Tucker Carlson speaks at the National Review Institute's 2019 Ideas Summit. Follow Tucker on X: https://x.com/TuckerCarlson Text “TUCKER” to 44055 for exclusive updates! #TuckerCarlson #speech #men #family #lifeadvice #politics #news #debate #conservative #manhood #womanhood #populism #interview
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| You are in Washington much of the time, which is glittering, it's getting richer all the time. | ||
| The home values are going up all the time in every county around it. | ||
| But you also go to Western Maine. | ||
| Was that something that clued you in that maybe... | ||
| Yeah, it had a huge effect on my life, on my politics, on the way I see the country. | ||
| Yeah, I've gone to the same little town my whole life, one of the poorer counties, one of the poorest counties on the East Coast, beautiful place. | ||
| And I've watched it dissolve. | ||
| I mean, the culture there, wonderful people. | ||
| I spend three months a year there every year. | ||
| And you watch the same very familiar pathologies that we wrote a lot about in the 80s and 90s in the inner city, right in the middle of this overwhelmingly conservative, 100% white, rural community. | ||
| And you start to ask yourself, like, well, why is this happening? | ||
| Is it because they just, you know, is welfare doing this? | ||
| Well, I'm not sure that our assistance programs make it better. | ||
| I think they undermine the family in a lot of ways. | ||
| But they're not the herb problem. | ||
| I mean, they didn't cause this. | ||
| Actually, they're exacerbating it. | ||
| They didn't cause it. | ||
| And what caused it was the collapse of male jobs. | ||
| And we should have learned this. | ||
| And it actually has made me reassess a little bit, not my feelings about watching the family collapse in inner city America. | ||
| I still feel that's a disaster. | ||
| It demonstrably has been a disaster. | ||
| There's really no other way to look at it. | ||
| But the causes are a little different from what I thought. | ||
| Like, if men don't have full-time work, families fall apart. | ||
| If men make less than women, women don't want to marry them. | ||
| This is not some handmaid's tale-like talking point that we in the alt-right believe. | ||
| This is the product of like a century of consistent social science. | ||
| And by the way, I wish it weren't true. | ||
| I wish women were very excited to marry overweight, indolent men who played video. | ||
| serious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tucker, what are you saying? | |
| I'm serious. | ||
| I wish it were enough to sort of be charming at dinner. | ||
| But it's not, actually. | ||
| And that's not a choice that men make. | ||
| It's an instinct that women have. | ||
| And it's true over time across population, race, income. | ||
| So like, clearly, this is a feature of human nature. | ||
| So if you're mad about it, kind of not my problem. | ||
| At some point, you have to address people as they are, which is my basic problem with a lot of what happens in Washington, is not address human nature, which is immutable. | ||
| It's the one thing that doesn't change. | ||
| And so if you have a society where, on average, women make more than men, you will see a very predictable series of events. | ||
| Women will stop getting married. | ||
| They will not stop having children, by the way. | ||
| That's a biological imperative. | ||
| They will continue to do that. | ||
| But those children will not have a father in the home over large populations. | ||
| And that's exactly what. | ||
| And then everything else that happens, which as conservatives were very familiar with, because we spent a lot of time moralizing about it. | ||
| I certainly have. | ||
| A lot of time. | ||
| And we spent almost no time asking, like, how can we make this better? | ||
| So if you have a society where the only full-time employers, and this is true in Western Maine, and it's true in much of rural America, are the hospitals and the schools, you have to ask yourself, like, you know, can you have a functioning society, the basis of which is always the nuclear family, always, in such a place? | ||
| And the answer is no, you can't. | ||
| So I don't know why we're not spending more time on this. | ||
| I also don't know why, you know, these stats come in every day, and we have a couple people on our show who are really interested in this stuff, share my interest in it. | ||
| And so they're constantly sending me this stuff. | ||
| I just got one today. | ||
| So there's, of course, the life expectancy numbers, three years in a row down. | ||
| I mean, if that's not a red alert, I'm not sure what is. | ||
| The suicide numbers are my fixation. | ||
| I know four different people have killed themselves in the last year and a half, all middle-aged men. | ||
| And if you're, I'm going to be 50 in May, if you're roughly my age, ask yourself if you don't know people who've killed themselves recently. | ||
| You probably do, because the epidemic is that widespread. | ||
| And by the way, these are affluent people, too. | ||
| Something's going on. | ||
| There's no interest in what that might be. | ||
| But the statistic that I got today, which I think is, and I don't care how it sounds because I think it's real, out today, two hours ago, new study shows that the number of men under 30 who report having no sex at all ever has risen by threefold in 10 years. | ||
| So I'm reading this and I'm thinking, I'm a social conservative, just for the record, a pretty strident one, actually. | ||
| My first thought was, well, porn. | ||
| That was my first thought, which I think is bad. | ||
| I do. | ||
