Sept. 3, 2025 - The Tucker Carlson Show
01:28:10
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| And uh, but that's not really true because, you know, natural religion does have something to recommend it. | ||
| And I think Pope Francis got in trouble for recognizing that in all sorts of traditions, there is often a kernel of truth. | ||
| There is at least some truth in it. | ||
| In paganism, there's a kernel of truth. | ||
| You think of C.S. Lewis, Barfield and those guys loved the myths because it tells us something about our human nature. | ||
| And the first Vatican Council tells us that the existence of God can be known with certainty from human reason, looking at the created world. | ||
| There's more to it. | ||
| You got to keep going, you know, that God also reveals himself. | ||
| But that you can be certain God exists just by looking at his creation. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Using that's the truest thing ever. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But in the during science gets you to God in the end because there's no I think so. | ||
| You think so. | ||
| Thomas Aquinas thinks so. | ||
| But a lot of people in the modern world, they say, oh, no, religion is just, it's just kind of a private matter of judgment. | ||
| Well, they're children. | ||
| They've never thought about it. | ||
| I mean, that's. | ||
| And think about there was a new doctor of the church just named just within the last few weeks. | ||
| That would be John Henry Newman, greatest theologian in the English language. | ||
| He was made a doctor of the church. | ||
| And Newman's entire life was spent inveighing against liberalism in religion. | ||
| You know, this kind of wishy-washy sense. | ||
| Who is Newman? | ||
| Newman is great. | ||
| He was a Protestant and very anti-Catholic. | ||
| And then he became a Catholic and then he became a cardinal and then he became a saint. | ||
| And he was American? | ||
| No, British. | ||
| He was British. | ||
| I don't think we have any American doctors of the church yet. | ||
| I'm working on it, but unfortunately, I have like a fifth grader's understanding of theology. | ||
| So I don't think I'm going to. | ||
| Yeah, I don't even have that. | ||
| But I certainly believe, but in a childlike way. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But so Newman was a British Catholic theologian. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he became Catholic. | ||
| And one of his conclusions, and it's something that we're coming to grips with today, is we can know things. | ||
| We can actually know things. | ||
| That this modern idea that religion is just a matter of private judgment, you know, and so you're a Shinto and I'm a Methodist and it's like, whatever, man, who knows? | ||
| You know, you just do you and it's all good. | ||
| And he says, no, religion is a public thing. | ||
| It's a scientific thing. | ||
| We can know something about it. | ||
| He wrote a great book. | ||
| You look at the crises of the universities today. | ||
| There's a remedy to it, which is a book that he wrote called The Idea of a University. | ||
| And in this book, he says, you know, it's so crazy. | ||
| We have these institutions that purport to universal knowledge. | ||
| And increasingly, they won't even acknowledge God. | ||
| But just on its face, even if you're like the most hardcore atheist you can imagine, how can you even pretend to universal knowledge while denying God, the source and summit of all knowledge? | ||
| What are we talking about then? | ||
| We're talking about just like chemistry problems. | ||
| That's so silly. | ||
| We're talking about data. | ||
| We're talking about accumulation of numbers. | ||
| And what they say is, no, no, no. | ||
| Because we live in this world after the crackup of Christendom where everyone has their own private ideas, you know, there's just no way of knowing anything for certain. | ||
| So we're just going to settle on certain economic matters. | ||
| We're all going to try to get rich. | ||
| We're all going to try to live in relative peace and we're going to leave that heady stuff. | ||
| You do that on Sunday morning. | ||
| And that's obviously impossible. | ||
| Do you remember 20 years ago, there was this phrase? | ||
| It hasn't worked? | ||
| Look around. | ||
| Well, actually, looking around here, it's okay. | ||
| But if you look in the city, it's not so great. | ||
| There was this idea that you can't legislate morality. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Remember the idea? | ||
| It was the operating thesis of the United States of America. | ||
| And yet, not one person ever practically believed it. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| You can't pass a law about speeding. | ||
| You can't pass a law about jaywalking without recourse to morality. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And when you come to that conclusion about practical morality, which is ultimately derived from your understanding of religion, you are going to impose a moral view on someone. | ||
