Dec. 13, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
02:03:35
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Yo! | ||
| What's up, Mario? | ||
| How are you, man? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we go. | |
| How are you guys? | ||
| Welcome, everyone. | ||
| We're going to send out the invites. | ||
| And then we can kick it off. | ||
| Let me get Tucker in. | ||
| You are listening to... | ||
| And there he is. | ||
| Tucker Carlson, the man's first ever X-Space. | ||
| And... | ||
| We are incredibly hyped because Tucker Carlson is goated. | ||
| Goated on X. He's up, Mr. Carlson. | ||
| Are you there? | ||
| I'm right here. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I was just dicking with the mic app on the phone. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| Tucker, no matter how much dicking you do with the mic, at least you're not going to piss live on the stream. | ||
| No! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't hear that, but I heard about it, which I kind of love. | |
| How was that? | ||
| Really obvious? | ||
| Really obvious. | ||
| Elon Musk asked Vivek if he felt better after taking a long, live piss. | ||
| Well, that is... | ||
| And by the way, that might... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think, Tucker, you just cut out... | |
| Maybe someone cold called you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So whenever someone calls you, Tucker, it will cut out your space. | |
| You can put it on... | ||
| That's all good. | ||
| As long as you don't go to the bathroom, you're chill. | ||
| But you can put it on... | ||
| You can put on Do Not Disturb, though, if that makes it easier for you. | ||
| Sure, let me do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was hoping you'd one-up Vitek. | |
| Great. | ||
| It's on Do Not Disturb, and I went before this, so we're all set. | ||
| I believe that everyone on here most likely listened to your interview with Theo Vaughn. | ||
| And so we've heard plenty about cat toys and feathers. | ||
| Sorry, I wasn't expecting to do that interview. | ||
| That was like a literally last moment thing. | ||
| We were staying in the same hotel. | ||
| So yeah, I didn't have time to organize my thoughts and I went right to cat toys. | ||
| So, Tucker, before we even started, this was the most successful space in X history. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did Benny just cut out as well? | |
| Tucker, before we even started, there was an entire sports arena waiting to hear from you. | ||
| There was 30,000 people just waiting to listen to the goat of X history. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Where's the sports arena? | ||
| And is there a game? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're all below. | |
| You can check it. | ||
| Benny, by the way, I think someone keeps calling you, so it keeps cutting out on your end. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| We've got, just to give you an idea... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh... | |
| And there is Mario cutting out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Great. | ||
| Well, I'm still here. | ||
| I think we're breaking spaces. | ||
| I'll take the first question. | ||
| I'll take the first question, welcoming you to the space. | ||
| Obviously, when so many people join, the spaces build in their capacity. | ||
| So sometimes there's little mic glitches. | ||
| So anyway, here we go. | ||
| Tucker, I'm sitting here looking at an article right now from Axios. | ||
| And this article says that Melania Trump wants you to be the vice presidential candidate. | ||
| For Donald Trump, with Donald Trump in 2024. What do you say to Melania Trump? | ||
| Well, she hasn't texted me that, and it's in, you know, a publication published in Washington. | ||
| So I'm going to kind of reserve judgment on that. | ||
| Obviously, I'm flattered if it's true. | ||
| I like Melania. | ||
| I don't really know her. | ||
| But she's Eastern European, so that suggests we have exactly the same attitudes about everything. | ||
| I'm so flattered. | ||
| Yeah, Benny, the mic keeps muting by itself, so you've got to unmute again. | ||
| Just a heads up, Benny. | ||
| Keep an eye out on the mic. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Benny? | |
| Benny? | ||
| So, Tucker, that would be breaking news that you would be able to publish at the Tucker Carlson Network. | ||
| Can you please tell everyone about the Tucker Carlson Network? | ||
| Well, basically, it started on X. So I got... | ||
| You know, unemployed again, not for the first time in April. | ||
| And I'm sort of, you know, I'm not that old and I have a lot of opinions and I was sort of wondering what to do. | ||
| And about an hour after that happened, Elon called me and said, you know, you should just bring the whole operation to X. Not for pay, but just, you know, use it like anyone else would, you know, with the guarantee that he's made to everyone that this is not going to be governed by censorship and you can say what you think. | ||
| As long as you're not committing a crime. | ||
| And so that really just saved me. | ||
| It saved me. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if you've been fired before, but this happened to me a couple firings ago where there's this moment where you're like, well, I guess I'll just go fishing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Or something else that's not healthy. | ||
| And you lose your momentum. | ||
| And then you're like, what am I doing with my life? | ||
| And because of that, because of this... | ||
| Of this venue, this platform, I was able to keep working within days. | ||
| So I'm just grateful for that. | ||
| But it dawned on us at a certain point that if you're going to hire a bunch of people, and we brought almost everybody from our show at Fox along, so they're all still here. | ||
| I'm working with the same people I've worked with for years. | ||
| You need revenue. | ||
| And if you're going to send people out to go cover stories or make documentaries, you need to pay them. | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| Well, you do it with advertising, but if you do it with advertising, then you're subject to the whims of the advertisers, and they always want to hem you in in some way or tell you what they think, or they'll pull their ads, or they'll be bullied by some AstroTurf boycott operation, or Media Matters will get involved and call you a Nazi, and then the next thing you know, your company shuts down. | ||
| So you really have to find, at least if you're me, Another form of revenue and the most obvious is subscription because you're invulnerable. | ||
| It's a fortress. | ||
| They can't dick with you at that point. | ||
| And that's of paramount importance to me because I've been dicked with a lot. | ||
| So basically we're doing what we've always done but from within the fortress of a company that can't be canceled. | ||
| And so that's what we're doing. | ||
| That must feel incredibly liberating. | ||
| Well, it feels great, actually. | ||
| I mean, it's felt liberating for the past seven months to post stuff on X and know that no one's going to call me and say, you can't do that, or, you know, that my job is on the line. | ||
| I mean, I don't have a job. | ||
| I don't work for anybody. | ||
| And after, you know, almost 30 years of working for big news companies, it's wild. | ||
| And it's actually changed my views a lot. | ||
| And I thought I was uncontrolled when I had my last job because no one really ever bothered me. | ||
| But of course, if you work for somebody else, you're probably setting hedges around what you're allowed to think. | ||
| And I probably was doing that. | ||
| I know that my views have changed even more since I left in the past seven months. | ||
| I've traveled a lot, seen a lot of things. | ||
| And they haven't changed so much as they've solidified. | ||
| And the current trends have accelerated. | ||
| So yeah, it's been an amazing time. | ||
| I mean, not to sound pompous, but just like intellectually, just to think about stuff and see stuff and what is going on exactly. | ||
| You know, there are a thousand things happening at once, big things, history changing things, and how are they all connected to each other? | ||
| And anyway, just having a chance to continue to learn and to post some of what we find on X and have people see it, you know, it's just been amazing. | ||
| I've loved it. | ||
| So Elon Musk is suffering himself a bit of a advertiser boycott. | ||
| And they're trying to use the same tactics that they used with you multiple times on multiple shows to cancel X and to cancel the entire platform. | ||
| Elon Musk famously said, go fuck yourself to Bob Iger live. | ||
| And that was really a watershed moment. | ||
| What's your take on that moment as the man who actually originated the GFY when... | ||
| We've all seen the clip. | ||
| You said, media matters. | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| I think while you were preparing for a show, your thoughts on that, Elon Musk paraphrasing you, your thoughts on the cancellation tactics of trying to cancel X platform. | ||
| That media matters clip, they stole that from our internal feed and put it up like it would somehow discredit me. | ||
| I thought it was hilarious. | ||
| What do I think of what's going on with X? I'll tell you exactly what I think. | ||
| Have you ever gotten really sick, like you get the flu or get corona or you get... | ||
| Any kind of physical ailment and you're in agony and you think to yourself, why didn't I appreciate every single day where I felt good? | ||
| I just took it for granted. | ||
| And those were great times when I didn't have whatever I have now. | ||
| Have you ever felt that way? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's how I feel about X right now. | ||
| X is the last remaining large free platform in the world. | ||
| It's the last free speech platform on planet Earth. | ||
| And we're all the beneficiaries of that. | ||
| I think, by the way, I think everyone on Earth is the beneficiary of that. | ||
| But those of us who are participating in the conversation on X are participating in something that's amazing. | ||
| I mean, it has no peer globally. | ||
| And it may not last forever. | ||
| But it's true right now. | ||
| So I can't foresee the future. | ||
| There are intense global forces coming to bear on this platform and on the man who owns it to shut it down, to effectively shut it down. | ||
| Like, no, you can't say that. | ||
| You can't disagree with the people in charge. | ||
| You can't tell the truth about things. | ||
| Of course, lying is never punished, ever. | ||
| Only telling the truth is punished, and they mean to punish it. | ||
| They mean to shut it down. | ||
| And for right now, they're failing. | ||
| And so I guess what I tell myself every day is appreciate this. | ||
| I mean, I hope it lasts forever. | ||
| I hope everything good lasts forever, but often it doesn't. | ||
| And so we should be really, really grateful to be living in this super cool historical moment. | ||
| Where this billionaire decides, hey, I like free speech. | ||
| I'm going to make it possible for people I've never met. | ||
| Like, who does that? | ||
| Well, he did that. | ||
| Whatever you think of Elon, and maybe you disagree with this or disagree with that or whatever you think of the guy, he did indisputably do that. | ||
| And it's kind of without parallel in history. | ||
| Like, who's ever done anything like that? | ||
| And so I'm grateful. | ||
| I mean it. | ||
| So they're obviously going to see X as a platform. | ||
| They're going to try and take X offline and metaphorically assassinate X. You've spoken at length in multiple situations about how you think that we are speeding towards assassination potentially for Donald Trump in his candidacy because equally Donald Trump speaks hard truths that are uncomfortable for people and also Donald Trump is a threat to the existing system. | ||
| Do you really believe? | ||
| That we are on our way to a physical assassination attempt? | ||
| Well, I don't know what we're on the way to, but we're certainly on the way to something. | ||
| I mean, one of, you know, the great lie that we tell ourselves is that our lives in the world are static. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| They're always progressing towards something. | ||
| We don't usually know what it is. | ||
| But we're always on the road to somewhere. | ||
| And you just sort of have to ask yourself logically, like, what's next? | ||
| I mean, the amount of energy and money and time and public attention, all of which are precious commodities. | ||
| The asshole community has taken to destroy Donald Trump is just astounding. | ||
| I mean, it's honestly like the moonshot. | ||
| In fact, they've expended more resources on destroying Trump than they did on getting a man to the moon, assuming you believe that actually happened, and I think it's in question. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| I mean, when they wanted to stop Bernie Sanders, remember, they kind of seemed to threaten his wife with criminal prosecution. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| And all of a sudden, Bernie Sanders is on board with everything, and he stops whining about the billionaires, and he's actually friends with Goldman Sachs now. | ||
| And, like, Deutsche Bank isn't so bad, and, like, I'm all in on the war in Ukraine, and, of course, we'll take refugees from Gaza. | ||
| Like, they turned Bernie Sanders into a bitch, and they did that by applying pressure points, of course, which is what they always do. | ||
| And they've done that to Trump at scale. | ||
| We're going to put your son in jail. | ||
| We're going to put your oldest son in jail. | ||
| And Trump's like, yeah, fuck you. | ||
| I mean, again, whatever you think of Trump, you don't have to like Trump or even agree with him to appreciate the remarkable resilience in the face of, like, every power center in the world opposing him, except for, like, the presidents of El Salvador and Hungary. | ||
| Everybody's against Trump, and he's still standing. | ||
| So that does raise the question, like, okay, what next? | ||
| You indict him four times. | ||
| You threaten him with life in prison. | ||
| These are credible threats, by the way. | ||
| His trial begins in the middle of the primary season, in March, a few months from now. | ||
| And the guy is still running and he still appears to be unbowed. | ||
| So, you know, you're kind of reaching to the bottom of your bag of tricks and you find it empty and it's like, we're threatening you with life imprisonment. | ||
| Call it off. | ||
| Drop out. | ||
| You know, pick a successor and leave. | ||
| Retire. | ||
| We'll leave you alone. | ||
| He won't. | ||
| So, like, what else are they going to do? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I'm just guessing here, but, like, why wouldn't they kill him? | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| One of the most fascinating shows you ever did was when you spoke to a CIA, you'd have to assume, you didn't reveal who you spoke to, but you spoke to a CIA intelligence official who apparently had deep knowledge of the CIA's operation against JFK. So when you say that they're speeding towards Donald Trump's assassination, well, you've actually done the reporting on this the last time a president was assassinated. | ||
| And your conclusion, based on your intelligence, was that the CIA was involved in Kennedy's assassination and is a different country than we know it to be. | ||
| Can you expound on that? | ||
| Well, in the specific case, it was last winter, and I spoke to someone. | ||
| Who had, and this is confirmed, it's not a guess, had read the files that were withheld once again by the current president, as they were withheld by the last president, at the urging of the CIA directors, two different directors, but same request, don't release these files. | ||
| 60 years after, and I asked, what's in the files? | ||
| And he said, they implicate the CIA. Of course, the whole CIA, it's a huge agency, but the operations directorate under James Angleton. | ||
| So, yes, the CIA—and some of this is sort of dribbled out, but, like, basically the crazies were right. | ||
| You know, it was not a lone gunman being murdered by a lone gunman. | ||
| That was ridiculous. | ||
| The Warren Commission was absurd. | ||
| Smart people knew that. | ||
| And so the question is, like, what lessons do we draw from that? | ||
| Well, the first lesson is that, yes, the U.S. government does and has, I'm not sure, on a daily basis or regularly, but it certainly has killed American citizens without trial or even charges. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| And it's been confirmed to me in a bunch of other cases, not a bunch, but several, including fairly modern ones. | ||
| In fact, it was last year that we learned that Mike Pompeo discussed murdering Julian Assange in London. | ||
| Now, Julian Assange had been charged with no crime in the United States, or, by the way, in Great Britain, for that matter. | ||
| Charged with no crime. | ||
| And yet he embarrassed the CIA, so they decided to kill him. | ||
| And this came out. | ||
| And it was published by Yahoo News. | ||
| Mike Pompeo's response was not to deny it. | ||
| It was to accuse Yahoo News of breaking confidentiality laws, classification laws, and thereby committing a felony. | ||
