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Aug. 26, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
26:41
Tucker Carlson - The world is realigning at high speed, and turning against the United States. But the Biden Administration is spending its time harassing one of our last sincere allies in Europe, Hungary, for the crime of being too Christian. Watch. (Tucker's Speech in Budapest)
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tucker carlson
26:22
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tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
It is so nice to be in this retrogate right-wing hellscape.
This is my second time in Hungary, and both times have had exactly the same reaction.
First, well, the first reaction, if I'm being honest, is the food is amazing.
The second reaction is I have no hope in this lifetime of speaking Hungarian, but I admire it.
And the third reaction is this does not seem like a right-wing hellscape to me at all.
It actually seems very much like the country that I grew up in.
It seems like America circa 1985, you know, where there's a big bulk of normal people who aren't that interested in politics, then you have people on both sides who are each making their case, and there's a vigorous public discussion about that, and people disagree, but they're not on the verge of shooting each other.
It's all kind of normal.
That's the way it seems to me.
So if this qualifies as a dangerous, rogue, right-wing country, I'm thinking maybe the terms have changed a little bit since my childhood.
And that leads me to the apology that I want to begin my remarks by giving you as an American.
I'm 54, so I've watched my country for a long time, and I'm loyal to it.
I will never leave.
I don't have another passport.
I love the United States.
For all its flaws, as you do when you're from somewhere, it's like your own family.
It's imperfect, but it's yours, and so you love it.
And that's how I feel about the U.S. And so I'm not in the habit of apologizing for the United States.
In fact, I don't think I ever have.
But the behavior of the American ambassador to Hungary makes me want to apologize.
It's disgusting and inexcusable.
It's also so far from the norms of diplomacy in my country that it's hard for me to believe.
That David Pressman is actually doing what he's doing.
And I say that as someone who spent his life 35 years in Washington.
I'm the son of a diplomat.
So I have a maybe better than average sense of what diplomacy is.
Diplomacy is a pretty simple concept.
It's the business of, often the art of, convincing other countries to take your side on matters that help you.
And the entire premise behind diplomacy is countries are different.
They're not all the same.
They have different languages and histories and religions and cultures, and they're hard to understand.
And that's why you hire people who can understand them, who speak the language, who are on some level sympathetic, maybe.
And then you send those people to the other country to try to convince that country, whether it's an ally or a potential ally or even an enemy, to take your side on an issue that helps you.
That's the whole point of diplomacy, is to convince other nations to take your side.
The point of diplomacy is not to hector other nations for its own sake.
To show up in somebody else's country and scream at them because they're different from you.
Because they have a different history or language or religion or culture.
That is the opposite of diplomacy.
It does not serve the interests of the country that sent you.
It harms them.
And so for a creep like David Pressman, who was not a diplomat, who was a political activist and Biden donor, to show up in your country and lecture you about your culture and threaten you because you do things differently from the way they do things where he lives, hurts the United States and is a grave embarrassment to me as an American and an outrage to me as someone who pays his salary.
It's disgusting.
And I would say that...
I would say that...
Even if I agreed with what he was saying, it's not simply that I agree with you and don't agree with David Pressman.
It's that as an American, he's not serving my interests, he's hurting them.
If he showed up, or a so-called diplomat from the Biden administration showed up in, say, Bahrain, or Qatar, or UAE, or some important Gulf state, and started lecturing them about how it's wrong to venerate a 7th century goat herder, I'm not a Muslim, but I would be gravely offended by that.
Because it's not the business of the U.S. government what you believe.
It's not our job to tear down and assault your culture.
It's the job of our diplomats to win you to our side, not to enrage you for no reason.
And David Pressman is doing this not on behalf of the American people, who do not share his views, and it's measurable in our public opinion polling, He's doing it on behalf of a tiny percentage of the American population, on behalf of an interest group, the Human Rights Campaign, carrying their water under the U.S. flag paid by U.S. taxpayers to this country to attack you because you have views he doesn't like.
