Tucker Carlson and Sen. Mike Lee dissect the VP debate, where J.D. Vance’s sharp rebuttals exposed Tim Walz’s lies—like his altered abortion law claims—and moderators’ bias, while Lee slams Walz’s 2020 Minneapolis riot failures and Biden’s border chaos, including CBP One’s migrant surges. They warn of Democratic power grabs—court-packing, filibuster abolition, and Puerto Rico statehood—to lock in one-party rule, calling it treasonous. Lee also attacks federal land hoarding (30% of U.S. territory) as eco-theater fueling wildfires and inflation, while Kamala Harris’ housing plan risks $25K/unit price hikes amid $1T debt service. With gold at $2,600/oz and 32% grocery inflation, Lee ties the crisis to progressive governance, but sees Trump-Vance as a chance to reclaim constitutional limits before America’s dollar collapses. [Automatically generated summary]
So our longtime producer Justin Wells and a team have been embedded, with no publicity at all, with Donald Trump on the campaign trail for months.
They're the only crew capturing what is going on on the campaign, in real time, intimately.
They're with Trump as he campaigns for the presidency across the country, and they've shot some amazing footage.
It shows you what it's really like in there.
So if you're a member, you will soon be able to get this docuseries covering the historic campaign, the fall of Joe Biden, never-before-seen footage from the assassination attempt at the Butler Township, Pennsylvania, Trump rally, and a lot more.
It's going to pull back the curtain completely.
They are embedded inside the campaign.
I can't wait to see it personally.
But to get it first, go to TuckerCarlson.com, become a member of the greatest television event of the year.
And he was doing this against an unarmed opponent, somebody who seemed dangerously ill-equipped for the task, and I can't say enough great things about J.D. Vance's performance and enough bad things about Tim Walsh's.
Now, this is a man who was competing.
This was a three-on-one debate, just as the debate hosted by ABC a few weeks ago was three-on-one against Donald Trump.
This was similarly aligned against J.D. Vance, and yet he...
I mean, I would have lost it about 15 different times, particularly, and without focusing on it, but the moderators, I really hope this is the last time in American history that CBS, which I assume will be bankrupt by the next election anyway, but that any so-called news organization like this has any role in a debate.
I thought they, I mean, I can't imagine their bosses can't see that.
That was not a good ad for CBS. And then, in the commercial break, they start playing some advertisement for a show that is itself an advertisement of a Kentonji Brown Jackson or whatever, however she's pronouncing her name, on the Supreme Court, that was a tongue bath.
There are a lot of good people who are friends with NASCAR team owners, but saying I'm good friends with mass shooters, that doesn't really have the same vibe.
He came across as that guy in the Gary Larson Farside cartoon who, while talking to a kangaroo, says, you may be a kangaroo, but I know a few things about marsupials myself.
Everything came across as wrong, just a little bit off.
I don't know whether he had back surgery recently or what, but this was off.
Look, under Minnesota law, before Tim Walz changed it with legislation he signed into law as governor, it provided protection.
Standards of medical care that had to be given to a baby born alive following a botched abortion.
And Tim Walz signed another bill into law saying that's no longer the law, just removing those protections altogether.
And it replaced them with something.
What Walz was relying on there was language providing some level of care.
I think they actually used the word care almost unmodified.
Some people have characterized that, I think, fairly by saying that means that in that circumstance they can provide the equivalent of hospice care for an unwanted baby.
That's really grim.
And that's not going to wear well, especially when people realize that he was mischaracterizing his own record.
He's either unaware of the content of a bill he signed into law, or he's lying about it.
And so he expected to be able to go on in this friendly environment of these co-opted CBS moderators and say something that just wasn't true and expect that nobody would catch him on it, nobody would call him on it.
Well, we've got a different world today.
Sure, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC used to control the entirety, but today we've got...
The Tucker Carlson show.
And we've got X. And we've got a few other channels through which people can communicate actual information.
And the current administration, of which this would be the successor in interest, is itself dancing a very, very delicate dance with regard to Israel.
On the one hand, they want to be seen as...
Pro-Israel.
On the other hand, they're constantly telling Israel, cease fire.
Somebody attacks them.
Oh, cease fire.
You gotta stop defending yourself.
That's very, very strange.
And you're right.
They're doing this as a reaction to a radical element within their own base that is increasingly not only anti-Israel or Israel-skeptical, but anti-Semitic.