| In other words, it's a felony to tell people that I was planning to commit a felony. | ||
| So that's mind-boggling. | ||
| That took place out in the open. | ||
| That's not on the dark web. | ||
| That's available to anyone with Google. | ||
| And so you have to ask yourself, knowing those things, the elements of the federal government, not the whole federal government, not the Interior Department or whatever, but there are... | ||
| Parts of the permanent bureaucracy that are willing to take human life in order to avoid embarrassment, avoid having their own crimes revealed, and to stay in the positions that they occupy, which is to stay in power. | ||
| Once you know that, I don't know that there's a plot against Trump, but man, they've used the entire U.S. media, the entire U.S. government to stop this one guy from holding power. | ||
| They mean it that much. | ||
| They've made a mockery of our system. | ||
| They've completely degraded our justice system, which was the fairest in the world. | ||
| It no longer is, thanks to them, so they could get Trump. | ||
| And it's like, is it really a stretch to think, why don't they just kill the guy? | ||
| And by the way, I'm totally opposed to murdering people, and I happen to really like Trump personally. | ||
| I'd be very sad if he were killed. | ||
| But if you're just making a utilitarian calculation like... | ||
| Hurting one person is better than destroying, you know, your ancient systems, which they have done. | ||
| I mean, they literally, like, wrecked our systems. | ||
| No one trusts elections and no one trusts trials. | ||
| No one trusts our chief law enforcement agency, the FBI. No one trusts our chief intelligence gathering agency, the CIA. So they've done a whole lot of damage in the pursuit of this one man. | ||
| Incalculable, irreparable damage. | ||
| And so why is it a stretch to think, well, yeah, they just killed a guy? | ||
| Maybe that'll solve the problem. | ||
| I mean, again, I hope that doesn't happen, but you'd have to be an idiot to think it couldn't. | ||
| Tucker, you were the first one out through the wall with tapes that had not been seen of January 6th. | ||
| If you're speaking about government lies and you're speaking about half-truths or total fabrications told by the government, it seems like you are utterly vindicated now in your reporting. | ||
| Based on the preponderance of evidence, I mean, I know I see that Jacob Chansley is listening in to this live. | ||
| A good example of that is you completely retold the story of Jacob Chansley, right? | ||
| Known as the Maga Shaman, Buffalo Horn guy, right? | ||
| You completely flipped the script, broke the narrative on that. | ||
| Your thoughts on, as the man with the first access, the first reporter to see the January 6th tapes, what are your thoughts on the leaks that have been coming out now? | ||
| Well, first, I loved your interview with Chansley, who is just, you know, the people they tell us are the worst are often some of the sweetest and the best. | ||
| And he's definitely in that category based on your interview with him, I thought. | ||
| So thank you for that. | ||
| But because everything is a total inversion. | ||
| Our heroes are actually like the worst people and the most reviled are actually the kindest, of course. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess I feel vindicated. | ||
| I've taken no pleasure in that. | ||
| It's interesting, though. | ||
| It wasn't reporting that got me to that. | ||
| It was instinct. | ||
| I mean, and I will say my instincts, and I think all of our instincts are undefeated. | ||
| Your instincts don't lie to you. | ||
| Your instincts are not trying to sell you a product or spin you. | ||
| Your instincts are only there to tell you the truth. | ||
| So if you pay close attention to them, and if you figure out a system for, you know, pointing you in the right direction, and my system is really simple, whatever they're hysterical about, Is something they're lying about? | ||
| Because why are they hysterical? | ||
| If I'm not lying, I'm not hysterical. | ||
| Why would I be hysterical? | ||
| I've got nothing to hide. | ||
| Like, you don't believe me? | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| I'm telling the truth. | ||
| But if I start screaming at you and calling you a Nazi when you ask me a question, I'm probably hiding something. | ||
| And that was the guide I used on the COVID vaccine and on January 6th. | ||
| I had no reason to believe there was anything weird about January 6th. | ||
| I wasn't paying very close attention, to be honest with you. | ||
| And then within hours, they were telling me it was a white supremacist insurrection. | ||
| And like, that's the one thing I knew that it wasn't. | ||
| And so I was like, well, why are they telling me that? | ||
| And then they kept telling me that. | ||
| It wasn't just a momentary surge of hysteria. | ||
| It was a narrative they were creating. | ||
| And then I was like, oh, wow, you're hiding something really, really dark. | ||
| And it turned out to be hundreds of federal agents in disguise in the crowd. | ||
| And of course, it was a setup, just as I began to suspect it was. | ||
| And but anyway, that's how I got there. | ||
| I was the only reporter to see those tapes because I was the only really one of the few who was interested. | ||
| I mean, we asked. | ||
| That's kind of how we got them. | ||
| Just ask, like, call the new speaker. | ||
| Like, you have these tapes thousands of hours. | ||
| Why can't we see them? | ||
| And of course, they didn't want to give them up, but they did. | ||
| And they showed kind of what you suspected. | ||
| You know, there were vandals outside. | ||
| People broke windows. | ||
| I'm opposed to that. | ||
| People, you know, it's a big crowd. | ||
| Pushed in. | ||
| Some of them, you know, did violent things. | ||
| Pretty low-grade, by the way, violence. | ||
| But whatever they did, bad, won't defend it. | ||
| But most of them were just like, holy shit, I can't believe I'm in the Capitol. | ||
| And they wandered around. | ||
| And then the cops led them in to various rooms within the Capitol, including the Senate chamber. | ||
| Now, that was the point at which, and it's on video, they opened the door for Chansley. | ||
| They show him where it is and let him in. | ||
| And then he says to one of the cops, like, can I say a prayer for you? | ||
| And I'm like, this is so different from everything I've been told that it's bewildering. | ||
| And moreover, why are they letting him into the Senate chamber? | ||
| Why wouldn't they say, hey, pal, you can't be here, like, you know, scoot, get out of here. | ||
| You get arrested, which is what cops would do. | ||
| But no, they led him there. | ||
| And then I'm like, well, I'd like to talk to those cops. | ||
| But of course you can't because you're not allowed to know anything because it's a national security matter. | ||
| And then I was like, this looks very much like a setup to me. | ||
| I mean, what else is it? | ||
| And of course, the second I said that or suggested, I didn't even say it, I suggested it. | ||
| A bunch of people from on-air people I worked with quit in outrage, moral outrage. | ||
| They were just so shocked. | ||
| That Jonah kid and that dumb guy was his partner, whatever, Hayes. | ||
| And they're like, oh, we just can't. | ||
| This is so unbearable, you know. | ||
| And it was like, why are you so mad that I suggested that? | ||
| Like, if you disagree, tell me why. | ||
| We can have a reasonable... | ||
| Nope, nope, nope. | ||
| We're quitting because it's a moral crime that you ask the question. | ||
| As soon as people say it's a moral crime for you to ask a question... | ||
| Any question about anything, then you know they're the ones committing the moral crime, 100% of the time. | ||
| So, yeah, that was my guide. | ||
| And, yeah, of course, you know, it turned out to be true. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Speaking of things, you say you got to watch out for what people are hysterical about or what they're trying to hide, the questions you're not allowed to ask. | ||
| And one question that you're not allowed to ask, that, again, you were the only person, you were the only person with any platform of... | ||
| Of sort of national syndication that asked the questions, how did Jeffrey Epstein die? | ||
| And we just saw this week, Dick Durbin blocking the subpoena of Jeffrey Epstein's flight logs. | ||
| So once again, you have the foremost predator, the foremost pederast in the world, and... | ||
| There is an entire unified front in Washington trying to stop information getting out about who he was associated with and what he was doing exactly. | ||
| So, question, Tucker, who was Jeffrey Epstein? | ||
| How and why did he die? | ||
| And why are some of the most powerful people in the world still trying to protect the world's foremost predator of children? | ||
| Well, those are questions that I don't, strictly speaking, know the answer to. | ||
| A lot of it is speculation. | ||
| I happen to... | ||
| I know someone very well who I've seen very, very well. | ||
| And I've talked with him a lot about it. | ||
| And I know his brother, Mark, who just texted me about eight minutes ago, weirdly. | ||
| And I've talked to him quite a bit about it. | ||
| And, you know, I don't know a lot of the details. | ||
| Here's what I do know. | ||
| He was murdered in federal lockup in Manhattan in the... | ||
| Special housing unit, which is supposedly the most secure place. | ||
| I think there are eight cells total in there, and he was, I think, very clearly killed by one of the inmates in there. | ||
| And the question is, why? | ||
| And why can't we get the names of the inmates who were held with him from the Bureau of Prisons? | ||
| Well, you can't. | ||
| Why has no investigation ever been done into his death? | ||
| It hasn't been done. | ||
| Why was the Attorney General of the United States, Bill Barr, lying about all of this, which he absolutely did? | ||
| Go and read his autobiography. | ||
| He's lying. | ||
| He's saying things that he knows are not true. | ||
| So why is the Attorney General of the United States covering up the murder of Jeffrey Epstein? | ||
| I can't begin to guess. | ||
| I mean, the speculation, as I'm sure you know, is that he worked for not just U.S. intelligence, which he did. | ||
| But for a number of different foreign intel agencies, and that was certainly the world he lived in, and he was operating a blackmail operation on their behalf. | ||
| And I think that sounds right. | ||
| Can't prove it. | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| And I think it's, you know, it's like an Agatha Christie novel. | ||
| There's any number of suspects in his murder. | ||
| But you would have to think, given the nature of it, like, who has the power to get into federal lockup in downtown Manhattan? | ||
| Who could pull that off? | ||
| Who could actually do that? | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| Could the mafia do that? | ||
| No. | ||
| The Sicilian mafia could not do that. | ||
| Could Google do that? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Google could not do that. | ||
| The only people who could do that are in intelligentsy. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And there are only a few who have the power to do that in the United States, and one of them did it. | ||
| So, you know, I don't know. | ||
| And I do know, as I interviewed people, I spent a while on that story. | ||
| I did it myself because I was interested, because I've been talking to his brother Mark, who reached out to me, who's very upset about it, not because he's... | ||
| He's not political at all. | ||
| It's his brother, and he's mad about it. | ||
| And he's been stymied at every turn trying to get the information. | ||
| But as I called people, no one wanted to talk to me. | ||
| I got hung up on. | ||
| And finally, I reached someone who said off the record, like, think about it, man. | ||
| Whoever killed this guy, not that we're mourning his passing or anything, but, like, whoever did that, did that in a federal detention center in the most secure area of that detention center in the United States of America. | ||
| This is not Honduras. | ||
| Who could do that? | ||
| Well, you know, can't say with any specificity, but I can say it's someone who could certainly kill me if he wanted to. | ||
| So maybe we shouldn't fuck around here. | ||
| And that makes sense to me. | ||
| I mean, that's perfectly, that's a logical conclusion. | ||
| So I can, but I'm kind of fixated on the Bill Barr thing. | ||
| I have nothing against Bill Barr personally. | ||
| He's a liar, which is a problem if you're the Attorney General of the United States, and he's lying about Epstein's death. | ||
| And why is that? | ||
| And I asked. | ||
| I mean, I sort of know him. | ||
| I have for a long time. | ||
| He was an attorney general before in a previous administration. | ||
| He's been around D.C. for many years. | ||
| And we just put it to him directly. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Why were you lying about it? | ||
| Why were you covering up the murder of a guy in your jurisdiction? | ||
| You know, the attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer. | ||
| Bureau of Prisons falls under him. | ||
| You were effectively holding this guy and he got murdered by somebody. | ||
| Why aren't you interested in finding out more? | ||
| You know, it's like kind of an amazing, amazing question, don't you think? | ||
| I think it is absolutely an amazing question. | ||
| I think another amazing question, and by the way, we are handing it off to the panel. | ||
| As soon as I'm done with this last question, I just got to get this last question in, but we got such an unbelievable series of people who are joining right now. | ||
| Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Patrick Beck David, the Tate brothers, and an attorney general. | ||
| But before we open up the panel... | ||
| One final one. | ||
| You're talking about secure locations where you can get information, you know, where you shouldn't be able to commit crimes. | ||
| Yet somebody left a bag of Coke at the White House. | ||
| I know that you've been to the White House. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Who left the Coke, Tucker? | ||
| I leave my blow in the truck every time, just on principle. | ||
| I mean, they got dogs in there and everything. | ||
| And I think most people do because... | ||
| It's the White House. | ||
| And so, you know, I've been sober for 21 years, but, you know, I have used drugs, and I know the paranoia that accompanies the use of illegal drugs. | ||
| And no normal cocaine user, whether chronic or habitual, would ever think to bring cocaine into the White House because that's a no-no. | ||
| I don't care how high you are. | ||
| I'm not doing that. | ||
| And so clearly it's someone who lives or works there, who's so familiar with it, that... | ||
| The, you know, the fear of being around Secret Service and dogs, they got a lot of dogs at the White House, is not at all a motivator. | ||
| So, like, you know, it's someone from the family, obviously. | ||
| And you've got a couple of heavy drug users in the family. | ||
| I feel sad for the family. | ||
| A lot of families have heavy drugs. | ||
| I'm not attacking the Bidens, by the way. | ||
| I feel sorry for them. | ||
| But, you know, Ashley Biden has had a publicly documented struggle with substance abuse and, of course, Hunter as well. | ||
| But what's amazing to me, so you sort of feel bad for anybody who's like, gotta get high so bad they're bringing cocaine into the White House. | ||
| But on the other hand, it's like, stop lying to me. | ||
| But the whole thing is a lie. | ||
| The presidency is a lie. | ||
| The guy's senile. | ||
| His press secretary can barely speak English. | ||
| She's like a functional moron. | ||
| How does she have a driver's license? | ||
| Like the whole thing. | ||
| Torian Newland is undersecretary of state, the person who helped start the Iraq war. | ||
| It's like, it's a grotesque. | ||
| Painting, it's honestly, it's like a Salvador Dali portrait of government. | ||
| It's like insane. | ||
| It's like the least competent, the most malicious, the least accomplished, and the most personally damaged people are running everything. | ||
| There's got to be a name for that, government by freaks. | ||
| Hey Alexa, I'll give you the mic because I know you've got a couple of questions, then we'll open it up to the panel. | ||
| Tucker, the beauty about space is that you never know who you'll get. | ||
| So yesterday we had a... | ||
| Two days ago, we had a space with Alex Jones, and I pinged Elon. | ||
| He jumped on, and then everyone came in. | ||
| Andrew Tate came in. | ||
| Patrick, who's on stage right now. | ||
| Tristan came on. | ||
| And we've got an incredible panel for you as well. | ||
| I think you'll enjoy the discussion. | ||
| Hey, Alex, the mic is yours, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so Vivek Ramaswamy last month asked at the RNC debate, he proposed that you, Elon Musk, and Joe Rogan run a debate instead of who the RNC pick, you know, the Russiagate pushers and everyone. | |
| Would you be open to such a debate? | ||
| Oh gosh, of course I would. | ||
| Of course I would. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds fun as hell. | ||
| I absolutely would. | ||
| I mean, it would, I think, have to be outside the RNC's jurisdiction, and that would be good. | ||
