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Nov. 26, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
08:05
Do Not Give In to Your Herd Instinct

Tucker Carlson warns against tribalism and breaks down the importance of free speech during his address at The Heritage Foundation's 50th Anniversary Celebration on April 21st, 2023. Watch the full speech here: https://www.youtube.com/live/ebG2POkoHgU?si=Jewp9m3zACAfsxlh #TuckerCarlson #speech #blm #tribalism #heritagefoundation #conservative #liberal #fear #economy #News #Politics #donaldtrump #opinion #debate

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tucker carlson
dailycaller 07:51
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Speaker Time Text
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
As you look around and you see so many people break under the strain, under the downward pressure of whatever this is that we're going through.
And you look with disdain and sadness as you see people you know become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards, you see them going along with a new new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing.
You know, saying things you know they don't believe because they want to keep their jobs.
If there's a single person in this room who hasn't seen that through George Floyd and COVID and the Ukraine war, raise your hand.
Oh, nobody, right?
You all know what I'm talking about.
And you're so disappointed in people.
You know, you are.
And you realize that the hurt instinct is maybe the strongest instinct.
I mean, it may be stronger than the hunger and sex instincts, actually.
The instinct, which again is inherent to be like everybody else and not to be cast out of the group, not to be shunned, that's a very strong impulse in all of us from birth.
And it takes over, unfortunately, in moments like this, and it's harnessed, in fact, by bad people in moments like this to produce uniformity.
And you see people going along with this and you lose respect for them.
And that certainly happened to me at scale over the past three years.
I'm not mad at people.
I'm just sad.
I'm disappointed.
How could you go along with this?
You know it's not true, but you're saying it anyway.
Really?
You're putting your pronouns in your email?
You're ridiculous.
You know, but no one else thinks it's ridiculous.
Oh no, it's the pronouns in the email.
What does that even mean?
What does it even mean?
You're saying things you can't define.
LBGTQIA plus?
Who's the plus?
The plus is invited to my show anytime.
Find a plus and I'll interview them.
What's it like to be a plus?
Am I a plus?
I'm serious.
I feel like I'm an addition.
unidentified
Does that make me a plus?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
No one even knows what it is.
unidentified
And the whole society, LGBTQIA plus.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
All right.
What's the plus?
Oh, shut up, racist.
Okay.
So you reach that place and you feel, and this is one of the reasons, Father Sclee, I was actually overcome a little bit with emotion as you prayed because I realized that I was so upset by the behavior of some people I love, frankly, in a country I revere and always have, that I wasn't praying for the country.
You know, that's on me, and we all should be.
But back to my point.
So you see the sadness happening.
But there is, as there always is, this is a fact of nature and theology and of observable reality, there is a countervailing force at work always.
There's a counterbalance to the badness.
It's called goodness.
And you see it in people.
So for every 10 people who are putting he and him in their electronic JP Morgan email signatures, there's one person who's like, no, I'm not doing that.
Sorry, I don't want to fight, but like, I'm not doing that.
It's a betrayal of what I think is true.
It's a betrayal of my conscience, of my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy.
I am not a slave.
I am a free citizen, and I'm not doing that.
And there's nothing you can do to me to make me do it.
And I hope it won't come to that.
But if it does come to that, here I am.
Here I am.
It's Paul on Trout.
Here I am.
And you see that in people, and it's a completely unexpected assortment of people.
I'm really interested in cause and effect.
And as I noted at the outset of my remarks, and my ability to predict the future, working on that.
But because I'm sort of paid to predict things, I try and think a lot about, you know, what connects certain outcomes that I should have seen before they occurred.
And in this case, there is no thread that I can find that connects all of the people who've popped up in my life to be that lone, brave person in the crowd who says, no, thank you.
You could not have known who these people are.
Don't fit a common profile.
Some are people like me.
Some of them don't look like me at all.
Some of them are people I despised on political grounds just a few years ago.
I could name their names, but you may not even know about their transformations.
I don't want to wreck your dinner by telling you who they are.
But there is in one case someone who I made fun of on television and certainly in my private life in vulgar ways, who was really the embodiment of everything I found repulsive, who in the middle of COVID decided, no, I'm not going along with this.
And once you say one true thing and stick with it, all kinds of other true things occur to you.
The truth is contagious.
Lying is, but the truth is as well.
And the second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this.
I don't want to get supernatural on you, but you are filled with this power from somewhere else.
Try it.
Tell the truth about something.
You feel it every day.
The more you tell the truth, the stronger you become.
That's completely real.
It's measurable in the way that you feel.
And of course, the opposite is also true.
The more you lie, the weaker and more terrified you become.
We all know that feeling.
You lie about something, and all of a sudden you're a prisoner of that lie.
You are diminished by it.
You are weak and afraid.
Drug and alcohol use is the same way.
It makes you weak and afraid.
But you look around and you see these people, and some of them really have paid a heavy price for telling the truth.
And they are cast out of their groups, whatever those groups are, but they do it anyway.
And I look on at those people with the deepest possible admiration.
I am paid to do that.
I face no penalty.
Somebody came up to me, you're so brave.
Really?
I'm a talk show host.
It's like, I can have any opinion I want.
That's my job.
That's why they pay me.
It's not brave to tell the truth on a cable news show.
And if you're not doing that, you're really an idiot.
You're really craven.
You're lying on television.
Why would you do that?
You're literally making a living to say what you think, and you can't even do that.
Please.
But how about if you're a senior vice president at Citibank?
I'm serious.
At Citibank.
And you're making $4 million a year.
And you've got three kids in Bedford and two are in boarding school and one starting at Wesleyan next year.
And like, you need this job, honestly.
And your whole sector is kind of collapsing, and you know that.
There is no incentive whatsoever for you to tell the truth about anything.
You just go into little re-education meetings and you're like, yeah, diversity is our strength.
That's exactly right.
We need equity in the capital markets.
Okay.
unidentified
All right.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
So if you're the one guy who refuses to say that, you are a hero, in my opinion.
And I know some of them.
In fact, my job is to interview them.
And I sit back and I look at these people and I give them more credit than I do people who display physical courage, which is often impulsive, by the way.
And I'm not denigrating physical courage, which I deeply admire, but you interview people who do amazing things, you know, who rush into the proverbial burning building.
And like every man is kind of trained from birth to fantasize about what he would do when the building catches fire and you hear a baby crying.
And it's like, you run inside.
No one is trained to stand up in the middle of a DEI meeting at Citibank and say, this is nonsense.
And the people who do that, oh, they have my deepest admiration.
And so their example really gives me hope.
It thrills me.
I talk to them all day long, people like that.
That's the first thing.
We should, in this sad moment of profound and widespread destruction of the institutions that people who share our views built, by the way.
Earlier generations that would agree substantially with every person in this room, they built those and now they're being destroyed.
And oh, that's so depressing.
But we can also see rising in the distance new things, new institutions led by new people who are every bit as brave as the people who came before us.
Amen.
You'll hear people say the news is full of lies.
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