| Maybe someone else is very pro-jaywalking. | ||
| Maybe someone else deeply feels in their sincere religious beliefs they need to jaywalk. | ||
| All rules are based on a moral code. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they're exclusive. | ||
| You can't violate the law of non-contradiction. | ||
| Either you're going to have a law against jaywalking or you're not. | ||
| Either you're going to have a law against murdering babies or you're not. | ||
| And you're going to impose that on people. | ||
| That's how government, that's what government is. | ||
| Well, as soon as people started saying you can't legislate morality, they started giving everybody, very much including me, these moralizing lectures. | ||
| The country got more rigid and moralistic. | ||
| It's why you were described as disgusting for noting that Greta Thunberg is unwell when it's obvious. | ||
| Her mother wrote a book about it. | ||
| And exactly. | ||
| And sad and she's worthy of compassion. | ||
| But that, what happened to you, is a result of this epidemic of shallow but highly aggressive moralizing that took the place of something that we had before. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's why I think, okay, now we're going to get on our puritanical high horses about pronouns or whatever, you know, like where you must put rainbow flags, which is in front of every doorstep everywhere in the country. | ||
| We're going to get on our high horse about that. | ||
| But we're going to shrug our shoulders when it comes to murdering babies, when it comes to the meaning of marriage, when it comes to whether a people can have borders in a nation. | ||
| Oh, we can't know about that, but we can know about some ridiculous Gnostic heresy about pronouns and identity or whatever. | ||
| It's totally incoherent. | ||
| And so what you're seeing, and this to me. | ||
| Well, they just replaced Christianity with a much less forgiving religion. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A much harsher, crueler, less compassionate religion. | ||
| And false religion. | ||
| Well, of course, definitely false. | ||
| But in its effects, you could tell it was bad because it didn't elevate people or forgive people. | ||
| It wasn't kind to people. | ||
| It was cruel and unyielding and vicious. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And I mean, all these people got destroyed, literally driven to suicide. | ||
| If you don't like the God who loves you, just wait till you meet all the other gods. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because everyone's got to worship something. | ||
| You know, Bob Dylan was right about that. | ||
| So how did you go? | ||
| So you said that you were an atheist when you were at Yale, I guess? | ||
| No, when I was 13, I was confirmed at 13. | ||
| In the Catholic Church. | ||
| And before my confirmation, I told my mother, I said, you know, I don't believe it. | ||
| Christopher Hitchens, he's so smart. | ||
| And, you know, Richard Dawkins, and I'm really taken. | ||
| I'm such a. | ||
| You thought Richard Dawkins was smart? | ||
| Listen, I was 13. | ||
| Okay, come on. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| And actually, the new atheism really appealed to punk 13-year-olds who thought they were smarter than they are. | ||
| That is the ideal audience for the new atheism. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And I told her, I said, I don't want to be confirmed. | ||
| My mother, she's, you're going through a phase. | ||
| You kid, you're going through a phase. | ||
| Wise woman. | ||
| Wise woman. | ||
| She goes, receive the sacrament. | ||
| She wasn't even like super duper religious, but she said, receive the sacrament. | ||
| You're going to regret it if you don't. | ||
| And you're going to come to your senses in a few years. | ||
| She was totally right. | ||
| So I did that. | ||
| I was away from the church, would have called myself an atheist or at least an agnostic for 10 years. | ||
| Can I just ask, what did you think was cool about, I mean, Hitchens was, I knew him well, it was, you know, clever. | ||
| Yeah, lots of good things about Hitchens, but his life was so sad that he was not really an advertisement for atheism. | ||
|
unidentified
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I didn't think. | |
| Yes. | ||
| But like, what did you think was cool about that whole thing? | ||
| Well, I thought religion was for stupid people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought religion was for stupid people. | ||
| And I, of course, didn't know anything and hadn't read anything. | ||
| And my brain was. | ||
| You hadn't lived. | ||
| Hadn't lived, but I was quite wrong, but I was never in doubt. | ||
| And so I've been there. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I said, look, I just don't, I don't see God. | ||