| I mean, by the way, if any, I don't know how many people are on this call, but if anyone present can see a purpose for the RNC to continue to exist, just shoot me a text because I'd love to. | ||
| The RNC is like NATO. | ||
| You know, it has no reason for being. | ||
| It only consumes resources and says annoying things and breaks things. | ||
| But there's sort of no reason to have it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Brian? | |
| For sure. | ||
| So good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Brian, Tristan? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, sure. | |
| Hey, Tucker. | ||
| So we're on different sides of the political spectrum, obviously. | ||
| But I have a question to you about political polarization in the country. | ||
| Obviously, with the election coming up, it's going to get much worse. | ||
| I think both sides agree to that. | ||
| How do you think we can better foster Well, I'm sure I've contributed to all kinds of bad trends in this country. | ||
| You know, polarization, bad haircuts. | ||
| I mean, I try not to deny my sins. | ||
| I supported the Iraq War in 2003, so, you know, I've got a lot to apologize for, and I've tried to apologize for it. | ||
| But You want the honest answer? | ||
| The first step is let's just agree to stop talking about race. | ||
| I mean, that conversation is designed to divide us. | ||
| I think it's intentional. | ||
| I think there's a very specific purpose to it. | ||
| But it hasn't helped. | ||
| We've been doing it for many years, and there's kind of no more meaningful legislation to pass on that subject. | ||
| There's only wounds to pick and to inflame and lies to tell. | ||
| And you wonder, again, why? | ||
| We're being encouraged to talk about race all the time. | ||
| It's not wholesome. | ||
| It's not helpful. | ||
| And it makes rational conversation impossible. | ||
| It's also boring because, yes, there are racial differences, but they're not as profound as lots of other differences. | ||
| Income differences. | ||
| If I make a billion dollars and you make $50,000, we're far more different than we are if we're different colors. | ||
| That's just true. | ||
| And so... | ||
| We're not getting anywhere. | ||
| It's only dividing us. | ||
| And people say, I want a conversation about race. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| No one wants a conversation about race. | ||
| No one allows a conversation about race. | ||
| And if they did, that probably wouldn't help us either. | ||
| So let's just agree. | ||
| Let's do a mutual ceasefire on race. | ||
| And then, honestly, you will see a lot of the differences just recede. | ||
| Because then we'll be talking about economics. | ||
| And the second we talk about economics, then you will find that most people are on the same side. | ||
| They don't want to pay $11 for a dozen eggs. | ||
| They don't think, actually, you should have a country run by billionaires. | ||
| That's not healthy. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| And I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm here because a billionaire has guaranteed free speech on this platform, and I'll forever be grateful for that. | ||
| But you don't want every part of your civic life controlled by people just because they're rich. | ||
| Like, that's not democracy, for one thing. | ||
| And it's super unhealthy, for another. | ||
| It's not even feudalism. | ||
| It's beneath feudalism. | ||
| So, anyway, that's the first thing I would do. | ||
| If you just... | ||
| I don't want to ban anything, but if you had a gentleman's agreement that we're not resolving anything, racial differences are actually not as big a deal as we make them out to be. | ||
| It's not the beginning and end of every fucking story what color you are. | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| And we're just not going to talk about it. | ||
| We're going to take race off federal form. | ||
| We're going to stop counting people by race because it totally dehumanizes a person to classify him by race. | ||
| He didn't choose his race. | ||
| It has nothing to do with anything he did. | ||
| How would you like if we classify people by height? | ||
| And then argued about short people versus tall people. | ||
| All of us could see what a fruitless conversation that would be. | ||
| And hopefully if we're rational, we'd stop having it and just accept that tall people are a little different from short people, but not that different. | ||
| They're still people. | ||
| And then we could have a good conversation about things that, A, we can change and B, that we have in common. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I think those are decent points, obviously. | |
| How are they decent? | ||
| I think where I differ is that there are times where I think it's important to speak about race. | ||
| I think that America in general, they over-speak about race. | ||
| I think that people accuse others of being racist too easily, and when they do that, it's causing more harm than good. | ||
| It's making real racists seem less racist. | ||
| But let me just ask you a question then. | ||
| You've taken a lot of assumptions on faith, I notice, in that. | ||
| Can you think of any material improvement to the United States that we have achieved over the last 10 years by talking about race? | ||
| We passed the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| We've done a whole lot on that question for 60 years, 70 years now. | ||
| But in the last 10 years, it feels like we've kind of run out of things to talk about. | ||
| It's almost exclusively used as a cudgel. | ||
| But maybe I'm missing something. | ||
| Can you think of some way where a large group, millions of Americans, have benefited materially from our In the last 10 years, I would say that there hasn't been much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There hasn't been much accomplished. | |
| I don't think we are anywhere further along racially than we were 10 years ago. | ||
| So I'd agree with you there. | ||
| Does that mean that if somebody does something horrible to a certain race, we should just not talk about it? | ||
| I don't think that should be true. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, maybe it might be worth treating people as people. | ||
| So I guess implicit in your question, and I really appreciate this, is the desire to see the country come together and people stop arguing with each other over pointless stuff and be a nation again rather than just 360 million disgruntled individuals, which I think that's what you're saying, and I'm totally for that, okay? | ||
| But any talk about race, like, by definition, reduces somebody to a physical characteristic. | ||
| And I, A, I thought we thought that was bad. | ||
| I still do. | ||
| But B, that is like a recipe for dividing people. | ||
| It's absolutely a recipe. | ||
| why wouldn't we emphasize, even in the case of crime, our commonality? | ||
| One person hurt another person, not a white hurt a black or a black hurt a white, because the implication there is all blacks hurt all whites or all whites hurt all blacks. | ||
| And that's not true. | ||
| That's not helpful. | ||
| So why don't we just say a person hurt another person? | ||
| We're against hurting people. | ||
| We're going to punish him on the basis of the harm he caused. | ||
| I mean, that seems like a much more, quote, liberal approach, but a much more humane and constructive approach. | ||
| And I can promise you, if we did that, we would be talking about stuff that matters. | ||
| Like, how is this war helping anybody? | ||
| Is our tax rate fair? | ||
| It doesn't seem fair to me. | ||
| I can't get anyone to listen to that argument because they're all like, well, shut up, racist. | ||
| I mean, you know what I mean? | ||
| Candice, I don't know if you have the capacity to talk. | ||
| If you could unmute your mic, the space is yours and the floor is yours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, I'm just here to listen and first off, just to support Tucker. | |
| I mean, just an amazing launch. | ||
| So excited to see what you do with it. | ||
| The world needs more Tucker Carlson. | ||
| We need more speech and just kind of building upon what Tucker is saying. | ||
| Yeah, the world has been And America especially has been harmed by pushing down, you know, pushing through this race narrative. | ||
| It's led to a more divided nation. | ||
| And I think that, you know, we're seeing this over and over again. | ||
| And right now we're being presented with it on both the left and the right. | ||
| You know, people that are calling for the censorship of speech, people that are using the exact same tactics to silence people, you know, cancel culture in general. | ||
| It has been extremely harmful. | ||
| People aren't allowed to make mistakes. | ||
| And Tucker, I think it's amazing. | ||
| That you point to your past, you say, I supported the Iraq War. | ||
| You know, I changed my mind on that. | ||
| We're growing closer toward a nation that doesn't seem to want to allow people to be able to transform. | ||
| And I think that's very scary when people can't make mistakes, when people can't adjust their opinions. | ||
| You know, so I guess my question to Tucker would be, what are your thoughts on cancel culture and where it stands today? | ||
| And I think it's a remarkable thing to consider. | ||
| With this week, Alex Jones being back on Twitter, some people saying that he never should have been allowed back to have a platform on the basis of some things that he said. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| Where is cancel culture today? | ||
| Let me just say, I'm grateful that you're here, and I hate to sound like I'm log rolling, but I'm like the world's biggest Candace Owens fan, so thank you. | ||
| You know, I think that people, and even some liberals, honestly, and I have... | ||
| Boundless contempt for liberals. | ||
| I kind of like a lot of people on the left. | ||
| In fact, I do like a lot of people on the left. | ||
| You know, serious. | ||
| I don't always agree with them, but I think they're real people. | ||
| But liberals, I make fun of a lot. | ||
| But I think even, like, kind of ordinary liberals are beginning to realize that the justification for censoring people was a lie. | ||
| So the idea was we have to make you shut up because you're hurting someone's feelings. | ||
| And in order to be compassionate, and it preyed upon their best instincts, which are... | ||
| For compassion, which is a good thing. | ||
| And they would say, we have to have compassion for this or that person, and so that person has to be censored. | ||
| And liberals kind of said to themselves, well, I'm not for censorship, but I'm even more opposed to hurting someone's feelings, so I'll go along with it. | ||
| That was the initial bargain that they made. | ||
| And that's how the ACLU went from, you know, an anti-censorship organization to advocates for censorship. | ||
| And that's how Media Matters was allowed to become this huge force in American life. | ||
| But I think even liberals are starting to realize the point is not to protect anyone's feelings. | ||
| Nobody cares about anybody's feelings. | ||
| Nobody cares about other people. | ||
| And just look at what's happening in our country. | ||
| The amount of suffering going on in the United States has grown exponentially over the last five years. | ||
| Exponentially. | ||
| And nobody cares. | ||
| So clearly your feelings or someone else's feelings or the feelings of transgender American Indians on the res, it's all irrelevant to them. | ||
| Censorship is a tool of power used to preserve power. | ||
| It always has been. | ||
| It always will be. | ||
| If someone's telling you you can't say something, they're telling you that on behalf of someone above you. | ||
| Not below you, above you. | ||
| This is a revolution aimed downward at people. | ||
| And I think, even again, I think even liberals are getting it. | ||
| And by the way, it's very tiresome. | ||
| Oh, you can't say that. | ||
| Well, fuck you. | ||
| Well, you can't say, you know, this or that. | ||
| You know, I could give you a thousand examples. | ||
| I've been dealing with this my whole, you know, for over 30 years. | ||
| But the justification for it is a lie. | ||
| And I think everyone knows that now. | ||
| Tucker, I'm going to ask you a question. | ||
| I'm going to link it to Tristan, and Andrew Tate could be joining us as well. | ||
| But you've talked about X being the world's largest free speech platform, and you talk about censorship now. | ||
| He also said if X is not shut down, we have a chance at a real election. | ||
| But with the polarization, I'm genuinely concerned for this, and I'm concerned for the concept of a democracy, and I know you've got similar concerns. | ||
| With the trust in the justice system, Pretty much hitting an all-time low, and if X does get shut down or does get hit, we've seen what's happening with media matters right now. | ||
| What do you think could happen next year? | ||
| Is there any concerns, anything that keeps you up at night? | ||
| Oh, it absolutely keeps me up at night. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, the next 12 months, I don't think, and I'm not given to apocalyptic statements, and again, as I've already conceded, and I always will, I've been wrong a lot. | ||
| And I hope I'm wrong now. | ||
| But I see a number of basically irresolvable conflicts coming to fruition in the same period, not just in this country, but around the world. | ||
| And I'm very concerned about that. | ||
| Now, the election specifically, you can't have a democracy and you can't have a free and fair election unless people can say what they think and get all the publicly available information that they can. | ||
| And publicly available is a big thing. | ||
| Like most information about what your government is doing should be publicly available. | ||
| And if it's not, well, again, that's another sign that you're not living in a democracy. | ||
| So the 2020 election was the mirror image of that. | ||
| I mean, we weren't allowed to hear all kinds of things. | ||
| All sorts of information was suppressed, not just Hunter Biden's laptop, but a lot. | ||
| And we learned that in the Twitter files. | ||
| So that was not a free and fair election. | ||
| And I can't imagine that any liberal, as much as they may love Joe Biden or hate Trump, but that's fine. | ||
| But I don't think any honest person can say that it was. | ||
| You don't have to believe the voting machines were rigged, though maybe they were. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They could be. | ||
| They're electronic voting machines, and no serious country uses electronic voting machines, but whatever. | ||
| But you don't even need to go there. | ||
| All you need to know is that there was no place where people could present information or speak their beliefs honestly about COVID, the vaccine, about Hunter Biden, about China, about a bunch of different things. | ||
| And that's not a free and fair election. | ||
| And so the fact that X, thanks to Elon, is now open. | ||
| Is a massive threat to the people who don't want a free and fair election? | ||
| I mean, of course. | ||
| And so I'm super, super concerned. | ||
| I'm also worried about the prosecution of Trump. | ||
| You can't, you know, the charges just aren't real. | ||
| I'm sorry, they're not. | ||
| I mean, you could say, well, he's guilty of this or that in the four cases. | ||
| Okay, maybe he is. | ||
| But the crimes themselves are ridiculous. | ||
| They're ridiculous. | ||
| He brought classified documents home? | ||
| Are you serious? | ||
| I spent 35 years in Washington. | ||
| I moved there at 15. You know, I left at 50. My dad ran a federal agency. | ||
| I know Washington. | ||
| It's like the only thing I know. | ||
| Ask me about Washington or fly fishing and I can give you credible answers. | ||
| And the idea that you're prosecuting a man on a felony charge for bringing home documents and not returning them to the National Fucking Archives. | ||
| Are you serious? | ||
| Is there a single high-level bureaucrat in Washington, elected or not, who doesn't do that every single day? | ||
| No. | ||
| Because there are over a billion classified federal documents, and the overwhelming majority should not be classified. | ||
| There's no national security justification for classifying them. | ||
| Look me in the face and tell me the U.S. government has a legitimate reason for classifying over a billion documents. | ||
| You can't, because they don't. | ||
| It's a scam, as you know, designed to maintain power and disempower the population. | ||
| So to indict him on that, and then tell us they were nuclear secrets, but then never even suggest what those secrets might have been. | ||
| At the same time that the sitting president did the same thing, and you're expecting me to go along with this and be like, oh, it's the rule of law, these are our sacred norms. | ||
| No, you're violating the rule of law, you're mocking our sacred norms, and you're doing it with the presidency at stake. | ||
| You are trying to take the frontrunner out of the race with bogus legal charges. | ||
| And when I saw that happening, I mean, I always had qualms about Trump, particularly the people he hired. | ||
| Some of them were just like... | ||
| Beyond. | ||
| I couldn't believe you'd hire someone like that. | ||
| And I've told him that to his face, and I think that. | ||
