Nov. 15, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
39:25
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| In 1616, the Roman Inquisition hauled in Galileo, the Italian astronomer, and commanded him to stop saying that the Earth revolves around the Sun. | ||
| Shut up, they said! | ||
| Everyone knows that's wrong, and you're a bad person for saying otherwise. | ||
| That's a well-known story, of course, and we laugh about it now, 400 years later, because the authorities were completely wrong. | ||
| Galileo is a hero. | ||
| They are fools. | ||
| And we explain this by pointing out that they were religious nuts. | ||
| They were superstitious! | ||
| Nothing like that could ever happen now. | ||
| But it turns out the one constant in human history is human nature. | ||
| Not only does it happen now, it happens more than ever. | ||
| Watch Candace Owens get widely attacked, not by one person, but by everyone, for being right. | ||
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People like Candace Owens and others have been flagrant at putting out disinformation into the public sphere. | |
| The top performing post of the week was this post by Candace Owens, a far right-wing commentator and a favorite on Fox, denigrating George Floyd. | ||
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It just shows how this website is a radicalization engine. | |
| You do have this sort of parade of MAGA world that are parroting Russian talking points. | ||
| Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard, I think somewhere along the line, they don't believe this, but they think that it's in their interest to say these things. | ||
| These people are almost collaborators. | ||
| That Candace Owens video was the top video on Facebook this past week, and she's, you know, saying all sorts of things about George Floyd and denying any systemic racism problems. | ||
| And so there's a deeper fundamental issue with... | ||
| What the Facebook algorithm and all social media algorithms, what kind of content they reward. | ||
| Others doubled down on vaccine disinformation. | ||
| Folks like right wing commentator Candace Owens, who told followers that she wouldn't take the vaccine even on her deathbed. | ||
| Notice why they were attacking Candace Owens. | ||
| What did she say? | ||
| She said, well, actually George Floyd was not murdered by a racist cop, much less by a systemically racist society. | ||
| She said, actually, the vaccine doesn't work very well and it may be dangerous. | ||
| She went on to say, no, Ukraine is not going to win the war against Russia. | ||
| And for saying these things, every one of which has proven true, she was attacked as an immoral person, a racist, and a traitor to her country. | ||
| What's interesting, however, is that no one leveling those taxes ever apologized to her. | ||
| And so, maybe like Galileo, she's going to have to wait for her descendants to get the praise for her truth-telling. | ||
| And we thought that seems unfair. | ||
| We decided to invite Candace Owens into the studio and congratulate her face-to-face. | ||
| Candace Owens, thank you for joining us. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| By the way, you're about to have another descendant. | ||
| Actually, yeah. | ||
| 40 weeks, but I was not missing this. | ||
| I was so excited. | ||
| I'm honored to be here. | ||
| Well, so it's a little weird to see yourself. | ||
| Look, we all get things wrong. | ||
| I certainly have gotten a lot of things wrong. | ||
| I think it's fair to be attacked for getting it wrong. | ||
| But if you get it right, and it's proven that you got it right, and three instances it has been proven that you did on the biggest issues of the day. | ||
| Shouldn't the people who attacked you apologize? | ||
| And shouldn't someone at least put out, hey, Kenneth Owens was right about that? | ||
| No, I think what tends to happen is they have too much ego and they're too proud and they want to sort of move on and pretend that they weren't as radical as they were in their stances and calling you a grandma killer, you know, if you wanted to go out the door and get groceries or if you wanted to maybe see your grandma because grandma shouldn't be dying alone even if she is dying. | ||
| So it takes a tremendous amount of humility to admit that you were wrong. | ||
| People prefer to then pretend the internet will forget and just that they had more nuance than they did on the issue of the day, which is fine with me. | ||
| I mean, it's one thing not to admit you're wrong. | ||
| I understand it's difficult to do that. | ||
| I have to force myself. | ||
| But to attack other people for being right and then apologize for it does seem immoral. | ||
| It is immoral, and when we're living in an environment where there is a lot of media immorality, you know, people would rather you parrot certain talking points rather than have a meaningful discussion and a meaningful dialogue, and they don't accept it. | ||
| And at the moment that they start to censor speech and they start talking, you know, calling you names, like calling you a grandma killer, calling you a pro-Putin puppet, you know it's because they don't actually believe what they're saying. | ||
| It's just these are ad hominem attacks to dissuade from having an actual debate, and there always should be an actual debate on that issue. | ||
| Never explain what you got wrong. | ||
| They don't call it wrong. | ||
| They call it disinformation, which suggests it could be right. | ||
| That's usually a tell. | ||
| And speaking of, so I was out of the country yesterday and didn't have adequate internet access on the plane to really follow this. | ||
| And I don't understand the context exactly, but the internet was dominated yesterday by video of Ben Shapiro, who you work with at The Daily Wire, I think it's fair to say, attacking you. | ||
| Here's the video. | ||
| I just want to get your reaction to it. | ||
| Yes, the question is about Candace Owens. | ||
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I think her behavior during this has been disgraceful. | |
| I think that her faux sophistication on these particular issues has been ridiculous. | ||
| It's not faux sophistication, it's ridiculous. | ||