| Bad things happen to good people. | ||
| And, you know, science has microscopes. | ||
| And anyway, and getting, actually getting back to the point on the reforms of the church and everything changing, it was kind of weak liturgically. | ||
| There were all these sappy, effeminate hymns that were like, you know, about eagle's wings and stuff that was not really appealing to a young boy and all this nonsense. | ||
| The eagle's wings, got you. | ||
| Like, oh, God, it was such, you know, it wasn't even cool in the 70s when those. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| Oh, I was there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I said, well, look, it's just so obvious. | ||
| Social proof. | ||
| All the smart people are atheists. | ||
| And then I get to college and everyone's an atheist. | ||
| And many people are much smarter than me at college. | ||
| But I did notice the smartest people believed in God. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yes. | ||
| At Yale. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| There weren't a ton of Muslims, though there were a couple. | ||
| But across the board, the Muslims, the Jews, the Protestants, the Catholics were smarter. | ||
| They seemed smarter. | ||
| Maybe their IQs weren't even higher, but they just seemed more with it. | ||
| They made better arguments than some stupid spaghetti monster nonsense from Christopher Hitchens. | ||
| And I said, huh. | ||
| And then I was presented with an argument for the existence of God. | ||
| What an interesting observation. | ||
| There weren't even that many of them there, but you kind of say, oh, wow, it's a little bit the wheat from the chaff, you know? | ||
| They'd have to be the braver section of the population, too. | ||
| This is one of the arguments to go to a liberal college is even just in your own politics, if you can make it through and not be swept along the tide of liberalism, you make it through to the end, you will have heard every argument. | ||
| You will have heard every refutation of everything you believe. | ||
| You will either give up some of your beliefs, maybe some of you should, or you will become much stronger in your beliefs, which is what happened to me. | ||
| I left Yale much more right-wing than I went in without question. | ||
| And I'm not the only one. | ||
| So I was presented with an argument from a guy who's smarter than me. | ||
| And he said, you think God doesn't exist? | ||
| What about the ontological argument? | ||
| And I won't be tedious with the art, but the argument is basically God's the maximally great being. | ||
| That's this definition. | ||
| He has all the great making characteristics, none of the corrupting characteristics. | ||
| It's better to exist than not to exist. | ||
| We would all agree with that. | ||
| We'd go off ourselves right now if we disagreed with that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Therefore, God exists. | |
| That's it. | ||
| That's the argument. | ||
| And Bertrand Russell, a great logician, atheist, famously threw his tin of tobacco in the air. | ||
| He would have had Alps if it had been around at the time. | ||
| He famously threw his tobacco in the air. | ||
| He said, by golly, the ontological argument is sound. | ||
| It's easier to think there's a flaw in the argument than to actually point out the flaw. | ||
| And I said, well, darn, I can't refute that. | ||
| Then I read Lewis, C.S. Lewis. | ||
| So who is this person who said that to you? | ||
| This is my roommate, actually. | ||
| What ever happened to him? | ||
| Oh, he's my best friend. | ||
| Still to this day. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Very, very close. | ||
| And he's a Christian. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And he, he was a cradle Catholic, raised kind of mega church Protestant, and then he reverted to the church. | ||
| He was confirmed in the church later on. | ||
| And, but, you know, he and I and some other people were kind of going through this together. | ||
| You know, so I would say 18 to 23, I was, I was really dragging my feet. | ||
| You know, I said, oh, C.S. Lewis makes good arguments. | ||
| Chesterton makes good arguments. | ||
| Maybe I should read the Bible at some point. | ||
| That might be smart. | ||
| I'll do that later. | ||
| And I'm going through, I finally, you know, seriously read the Bible at 23. | ||
| I said, oh, this is true. | ||
| This is, this is right. | ||
| You know, first you have to accept that God exists. | ||
| Then you say, okay, well, is Jesus who he says he is? | ||
| If he's not, that's going to lead me in one direction. | ||
| If he does, it's going to lead me in another direction. | ||
| Then you have to ask yourself, well, is the church? | ||
| What kind of church did he establish? | ||
| That's going to leave. | ||
| And there were plenty of Protestants along the way who were really helpful in my return and thinking. | ||