The salient fact of Tim Walsh's career, which is that he presided over the destruction of a state in its biggest city, Minneapolis, on Memorial Day 2020. And that his wife enjoyed it.
Opened the windows of her home so that they could marinate in the smell of burning rubber from overturned police cars and the lawlessness that was going on.
She apparently loved this.
Now, this is...
This is something you sometimes associate with leftists.
Marxists like the idea of people who consider themselves oppressed throwing off the established order of things and bringing about chaos and violence.
But rarely do they actually say it in those terms.
It didn't come up because they were too busy holding J.D. Vance to account for why Republicans are to blame because, obviously, Republicans caused climate change and climate change caused hurricanes, including the hurricane that Americans have been dealing with for the last few days, especially in states like Florida and North Carolina.
And they didn't want to have to...
Hold Democrats to account for their handling of those things, so naturally they blame it on climate change and climate change on rebuilding.
We're talking about many, many tens of trillions of dollars that will have to be...
Pumped into the economy, out of the economy, out of otherwise productive uses into non-productive or less productive uses so that they can sort of remake the economy.
It was a picture of some baths constructed during the height of the Roman Empire in a coastal city somewhere in Europe.
And it pointed out that these baths are exactly at sea level as they have been for 2,000 years.
And they have not changed, even as our...
Carbon emissions have, of course, changed significantly.
The sea level there and elsewhere has not changed.
So this is a tall order that they're asking us to carry.
They're asking us to impoverish ourselves, to rely on less efficient, less stable sources of electric power and means of powering our vehicles and things like that without any proof.
They're asking us, as it were, to accept an almost religious...
Where we're sitting right now was covered by a mile of ice at a time when this continent had hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people living on it.
I mean, this was a heavily populated continent during the last ice age.
And there were no, that we know of, there was no...
Carbon emission?
I mean, from people?
I mean, none of this makes any...
And then it warms sufficiently that all that ice melted.
And if you're telling me that bulldozing forests to build solar farms is good for the environment, cutting off the top of mountains to build windmills is green.
You know, I guess there's nothing I won't believe if I accept that.
Bulldozing trees, there's nothing virtuous about that at all.
One of our plans when we started TCN was to run great long-form content, documentaries and topics that other people were ignoring.
We have the best so far.
It's called Wine in the Sand, and it's by James O'Keefe, one of the last brave and honest journalists in this country.
How brave?
James O'Keefe embedded with the cartels as they moved migrants engaging in human trafficking at the largest scale in modern Let me ask you specifically one of the reasons I'm so grateful that you're here.
J.D. Vance, of course, is a senator.
Tim Walls is running with a former senator.
A lot of the discussion tonight.
There was a moment when Tim Walz described the so-called border bill, the immigration bill that died in the Congress as the toughest ever.
So here again, Tim Walsh is either lying, meaning he knows the truth and he's not stating it, or he's been deceived by somebody else and didn't bother to do his own homework and check it up.
In the first place, the reason we have a crisis along the southern border has everything to do with the fact that the current administration refuses to enforce laws as they exist on the books already.
The Biden-Harris team has done a phenomenal job at selling a lie.
The lie is that...
We really wanted to fix the border crisis.
We just couldn't.
So we had to have changes in law in order for us to enforce the border.
Republicans refused to go along with that.
So, sorry, we can't do anything.
All of that is a lie.
Existing law allows them to stop the problem.
They don't want to do it.
So they came up with this bill.
Now, this bill was negotiated by two or three people in the Senate.
Only one of whom is a Republican.
My friend and colleague, James Lankford, a great senator from Oklahoma.
I really do like James Lankford a lot.
I disagree with him on this bill.
But Mitch McConnell assigned him to negotiate that bill with Democrats.
And at the time he did that, a lot of us told him, look, the best thing you could do with this bill is find a way to negotiate something that says, we want to tie Joe Biden's hands.
The Democrats really wanted funding for Ukraine?
A lot of Republicans, like myself, didn't want to do that.
Republicans really wanted a secure border, so the idea was maybe we can force them to secure the border by tying Joe Biden's hands so he can't just continue to have the open borders immigration policy.
A couple months go by, Lankford puts a lot of time into it, but what he negotiates doesn't tie Biden's hands, and if anything, it would make it a lot worse.
