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April 25, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
53:27
Tucker Carlson - One of the most important qualities in a leader is the love of nature and animals.
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
And it's my honor and privilege to share with you tonight our keynote speaker, Mr. Tucker Carlson.
Thank you.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
A man I can look up to.
When you told me that in Wisconsin, I was actually on the way to our annual grouse trip north of Manishwish Waters.
What a great state.
It's like Maine where I live except flatter and a lot friendlier.
And you told me that.
I didn't even believe you.
And then I looked it up, and it turned out to, of course, be true.
And it didn't really actually surprise me at all, much as it horrified me.
Because, of course, in a moment where anything that is sacred is under attack, they're going to attack the thing that is most sacred to me, which is the relationship between man and animal that comes really only through hunting.
So, of course.
And that's why one of the reasons I was so honored.
To be asked to come here tonight.
Also, any group with Teddy Roosevelt in the name, it's like, done.
I'm there.
When I was a kid, Teddy Roosevelt was the model of manhood in my house.
And I'm not that old, actually, despite my appearance.
I grew up in a world where Teddy Roosevelt was commonly acknowledged as the archetype of what it meant to be a man.
And if you're interested in his life, and I'm sure everyone here has read the Morris biographies and knows a lot about Teddy Roosevelt, but the thing you notice immediately is that at every moment in his life when things kind of fell apart, he instantly retreated to the wilderness.
That's the first thing he did.
When his father died when he was 19 at Harvard, the first thing he did was go to Maine, which we're flattered by that in Maine, and wound up...
Spending the winter, a lot of the winter in Maine, hunting, fishing, and trapping in the state, in northern Maine, climbed Katahdin, and started a lifelong friendship with his guide, which, you know, those of you in the room who've hunted and fished your whole lives know about that sort of weird, almost holy relationship you can have with a guide that can extend the entire course of your life.
And we have a couple of them in our family's life who sit at our...
Thanksgiving dinner table every year, and that's how close it is.
The relationships that you build with people through the sports of hunting and fishing are not like other relationships at all.
And you see it in the people.
I met a ton of people before giving the speech, and I have to say of the women, not only are they very pretty, but I would say about 60% had cross necklaces on, which is, I'm just going to say it, my favorite thing.
You approach me with a cross necklace on, I love you.
Not only because you remind me of my wife who wears one, but because it symbolizes what's important to me.
But it shouldn't be surprising that a group dedicated to conserving God's creation would be wearing a necklace like that.
Because the connection between people and the land is really the connection between people and the eternal, in my opinion.
No, it is.
If the most important thing to you is God's creation, you know, it tells you a lot about who you are.
And I have to say, like Teddy Roosevelt, I've not lived half as an exciting life as Teddy Roosevelt, who's literally, as everyone famously knows, in 1912, while giving a campaign speech, running for president, a campaign he never should have run.
Even a man as great as Teddy Roosevelt was subject to hubris.
But he's giving a speech, and a man called John Schronk walked up and shot him point blank with a.38.
The gun I carry, I think a lot of the.38, I think it's a pretty robust cartridge, but somehow his glasses case stopped it, and he spent the rest of his life, he lived another seven years with that.38 slug in his flesh, and gave the speech anyway after being shot.
Imagine the kind of man it would take to give a speech, a 90-minute speech while bleeding with a.38 slug in you.
And I think, could I do that?
unidentified
No.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Now, I would collapse.
I've been shot!
He was running on the bull moose ticket that year, and instead of saying, I've been shot!
He looked calmly at the crowd and said, it's going to take a lot more than that to kill a bull moose.
Which, I can tell you, as someone who lives in Maine, is true.
Hard to kill a bull moose with a.38.
But still so impressive.
But one of the things about his life that has resonated in mine is that when things get bad, you retreat to the wilderness.
And when things started to get super crazy for us in Washington, the city that we spent most of our lives in, my wife and four children, you know, maybe six or seven years ago, our first instinct was to move to the town that we had gone to our whole lives in Maine, and not in coastal Maine, not in the, you know, the lighthouse in lobster roll Maine, but the macaroni and cheese fentanyl Maine up near Canada, which we love.
An area where literally the only reason to live there is if you love nature.
There's nothing else there.
I'm sitting next to Cabela's and I got super enthusiastic about their store in a way that I think made them uncomfortable.
Because I was such a fanboy about it.
But because when we got at Cabela's, two hours south of me in Scarborough, Maine, everyone in my town of 100 people was like, they got at Cabela's in Southern Maine!
No one goes to Southern Maine because that's where all the people you don't want to be around live.
But the whole town made the pilgrimage to buy cheaper ammo and sporting clays at your store.
And that's not surprising because why would you live there otherwise?
So to live in a world of people who really don't have a lot, I mean, actually, the town I live in is poorer than any inner city neighborhood in the United States, literally, in per capita.
I mean, there are two houses walking distance from my house without running water.
I've got two people who work for me who grew up without running water.
I'm not overstating, it's just a fact.
And so this is a legitimately, it's one of the poorest counties not on an Indian reservation in the United States.
But it's a pretty happy place, actually.
And I've always thought that it was happy not because anyone's thriving, there are no jobs, and drug use is endemic, and that's, of course, really sad, and it kills a lot of people.
And there's kind of no excusing that.
But if you talk to people there, they are pretty satisfied with their lives, a lot more than if you're poor in a city.
You could be twice as rich.
You could be ten times as rich in a city and not be as happy as the people who are standing outside our gas station, the only store in town, watching the bear hunters come in in September.