| But the second they indicted him on ridiculous charges and raided Mar-a-Lago and went through his wife's underwear drawer and all that shit, I was like, I don't care. | ||
| That can't stand, because I have to live here. | ||
| And I've got a bunch of kids, and they have to live here. | ||
| And hopefully they'll have kids. | ||
| And my descendants will live here, as my ancestors did. | ||
| And I want them to live in a country with a functioning justice system and elections that are semi-real. | ||
| And if we allow this to happen, none of that will come to pass. | ||
| I'll take it. | ||
| What concerns me is I'll take it a step further. | ||
| One of the first, and Tristan, that goes to you as well after Tucker, is one of the first things Elon said when he came on the Spacey, he said something along the lines that I'll never kill myself or if anything happens to me, just rest assured, I'll never kill myself. | ||
| And then Andrew came on and said the same thing two days ago. | ||
| Tristan, I think you shared a similar concern. | ||
| You know, for so many people to be saying this, and then you see big tech being able to completely cancel someone. | ||
| We saw Alex Jones talk about his experience two days ago. | ||
| It just seems that the concept of a democracy is just not working. | ||
| To have so many voices say something like this and seeing what's happening with Trump, do you share such a concern as well? | ||
| Well, have you ever thought about this? | ||
| Of course I do. | ||
| Of course I do. | ||
| And not only have I thought about it, but I mean, how many democracies between Rome and the American Revolution did the world see? | ||
| Let me do the math. | ||
| Oh, zero. | ||
| So look, there are inherent problems with democracy. | ||
| There was a lot of conversation about this in the late 18th century in Europe, and not just from fascists, from liberal minded people who wanted the maximum amount of freedom for a population. | ||
| And they argued famously that democracy inevitably leads to authoritarianism. | ||
| I hope they're wrong. | ||
| You know, I was born into democracy. | ||
| I hope to die in one. | ||
| I support the system that... | ||
| You know, gave birth to my country. | ||
| So I'm not against democracy, but I'm just going to note the obvious, which is it's very hard to maintain one. | ||
| Very hard, especially at scale. | ||
| The country gets big. | ||
| We've got officially 240, probably got 280 million people in this country, and they're very divided. | ||
| It's hard to have a democracy under those circumstances, but we have to keep trying. | ||
| And I will say the magic ingredient in a democracy is tolerance. | ||
| You have to accept that there are countrymen, your fellow citizens who disagree with you, And want something different from what you want. | ||
| And you have to accept that. | ||
| You have to live under their rule from time to time. | ||
| You have to be in the minority. | ||
| Because a democracy, by definition, means ultimately, while we have respect for minority rights, the majority gets what it wants over time. | ||
| That's what the system is. | ||
| And that's what it demands. | ||
| And if you get rulers in there who are like, well, we're in power now, and we don't give a shit what you want, you're not getting it, and we're going to stymie your desires at every turn, two things happen. | ||
| One, you make a mockery of the system that you purportedly uphold and represent democracy. | ||
| That's the opposite of democracy. | ||
| And the second thing that happens is you get a really volatile society because people have no outlet. | ||
| They have no power. | ||
| They have no financial power. | ||
| Labor has no value in the United States. | ||
| And even less, now we've let in 50 million illegal aliens. | ||
| No value in your labor. | ||
| Okay, none. | ||
| And that's a function of technology and immigration. | ||
| So they don't have that anymore. | ||
| The working class has no power economically. | ||
| But they still have political power. | ||
| The people who were arrested on January 6th were the working class people who were like, wait, my vote is the last thing I have. | ||
| It's all I have. | ||
| And you're taking that away because that election clearly was unfair, which it was. | ||
| And then rather than listen to their concerns, we're like, shut up, insurrectionist. | ||
| We're putting you in jail. | ||
| Or Ashley Babb, we're just going to kill you. | ||
| And no one's going to care. | ||
| Like, if you do shit like that and you keep doing it, you are going to get something super ugly. | ||
| You are. | ||
| Without a pressure relief valve, your society will blow up. | ||
| It's really obvious. | ||
| I do not have an especially high IQ, and it's really obvious to me. | ||
| So I don't know how they're missing this. | ||
| It's going to blow up in their faces, too. | ||
| There's no global sanctuary. | ||
| If you're super rich, where are you going to go? | ||
| You can't just live at the Discovery properties at Baker's Bay. | ||
| You can't live at the Yellowstone Club. | ||
| What do they think is going to happen? | ||
| And so I think it's a moment of mass insanity, and the way to fix it is to just resolve yourself to the fact. | ||
| That at some point in a democracy, somebody's going to get elected that you don't like, and you're just going to have to deal with it. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That's just true. | ||
| Tristan, I want you to jump in on that particular point you guys are facing, you and Andrew are facing, let's say, a flawed justice system in Romania. | ||
| We've got – we're he being concerned about the US. We'd love you to jump in on this point and any other questions you have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| To speak about lawfare for just a moment, what I will say is… I think that the overuse of power is something that becomes very obvious with time. | ||
| Over the last 70 or 80 years, we don't know exactly who was assassinated, who killed themselves, who didn't. | ||
| There are some cases, obviously, that you just mentioned, Jeffrey Epstein, that are far easier to prove or easier to build a case to the public than others. | ||
| But truthfully, we don't know. | ||
| So Elon coming out saying, I would never kill myself. | ||
| Tucker, Andrew, myself always harping on about the fact that... | ||
| We will never kill ourselves is a very important thing to say, because if they do use this weapon on us, if this weapon is used to silence any of us, and I'm speaking of obviously the higher-ups, people who are more influential than myself, then at least the world will be wise to it. | ||
| The question is, what are we going to do? | ||
| Because I genuinely worry for Tucker, and I worry for Elon, and I don't want to be Mr. Doom and Gloom. | ||
| When I say I worry, what I mean is I include them in my prayers every single night. | ||
| Because lawfare is the next step. | ||
| They're doing it with Trump. | ||
| There's a very interesting book, I suggest everybody at home read, called Three Felonies a Day by a man named Harvey Silverglake. | ||
| And he speaks about how if somebody within the Justice Department wants to get you for something, any aspect of your life can be interpreted and prove that you've committed at least three felonies a day. | ||
| Now, the book does exaggerate with that number. | ||
| What I will say is, you know, as Tucker's saying, bringing classified documents into your home, everyone in Washington is doing it. | ||
| Okay, well, technically it's illegal. | ||
| Let's get Trump with it. | ||
| Let's attack him with it. | ||
| My case, I don't want to talk about it because I'm not the subject of this Twitter space, but essentially it's saying that even suggesting any kind of social media collaboration with people, even if they do not live with you and they live in other countries, can be human trafficking. | ||
| If that's in the hand of a prosecutor, I would like to think that the world is now smart enough that if Tucker Carlson, in the next six months living a public life, as he has done for the last 30 years, and Elon Musk being a successful millionaire ever since his first game developments and his sale of PayPal, if a bunch of random imaginary crimes from his past creep up, I think that people just need to be smart enough to think, why did this man go so public and so loud and state his opinions so virently? | ||
| When he had a criminal past. | ||
| And the answer to that is going to be, well, they don't have a criminal past. | ||
| What's happening is the justice system is being weaponized against us. | ||
| Now, obviously, in the United States, there's a little something called trial by jury, which is nice. | ||
| Same in the United Kingdom and a few other countries where the people can actually protect people against the justice system by knowing that something's rigged, knowing that something is a setup and saying not guilty, irregardless of what the district attorneys or the prosecutors want to bring. | ||
| But there are other parts of the world. | ||
| I won't name them, but you know where I'm talking about. | ||
| They don't even have a trial by jury to protect people from lawfare. | ||
| It's very scary. | ||
| And I guess before I move on to my next point, because I actually did have a very important point to make, what I would say is what does the person at home, Tucker, what does the person at home do about it? | ||
| If you get accused of five or ten random crimes that happened 20 or 30 years ago, which obviously didn't really happen, but it's just your word against someone else's and you're being dragged through the courts. | ||
| What does the person at home do about it and what can they do to assist you in any way or to stop this from happening? | ||
| Well, first of all, I didn't realize that was Tristan Tate talking. | ||
| I'm such a fan. | ||
| It's great to hear your voice. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| What can the average person at home do? | ||
| Well, nothing. | ||
| And that's kind of the whole point. | ||
| I mean, no one wants to say this, but I mean, I guess I'm just I'm from a different world or something, but I mean. | ||
| To whom much is given, much is required. | ||
| And I really believe that. | ||
| And I think all the decisions in any society are made by a small percentage of people. | ||
| And that's unfair, but it's been the rule throughout recorded history. | ||
| We've never had a society where that wasn't true. | ||
| And so it's up to those people. | ||
| It's incumbent on rich and powerful people to write the system and to make it fair once again and to make sure that principles are applied universally, not simply to my enemies or to my friends, but to everybody, regardless of color or political belief. | ||
| That is absolutely essential. | ||
| But that can't be done by the average person. | ||
| It can only be done by those people who through luck or virtue or whatever, whatever the qualities are to get certain people to certain places. | ||
| But once you get to those places, you have an obligation to make it better. | ||
| Not not just to accrue wealth for yourself, not just to throw it in some foundation to buy mosquito nets for Congo or whatever, but to fix your own country to help your own neighbors. | ||
| And that's really who I'm pissed at. | ||
| I mean, even when the looting was going on after the George Floyd death, you know, and they were burning Wendy's and all this stuff and like, yeah, they're out of control. | ||
| I hate that. | ||
| And I do think it would be fine to shoot some looters. | ||
| But I was really not mad at the looters. | ||
| I was really mad at the people who are funding them and cheering them on and making excuses for them, the people who should know better, who have the power in our society and who are instead destroying what they should be protecting. | ||
| And those are the people I hate. | ||
| So I think we should focus all of our energy on pressuring people with power. | ||
| And last thing I'll say is that given the overwhelming advantage that technology gives to the powerful, and I'm a huge believer in, you know, gun rights, and I have a lot of guns, and I believe in the AR-15, and I shoot a lot and all that. | ||
| That's all great. | ||
| But in the end, Joe Biden is right about one thing. | ||
| It is an asymmetrical battle between you and the government. | ||
| That is absolutely true. | ||
| You're not going to be the drone. | ||
| Even with a, you know, 12 gauge with Magnum duck loads, you're just not. | ||
| So you need to have, you need to make sure that people like Elon Musk, people who, Donald Trump, and there should be many, many others who have power are restraining the forces of totalitarianism before they crush you. | ||
| So you need to, like, the pressure campaign should only be unpowerful people. | ||
| I don't think mass demonstrations are going to get us there. | ||
| I just don't. | ||
| I hope I'm wrong, but I don't. | ||
| By the way, we've got... | ||
| Tristan, I'll give you the mic, and then we've got Patrick. | ||
| We've got David just jumped in. | ||
| David Sachs. | ||
| You and David had a great interview. | ||
| I was listening to it earlier. | ||
| I'd love you to dig into Ukraine. | ||
| Charlie's here as well. | ||
| Tristan, I'll give you the mic. | ||
| Then, Benny, I'd love you to intro Charlie and Patrick. | ||
| But Tristan, go ahead, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, when you were speaking earlier, or even just now, about powerful people bringing the tools back... | |
| I have a question about, because this is a space about you, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk and the things that you guys are doing, which I think are absolutely wonderful. | ||
| Congratulations on the foundation of the Tucker Carlson Network, first of all. | ||
| What I would say is, I feel like your massive success, your massive success, unprecedented success in recent times hasn't just been because you're... | ||
| Charming and handsome and you tell the truth on your news show. | ||
| I feel like in your experience, I mean, you've been involved in the media and the news since I was in kindergarten. | ||
| You've been at this game a very, very long time. | ||
| I feel like what Elon Musk has done by opening X in the way he has to you is essentially like giving a master craftsman the tools. | ||
| To finally live up to his full potential, like giving Michelangelo the hammer and chisel, like giving Michelangelo the paintbrushes. | ||
| And you have absolutely run away with it. | ||
| My question to you is, he's given the tools to everyone. | ||
| This isn't a gift he's given to Tucker Carlson. | ||
| This isn't a gift he's given to Alex Jones. | ||
| This is a gift he has given to the entire world. | ||
| First part of the question would be... | ||
| Why do you think people who disagree with you ideologically and politically aren't doing the exact same thing? | ||
| Because there are people, arguably, especially in the American media, who have just as much experience and just as much potential. | ||
| Names like Gilmar come to mind. | ||
| Why aren't they doing it? | ||
| And the second part of the question would be, when the world's media finally uses the tools that Elon has now made available to everybody? | ||
| And I'm not talking about the American media. | ||
| I'm talking about the Russians, the Chinese. | ||
| Everyone can use this platform and speak what they think to be true on it. | ||
| When that does happen and if that does happen and if everybody's potential is unlocked the way yours has been unlocked, how do you think that's going to change the political landscape of both America and the world? | ||
| Well, thank you for the question. | ||
| I mean, to answer the second part first, I think it matters a great deal. | ||
| In fact, I think it matters more than anything because I think words matter more than anything. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I mean, words endure. | ||
| Weapons do not. | ||
| I mean, you can kill people. | ||
| Killing people is easy. | ||
| But changing people's minds is very hard, and it requires words to do it. | ||
| And if you want to change history, you have to change minds. | ||
| If you can enslave an entire population, you can commit genocide, and that's all been done. | ||
| But in the end, it's not enduring. | ||
| The only things that last are voluntary. | ||
| And words achieve that. | ||
| And so that's the first thing they ban. | ||
| You know, they want to take your guns, for sure. | ||
| But they haven't. | ||
| They've definitely taken your words away. | ||
| And there's a reason for that. | ||
| There's a reason it's the First Amendment, not the second. | ||
| It protects your right to speak, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| So I don't think we can overstate the significance of X. I'm not just saying that. | ||
| And I should just say, to be totally clear, I haven't taken a dollar from Elon Musk. | ||
| I don't work for Elon Musk. | ||
| I'm just like anyone else on Twitter. | ||
| I don't have some special deal with him at all. | ||
| So I'm not, like, flacking for Elon Musk. | ||
| I'm just saying I don't think we appreciate what a big deal this is. | ||
| I can tell you the other side appreciates it very much. | ||
| And they're going to do whatever it takes to shut it down. | ||
| So that's the first thing. | ||
| The second thing, you're a great question. | ||
| Like, why aren't more people on the other side using the opportunity to make their case? | ||
