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Nov. 21, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
12:53
Laugh in the Face of Authoritarianism

Tucker Carlson's speaks in Esztergom, Hungary in August 2021 at MCC Feszt. Find the full speech on X: https://x.com/TuckerCarlson #TuckerCarlson #Politicians #Hungary #authoritarianism #JoeBiden #speech #MCCFeszt #Comedy #Esztergom #News #Politics #donaldtrump #freespeech #Debate

Participants
Main
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tucker carlson
dailycaller 12:31
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Speaker Time Text
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
The first two things authoritarian movements do, first they try to control your language, and second, they stop you from laughing.
Why do they do that?
Well, they control your language so they can control your mind.
And those of you who were born speaking Hungarian, someone said to me the other day that Edward Teller, when he won the Nobel Prize, said, I would not have won this if I didn't speak Hungarian, but because I do, my brain works differently.
And I think a language as complex as Hungarian, totally indecipherable.
I mean, I pick up Spanish going to Taco Bell.
I've not picked up one word of Hungarian this entire week.
I think it's true, especially for your language, but it's true for all languages.
Words determine the way that you think.
And if you take the words away, as Orwell famously noted in about four different books and a hundred newspaper columns, you take away people's ability to think about things.
So that's the first thing they do.
The second thing they do is make it illegal to laugh, particularly at them.
Now, why do they do that?
Well, partly because they're thin-skinned and insecure, and that's why they went into politics in the first place, to prove something to their absent or alcoholic fathers.
Granted.
But there's a deeper reason for it.
And that is that humor is perspective.
How do you find something funny?
By rising above it to a high altitude and looking down at its outline, by seeing things in their entirety.
By looking up from the script and gazing around and noticing where you are and finding it hilarious.
That just, in fact, happened to me.
I was kind of in my own world texting with my wife and I look up and I'm right across the Danube from Slovakia about to give a speech to people I don't know.
And I thought to myself, kind of hilarious.
Where am I?
Not really sure.
Enjoying it?
Yes.
And I laughed to myself because I had perspective.
Perspective is the one thing they refuse to allow you.
This is the way it is.
This is the way it's always been.
And this is the way it's going to be.
Now, that's an obvious lie, but in order to convince you of it, they have to eliminate any reference to the past.
They topple your statues.
They tell you to shut up and stop talking about your family or your country.
Be ashamed of what your ancestors did.
unidentified
Hate your history.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
They prevent you from having old words because old words describe old ideas.
And above all, they prevent you from rising above the current situation and looking down to assess it clearly, otherwise known as comedy.
So I'm not bragging when I say the United States has been, I'm 52, for my life, the single funniest country in the world.
A truly hilarious place.
We have an entire economy built on being funny.
It's called stand-up comedy.
And we led the world, as we did in aerospace, in comedy for generations.
It's all gone.
It's all gone.
It is no longer allowed.
So I think if you're going to recognize what's happening, you first need to recognize that this is not liberalism that is being imposed on you.
That's one of the many words they've stolen.
It is illiberalism.
It is the opposite of liberalism.
It is a totalitarian idea that everyone behaves the same.
Everyone reads from the same catechism, from the same list of slogans, and that everyone obeys.
That is the opposite of Enlightenment liberalism, which forms the basis of my politics and my worldview.
Okay, that's the first thing.
The second thing is they hate it when you leave the country and look around because you might conclude that, hey, even a country with a GDP smaller than the state of New York that has no Navy because it doesn't have an ocean, that is stuck between hostile neighbors that's been overrun by foreign powers for the last 900 years, even a country like that can have kind of happy people and can stand up for its own citizens.
So if they can do it, if they can do it, why can't we do it?
Like, how hard is it?
I went to your border the other day.
Yeah, I went to your southern border.
We bombed down there on Wednesday.
And the producers and I were talking on the trip down.
And, you know, obviously, Hungary's not as rich as the United States, but they're technologically advanced.
They've created all these Nobel Prize winners.
You know, they sort of, they understand math, okay?
That's why they're good at chess.
So clearly their border barrier is going to be this super high-tech wonder of science that can detect Syrians 30 kilometers away and stop them in their tracks.
So we get there and your border wall turns out to be a chain link fence.
And there's nobody there.
There's not one person there.
I grew up on the U.S. border, actually, on our border with Mexico, 15 miles from the border.
I know the border very well.
I know what it looks like now.
And it is a perpetual scene of human suffering.
Children crying, people getting hurt, garbage everywhere.
It's a disaster.
It's a hellscape.
And it's a sad thing, not simply for the United States, but for the migrants trying to come north.
It's bad for everybody because chaos always is.
So I look at your border and I'm thinking, well, what is the secret here?
How can this country, I didn't even see anyone with a gun.
There was one guy with, not even a Vishla.
He had a German shepherd.
Which I thought was a little bit degrading to your national pride, got to be honest.
Get the Vishlas involved.
It's your dog, but it's not my call.
Labrador, now you're speaking.
Spaniel, get some Springer Spaniels, an underrated dog.
We have four.
But here's my point.
It took about an hour to figure out how exactly a country much less rich and technologically advanced than ours, with a much bigger as a proportion of population border problem than ours, could secure the border completely.