In Maine, you have to take the tooth out and give it to the lady at the cash register to tag it.
And so there are, you know, trucks out front every morning and people are comparing bears, dead bears.
Everyone's like, you know, pulling up the teeth and kind of hoping they're still dead.
Then yanking them out and bringing in the lady who's like collecting teeth.
Then they all buy the little shots of Allen coffee brandy and generic cigarettes to celebrate.
And, you know, it's a very culturally specific place.
Those of you from Wisconsin can kind of relate.
Less beer in the morning, more liquor, but whatever.
It's the same vibe.
And everyone's happy.
And there's not one person there with health insurance.
I don't know.
There isn't.
I mean, that's real.
I don't know.
I'm not aware of any dentist.
Within a 20-mile, 25-mile drive from where I live.
And everyone lives on well water, so the combination of very hard well water with all kinds of minerals and no dentist is pretty intense, as you can imagine.
And I'm not mocking.
I'm marveling at how rooted and happy people are.
I'm not just guessing.
I'm not a passerby.
I've been in the same town for 50 years, so I've sort of seen this, and I've seen it collapse economically, truly collapse.
As the dowel mills went under and the wood products business moved to Canada and all the economic changes that globalization wrought that really wrecked rural America, and those of you who live in it know.
But what's so amazing is that the spirit of decency remains, and that is directly tied to, it is a product of, the connection that people have with nature.
That is not just the saving grace, it's the whole point.
It's the whole point.
If you are...
Highly aware of the natural world.
If you have a deep relationship with animals, then you're a different person from the people who don't.
It's just true.
I hunt with dogs.
I hunted with my dogs yesterday.
And I'm not going to talk about it.
My wife always says, no one wants to hear about your dogs.
And I would say, I think people really do want to hear about my dogs, actually.
And she always says, ever been on a plane and some half-drunk person pulls out pictures of their grandchildren?
We're all kind of weird looking and you have to pretend they're cute.
I'm like, yeah, I hate that.
She's like, that's what it's like when you talk about your dogs.
Everyone's like, oh, your dogs are so interesting.
So I'm not going to tell you about my two flushing dogs, the two probably best grouse dogs in Maine, best quail dogs in Florida, Springer and an English Cocker, incredible animals, lifetime dogs, Brookie and Alice, amazing.
But I, you know, I hunt them, you know, I'll just be honest, multiple times a week.
And we were just talking at dinner about how when you hunt with dogs, you're not really hunting.
The dogs are hunting.
And you, like, come home and take credit for it.
I killed this or that.
You know what I mean?
A mountain lion bear.
In my case, a quail or a grouse or a pheasant or whatever.
Chucker.
I'm not above hunting chucker.
Anyway.
And, you know, I shot this.
I shot that.
And then I go on about how the 28 is actually superior to the 20. But it's all kind of a lie.
Your dogs did that.
And in so doing, you had this relationship with these animals that transcends the moment.
In fact, it transcends the era.
This is the only carnivorous animal human beings have ever domesticated.
We're not even sure how or why people domesticated dogs, but we know for a fact since the beginning of any kind of human civilization, people have lived with dogs.
They're in cave paintings.
They're in graves.
And why is that?
Well, who knows why?
But it's only through the experience of hunting with them that you begin to maybe understand the roots of that and the main thing that you learn when you hunt with dogs and you don't learn this in any other way is that the distance between people and animals is a lot narrower than we imagine that it is.
And I don't think people who don't hunt who don't work with animals work with animals understand that.
I don't know how they could.
It's a completely different experience to come home Tier, what are those weird hybrid dogs that everyone has now that are part poodle?
I don't even know what they're called, but they're supposedly better for your furniture or something.
I don't know.
Whatever.
I'm sure they're fine.
I'm not even going to say it.
I'm not going to say it.
But if you come, I know I'm being mean.
I can't control myself.
Remember, talk show host.
Okay.
But if you, you know, have a dog at home, and I've had them all my life, many of them, four at a time.
And that's wonderful.
But the experience of working with a dog, hunting with a dog, sharing a mission with a dog, communicating with a dog while working in nature, brings you insights into yourself, into people, into the natural order, the hierarchy of living things, and I would say into God, that you would never have otherwise.
We flatter ourselves.
Oh, you know, it's us and then all the animals.
And I do think that people who live in cities and want to ban hunting because it's mean to animals are speaking out of such ignorance that it's hard even to take it seriously.
What's a deciduous versus a conifer?
Like, name three bird species.
Like, do you know anything about nature?
Nothing.
And it's only from that position of ignorance that they can issue decrees like, we're banning all hunting because it's mean to animals.
And the response from people who hunt is like, well, where do you think food comes from?
And they always say that.
You know, where do you think food comes from?
Well, it comes from animals, right?
Protein comes from animals.
But I would take it even the next step, which is to say, like, shh, adults are talking.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
You literally have no idea.
You're so ignorant.
I mean, the first rule of politeness is be quiet when you don't know what the adults are talking about.
And we should enforce that.
I don't think the clever retorts about, oh, you need hunting, you need animals.
No.
Be quiet.
And by the way, stay away from our power grid.
You don't understand that either.
You belong in the sociology department of a community college, and that's fine.
We can sort of wall you off, and, you know, when they say keep Austin weird, we're just talking, but that's what they mean.
People with elaborate earrings who work at a community college, that's totally fine.
You're in your little lane.
But stay away from the things that keep civilization going.