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Everybody can see the moves that she's making and the things that she's saying, and I find them just reputable. | |
| So maybe there's a point in the video where he explains what exactly you did wrong and how you were wrong. | ||
| I haven't seen it. | ||
| But to call somebody, quote, absolutely disgraceful, particularly a coworker, seems like a pretty big step. | ||
| And I really don't know the background here. | ||
| What is that about? | ||
| You know, there isn't much of a background. | ||
| I saw the video when everybody else saw it when I woke up. | ||
| No one warned you about it? | ||
| Nobody warned me about it. | ||
| It looks like maybe he didn't know he was being recorded. | ||
| It looks like it was some sort of a private event. | ||
| I got no clarity on the issue that he was particularly speaking on. | ||
| And in what was said, I also, I can't respond to it beyond what he's saying because it's just ad hominid attacks. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, because it's not, you know, we disagree or, you know, I don't think she's correct or maybe she doesn't know what she's talking about. | ||
| It's absolutely disgraceful. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And so I can't respond to it on a level of intellect because there's nothing that he has expressed, at least in that short clip, that he fundamentally disagrees with in terms of what I said. | ||
| But I will say that... | ||
| I'm not going to respond with the same Ed Hoffman in a text. | ||
| I don't think it helps further discussion. | ||
| And if that was me that was caught on a video saying that about colleagues that I work with, I would be embarrassed. | ||
| So I think that the video speaks more to Ben's character than it speaks to mine. | ||
| Has he texted you to apologize or explain or anything? | ||
| No, nothing. | ||
| I haven't heard a single word. | ||
| It just was sort of something that he said. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Ben and I have many disagreements, so I don't think that that's particularly something that's interesting. | ||
| We disagreed on the COVID vaccine. | ||
| We disagree on Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| He has taken virtually every stance that has been the opposite of mine on every issue over the last five years. | ||
| So I don't think that that's particularly remarkable. | ||
| Really, I didn't remember that. | ||
| Yeah, he was pro the COVID vaccine. | ||
| I was anti the vaccine. | ||
| We were all idiots for not getting the vaccine. | ||
| So that's totally fine. | ||
| I am totally open to people having a difference in opinion. | ||
| I would hope that amongst colleagues that it would always be Civil disagreement. | ||
| And I would never in a private event stand on a table and talk badly about Ben. | ||
| It's a little weird. | ||
| So he was on the left on those three biggest issues of our time, is what you're saying? | ||
| He has converted his opinions. | ||
| He's accepted responsibility. | ||
| He said, you know, I was wrong about the vaccine. | ||
| Oh, good. | ||
| He is, you know, obviously pro-pharma. | ||
| His mom's a doctor. | ||
| And I say to people, I'm very aware of... | ||
| My perspective's on Big Pharma, and I talk about it on my show openly, and I think that that's a tremendous credit to The Daily Wire, that they allow a difference of opinions. | ||
| But I would, as I said, hope that it would remain respectful and that you wouldn't throw your colleagues under a bus, so to speak, in a private setting. | ||
| I think that's fair. | ||
| And just for clarity, because I really don't know, is he your boss? | ||
| I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about Ben's involvement. | ||
| He's not the CEO of The Daily Wire. | ||
| He is not making the data into The Daily Wire. | ||
| And I do want to make it very clear because people are like, how could you possibly save Daily Wire after this? | ||
| I have a very good relationship with the co-CEOs of The Daily Wire. | ||
| Especially right now, the acting CEO is Caleb Robinson. | ||
| He's a wonderful person. | ||
| He's worked very hard to be where he's at. | ||
| We have a lot in common that we connect on. | ||
| And so people don't get to see that, which is unfortunate. | ||
| Ben lives in Florida. | ||
| He's not a part of the day-to-day movement of The Daily Wire. | ||
| The rest of the hosts have their shows situated in Nashville. | ||
| So we see each other every day. | ||
| We talk. | ||
| There's great camaraderie. | ||
| And there's actually more agreement. | ||
| There's actually a lot of people that are, as I describe myself, just... | ||
| We're America First. | ||
| And I think I've been that way consistently throughout my political career. | ||
| Whether people agree with it or not in different moments is up for debate. | ||
| But I don't want that video to become a reflection of how The Daily Wire works and The Daily Wire operates because I have had a very good experience with the CEOs and, you know, love Michael Knowles, love Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan. | ||
| We all get along really great. | ||
| Well, it certainly speaks well to The Daily Wire then. | ||
| So it's not, I mean, a clip like that. | ||
| On the internet, oh, Candace Owens is out or something. | ||
| That doesn't sound like that's what it means. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's a small group of people. | ||
| We see each other every day. | ||
| Brett Cooper is another one who just joined about two years ago. | ||
| She's great. | ||
| She's up and coming. | ||
| And there's a lot of stuff that we're working on. | ||
| And that's why I think this video is even more unfortunate because people see him as a figurehead, rightfully so, of The Daily Wire. | ||
| And it allows people to, you know, speak. | ||
| Energy into the Daily Wire that isn't necessarily there because he's not there on a day-to-day basis. | ||
| Okay, that's very interesting. | ||
| So if we could take three steps back and give us the context for this debate. | ||
| How are you on different sides of it? | ||
| I haven't heard you endorsing Hamas. | ||
| Well, I have not endorsed Hamas in any way, and yet people have interpreted things that I say, or actually rather things that I don't say. | ||