| But that's not it. | ||
| What society does that remind me of? | ||
| It reminds me of the Middle East, actually. | ||
| One of the core problems in the Middle East, and we laid this at the feet of polygamy, but it's deeper than that, is that the economic stratification is so profound that only the rich people get to mate. | ||
| And you have a huge population of young men who don't have mates. | ||
| Now, I'm sorry if it makes you uncomfortable, it's just true, because again, it's nature, and the farther away you get from nature, the farther off course you are. | ||
| Nature tells you, and your life experience tells you, you don't want a large population of celibate men. | ||
| That is a recipe for instability, for chaos, actually. | ||
| It's a dangerous group to have. | ||
| You better be, you're lucky. | ||
| No wonder everyone's pushing weed on the population. | ||
| I'm not joking, because they're afraid. | ||
| And so what that is a picture of, it's a picture of a society in which the spoils increasingly go to a smaller or shrinking really number of people. | ||
| And your average young person, that's the poorest segment of our society, is young people, don't have enough to buy a car or a house. | ||
| They're shackled to student loans from which they cannot escape. | ||
| And they don't have enough to mate. | ||
| And one of the reasons is because they're living with their parents. | ||
| We have a higher percentage of young men living with their parents than in my lifetime by far. | ||
| That's an economic question. | ||
| Now, I'm not espousing socialism, obviously, which I abhor and which does not work, at least in the way that it's been administered in every country that I'm aware of. | ||
| What I'm saying is we're going to get something really radical and destructive and dangerous unless we address these things. | ||
| That's the only point I made. | ||
| You say you're not a populist. | ||
| You grew up in all these, in a nice area. | ||
| You grew up, you live among the elites. | ||
| You like your home in Washington. | ||
| Sort of, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And but your book, you know, your recent book, Ship of Fools, you kind of trace this to the idea that it was Democrats who gave up on Youngstown. | ||
| That was, of course, Traffican's accusation, right? | ||
| He said, he warned Al Gore, don't even come near me or come near Youngstown. | ||
| And they made the transition very quickly, and now Democrats and liberals, they love the largest corporations in America, right? | ||
| They love Facebook, they love Apple. | ||
| They worship power. | ||
| Well, that's as succinct as you can put it. | ||
| What should be the conservative response when you see a liberal, a supposedly liberal party or a progressive party that's dominated by elites at the top who love corporate power, who themselves are winning more and more votes from the upwardly mobile part of America? | ||
| And even though the Republican Party has almost tried to repel working class whites from coming in, and in some cases working-class Latinos from coming in, they seem to be coming into the party. | ||
| So what is the role of a conservative in America right now? | ||
| Or working-class black men, by the way, if I could just say the obvious. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's no reason that African-American men shouldn't be voting for a party that rejects rigid 1970s-era feminism or that stands for due process in the rule of law. | ||
| I mean, there's just no reason. | ||
| And one of the reasons you see such chaos in our politics right now is because the terms haven't been defined. | ||
| Sort of nobody knows where we are. | ||
| I mean, you had the party of the factory owners versus the party of the workers, and now they've inverted, but the leaderships don't really understand that this has happened. | ||
| And they don't want it to happen, actually, certainly on the Republican side. | ||
| I mean, they, you know, my whole lifetime, you would hear people say, oh, it's the party of the country club. | ||
| And you'd be like, well, that's appalling. | ||
| That's totally untrue. | ||
| And you retreat to the bar at Round Hill and be like, you know, I can't believe they're saying that. | ||
| It was totally true. | ||
| And by the way, and you're absolutely, I am not a populist. | ||
| I think populism is not sustainable. | ||
| Populism isn't a form of government. | ||
| It's a warning sign that you've got bad elites. | ||
| You will always have elites because people are hierarchical. | ||
| It's in their nature. | ||
| Dogs are hierarchical. | ||
| Do you have any? | ||
| You know that. | ||
| There's a head dog. | ||
| There has to be a head dog, period. | ||
| It's just the way we're made, okay? | ||
| So every society is hierarchical, including Venezuela and Sweden and the former Soviet Union. | ||
| I mean, you're not getting around that. | ||
| The only interesting, the only meaningful question is, how are your elites? | ||
| Are they impressive? | ||
| Are they wise? | ||
| Are they making decisions that help people, or aren't they? | ||
| And so my critique is not, it's really simple. | ||
| We had a populist election last time, and that ought to be a terrifying wake-up call to anyone who's benefiting from our society right now. | ||
| If you want to keep what you have, and I do, then you need to pay attention to the forces that gave rise to this thing. | ||
| Don't ignore it, because it won't get better. | ||
| It's like appendicitis. | ||
| It's one of those rare things you can't ignore. | ||
|
unidentified
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Johnny, people say the news is full of lies on Kennedy's motorcade. |