Like energy and infrastructure and air travel.
Like agriculture.
And yes, like hunting and fishing.
Because you just don't know.
And that's fine.
You live a spiritually impoverished life alone.
Your only human contact is with the DoorDash guy and Netflix.
And I'll pray for you.
But you get precisely zero power in our society because you will destroy it because you're dumb and you don't know how dumb you are.
No, you can't have my firearms.
What?
I'm not going to give them to my five-year-old.
I'm not giving them to you either.
Back off.
So I guess what I'm really saying, I don't want to go on too much about what you already know, which is that the importance of hunting and fishing go far beyond the number of fish.
You catch or the moose you shoot, though it is inherently beautiful.
I mean, I literally live in a house where my grandfather's doll sheep hangs over my reading chair, which he shot freshman year at Yale.
And he was the pistol champion at Yale and a great hunter, an amazing shot.
And he promptly became a chronic alcoholic and achieved literally not one thing for the rest of his life.
No, like literally not one thing.
He was a disgraceful man.
But in his younger years, he shot this animal, which has graced our living room, you know, it's 100 years ago we shot this.
And like, that's kind of enough, actually.
He brought this beautiful thing from nature into my house, and that, and of course, his genes produced me and then my children, and so we're grateful for that, for his genetic contribution, made doubtless while drunk.
But I've said to my wife, you know, I've made fun of my grandfather.
I didn't, of course, really know because he was drunk.
But I'm grateful for what he left me, which is this animal head or several animal heads.
And, like, that suffices for me, actually, because they're so beautiful.
And they're a reminder of the world beyond my iPhone, which is the real world.
It's the actual world.
The world that AI can't touch.
No doll sheep knows what AI is.
No doll sheep is mad at Mark Zuckerberg for stealing the last election.
They would be if they knew, but they don't.
And that's kind of beautiful.
In fact, it's the only thing that's beautiful.
And the people who do it and who understand that are better people.
And I hate to say, like, any one group is better than another, but it's just true.
And I know that because I've been around it my entire life.
My moments in duck camp with my dad and my brother were the happiest moments of my childhood.
And my moments in the field with my brother and my son and my nephew and my son's wife, who we somehow convinced to shoot.
Don't see a lot of that.
Ladies in the field, but I love hunting with her.
And those moments are the happiest moments in our family.
And we're fanatical fly fishermen, too.
And we've been, you know, obviously around the world fishing.
But those, I mean, that is my family, is being outdoors with them.
And so it makes all the difference.
But it's under attack.
In ways, and this is what, and I'll, by the way, stop and take your hostile questions in just a second, which I look forward to, but it's under attack in ways I don't think that we fully perceive, and I'm so grateful for you all because you're fighting this battle on the federal front and with the government, the largest landowner in the United States, and I think that's absolutely essential.
I mean, of course it is, and it's also very complicated and very difficult and also incremental, I can say, as someone who watched the process.
For decades in Washington, no victory is permanent.
These are won a little bit at a time.
Nothing is an absolute victory.
It's a little bit like the First World War.
You win, but you don't really win.
There's another war 20 years later.
So that's the nature of influencing government.
But I don't think that those are the only threats.
And I want to suggest two other threats that we never acknowledge, particularly those of us on the right.
And I'll just be honest, I am on the right or I'm identified that way, I guess.
But the world has changed so much that I think A lot of us who are middle-aged need to update our files a little bit on what the big threats are.
And of course, in the West, it's a completely different story.
I live in a state where there's almost no government land and no real property rights.
So you can just walk onto someone else's land in Maine and kill all their animals.
So it's a completely different world than, say, Montana or Wyoming or Nevada or whatever.
But the two other threats that people don't mention, one is development.
And conservatives never want to mention this because they're for free enterprise.
And a lot of them are developers.
And I think a lot of, you know, some development's great.
People need a place to live.
And I think housing prices are one of the most important questions in people's lives, right?
But I also think it is fair to say, and conservatives never say it, that not all development is the same.
And if you come into my pretty nature-centered town with 19th century buildings and build something really ugly...
Made out of plastic that makes the landscape, you know, it's basically like spray painting a Rembrandt.
If you make the landscape uglier where I live, then you're my enemy.
Sorry.
And no one wants to say that, but I don't know why.
Beauty is essential.
It's as essential, I would say, over time as air or water or food.
We can't really live fully as humans without it.
We will be diminished without it.
We punish our most dangerous citizens by putting them in concrete cells alone, without beauty.
If you wonder how important beauty is, and anyone who hunts or fishes knows, that a huge part of the experience is the stream itself, regardless of the massive, fat, square-tailed brook trout that reside there waiting for your flight, or the field itself, or hunting doll sheep at altitude.
It's like, the mountains are a huge part of it.
The solitude is a huge part of it.
God's creation.
I mean, I was stuck in New York City for years in my grim television job trying to pay private school tuition, none of which was worth it, I would say, in retrospect.
And I was stuck there on the weekends for four years, and I had no outlet because I was in midtown Manhattan, which really is an offense against humanity.
And so I would trudge with my fly rod to Central Park to try and catch some of their radioactive diseased bass.
And if you've ever, you know, put together, you know, a six-weight in Central Park, I mean, it's literally weirder and more offensive than, say, shooting heroin or mugging somebody in Central Park, both of which are just features of the landscape.
And, of course, it's just some mugging.
It's drug use.
We get it.
What are you doing, you freak?
And I was confronted repeatedly.
And, of course, I hated the whole thing, but I needed to do it because you have to do it.
