Ken Paxton accuses George Soros of bankrolling progressive Texas DAs—who he claims enable cartel trafficking profits (billions from drugs, human smuggling, and weapons like surface-to-air missiles)—while blaming Biden’s open-border policies for destabilizing the U.S., including corrupting officials and threatening air travel. He slams Fox News’ blacklisting after clashing with Rove and George P. Bush, vows to challenge Sen. Cornyn in 2024, and warns California’s $25M legal fund will block deportations under a Democratic AG. Paxton also details Texas’s $1.4B Meta settlement for facial recognition abuses, lawsuits against Google’s ad monopoly (97% market share), and Pfizer’s vaccine misrepresentations, arguing state action is the only check on corporate power—while dismissing critics as out-of-touch elites ignoring middle-class struggles like $120K-earners facing inflation and crime. His fight, he insists, is about restoring accountability before tech and politics erode American values entirely. [Automatically generated summary]
So, the most pressing problem, I think it's fair to say, as an outsider in Texas is immigration.
It's totally changed your state in every way.
Do you expect that the new administration and the executive orders in the first couple of days are going to have a material effect, a noticeable effect?
I know they are, just because I saw what happened four years ago, or eight years ago, when Trump came into office.
I mean, I went through, I've been in politics since Bush was in office.
And I've seen how Republicans and Democrats have dealt with immigration.
They have not dealt with it effectively because they have not enforced federal law.
Trump was the first president to use the force of our federal laws, which are good and designed to protect us, whether it was Romania, Mexico, or whether it was Title 42, or it was stopping catch and release, basic common sense things like building a wall.
Those things work.
They just absolutely work.
And just what he's done in the first couple of days is significant and changing where Biden was taking us.
We as states don't have much authority to stop illegal immigration, but the federal government has that authority.
And by designating these cartels as terrorist organizations, now the military, our military force can be used against them rather than just using border patrol and leaving the states subject to the cartels' crimes.
I think the Biden administration has indirectly funded the cartels.
They have encouraged, by saying no deportations on day one of his administration, they've encouraged illegal immigration, and that's a profit center for the cartels.
You know, $8,000 to $12,000 a person.
If you just do the numbers on $14 million, that's a lot of money.
They're making billions every month.
And then they can go and use that money to buy weapons from Ukraine, which we're funding.
We're sending that over free.
So, indirectly, they're part of the whole process.
One, allowing the cartels to have access to our country and allowing them to make a profit.
And then to use that money to arm themselves in a significant way.
I find that DAs, they have more power in Texas than any elected official I've ever seen because they're not accountable to anybody.
If they commit a crime, no one can prosecute them.
If it's a state crime, they'd have to prosecute themselves.
And they can allow any crimes in their area.
And they can go after, in Texas, it is so easy to get an indictment.
You just walk in, you can tell the grand jury anything you want to.
You can lie.
Once you have the indictment, you've got it.
There's no getting out of it.
And so I think a lot of our politicians are afraid of their DAs.
Even if they're liberal Democrats.
But if we don't get control of this in our state, in other states, and give somebody like the Attorney General, I'm not going to be there forever, give that authority so that there's another way to prosecute when the Soros DAs, and Soros has figured it out, but the Republicans have not.
I'm sorry to be so naive but I grew up in this country and we didn't have things like this that I was aware of in 1985. Do you think that members of the Texas legislature are afraid they'll be indicted if they push back against the DAs?
And he also, I believe, got control of our Court of Criminal Appeals, which is our highest court.
We have a bifurcated system in Texas.
We have the Texas Supreme Court, that's the final appeal on civil, and the Court of Criminal Appeals.
But no one knew who they were, and suddenly they strike down a law that directed me to prosecute voter fraud, and they took it away just by saying, oh, it's unconstitutional because you're in the executive branch, and separation of power says you can't be in court.
How insane is that?
So I've had to go run three, I'm trying to take that court back, but right now I can't even prosecute voter fraud, which opens us up to...
Unfair elections in Texas, which I was prosecuting plenty of voter fraud before that happened.
So that's what it doesn't take him that much money and controls our whole situation with crime and controls our judicial system, at least on the criminal side.
And we're sitting here letting it happen in Texas and other states.
Yeah, I think you got it right in your speech at the Bible Museum during the inauguration about humility and realizing your need for God's work in your life.