| So, you know, it was very helpful this whole period. | ||
| But I took the long road. | ||
| I took the long route. | ||
| I could have just, you know, Norm McDonald, the comedian? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Of course, greatest comedian probably ever. | ||
| I didn't know him, really, but he and I, we would write each other long letters on Twitter DMs for weeks. | ||
| This is the strangest thing because I saw he was following me on Twitter and he wasn't following a lot of people. | ||
| And I was a huge fan of his. | ||
| So I didn't even want to message him. | ||
| I was so. | ||
| And one time he sent out a tweet and it sounded kind of despairing. | ||
| Now we know he was dying of cancer. | ||
| I thought he was suicidal or something. | ||
| I just sent him a note. | ||
| I said, I feel bad if I didn't. | ||
| I said, hey, Norm, huge fan of yours. | ||
| If I can be of any help, I don't know that I can, but I'd be happy to. | ||
| And we started writing each other these letters. | ||
| And yeah, for weeks, every night, just for weeks, it's long essays, really. | ||
| To Norm McDonald on Twitter DM. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| This is one of the strange every night. | ||
| And he would do this thing where he'd say, Michael, I can't do it, right? | ||
| Norm. | ||
| He'd say, it would be prideful for me not to take you up on your offer because, Michael, I'm not an educated man. | ||
| You're an educated man. | ||
| I don't have an undergraduate degree. | ||
| I'm not an educated man. | ||
| I didn't really go to college. | ||
| And then he would do this thing where he'd make it seem like he's just some old chunk of cold. | ||
| And then he'd use a word that I didn't know. | ||
| He was certainly much better read than I am and love the Russian novelists. | ||
| And we were talking about religion basically the whole time. | ||
| And he said to me, I don't know his, I still don't know his particular, the particulars of all of his religious views, but he said, you know, for me, I told him how I converted, reverted. | ||
| And he said, oh, yeah, for me, I just, I've just always known the Bible's true. | ||
| I just always knew. | ||
| I just, I'd read it. | ||
| I just knew. | ||
| So anyway, that's it. | ||
| And I thought, well, that's that's the better, that's the better way. | ||
| You know, it's like Christ to Thomas the Apostle. | ||
| He says, you know, blessed are you. | ||
| You've seen and believed, but blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed. | ||
| And that was Norm. | ||
| And yeah, that's another example, too. | ||
| Of you think, okay, the whole culture and all these smart people are atheists. | ||
| Norm is one of the smartest pop culture figures that's been around for decades. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And, but he knew. | ||
| And it's just like, everyone kind of knows deep down. | ||
| Everyone kind of knows. | ||
| That's totally right. | ||
| And that's why they're mad. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| People feel judged. | ||
| They feel judged. | ||
| I never feel judged by like the earth is flat people. | ||
| You know, I don't think the earth is flat, but I don't, it doesn't bother me that you do. | ||
| I mean, you know what I mean? | ||
| I get a kick out of it. | ||
| I'll go down the whatever. | ||
| It's not a threat. | ||
| I don't, because I did, I know in my heart, it's probably not, it's probably not flat. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know what I mean? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But the ancient Greeks thought that. | ||
| No, I remember thinking that even in early high school with the question of abortion and, you know, people just get hysterical about it, like hysterical. | ||
| How dare you judge me? | ||
| And all this is like, whoa, I wasn't even really judging you, but like clearly you're judging yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you know that you took a life and I, you know, there are all kinds of extenuating circumstances. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But in the end, you, you killed the kid. | ||
| And that's how they know that you did. | ||
| The devil gets you this way because he says, and before you commit the sin, he says, it's no big deal. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
| It's a clump of cells. | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
| It's your freedom. | ||
| It's your body. | ||
| It's your choice. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| You're not going to feel bad about it. | ||
| I mean, you just got to do it. | ||
| And then you do it. | ||
| And then one second later, he's in your ear. | ||
| He says, you'll never be forgiven. | ||
| You can never admit this is wrong. | ||
| The second you do, you are damned walking the earth. | ||
| You are done. | ||
| You're done. | ||
| And I think that explains a lot of modern behavior. | ||