| It's becoming very much reminiscent to me and why I have used my platform to say this of Black Lives Matter, where if you don't say anything, they say your silence is violence. | ||
| If you say something and it's even handed and it's nuanced, which is to say, you know, during the times of Black Lives Matter, you might say, I don't support police brutality. | ||
| Who does? | ||
| I don't support racism. | ||
| Who does? | ||
| But also, I think that police are a crucial part of every... | ||
| We need to have policing in cities so these calls to defund the police are immoral and wrong and are going to lead to more Black deaths. | ||
| People didn't want that nuance. | ||
| Following George Floyd, there was no nuance. | ||
| You had to explicitly say, defund the police. | ||
| You had to post a Black square. | ||
| If you didn't post a Black square on Instagram, by the way, specifically on the platform of Instagram. | ||
| And you maybe were busy that day. | ||
| Maybe you were in another country. | ||
| You know, maybe you just didn't log on to Instagram. | ||
| You were accused of being a racist. | ||
| I'm seeing a lot of that behavior right now when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a conflict that I have seen every single person, including myself, condemn what happened on October 7th. | ||
| Because who wouldn't condemn terrorism? | ||
| It's obviously who would not condemn innocent Israelis dying. | ||
| But if you then say that it is also sad when an innocent Palestinian child dies, suddenly... | ||
| This is pro-Hamas, or you need to say, even when you're talking about how sad it is that a child dies, you need to button that statement by saying, but that child was a human shield. | ||
| That's not going to be my response. | ||
| First off, as a mother, that's not going to be my response as somebody who is about to give birth when I see these images of children involved on both sides of the conflict. | ||
| I have pointed to the people that are mocking dead Israeli children and said that they are horrific. | ||
| I am even keel on this matter, and yet people think that you need to be extreme. | ||
| So people that have become more radical and extreme are perceiving a moderate stance as not enough. | ||
| I was about to say, people can disagree with you or agree with you or whatever, but you certainly don't seem radical on this topic. | ||
| I'm definitively not radical. | ||
| My stance has not changed in terms of whether or not America should be involved in this conflict. | ||
| Whether we were talking about Afghanistan, my comments have been clear. | ||
| They've been documented for years. | ||
| Whether we are talking about Ukraine and Russia, my comments have been clear and they have been documented. | ||
| I mean, you can go back to me even talking about NATO expansion before things erupted, Yeah. | ||
| and having a meaningful discussion about how much expansion is too much expansion. | ||
| How would we feel if we had troops on our border? | ||
| These are things that should be allowed in an academic discussion. | ||
| You should be able to sit on stage and should be able to debate these ideas without using odd hominid attacks to say that you're a pro-Putin puppet or you're pro-terrorism, even in the aftermath of 9-11, something that we all remember as part of my childhood. | ||
| I think I was in seventh grade at the time, and I'm born in the New York City area, so this was a very big deal. | ||
| If a person the day after 9-11 wanted to debate the Patriot Act, it's not fair to call them terrorist sympathizers. | ||
| No. | ||
| Actually, they would have been proven right in the long run that we gave up a lot of our freedoms. | ||
| And I think there was only one congressman, a Republican, that was against the Patriot Act at that time. | ||
| So it's important, actually, when you start making decisions in a highly emotional time, that people sit down and have these academic debates. | ||
| And there are people that are saying, no, it doesn't matter because people are dead, that you need to just choose a side, and that needs... | ||
| It needs to become tribal. | ||
| There's also, I can't help but notice that your views reflect mine, I would say pretty much. | ||
| I'm an American. | ||
| I was horrified by what happened on October 7th. | ||
| I think it was pretty strange. | ||
| I don't really understand how it happened, but innocents died, and that's awful. | ||
| And I hated watching that. | ||
| I feel so sorry for the Israelis who were killed. | ||
| However, there's an emotional response that is disproportionate, I think, on the part of some commentators. | ||
| Our country is being invaded right now by millions of young men whose identities we don't know, who probably don't even like America, and they're now living here. | ||
| Over 100,000 Americans die every year of fentanyl. | ||
| I've known a couple. | ||
| Those are real tragedies. | ||
| I've never seen anything like the emotion from any commentator around those tragedies as I'm watching about a foreign tragedy. | ||
| I think that's odd. | ||
| I think what tends to happen is, of course, we all have elements of selfishness within us, and so when it particularly pertains to an issue that impacts you. | ||
| Was strongly speaking out against Black Lives Matter as an organization very early on as a conservative because I understood the implications were going to be of defunding the police. | ||
| It was an issue that was important to me. | ||
| I created an entire documentary to talk about this issue. | ||
| And I held on for a long time and people began to see that actually I was telling the truth and now we have more death in inner city communities than we had before. | ||
| These riots and these George Floyd protests calling for defunding of the police. | ||
| And I think in terms of this, that's what's also happened is that people that are pro-Israel Are pro-Israel, a lot of them, because they have family members in Israel. | ||
| They have homes in Israel. | ||
| And so they feel very attached to this issue. | ||
| And, you know, I was very happy to host somebody who was pro-Israel. | ||
| He's a pro-Israel comedian on my show the other day. | ||
| And I explained this to him. | ||
| I said, you know, you are demanding that we Have this same response that you are having about what people are saying on college campuses. | ||