And without that, we all have a tendency to go down the wrong path.
100%, and you lie to yourself, oh, I'm doing this for the greater good.
You know, I have known people personally who've killed other human beings because they thought, or they convinced themselves, you know, this is actually for them.
So the whole point of market capitalism is consumer choice.
You have a choice between products and services.
And the competition between companies makes the goods and services better.
That's the core idea.
Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of monopolies out there.
Monopolies are not good for consumers.
They are not good for you.
And one of the places where there's effectively a monopoly is in wireless contracts.
But it's not a complete monopoly.
You're probably paying way too much to use your cell phone.
But now you have a choice.
You don't have to pay $100 a month just to get a free phone.
That's not a good deal.
There's a company called Pure Talk, which we use.
That has no inflated prices.
With a qualifying plan of just $45 a month, you can choose a free phone, an iPhone 14 or a Samsung Gallery.
Then you get unlimited talk, tax 25 gigs of data, which is enough for most people, a mobile hotspot, all for that low price.
And it's got the most dependable 5G network.
So you get your free iPhone 14 or Samsung Galaxy by visiting puretalk.com slash Tucker, and you switch to Pure Talk today.
America's wireless company, Pure Talk.
So can I ask you, I was reading in the final weeks before the election that the Biden administration was selling off portions of the materials for the border wall.
We had sued the Biden administration a couple of years ago.
And you know, these cases, these federal cases don't happen overnight.
It took us a couple of years.
We sued them and we said, Congress appropriated money for the building of the wall.
You are not building that wall.
You're actually selling off assets.
So we sued them.
We won that lawsuit, and in May, we got an injunction from a federal judge saying, you, DOJ, you, Biden administration, cannot sell any more assets off.
So then, I get a call from President Trump, you know, a month ago, and he said, they're selling assets off.
So, would you sue him?
And I said, well, I don't have to, if I've done it.
So, I already got an order.
So, we go back into court, we tell the judge, hey, they're selling off assets, we've been told they're selling off assets, we went into accounting, and before we got there, DOJ is calling us, begging us, hey, we're done.
We're not selling, we swear, we won't sell any more assets.
They didn't say they hadn't.
They said we won't sell any more.
So they signed an agreement and said they wouldn't sell any more.
But the judge, which we asked for, there's going to be an accounting and there's potential sanctions if they lied and they followed, they did not follow that order.
We don't know that yet.
We're going to know that soon now that DOJ is switching.
We're going to know that soon.
I truly believe they're selling off assets in violation, not only of federal law.
But in violation of a court order that we got in May saying, you can't sell off assets.
Because we were trying to protect those assets so that if Trump won, we would come back.
Because I knew Biden would never build that wall, even if he was instructed by Congress to do so.
So why not pass a law that says anyone, any elected official who opposes the building of a border wall is prohibited from putting a lock on the front door of his house?
So, I think about the Texas House and what's going on there.
What's gone on there for 16 years were a small group of Republicans for power align themselves in the House with the Democrats so that the Speaker is elected by mostly Democrats and a few Republicans.
They just did it again.
Dustin Burroughs just got elected by a minority of Republicans.
After he put the rules in place, That the caucus, the Republican caucus, would decide who the Speaker was.
And when he lost that vote in caucus, he walked out, cut a deal with the Democrats, and he just became Speaker of the Texas House.
That is for power.
That is for his own personal power.
And the Republicans that do that have traded getting good policy done, getting property tax done, school choice, protecting the border, not doing impeachments of guys that just got elected.
So, this goes back to George W. Bush appointed him to be a U.S. Supreme Court judge.
And when he did that, he authored an opinion that created this thing called Robin Hood, which takes from the wealthy school districts and gives to the poor, supposedly.
And what that did to our system was it created a mediocre school system because it's just socialism.
Instead of just letting the wealthy school districts make their schools however they want to, we've got to take their money away.
No, he's helped Zelensky, and that's pretty much it.
Okay, so what's the process?
I've never met anyone who likes John Cornyn, never met anyone who thought he's achieved anything, never met anyone who thinks he's smart, he's pompous, he's quite a self-righteous little guy.
So I think he's very unpopular with every person I've ever met in my life, and yet, all things being equal, he gets re-elected.
So I'll give you an example of what you were just saying.
