.
I I don't think everything's about Jews.
Like I have whole periods of my day where I don't brood about Jews.
I mean, it's so crazy.
And it's actually the definition of craziness.
You know, you like see things that aren't there.
If I was trying to make a point about Israel, I would just say it.
I uh why wouldn't I?
That's the last thing I intended to do.
And I think it's very bad for your soul to become obsessed either because of hate or because of ethno-narcissism.
I mean, both are kind of the same thing.
They're twins with an ethnic group.
Like the it's crazy.
Like, I think they're both really sick and need to pull back from this.
And you do see it a lot online where everybody on, you know, your ex-feed is talking about the Jews.
How is that good?
It's not good for the Jews, it's not good for anybody else.
It's it's all kind of a species of mental illness.
And because it doesn't reflect reality, like in real life, you know, I have a million interests and concerns, in fact, almost all of them that have nothing to do with Jews or Israel, or like it's just not an obsession for me at all.
But it is an obsession for Zionists in a very unhealthy way, and an obsession for anti-Semites and also an unhealthy way.
So I just, and they feed off each other, they're symbiotic, you know, and one kind of helps create the other and needs the other.
It's very bad.
It's sick, and it's bad again, bad for the people who engage in it, and bad for this country.
So I hope we can get off that topic, treat Israel like we just treat a country with overlapping interests and diverging interests.
It's you know, it shouldn't be that different in our mind from Malaysia where you just were, you know, a lot of things I like about it, some things I disagree with, that's okay.
You know, but it's not that, it's something really uh bad.
I was I mean, to me, your point was so simple.
The main argument of turning point, USA, uh faithful, including Erica Kirk and the entire top management of Turning Point was a very, you know, natural moving one.
I I've seen this in uh in many other contexts where someone dies, and you want to say, look, their death was not in vain, like they're not gonna be forgotten.
They're in fact probably going to uh embolden the movement.
And this has been a very common media theme, a media theme on the right that Charlie Kirk's death clearly has done more to elevate Charlie Kirk and his message and his cause and to embolden people to join it.
By far than any other thing that that has happened, and all you were doing was saying that it's exactly the same thing that happened when they thought if they killed Jesus, they would get rid of Christianity.
And of course, the same thing happened.
And it's like but but but but I mean, I I just want to I think though, the key context here is it's not just like people misunderstood what you were saying.
You have become a very important and influential person on the American right.
It doesn't matter on the American left, there's always been a lot of criticism of Israel, very virulent, But on the American right, it's been more or less locked down that people are supportive of Israel.
You've had some exceptions, some important ones like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, who definitely not were on board with those things, but it it's much bigger now, and you're one of the most prominent people doing it.
There's clearly an attempt to drive you out of the discourse.
The ADL, when you were at Fox tried to get you fired.
There's clearly an attempt to destroy your reputation.
And they seized on this Charlie Kirk speech that was so benign in order to do it, and did so under the disgustingly, you know, uh projecting guys that you were the one who politicized the Charlie Kirk memorial by bringing up Israel and bringing up, you know, how the Jews killed Jesus when it had nothing to do with that.
But do you do you is this something that I'm just wondering because it is a as we know, Israel is a very intensely debated topic.
There's a huge lobby that wants to destroy people who question any of the orthodoxies.
Is something this something that you have been feeling more of?
I know you stay off social media, but you know, it it's so big that you can't be inertia.
How is that affecting you, if at all?
And and what is your strategy for dealing with it?
Well, it makes me sad because it in this specific case, because actually what I said was the Christian message before anything else calls on us to repent, which is to admit what we've done wrong, not what you've done wrong, not what Israel's done wrong, what we have what I have done wrong.
That is the ticket, okay, in in my religion.
And Charlie said that a lot.
And I think that's so it's the opposite of blaming other people.
It's blaming yourself first.
That's the Christian message right there.
And I really want people to hear that because I think it's so important.
And I try to practice that.
I try, it's hard.
I try.
So um I was bummed out that other people's hate and narcissism, crazy narcissism, um, obscured what I was trying to say.
It's it's actually not about you, sorry.
Um, it's about the world's biggest religion and my faith.
If we could just talk about me for one second or talk about Jesus for one second.
So that's a look.
I never want to fight about Israel ever.
I'm actually pretty moderate on the subject, I think.
Always like going there.
I know a lot of Israelis always liked uh talking about it before October 7th.
You never really talked about it before October 7.
They're gonna be shoved on the front burner.
Exactly.
It's like this is my country.
This, I mean, I don't own the country, but I'm a shareholder in the country.
I'm an American, and you can't use my country like some kind of disposable product.
Like you just can't.
I mean, BB's running around, this is a fact.
I'm not guessing about this because I talked to people he said it to, is running around the Middle East, his region and his own country, and telling people point blank, just stating it, I control the United States, I control Donald Trump.
He's saying that.
And again, I'm not guessing at all.
That's a fact.
And I dare them to say that's not true, because it is true and they know it's true.
So I'm an American.
How do you think that makes me feel?
Even if I didn't vote for Trump, which I did, I did vote, I campaigned for Trump.
But even if I, even if it was Joe Biden, I'm an American.
You can't treat, it's too humiliating.
I can't handle that.
And I shouldn't have to put up with that.
This is a country of nine million people.
I'm not saying it's I'm not even attacking the country.
I'm attacking my leaders who are allowing my nation of 350 million people to be forced into doing things that are bad for me and my children because of some other country.
Like that is a violation of the most basic arrangement we have with our leaders, which is represent us, please, at least most of the time, and they're not.
And there's a ongoing humiliation ritual designed to make us all crazy, designed to turn us into haters.
I'm gonna, I'm not gonna give them the satisfaction of becoming what they call me.