Now, there are some good provisions in there, but there are a lot of provisions that, especially in the hands of of a Biden-Harris administration would have made things a lot worse.
Like the fact that they would have to under Section 244B of the bill.
There's some indication they'd have to let in about 1,400 people every single day.
Remember Jay Johnson, who served in the Obama administration in the Department of Homeland Security, had said that we reach crisis levels at 400 migrants per day.
This would have systematized it as high as $1,400 per day.
So this is one of the many examples within this bill.
And then we've also got this Section 3402 within the bill that would have provided billions of dollars, what was it, $2.3 billion to this global initiative to facilitate migration.
But all of the countries that we are aware of have some kinds of restrictions like these.
Why would the United States abandon those?
And the truth is, our law doesn't do that.
It's just President Biden has been manipulating our system of law to find ways to refuse to enforce it.
So that was the biggest flaw in this border security bill.
Number one, it presupposed that we needed a bill, which we didn't have to have one.
It would have been nice to have one that forces hands.
But number two, it didn't do what we as Republicans were demanding.
Now, I don't know why that didn't happen, whether Mitch McConnell didn't specify that to James Lankford as the minimum negotiating standard.
I wasn't in the room when they had all those conversations.
But I do think this is a problem.
I think somehow the message got through to Senator Lankford from Mitch McConnell, don't worry about forcing Joe Biden's hands, because that's what we got out of this bill.
Knowing Mitch McConnell, I doubt he would have thought, yeah, go and do all those things.
Maybe he didn't realize the extent to which it would have this effect.
I read Mitch McConnell's position in this circumstance as being focused much more on, let's just do whatever we've got to do to fund Ukraine, to send more money to Ukraine.
Some of my colleagues will actually get a little teary-eyed when speaking of Ukraine, as if they were talking about their...
Their beloved aged sibling who's going through something awful.
Now, look, I understand.
Ukraine's gone through some horrible things.
And I'm deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Ukrainian people.
Nonetheless, I think what's motivating this is something much more sinister.
Whether people realize it or not, those who have gotten enmeshed in this have become part of the military-industrial complex.
And guaranteeing that no matter what, we can...
Pump a whole lot of money into that.
Let me explain what I mean there.
You can sometimes tell what people are thinking by what they say when they're defending something.
A lot of my colleagues, especially on the Republican side, when defending their votes to send, what is it now, close to $200 billion to Ukraine for a war that is not ours, will say things like this.
A lot of this money you see is actually going to go into the U.S. job market.
It's going to fund...
The arms companies, the people who are building the arms being purchased by Ukraine to create American jobs here.
That is really unsettling.
I find that unsatisfactory and I find it morally repugnant that we would justify prolonging both the duration and magnifying the severity of somebody else's war half a world away with a nuclear armed power.
And also, I mean, everyone laments the decline of American manufacturing, but you don't want to live in a country whose only manufacturing center is weapons.
Obviously, we're not at or anywhere near the point where our only manufacturing sector is weapons.
I don't want to go anywhere near the point where we're funding somebody else's war, making it longer, making it more severe, against a nuclear-owned power, no less, the one that hates us, just on the basis that, well, it'll create some American jobs.
I wonder how people like Mitch McConnell or your colleagues or anybody in the media, the whole media is this way, Get away with pretending to be the defenders of the Ukrainian people when they have abetted the slaughter of the Ukrainian people, an entire generation, hundreds of thousands of people, and then...
You know, Zelensky, their guy, has just changed the law in Ukraine so foreign entities can buy Ukrainian farmland.
So they're going to lose their population and their land.
There will be no recognizable Ukraine in 10 years thanks to these people.
Spending money to the tune of now close to $200 billion in just a couple of years.
We took peace off the table for them.
There really were peaceful off-ramps for this thing in the earlier months of the war, particularly during the first year of this particular war in 2022. Those were taken off the table as we started dumping all this money on them.
And so, yeah, if I were from Ukraine, I would deeply resent the U.S. government.
Or any of the countries that border Ukraine, and they'll tell you that all the luxury car dealerships have sold out.
I mean, there are a lot of rich people who fled Ukraine.
And by the way, I'm not even judging them.
I'm just saying that's a fact, whereas people who couldn't afford to run away and go buy a Bentley in Dubai have been killed in the war that we created.
A lot of foreign aid is about poor people in rich countries being forced to give money to rich people in poor countries.
That's certainly happening here.