You have to be in a place.
Where human beings in their folly haven't made things uglier.
You just have to, or else you die inside.
It's like that important.
And I think that's the story of every person, whether we recognize it or not.
And so, again, anything that destroys the landscape thoughtlessly, I mean, all development destroys the landscape.
Some of it's necessary.
But if there's no effort at all.
To preserve beauty.
If everything is done purely to maximize the return for the people who did it, leaving behind the detrius, this ugliness that the rest of us have to live with for generations, then that's a crime.
And we should say so.
No, you're not allowed to build something ugly in my town.
Sorry, you can't, because I live here.
No, you can't build an industrial wind farm on the mountains that I look at.
And if you're going to do that, we're going to find out if a 308 can take one down.
And this is a...
No, this is like a massive debate where I live.
Can a 308 do that?
It's pretty good when NATO around.
Like, it can do it, right?
No!
50 BMG minimum!
I've never actually done it.
I'm moving toward doing it.
I will do it before I die.
It's one of the...
You know that little bucket list thing?
You know what I mean?
Vacation in Tahiti, Mile High Club, whatever's on yours, okay?
Wow, I can't believe I said that.
Sorry, I just revealed too much!
But seeing if a 308 can actually stop an industrial wind turbine, yeah, that's on my list.
It is, and I'm going to do that.
And when I get taken to jail, I'm going to be a prisoner of conscience.
I'm going to be the Julian Assange of Western Maine.
Yeah, I did it.
Yeah, I did it.
And I did it for humanity.
That's why I did it.
But it's just interesting that, okay, so this attack, and these are private companies from Canada doing it where I live, and whatever you think of wind power, I mean, I'm not actually against wind power on some principle.
Of course not.
It's not a bad idea.
And neither solar.
Not an inherently bad idea.
I'm not that much of a crank.
But it matters both whether or not it works.
Spoiler alert, it doesn't.
But it matters most of all to me.
What it does to nature.
And if you're going to make the mountains around my house into industrial wind farms and destroy the view, I think it is totally fair for me to say you can't destroy the view.
And people are like, oh, well, why is the view, why is that of significance as compared to, say, the profit that the Canadian private equity firm will make by destroying your town?
You say, well, I actually think it's kind of more important.
It is.
It is.
Beauty is more important than whatever the Canadian private equity firm is making.
And by the way, get out of my country, okay?
Scamper away.
I don't think we should be ashamed to say that at all.
And some massive, ugly housing development?
How about you build a massive, beautiful housing development?
And it costs you 20% more, but, you know, that's kind of the price of not destroying things.
And we're going to demand that you do that.
But we don't.
And we just sort of sit back and go, that's the free market.
Well, no one's...
Well, I would say two things.
One, I'm strongly for the free market.
I wish we had one.
We don't.
We have an economy based on monopolies that exists because they have favor from the government.
Period.
That is our economy.
And second, like, how far do we want to take the ideology here?
I've got a bunch of kids.
I'm sure everyone in this room has a bunch of kids because they're the kind of people who would have a bunch of kids, and God bless you for that.
But if you're like, well, I'm not going to kind of raise or direct my kids as they grow up.
I'm just sort of hoping.
You know, they arrive at a good place.
It's kind of the free market as applied to childhood.
You're going to be visiting your kids in rehab.
For real.
That's not how you raise kids.
You raise kids with intention.
You don't have to be a fascist about it, but you have to clearly articulate this is what our family stands for.
These are our values.
This is what we believe.
This is what we do.
What we don't do.
You can't smoke pot at the breakfast table.
Sorry.
We don't do that.
We don't have a free market approach to that.
And now you can't build another dollar store in my town.
Like, no!
And look, maybe I'll burn it down if you do.
How does that sound?
Because it's my town.
Oh, you're so radical.
Really?
I'm the radical one?
I rolled into your town and made it ugly?
I don't think I did.
I think you did that.
I think you're the radical.
And I'm responding in self-defense.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that with a little bit of menace.
And I mean that.
Because I think the stakes are that high.
If you wake up, there are parts of this country that look nothing like they did 20 years ago.
And I drive through them, and I said, who built that?
Where's the architect, and why is he not in prison?
People didn't build buildings like that 80 years ago.
There wasn't one building in America that looked like that.
Why are we doing that now, and why are we letting them do that?
And rich people don't live like that.
There's no building like that at the Yellowstone Club, in case you haven't been recently.
Baker's Bay doesn't have a dollar store.
No, it's true.
The snickering ones have been to Baker's Bay, you know.
No dollar store.
Because no one wants to live around that stuff.
So why are we doing this to rural Americans who everyone knows in their hearts are the best people that we have?
And they have the greatest claim on this country because they've been here the longest.
Their families have been here the longest.
And so why do this to them?
Because we can.
It's totally immoral.
Hurting people because they don't have the power to fight back is the worst thing that you can do.
It's beating an animal.
But we do it, and no one says a word about it.
And people who hunt and fish should defend rural America.
Not just America, but Americans.
The people who live there.
Because they are the best people.
And they're hurting.
And the second thing that we should be very concerned about is related to the first thing is population.
So we spend a lot of the winter in southwest Florida.
And of course, you know, we've got amazing tarpon and redfish and particularly snook fishing, tarpon in the spring, but snook all year round, huge snook, 40-inch snook.
Try to catch one of those on a fly, sight casting.
I mean, it's harder than tarpon.
It's amazing.