I'm not a hater, and I'm never gonna become one.
But I will never accept this.
I shouldn't have to accept it.
I've nothing to be ashamed of.
I have no unexpressed views.
I'm not hiding anything.
I say exactly what I think all the time.
This is wrong, and if it's not wrong, tell me how it's not wrong.
Why don't you stop attacking me and my trying to get family members fired, which they never stop doing?
Why don't you instead tell me how you disagree with me?
But they can't because they don't actually have an argument.
There's no way to justify controlling the U.S. government for the purposes of another country's whatever their plan is, um, expansion.
There's no way to justify that.
And so they just scream at you and call you names.
And I guess I'm just blessed because I don't believe that about myself.
So that doesn't hurt me.
You know, if they said, well, you've gained 10 pounds, you might hurt my feelings.
But calling me a bigot is Doesn't hurt my feelings because I know that I'm not.
How's that?
And the irony of it is you had 10 years of practice anyway, because the primary tactic of liberals was exactly the same as the one being wielded now against you by Israel supporters, which is that's for sure.
Thank you for saying that.
And it's amazing.
That's totally right.
Realize that, you know.
Um we all had to kind of you know find a tactic for deciding that we don't care about being called those names because of how easily and casually they were being thrown out.
So I do think it's been good practice.
Um, let me ask you just one quick last question before I let you go in respect for your time.
And I'm super happy you came on.
Uh the uh I remember when Donald Trump first ran in 2016.
This was really the moment neocons turned on him, and you can go back and and and watch this was when he gave an interview and they asked him about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he said something extremely reasonable, but also extremely taboo, which was the problem is that it's in the United States' interest to get a two-state solution, which has always been the view of U.S. governments going back decades.
And the problem is we have become perceived as being way too far on the side of Israel, that we can't be an honest broker for peace, nobody trusts us, that we need to be more even-handed.
And for saying we need to be more even-handed, I remember it was just, you know, that was one of those porn foreign policy statements that's so far outside of what is permitted in Washington, kind of taboo that the neocons went ballistic.
And and I do think Trump has, you know, a lot of foreign policy principles that would seem to undercut this intense investment on the part of the United States in this horrific war that's now ongoing for two years, to say nothing of all the other ancillary wars and and the suppression issues of speech at home.
What do you think explains the fact that that Trump in this second uh term seems to have empowered the group that is primarily obsessed with that issue, or at least with the most, you know, kind of oppressive parts of how it expresses itself in in our debates.
I mean, the the short answer is I don't know.
I don't know.
I know that um that Trump is really loved by a lot of Arab leaders, and I've talked to them about it.
Um, and Trump loves them too.
There's a c there's a kind of cultural vibe there.
I mean, there is a if you've ever spent time in the Middle East, it's it's a it's an elaborately polite, interesting society, and and he just likes it.
And they just like him.
And um, so I think there's a lot of and he gets along with him great.
He says this, you know, he's never attacked the Qataris, he loves the he loves the royal family of Qatar and all the rest of it, MB, MBS, MBZ, and so there's a real opportunity to have a foreign policy that helps the United States.
It doesn't hurt Israel.
No one, I don't think anyone wants to hurt Israel, or maybe somebody will do.
He doesn't, but that you know, spreads the love, creates peace.
I mean, we're moving in the opposite direction, of course, at great, immense cost to the United States.
We could end up seeing the Oxomasque blown up.
And that would be the beginning of you know, the end of the world as we know it, the beginning of a global war.
And so the stakes could not be higher, literally couldn't be higher.
I think he understands that.
I think his instinct has always been in the 20 years I've known him, um, has always been toward conciliation, toward toward peace, um, certainly not for war.
But, you know, the the I I have to say that the last six months don't suggest an even-handed approach.
And I I don't really know.
I do think that, you know, he saw lots of curated pictures from October 7th that upset him.
October 7th was bad.
I'm not suggesting by the way it wasn't, but I think he's seen a lot of uh images from that, and it affected his view.
But I there may be other reasons I really don't know the answer.
I will say this.
Bibi, not the nation of Israel, not Israelis, and certainly not Jews, whatever that means.
The leader, the secular prime minister of a country is doing immense harm to Donald Trump's presidency to the United States and to the world.
Immense harm.
This is an unbalanced person whose only real concern is for himself.
He's meddling in an extensive way in American politics in a vicious way, a dishonest way.
He's loathed by the entire world.
He needs the United States, and yet at the same time, he has this patronizing attitude toward Donald Trump, demeaning Trump to people Trump knows constantly.
I don't I can't explain that behavior.
It's bizarre, it's self-destructive, but it's also very destructive to the U.S. So I think separating from Bibi immediately, not from Israel, and of course not from Jews, whatever that means, they're not the same thing.
They're not even close to the same thing.
Tons of Jews hate Bibi, including in Israel.
But separating from Bibi immediately, I think is an essential next move.
I have no idea whether that no one's going to take my advice on it, of course, because I've been so maligned.
But objectively, that is absolutely necessary and very soon, because he is hurting his own country, our country, and the world.
Period.
Tucker, thanks so much for coming on.
Maybe you want to go and enjoy a plate of hummus as a way of making penance for your uh neo-Nazi remarks that uh went all around the world.
Maybe that'll help.
I don't really know.
Um apparently it's Jewish food.
I never knew that before.
Yeah, no, but it's Jewish food.
So maybe that'll be.
It's Arab food.
I know, I know.
I never knew it was Jewish food.
That's what part of my confusion was.
I still don't think it is.
I didn't either.
But anyway, it's great to see you, Tucker.
I really uh always enjoy talking to you.
Thank you, and uh, we'll talk soon.
Have a great day.
Thanks a million.
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