Right after I beat George P. Bush, who he came out and endorsed, of course, and then he made disparaging comments about me being an embarrassment to Texas, and he made some comment about me being part of Russia propaganda.
Who's the more loyal American, you or John Cornyn?
Who's more focused on the fortunes of his own country and his own people, you or John Cornyn, who obviously doesn't care at all, didn't say anything as his own state was invaded, and lectures us endlessly.
It's a tool of the intel agencies lecturing us about Ukraine.
But you're the disloyal American?
It's actually, like, you shouldn't say things like that.
The crazy thing, we have a Texas Republican convention shortly after the election where I win by 38 points against George P. Bush, which is a pretty significant margin in a primary.
So we have the convention, there's 12,000 Republicans there.
He and his wife walk up on stage, and for 10 straight minutes, he doesn't say a word, he gets booed.
For the 20 minutes that he's speaking, he never adjusts his speech.
He gets booed the entire 20 minutes.
He gets booed 30 minutes straight.
I'm standing waiting to go on stage.
I walk away because I'm afraid of what I might say after he's said these things public to me.
I go up and get a standing ovation.
So there is the people of Texas know John Cornyn and I don't think he'll survive another primary.
So primary voters, if they're educated, will make good choices based on what you've actually done.
And that was always me.
With Dan Branch, we were in the House together for 10 years, and I moved over to the Senate for two while he was in the House.
And I said, don't listen to the rhetoric.
Look at the record.
We both have a record.
Go look at the record.
Compare them.
See if they're the same.
They're not.
He can say what he wants.
He's running on my record.
Look at his record.
And that works in primaries.
And the same thing with John Cornyn.
I bring out what he said about Trump and how disparaging he was to Trump in 2016 and just in those last elections saying he shouldn't run, he's not the right guy.
I mean, John's wrong about most everything.
There's very few things.
He tends to side with the swamp in Washington and he does what Karl Rove tells him to do.
So that doesn't work in Republican primaries, not in Texas.
And I know that from hosts of shows who have said, sorry, weak.
They will even, like, I will have a case.
They will, we will get, we will, Jesse will talk to my...
Communication.
They'll book me.
Then they'll cancel me.
Then they'll go try to find another AG. They'll call the Republicans and say, can we find another AG? Or they'll ask for somebody else in my office other than me.
Imagine, if I can just say, since I know these systems, I lived it.
Imagine you're the host of a show and you get a call saying the sitting Republican Attorney General of the second biggest state is not allowed on your air because of reasons we won't explain.
Because like Karl Rove, it's like a totally discredited buffoon, doesn't like the guy?
There was still one host that would sort of have me, and I was supposed to go on this show, and I had two different settings to go on, and both got canceled, and I was sold.
So I had friends that were called into the Speaker's office, Republican House members, and they were saying, look, we need you to vote for this impeachment.
They said, well, can you just show us some evidence?
Well, you have this three-hour hearing.
Well, there's no evidence there.
Can we see some evidence?
No, you're not getting any more.
Well, can we have a little more time to kind of figure this out?
We've only had like...
Three days.
We're going to vote on this in three days.
No, we're not giving you any more time.
What about, like, can we talk to the witnesses?
We don't even know who they are.
None of them were sworn in.
We don't even know who the witnesses against him are.
And they said, no, we're not going to let you do that.
And they said, well, why is it that we can't see the evidence?
Why is it that we can't see the witnesses?
Why is it that it has to be in three days over Memorial Weekend?
And they said, because if we give Ken more than three days, he'll win.
I'm convinced that the Biden administration went to the House, Texas House, with the Democrats and said, we want him to impeach.
And then Biden sent two lawyers from the Department of Justice to help the General Investigating Committee, which was five-member committee, three Republicans, two Democrats.
I mean, it's amazing the number of Republicans who are Republicans who are Mobilizing against Trump's nominees, particularly Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard.
He must be having...
I don't know this, but do you think Carl has a hand in any of that?
Some Republicans, who I know well, mobilizing against Bobby Kennedy, and they're saying, we're doing it because he's pro-choice, and, well, I'm vehemently, passionately pro-life.
I have always been, I will always be.
But these are all people who are themselves pro-choice, who supported plenty of pro-choice nominees, and it's not about that.
It's about the fear that Bobby Kennedy means it, that he's sincere.
And that he'll get something done.