But we also have, over the last couple of years, really good native quail hunting, which is kind of amazing considering we're that far south.
I hunt on a huge ranch outside of...
Fort Myers.
Huge.
Second biggest ranch in Florida.
I know the people who own it.
Wonderful people.
They've had it for over 100 years.
I'm not going to name them and embarrass them, but they're a great family.
And, you know, the land in Florida doesn't produce a lot.
At this point, it's like citrus is dying, so it's like, you know, it's cattle, of course.
Breeding cattle, not raising them.
They go to Texas for that.
But watermelons and sod don't get a lot out of the land.
So they decided to...
How can, since we have so much land, maybe we could manage it for wild quail, which is very complicated.
Anyone from Texas can tell you.
Quail are like a mystery of the universe.
We don't really understand how they work.
We could send a man to the moon, but we can't keep the bobwhite population healthy, right?
Which is extremely distressing.
Like, I don't care about the moon.
I care about bobwhite.
But anyway, those are my priorities.
But they have succeeded.
The ranch managers...
A 3,000-acre portion of this ranch, all of whom dip and drink Mountain Dew, like, first thing in the morning, not one of whom finished high school, and all of whom are geniuses, have succeeded in bringing back wild Florida quail.
When I jumped to Covey yesterday morning, or I would say, to the Cabela's point, my dogs jumped wild Covey.
It was like a flock.
It was like 30 birds.
They did that.
They're not, you know, no one is going to give them a Presidential Medal of Freedom, though if I ever get in the office, that's the first thing I'm doing.
But I thought, how did they do this?
They did it because they have a lot of land.
Because they have space.
Quail and all animals, actually, and particularly game birds and big mammals and even smaller mammals.
They need land.
They need space.
And in Florida right now, a lot is going on in Florida that's great.
It's a refuge, you know, for normal people.
But it's also completely overburdened by people.
And they're developing Florida without any thought.
I mean, they've been doing this for 50 years, but right now it's accelerated in the last three years, particularly in the southwest part of Florida, so between Naples and Fort Myers.
They're developing it heedlessly.
And land is disappearing.
And ag, encumbered ag land.
All kinds of weird tax encumbrances on it.
It's like $10,000 an acre because there's so much pressure.
And this one family has decided, we're not selling, and we're going to just create this amazing resource by bringing natural quail back.
And I thought, that can't happen unless somebody decides that open space is worth it for its own sake.
Not just for quail hunters, but for everybody.
For people who drive by.
For the birds themselves.
For migratory birds.
And yes, even for the hated pigs.
And I do hate the pigs, and I wish someone figured out how to shoot them more effectively during daylight, obviously.
But I also sort of love the pigs.
Because the pigs, which were, of course, originally domesticated animals, the hogs, sort of use the whole landscape.
They don't care whose land it is.
There's no fence that can keep them in.
They're way smarter than almost any of my college roommates.
And they're like the bison of the modern era.
They roam free, despite all our attempts to pen them in and shoot them from helicopters with ARs.
And by the way, I don't really think you can kill a hog with.223, but my son claims you can.
But whatever, the point is, keeping land open and away from development, not because all development is bad, it's not.
You know, I'm not here from Earth First or something.
Though, you know, I don't dismiss all their priorities at all.
But anyway, the point is, That is essential.
And it's going to be harder than ever because of population growth.
And population growth is the one thing that nobody ever talks about.
And the only people who ever talk about population growth are like the crank anti-children people.
Like, no one should have kids.
Well, I think Americans should have tons of kids.
I only have four.
I wish I had ten.
I'm not even Catholic.
And I really mean it.
So I'm totally for children.
I hate any attempts to convince people not to have children because children are the only thing that matters.
Obviously.
And dogs.
Spaniels.
But...
But I'm not talking about population growth driven by happy Americans deciding they want to continue their line with a new generation.
That's not happening.
I'm talking about population growth from the rest of the world through immigration.
10 million people in four years, at least.
And there's a huge debate about the legality of this, and our country's being invaded, and all this stuff.
It's all true, and I have strong feelings about all of it.
I'm sure everyone does.
But people miss the most important fact of immigration is the bottom line number of the people who live here.
And it doesn't matter what they're like, if every one of them, and I think a lot of them probably are great people, because I like people, and I think God created all people, and I probably like a lot of people who broke our law to get here, as mad as I am that they did it.
Because I just like people.
But at a certain point, it doesn't matter.
The result is a crowded country.
And I can tell you as someone who's been in, you know...
A lot of countries, many, many countries around the world for a living for 30 years, you do not want to live in a crowded country.
You just don't.
And we never say that because we've never had to face it.
Because even in our grandparents' lifetime, there were parts of the country that were kind of like unknown.
And even now, there are parts of Maine.
I've never met anyone who's been there.
I have a camp on a remote lake.
There's no road to get there.
I mean, there are still remote places in the United States, and many of you have hunted and fished.
You know, in them.
But that will end if this country becomes crowded.
And the second thing that will happen and inevitably does is it'll become physically dirty.
And it's just so interesting that you are not allowed to say that.
That really, what is the word, triggers people if you talk about littering.
Well, I think littering is one of the gravest crimes against humanity you can commit.
I think the act of littering, throwing garbage into nature, should be punished with maximum physical severity.
And I absolutely mean that.
I'm not joking.
And it's so interesting because it's the most profound act of disrespect against nature.
It affects everybody else.
When you throw a bag of McDonald's out of your window or dump a gallon of motor oil into my trout stream, other people are affected by it.