| And I would, I'm not being snide or glib. | ||
| I don't think, and there are some, and good for them. | ||
| I really do support that. | ||
| Like, make your case. | ||
| Tell me what you're for. | ||
| Tell me why you're right. | ||
| Don't just attack people. | ||
| Tell me what you believe. | ||
| And I don't think there's much of a case to be made at this point. | ||
| I mean, there is a case on the left, on the actual left. | ||
| You've seen very articulate people come on, especially in foreign policy, and make a very strong case for a left-wing foreign policy perspective, which, you know, I don't always agree with, but it's a coherent case. | ||
| You can't find—I mean, what is the coherent case for castrating your children so you don't have grandchildren, the one thing that everybody in the world wants? | ||
| I mean, like, it's just—those are the kinds of objectives that can only be achieved by force. | ||
| It's not about convincing people to sign on. | ||
| It's not about convincing them that you're right. | ||
| It's about forcing them to do something. | ||
| And that's what worries me. | ||
| The fact that we don't have more neoliberal voices on Twitter and neoliberals run the world or the West at the moment, not for long in my view, but they do now, but their voices are absent in the public debate. | ||
| They don't want to debate. | ||
| And that just tells you that they move past the debate stage into the coercion stage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's scary as hell. | |
| Patrick, I want to ask you and Tucker a question. | ||
| I'd love you guys to go back and forth. | ||
| And something that is not getting enough attention, and every time I talk about it, mainstream media never brings it up in the articles. | ||
| And that's censorship. | ||
| I think not enough people care about this. | ||
| You, Patrick, Tucker, of course, Andrew, Tristan. | ||
| Hey, Mario, they lost. | ||
| Oh, the mic is off. | ||
| Yeah, the mic is off. | ||
| I'm back now. | ||
| Go ahead, Patrick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was there a question, or did you give me the phone? | |
| No, the mic... | ||
| Yeah, the floor is yours. | ||
| My question is more about censorship. | ||
| I always try to bring attention to it, especially with Tucker's network just launched. | ||
| So I'd love your thoughts on that, Patrick, and then a back and forth between you and Tucker. | ||
| The mic is playing up a bit, so just make sure you're on mute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First of all, Mario, you're doing a great job with all these spaces. | |
| For whatever reason, you keep running the biggest Twitter spaces and everybody around the world is jumping in to listen in. | ||
| And obviously, shout out to Elon. | ||
| For the platform he's picked up, as if he wasn't busy enough already to pick this up. | ||
| Tucker, congratulations to you on TCN, Tucker Carlson Network, both as a fan and as a capitalist and as a guy that, you know, loves America and wants to see more fighters out there that have the audacity and the brass to go out there and impose and push the envelope and stand up. | ||
| I'm happy for you. | ||
| I'm excited for you. | ||
| And I'm looking forward to seeing you whoop some ass. | ||
| But my question for you was the following. | ||
| So, I think everybody is wired in a different way. | ||
| I try to study you to see, you know, what level of fight you're willing to do for this country. | ||
| Because, obviously, for my end, I've watched you, not the other way around. | ||
| I consume your content. | ||
| My boys are in the car right now. | ||
| I just picked up Dylan, my oldest son, who's listening. | ||
| My youngest son who plays soccer, my oldest son who watched you a lot for many years, he's 11 years old. | ||
| The youngest is 10. Trump's first election he went on, first, you know, 2016, he had to choose a VP like Mike Pence. | ||
| And the reason why that worked, obviously, you know, who Mike Pence had as voters, location, state, where he was based out of, what sect of voters he could win over, whether that helped or not, it is what it is. | ||
| But he kind of needed a person that was a yes person that wasn't going to say a lot, and Trump was going to lead the way. | ||
| And, you know, the intentions was, you have two terms. | ||
| So you kind of go get the job done. | ||
| He wasn't expecting for the mess that happened with what happened with YouTube, Twitter, all these other Twitter files that came out, X-files that came out. | ||
| And then now, him running, it's a different strategy on how to pick a VP. This time around to pick a VP, he can't pick somebody that's just going to be a one-term. | ||
| Because to get the job done, you know, in the edge Russia and UK and some of these other places have, somebody can be in office and running for a while. | ||
| Look, we don't support that. | ||
| It's not the America way. | ||
| But that allows for you to really inject some of the ideas that you have. | ||
| So if you're a good leader, you really have plenty of ample time. | ||
| You have ample time to create that momentum. | ||
| But on this time around, he only has one term. | ||
| Four years. | ||
| Okay, and his age is getting close to 80. Now, he's a fired-up, energized guy, so it doesn't look like he's slowing down, but his VP choice has got to be different. | ||
| So, I know the question was asked at the beginning that they said, you know, what Melania said, and you were very complimentary, but one, if you did get that phone call, would you entertain it? | ||
| And two, if not, do you think if you could be... | ||
| You know, unbiased in the most possible way. | ||
| Do you think you would make a good VP candidate? | ||
| And if not, who would you think would make a good VP candidate? | ||
| Because the strategy has got to be 12 years, not just four years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, thank you for that question. | ||
| Thank you for the nice intro. | ||
| And it's good to hear from you. | ||
| I don't know if I'd make a good VP candidate. | ||
| I mean, probably not, actually. | ||
| I mean, I've never done anything like that at all. | ||
| I'm, you know, I don't think I'm crazy just to be totally blunt with you, but I'm, you know, I'm a little eccentric in that and I'm definitely committed to saying what I think. | ||
| And so, you know, the structure of politics is totally foreign to me. | ||
| I know I could give good speeches because I like giving speeches. | ||
| But, you know, there's a lot more than giving speeches. | ||
| So would I be good at that? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But it's just impossible to to imagine ever being involved in politics. | ||
| And I'm not being coy or anything like that. | ||
| I just. | ||
| I've covered it my whole life. | ||
| The number of politicians I would voluntarily have a meal with is like, you know, fingers on a hand. | ||
| I just don't like them. | ||
| And so I generally think you should stick to things that come naturally to you that you like, you know, that you have an innate aptitude for. | ||
| And in my case, it's writing and talking. | ||
| But it's not kind of like raising money or reading talking points or... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just don't see myself doing anything. | ||
| I don't like that, to be honest with you, though. | ||
| I mean, who knows? | ||
| God knows where this country's going, you know? | ||
| Tucker, Charlie Kirk on, wanting to ask you a question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Tucker, excited to see you this weekend at AmFest. | |
| It's going to be great. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Looking forward to seeing you in Phoenix. | |
| Super quick. | ||
| So, Tucker, I want to get your thoughts on this. | ||
| As you know, we do a lot of stuff on campuses, and I've been... | ||
| For the last 11 years, trying to get wealthy donors to realize it's a bad idea to send money to these universities. | ||
| And in the last six weeks, it seems as if that's finally having some momentum. | ||
| When you were sitting down with Candace, you said, I really hate these people that have been funding the anti-white nonsense on these campuses. | ||
| And I was honestly shocked, speechless, when Bill Ackman came out the other day and said in his letter, basically, I realized that I have been... | ||
| Asleep, almost complicit with funding these universities for years and how anti-white, anti-Western, anti-male they are. | ||
| So, Tucker, you said all the rage should be against powerful people. | ||
| Should we forgive people that have been funding this for the last 20 or 30 years? | ||
| How do you think about this? | ||
| Your mic, Charlie, your mic, I think it's under a shirt. | ||
| Tucker, did you hear the question? | ||
| I know this mic kind of cut out at the end. | ||
| Yeah, first of all, thank you for that question, Charlie. | ||
| And, I mean, well, just to start at the end, we should always forgive people. | ||
| You know, as we ourselves want to be forgiven for our many faults. | ||
| I mean, I really feel that way strongly, and I will always forgive somebody for anything. | ||
| You know, if the contrition is heartfelt, I mean, it's our obligation to forgive people. | ||
| And the lack of forgiveness in our increasingly secular country, where our leaders worship themselves as gods. | ||
| is one of the main problems that we have. | ||
| So, of course, I will always forgive anybody, and I would ask people to forgive me for my shortcomings. | ||
| And that would include Bill Ackman, by the way, who I have mixed feelings about, but I loved reading that the other day. | ||
| But my point remains, which is, our principles have to be universal. | ||
| And so if it's wrong to attack one group, it's wrong to attack any group. | ||
| It doesn't matter what the group is, or whether I'm related to them or not, or know them. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| attacking people on the basis of their group identity or their immutable characteristics is always wrong period and this country is founded on universal principles and if it's not then it's just you know if whatever it's just surinam i mean it's just like any other crappy little country run by power mad people who are transactional and have no principles and crush the weak and reward their friends so we have that is the one thing that we can't give up is the acknowledgement that these principles are universal they apply to everybody | ||
| Second, I don't understand why nobody has made the obvious point, which is, If it is a sin to attack a foreign country, if it makes people feel unsafe or whatever, okay, then why is it okay to attack our country? | ||
| I mean, people piss on the United States constantly. | ||
| I personally think they should be allowed to because I believe in free speech. | ||
| I don't think you should, you know, fire someone or I don't know, fire, but I don't think the government should penalize somebody for attacking the United States. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| The outrage disparity is really shocking to me. | ||
| So you attack a foreign country, people are like, how can you do that? | ||
| That's hateful. | ||
| And at the same time, everyone sort of accepts as a matter of course that the entire college experience is based on attacking the United States and its institutions and its history, often very unfairly, sometimes fairly. | ||
| There are definitely ways you could attack the United States, and that's, you know, fine. | ||
| But to claim the whole country was built on slavery and it's the most unfair country in the world when, of course, it was the most fair country in the world. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| For all, it's false. | ||
| So I just would like to see a little bit more parody. | ||
| You know, if it infuriates you to see a foreign flag burned, does it bother you to see your own flag burned? | ||
| If it infuriates you if you think it's a crime, an act of violence to criticize the policies of another country, why is it not the same to criticize the policies of your own country? | ||
| Can you explain that to me? | ||
| Can you speak slowly as you do? | ||
| Because I don't understand. | ||
| And I take it personally because I'm an American and I don't have another passport and I'm not going anywhere. | ||
| And my ancestors have been here for hundreds of years and I hope my descendants will be too. | ||
| So I do take that personally. | ||
| And I think it's gross. | ||
| And to watch some of these – and by the way, I don't begrudge them if there's some popular podcast host who's super upset about what's happening in a foreign country. | ||
| That's fine with me. | ||
| I'm not mad about that. | ||
| But if he's – Applying such different standards to my country, nothing's too crappy for the United States. | ||
| We should send the refugees that I'm describing as terrorists to the United States, because who cares about the United States? | ||
| What we should really care about is some foreign country. | ||
| I'm offended by that. | ||
| And by the way, that's not an attack on the foreign country. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| And it's not an attack on any group of people. | ||
| It's just a natural response from someone who lives here and was born here and plans to die here. | ||
| I don't know why that doesn't make sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does make sense. | |
| I just want to jump in and say it absolutely does make sense. | ||
| And we need more people to be willing to say that. | ||
| There's nothing wrong or dirty about being America first. | ||
| And the people that are trying to switch the narratives and make it seem like, you know... | ||
| To love your country and to want to see your country secured first is wrong. | ||
| They're the ones that are wrong. | ||
| And I'm saying that because, Charlie, obviously you mentioned me and the conversation that Tucker and I had. | ||
| And I'm sure, Tucker, you don't pay much attention to the headlines, but people tried to make it seem as though our conversation, us wanting to be America first, was somehow wrong and backwards. | ||
| And so I'm grateful for people like you. | ||
| I think whether you want to or not... | ||
| You are a pioneer. | ||
| And I think that people with platforms, as you said, who much is given, much is tested, are wondering, you know, what does the future look like in media? | ||
| You know, what does the future look like for the Tucker Carlson Network, for people that are willing to stand up and to say things that are plainly obvious and plainly true and are unwilling to, you know, be smeared out of existence? | ||
| What does the future look like for people like me and Charlie Kirk? | ||
| You know, we're a generation beneath you. | ||
| What do we have to do? | ||
| You know, I want to just know more about your future vision for the Tucker Carlson Network, because obviously, you know, all of us are excited about what you're doing, and we do view you, as I said earlier, as a pioneer in this space. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| I mean, my vision is, you know, partly in Coet, I'm just being honest. | ||
| I mean, these things evolve in ways that you can't foresee it, and this will be no different, but... | ||
| My baseline belief is that you have to be protected, and I know that from experience, and you can work for people who you really like and who you think like you, and then things will happen that you don't understand, and all of a sudden you're cut off from any kind of audience, and you have no opportunity to say what you think is true. | ||
| And that's happened to me before, and I don't want it to happen again. | ||
| And to rely on advertising, if you're me, if you're Elon, it's fine because you're in a different category. | ||
| You're the richest man in the world. | ||
| But if you're me, you can't rely on just advertising. | ||
| You can't because it's a fickle world. | ||
| It's a turbulent world. | ||
| And you need the fortress, effectively, that a subscription model affords. | ||
| We're going to be posting on X every single day all of our content. | ||
| And some of it will be behind a paywall. | ||
| But part of all of it will be on X because we want the biggest audience. | ||
| We can get, and we so appreciate the amazing and, at this point, unique nature of this platform. | ||
| But you have to have subscribers who support you and will protect you and your ability to fund this stuff, the documentaries. | ||
| We've got more than 20 people working for us right now. | ||
| And you can't rely on advertisers to keep that open if all of a sudden there's another January 6th or they make up something or there's a terror attack and, oh gosh, we have to shut down anyone who's criticizing the government now. | ||
| You think that won't happen? | ||
| Of course it'll happen. | ||
| I mean, it's guaranteed to happen. | ||
| And I just want to stay afloat during that time. | ||
| And I'm not money-driven. | ||
| I never have been. | ||
| I'm happy to make money, but it's not my goal in life at all. | ||
| My goal in life is to say what I think is true. | ||
| And I think this will allow it. | ||
| Speaking of saying what you believe is true, Media Matters is of course trying to censor. | ||
| There is very few people that are properly fighting back. | ||
| Elon, this is one of them. | ||
| Another is the Attorney General of the state of Missouri. | ||