And by getting done, it's like fighting the corruption that controls Washington.
So in September, we went across the country, coast to coast, 17 different cities on a nationwide live tour, and it was amazing.
We brought the entire staff with us, like we always do, because we've all worked together for so long and enjoy traveling together.
And one of our producers is a documentary filmmaker, and so he decided to make a documentary film about our trip, a full month across America with some of the most interesting people around.
We'll join us every single night on Gino and Russell Brand and Bobby Kennedy and J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, etc., etc.
We had the best time, and the fruit of that is a documentary called On the Road, the Tucker Carlson Live Tour, which is available right now on TCN. On the Road, Tucker Carlson Live Tour is hilarious.
I mean, I'm probably too fixated on this because I've lived in a Republican world in Washington for so long, but I think it's fair to keep a list of, like, the Republicans who are working against reform, who are working against Trump's best decisions, which are reform-minded decisions, like nominating Bobby and Tulsi.
We can, just like with this thing I told you about America, if we do the right things and we take care of the people in our state and we give them opportunity, we give them a good education, which the state is responsible for, if we provide opportunities for their children, if we provide just freedom to go be the best you can be and not get in their way with regulations and taxes.
We give them, we will be a Republican state because it doesn't matter what your skin color is, if you get a chance to be successful, you're going to vote with the people that gave it to you.
Yeah, and look, Trump is winning counties in Texas that have never been won before.
And we are having more and more Democrat, Hispanic politicians move to our party.
And their positions are not changing.
They're just realizing that the Democratic Party allowing all this illegal immigration and hurting their areas and all those types of things, they don't want that.
I guess the only thing I would say, just as an outside observer, is if the drug cartels are allowed to control the machinery of democracy in Texas, it could become Mexico.
That's why the whole DA thing that I was telling you about is so important.
I remember when I was coming into the Attorney General's office, Abbott served as long as serving AG in Texas history, 12 years, becoming governor.
I'm now about to tie that, but he was the one that told me the most powerful, Elected officials in the country are the Texas district attorneys because they can do whatever they want.
Because it does seem like there was a standard in place under Biden where illegal aliens who are by their presence committing a crime were held to a lower standard than American citizens.
If you go and beat Cornyn in the Senate, which I certainly hope you will, is there someone coming up behind you who can get elected who will be as aggressive and focused on the needs of Texans?
I just think it's, you see this weird dynamic in Texas where, I mean, there's so many great people in Texas, but all the money, not all the money, but a lot of the money in, you know, Highland Park and River Oaks, you know, your richest zip codes, pretty liberal.
What is that?
And by the way, I know a lot of those people, and I really like them, and I'm not attacking anybody personally, because I know a lot of them, but boy, they seem to be funding people who will not continue Texas as currently organized.
I think it may be that rich people are so insulated from the effects of everything that they don't really feel like these arguments are existential, that they really, really matter.
Whereas, you know, if you make $120,000 a year and you live in Houston and you see the city, like, you can't use the hospitals and crime's out of control and, like, everything is changing too fast to metabolize, and you make $120,000 a year, you can't really do anything about it.
You're powerless.
And that's, by the way, twice what the average person makes.
So if you go to California, if you go to Marin or downtown San Francisco or the town that I grew up in, affluent town, you know, everyone's kind of openly liberal.
You know what I mean?
Like they're smoking weed with their kids and they're whatever, they're liberal.
You go to Texas and you meet the affluent class in Texas.
Boy, they're just great people.
They're just great people who share your values.
And I think they really do, by the way, at least the ones I know, they sincerely do.
But they don't feel that sense of eminence of like, holy shit, we got it.
If you look at my campaign finance reports, I usually have a massive number of people giving, but a lot lower level than some of the other statewide officials.
The numbers are just staggering.
I raise less money, but my contributions from the number of people I get, I think I had the last report, maybe I'm off on this, maybe it was one for 8,000 contributors in six months.
Well, I don't think anybody comes close to that, but it's not the million-dollar checks.
I don't get million-dollar checks.
I have a much lower contribution, but I love it because I like the fact that the people as a group are helping me.
And there's a, by the way, I just want to be clear, especially in Texas, like the rich people I know in Texas are good people with nice, you know, love their families, their children turn out well, like they're good people.
For real.
I love them, actually.
But I, and they would agree with everything you say, but in practice, it freaks them out.