It's just too disrespectful against something that you didn't make.
It's not yours to destroy.
And what's so interesting is that I grew up, I was born in 1969 in California, San Francisco.
So bizarre, a place you can't even go now, but whatever.
Which had a very strong hunting and fishing culture.
And my family had been there for 150 years or whatever, literally.
And in Golden Gate Park, there is a fly casting pool built during the 1930s.
During the Great Depression, the WPA built a, and I've casted in there with, I don't know anyone's spayfishes, but I spayfish, you know, double-handed rod casting, you know, get your skagit head and go practice in a public park.
That's how profound the sporting culture was in San Francisco in 1933. They thought it was a good use of public money to build a fly casting pond, not with fish in it, but to see how far, can you cast the whole fly line?
And these are oiled silk fly lines.
Imagine that today.
Of course not.
You couldn't even get a pickleball court built in a public park.
So, in my childhood, the dominant PSA on television was the crying Indian.
Do you remember this?
You know, it was supposed to make you feel guilty, white man or whatever, for throwing your McDonald's out the window?
And I did feel guilty.
And I hate white guilt.
I'm just saying.
It's one of the most poisonous things ever created.
But I'm all for that kind of guilt.
You should feel guilty if you litter.
Period.
Turns out the guy in that ad was not even Indian.
He was Sicilian.
Whatever.
But the point was, the point was, hey, people have been here a long time.
Don't wreck it.
And yet, for some reason, everyone feels so guilty, not about littering, but about telling other people not to litter, that nobody does!
I think this is a really big deal.
The beginning of my My awareness of the natural world, even before I was allowed to shoot a gun or cast a fly rod, which I started pretty young, very young, but even before then, my awareness of the importance of maintaining natural beauty came from that stupid PSA that played during Gilligan's Island with the crying Indian in his canoe with garbage floating by.
Do you remember this ad?
Yes!
And I remember thinking, man, the worst thing that you can do...
Is make the landscape uglier.
That's the worst thing.
I don't know who's doing that, but they should be executed.
And I still feel that way.
And I mean it, too.
You think of all the people who are punished.
All the people still in jail from January 6th.
There are no litterers in jail.
Why is that?
But it's not even, even if you don't have a medieval punishment mindset like I do.
Even if you don't want to go full Saudi on the litterers.
You have to acknowledge that a respect for the natural landscape is a key component of citizenship, of belonging to this country.
Because what is this country, actually?
A question we're going to have to ask ourselves increasingly in the coming years, as there's no majority of anything.
So what is it that holds us together as a nation?
There are 50 components in this nation, which is the size of a continent.
Bordered by this, you know, frozen wasteland to the north and this chaotic drug cartel scene to the south.
And then in the middle is this country we call the United States of America.
Why are they united?
It's not on the basis of religion or race or even language now.
So what is America?
Well, I would argue it's not a lot of the things we say it is.
What it really is, is America the landscape.
It's physical America.
This is the prettiest country on planet Earth.
And I went to, I skied in Switzerland twice last month.
Not because, I know, I can't believe I said that.
It sounds so douchey.
I happen to be over there.
Not because I'm always skiing in Switzerland.
Because I was working and I had to stop and say, yeah, okay, okay, rich guy, yeah, all right.
One of the times I flew on Air Serbia coach, okay, so that just gives you a sense of how glamorous my life is.
But whatever the point is, I was just in, I was just in.
In Zermatt and Link, we're both very pretty alpine towns.
It's a beautiful country.
The alpine parts of Switzerland are famously beautiful, right?
Not as pretty as where I live.
Just not.
It's not as pretty.
Nothing is as pretty as the United States of America.
Nothing has deeper resources than the United States of America.
Nothing has more fresh water than the United States of America.
Fresh water, which we completely take for granted.
The rest of the world is dying for it.
They're building desal plants that they can't afford to run.
We have the Great Lakes.
We have the Great Lakes.
We have more water than Lake Baikal in Siberia.
We are so blessed by our resources.
I'm not even mentioning our energy resources or our mineral resources, which are immense.
Our timber resources, they're incredible.
Our ag resources.
California.
The Great Plains.
No one has this.
We have this.
And no one appreciates it.
Instead we're talking about all the innovation and Silicon Valley and the dumbest people, the ugliest place producing the most pointless products and all we do.
Is talk them up.
And no one ever says anything about a real wealth which is physical.
And I guess if you live on your iPhone, you don't even notice the physical.
You don't notice the McDonald's bag in the park.
You don't notice the litter.
You don't notice the filth.
You don't notice the homeless guy dying of a fentanyl OD. You don't notice anything.
You don't notice the actual pollution.
All of your concerns are theoretical.
Climate!
We control the weather now!
We're not saying we're God or anything.
We just happen to control the weather.
Right, okay, sure you do.
Shut up.
You don't control anything.
You're not even married.
Be quiet.
You can't even convince a woman to like you.
Like, your achievement is, I've slept with all these girls, I'm matched up with some stupid app.
Really?
Make the same one happy for 30 years and get back to me.
Then you're a man.
unidentified
Anyway.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
I'm completely out of control, but the point is, what matters in America is right in front of our faces.
It's what God gave us.
It's the promised land that our ancestors inherited.
We're bequeathed, I would say.
And to the extent that we preserve that, and not just preserve it, but celebrate it proudly, And the people who are blessed enough to live there in these sad, dying little rural towns with the best people we have wasting away, we should protect them and the landscape around them, and we should do it with pride and with maximum vigor.