| Andrew Bailey, who's joining the show right now and has filed now an investigation into Media Matters over the last 24 hours, has announced that the state of Missouri will be investigating the fraud of Media Matters. | ||
| Would love to give the floor to the Attorney General of the state of Missouri. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on. | |
| Thank you, Tucker, for what you do to speak truth and to consistently espouse these basic principles. | ||
| And it seems to me that there are three strategic objectives in the defense of our nation right now. | ||
| And we've talked about all three of them. | ||
| I've certainly heard a discussion about all three of them this evening. | ||
| And really, the first one's the border. | ||
| You know, no border, no country. | ||
| If we don't secure our southern border and we allow this mass invasion to continue, we will lose. | ||
| Who we are as the United States of America, and it undermines the rule of law. | ||
| We see that time and time again, going after President Trump and political opponents, weaponizing the criminal justice system to achieve political objectives that you can't win on the merits. | ||
| And so you've got to undermine the rule of law to be able to achieve those objectives. | ||
| I mean, at some point, like you pointed out, Tucker, this turns into a banana republic. | ||
| And again, it's a rule of law issue. | ||
| But the one I'm most concerned about tonight that I really want to focus on and I think touches and concerns the most recent issue with Media Matters. | ||
| Look, it's the battlefield of ideas that is the essence of free speech. | ||
| And that's a foundational principle of our republic. | ||
| It's about individual expression. | ||
| And what I see time and time again today are radical progressive tyrants who want to take that freedom away from us. | ||
| And they're willing to lie, cheat, and steal to do it. | ||
| These are cowards who can't fight and win the battle of ideas. | ||
| So again, they're going to manipulate. | ||
| They're going to deceive. | ||
| They're going to destroy our ability to carry on the conversation. | ||
| And really, it boils down to two principles of how to motivate human behavior, inspiration or manipulation. | ||
| And that's why I think this new front in the battle for freedom of speech is such an interesting juxtaposition between Elon Musk, an inspirational figure who inspires innovation, against the manipulative behavior that we see. | ||
| And I think that, again, that's a very clear moral distinction between that inspiration and that manipulation. | ||
| I'm here to tell you, you know, what I see from Media Matters are a series of lies, deceit, and manipulations. | ||
| The entire organization is... | ||
| The fact that we've got a radical progressive advocacy group masquerading as a media outlet is shameful that they've been able to go this far and get away with it. | ||
| And I'll tell you, as part of our investigation, we've already received documents that purport to be internal memoranda from Media Matters. | ||
| And we're going to hold that as part of our internal investigation. | ||
| And I'll tell you, the contents of these documents would chill the devil's spine. | ||
| You know, one of the more disturbing quotes is where Media Matters opines that A deeper grassroots bench also means that Media Matters will be better positioned to win corporate pressure campaigns. | ||
| They take credit for forcing Facebook to adopt censorship by using public pressure, then working hand-in-hand behind the scenes to maintain censorship on Facebook. | ||
| So this is a pattern of behavior that we've now seen replicated in their attack on X. And again, my question to you, Tucker, is in this fight for free speech, how did we get to a point in our country where one side of the political spectrum Thank you for that, and thank you for what you're doing on this. | ||
| I don't think there's much that's more important. | ||
| I would say, you know, we allowed the framing to be created by, you know, the other side, and the other side lied about why they were doing it. | ||
| Again, the point of censorship is to protect the people in power. | ||
| Always. | ||
| They're the only beneficiaries of censorship. | ||
| And the rest of us kind of went along with the lie that this was being done on behalf of the weak. | ||
| Some oppressed group or other who needed us to be more sensitive. | ||
| And it was merely that. | ||
| Just be more sensitive. | ||
| Don't hurt anyone's feelings. | ||
| Don't use the word retard. | ||
| It's mean. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| I don't need to use the word retard. | ||
| I'm okay. | ||
| You know, right? | ||
| But that metastasized into what we're looking at now, which is just this massive structure, which is a kind of combination of government and private power aligned against the majority of the population in order to preserve power for a few against the many. | ||
| I mean, that's just true. | ||
| So I think the way to combat it is to get to who's funding it. | ||
| I mean, they're not doing this on behalf of the oppressed trans community or black people or whatever. | ||
| Whatever they're saying they're doing is a lie. | ||
| They're doing it on their own behalf. | ||
| So who's paying for it? | ||
| Who's paying for Media Matters? | ||
| Really, I think long-term, the only way... | ||
| I mean, the premise behind non-profit status is that non-profits are, quote, acting in the public interest. | ||
| But that's clearly untrue. | ||
| They're acting in their own interest. | ||
| By the way, it's a massive tax dodge for people to, you know, well beyond their own deaths, continue to, you know, control the society. | ||
| But more than that... | ||
| It's unfair, and it totally distorts our political system completely. | ||
| All this stuff's being paid for. | ||
| All this stuff is possible because the people doing it don't have to pay taxes. | ||
| How is that fair? | ||
| Like, in what world is Media Matters making America better? | ||
| It's in direct opposition to the Bill of Rights. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| So I think the only way to fix it is to get to the roots. | ||
| Ignore all the stuff about identity politics. | ||
| It's merely a cover. | ||
| This is powerful people seeking to preserve their power non-democratically. | ||
| And I think bringing pressure to bear on those people, exposing them, saying their names. | ||
| The Soros stuff has been very effective, actually, in a sense. | ||
| I mean, even when I worked at, you know, among purported conservatives, the word would go down, don't criticize Soros because that's bigoted. | ||
| And I always say that the guy's like the biggest donor in American politics, and he's an atheist. | ||
| Like, how is this bigoted? | ||
| And I ignored it. | ||
| But many people didn't ignore it. | ||
| They wouldn't criticize George Soros. | ||
| Well, how did that happen? | ||
| Because the attacks on George Soros rattled George Soros. | ||
| So he sent out the word, you know, get them to stop attacking me. | ||
| It works when you attack people by name, when you call out what they're doing with evidence, not the low-level people, you know, not the Antifa soldiers who were, you know, hassling people in public parks just to arrest them, the people paying for them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
David, I want to go to you, David, and you and Tucker were two of the first. | |
| By the way, Benny, there's a bit of an echo from your end. | ||
| David, I want to go to you. | ||
| I'm not sure if you're going to ask about Ukraine or chat about Ukraine, but I'd love if you do. | ||
| Elon did stay not too long ago in a space. | ||
| We are sleepwalking into World War III, and I think people are just ignoring the war now, especially with what's happening in Gaza. | ||
| You and Tucker had a great conversation about it in your interview, but we'd love to get your thoughts on it and Tucker's as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Mario, I'm happy to talk about that. | |
| But first, just building on this previous conversation about censorship and weaponization of government, I just want to ask Tucker, is this, in your view, a sign of weakness or strength on the part of the ruling elite? | ||
| I mean, on the one hand... | ||
| It feels like it's a sign of weakness in the sense that they wouldn't need to be censoring their opponents if they were really strong. | ||
| On the other hand, it really does feel like they're just kind of cementing their total control over our discourse. | ||
| And if it weren't for Elon buying Twitter, which was kind of a fluke, it would have already happened. | ||
| So how do you interpret that? | ||
| I mean, are the elites who are perpetrating this, do you view this as a sign of weakness or strength? | ||
| Thank you, David. | ||
| Your podcast is unbelievable. | ||
| I keep texting you this, but the number of people who listen to it is blowing my mind. | ||
| Very cool. | ||
| Obviously, it's a sign of weakness. | ||
| Hysteria is always a sign of weakness. | ||
| It's hysteria. | ||
| It's a gender-assigned term, and it was... | ||
| It was the opposite of manliness. | ||
| Manly self-control was the opposite of hysteria. | ||
| So, you know, it's always a sign of someone who believes he or she is in the subordinate position. | ||
| And it's true in your own life. | ||
| You know, if your kids disobey you and you get hysterical, what you're really telegraphing is, I have no control over you. | ||
| And if you know you're in control, if you're firmly in control and have the respect of your children, then you can firmly but calmly correct them. | ||
| And, you know, that's how a man who's in charge of his house behaves. | ||
| Hysteria is not. | ||
| That's the single mom play. | ||
| So, yes, it's a sign of weakness. | ||
| The problem is they have a lot of power. | ||
| They still have a lot of power. | ||
| So they may feel they clearly feel existentially threatened. | ||
| I mean, there's no mistaking this behavior. | ||
| This is, you know, this is Ceausescu. | ||
| I always think of this, you know, was on tape when he and his wife, Elena, were led away to be executed in 89 in Romania. | ||
| And it was videotaped. | ||
| And they tell him, we're about to execute you. | ||
| And he starts barking orders at the people who are about to kill him. | ||
| And I thought, what an interesting response that was. | ||
| He became even more insistent on his power, as it was obvious that he had none. | ||
| So that's a very human response. | ||
| When you feel like it's slipping away and you're about to be executed, you freak out. | ||
| But what's interesting and very revealing is they're not about to be executed. | ||
| I mean, we're nowhere near realigning this country to majority rule. | ||
| We're not even close to that. | ||
| Like, they have all the power. | ||
| But they don't know that or something? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's some weird psychological tick here. | ||
| I think it may be as simple as they know what they're doing is illegitimate. | ||
| It's not consistent with the Constitution or American history or even with decency. | ||
| And they feel very paranoid as a result. | ||
| It's like an Edgar Allan Poe story. | ||
| They can hear their own heartbeats because they know they've done wrong. | ||
| I mean, I do think that's what we're seeing. | ||
| The problem is that... | ||
| People who feel that way, who have a ton of power and feel threatened, are very, very dangerous. | ||
| Very dangerous. | ||
| Like, because they'll do anything to save themselves, and they can do anything. | ||
| So, they're freaking me out right now. | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I think we just got another example of that today. | ||
| do you see that there was an FCC commissioner published a letter opposing the fact that the FCC just canceled a contract with Elon's company SpaceX, which is the only company that can really provide internet from space. | ||
| And yet the FCC just out of the blue for no reason canceled a, you know, almost billion dollar contract. | ||
| And he basically said, this is because the Biden administration has declared Elon persona non grata. | ||
| So yeah, just another example. | ||
| Well, you could, I mean, it kind of, You know, if you use their reaction as a guide to what's important and what matters, which is a pretty handy guide, like what actually matters, just look at what they're doing, what they care about, because they're pretty good at figuring out what actually matters. | ||
| Keeping X open as a free speech platform is, I think, the biggest deal in their world and the single biggest threat to their illegitimate rule. | ||
| So you can imagine a situation, I mean, I haven't talked to Elon about this, I'm not an intimate friend of his or anything, but you can imagine where they just bring so much pressure to bear, where, you know, it's a very expensive company, it's expensive to operate, you paid a lot for it, and you sort of wonder if there isn't a way for the public, on both sides, anyone who supports free speech, to help. | ||
| I mean, is there some sort of public investment vehicle where, you know, people who support free speech could become... | ||
| Minority owners of the different class of shares of the company to help? | ||
| I mean, you know, I think that's every bit as virtuous as sending money into the March of Dimes. | ||
| I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I think the thing that everyone could do is just upgrade to Twitter or to XBlue, you know, the premium account. | ||
| So that would be the simple thing. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, I think you're right. | ||
| By the way, let me just say that congrats on the launch of... | ||
| Just speaking as a web product guy, I thought it was extremely well executed and I was happy to subscribe and I would urge everyone here to do the same. | ||
| But I think to your point, I mean, I agree with you that these people would not be attempting censorship, which is so un-American's anathema to everything that the vast majority of Americans believe if they weren't fundamentally weak. | ||
| And yet, it feels like they're so close to cementing their control. | ||
| Look, like I said, Elon is kind of a fluke. | ||
| I mean, in the sense that I know lots of, you know, really successful people in Silicon Valley, none of them would have stuck their necks out to oppose the censorship regime in the way that Elon has, never mind, you know, spending, what is it, like, you know, $45 billion to acquire Twitter. | ||
| So, and to keep on suffering the penalties that he's suffering, I mean... | ||
| Look at what they're doing. | ||
| You had this FCC decision today just canceling this huge contract. | ||
| They're investigating him for supposedly building a glass house at Tesla. | ||
| I never knew that was a crime before. | ||
| The DOJ is investigating SpaceX for not hiring enough non-Americans, like enough refugees to... | ||
| To jobs that are involved in sensitive national security jobs. | ||
| I mean, it's just like insane what's happening. | ||
| And I'm just speaking right now as somebody who's reading the news. | ||
| This is not me divulging anything I've talked to Elon about. | ||
| This is just me reacting to publicly reported news stories. | ||
| So Elon, I think, is really kind of a fluke in his willingness to stand up and potentially face the repercussions of opposing the censorship agenda, never mind buying Twitter in the first place and, you know, opening up the Twitter jails and restoring free speech. | ||
| So and I guess the point I would just go back to if that hadn't happened, which really only happened because he cares so much about free speech and he really does think it's fundamental to America and to civilization in general. | ||
| I mean, we really got lucky that one... | ||
| I mean, really, and literally only one of our major successful people in Silicon Valley had the means and the worldview to do that, that we're even speaking on this platform right now. | ||
| And that's the thing that, I mean, so I agree with you. | ||
| On the one hand, it's a sign of weakness that they're pushing this agenda. | ||
| On the other hand, I mean, they are so close to implementing their total control over the public discourse. | ||
| And it's, like I said, only a fluke. | ||
| That it hasn't happened already. | ||
| So let me stop right there and get your reaction. | ||
| Well, I couldn't agree more. | ||
| And it's hard for me because I lost my show in April and Elon immediately encouraged me to use this platform. | ||
| And it was great. | ||
| It was great for me personally. | ||
| I didn't make any money, but I really enjoyed it, deeply enjoyed it. | ||
| And it changed my life for the better. | ||
| And so I don't want to seem like I'm flacking for the guy. | ||
| I think objectively, if I'd never been on the platform and I had no connection to it, I'd still feel the same way. | ||
| Without it, you can't be a democracy, you can't be a free country if there's no place for people. | ||
| It's Speaker's Corner in London. | ||
| We don't have anything like that except this. | ||
| And I'm just not sure, and I agree with you completely, that it takes a very unusual person to want to do something like this, and it takes an even more unusual person to pull it off. | ||
| Not just a rich person. | ||
| I mean, by the way, most rich people are cowards, as you well know, and you're one of the rare exceptions to it. | ||
| People always talk about fuck you money. | ||
| He's got fuck you money. | ||