That never happened before.
I don't think that's happened in my lifetime.
Nobody from the State Department could get away with that.
He'd be recalled immediately and scolded and fired, as David Pressman should be.
So I just want to say I'm embarrassed that I share a country of birth with a man, with a villain like this.
It's horrifying.
And my advice, to the extent I would presume to give you advice on how to handle this, is just wait it out.
Wait it out.
The United States is in a place right now where this is not sustainable.
You can't run a global empire based on the imposition of boutique sexual politics on countries that don't want them.
The United States, I think, did a lot to liberate Hungary from the Soviets, from the Russians.
And I'm proud of that.
My father was involved in it.
That's how I knew about Hungary, because my father visited Budapest 35 years ago.
When you were still under the yoke of the Soviets, and the purpose of American diplomacy in Eastern and Central Europe then was to help liberate the country so they could run themselves.
And the idea was you didn't want a foreign superpower telling you how to live, because that's the opposite of democracy.
It's tyranny.
And to wake up one morning 35 years later and see my own government engaged in exactly the same kind of tyranny.
The Soviets told you you had to worship Lenin.
The State Department tells you now you have to worship transvestites.
It's not so different.
It's a foreign power pushing its weird boutique religion on you, and it's wrong.
You worship whatever you want.
It's your country.
And I just believe, as a practical matter, this can't continue because that's not the basis for a successful empire.
Everybody wants freedom.
Everyone understands the concept of self-determination.
If you go to people who are under a foreign yoke and you say, someday you can be free.
They understand that.
They want that.
That's a product you can sell because everybody wants it.
You show up in a country and you say, you know what?
Your boys really should be girls.
You know, there's some percentage who will be excited by the prospect of never having grandchildren.
But most people won't be excited by that.
In fact, most people will say, but boys can't become girls.
It's biologically impossible.
Sex can be determined at the chromosomal level.
We can dig up bones 300,000 years old and tell whether they're male or female.
There's no non-binary in science.
You're insane.
unidentified
Go away.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Most people don't want that product.
And so if the purpose of your empire is selling something that nobody wants, you're not going to be in business for very long.
And my hope is that the United States is in business for A thousand years.
I love the United States.
It's my country.
I was, to restate, born there and am never leaving.
And I love my country.
But the people who run it right now are dangerous and insane.
And you can see that in the way they're treating your country.
Which, even if you don't like the values of the majority of Hungarians, even if you reject the Hungarian Constitution as Christocentric and think that Viktor Orban is a bad guy, And you hate goulash.
Even if everything about Hungary is repugnant to you, if you're the United States, you're still not going to spend a lot of time hassling Hungary because Hungary isn't hassling anybody else.
Hungarians have views, your government has views, and even if you disagree with them, you must acknowledge that Hungary is not exporting their views to anybody else.
You're not rolling across the border to reclaim territory.
Lost after the First World War.
That could happen, but it's not happening now anyway.
Transylvania is safe in Romanian hands at the moment.
But it's true.
This is not an expansionist power.
This is not a power that's crushing weaker nations with sanctions.
This is not a power that's exporting something ugly to the rest of the world.
This is a country concerned with its own safety and prosperity.
That's, in the words, You used to hear a lot in the United States, a country that is minding its own business.
And so even if you disagree, which for the record I do not, but even if I did, and I ran the State Department, I would say, you know, let's take a pass on Hungary.
We've got bigger problems.
But they can't.
They hate Hungary.
And they hate it not because of what it's done, but because of what it is.
It's a Christian country and they hate that.
And that's the truth.
And nobody wants to say it, but it's true.
And it's not a particularly provocative Christian country.
I don't think most Hungarians go to church.
It's not a theocracy.
You're not required to believe in the catechism to live here.
It's nothing like that.
It's a soft Christian country, the softest ever.
300 years ago, people would look at modern Hungary and say, that's not a Christian country.
But by modern standards, it's one of the last countries that identifies as a nation built on Christian precepts.