| The rhetoric on college campuses hasn't changed. | ||
| Did you not remember what they were saying? | ||
| What professors were saying? | ||
| The anti-white explicit racism that was happening, and not even just allowed in terms of student protests, but was written into the curriculum at these universities for years. | ||
| People were learning this actively in school, that whiteness was associated with wrongness. | ||
| You had college professors that were writing about this need to, there needed to be less white people. | ||
| In America, you can find these articles. | ||
| They exist online. | ||
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They're everywhere. | |
| And that seems genocidal. | ||
| It is genocidal. | ||
| Like, by definition, if you're saying being a certain ethnicity or race is itself a sin and we need less of you... | ||
| I mean, that is the definition, is it not? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was an understanding of needing to breed out white people. | ||
| It was unbelievable what I was seeing, and I was impacted by it because I'm in a biracial relationship and I have biracial children. | ||
| So you are telling me that my children are going to have to decide between whether or not they are white oppressors or they are black victims. | ||
| It doesn't stand for me. | ||
| So I was attached to this issue, and it's something that I fought for hard on college campuses, and there was no support. | ||
| There was nobody talking about, well, this is what needs to go. | ||
| These kids need to go on to blacklists. | ||
| And by the way, if they did speak that way, I would have disagreed with it. | ||
| I am pro-1A. I believe in the First Amendment. | ||
| I believe that kids, by the way, are naturally stupid. | ||
| In case people forget, I started on the left. | ||
| So if you found me in college, you would have found a pro-life person who believed in some racist principles, fundamental racism in America, because that was what I was being taught systematically in the classroom. | ||
| And then I got to grow up and change my mind. | ||
| And I don't think people have thought past their immediate emotions to consider what's going to happen when you put these kids on blacklist. | ||
| You think that's going to bring them over to the pro-Israel side when they get older? | ||
| Most of these kids, especially when you're talking about the cream of the crop at these Ivy League universities, already have access to money and wealth and connections. | ||
| And so maybe debating the issues and explains them why it was wrong to sign this specific letter, which didn't call for explicit violence against the Israelis, but it actually was very poorly timed and it blames them for what happened, which would have been horrific. | ||
| Imagine after 9-11, somebody issues a letter on college campus and says, oh, well, sorry about the fire department. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I get why donors are mad. | ||
| Imagine, yeah. | ||
| By the way, I support donors giving money to things they agree with. | ||
| Yes, I support that. | ||
| I strongly do. | ||
| The part that, and so I have no problem with that at all. | ||
| You don't like it, don't pay for it. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| However, then I thought, well, wait a second. | ||
| If the biggest donors at, say, Harvard, have decided, well, we're going to shut it down now, where were you the last 10 years when they were going for a white genocide? | ||
| You were allowing this. | ||
| And then I found myself really hating those people, actually. | ||
| You're okay with that? | ||
| On what grounds were you okay with that? | ||
| And this is what I've been trying to explain to the pro-Israel lobby, that what you are seeing as lack of support is people that are asking the question is, where were you as we have endured all of this? | ||
| You were paying for it, actually. | ||
| You were paying for it. | ||
| You were paying for it. | ||
| You were calling my children immoral for their skin color. | ||
| You paid for that. | ||
| So why shouldn't I be mad at you? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| And so that is, you know, obviously, you have a ton of white people that are asking this question, and they're now being called anti-Semitic. | ||
| And I think that that's wrong. | ||
| I think these are meaningful questions that deserve to be answered. | ||
| Why was this sort of verbiage allowed into the curriculum? | ||
| I mean, could you imagine if in the curriculum it said that every Jewish person born is a terrorist? | ||
| This is systematically what has been said. | ||
| I would be totally opposed to that. | ||
| You're learning this, not even just, by the way, at the college campus level, in high schools. | ||
| I've covered this on my show at high schools, that they are now allowing children to stand up in an auditorium during, uh, not Black Lives Matter week, during, uh, what is February? | ||
| African, uh, yeah, for a whole month of February, African American month. | ||
| Black History Month. | ||
| Black History Month. | ||
| I was totally blank. | ||
| I'm like, what is February? | ||
| Black History Month, they were allowing at this very elite school $50,000 per month to attend the school, per year to attend the school, for these children to stand up on a stage and yell in an auditorium. | ||
| Black kids were allowed to be on the stage. | ||
| White kids were sitting down at this elite school, and they said, you don't know what we lived through. | ||
| You don't understand how your whiteness impacts me. | ||
| This is going on. | ||
| In New York City right now, that is explicit anti-white racism that is happening. | ||
| And I covered it on my show extensively. | ||
| Nobody cared. | ||
| There was no bus calling these kids anything wrong. | ||
| And so trying to explain that of why people maybe are not reacting with the amount of vigor that you would like to see is now being interpreted as... | ||
| Anti-Semitism. | ||
| So everyone's being called anti-Semitism. | ||
| It's a little bit like watching the city of San Francisco in the week before Xi Jinping shows up become totally clean, sparkling clean. | ||
| There are no junkies or rapists on the street. | ||
| And you feel like asking the authorities, well, wait, you had the power to do this, but you didn't? | ||