| Totally right. | ||
| It's totally right. | ||
| If you ever watched a shout your abortion event, it's always like fascinating, weirdly fascinating. | ||
| To me, and I always feel so bad for the girls because they, but they never really can muster enthusiasm for the abortions they had because, and you can see it right in their faces. | ||
| It's like, oh, I feel so sorry for them. | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| Well, this, to make it fully religious, Peter Craft made this observation that even the language of the abortion, this is my body, is a satanic inversion of the Eucharist. | ||
| This is my body, which is. | ||
| But everybody knows, I guess it's sort of, I'm just tying to the Norm McDonnell observation, which is, gosh, the truest thing. | ||
| You read it and you're like, oh, wow, that's true. | ||
| Even that was certainly my experience in reading it. | ||
| Even things I was like, oh, I don't like that. | ||
| But I still thought that's true. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| So, you know, you all know, because everyone does have a conscience, even if it's darkened by sin and a little bit and drugs and porn and dumb classic shiny like stainless steel. | ||
| But yes, I can imagine there are others who had darkened consciences. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And but you all kind of know. | ||
| And then the other impulse, which is, you know, centuries in the making, well, it really goes back to the fall, but especially politically with liberalism, is this notion that we are really to be gods. | ||
| Ultimately, we are in control. | ||
| No gods and no kings, only men. | ||
| And we decide. | ||
| So I never fell for that. | ||
| That's so obvious. | ||
| I fell for it for shit. | ||
| I totally fell for it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Then I never thought that was for all my many problems and lies I believed and lies I've unwittingly repeated and all my many sins. | ||
| I never bought the word gods thing because we can't extend our lives, really. | ||
| And if you can't do that, then you have no power. | ||
| Tucker, you clearly don't read the news. | ||
| We're on the brink. | ||
| We're this close to curing death. | ||
| I see it every day in the headlines. | ||
| They've been trying it since Pharaoh, but they're this close now, don't you know? | ||
| You know, it's like salmon farming. | ||
| Salmon farming is my favorite idea because it was something I just thought, because I obviously I love to catch saying I'm a fisherman. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I love Atlantic salmon fishing. | ||
| They're, you know, it's hard to catch them. | ||
| There aren't that many of them. | ||
| And so the idea was people love to eat salmon. | ||
| Let's just, let's just have a salmon farm. | ||
| I would make a giant net, just breed them right there in the ocean. | ||
| Like there's no downside. | ||
| It cures the problem. | ||
| And salmon farms have basically destroyed wild salmon, both through the pollution and for crossbreeding with the salmon. | ||
| And, you know, they don't spawn. | ||
| And they've, I mean, we're in danger of like losing. | ||
| We don't spawn either, by the way. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, exactly. | |
| But we're like in danger of losing Atlantic salmon as a species because of salmon farming. | ||
| People are just starting to figure this out. | ||
| And, but it's like, it's a species of the same lie. | ||
| I'm in control of nature. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| We'll just salmon farm. | ||
| Like, duh. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We'll just, whatever it is. | ||
| We have done that. | ||
| We have now exercised increasing control over how we spawn through contraception. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Oh, no, we're in control now. | ||
| This is going to lead to flourishing. | ||
| We're going to die off. | ||
| I mean, we have a global population collapse on the horizon. | ||
| So if you ended up extending human life to 150 years, like the last 80 years of the life would just be like living hell. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, for one thing, I've always thought this is like one insight I did have when I was young, which is the problem with getting old is not like bladder control and it's not even dementia. | ||
| It's, it's instead, it's remembering your youth and how much has changed. | ||
| And it's the burden of the past becomes unbearable. | ||
| And any old person will tell you this in their moments of lucid thought, they'll tell you, like, I'm just, I can't believe how fast it went. | ||
| And they're, they're crushed by that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So imagine living to 150. | ||
| And think about when they're all promising this. | ||
| And there are people on the right who are really into this too, radical life extensionalists. | ||
