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Feb. 18, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
10:30
What Tucker Learned From Surviving a Plane Crash

Tucker Carlson speaks at ISI's 70th Anniversary Gala in October of 2023. Watch the full speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRLb6pq2jUc Follow Tucker on X: https://x.com/TuckerCarlson Text “TUCKER” to 44055 for exclusive updates! #TuckerCarlson #planecrash #Dubai #MiddleEast #travel #politics #news #lifelesson #lifeadvice #speech #debate #QandA #journalism

Participants
Main
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tucker carlson
dailycaller 10:18
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Speaker Time Text
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
It's important to understand the moment that you're in, and it cuts against the very core of human nature to understand it, because I am totally convinced at my age that denial is the most powerful of all human instincts.
I'm serious.
I mean, honestly, I was almost 22 years ago next month, I was in a plane that crashed, amazingly, in the Middle East, flying from Peshawar, Pakistan.
The Khyber Pass was right after 9-11.
I was going over to cover the Taliban, and something happened in the cargo hold, and we went down in a sand dune in Dubai.
Obviously, I survived, but it was a Pakistan international airways flight.
And the thing that changed my life about that experience was something happened horrible to the plane.
Like there was an explosion in the cargo hold.
Some debate about what it was, but it happened.
And the plane starts dropping, and the wing appears to detach the right wing.
And the plane is like struggling for altitude and going up, gunning the engines and sideways.
It's like three in the morning over the Arabian Sea.
People are freaking out on the plane.
Every person on that plane thought we're going to die, very much including me.
I had three little kids.
I was half drunk, which makes it worse.
And we finally come in kind of sideways into the sand in the planes on its side.
And I'm in the first seat on the plane.
It's a big double Airbus.
And I just had one thought, which is I'm getting off the plane.
And it's, you know, totally dark.
And you can see burning from the wing.
So it's like, it is time to depart the plane.
So I hop up, and this male flight attendant stands right in front of me and goes, sit down.
Everything is fine.
Everything is fine.
That's a verbatim quote.
Everything is fine.
It was so demonstrably unfine, I can't even begin to describe how unfine it was.
And I think just out of pure panic, I like ignored the guy.
And I opened the door and the slide went up and I jumped into darkness with like four other Westerners in the front.
Everyone in the back, though, they were like, oh, everything's fine.
And I thought, I've brooded on that for over 20 years.
Like, why did he claim everything was fine?
The pilots, by the way, went right out the front windows.
Well, they did.
Oh, absolutely.
Like, whatever.
Good luck, guys.
And I think he just couldn't metabolize the change.
It was so awful.
He just could not admit what was happening right there in front of everybody.
And this really bothered me all these years, despite the fact it wound up fine for me.
By the way, the plane is now a dive site off the Burj Hotel in Dubai.
You can swim through it.
Someday I will.
But then last year, I read the biography, which I would recommend to everyone in this room, of Peter Wrangel, who was the leader of the revolutionary white forces during the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, rather, that came after the revolution.
And he was a Baltic German living in Russia and a general work for the Tsar.
The war ends, or Russia ceases its hostilities with Germany.
He comes back to St. Petersburg, and the country's in complete chaos.
And the Bolsheviks have decided that, you know, it's the discontent within the army that we need to inflame.
And we need to get the army.
I don't know if this sounds familiar to anyone here, but get the guns and the people who wield the guns.
We need them.
So the first thing they do is destroy all discipline in the Tsar's army, complete.
So Peter Wrangel's just been on the front for four years.
He comes back into St. Petersburg, totally civilized city, two-hour drive from Helsinki.
I mean, it is Europe, okay?
Whatever anyone tells you.
And he's wandering through, and soldiers are going crazy in the streets.
And they're raping women.
They're stealing a gunpoint.
Soldiers in uniform in a monarchy, which had not had any behavior like this at all.
And Peter Wrangel just can't even believe it.
These are his soldiers.
He's a general.
And so he's completely freaked out.
And he goes into a movie theater.
And everyone in the movie theater is completely absorbed in the movie.
Like there's no revolution happening outside.
And Peter Wrangel thinks these people are insane.
So he goes back, he's like, I got to get to Moscow.
So he takes the train to Moscow.
I have to tell the czar this country's falling apart.
He's very close to the Romanovs, the family.
You should read this.
It's just out in English translation in the last three years.
It's an unbelievable book, lost to history until recently, to English speakers.
So he goes back to Moscow and he's close to the Romanovs.
And so he goes into the imperial court and he knows all the relatives and there are millions of them hangers on.