Again, not imposing them on anyone else.
But that is enough to incite our policymakers in the United States.
And that is exactly why they hate Russia, by the way.
I'm not a fan of Russia.
And if I was, I wouldn't admit it to a Hungarian audience.
When I hear Orban described as a Putin suck-up, I think, really?
That image of Orban being pushed against a police car with a baton to his neck by Soviet-backed policemen.
Yeah, he's probably not pro-Russian.
Just guessing.
But why do they make that charge?
Because one thing that Russia and Hungary have in common is a big part of the population identify as Christians.
Now, why would that be provocative?
A huge part of Malaysians identify as Muslim.
Fine with me.
But it's not fine with Washington at all.
It's deeply offensive to see that alive in Europe.
And that is the core.
It's not rational.
This is happening on a gut level, but it is expressed through policy.
Policies that I'm ashamed of that most Americans don't even know exist.
The fact that Americans working in Hungary have to pay Hungarian and American taxes, one of the few countries in the world where that's true, that's punitive.
That's punishment.
And it's punishment for your constitution and for your attitudes.
That is cultural imperialism.
That's what we used to call it.
The idea that the bigger country gets to impose its way of life on smaller countries, not convince them to adopt our way of life, not convince them to drink Coca-Cola because it tastes great, but force them.
Convert or die.
That was repugnant to Americans.
That was the opposite of the American promise, which was this is all voluntary.
Come to our side because you want to.
We've got something better to offer you.
We're not going to force you.
We want you to come under your own free will.
And that's no longer true.
And what's sad, in my opinion, is that while the United States still has, I think, a lot to offer to the world, and I would never leave because it's, and no offense meant by this, and I hope none will be taken, it is the prettiest country in the world.
It is, let's be honest.
Even the crummy, sorry, sorry, it is.
It's beautiful, and it has wonderful people, and I know many of you have relatives there.
A lot of you are Americans, and you know exactly what I'm talking about.
It's been taken over by lunatics.
But the core of the country has not changed.
But what's so interesting to me is that the people running the United States are no longer even pretending to offer a better life to the people who live there, which is a huge change.
I mean, throughout the course of my life until fairly recently, we had people I voted for in office, people I would never vote for in office, but all of them made basically the same promise.
Elect me, give me power, and I will make your life better.
And here's how I'll do it.
I never hear anybody make that case in the United States.
And what they're offering is a world in which human flourishing is, if not impossible, very difficult.
The ruling party is the party of the childless, the childless, The unmarried?
The people who are working for low wages for large corporations and living in tiny apartments in overcrowded cities that are rife with crime?
That's not a cliche.
That's true.
It's not a talking point.
It's true.
Who votes for the people who run the United States right now?
People who are, again, working for big non-profits or big banks, living in crowded conditions, very often alone.
In big soulless cities, having their food delivered by immigrants, and spending their time glued to a screen.
What does that sound like to you?
It sounds like prison, actually.
It sounds like prison.
When people violate our laws in the United States, how do we punish them?
Well, we execute a few.
Not very many.
But mostly, our harshest punishment is locking them in a small cell.
Where they can't see the sky, where their food is delivered through the bars, often by immigrants, from the commissary, which is the Uber Eats of prison, where they have to sit cut off from nature and in solitude for years.
Well, that's the life of your average Democratic voter.
Solitude, isolation, cut off from nature.
Who are the people who oppose this?
And some of them are Republicans.
You're not going to hear me say word one in support of the Republicans, by the way, who have collaborated in the most dishonorable possible way with the Biden administration.
So instead of saying Republican, I will describe them as anyone who's not with the program, which is the majority of people in my country.
Where do they live?
And more important, how do they live?
Well, they're poorer, generally, on paper.
But are their lives worse?
If you live in a place where you can see the sky, where you can make your own food and maybe even know where it comes from, if you can go outside and, say, identify three species of trees or hear birds, or experience silence, the rarest commodity in the modern world, silence, where you can hear voices that aren't being broadcast from NBC News or Google, maybe higher voices, Those are the people who are not with the program.