| And they say, Michael, if you could take the pill to live for 500 years, would you do it? | ||
| I said, not a chance. | ||
| Dude, I won't take an Advil. | ||
| Pills are bad. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Pills are just, let's just start there. | ||
| Pills are bad. | ||
| Anyone who wants you to take a pill, fuck off. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| That's like, that's how I feel. | ||
| So I just, I strongly feel that way. | ||
|
unidentified
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But why would you want to live to 150? | |
| And this is the understanding. | ||
| I mean, you know, the curse, you know, when we fall out of the garden is that we die. | ||
| But is that really a curse? | ||
| If you live in a world that's fallen, it's full of like rape. | ||
| I don't think it's a, it's actually a great mercy. | ||
| It depends what you think happens next, I guess. | ||
| Yes, that's true. | ||
| And people are, I think, also increasingly aware that something might happen next. | ||
| They're kind of clinging on to this hope that, well, I hope this is all there is, you know, and I just turn to worm food and take a dirt nap, you know? | ||
| And, and I, I don't think that makes sense at all. | ||
| And the smartest people in history didn't think it made any sense. | ||
| I don't think anyone in history has really thought that. | ||
| No. | ||
| Until Hiroshima, which was the ultimate expression of godlike power. | ||
| And that, that, that is what kills me. | ||
| I am, uh, I am the destroyer of worlds. | ||
| That's exactly death, you know. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, what, okay, so if all these young people are becoming Catholic of all unfashionable things, like that's probably the most unfashionable, you know, but by the standards of 30 years ago, becoming a Catholic. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is why I think, you know, the vice president is probably the most famous convert in recent years. | ||
| And people, his political enemies are always saying, oh, he's cynical. | ||
| He's just changing his views with the times or whatever. | ||
| I think, hold on. | ||
| You're telling me a guy who had a tough upbringing who graduates law school wants to start, is in Silicon Valley, then goes back, he wants to launch a political career in Ohio. | ||
| The way he thinks he's going to do that is by becoming Catholic. | ||
| You think that's going to help you? | ||
| No, that's like the craziest thing to do if you were thinking cynically or opportunistically. | ||
| Well, it's a radical move, I guess. | ||
| And again, I'm not promoting it. | ||
| I'm not doing it, but I just, as an observer, I'm like, wow, that's pretty wild. | ||
| So I guess here's my question. | ||
| It's a political question. | ||
| If people, if young people are converting to Catholicism, like what else about their views is changing? | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| So that's my sense. | ||
| Well, on the political level, and I think this also touches on part of the conversions, we're beginning to realize that history didn't start in 1965. | ||
| History didn't start in 1865. | ||
| History didn't start in 1776 or even 1620. | ||
| We're part of something that's much bigger and much broader and much more beautiful, you know, and even just in our political order, we used to call it Christendom. | ||
| Now we call it the West. | ||
| And there has been an attack on that. | ||
| Going back many decades now, I think of Jesse Jackson marching down Stanford. | ||
| Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. | ||
| And people are beginning to realize, you know, it's not that I just want to preserve my town or my 90s liberalism or my what I want to preserve this great cultural patrimony that I've been given. | ||
| And that cultural patrimony has to go deeper than just aesthetics. | ||
| It has to go deeper than just abstract ideology. | ||
| You know, cult and culture come from the same root word. | ||
| So what you worship is going to define your culture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so what's the bottom? | |
| What's the foundation? | ||
| What's the ballast for all of that? | ||
| I think people, you know, even beyond questions of conviction of the Holy Spirit and rational arguments and all that, they're just saying, well, you know, this thing's pretty sturdy. | ||
| It's been around a long time. | ||
| Belloc, again, Belloc keeps coming to mind. | ||
| He had this line. | ||
| He says, I am, he said it more eloquently. | ||
| He said, I'm required as a matter of faith to hold that the church is divinely instituted. | ||
| But for those who doubt it, one proof of its divine institution is that no other group conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight. | ||
| Obviously true. | ||
| Yeah, the best thing I ever heard from a practicing Catholic in the last five years, I was, there was no one around as a very close friend of mine and I, and he was going on about Catholicism. | ||
