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Dec. 3, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
12:47
Here's What We Should Demand of Our Leaders

Tucker Carlson speaks at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum on October 18, 2018. Watch the full speech here: https://youtu.be/BA7uVQJqVgM?si=d-JG71nrUPQviH1F #TuckerCarlson #speech #RichardNixon #DonaldTrump #JoeBiden #conservative #liberal #BarackObama #leadership #news #politics #unitedstates #Christianity #California

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tucker carlson
dailycaller 12:06
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Speaker Time Text
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
I'll just be blunt.
As a Christian, I do believe in forgiveness and redemption, and I believe in being honest about the limits of human power and human wisdom and decision-making.
We screw it up a lot.
I certainly do.
By the way, because of YouTube, you can see my screw-ups.
I always deny that I was in Dancing with the Stars, but I actually was.
Okay, so I don't judge.
I don't.
But here's the difference.
I never went on Dancing with the Stars again.
So that really is it.
That's what we ask of people, and that's what we need to demand of our leaders, is not that they don't make mistakes, but that they acknowledge the mistakes that they make and critically learn from them.
Learn from them.
I have a ton of children, like a ton.
And I'm never surprised when they do something wrong, because I'm not, because I'm never surprised when people do, because I know what people are about, because I am one.
What I demand of them is that they acknowledge that they did it, and that they pledge to be better.
That's it.
That's all we can ask.
It's all we should ask.
But when people exert power over us, we have a right to expect it.
Okay?
And if they don't perform that simple human task of learning from their errors, and if instead they deny those errors, and if instead they go even farther and blame us for those errors, then they are unfit to rule.
It's that simple.
Okay?
So I would say to compound this, the mistakes made by the people in charge, and by the way, I'm not limiting this to our political class in Washington.
I would say they're uniquely guilty.
But I would say also of the people who make the decisions that shape our economy, broadly speaking, and those who shape our culture, the people who determine what your kids watch on television or at the movie theater or online.
They made a series of bad decisions over decades that had measurable effects on the population that were bad and well known to anyone who cared to learn them.
So in 2015, when I learned this, I wrote the book.
In 2015, the middle class in this country became a minority.
And I read that in some relatively obscure place, by the way.
I did not read that in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Not that I read either one anymore, but I did for many years.
No, I read it in some website, and I thought, well, that can't be true.
So I checked, and it was true.
And I thought, well, I'm in the news business.
My job is to follow developments, big and small, sometimes picky you and really small.
This is not only a major development, it's a pivot point in the history of the country.
You can't have a functioning democracy, or by the way, a functioning market economy, without a robust middle class that comprises the majority of your country, period.
And by robust, I mean really simple, self-supporting, not dependent upon government, living cheerfully, by and large, with the hope of doing better and with the near certainty that their kids could do better if they apply themselves.
It's not a hard definition.
It's a common sense one.
And for my entire life, in fact, for the entire life of our country that we can measure, that has been the majority of our country.
And in 2015, it became a minority.
Now, I left California, but if I lived here, I would have already known that because that's the story of this state.
And it's the saddest thing about this state.
It's not that there aren't rich people.
They're the richest people in the world live here.
I just flew in from San Francisco this morning.
And it's not there aren't poor people.
There are more poor people in California than any other state.
Like a third of all welfare recipients live in one state, this one.
So you've got plenty of people at the polls.
And by the way, you will always have rich people.
You'll always have poor people.
Society will always be stratified because people are hierarchical.
Just that's their nature.
You know, the egalitarian ideal is not achievable.
Dogs are hierarchical, by the way, so I think it's a mammal thing, but whatever.
But in order to have a healthy, stable society, you have to have most people in the broad, happy center.
And when that starts to change, you have not simply a moral problem.
This isn't a college dorm room debate about what's, you know, what's just or not.
Who cares?
You have a very practical problem where your country's going to become super volatile, really volatile.
And you might have, just throwing this out there, like a populist movement where voters get so mad they elect somebody out of nowhere.
No, I'm serious.
That's what happens.
And wise leaders would anticipate this because it is so obvious I thought of it.
This is not complex in any way.
This is leadership 101.
But they didn't come to that conclusion, or more precisely, they didn't care to come to that conclusion because they didn't care.
Which leads you to the second obvious conclusion about our leadership class, and I mean across sectors here.
I mean, this applies every bit as much to the tech sector.
Travis, what's his name at the car company?
What is it?
No, Travis Kalnev, the teenage billionaire who runs Uber, whatever.
Our tech chieftains, as it does to our U.S. senators.
They didn't actually care.
And I guess I've already noticed at the outset, I'm a lifelong conservative.
I'm not a liberal.
I'm not in therapy.
I'm not the kind of person who talks the touchy-feely language of the town I grew up in at all, okay?
So this is not a touchy-feely observation, it's a true one.
And it's really simple: empathy is a prerequisite for leadership.
You have to deeply care about the people you're in charge of, or you will not do a good job of leading them.
And this is true across the board, it's true in your family.
If you don't love your children, if you wouldn't give your life for your children, you will be a bad parent and hurt them.