We should do it like Teddy Roosevelt would have done it.
So with that, I will stop and take your questions.
Thank you.
unidentified
Oh, don't stand up!
I was...
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Come on.
I'm from a culture of cruelty and confrontation, so I hope someone will scream at me as a fraud or a climate criminal really quick so I can get back to the life I'm used to.
Do you have any questions?
I don't even know how long I went.
Oh, you're talking about the tobacco-free nicotine product I use.
No, I can't.
I probably shouldn't do it.
No, like a lot of people who hunt and fish a lot, you know, I grew up using tobacco.
My father's only instruction to us when we were kids was filters are bad.
They clearly block the oxygen.
And then he told us, he learned this in Marine Corps, that when you smoke a straight, he smoked palmels, we smoked camels.
He was like, when you finish it, you field strip it.
And you roll up the paper in a ball and you flick it away and then the enemy doesn't know you're an American.
And I was like, Pop, we live in La Jolla.
What enemy are you talking about?
He was never clear on that.
But we always dipped on, always, like in a duck blind.
Because you can't smoke with mittens on.
It used to be freezing in duck blinds.
So we would always dip Copenhagen and I just...
I kept doing it my whole life until I realized that actually women don't like it.
I thought that was a lie.
You know what I mean?
One of the great sort of puzzles for men when they get married and then they have daughters is to discern between the things that women claim they don't like and the things they really don't like.
And I'm not going to go through what those might be, but...
There are several.
But in the actually don't like category is chewing tobacco.
I learned this.
And when my son got married, he's like, how is it she told me I can't dip in bed?
And I was like, well, that seems reasonable.
I'm like not a feminist, okay?
I actually believe in the patriarchy and I think you should run your house like David and Solomon ran theirs.
You know, I get it.
But I do think that's a fair request.
And he goes, I don't think she means it.
I was like, no, she means it.
She means it.
Yes, they're not into it.
I've been through this with your mother for about 33 years and not into it at all.
And so anyway, but Zin is quite a good option, I would say, if you want the life-enhancing effects of nicotine without the carcinogens and you want to feel the hand of God massage your central nervous system.
Not to oversell it, but I think it's a pretty good product.
Yes, sir.
unidentified
Yes.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
So the question was, you went to Russia, you met with your handler, Vladimir Putin, who paid you in gold rubles, and then you scampered back to the country you're working to subvert the United States and you complained about American architecture as opposed to Russian architecture.
How do you respond to the criticism?
And I think, how do you process it, was the question.
And the answer is, I haven't really processed it, because I've been on the road and been to a lot of places since then.
But I would just say the obvious, which is, you know, there are many things I am, not all of them good at all.
But among those is American.
I'm American.
I'm fundamentally American.
My family's been here hundreds of years since the colonial period.
I have no other passport.
I'm totally rooted here for good or bad.
I'm never leaving.
I don't care what happens here.
I'm never going anywhere.
And I'll die here.
I'll be buried in our family plot in Maine next to my parents.
And so I'm, for America, I'm highly concerned about the people who run the country, not just officially, but the people who exert influence on the decisions that are made.
And I don't think they're worthy of it at all.
And one of the things that Teddy Roosevelt wrote quite a bit about...
I would say, just to turn it back to TR, who was, like all of us, a flawed man also, and didn't live long enough actually to write about what he had learned through the tragedy in his later life.
His son was famously killed in the summer of 1918 in the First World War, a war that he had pushed really, really hard and very thoughtlessly, in my opinion.
And then his favorite son, Quentin, was killed behind enemy lines in a plane.
He was in the Army Air Corps.
And Roosevelt died the following January, so five months later.
And he never really told us what he learned from that, unfortunately, because I think he would have had a lot to say about how that changed him, and we would be the beneficiaries of that wisdom, but we weren't, and so we got into another war.
But anyway, that's my opinion.
But one thing he did write a lot about was the need to have an impressive ruling class, and he was often called a populist, and of course he went after the trust, including a trust that my relatives controlled, the sugar trust, the Havemeyer sugar trust, which he destroyed.
But he was a product of that same class.
He was a ruling class guy.
And that's why he was an effective critique of that class.
Because he knew them.
He wasn't sort of pressed against the glass hoping to be one of them.
He was born one of them in New York City.
I think on East 30th Street, if I'm correct.
But anyway, the point is, he knew the people he was talking about.
And he knew how unworthy they were of leadership of a country this great.
And that's why his criticism stung.
That's why his reforms worked.
Because he knew what he was talking about.
He wasn't trying to get rich.
He was rich.
They didn't have anything that he wanted.
He had social status and he had money.
And so he cared about the country.
He cared about nature.
He loved animals.
And as decent people do, he loved children.
He had a ton of them.
And he loved the nation enough to call out the bad actors in the ruling class.
Not because he was against ruling classes.
He was a man of deep learning.
The book that he wrote at Harvard, The Naval War of 1812, the two volumes, is still in print.
And he wrote it.
It's still assigned to the Naval Academy, or was a couple years ago.
He wrote it because he was bored, because Harvard wasn't hard enough for him.
That's how intense his intellectual energy was.
He wrote like 50 letters a day, and he read all the time.
While exercising, he read.
And one of the things he learned from his deep...
Reading in history was that the ruling class, the hierarchy, is a feature of human nature, as it is in the animal world.
There's one head dog in a house.
And if there's any confusion about who the dog is who's in charge, the dogs will kill each other until a leader is chosen.
It's just a feature that we didn't create and it will never change.