| There's no such thing as fuck you money. | ||
| There's only fuck you poverty. | ||
| A lot, you're fearful of losing it, so you're even more under control. | ||
| So he's just, he is a complete fluke. | ||
| There are not a lot of people like Elon in any society ever. | ||
| Very few. | ||
| Handful. | ||
| Dinner party number. | ||
| And so the fact that everything aligned and we have this, I just feel like, and just again, it's hard for me to say because my own fortunes are tied up in this too, to some small extent, but I just can't overstate how important I think it is for every decent person in the country, regardless of background or voting history, who cares about preserving a free society. | ||
| And I think on some level, everybody wants a free society. | ||
| I mean, honestly, everybody demands and does anything he or she can do to keep this open and free of government control. | ||
| I mean, because if we lose this or if we don't have no platform like this, we kind of are done. | ||
| Honestly, all the podcasts in the world will not save us, including mine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd like to chime in here for a second, if you gentlemen don't mind. | |
| I believe, looking at the panel tonight, I'm the only speaker who's never lived in the United States as an adult. | ||
| There's a lot of people listening who perhaps don't know who I am, of the 55,000 people who have tuned in. | ||
| I left the United States involuntarily at age eight, so I am an American citizen, but I've never lived in the United States as an adult. | ||
| I live currently in Romania. | ||
| I've lived in Slovakia, Poland, the United Kingdom notably, and the Middle East. | ||
| I don't think that the people listening at home, the Americans listening at home, perhaps understand how alien this concept is around the world, that not just foreigners, We're | ||
| good to go. | ||
| For whatever reason it is, is to demonize American society, to demonize the American people based largely on ridiculous claims that everybody is inherently born a criminal. | ||
| Now, I've lived in Romania for seven years, even with what's going on right now. | ||
| I would never say something so stupid as to look at something in Romania's past. | ||
| If anyone knows World War II history, Antonescu famously allied with Hitler during World War II and accused the average Romanian person. | ||
| Of being a Nazi sympathizer because their great-great-great-grandfather or their great-great-grandfather, who's long since dead, has somehow passed on this genetic legacy of being an evil person. | ||
| I think that if I said that to a Romanian person on the street, quite rightfully, they would punch me in the face. | ||
| So, as the only non-American, I guess, here, the non-American resident, I'd like you all to know that it is absolutely... | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| It is wild to people living in countries like Romania that, you know, South Africa and England and America are literally from within its own people demonizing every single other member of that society and saying that everybody from outside of our country is good and we ourselves is bad and we owe the world X and we owe the world everything because our great-great-great-great-grandfather may have owned... | ||
| African-American slaves. | ||
| Keep in mind, I'm the descendant of African-American slaves myself. | ||
| It's absolutely wild that this takes place, and it's absolutely unthinkable to even someone like me, who left the country at eight years old, of all the countries I've lived in. | ||
| And a very, very good point was made by the Honorable Attorney General earlier, Mr. Bailey, when you said... | ||
| Like, why? | ||
| Why is the southern border not secure? | ||
| People argue about this. | ||
| I remember people were arguing about securing the southern border. | ||
| The first elections I can remember, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, when I was just a kid, this was an issue that was on the table and it still has not been done by anyone. | ||
| Romania has probably one-sixth of the GDP per capita of the United States. | ||
| In terms of money and finance, it is flat broke compared to the United States. | ||
| And we share a southern border with Bulgaria. | ||
| And as next to, as close to zero as you can imagine, people sneak from Bulgaria into Romania every single year. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| And it would be nice if people in the United States, instead of hating themselves and hating the country for misdemeanors committed way before any of us existed, if they had the attitude of some of these Eastern European countries. | ||
| I heard, I don't know if it was Viktor Orban of Hungary or a Polish politician. | ||
| I think it was a Polish politician who said, the Polish border is more than just a line on a map. | ||
| The Polish border was paid for by Polish blood, the souls of Polish men, and we will not take this issue lightly. | ||
| Yeah, it's just absolutely wild and unthinkable. | ||
| It's a uniquely Western problem. | ||
| I feel like it's American more than it is any other country. | ||
| And quite frankly, people need to fucking drop it, in my opinion. | ||
| Well, you gotta wonder why it's happening. | ||
| But why is it happening? | ||
| I mean, and I would say, I don't think it's just America. | ||
| I think it's the entire Anglosphere. | ||
| You know, Americans are being taught to hate themselves, but the Brits already do hate themselves, but not as much as the residents of Australia and New Zealand do. | ||
| And, of course, no one matches Canada for masochism. | ||
| So, like, this is a thing that's happening. | ||
| It's not organic. | ||
| It's on purpose. | ||
| And what's the point of it? | ||
| Well, the point of it is to destroy your civilization. | ||
| Because all of those, particularly this country, are... | ||
| Countries without a working majority of anybody who has anything inherently in common, racially, ethically, religiously, which is fine. | ||
| I'm not arguing against that. | ||
| I'm just saying, in the absence of an overwhelming majority who have something obvious in common, the only thing that binds the country together is love of country. | ||
| That's all they have. | ||
| Is a common culture, which, by the way, begins with a common language. | ||
| And the assault on English, the idea that we should, like, print voting forms in foreign languages, or we can't, that it's, quote, racist to declare English the national language. | ||
| These are not academic debates. | ||
| Like, this is the future. | ||
| Our country will collapse if it becomes multilingual. | ||
| Quebec can't even, you know, exist peacefully with Western Canada. | ||
| So anyway, my only point is... | ||
| This is a bigger deal, I think, attacking American history is more than annoying. | ||
| It's an attack on the ability of the country to continue, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Benny? | |
| Hey, Tucker. | ||
| Charlie has a follow-up. | ||
| His mic got cut off, and I'm going to throw to Charlie. | ||
| Charlie, are you there? | ||
| Your mic is not working, Charlie. | ||
| I'm not sure what's happening. | ||
| Whenever it works, just jump in. | ||
| I want to try to press again, Charlie, until your mic works, just jump in when it does. | ||
| Tucker, David, I want to try to press on the Ukraine question. | ||
| David, you've been very vocal about it. | ||
| More and more people are starting to pay attention. | ||
| Do you think the tide is shifting now? | ||
| Do you think we'll get a peace deal soon? | ||
| David, Tucker, I would love both of your thoughts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't think we're going to get a peace deal because you heard today at the press conference with Biden and Zelensky that Biden's living in some sort of fantasy land. | |
| He's still talking about Ukraine joining NATO. I mean, it's like, you know, it's totally contradictory. | ||
| I mean, a few months ago, Biden was saying that Putin had already lost the war. | ||
| Then a couple of days ago, when he needed Republican support to push through more Ukraine funding, he said that if we don't provide this funding, Putin's going to win the war. | ||
| And now today at the press conference with Zelensky, he's saying that Ukraine's being part of NATO. So it's all totally confused. | ||
| But just to connect the topic of Ukraine to the topic of censorship, I want to get Tucker's reaction to this. | ||
| I mean, I personally believe that there are half a million people in Ukraine who are dead right now because we do not have an honest public conversation in the United States. | ||
| If the mainstream media had honestly reported that there was a deal available, In the first month of this war, to end the war, all we had to agree was for Ukraine not to be part of NATO, which it never will be anyway, because it's not going to win this war. | ||
| If the mainstream media just reported that, I think the American people would have said, of course we should sign that deal. | ||
| Just, yeah, make that deal. | ||
| Why would we block it? | ||
| And instead, we blocked it, and look at what's happened. | ||
| Half a million people are dead, and Ukraine's losing the war. | ||
| They're on the back foot. | ||
| The country's been completely destroyed. | ||
| And I look at all of these virtue signalers on Twitter who've been enforcing this narrative, the people with the Ukraine flags on their profiles, the ones by, you know, every day by the thousands who are attacking me for pointing out the truth about this thing, saying somehow I'm an agent of Putin or whatever. | ||
| I think that if we had an honest conversation on social media or in the mainstream media, this never would have happened. | ||
| So let me throw it to Tucker. | ||
| I mean, what is your view? | ||
| I feel like when you were on Fox, you were probably the only person honestly telling the story of how this war started. | ||
| And I think you were just about alone in that. | ||
| And if more people had told the truth about this war, where do you think would be today? | ||
| Well, lying has consequences. | ||
| And of course, this war wouldn't be still in progress were it not for... | ||
| The Biden administration, abetted by the leadership of the Republican Party. | ||
| So, I mean, there's like a direct line between the propaganda, the lying, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, an entire generation of Ukrainian men. | ||
| I mean, Zelensky just said they're going to call up 40-year-olds. | ||
| What does that tell you? | ||
| There are no more 25-year-olds. | ||
| And I shouldn't chuckle because it's like horrible. | ||
| And really, in the end, it abetted cruelty because that's what we're looking at. | ||
| The people who put—and I'm not talking about your neighbors who got— I'm talking about the people who pushed this war, who went to the Munich Security Conference, the Vice President of the United States, the Under Secretary of State, and... | ||
| And said to Zelensky, we want you to join NATO, knowing that that was the red line. | ||
| It has to be the red line for a sovereign country, period, meaning Russia. | ||
| You're going to have a war if you do that. | ||
| They knew that. | ||
| They did it anyway. | ||
| They wanted a war. | ||
| And then they created, you know, they destroyed Western Europe's economy by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| But the main thing they did was destroy Ukraine. | ||
| And they didn't care. | ||
| I mean, that just I don't know. | ||
| I'm not an expert on war. | ||
| I've seen a couple and it means like lots of dead people who shouldn't be dead and there's no reason for them to die. | ||
| And we now know the Israelis were honest enough, as you remember, Bennett, to say a year ago, over a year ago, yes, there was a peace deal in progress and it was scuttled by the U.S. That's a massive moral crime. | ||
| Like the blood of those kids is on their hands. | ||
| I think that I don't I don't think that's an unfair conclusion to draw from the facts. | ||
| And yet they're running around lecturing us about democracy and how they're on the right side of history. | ||
| The opposite is true. | ||
| They've committed a horrific crime, and the main victim has been Ukraine, and they're still posing as the defenders of Ukraine. | ||
| I mean, it's like mind-boggling to me. | ||
| I can hardly believe it's happening. | ||
| Tucker, Congresswoman Paulina Luna is on. | ||
| Speaking of Ukraine funding, the floor is yours, Congresswoman. | ||
| Hey, guys. | ||
| Yeah, I just wanted to speak on that for a minute. | ||
| I actually had gone to Poland and met with the Ukrainian parliament and delegation there. | ||
| And part of the reason why I've been so basically vocal about not giving them any more funding is, and I think that everyone should know this, that... | ||
| What the parliament anticipates and intends is once this war is over, they actually want to take all of the equipment that we've given them and essentially start their own Wagner Group. | ||
| And I think that the fact is that the Republican Party as a whole, even McConnell, I mean, many people have been complicit in really just supporting the military-industrial complex in this. | ||
| And frankly, had Trump been in office, I think that this would have never happened. | ||
| I think, frankly, that... | ||
| Probably there would have been peace talks. | ||
| And the fact is, is that no one wants peace talks. | ||
| They just want more war talks. | ||
| And that's exactly why Zelensky was in Washington today. | ||
| So, you know, to give you hope for the future, though, I do think that the more people that we can get into office that are not a part of this problem, we stand a chance at saving this country. | ||
| But there really is a movement that I think is starting to take form now and don't lose hope because this country is worth saving. | ||
| Well, that's heartening to hear. | ||
| Thank you, Congresswoman. | ||
| I mean, at some point you think common sense has to prevail, and of course it's not a matter. | ||
| I'm going to say really quick how ashamed I am for how mad I was about being called an agent of Putin and how defensive I was. | ||
| I've never been to Russia. | ||
| It's like being called a racist. | ||
| I'm not a racist. | ||
| I'm not an agent of Putin. | ||
| It's not even worth getting mad about it. | ||
| And in fact, I think the slur is designed to make you mad and designed to channel your attention and your energy into fruitless directions. | ||
| Like, just laugh. | ||
| That's absurd. | ||
| And I wish I'd done more of that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I know what you mean, Tucker. | ||
| I just want to underscore your point, Tucker, about the moral crime. | ||
| I think it's really important to say that all the people who wanted to fight in this war on the Ukrainian side, The people who are now being mobilized or conscripted are all people who didn't want to fight, | ||
| who are literally hiding in their homes or hiding elsewhere trying to avoid the draft. | ||
| There have been an abundance of articles now, including from You know, pro-Ukraine, Western publications talking about the fact that all the whatever young people are remaining in the country are in hiding. | ||
| They do not want to fight. | ||
| And yet the talk now is that Zelensky is going to have another wave of mobilization or conscription. | ||
| They're going to round up the students. | ||
| They're going to round up young women. | ||
| They're going to round up the people in their 40s or older. | ||
| And they're going to be fed into this meat grinder of an unwinnable war because, you know, unfortunately, the Russians just have too big an army. | ||
| I mean, this should have been really clear before the war even started. | ||
| The Russians' industrial production of artillery shells and other weapons of war is just far too great. | ||
| It's greater than even what the West can produce. | ||
| And so what we're talking about now, if we give Ukraine another $60 billion or whatever, What we're talking about is conscripting people who do not want to fight. | ||
| We're talking about rounding them up at gunpoint and sending them to the front lines. | ||
| And there have been plenty of articles talking about how people are sent to the front lines with only five days of training. | ||
| No real training. | ||
| And they're being sent there and turned into cannon fodder, being destroyed by Russian artillery. | ||
| I do think it is a moral crime for the United States to persist in this delusion. | ||
| That somehow we're going to add Ukraine to NATO by rounding up whatever is left of young Ukrainians and sending them to the front lines at gunpoint to be destroyed in this artillery war. | ||
| It makes no sense to me. | ||
| David, I want to get your thoughts on how could this end? | ||
| You've mentioned, and a lot of people don't want to say the taboo word of a potential World War III, and you're called a fee-monger as soon as you mention it. | ||
| Is that still a concern in your opinion? | ||
| And if not, what other options do you think are more likely? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's only a concern if the U.S. escalates by getting directly involved. | |
| I don't see the Russians using nuclear weapons because they're running the war with conventional weapons. | ||
| So why would they escalate in that way? | ||
| The great danger, actually, is that faced with a crushing defeat that the Biden administration will do something stupid. | ||