And that's something that I appreciate, by the way, about J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance, you know, it's somewhat uncommon for a new senator to come in and display as much confidence, respect for colleagues, respect for the system and the process.
And complete fearlessness, as he had from J.D. Vance.
But he did it all in a way that was unassuming, that was unoffensive, that was always respectful to members.
But talking about Ukraine makes me remember this aspect of J.D. Vance.
He came into the Senate at the beginning of 2023. Brand new senator.
He already was one of the few people who was willing to be bold in asking questions that needed to be asked about Ukraine.
He's shown that consistently through the entire thing.
And as recently as just a few months ago, he and I and a small handful of others stayed up all night on the Senate floor, pushing back on the Ukraine supplemental.
We had a lot of people, including members of our own party and the other party.
Swore at us and were unhappy with us for that.
But J.D. Vance then, as you saw tonight, was respectful back to them, didn't allow it to affect his mood, and just kept right on going.
That's the kind of vice president we're going to have.
That's why I was a little shocked when Lindsey Graham went out of his way to savagely attack J.D. Vance to Trump back in July, the day before Trump was making this decision.
People were very cruel about Vance.
Off the record, of course, no one in public, but I know for a fact that they did it.
I haven't heard him speak that way of J.D. in private.
But let's assume that he or others were in fact saying those things about him.
There are those who feel so passionately about the Ukraine issue that some of them might take such great offense to someone like J.D. coming along and asking questions, saying, should we really be doing this?
And J.D. comes at this from the vantage point of somebody who speaks with a fair amount of experience.
You know, enlisted in the Marines.
He went to school on the GI Bill.
And he's got a really good head on his shoulders.
And so a lot of people probably resent him from that.
And if some of my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle were saying things like that, I suspect Ukraine had a lot to do with it.
But what I love about J.D. is that even after someone publicly mistreats him, and I've seen some of our colleagues, including some of our Republican colleagues, do that.
The next day, J.D. Vance will be sitting next to them at lunch, smiling, laughing, not necessarily pretending that the whole thing didn't happen, so much as showing that...
They're not going to get under his skin.
He's not going to let them influence his own behavior.
So there's an application called the CBP One App, where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.
unidentified
That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for 10 years.
It was masterful by J.D. First of all, kudos to CBS. For allowing Governor Walz to quote Matthew 2540 without interrupting him and saying, I'm sorry, that's an attempt at bringing in foreign disinformation campaigns.
I mean, I do think there ought to be a general rule if you're going to quote the New Testament.
Maybe you should acknowledge that some of your policies aren't exactly compatible with that, but setting that aside for a minute, I love JD's invocation of this problem with the CBP1 app.
To fix this problem.
And I've been calling this out for a long time.
JD encapsulated that much better, more concisely than I've ever been able to.
But they have developed this application that people can use on a smartphone, which all these migrants seem to have.
They can go on and just fill in their own biographical information.
That then serves as their de facto passport when they get here.
They can do whatever they want.
They're admitted into the country using that app.
And it's one of many examples of how this administration has actively nurtured, fostered, cultured this environment in which migrants come up by the millions.
We're talking at least 10 million people who have entered this country illegally since January of 2021. In the meantime, what we've done is we've enriched international drug cartels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year.
We've also brought in enough fentanyl, potentially to kill many tens of millions of Americans.
And it's been trafficked in on the backs of women and children, many of whom are being sex trafficked.
So this is what we have to thank the Biden-Harris administration for.
And through this process of social promotion and the teachers' unions facilitating the social promotion, they paper over it and they make it look like everything's okay when we know it's not.
This is before we even get to the more dire...
Human cause of the people who have been raped, who have been murdered, who have suffered through home invasion robberies, been assaulted and battered as a result of people coming into this country who didn't belong here to begin with.
Given that there's zero support that I can detect in polls for these immigration policies, which are permanent, change the country forever, how is democracy functioning if something this central to a nation's identity, who lives in the country?
Is taking place without any input at all from the citizens who already live here?
taking place not only without their meaningful input, but also setting things up so that non-citizens can and will vote in elections.
That's why I've spent months, the last few months, trying to push the SAVE Act, trying to attach it to the spending bill.
The SAVE Act would make it so that you can't vote in a federal election without showing some type of proof that you are a U.S. citizen and therefore eligible to vote.
If it doesn't happen, then we're banning something that doesn't happen, but it's already illegal.