| I was like, okay, but that pope is just, I just can't, I won't even tell you what I said, but it was hostile because that's how I felt. | ||
| And he goes, you sure you're not Catholic? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was the greatest thing ever. | ||
| He goes, yeah, I totally agree, but he's not the worst pope we've had. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Was it completely non-defensive? | ||
| This happens. | ||
| It's like, let me tell you about the ninth century. | ||
| No, but I think that's right. | ||
| If you want to win people over, don't be defensive. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Don't tell me that there's no, that what I'm seeing isn't real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Be honest. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, it is. | ||
| Okay, but I don't know that I've talked to too many Catholics about Catholicism. | ||
| Maybe they all feel that way, but I thought that was just a wonderful response. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| You know, we have to remember that the Pope is fallible, except when he's infallible. | ||
| And sometimes God gives us bad popes to make us really grateful for good popes. | ||
| And the other point I'll mention on Francis, because, you know, obviously I had some questions about the Francis pontificate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I reverted during the Francis pontificate. | ||
| This trend started during Francis. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It might have been in reaction against many of the things that Pope Francis was said to stand for. | ||
| I don't know exactly how it worked. | ||
| That's above my pay grade. | ||
| But that's, you think of like the progress of the church and our whole civilization, and we think of it as just like a straight line, but I think it's a little bit more kind of like this, you know, and the papacy goes to have a yoon for a little bit. | ||
| And there's some king is like arresting the pope. | ||
| And you know, it's like kind of a little bit more circuitous, but it's always pointed in the same direction. | ||
| So there's not, it just reminds me of God using Pharaoh, blinding Pharaoh to the truth in order to save the Jews from slavery, which is what's described. | ||
| And I always imagine that there's a direct line between the quality of the leadership and the quality of the people. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| This is why I came to that. | ||
| But that's not always true. | ||
| So as America becomes more prosperous, the people become weaker and sillier. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, that's how I grew up. | ||
| I grew up in the richest country in history. | ||
| But there was a steady decline in the quality of thinking, certainly, and of behavior. | ||
| And of leadership. | ||
| And of leadership. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, is it H.G. Wells who said democracy is the theory that was it? | ||
| No, I don't know. | ||
| Who was it? | ||
| I forget who it was. | ||
| Who said democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard? | ||
| Is this why I can't get into? | ||
| I have many, I love the populist movement. | ||
| I was so into the rise of Trump. | ||
| I remain into the rise of Trump. | ||
| I think this has been the healthiest political awakening in my lifetime. | ||
| I think I'm all about it. | ||
| But I can't throw too many stones merely at the leadership class because one, the civil authority is there for our own good. | ||
| It's in that way appointed by God in a certain sense. | ||
| And also, we kind of get the government that we deserve. | ||
| And if you don't know anything about your country and you don't care about your civic life and you're just going to be greedy, you're either going to, on the left side of things, just indulge in weird social stuff that's purely selfish. | ||
| And on the right side of things, you engage in economic selfishness and no one cares about the common good and no one cares about the body politic, then that's kind of where we are right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And you're going to get crappy leadership a lot of the time. | ||
| And sometimes you get a, sometimes you get a second chance. | ||
| So it's just like greed, greed, and lust does your choices. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And this, look, this is classic political philosophy going all the way back, which is that greed, avarice, is the beginning of evils in the city. | ||
| And it's natural and you have to draw. | ||
| Worship of money is the root of all evil. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| So, okay, have you noticed? | ||
| I mean, I have a lot of young people who work for me. | ||
| I have children and all that. | ||
