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Jan. 20, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
19:07
3 Things Tucker Learned About the Left, and You Should Learn Too

Tucker Carlson speaks at the 2019 National Conservatism Conference. Watch the full speech here: https://youtu.be/AXGoWtK1NnY?feature=shared Follow Tucker on X: https://x.com/TuckerCarlson Text “TUCKER” to 44055 for exclusive updates! #TuckerCarlson #speech #debate #liberal #left #politics #news #lifeadvice #conservative #protest #antifa #BLM #leftism

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tucker carlson
dailycaller 17:57
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Speaker Time Text
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
So here are three things that I have learned about the left over the past couple of years.
And I think they go, since this is a conference about nationalism, they might help explain the resistance to nationalism.
It wouldn't seem obvious that there would be much.
There's nothing inherently wrong with nationalism.
In fact, it should be the default setting for a nation, right?
I mean, by definition.
But there are, as you well know, and if there weren't, this conference wouldn't be occurring.
There are powerful forces who are opposed to it.
And so the question which is too rarely asked is, why?
And I'm not sure I have an answer, but here are three observations that help, might help fill in the blanks.
The first and the most shocking to me is, and this is something that I've said like 30 times on my show, but every time I say it, it's like, I'm bewildered that I'm saying it.
The main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose does not come from the government anymore, but comes from the private sector.
I can't believe I'm saying that.
As someone who really grew up in this city, my father worked for the government, was engaged day to day in fighting the Cold War.
And maybe because of that, I was trained from the youngest age, from a pup, to believe that the threats to liberty came from government, of course, because the Soviet Union was our model.
You know, the force that was clamping down, was darkening half of the world and crushing religious expression and the market was a government, the Soviet government, and all the satellites in China.
And so it really took a huge amount of evidence wagging right in my face, not being the brightest person in DC, to realize that in 2019, the threat to the things that I want to do and the things that I want to say,
the threat to my conscience, to the ability to believe what I choose to believe, and that's the fundamental right, that those threats really come primarily from companies and not from the federal government.
And this even now is a controversial statement.
I'm sure there are libertarians, well, libertarians already hate me.
It's requited, trust me.
But even non-libertarian conservatives almost can't form the words because they've been trained for so long not to believe that.
But the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.
And not just in sort of the small annoying ways, the fact that America's most popular cookie, the Oreo, now has a statement of gender politics on it.
Well, I'm not joking.
I would need reading glasses to read it, but apparently, since I'm 50, apparently all new Oreos have the question, what's your pronoun?
So this is the kind of story that cable news thrives on.
I'll be like, oh, that's so annoying.
They're so crazy.
Take three steps back.
What's actually happening?
A large American company is committing a pretty brazen act of propaganda aimed at your kids.
And the message is that the binary gender scheme, which we were taught in biology class in seventh grade, is no longer operative.
This is basically a kind of profound statement against nature.
And you have to kind of ask yourself, like, is the federal government doing that?
No.
Mongolay is doing that.
Oreo is doing that.
Multiply that times every Fortune 500 company in America, 500.
And you have the state of play.
The coercive, okay, so to which libertarians will say, well, I mean, yeah, if you don't like it, start your own Oreo company.
Okay?
I guess.
And we can argue, or, you know, go nill a wafer or whatever.
There's no sort of way to imprint messages on a nill a wafer.
It, okay?
But that's not really an operative option in a world of monopoly power.
And I know that I think Arthur Millick is speaking later on this, maybe Oren Casper, probably a bunch of people are going to address this in much deeper detail and much more capably than I'm going to now.
But let me just say, you can't create your own Google.
And if you have a company, and we do, through which all human information in English flows through a choke point that we can't control, there's no democratic way of controlling.
You have the potential.
Well, first of all, you have more power vested in a smaller number of hands at any time in American history, A.
And that itself is ominous and should make all of us, like, cast aside any kind of ideology or theology or whatever.
Just look at that straight in the face.
Are you comfortable with that?
You shouldn't be.
Of course, you're not comfortable with it.
It's terrifying.
Let's stop lying to ourselves.
It's awful.
All right?
And that's where we are.
But think through for five minutes the potential risks, the threats from that, and they're really obvious.
It's like they could make whole ideas disappear.
And in fact, there's some evidence that they're working to do that.
And as Orwell noted, once you take away the words, you take away people's ability to think about the concepts.
Right?
You can't have an idea if you don't have the words to express it.
And so the person in charge of the words really has the power over your mind.
And they do.
And the pushback from our elected officials has been basically zero.
Now, I'm not going to go on a long Jeremiah about why.
I think you know why, because they're corrupt.
Literally, the antitrust think tank in Washington takes money from Google.
No, I'm not.