Yeah, it's already illegal, but there are all sorts of things that are already illegal.
That are too easy to carry out, and that's why you need to have some penalties attached to it, which is what the SAVE Act does.
It would require the states to ask for some type of proof of immigration status and require the states to cull through their voter registration files to remove non-citizens periodically, and then it imposes a criminal penalty for anyone who knowingly gives a ballot or a voter registration to a non-citizen.
So, here again, what we've got are laws that have been easy to circumvent.
This would have fixed it, and they said it's not necessary because they don't vote because they can't vote.
Only every day, Tucker, it becomes more and more apparent that people are getting onto the voter registration files, being non-citizens, because of the Supreme Court's interpretation of the National Voter Registration Act, where they said the states cannot ask for proof of citizenship.
And in all 50 states now, you can apply for and get a driver's license as a non-citizen.
And when you do that, if you fill out the NVRA part of the form, you check a box and sign your name, then you are a registered voter, even though you're a non-citizen.
And so, this is troubling.
Meanwhile, you've got the American people who are being ignored.
Was to make it easy to fill out a driver's license application and simultaneously register to vote.
The problem is it makes it way too easier.
We've now got 30 million plus non-citizens in this country.
And it's so easy to apply for a driver's license today.
You add to that the Supreme Court's bad ruling, a bad interpretation of the NVRA, saying the states can't ask for voter ID, and you've got a problem.
You add all of that to this major overhaul of immigration policy, undertaken without the consent of the American people, contrary to their will, where the administration is basically just effectively rewriting immigration law by refusing to enforce vast swaths of it.
I mean, how could a Republican ever get elected if you've got a brand new electorate brought in by the Democratic Party, All kinds of free things that American citizens don't get made dependent on that party for its life.
It can't be both revolutionary and institutional, but they managed to do it.
I think the Democrats, whether they realize the PRA angle or not by name, I think that's what they're trying to do here.
Think about what they do.
So they brought in 10 million plus non-citizens.
they've then shipped them strategically to different parts of the country.
Many of those will end up being able to vote since the Save Act, much to my dismay, wasn't attached to this spending bill.
If that happens, they may well seize control of things they wouldn't have otherwise controlled.
I hope it won't happen, but it could.
Once they're in, if Democrats have a clean sweep, meaning they get the White House, they keep the Senate, they take back the House of Representatives.
Kamala Harris has made known her agenda to nuke the filibuster in the Senate.
And with Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin out of the picture, it'll be easier for them to do that if they've got the majority.
Once that happens, they will pack the Supreme Court.
They will pass voter registration and voter reform bills that will take a lot of the discretion to draw legislative districts away from state legislatures.
They'll add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states and make a couple of other changes, including to our campaign finance laws, that together will make an indefinite, perpetual democratic majority in the United States Congress our new reality.
They'll be the pre-party, but for the United States.
Look, their conception of democracy is not actually about citizen input.
It's about something else.
It's about achieving the size, scope, reach, and power of government in general, and the federal government in particular.
It's about enhancing their ability to carry out their radical, progressive Marxist objectives.
And that's what they want to do.
They see the rest of us as illegitimate and as obstacles to that task, and therefore people who are deserving of being canceled, of having our votes diluted and not counted.
But it is our duty as citizens of this great republic to sound the voice of alarm when we see a risk of that happening, and I certainly see that risk here.
Look, these really are perilous times.
And we can't afford any longer to sugarcoat what it is that they're doing.
And what they're doing is really, really dangerous.
So you've seen all kinds of indicators pop up in media outlets that exist.
Really for the people who run the Democratic Party, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, specifically, and others, have run pieces recently saying the Constitution is an impediment to progress.
Because look, first and foremost, if you view the ultimate objective as being democracy, which I don't think they do, but let's just go with me on this.
If they view the ultimate objective as just democracy, pure democracy, as pure as we can get it, then the Constitution is itself an impediment to that.
The Constitution is designed to be counter-democratic in its operation.
It's designed to be an intermediating filter of sorts between pure democracy and the rights of the people.
In fact, that's the only reason you have a Constitution, is to limit the power of government so that it doesn't become abusive of the rights of the minority.
That's the Constitution and its purpose in a nutshell.
So, if the Democrats love this idea of pure unrestrained democracy so much, I don't believe that's really accurately explaining what they want, but if that were what they want, then it would make sense for them to try to trample on it.