So populism as an idea is stupid.
You're not going to have a flat society.
You're always going to have a hierarchical society.
What you're looking for is a ruling class that is wise.
Who understand their own limits.
Who know that they're not God and who treat the people beneath them fairly.
And with love.
Who care about the people they lead.
Love is the key.
And I'm not a liberal.
Hardly.
I already said I want to execute literators, so you know I'm not a liberal.
But I'm going to use liberal language when I say love is the key.
You have to love the people you're in charge of.
Whether it's your children or your troops if you're an officer, whether it's your employees if you're an employer, or whether it's your voters and citizens if you're a political leader.
And if you don't love them, you will hurt them.
It's really, really simple.
But Ephesians has to be at the heart of your motive.
And if it's not, you're a bad leader.
And Roosevelt understood that and said that much more articulately than I am now doing.
And we don't have that.
And that's what drives me crazy.
It's not a question of...
Biden versus Trump.
I mean, it is, strictly speaking, that question.
And I have obvious preferences, which I've expressed many times.
I had dinner with Trump last night.
But it's much bigger than that.
It's the people who've reaped the most benefits from the system, A, don't believe in the system, and don't love the people who made those benefits possible, the rest of the citizenry.
They don't.
And I live in one of those towns and I've seen it.
They don't care at all.
If everybody in the town I lived in died of a fentanyl OD, there'd be no story in the New York Times except as a kid of curiosity.
The entire main town dies.
No one cares.
You have to care.
That's why you're a good parent.
Not because you're super smart or unusually selfless.
You're not Mother Teresa.
You're just a goofy dad like the rest.
We're all just goofy dads making dumb mistakes with our kids.
But if we love them, they'll turn out okay.
That's all that matters is your motive.
And that's why everybody can be a pretty decent parent.
Everybody.
Even the super dumb people.
You're like, oh, that person shouldn't have kids.
I think they should, actually.
I think they should.
Because they can do it.
All they need is to love their children.
And they'll get it right enough.
The dumb people will probably make more mistakes because they're dumb.
But it'll still be okay if they love their kids.
And it's exactly the same with our leaders.
Everyone's like, our leaders are so unimpressive.
Yeah, well, if you only knew, I know them.
Are you joking?
You wouldn't hire them to run your kid's birthday party.
They're losers.
But they'd still be okay.
They'd still be good enough.
Maybe not the best we could get, but that's all right.
You're not always going to get the best.
They would be okay if they loved the people who live here.
And so that's just my message.
I have a message.
It's that.
It's like, why does a place like Russia run by Vladimir Putin, who I'm not endorsing?
I don't want to live in Russia.
I would if I wanted to.
But I don't.
I don't want to.
I'm not Russian.
I'm American.
I just want that here.
I don't want their system.
I don't want their language.
Their food is excellent, I will say that.
But I do want to live in a place that's a lot prettier.
And the question it evoked in me...
Was, why isn't my country, and its cities in particular, that pretty?
Like, what's the answer?
Oh, shut up!
No, how about now?
I'm not going to shut up.
Because I'm 54 and my kids are grown up and I don't have to.
And now I've got the internet.
So be quiet!
Now, what's the answer?
Why does Moscow, Moscow, which I didn't even want to go to, I mean, I had no idea what Moscow, I'd never been there before.
I had no interest in going there, ever.
And the main reason I went there was because they told me I couldn't go.
Oh, well, I think I can!
Because I don't know who you are.
You're not my dad.
Back off!
I'm going to Moscow.
Anyway, so I went there, and the first thing I noticed was, and I didn't like the system, and I believe in free speech, and I'm American, and I want to live in America.
But it is so much prettier than any city we have.
It didn't make me love Russia or love Putin.
It made me really mad at the people around my country.
Why are you putting up all these ugly glass buildings everywhere?
No one likes those.
There's no privacy in them.
One of the beauties of being in solitude in the woods is there's privacy.
We have a fishing camp in our family purchased for $70,000.
Just for the record, it's one mile of trout stream.
Very productive trout stream, by the way.
We've never managed it in any way through native wild trout.
And my kids are always like, no one's ever been on the property except us.
That's it.
It's 25 minutes from my house.
It's my favorite place in the world.
In fact, my backdrop for our show that we're doing is video shot at our fishing camp because it's so beautiful.
$70,000.
That's rural America.
And my son always goes, you know, we could fish naked.
We can't because the mosquitoes and the black flies.
We actually fish like Bedouin, you know, totally covered up.
But whatever, you could because there's no one there.
So in privacy, we have freedom.
That's why we have doors on the bedroom.
Not because we're ashamed of what we're doing in the bedroom, but because that's a prerequisite for freedom is privacy.
Anything that denies us privacy is an attack on our spirit and on our humanity.
In a glass building, An open floor plan where everyone works in a cube is an assault on my spirit and dignity as a human being.
And nobody says that.
You're a freak!
You're a weird theory.
They're not weird theories.
They're the most obvious observations a man could make.
And that's all I want to say, is we don't have to live like this.
And we shouldn't live like this.
We should refuse to live like this.
You cannot dehumanize me.
You can't tell me what to say or think.
You can't force me to live in a way that I wouldn't force my dogs to live.
We've bed-trained them, by the way, so they're right there, but whatever.
That's all I'm saying.
And if you denounce me as a tool of Putin, I don't care.
Because I don't care about you and your dumb opinions.
Adults are talking.
That's it.
Thank you.
Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organization.
Societies are defined by what they will not permit.
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