| You had the power to stop racism at Harvard, but you didn't? | ||
| Why are you not a criminal, actually, for allowing that? | ||
| Have you asked anybody this? | ||
| Have you asked a donor this? | ||
| I've been trying to get one on the show. | ||
| Say, I support what you're doing. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Don't pay for what you don't like. | ||
| But you did like the white genocide stuff. | ||
| You're kind of okay with that, huh? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I've even asked, did you use your platform to speak out against it? | ||
| Because I've been speaking out against this for years. | ||
| Now you're demanding that I use my platform to focus on a conflict that's overseas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the answer I tend to get is no. | ||
| I didn't talk about what was happening. | ||
| I didn't realize it was happening. | ||
| So it actually is quite a selfish viewpoint, which we all have. | ||
| We're all guilty of it. | ||
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Oh, I get it. | |
| I get it. | ||
| We write ourselves into the storyline. | ||
| How is this going to impact me? | ||
| And that is, I think, is why it feels existential for other people and not existential people that have been dealing with this for the last decade. | ||
| I know, but it's a pretty simple principle that, I mean, existed at 54, I can tell you, in this country for a long time, certainly from, say, the Civil Rights Act until, I don't know. | ||
| 15 years ago, you're not allowed to attack people on the base of their race in public. | ||
| I mean, everybody has bigoted views, probably. | ||
| You know, or thinks their group is best, or whereas, pretty normal. | ||
| But you're not allowed to say, I don't like you because of your race. | ||
| You're not allowed to do that. | ||
| Why can't we just return to that standard? | ||
| I'm missing it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this has been a dialogue that I think some of us have been having for years. | ||
| Some people are just now jumping into this dialogue. | ||
| And I don't fault them their emotion, but I'm not going to become a radical and rise to that level of emotion. | ||
| I think my takes have been very moderate. | ||
| Even people that are reading into things that I haven't said are unable to explain to me why what I'm saying is not okay. | ||
| They can't point to a specific sentence that I said that was wrong. | ||
| It's more about how they're reading into the sentence, which if it's how you are reading into it, that is your emotion. | ||
| And as I said, my views have not shifted since I got into the political sphere. | ||
| I have always been pro the First Amendment. | ||
| I have always been pro staying out of foreign conflicts. | ||
| And I'm sorry if that feels to you like a personal attack. | ||
| There's this wonderful Thomas Sow quote where he says that people that are used to special treatment, when you start to treat them the same, feel like they're being discriminated against. | ||
| He says it much more eloquently. | ||
| He's Thomas Sow, Dr. Thomas Sow. | ||
| But that's the gist of it. | ||
| And I think that what we're seeing right now is things that are being perceived as a discrimination. | ||
| And it's not discrimination. | ||
| I'm just treating you the same as everyone has been treated. | ||
| And throughout my, at least my dialogue and the things and monologues throughout the last six or seven years. | ||
| And I do also want to say that I find it particularly despicable, as I have said on my platform, when people who are pro-Israel, Are now being called anti-Semites for asking meaningful questions. | ||
| I talked about Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Charlie Kirk, following the attacks on October 7th, turned to the Israeli government and said, how did this happen? | ||
| You know, he talked about Israel being the size of New Jersey. | ||
| He's been there many times. | ||
| He funds thousands of students to go there and to visit. | ||
| He's honestly radically pro-Israel, I would almost say. | ||
| It's probably a fair thing about Charlie Kirk. | ||
| And he was asking these questions with the intent of, if these were your children, and they were involved in this horrific attack, wouldn't you want to know these answers? | ||
| He's like, you can't move five feet without seeing an IDF soldier. | ||
| I've been to Israel, and that is a fact. | ||
| I admire, I have too, a number of times, and I admire their border barriers, and I always have. | ||
| I always think, I wish we had that. | ||
| So that's a totally fair question. | ||
| Totally fair question that he asked, and it got interpreted, and then there were suddenly these attacks calling... | ||
| Asking the question of whether a turning point was seeping with anti-Semitism and how unfair. | ||
| How unfair to, after all the work that he has done to support your cause, turn your back on him and to call him an anti-Semite because you don't like a question that he asked that actually was being asked from the heart and with a little bit of rage toward this even being allowed to happen. | ||
| We always have to hold our governments accountable in how they are responding. | ||
| And plenty of Israelis, some of whom I know, are asking that question. | ||
| And why wouldn't they? | ||
| So you said a minute ago that one of your concerns about having a news story or a public conversation defined by emotion is that it allows the people in charge to change our lives and to take away our civil liberties because we're so distracted by the rage that we feel or the sympathy that we feel. | ||
| I mean, these are some good feelings too, but we can be manipulated during moments like this. | ||
| Here, case in point, here's a woman who is running for president. | ||
| The former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, explaining that because of these attacks on October 7th, the rest of us need to register with the government in order to express our opinions online. | ||
| Here she is. | ||
|
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When I get into office, the first thing we have to do, social media accounts, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms. | |