And we found out in the afternoon over the space I timed it, it was about 26 minutes, where two migrants from the Middle East, I believe they were from Syria, were apprehended, two young men, and they were taken into custody right in front of us, and they were photographed.
They were patted down on the outside of their clothes.
And then they were led away, right in front of us.
They were led away.
Now, I'd read enough about Hungary to know that when you're led away in Hungary, obviously you're going to the dungeon.
So I decided as a journalist, I should follow these unfortunate young men as they were led to hang from the rack in the basement of the castle.
So they went through this door, and I followed them, and I said to the guy who was escorting us, what is this?
And he said, this is our border.
And they were led politely out and brought to the other side.
And that was it.
The whole thing took 30 minutes.
That was the whole process.
They weren't dropped off in downtown Budapest to beg or to live in a shelter.
They were just politely told, I'm sorry, you don't have permission to come here.
See you next time.
And sure, they'll try again.
I said, will they try again?
Oh, absolutely.
They'll try again.
What are you going to do that time?
Bring them back.
How many times?
Well, the record is 52.
But we can go to 53.
We can do that.
We have the technology.
We have guys who can walk, and we'll just escort them through the border door.
Okay.
And that's why there's no one at the border.
So I thought about this for a second, and I thought, what does this say about Hungary?
It doesn't suggest profound technological sophistication.
It suggests profound commitment.
These are people who've decided they want to do something and using the lowest tech means possible are achieving it much more effectively than the powerful United States government.
So what's the difference?
And by the way, if I sound critical of my own government, it's because I am.
But there's nothing I believe in more than America.
So I just want to be totally clear on that.
And I really think, I don't actually really think what I'm going to say anyway and pretend as though I think dawn is coming soon.
But here's the point.
unidentified
You behave this way if you care.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
If you care.
If you think of your country like your home, you don't want it to look crappy.
It's really that simple.
If it's your house, you want to be in charge of who sleeps there.
That's not a complex principle.
It's the most basic human principle.
So as I'm standing at the border, literally at the border fence, thinking about this, watching the German shepherd amble past, I was trying to talk to a border guard who, by the way, like, as noted, like every Hungarian I have met, every, from the driver to the waiter to the border guard, had better English than their own president.
I said, how often do people come to the border?
How often do you see migrants putting ladders atop the concertina wire?
Is this like every hour, every day?
Is it at night during the day?
I'm trying to ask the dumb journalist questions.
And he said, well, and then he stopped and he looked down like very intensely, like something bad had happened.
And I'm from the U.S. where we have poisonous snakes.
So I immediately thought, you know, I don't know if they have cobras in Hungary.
Again, I don't speak the language.
So I stepped back and there is a plastic sandwich bag about that big on the ground stuck at the bottom of the chain link fence.
And this guard reaches down, grabs the bag, and puts it in his own pocket.
And I don't think I have seen in my life very few displays more powerful than that.
So here's a border guard.
I don't know what they make.
I'm guessing not much.
He's a civil servant.
He works for the government.
And he's so offended by the idea that there's litter in his country that he puts it in his own pocket.
What does that tell you?
It's the clearest possible expression of love and respect.
When you love something, you keep it clean.
Period.
I've said this on television many times, and every time I do, they call me a fascist, as if cleanliness were a fascist quality.
It's not.
It's a virtue.
Order and cleanliness are essential to human happiness.
And if you have teenagers, you know, because they're filthy.
They're disgusting.
They live in filth.
I've had four.
I can attest to this.
It's not a moral failing.
It is a failure to teach clear virtue.
Happy people are organized.
My father always made us make our beds in hotel rooms.
And I would always say, why would you make your bed in a hotel room?
You have a chambermaid to make your bed for you.
And my father said, because you respect yourself.
And you don't have an unmade bed because you're not a slob, because you're not an animal.
And the same is true of countries.
If you care about your country, it's clean and orderly.
And you can tell precisely the point when people stop caring about their country is when drug addicts start building tent cities on the sidewalk.
The entire state of my birth, California, you too?
You're a refugee?
It's disgusting.
And for reasons that used to confuse me but now make perfect sense, the one thing they flip out, they become enraged if you complain about is that.
So you can stand up in the public square in the United States and say, you know, I think our marginal tax rates are too high.
Or I think, you know, we should erect more tariffs against American corn or foreign corn competing with American agriculture.
Any kind of policy issue.
And people will say, you know, that's a good idea.
It's not a good idea.
Let's debate it.
It's fine.
That's within bounds.
That's allowed.
If you stand up and say, there's a vagrant defecating on the sidewalk in front of my house, and I came out this morning with a rolled-up piece of paper and smacked him in the nose and said, get the hell out of here.
You can't crap on the sidewalk.
It's my sidewalk.
It's my house.
It's my city.
It's my country.
It's not allowed.
I feel sorry for you.
I hope you find someplace better to go.
I hope you get your life in order, but you're not going to do this here because I live here.
unidentified
If you were to say that out loud, oh, you're a fascist.
Oh.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
So why is that not allowed?
Why can't you say that?
I'll tell you exactly why.
Because it reveals how little the people in charge care about the country they run and about you.
They don't care at all.
unidentified
And it's obvious.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
You'll hear people say the news is full of lies.
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