People who have a daily experience of others and who have a daily experience of nature.
And those people are much more likely to acknowledge a power beyond themselves and beyond their government.
And there's a reason for that, because they can see it.
When you're isolated in a cell, living, as the urban planners of the United States now refer to it as, in density.
Which is somehow supposed to be good for the climate or the world.
No, it's death.
It's enslavement is what it is.
When you're living crowded as you would on an industrial farm as a cow or as a chicken in a pen, you are not liberated.
You are enslaved.
And you can't think clearly.
And your reference points are gone.
And you can't see the stars.
And you can't see the trees.
You cannot see God's creation.
All around you, you see what?
Drywall and screens.
Made by other people, people who don't mean you well.
And your ability to make clear judgments, to think clearly, to think rationally, goes away.
And the next thing you know, you're still wearing a COVID mask three years later.
Because how would you know not to?
Four years ago, I moved with my wife and some of our many children outside of the city where I had lived most of my life, Washington, D.C., to a rural area.
And the very first thing I noticed...
When we left the city was every time you would stop and do something, whether it was, you know, go to the store to get something to drink, go buy food, go to the post office, the very first thing that would happen is someone would talk to you.
Do you know what talking is like to a person?
It's different from texting.
People speak and you look at their faces when they talk.
And I hadn't had this experience quite as often as I did when I moved to a rural area and they would talk.
And they would say things that weren't necessarily relevant to my daily schedule, like, how are you?
How are your dogs?
Stuff like that.
And my first instinct was, man, I've got to go.
I've got texts to do.
I have a lot of emails to return.
I don't have time to talk to this person.
And I'd feel jittery, like you're getting in the way of my schedule by making human contact with me.
And then I realized after a year or so, that is the whole point of life.
It's not to return texts.
It's to have relationships with other people.
That is the whole point of life.
That's where all joy comes from.
It doesn't come from money.
It comes from being in relationship with other people.
And with God, for that matter.
And one leads to the other.
And I had, you know...
As close to the earth as I tried to live while living in a city, I completely lost track of this.
And so I guess I would just end on this.
If you're trying to assess whether a political philosophy is a good philosophy or a bad philosophy, the test is really simple.
Look at what it produces.
If a politician, if a leader is telling you, vote for me, support me, send me money, I'm on your side, you can know whether that person is worth supporting by the world he has created, both around him and within his own home.
Is that person happily married?
Does his wife respect him?
Do his children listen to him?
How many dogs does he have?
Is the town or city or country that he runs getting prettier?
Is it cleaner?
Is it less crowded?
Is there more or less graffiti?
Are there more people living on the streets?
What percentage of people are on drugs?
How many people died of drug overdoses on the sidewalk last month?
These are measurable.
And so by the fruits, you will know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
And you will also know by the degree to which the person lies to you.
Now, all politicians lie.
It's a feature of politics.
So it's a matter of degrees.
Is he lying to you in small ways?
Is he bragging?
I had a million people at my event.
No, there were 300,000.
No, it was a million.
Okay, that's a lie.
But is it a lie that threatens your existence?
Probably not.
It's the ones who tell you the 180 degree opposite of the truth who you need to be careful of.
And they're the ones who will enslave you.
That is true.
If they're telling you, It's nighttime when the sun is shining.
If they're telling you up is down, black is white, they are the ones to avoid.
They are dark forces.
And even in a country as great as mine, with as many choices as any country in the world has ever had, there are 150 different brands of cat litter in the United States.
We have choices.
But even in a country like ours, where the promise is, there's a flavor for you, There is no diversity whatsoever.
There is no choice in the information that you receive in our media landscape.
Everybody is saying the same thing all the time.
And now you have to ask yourself, why is that?
And, of course, the answer is very simple, because they're lying to you.
And anyone who doesn't lie is punished and pushed off the stage.