| Let us see why they're pushing what they're pushing. | ||
| The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name. | ||
| That's, first of all, it's a national security threat when you do that. | ||
| All of a sudden, people have to stand by what they say. | ||
| And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots. | ||
| And then you're going to get some civility when people know their name is next to what they say. | ||
| So Nikki Haley, this has been noted online, but it's not her real name, of course. | ||
| It's a pseudonym. | ||
| And so she's not even using a real name and telling us that we have to register with the government under our real names in order to give our opinions. | ||
| That's obviously contrary to the First Amendment. | ||
| I don't know why the anchor didn't say something about it to her, but sort of nodded all its accountability. | ||
| But it's fascism, actually. | ||
| So why isn't Nikki Haley getting laughed off the stage? | ||
| Well, Nikki Haley is someone that I would describe as radical. | ||
| She's a radical in this moment, and she's trying to present her opinions as not radical by hiding behind a terrorist attack, and it's not going to age well. | ||
| So right now, in this moment, people are like, this rhetoric is totally fine. | ||
| You're going to look back in a year, and people are going to say, actually, this was kind of crazy, some of the things that she said. | ||
| You know, she, in my view, has become increasingly radical every time she even hits the debate stage. | ||
| I don't even know, you know, what country she's running for president in. | ||
| And I think Vivek Ramaswamy called her out accurately. | ||
| And based on even my own personal experiences with her, which I've documented on my podcast, as somebody who isn't looking to actually win president, doesn't want to become president of the United States, what she's looking to do is to secure certain contracts after she leaves the stage and she loses. | ||
| And so for her, the motive are relationships that she's going to build and money that she's going to earn as best evidence by the fact that when Nikki Haley left her ambassadorship, she was broke. | ||
| And now she's... | ||
| a multimillionaire and you have to ask how that happens and Vivek Ramaswamy has had the courage to talk about her contract following so her concerns are not about American citizens whatsoever which is why it's all about sort of kowtowing to the person that I think that she believes or to people that she believes can write her the biggest checks that's been my assessment Nikki Haley from the very beginning it's still my assessment now uh take it or leave it but you've been attacked for saying that And in fact, she's not hardly alone in that. | ||
| I mean, a lot of politicians, in fact, almost all politicians respond to their donors. | ||
| I mean, I'm not attacking anybody, but that's just a feature of the business, right? | ||
| So you say, well, Nikki Haley is responding to her donors, and all of a sudden that's like blood libel or something. | ||
| It's foolish, and I won't play the game. | ||
| Obviously, money is motivating for a lot of politicians in D.C. that never leave. | ||
| You think? | ||
| Seriously, it's common sense, and yet sometimes people try to twist that narrative and pretend that what you're saying cannot be said because in this moment right now, she's being pro-Israel, so you can't talk about Nikki Haley and money, even though I spoke about this way before October 7th, from the second she announced that she was running. | ||
| I talked about my personal experience with her and how much she was charging for speaking fees at the time. | ||
| It was $300,000 plus a private plane for her to go anywhere to speak after she left her ambassadorship. | ||
| And she came with a list of prepackaged questions. | ||
| So her assistant at the time, you were not allowed to ask her one question off script. | ||
| Any person that hired Nikki Haley at this time will tell you this. | ||
| So her answers are practiced. | ||
| Her answers are rehearsed. | ||
| And her answers are rehearsed because she wants to make sure that she doesn't upset the people that are writing the checks. | ||
| So I said that. | ||
| Literally, the day she announced she was running for president, and now all of a sudden something that I've been consistent on is being misconstrued as anti-Israel or anti-Semitic because Nikki Haley is being radically pro-Israel. | ||
| So it does concern me, however, because in America in 2023, the only people defending the First Amendment, the foundational right, the right that precedes all other rights, which is the right to say what you really believe and prove you're not a slave, The right is the only group that defends that freedom. | ||
| And now they're not. | ||
| Now they're saying, well, actually, maybe you need to register with the government before you're allowed to talk. | ||
| So if the left's obviously opposed to the First Amendment, now a lot of the right is opposed to the First Amendment. | ||
| So, like, how do we keep the First Amendment? | ||
| Yeah, I think this kind of is... | ||
| It's almost what Trump was referring to when he talks about the swamp. | ||
| You know, they get a little taste of what they can earn for themselves, and they kind of go further into this, and it actually doesn't become about America at all. | ||
| And I think at this particular moment, you are seeing a fracturing on the right. | ||
| There are people that are pro-America, America first. | ||
| I am a person that considers myself pro-America, America first. | ||
| And it absolutely makes my skin crawl when people try to tie America's success to what we have to do overseas. | ||
| I believe in national sovereignty. | ||
| I believe that... | ||
| America has what it takes here at home to be a great nation. | ||
| And actually, I think history sort of tells us that once we started this campaign of international liberalism following World War II, things kind of started falling apart, especially a steep decrease following the 1960s without question. | ||
| I mean, socially, morally, economically, this has been a nation that's in decline. | ||
| And so I cannot stand when I see these politicians on stage emoting and saying sentences like, we can do both. | ||
| Look around you. | ||
