The Tucker Carlson Show - Do Not Give In to Your Herd Instinct
Aired: 2023-11-26
Duration: 08:05


=== Instincts Under Pressure (02:13) ===

[00:00:00]  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.
[00:00:08]  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.
[00:00:24]  You know, saying things you know they don't believe because they want to keep their jobs.
[00:00:27]  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.
[00:00:33]  Oh, nobody, right?
[00:00:34]  You all know what I'm talking about.
[00:00:36]  And you're so disappointed in people.
[00:00:37]  You know, you are.
[00:00:38]  And you realize that the hurt instinct is maybe the strongest instinct.
[00:00:41]  I mean, it may be stronger than the hunger and sex instincts, actually.
[00:00:46]  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.
[00:00:55]  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.
[00:01:01]  And you see people going along with this and you lose respect for them.
[00:01:05]  And that certainly happened to me at scale over the past three years.
[00:01:08]  I'm not mad at people.
[00:01:09]  I'm just sad.
[00:01:10]  I'm disappointed.
[00:01:11]  How could you go along with this?
[00:01:12]  You know it's not true, but you're saying it anyway.
[00:01:14]  Really?
[00:01:14]  You're putting your pronouns in your email?
[00:01:16]  You're ridiculous.
[00:01:17]  You know, but no one else thinks it's ridiculous.
[00:01:19]  Oh no, it's the pronouns in the email.
[00:01:20]  What does that even mean?
[00:01:23]  What does it even mean?
[00:01:24]  You're saying things you can't define.
[00:01:26]  LBGTQIA plus?
[00:01:28]  Who's the plus?
[00:01:30]  The plus is invited to my show anytime.
[00:01:32]  Find a plus and I'll interview them.
[00:01:34]  What's it like to be a plus?
[00:01:35]  Am I a plus?
[00:01:37]  I'm serious.
[00:01:38]  I feel like I'm an addition.
[00:01:39]  Does that make me a plus?
[00:01:42]  No one even knows what it is.
[00:01:44]  And the whole society, LGBTQIA plus.
[00:01:47]  All right.
[00:01:48]  What's the plus?
[00:01:49]  Oh, shut up, racist.
[00:01:51]  Okay.
[00:01:54]  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.

=== Brave Truth Tellers (05:51) ===

[00:02:13]  You know, that's on me, and we all should be.
[00:02:15]  But back to my point.
[00:02:17]  So you see the sadness happening.
[00:02:19]  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.
[00:02:27]  There's a counterbalance to the badness.
[00:02:29]  It's called goodness.
[00:02:31]  And you see it in people.
[00:02:33]  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.
[00:02:46]  Sorry, I don't want to fight, but like, I'm not doing that.
[00:02:48]  It's a betrayal of what I think is true.
[00:02:50]  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.
[00:03:00]  I am not a slave.
[00:03:01]  I am a free citizen, and I'm not doing that.
[00:03:04]  And there's nothing you can do to me to make me do it.
[00:03:07]  And I hope it won't come to that.
[00:03:10]  But if it does come to that, here I am.
[00:03:14]  Here I am.
[00:03:15]  It's Paul on Trout.
[00:03:17]  Here I am.
[00:03:19]  And you see that in people, and it's a completely unexpected assortment of people.
[00:03:24]  I'm really interested in cause and effect.
[00:03:26]  And as I noted at the outset of my remarks, and my ability to predict the future, working on that.
[00:03:34]  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.
[00:03:44]  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.
[00:03:56]  You could not have known who these people are.
[00:03:58]  Don't fit a common profile.
[00:04:00]  Some are people like me.
[00:04:02]  Some of them don't look like me at all.
[00:04:04]  Some of them are people I despised on political grounds just a few years ago.
[00:04:08]  I could name their names, but you may not even know about their transformations.
[00:04:11]  I don't want to wreck your dinner by telling you who they are.
[00:04:14]  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.
[00:04:27]  And once you say one true thing and stick with it, all kinds of other true things occur to you.
[00:04:33]  The truth is contagious.
[00:04:34]  Lying is, but the truth is as well.
[00:04:37]  And the second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this.
[00:04:41]  I don't want to get supernatural on you, but you are filled with this power from somewhere else.
[00:04:46]  Try it.
[00:04:47]  Tell the truth about something.
[00:04:49]  You feel it every day.
[00:04:50]  The more you tell the truth, the stronger you become.
[00:04:54]  That's completely real.
[00:04:56]  It's measurable in the way that you feel.
[00:05:01]  And of course, the opposite is also true.
[00:05:03]  The more you lie, the weaker and more terrified you become.
[00:05:07]  We all know that feeling.
[00:05:08]  You lie about something, and all of a sudden you're a prisoner of that lie.
[00:05:11]  You are diminished by it.
[00:05:12]  You are weak and afraid.
[00:05:15]  Drug and alcohol use is the same way.
[00:05:17]  It makes you weak and afraid.
[00:05:20]  But you look around and you see these people, and some of them really have paid a heavy price for telling the truth.
[00:05:26]  And they are cast out of their groups, whatever those groups are, but they do it anyway.
[00:05:31]  And I look on at those people with the deepest possible admiration.
[00:05:36]  I am paid to do that.
[00:05:38]  I face no penalty.
[00:05:41]  Somebody came up to me, you're so brave.
[00:05:42]  Really?
[00:05:42]  I'm a talk show host.
[00:05:44]  It's like, I can have any opinion I want.
[00:05:46]  That's my job.
[00:05:46]  That's why they pay me.
[00:05:48]  It's not brave to tell the truth on a cable news show.
[00:05:50]  And if you're not doing that, you're really an idiot.
[00:05:52]  You're really craven.
[00:05:54]  You're lying on television.
[00:05:55]  Why would you do that?
[00:05:57]  You're literally making a living to say what you think, and you can't even do that.
[00:06:02]  Please.
[00:06:04]  But how about if you're a senior vice president at Citibank?
[00:06:08]  I'm serious.
[00:06:09]  At Citibank.
[00:06:11]  And you're making $4 million a year.
[00:06:14]  And you've got three kids in Bedford and two are in boarding school and one starting at Wesleyan next year.
[00:06:20]  And like, you need this job, honestly.
[00:06:22]  And your whole sector is kind of collapsing, and you know that.
[00:06:26]  There is no incentive whatsoever for you to tell the truth about anything.
[00:06:30]  You just go into little re-education meetings and you're like, yeah, diversity is our strength.
[00:06:34]  That's exactly right.
[00:06:35]  We need equity in the capital markets.
[00:06:37]  Okay.
[00:06:38]  All right.
[00:06:40]  So if you're the one guy who refuses to say that, you are a hero, in my opinion.
[00:06:46]  And I know some of them.
[00:06:48]  In fact, my job is to interview them.
[00:06:50]  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.
[00:06:58]  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.
[00:07:07]  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.
[00:07:12]  And it's like, you run inside.
[00:07:14]  No one is trained to stand up in the middle of a DEI meeting at Citibank and say, this is nonsense.
[00:07:22]  And the people who do that, oh, they have my deepest admiration.
[00:07:28]  And so their example really gives me hope.
[00:07:31]  It thrills me.
[00:07:32]  I talk to them all day long, people like that.
[00:07:33]  That's the first thing.
[00:07:35]  We should, in this sad moment of profound and widespread destruction of the institutions that people who share our views built, by the way.
[00:07:45]  Earlier generations that would agree substantially with every person in this room, they built those and now they're being destroyed.
[00:07:50]  And oh, that's so depressing.
[00:07:52]  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.
[00:08:00]  Amen.
[00:08:02]  You'll hear people say the news is full of lies.