But of course, what they want is something much more sinister than that.
They want consolidation of the power of government, whereas the Constitution requires distribution of power.
It requires it to be...
Diffused so that no one person or group of people gets too powerful.
And so as a result of all that, you see them being doubly contemptuous of the Constitution.
The Constitution protects the rights of the minority, including heretics like you and me who dare to challenge the assumptions of the governing woke elite.
And the Constitution is also a threat to their ability to carry out their Marxist-inspired, far-left, radical progressivism.
Well, I'm seeing some alarming trends in this regard.
Democrats are much more forceful about it, much more upfront.
Sometimes you can feel from some Republicans feeling frustrated about particular provisions, but Republicans will at least always pay lip service to it, and I think with some degrees of sincerity.
What I'm seeing now for the first time, you know, I've been in the Senate now for 13 and a half years.
When I first got to the Senate, nobody in elected office would dare to be caught dead saying something that could be interpreted as contemptuous toward the Constitution.
And yet now you routinely hear members of Congress, Democrats, referring to features of the Constitution as incredibly problematic, like, for example, the Electoral College.
They hate the Electoral College.
They absolutely despise it.
And they will refer derisively to the Senate as a non-representative, as a sort of disenfranchising form of inequality.
Because the whole point of the Senate is that the Senate has to involve equal representation among the states.
Even if you amend it to say that each state will have a different number than two senators, Article 5 of the Constitution, which governs the amendment process, says that there's one type of amendment that is presumptively, preemptively unconstitutional.
You can't change the principle of equal representation.
They hate that.
Why?
Well, because a lot of their voters are focused in a smaller handful of states.
Heavily populated urban centers, and they think it's profoundly unfair that a smaller state like Utah or Maine will get two votes, while a heavily populated state like California or New York will have only two votes in the Senate.
I mean, they could amend the Constitution, but like I say, Article 5 makes that the one type of constitutional amendment.
That is unconstitutional.
I had this conversation with Justice Scalia once, who posited to me that maybe they could change it, but it would require two successive amendments to the Constitution.
First, you'd have to amend out the part that says that you can't change this, and then you'd have to actually change it.
Regardless, amending the Constitution to undo the Electoral College or to change equal representation in the Senate It's something that is nowhere near having the kind of support you would need right now to change it.
But I do worry, now that you've got one major political party that is openly contemptuous of at least those two provisions of the Constitution and becoming more contemptuous every day of the First Amendment, including not only the freedom of speech protections but also the freedom of religion protections, I worry that a chill wind blows in America when you've got a major political party that is still...
Not only possible, Tucker, but if they get the majority in the House and keep the majority in the Senate and they get the White House, they will do it.
And they will do it within the first hundred days they're in office.
That should scare every American.
If there's anyone within the sound of my voice who is thinking about voting for...
They'll say democracy because they think that answers everything.
They'll say climate change or they'll say racism.
A lot of them will say things like, well, we've got more circuit courts of appeals now, so we've got to increase it to reflect that.
That's nonsense.
There's not a lack of human resources among the nine justices on the court.
That's not an issue.
They just want to increase the number of justices for one simple reason, because they don't like the fact that there is a court now controlled by a majority that's content with reading the Constitution based on what it says, rather than on the basis of what progressive...
Yes, but they are radicals and they're unapologetic about it.
If they have the opportunity, meaning if they run the clean sweep where they control all three levers within the two political branches, they will do it.
Well, it wouldn't be all that hard for him to do it, and that's one of the reasons why I've been so worried about this election and making sure that it's actual U.S. citizens who are voting, is because this election really is consequential, just given how different the two competing visions of these two political parties happens to be.
We saw that on display tonight in this debate in great detail.
I mean, I would ask...
You have the same question.
Do you think that we saw a contrasting vision from the two parties?
Because in my view, tonight we saw a greater contrast between these two candidates than we've seen in a long time.
And just the level of thinking, I mean, really, it's a cliche, but it's true.
It really was three against one, and the one outshone the three with ease.
Just on something as small as that, well, it's not small, but as specifically as the housing crisis, the increase in the cost of housing in the United States.
And J.D. Vance makes this very obvious point that, you know, more people means higher costs because there's this thing called supply and demand.
If more people want something, it's price rises, right?
You have a limited supply, a growing demand.