Now, I've been in the media business my entire life, 32 years.
Since August of 1991. And I've known this.
And this realization has grown over the years.
But it's in traveling outside of my country that it becomes real to me.
And most recently this week in Hungary.
And I'll just give you one example.
And that's the war in Ukraine.
Now I think decent people can have different views on the war.
I have my opinions.
You may disagree with me.
I don't think that makes me a bad person or a servant of Putin.
And I don't think your opinion makes you an idiot or a bad person either.
I think it's totally fair to disagree.
What I object to is lying about what the facts are.
And in the United States right now, the overwhelming majority of the population believes that the Ukrainian army is this close to defeating the Russian army.
And, you know, again, I think it's totally fair to root for the Ukrainian army.
I'm not attacking anybody.
Sorry that Russia invaded Ukraine.
I'm not taking the Russian position on this.
I'm merely saying that the fact of what is actually happening, not what we wish would happen, but what is happening, is essential if we want to make up our minds about what to do next.
And in the United States, virtually everyone I've ever met believes that Ukraine is winning.
Now, if you think about this for a moment, here you have One country which has a hundred million more people than the other country and has much deeper military-industrial capacity can make more missiles, make more bullets, make more tanks than the other country.
So over time, the bigger country is almost certain to win, correct?
This is a physics principle.
Right.
It's not a statement of allegiance.
You're not a shill for somebody for acknowledging that.
If we're wrestling and you outweigh me by 100 pounds, you're probably going to win because you're bigger.
That's a fact.
And yet, my country, a nation of 350 million people, has been told exactly the opposite for a year and a half for ideological reasons, as a function of propaganda.
It is lying.
And the scary thing is that otherwise very smart people believe it, even though...
You can still, and this may change, go on Wikipedia in the United States and look up population numbers.
How many people live in Russia?
How many people live in Ukraine?
Oh, one outweighs the other by 100 million people.
That's probably going to win.
Maybe we should force a peace or whatever or adjust our expectations accordingly.
But no.
And it's funny, I showed up here in Budapest a couple of days ago and I've talked to a bunch of different people and eaten like maybe 27 different meals.
Gain a lot of weight in your country, gotta be honest.
That's not a criticism, just a fact.
And I've asked every person, you know, back where I come from, the most informed, the most technologically superior nation in the history of man, the only country to put a human being on the surface of the moon.
In that country, everybody believes that Ukraine is one F-16 away from beating Russia on the field of battle.
And every single Hungarian, most of them are anti-Russian, by the way.
I haven't met anyone in Hungary who likes the Russians, just being honest.
They don't like the Russians.
But everyone has looked at me like I'm insane.
What?
No.
unidentified
No.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
And it's embarrassing.
It's embarrassing to be from a place that has been lied to at scale and believe the lies so thoroughly.
But the truth is, That's kind of the state of man.
I'm always interested when I come to Europe in the Ottoman occupation.
And what's amazing to me is these countries went from Muslim to Christian in like one day, the day the siege ended.
And you're like, you think to yourself, well, did all these people convert in one day?
And not all of them, but yeah, most of them did.
Because the deep truth, which no one wants to admit, is that leadership matters.
When you have wise leaders who articulate clear goals and whose ideas are rooted in reality, physical reality and unchanging human nature, those leaders will have happy, prosperous countries.
And when you have leaders who have poison ideas that are rooted in anti-human, anti-theological ideology, When they get some crackpot idea like Marxism or neoliberalism or trannyism or whatever the ism is, those leaders will lead their countries to destruction.
So as much as me as a native Californian wants to believe that everybody's opinion is equal and we're all the sum total of our choices, that's not true.
We are all hostage to history.
We are living in a world that we did not create but that our leaders created for us.
That is true.
And by and large, we will follow them wherever they go.
And so your leadership matters.
It's essential.
Your heart may not change when leadership changes, but the world around you will.
And so do all that you can to preserve good leadership.
That would be my parting piece of advice.
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