| Does it look like we can do both? | ||
| Where is your evidence to support the claim that America can do both? | ||
| Because I'm looking around and it's very clear, it's very obvious that we cannot do both. | ||
| Our children are failing academically. | ||
| People are fearful to go into inner city communities. | ||
| We have people that are suffering from depression, overdosing on fentanyl. | ||
| We're fundamentally an unhappy nation because we don't have an identity. | ||
| Because of these things. | ||
| We don't have identity. | ||
| We've completely lost what it means to be an American. | ||
| It is why I feel very inspired when I hear someone like Vivek Ramasamy speak and talk about American principles. | ||
| I hate the way that they illustrate their opinions about people that want that old America, that are nostalgic about that America. | ||
| When someone says, and I've heard this statement, I can't remember who said it, but you can't be pro-American unless you're pro-Israel. | ||
| I just thought of the person who's probably in West Virginia who had both his legs blown off, right, fighting overseas, who is pro-American. | ||
| And you're telling him that, no, no, no, unless you agree that every single war should be everywhere, you're not pro-American. | ||
| We've lost our identity. | ||
| That's completely a foolish thing to say. | ||
| And I say this to somebody who, if I was going to be radical... | ||
| I'm probably radically pro-UK, right? | ||
| I married a Brit. | ||
| My children have dual citizenship. | ||
| I would never utter the sentence that to be pro-America means to be pro-British. | ||
| I love the Brits. | ||
| I love everything about, you know, I love being in the United Kingdom, but I know what it means to be pro-American. | ||
| It means to be pro-American. | ||
| As someone who's ancestors from the UK, I couldn't agree more. | ||
| You've got to kind of wonder where this is going now that... | ||
| You know, basically no one in the establishment in Washington is for the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primaries. | ||
| Trump gets the nomination. | ||
| Like, what happens then? | ||
| I think you're going to probably see the same things that we saw in 2015 and 2016. I think there has always been a never-Trump contingent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It has manifested itself now as... | ||
| Pro-DeSantis. | ||
| A lot of the Never Trumpers became, you know, very pro-DeSantis. | ||
| Some elements of it, obviously, people that are war hawks, people that want to kind of keep the military-industrial complex going everywhere, have always been anti-Trump. | ||
| Hate speech laws. | ||
| Yeah, hate speech laws that are dressed up as something more noble, and it's like, no, this is actually a law that is fundamentally anti-speech, and if you want to debate that, we can, and we should have that debate, but it, again, always seems to be reduced to smears and libels, and not an academic discussion, which it should be. | ||
| So I don't think this is new. | ||
| I think it's just kind of reappeared as something else. | ||
| And we have always had these people. | ||
| Will they, when they get to the ballot box, vote against Trump principally? | ||
| Well, they did it in 2015 and 2016, and it didn't have an impact. | ||
| And I think in 2020 they probably, I don't know if they cast their votes for Biden. | ||
| I don't know that they would. | ||
| I have taken myself out of political prognostications. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I obviously am always hoping that America wins at the ballot box. | ||
| people that are focused on American initiatives, are focused on wanting citizens to be successful here, not making them feel guilty about wanting to feed their families, not making them feel guilty about what they're seeing at the gas station that they can't afford, despite the fact that they do what they're supposed to do day in and day out. | ||
| They wake up, they go to work nine to five, and the government is taking everything and telling them that there's some new moral crusade. | ||
| Every time you blink, there is a new moral crusade. | ||
| How many have we lived through in just the last two years? | ||
| COVID, it was a global moral crusade. | ||
| But food prices are never a moral crusade, I notice. | ||
| Never. | ||
| God forbid you want to be able to afford a pack of bacon for your family. | ||
| God forbid you say that publicly. | ||
| Depending on what time of year it is, that makes you a grandma killer, that makes you whatever, a pro-Putin puppet. | ||
| It makes you an anti-Semite. | ||
| It makes you a racist. | ||
| We get it, okay? | ||
| We still would like to focus on our families. | ||
| We still would like to put American principles first. | ||
| So if there's no further argument... | ||
| It's just going to be smears and libels. | ||
| We like to turn the chapter and get talking about how we can actually do that, how we can actually fix America. | ||
| Who do you listen to when you're trying to figure out, I mean, some of the stuff comes at you so fast and you're talking almost every day or writing almost every day. | ||
| Who do you read or listen to to try to make sense or bounce ideas off of? | ||
| You know, I have been obsessed with Thomas Sowell, and everybody knows that. | ||
| I am pretty much a Thomas Sowell groupie. | ||
| Everything he writes, I read, and it is because he finally... | ||
| He was a part of my awakening story into politics and made me focus on the economics, which is to say, block out the noise and pay attention to the economics. | ||
| Go backwards in history to understand where we are. | ||
| When has this worked? | ||
| Oh, it's never worked. | ||
| So they're just telling me that it's going to work into the future. | ||
| And there's no evidence to support that. | ||
| So I think a lot of times in this environment, it's important to almost block out the noise and to focus on the things that matter. | ||
| The economic debates that people are having right now, which don't make sense. | ||
| How much more debt can America be in? | ||
| Trying to convince us that we're going to get out of it if we just commit to one more war. | ||
| By the way, where is all this money going? | ||