So the question is not: are you going to be a perfect parent and make a flawless series of decisions?
No, you're not.
You're going to screw it up.
But in the end, if you care more deeply about your children than anything else, you'll be a good enough parent.
You will be, every one of you.
Empathy is the key to parenthood, but it's also the key to every other kind of leadership.
If you didn't care about the safety of your men, would you be a good officer?
No, they would die.
If you didn't really care about your employees, would your company thrive?
Of course not.
If you didn't care in a democracy about your voters, would you be an effective politician?
No, you'd be the ones we just kicked out.
So that's it right there.
And I would say, part of the key, and I see this all that I saw tonight, Trump gives these speeches, usually during the primetime hours, you know, multiple a week.
He loves it.
And I have to say, it's pretty impressive in a way, as someone who talks for a living, that he'd stand up there on national television with no notes at all at like 71.
I'm 49, I can barely do it.
And he gets up there and he just goes.
He doesn't know what the terminus is.
He doesn't know what the destination is.
He just gets on the bus.
I don't care.
I'm serious.
unidentified
Just get me a Diet Coke and let me start talking.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
We actually always say, because they often happen during our hours, so we're watching carefully.
And my producers always say, when he gets to Space Force, we're almost done.
I should also note, I have no idea what Space Force is, but I love it.
I literally have no idea.
I'm not sure they do actually know what it is either, but I can say that if my son, who's 21, called me as a senior in college and said, you know what, I thought I was going into, you know, whatever, private equity, but I think I'm joining Space Force.
I would be so, my first question would be, what's the uniform like?
The second question would be, second thing I would say is, I'm so proud of you, boy.
Anyway, but the point is, other than Space Force, the one recurring moment in every Trump speech, and the reason that people like these speeches so much is he actually does because he's not working strictly from a script.
He does get like caught right up in it.
I mean, it's just like you see who he is in the speech because that really is who he is.
And trust me, I know him.
That's who he is.
It's exactly, I mean, less profanity, probably, slightly less, but like that's actually him.
And he gets so caught up in it, there's always one moment where he looks out and they start cheering him.
And of course, he loves that.
And he goes, you know what?
I love you.
unidentified
I love you.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
First of all, who talks like that?
The answer, of course, is only people who mean it.
And by the way, you know, there are many kinds of love.
I don't know if this is a love that's going to like call you the next day.
I don't judge.
But in that moment, it's totally real.
It's 100% real.
He stops in the middle of this.
He looks out and he's like, you know what?
I love these people.
And because he's emotionally incontinent, he can't keep that in.
And no, I'm not joking.
And the first time it happened, having spent a whole lifetime watching political speeches, I'm like, what was that?
And then I realized that was an authentic moment.
And the crowd understands that, not because they think about it, but because they can feel it.
Because the truth, the deep truth underneath all of it is we know who you are.
This is true of everyone.
A lot of our conversations are pure 100% pretense where we're all overthinking things and rationalizing them and going along with someone else's rationalization when the truth is right in front of our faces.
You meet someone for two minutes and you know who that person is.
You can smell it.
It's an animal sense that we're born with.
And other species don't override it with their higher brain, but we do.
And I always tell my children, don't do that.
If you think someone's dishonest, if you can smell it, he's dishonest.
That person's dishonest.
I'm sorry to sound like a Democratic senator.
Now, I do believe in due process, by the way.
I don't think we ought to imprison anyone on the basis of odor.
But I do think in our, because I believe in fairness, but I do believe in our personal lives, we always know who other people are.
Always.
Who is really shocked by anything we've learned about any president ever?
Yeah, Bill Clinton with internet.
Oh, I can't believe it doesn't sound like a Bill Clinton.
I know.
What?
Yeah, it does.
Everything I have learned about Trump, good and bad, I'm like, yeah, I know the guy.
Not because I went to high school with him, because I've talked to him and I've watched him.
It's true of everybody.
I mean, I always say to my children, the upside is, you know, it's not all bad.
Like, you think you're hiding things about yourself.
Like, you're really envious, or you're an alcoholic, or you're sort of secretly mean or whatever your kind of hidden sin is.
Everybody already knows that, actually.
It was like a bad toupee.
You're like, I'm fooling him now.
No, you're not.
Not for one second.
People are like, there's something weird about your hair.
unidentified
They don't say it, but they know it.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
And as I always say to my children, it's kind of horrifying to realize that every time you interact with another person, you are stripped bare.
You really are stripped bare.
But the good news is a lot of them love you anyway.
Like, it's actually not worth pretending when you start to think about it.
They already know.
And the one thing they know about Trump is that in his way, he does love them, actually.
He does.
And maybe it's a fleeting love.
I don't know what kind of love it is.
But it's a lot more love than you're getting from anybody else in power.
It's true.
unidentified
And that's why they love him back.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
It's so not complicated.
It's actually so helpful.
I said at the outset: being shallow is just like the greatest gift I have ever.
I'm not kidding.
I would recommend it.
unidentified
You'll hear people say the news is full of lies on Tennessee's motor case.
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