| And seek to get directly involved in the war. | ||
| I think that's probably a low probability event. | ||
| So I'm less concerned about the risk of World War III right now. | ||
| But, you know, I am concerned that we're going to keep this thing going and more people are going to need to see die. | ||
| Tucker? | ||
| I mean, I just affirm everything David said, and it's not only true, but obviously true. | ||
| What's crazy is that our media are so controlled, our news environment is so North Korean, that most Americans thought that Ukraine was going to win without, like, I don't know, consulting Wikipedia that would tell them that Russia has 100 million more people than Ukraine does. | ||
| And it has such deeper industrial capacity that there's, like, no comparison. | ||
| And it has a real army, one of the best in the world, we now know, for all of its faults. | ||
| I mean, it's not the Soviet army. | ||
| It is better, and it's big. | ||
| So it was never going to happen. | ||
| But Americans didn't know that. | ||
| And that's really, I mean, it's very distressing to me because if something that big and that obvious can be unknown to the majority of our population, like, what else can they pull on us? | ||
| And the other thing I would say is that it's a little bit strange that the people who are advocating for more literally pointless killing have somehow seized the moral high ground. | ||
| From people who are calling for a reasonable peace, which will, by necessity, require accommodations. | ||
| One hopes on both sides. | ||
| All peace agreements do. | ||
| And, you know, some are wise and some are unwise, but that's the nature of them. | ||
| It's the nature of every negotiation. | ||
| But as soon as we start, and we're very good, our leaders are very good about moralizing in the crispest, most black and white terms about foreign conflicts, where one side is all good, the other side is all bad, and any... | ||
| Accommodation is a moral crime. | ||
| Like, once you start talking like that, you're just guaranteeing perpetual war in which other people's children will die. | ||
| And so if you're doing that, you're like, by definition, a bad person, in my view. | ||
| And yet the people who question you are somehow they're the bad people. | ||
| I mean, it really is upside down world on this and so many other issues. | ||
| But it's just I never get tired of being shocked by that. | ||
| On this subject, I would like to go back to Congresswoman Paulina Luna. | ||
| Will Ukraine funding go through in the House? | ||
| Will the Republican majority hold firm on border funding? | ||
| What will be the outcome here? | ||
| Well, I know Mike Johnson actually just recently did a speech because Zelensky was up here. | ||
| So I think what's going to happen is I think they're going to try to join the Ukraine funding with border funding. | ||
| And then they'll put us in a tight spot because there are those of us that don't want to give a dollar more to Ukraine, but then also, too, we do absolutely need to secure our own border. | ||
| So I think that's where we're in the position of. | ||
| But, you know, going back to what Tucker said earlier, there are so many people who have basically said that if you don't support Ukraine, that you are somehow empowering Putin and that we are going to be... | ||
| You know, the ones responsible for Ukraine falling, when in actuality, when you go there and you see what's literally happening and you realize that it does very much so feel like this is kind of a distraction, when you really see what they're planning, it can be very frustrating at times. | ||
| Also, I wonder, thank you, Congressman, I wonder if people have any concept of the harm this has already done. | ||
| The sanctions alone, when you start seizing the personal property of residents of a country because they're residents of the country without any due process or without even charging them, and you seize billions of dollars of their personal property because they're, quote, oligarchs with Russian last names, I'm sure some of them are bad people. | ||
| Maybe they're all bad people. | ||
| But what you're telegraphing when you do that is that the rule of law doesn't apply to you. | ||
| Well, if you're the holder of the world's reserve currency and you're the safe haven, For the world, all rich people in the world want to invest in the United States because it's safe, because we don't just take people's shit because we don't like them. | ||
| We have a process. | ||
| If you start doing that, then the rest of the world is like, wait a second. | ||
| You're not what I thought you were. | ||
| I want to get out of dollars. | ||
| I want to, for example, form a massive global coalition of nations that are not aligned, and we'll do our own thing. | ||
| It's called BRICS, and it now represents most of the world's power. | ||
| That's just a fact. | ||
| So, like, we just ended American dominance in a bunch of different sectors or began the process of ending it. | ||
| And I don't even think most Americans know that. | ||
| Like, the consequences of what the Biden administration did in February of 2022 will be things that your grandchildren have to deal with. | ||
| And we never even had that conversation because it was like, oh, ghost of Kiev, heroes, Zelensky, he's Churchill. | ||
| Shut up, Putin defender. | ||
| Like you can't have big issues like this and no public conversation about them or else you will you'll destroy yourself. | ||
| And we are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I have a few words to actually say on the on the Ukraine issue, Tucker. | |
| Sorry for interrupting you, ma'am. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| What I will say about the war in Ukraine is I live just a few hours from the border. | ||
| So although I'm not a politician, I'm not a member of Congress, I'm not as politically well connected as a lot of people on this panel. | ||
| What I will say is I saw a side of this that a lot of Americans didn't see for at least a year until after Russia started its military operation. | ||
| From the first day, from the very first day that Russia rolled across the Ukrainian border, I myself and a few members of my team were personally on the Romania-Ukraine border just a few hours from my house, just helping out, giving shoes. | ||
| Clothes, coats to all the women and children coming across because it was the winter. | ||
| In fact, Tucker, when you were at my house, you saw the massive stockpiles of emergency food supplies I still have because obviously I was arrested halfway through my charity efforts. | ||
| When that first happened, when Ukrainians were first coming across into Romania and speaking to me, I heard a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them and some of them saying, you know, I just wish America had stayed out of our politics. | ||
| I wish America had stayed out of our politics. | ||
| I wish 2014 didn't happen. | ||
| If Americans had stayed out of our politics, this wouldn't be happening. | ||
| And when I voiced my opinions on the internet, and I voiced my opinions on, I was still active on Instagram back then, and also on some other platforms, Americans who, and people in the West, British, French, who probably couldn't point to Ukraine on a map, were telling me I was a liar. | ||
| And I was literally physically on the border myself. | ||
| I've lost three people I know in this conflict. | ||
| Two fighting with the Ukrainians, and one who was a young Belarusian man who was a friend of mine who was in Kiev at the time of the military operation starting, and he's vanished. | ||
| So I don't think a lot of people knew what was happening in Ukraine at all until you started your show on X, Tucker, until you started telling the American people what was actually happening, until you shone all this light on it. | ||
| So it's very... | ||
| All I can do is, I guess, personally thank you, because the more the American public actually understand what's happening, the more they're going to stand up to funding this pointless forever war. | ||
| It's not going to be a forever war because the Ukraine's running out of men very quickly, and the more lives we're going to save. | ||
| So I'd first like to personally thank you for that, and I'd also like to let you know, because as I said, I'm currently closest to the border than anyone else maybe on this panel, and I've been there myself many times. | ||
| Moved a lot of orphans, women, kids to the United States, to Europe, paid for flights, hotels, etc. | ||
| to facilitate refugees. | ||
| Somebody who I came into contact with just a few months ago, her father is a 51-year-old man with no military experience, very little fitness experience, in fact, as a whole. | ||
| He was dragged into this war and conscripted, and the first thing she did, the first thing he did, keeping in mind how much money you have given them as Americans, was he asked her to ask me... | ||
| To buy him a Toyota truck for $5,000. | ||
| I believe the United States at the time of him asking had given Ukraine over $20,000 for every single eligible soldier that it was possible to conscript within the country. | ||
| And the first thing this man needed when he was dragged into the war was a loan from me to buy himself a Toyota truck. | ||
| And I told the person, frankly, with a tear in my eye that I had no intention of... | ||
| Buying him a truck that's going to end up as his grave, because the Russians are going to destroy that Toyota truck and kill her stepfather, essentially. | ||
| Tucker, I know you've got a couple of minutes left. | ||
| Can you hear me, Tucker? | ||
| I hear you perfectly. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I've got a final question for you, and I think one you'll enjoy answering. | ||
| You saw the format with Spaces, and obviously you've been on Twitter for a few months. | ||
| And you've also talked about the death of mainstream media, especially with the launch of networks like yours. | ||
| So I want to get your thoughts on what Elon has built. | ||
| I know you talked about it a bit earlier. | ||
| And the whole structure of space is how you never know who could jump in. | ||
| You're talking about one topic and you have someone related to that topic just jump on. | ||
| You have a discussion with them. | ||
| And then your experience on X over the last few months as well. | ||
| And then your plans with your network. | ||
| Maybe it's a good way to wrap it up as well. | ||
| Yeah, and I'll just go quickly. | ||
| I mean, I'm a bit of a disadvantage and I feel a little bit fraudulent talking about tech platforms when, you know, I'm not honestly that fluent in it. | ||
| And I sort of, you know, I honestly, apart from the mail bombs, I love the Unabomber's Manifesto. | ||
| So that's kind of where I am on technology. | ||
| I think it's really dangerous and soul destroying. | ||
| So I don't know that much about it. | ||
| In this case, I think it's liberating and great. | ||
| But I've never been on Twitter Spaces before. | ||
| I think it's, or X Spaces, I think it's incredibly cool. | ||
| And I'm coming back. | ||
| But again, I think what Elon has done, I see it in larger terms. | ||
| Like, I think he's making democracy possible. | ||
| And it's kind of funny that, you know, a foreign-born guy, I mean, I guess it's often the way it works. | ||
| A lot of good people, as much as I'm foreclosing the borders, a lot of good people show up in this country and they come here because they really believe in its promises. | ||
| And some of them try to uphold those promises, and Elon's one of them, so God bless him. | ||
| We're doing something, as I said at the outset, I'll make it very quick, but we're trying to build a news company that's enduring. | ||
| We're doing it on a subscription model, pretty light subscription model, really. | ||
| I mean, most of the stuff, you'll see at least part of it on X forever, because I love the platform. | ||
| But we're creating a whole bunch of stuff and hiring a bunch of people, and somebody needs to be covering all these stories that aren't covered. | ||
| And the last thing I'll say, my greatest frustration with the news is not simply that it's biased, you know, that it's serving power rather than challenging it and holding it accountable, which is its job, but that it's tedious and boring and repetitive and that it's incurious. | ||
| They're not interested in the world and what's happening, and this is an amazing time. | ||
| And so the number of stories that don't get covered is totally ignored or there's some clip here or somebody texts you, do you know this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| And it's never... | ||
| Even acknowledged by big news organizations and acknowledged only, you know, on a surface level by social media, somebody needs to be following up on that stuff. | ||
| And that's what we're going to do. | ||
| And I think we can. | ||
| You know, the numbers work. | ||
| It's not that expensive to do that. | ||
| You know, and of course we're going to be sued. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know, that's how they shut you down. | ||
| But we're trying to raise a pool to defend ourselves against that. | ||
| You know, we hope to make it through the end of this coming year, which is a pivotal time in American history. | ||
| And I don't think I'm being hysterical over stating the case at all. | ||
| Tucker, this has been an absolutely incredible Spaces. | ||
| We really want to thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| I suppose we can close it out by simply stating that your entire show followed you from Fox News. | ||
| To this endeavor, it's really remarkable. | ||
| That's unheard of in this space. | ||
| There's no loyalty in corporate media. | ||
| There's some of the most godless, soulless work there is. | ||
| And that's remarkable. | ||
| And so what you're building is as valuable as what anyone is doing here and honestly complements what Elon is doing. | ||
| It does seem that you are beloved at Fox and obviously by your audience. | ||
| Greg Gutfeld continues to violate the ban on your name at Fox News. | ||
| Greg Gutfeld regularly name drops you. | ||
| And also most recently says, you know, if you want to look at how bad advertisers can become, two words for you, Tucker Carlson, violating again, the blacklist of your name on Fox. | ||
| So your message, your final sign off to Greg and your thoughts on having such a loyal staff. | ||
| Well, I love my staff and... | ||
| And, I mean, they're always at my house. | ||
| Including staying there. | ||
| So, you know, the line between staff and friend is definitely blurred. | ||
| I'm not a big boundaries guy. | ||
| So, you know, these are people I really love. | ||
| I would never work with anyone I didn't trust or love. | ||
| And my wife didn't feel the same way about it. | ||
| And she definitely does. | ||
| And so, yeah, we're unusually close to everyone. | ||
| And almost all of them came. | ||
| And I'm really grateful for that. | ||
| And in general, I pride myself on getting along really well with people I actually know. | ||
| I pride myself as well on being hated by people who don't know me. | ||
| It's just fine. | ||
| It doesn't bother me at all. | ||
| But I think it's really important. | ||
| In fact, I think the measure of a man is how the people who know him feel about him. | ||
| I mean, who cares what people don't know you think? | ||
| I just don't. | ||
| I never have. | ||
| But it's very important to me to get along with the people in my immediate orbit. | ||
| My wife, number one. | ||
| My children, number two. | ||
| My lifelong friends. | ||
| My brother. | ||
| My dad. | ||
| You know, the people who work for us and work with us. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Those relationships are the most important relationships in my life. | ||
| And I don't trust anybody who claims to love humanity but doesn't have close and enduring relationships. | ||
| And I do, and I'm proud of that. | ||
| And as for Gutfeld, I love Gutfeld, but I better leave it there so I don't cause him problems. | ||
| But I am happy to see. | ||
| I don't look at cable news ratings ever. | ||
| I didn't when I worked there. | ||
| But someone just sent them to me today, and Gutfeld has the two top shows on the channel. | ||
| That's heartening. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| He deserves it. | ||
| He's a good guy. | ||
| Tucker, pleasure to have you. | ||
| Thanks a lot for joining. | ||
| Benny, Alex, thanks for making this happen. | ||
| And guys, for the audience, we're going to have more spaces with other surprise guests. | ||
| We're talking to a lot of world leaders scheduled over the next few weeks. | ||
| But Tucker, honestly, I've been listening to your interviews preparing for this space, and I can't wait. | ||
| To see what's in store. | ||
| I think the discussions you had, I listened to the one you had with Meg and Kelly, the one you had with the All In podcast. | ||
| To be honest, surprised relative to how the media is trying to paint you. | ||
| So it's a pleasure to have a chat with you and I hope you enjoyed the space as well. | ||
| I absolutely loved it. | ||
| Thanks, guys. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Thanks, Tucker. | ||
| And thanks for everyone else that joined. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Benny, Alex, good to wrap up. | |
| Stay based. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| Bye, everyone. | ||
| See you guys. |
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