And it has a name, something like it's a very literal name.
It's like antitrust think tank.
And if you go through their list of donors, yeah, Google's on there.
So that doesn't seem to bother anyone on the left.
Well, why?
Because they're benefiting from JD fans, ladies and gentlemen.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
I'm so nearsighted that people loom out of the darkness at me.
That doesn't bother anyone on the left, of course, because these are the shock troops for their politics, of course.
Because they're an alliance with the progressive left.
It should bother people on the right, but it doesn't because, again, their minds are captive to an antiquated way of looking at the world, the build your own Google way.
So I just think, again, this is something that I could go on about to the point where you'd ask me to stop.
But I would just, I would stop on this point.
Ponder this.
Retrain your mind to acknowledge the things that are right in front of you that are obvious.
One of the upsides, there are many downsides, I will say, to Trump, but one of the upsides is the Trump election was so shocking, so unlikely.
We elected Donald Trump president, huh?
We all pretend, oh, of course we did.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
It was so shocking that it did cause some significant percentage of people to say, wait a second, if that can happen, like, what else is true?
In other words, like, if the Loch Nest monster is real, what about the Yeti?
unidentified
I'm serious.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Weirdly, the Trump election spurred in me a kind of reassessment of UFOs.
We've done a consistent series.
No, I'm not, I'm serious.
And it turns out like they're real.
It never occurred to me.
I spent my entire life making fun of people who had unauthorized thoughts.
I thought I was a free thinker.
You know, as all, you know, young people flatter themselves.
You know, of course, almost all fascists are under 30, in case you haven't noticed.
Especially true in the press corps.
And they think of themselves as really sort of the cutting edge.
You know, I'm willing to, I'm radical.
And that's why if you think something you're not allowed to think, I'll punch you in the face.
Right.
Well, you know, all young people, the truth is, are a kind of variety of that.
Including me.
And the beauty of Trump was, once he showed up, you're like, huh, okay.
Well, so this happened.
I guess I can think whatever I want.
So maybe it's time to trap to the mental attic and see what's in storage.
And what you realize, what I realized was there was all this junk up there moldering that I'd assumed was still sort of fresh and bright and worth keeping.
You really accumulate all kinds of ideas, most of which aren't actually ideas.
They're just ticks.
And you don't realize that you have them.
And Trump really, and it wasn't, of course, just me, but it was a lot of people, almost all of whom are in this room, actually, who went up there and they're like, huh, you know, well, is it still true?
And so what I encourage myself to do every single day, this is one thing I am faithful about, is I really encourage myself to just try to look clearly, like, what is actually happening?
I mean, the forces of lying have definitely increased.
They've gotten louder anyway.
It's like everyone's lying.
It's all propaganda.
So disregard all of it.
Put your earphones on to white noise and just look around.
And who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?
I'm serious.
And a lot of the people we've been told are good guys are not at all.
Actually, some of them are the worst guys.
I'll let you figure out who.
Sorry.
I got carried out.
Okay, so that's the first observation.
The second observation I would make is, and I'll be short with this, but it's another one of my obsessions, is that it's all a kind of Freudian projection.
Like, whatever they say you're doing is precisely what they're doing.
And again, because I'm not a super genius, it took a long time to figure this out.
And I really think Antifa was maybe the moment where I figured it out.
It's the guys who are literally armed with steel bars and have black masks on are calling other people fascist.
And I'm like, you know, so of course you go immediately to the cliche.
That's Orwellian.
No, actually, it's Freudian.
It really is.
The things I fear about myself, I transfer onto you.
And once you understand that, it really is the Rosetta Stone for their behavior, amazingly.
It's true for virtually everything.
And if you're me, the most, I mean, specifically me, the most bewildering of all is, you're a racist.
You're a racist, which is like, you know, I wake up, I open my door to get the paper.
You're a racist.
unidentified
And I guess at this point, I guess I probably need to admit it.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
But I actually not.
And I make the opposite.
I make an affirmative case against racism like all the time on my show.
Or for less race consciousness anyway.
It's such a boring subject.
It's such a dead end.
It can't be fixed.
It can't be changed.
No, I'm serious.
It's not even that interesting.
It's not interesting to me anyway.
It's not the America that I grew up in.
I'm not being self-righteous about it.
I'm not saying I'm above any, I'm above nothing, trust me.
One of the things you realize as you age is that you really are pretty loathsome.
You know?
As my father, this is vulgar, excuse me, my father, who is a genuinely wise man, I dinner with him last night.
He always used to say, when we were little, I mean like third grade.
My brother, Amid always said, boys, the root of all wisdom is knowing what an asshole you are.
Cheap?
People always say that.
And it was only in middle age that I realized totally how true that was.