I mean, it's just like the most, it's first grade math.
And Tim Walz goes, well, You know, can you find a study that shows that?
And then JD says, well, actually, I think the Fed just did a study the other day that shows that in great detail, but you don't need to point to a study.
And especially when they ask for it, and it's already been provided by the Federal Reserve Bank, which Democrats generally love, by the way.
I love that entire exchange.
I loved how J.D. handled it.
It was a great example of what we've been describing, of J.D. being the master of the mood of the debate, the master of reason.
And of dispassionate but persuasive reasoning.
I thought it was fantastic.
I also love the fact that he began his answer there by plugging a proposal that I've introduced called the Houses Act.
And the Houses Act would require, under certain circumstances, for the federal government to sell surplus federal land for the purpose of building single-family affordable housing.
And they've been pushing this for 10 years on this horrible program called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Program, where they're trying to make the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development this sort of master planner, master zoning commission for the entire country.
And giving benefits to local government entities that embrace their high-density zoning plans and punishing those who won't.
I mean, you could actually solve these problems in a day if you just drew up a list of, and I can give you the zip codes if you want, but let's just say Martha's Vineyard, Aspen, Bethesda, Maryland, Newton, Massachusetts.
Their family policy is something rather the opposite of a pro-family policy, you might say.
Tim Walls then interjects by saying, well, but in some places there's not all that much federal land.
Okay, fair enough.
But in a lot of states, there is a lot of federal land.
In fact, some of the greatest housing prices that you might find in the United States can be found in the western United States, where the federal government owns most of the land.
Federal government owns almost 70% of the land in my state.
And if you took just a tiny fraction of that, we're talking like half of 1% of the federal land in my state, and used it for the Houses Act housing plan.
You could, in a fairly short period of time, roughly double the supply of single-family affordable homes just by adopting that legislation.
So they really don't like it.
And they'll have you believe that all federal land...
Oh, and then he also threw in this quip about, oh, are you going to be building houses in the same place on the national parks where you're drilling for oil?
Now, there's not a property owner on planet Earth who can afford to own that much land, especially in a developed country like ours, and let it sit fallow.
But they get away with it because they don't have to pay taxes on it.
And that further impoverishes states in the West, like mine, where the federal government owns most of the land, because they don't...
The parks are also a tiny, tiny fragment, a tiny segment of a vast empire.
You know, the federal government owns close to 30% of the total land mass of the United States.
People east of Colorado are hardly aware of that because the federal government in most cases owns a percentage of land that can be reckoned at the low single digits in those states.
That's right, but you don't even have to go to the PCBs, which you'll see something like that on a military installation, before seeing that the federal government's a poor steward.
Just look at what they do to unpopulated, unused federal land.
They mismanage it to the point that they allow fuel buildup, meaning trees, brush to become overgrown.
They refuse to allow any kind of timber harvesting or...
Or for you to cut sort of a firewall swath in the middle of it.
They refuse to allow the locals to treat for bark beetle infestation, for example.
Then forest fires happen.
The forest fire destroys the air quality.
It destroys the watershed.
And it destroys the interest of adjacent landowners.
They love the idea of something as fundamental as land being managed by distant bureaucrats, not elected by the people, utterly unaccountable to the people, 2,000 miles away from the people, who then become more and more dependent.
On the federal government for that reason.
This stuff has been talked about.
It's been warned of since the time of the Constitutional Convention.
In fact, on September 3rd, 1787, it was raised at the Constitutional Convention in exchange between Elbridge Gerry and Gubernur Morris.
They talked about this risk of this power.
What if we give the federal government all this power over these federal lands?
They could use it to manipulate the states into an undue obedience to the general government.
We've been ignoring those risks for a long time.
It's one of the reasons why we need reforms like the Houses Act.
And rest assured, Tucker, that because Kamala is going to be handing out $25,000 checks for anyone who gains access to any of that housing, that the cost of housing will end up going up by exactly $25,000.
Well, look, in order to have more money, because we're the world's reserve currency, it's been fairly easy for them to effectively print money.
Now, there's a little more complicated than that.
They have to go through a treasury auction process.
People buy the bonds.
Then we print more money.
But the problem is, as we get more and more in debt...
And as we have to pay, you know, just a few years ago we were paying $300, $350 billion a year in interest.
It's mushroomed in the last couple of years as we've been spending so much more money.