| It's incredible to me that the government has the ability to reach into our accounts and to read every single line of what we spend down to your Zelle payments and your PayPal, and yet we just can't get an accounting for how they're spending their money. | ||
| It's incredible when tech works and when tech fails people. | ||
| I would say in terms of being inspired by people, I am very much inspired for different reasons. | ||
| And people will find this very weird. | ||
| Obviously, I've been very open about the fact that I'm... | ||
| I've been tremendously inspired by you in my career. | ||
| And I'm not just saying that I've said this long before. | ||
| Tucker Unleashed has been the greatest thing. | ||
| It is something that we have needed and it has been a great addition to the American campaign. | ||
| I also am inspired by Elon Musk. | ||
| He is so different from me and we probably have very little in common. | ||
| And yet in this weird way, his fight for freedom, what he did for Twitter is something. | ||
| There are no words to illustrate what that actually meant in terms of the global conversation. | ||
| He's a hero. | ||
| If everything else that he did was bad, he would be measured as a good man. | ||
| And that's my belief. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| I'm inspired by people like... | ||
| Dana White. | ||
| The ability to, during BLM, I absolutely love Dana White. | ||
| People don't realize what sort of pressure was on him being the first person to say, we're not shutting down the UFC. Allowing, by the way, which is something that is so beautiful, the differing opinions to take place at the UFC. He does not care if you come out in an Israeli flag, a Palestinian flag, a BLM flag, a pro-America flag, and then the press will put pressure on him and you hear him and he's like, so what? | ||
| They're going to bash each other as soon as they get into the octagon. | ||
| Tell them what they're going to think. | ||
| That means something. | ||
| These are little battles that we're winning, and people are fighting them on different fronts. | ||
| And these are the cultural people, the political people. | ||
| Thomas Massey, for being the most consistent congressman in terms of what he supports and what he doesn't support, is someone else that I admire. | ||
| There are a lot of different people that I admire, but I think what they all have in common is an underlying belief in freedom and a hatred for people who are trying to tell you it's freedom when they are trying to censor you and to belittle you and to smear you and to libel you. | ||
| It does feel, I mean, I'm going to end with this, but just your gut level sense of who's winning and who's losing right now, it seems to me, maybe I'm lying to myself, that the kind of moderate, sensible, common sense oriented People who want basically all the same things, a happy, stable, safe life for their families, they do seem to be winning. | ||
| I want to say to those people, because I know that sometimes you wonder if the world has gone mad. | ||
| The world hasn't gone mad. | ||
| Some people with big platforms who have gone mad have gone mad. | ||
| But it will always pay in the long run to stay on the side of morality. | ||
| To be moderate in your opinions. | ||
| To not ever fault yourself for wanting to feed your family first. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| I would never rush over while my child was dying and starving and feed the neighbor's child. | ||
| I would feed my child first and if there was leftovers I would obviously accommodate the person next door and that's called being charitable. | ||
| And I want those people to know that I do feel what you are feeling. | ||
| And I think that we are in a unique time in America. | ||
| I think the cultural conversation is switching. | ||
| I think more people are beginning to buck bad trends. | ||
| And the more of us who stand up for that morality, the more people that will be encouraged by that standing up and who will join us. | ||
| Do you find yourself thinking about God more than you used to? | ||
| Yes, without question. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Yes, it is just one of those things. | ||
| I've never been... | ||
| More confident in who I am as a person. | ||
| And I think that that needs to be said. | ||
| And a couple of years ago, or I would even say just getting started in politics, it's a wild world. | ||
| And you do realize that people do sell out. | ||
| You do realize that there are people that don't have courage to say certain things. | ||
| There's a lot of backhanded messaging and texting that's going on because people have aligned themselves to groups and not principles, which I think is wrong. | ||
| But something changed for me spiritually when I got married and when I had children. | ||
| And I would say that I became laser-focused. | ||
| And I've never felt more secure. | ||
| I've never felt more sure that I will land on my two feet if I follow a path that I deem to be righteous. | ||
| And I am not speaking these things to myself. | ||
| That's God operating. | ||
| That is God that is operating and it is the call upon all people to be righteous in their approaches to things. | ||
| And that can be very difficult in politics, but I'm confident. | ||
| And I think people are either very... | ||
| Angry about that confidence. | ||
| I think they can see the happiness that I have and they're angry because that means that it's less of an ability to control what I say and to control what I think. | ||
| But I'm still the same girl from the wrong side of the tracks. | ||
| I understand people and I can't sell out to anybody. | ||
| I demand to be free. | ||
| It's not an arrogant false confidence. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| And I find it inspiring. | ||
| Candace Owens, thank you very much. | ||
| What an honor. | ||
|
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I'm so excited. | |
| And congratulations on this baby. | ||
| I can't overstate. | ||
| I don't want any tight shots on Candace, but, like, we're days away. | ||
| Yeah, literally minutes away. | ||
|
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The fire department's on standby. | |
| Candace Owens, what an honor. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thanks for having me. |
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