So I'm not in any case, I'm not getting up and be like, I'm really not a racist.
Okay, please spare me.
What I'm just saying is it's amazing that the people who are so focused on the subject of race are the ones who are denouncing everyone else as racist.
And then you realize it's not amazing because it's true of literally everything they say.
Because it's not actually a matter of trying to convince you of their program.
It really is a very specific and recognizable psychological syndrome.
Right?
I mean, I remember the day that Bill Crystal, of all people, called me a racist.
And I was like, really?
Bill Crystal?
And I was like, oh, of course.
Of course.
It fits.
Anyway, so just keep that in mind.
And then I guess the last point I would make, which is worth brooding about, is that, and I don't want to believe this, and by the way, I hope I'm wrong, and perhaps I am.
But from where I stand right now, it seems pretty clear to me that they're not interested in peaceful coexistence.
And by temperament, you know, I just reject that.
I really am liberal.
I am, I'm literally an Episcopalian.
Still practicing, amazingly.
But I am liberal by temperament.
It would never occur to me to choose my friends by their political beliefs.
It would just never occur to me, ever.
Nor would it ever occur to me to try to control someone.
As much as I despise libertarians, and I really, really do, I mean that, I also kind of am one.
I mean, I am functionally in a lot of ways libertarian.
I'm just not that interested in other people doing their weird thing, go crazy.
It's just how I feel.
I probably shouldn't feel that way, but I do.
They don't feel that way.
They don't.
So if you were, and someday I'm going to do this if I have time, it'd be interesting to go down to like the most remote county in Alabama and interview just a cross-section of people at the Hardys, just 25 people, and ask them what they think of the personal sexual practices of the residents of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
And B, how often they think of it.
How much of your disk space does this occupy?
How many hours a week, estimated, do you spend seething about what they're doing in the sack 1,500 miles from here?
And I'm pretty sure you would find right around zero people would even understand the question.
It just wouldn't compute.
Brooklyn, huh?
I don't know.
Probably something weird, right?
Yep, something weird for sure.
unidentified
All right.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
That's in New York City, right?
unidentified
Yep.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Well, there you go.
Would you like to pass a law to prevent them from doing that weird stuff?
unidentified
Huh?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Who are you anyway?
No.
And I mean people, I mean all of them elders at the local Antioch Baptist Church.
I mean, evangelicals, 100%.
And they would tell you, no.
And then, of course, you know, you know, the second half.
Go to Williamsburg.
And what do you think of the people of Dothan County, Alabama?
You know that over 50% of them are against gay marriage.
unidentified
What?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
I was just thinking about that this morning.
We should kill them.
They lay awake at night thinking that somewhere in this country there is somebody who's not fully on board with the program.
And by on board with the program, I don't just mean is disobeying.
I don't mean a county clerk who's refusing to sign a marriage certificate.
You know, that's a real argument.
I get it.
No matter what side you're on.
No.
They mean someone who, in his heart secretly, is traipsing down to the basement after dinner and communicating by shortwave with someone else who disagrees.
And that's unacceptable.
And we're going to root that person out and we're going to fix that person.
In fact, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to re-educate that person.
Ah.
Yes.
These impulses are universal.
Yes, they are.
There's a reason that happened.
Because this is an evangelical faith, is what I'm saying.
The progressive faith is an evangelical faith.
It's a proselytizing faith.
And that's exactly what it is.
And you know why.
I can see there are religious people in this.
Of course, you know why.
Because you can't, you know, you can remove religion, but you can't remove the religious impulse.
Because it's inborn.
It's innate.
It can't be taken out.
So it'll just be redirected to something even.
Do you think the resurrection is implausible?
Let me tell you about woke politics.
Not only is it way more destructive, it's like 100% dumber.
Okay?
But that's what it is.
It's just a replacement, obviously.
But we should keep that in mind.
And by we, I'm not even sure who I'm talking about.
I don't know.
And I hope if this conference accomplishes anything, it's to explain what it means to be conservative or nationalist.
I don't even know.
I've lost track.
But whatever they're for, I'm against that.
That's kind of how I'm thinking of it right now.
I'm absolutely against that.
And I'm also, and I'll stop with this, I'm also prone, and I bet many of you are the same, I'm prone to lie to myself about it.
And I just want to be absolutely clear, because I notice there's a TV camera there.
I want to be really clear.
I'm still for living with people I disagree with.
I will always be for that.
I will always be for pluralism.
I will always be for intellectual diversity.
Always.
I'll always be happy to have dinner with someone who doesn't share my views.
My only point is, and that will never change.
I will not allow that to change because I think you become something less than you should be.
unidentified
Younger people say the news is full of lies on Kennedy's motorcade.
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