Sooner or later you get to the point where you can't issue enough bonds to keep up with that.
Not without paying much, much higher yield rates on your bonds.
And that's where the money really is going to run out.
And that's where we could, in very short order, see the US dollar's status as the world's reserve currency dropping into the Atlantic Ocean, never to be seen again in our lifetimes.
Well, then we, as a people, endure one of the single greatest upheavals that our country has ever known.
And one of the greatest economic upheavals that any group of people could go through.
Because when you've been used to the blessings, the benefits associated with having the world's reserve currency be your country's currency, all kinds of things happen.
And it becomes harder and harder for people to gain access to money they need to start a business or start a family or do whatever they need.
And not only that, Tucker, it's not just a vindication for those within the Republican Party who are doubters.
But I think there are a lot of people who are going to be pulled onto the Trump-Vance ticket, who are going to vote for President Trump because they saw the debate tonight.
I think it was that powerful.
I think he has the ability to move people.
Look, remember his background.
And what he's been through.
He's lived through circumstances made worse by federal policies, made by people in Washington, D.C. who convinced themselves and their constituents that they were making the world a better place by making a small handful of people in Washington, D.C. more powerful.
He's experienced the pain that that can cause.
And he's a living example of somebody who has overcome those things but has overcome them without forgetting from whence he came.
Without forgetting what it is that helped him overcome some difficult circumstances in his life.
It's those people who he has in mind.
It's those people who animated him in the first instance to run for the United States Senate and then to fight like crazy once he got there for what he sincerely and correctly believes would benefit them.
And that's a government that's more accountable to its people and more accountable.
They're based on core principles embedded in our Constitution.
Look, in Washington, D.C., you see a lot of things.
That have gone wrong.
The closer you get to that, the less attractive it is.
You see everything, warts and all.
As a young man, as a teenager, I was a Republican.
I served a two-year mission from my church along the U.S.-Mexico border.
And it was during that time period, even though politics aren't relevant to missionary service, I saw and experienced things there that turned me from a Republican into a conservative.
And it's a lot of the same things that J.D. Vance has experienced and that have caused him to come out a deep skeptic of the federal government.
Because I saw federal policies that were locking families into poverty for generations.
Federal policies that were causing people to make rational decisions that were harmful to their families in order to continue in that cycle of poverty, perpetuated by that.
The longer I've served in the Senate, the more that I've seen Washington, D.C. is perpetuating the very problems that the Constitution was designed to protect us against.
They all involve the dangerous accumulation of power in the hands of the few.
We've seen that power taken away from the people in two steps, from the people at the state and local level moved to Washington.
Within Washington, Washington.
From the people's elected lawmakers to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who now make most of our laws.
100,000 pages a year, and we can't vote those people out.
J.D. Vance sees in them, sees in that corrupt system, what I see in it and what has caused me to be more skeptical of Washington, D.C. by the day, which is that the American people are great.
They are strong, and they are different than their government, and their government is different from the government.
I can't speak for anyone else because I can't get into their head.
But I will say this, Tucker.
I understand how a lot of people get drawn into the impetuous vortex of big government and of consolidated power.
Because we've all been raised, every American, any American who's alive today has been raised entirely in an environment in which the primary and secondary education establishment, the higher education establishment, increasingly most of corporate America.
The news media establishment and the entertainment media establishment have all bought into the progressive vision.
And the progressive vision is itself fundamentally at odds with the Constitution.
The progressive vision is all about concentration of power, giving it to so-called experts, even at the expense of democratic input from the people.
But the more they catch the vision, Of what's gone wrong.
And the fact that what's gone wrong is inexorably tied to our deviation from that founding document, a document that I tend to believe was written by wise men raised up by God to that very purpose, even the U.S. Constitution.
I think more people are seeing that every day.
And whether they know it as a constitutional doctrine or not, they know something is dangerously wrong in Washington because by their fruits you shall know them.
And the fruits of Washington, D.C. are such that the American people are...
Poorer.
They are less free than they have ever been because they're living under the oppressive yoke of a government that makes laws with impunity in a way that would make King George III blush.
By the way, we have a documentary series that starts right now tonight.
There are going to be six episodes total.
The first one is now available.
It's on TCN. It's called Art of the Surge.
We've had someone embedded with the Trump campaign, a bunch of people embedded with the Trump campaign, and they've got a ton of amazing footage that you will see nowhere else.