And you see this with Bobby Kennedy, too.
Like anyone who's kind of tuned in realized, yeah, Bobby Kennedy is like a...
He's a turbo-liberal.
He's a Kennedy.
You know, he said all this crazy, gun-grabby, pro-abortion nonsense.
But then you watch him and you're like, oh no, that guy's on the same wavelength as me.
And he might actually get stuff done.
It's only...
Honestly, it's the rich Republicans who he freaks out.
He scares them.
For the same reason you scare them.
Because you mean it.
And they're like, ugh.
This is embarrassing and maybe I can't fully control it.
Well, all I can tell you is I've been statewide for 12 years and I've won my closest primary runoffs when there weren't, you know, four people in the race was 65-35.
The last one was better, 68-32.
I just go to the people.
And I usually get outspent.
As long as I can be within, like, two to one spending, I have a really good chance of winning a primary.
And I think anybody that is consistent on views that take care of their constituents, that's the key to winning, is take care of your people.
They were not actually looking out for the people they said they were looking out for.
And then they leave them in a terrible situation.
They're not better off.
What Donald Trump, supposedly the guy that doesn't like those people, when he's finished, all categories of people, black, white, Hispanic, are better off.
So, you know, my first term was about stopping Obama.
And so, I think in two years that he was there, I've seen him 27 times.
I stepped it up a little bit with Biden.
But we had four years with Trump.
And the reason I ran the second term was to deal with exactly that issue.
I saw big tech and I saw big corporations.
And people felt powerless because all their information is being taken.
They have no control over it.
They're being censored.
And I'm like, how do I solve this?
So I went out to Palo Alto.
I spent like a year of my life going out there talking to professors, talking to lawyers who were tech experts.
And we ended up putting together many lawsuits, several against Google, several against Facebook.
We sued Facebook because there's a Texas law that says you cannot steal somebody's face, take somebody's face or their voice without their permission.
And then once you've taken it, you have a certain amount of time, a reasonable period of time to keep it, and then you have to destroy it, and you can't sell it without their permission.
Between a state and a business ever, $1.4 billion.
We have sued Google, I think, five times.
We've won two of those cases.
We've got two settlements, but the three biggest are coming.
One of them is about the same thing that Meta did.
They stole our faces.
Another was about Incognito, where they told people, by the way, you go into this Incognito, you sign up for this, we will not track you.
Lie.
They tracked us anyway.
That's a deceptive trade practice in text, where they tell you one thing and do another.
They lied, and they're so big, and they make so much money, they just think they can win everything.
Well, the final one was, This is one that everybody thought was crazy, but we did it, and then DOJ filed a copycat case under Biden, actually, where Google controls 97% of the ad market, and they destroy the competition.
If you're competing, and we believe they cut a deal with Facebook to keep them out of it, pay them off, and they destroy you if you're small enough, they buy you if you're big enough, and they cut a deal if you're super big, and all of that's illegal under antitrust law.
So in April, we are going to trial in Texas.
They delayed me for two years by forcing me into what's called...
Multi-district litigation.
And I got put in New York.
But we got a piece of legislation stuck on a bill that got us back out of that.
So we're back in Texas.
So we are going to take on the big tech companies.
We're taking on General Motors.
Because General Motors would sell you a car and they wouldn't tell you that their OnStar system, when you signed up for it, was tracking all of your driving.
And then they're selling that to insurance companies.
And then you get canceled and your insurance goes up because they're tracking every turn of your car, what time you're driving, how many months.
And I think that arrogance that we talked about in politics, it happens in business.
And so, not only do they want to control every market and control every transaction on the internet, but they also want to tell you what to say and what you can say on their platforms.
And then they tell you they're not censoring, but they are.
And so, even with the Pfizer case...
We went in and sued them.
We sued them not just for lying about the effectiveness of the vaccine, which they did do, but secondly, for trying to censor people once they found out that their vaccine didn't work.
We got dismissed by a federal judge who said we didn't have, because of that federal law, our state laws don't apply.
I don't think that's right.
So we've appealed to the Fifth Circuit saying, wait a minute, they have their federal laws, but our state law, if you deceive someone, you lie to them, that is a violation of state law.
Who cares what the federal immunity thing is?
It has nothing to do with our state laws, and that's our argument.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, it's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
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