And he notices about 80% of the women in the Romanov family are wearing red ribbons in solidarity with the Bolsheviks who wound up, of course, we know how it ends, murdering them.
Murdering them in the basement at dawn.
So, wait, what?
Peter Wrangel says, how is it that this country is being devoured by a violent revolution?
And the people who can afford movie tickets, that is kind of our middle class, are refusing even to acknowledge that it's happening.
And the ruling class against whom it is aimed are sympathizing with it.
And if this doesn't remind you of BLM, I don't know what does.
I'm reading this in my porch.
I'm like, midnight, I couldn't go to sleep.
I was like, wait, I live in that country.
That's happening now.
This is a revolution.
Its aim is to hurt you.
Yes, that would include physically in the end.
Sorry.
If someone tells you you're not allowed to speak, if someone tells you your children are not your children, okay, these are not ideological differences.
This is not, oh, I prefer, you know, this capital gains rate.
These are totalitarian measures that treat you as non-human.
Human beings, free citizens, get to say what they think.
Slaves must be quiet.
That's the distinction.
So all this, like, oh, it's in the First Amendment.
unidentified
No, no.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, it precedes the First Amendment, as our founding documents make clear.
These are natural rights that distinguish the citizen from the slave, the human from the subhuman.
We can't consider slaves fully human or we wouldn't enslave them.
So anyone treating you as a slave considers you less than human.
People don't pause to consider the implications of this.
If someone says to you, I have a right to make your children hate you or to say weird, creepy sex stuff to your kids.
What's a valid response to that?
I'm calling for applying natural law to American life.
And if you refuse to do that, what happens?
Well, we're watching what happens.
They become increasingly aggressive.
The aims are exactly like the means.
Totalitarian.
Period.
This is not a debate.
They don't want a debate.
They've said that explicitly they don't want to debate.
So I really think that we should begin to see this for what it is, which is a very big deal on which all depends, not just our republic, but like your family.
And I'm not calling for stockpiling ammo, though.
I mean, I don't, you know, no one ever went broke doing that, I can say.
Maybe some have, but they'll get it back in the end.
It's a good investment.
What I'm calling for is approaching this moment with the seriousness that it both deserves and requires.
Requires.
So you read that beautiful letter from, was it Lieutenant Blue, after whom a spectacularly dysfunctional public high school in Washington, D.C. is named, I should tell you.
unidentified
Poor guy, that's his legacy.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Boys' room shootings.
But you read that and you realize a couple of things.
One, this man was not lying to himself.
He knew that everything hung in the balance.
He was in the middle of a civil war and he wasn't pretending otherwise.
I mean, it was literally a civil war, but he knew that it was.
It's one thing to be in a civil war, it's one thing to admit it.
And he did admit it.
Okay.
The second thing was his grave seriousness.
His grave seriousness.
This man foretells his own death in that letter.
I can feel it.
I'm about to die.
Not an inkling of self-pity at all.
Not even any.
I mean, if I thought I was going to die, I would write the world's treacliest letter to my wife.
You're so great.
He said, I'd rather die than be dishonored.
He says that in the letter.
This is a very serious person, maybe even a little self-serious, actually.
And we're not prepared for self-seriousness because we all, at least if you're my age, grew up in a world where self-seriousness, or even seriousness itself, was the gravest of all sins.
Taking yourself too seriously.
You have no ironic detachment.
You can't laugh at yourself.
You can't laugh at the moment.
Well, I mean, I'm big on ironic detachment.
I try.
I'm big on humor.
I really hope, you know, that when I get the diagnosis, you know, that I'll be man enough to joke about it.
I really do hope that.
On the other hand, it's not just about me and whether I can show coolness under pressure or tell a joke facing stage four.
It's bigger than that.
It's about my children and the grandchildren I fervently hope to have.
And their lives require me to be a little more serious than the world I was raised in, which was honestly not serious at all.
It was a very decadent world.
I didn't recognize that at the time.
You know, sort of well-educated, upper-income America, very decadent, actually.
Well, I'm not, who am I to judge?
Well, you know, on the one hand, okay.
Who am I to declare myself better than someone else?
I'm with that to this day.
I don't think I'm better than anyone else.
And actually, I've got a lot of evidence that I'm not.
On the other hand, it is for me to judge whether something is good for my country and my children.
That is my duty to judge.
And not to make light of it, but to see it for what it is, which is the choice between life or death, literally.
And so here's how I think we should respond: first, by taking stock of ourselves.
I mean, are we actually living lives that prepare us for whatever is coming next?
Younger people say the news is full of lies.
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