| But like every month or two, I'll run into like a younger person like in an airport or something and always strike up a conversation and they'll say things that, you know, super nice or whatever, but like you just feel like, wow, the attitudes are people are getting by my middle-aged standards pretty freaking radical. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I was talking, you've had this experience. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I have always been the most right-wing person in any too. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| And I've always been the radical. | ||
| I'm like, man, I better shut up because my thoughts are not welcome in public at all. | ||
| And all of a sudden, I'm like feeling a little bit more moderate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Well, that's good. | ||
| Listen, now we can go on TV and say, look, I'm the moderate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I've never felt moderate in my life. | ||
| I was talking to a professor who is very, very right-wing. | ||
| And he said, Michael, it's the craziest thing. | ||
| For the first time in my life, I'm being outflanked by my students. | ||
| I'm being outflanked. | ||
| He says, it's never happened before. | ||
| And now, part of this, obviously, is like a pendulum was like so far over here, you know, trans your kids and kill the ones that you don't trans. | ||
| It's going to fly back in the other direction, which is good. | ||
| That's a healthy impulse. | ||
| This is where, however, one must have a solid foundation with proper authority and guardrails through everything. | ||
| Because you need to make sure that you don't fall into the same error on the other side. | ||
| You want to get back to sanity and reason and be fully in command of your will and your intellect. | ||
| And you don't want to center your views on hating people. | ||
| You certainly don't want that. | ||
| You need chair. | ||
| I mean, you know, St. Paul says, if you don't have charity, you got nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, every wedding service in the country has reds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 1 Corinthians 13. | ||
| So, no, I think that's exactly right. | ||
| But I just wonder as like a political matter, here are a few of the things that I sense. | ||
| People feel free to say what they think in a way that is so inspiring and great and refreshing, but also a little shocking because what they think is like not what they're supposed to think at all or have been supposed to think. | ||
| I feel like there's a recognition that the whole like, let's put women in charge of everything just didn't work. | ||
| Cracker Barrel didn't work out. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| Female leadership just didn't work. | ||
| I mean, I guess I wanted it to work. | ||
| I don't know how I felt about it, but it didn't work. | ||
| And people feel free to say that. | ||
| There's also, I have noticed from talking to younger people, a recognition that democracy just kind of isn't working or our conception of democracy. | ||
| I don't meet really anybody who uses the term democracy non-ironically. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Well, when you go back to the framers of our constitution, you'll recognize that they use the phrase democracy in a derisive way and as a warning of impending peril, because even the notion that our country is a liberal democracy, that is a self-conception that came up in the 20th century. | ||
| It started a little bit in the 30s. | ||
| It really took off after the World War, and then it reaches its peak in the 80s. | ||
| That's when it gets escape velocity. | ||
| We're not a liberal democracy. | ||
| We have a democratic element, a healthy democratic element to our country. | ||
| Actually, in large part, I think it comes in because of Tocqueville's great book, Democracy in America, best study of America ever. | ||
| But even there, our regime is a mixed regime. | ||
| Our regime has a strong democratic element. | ||
| As it was initially instituted, it has an aristocratic element in the Senate, and it has a monarchical element in the president. | ||
| So you even think today, of all the kings around the world, the president of the United States probably has more practical monarchical authority than, say, King Charles, right? | ||
| Adrian Vermeule made this point the other day. | ||
| I'm pretty sure the president of the United States is a more robust king than like the king of Norway or whatever. | ||
| And so our regime, this was intentional, by the way, and it's outlined as the ideal regime in the Summa Theologia, but it goes all the way back to Polybius, this notion that there's a cycle of regimes, because it's a fallen world. | ||
| And so maybe you have a monarchy, but it's going to degrade over time and it's going to become a tyranny. | ||
| What's the difference between a monarchy and a tyranny? | ||
| A monarchy is for the common good. | ||
| Tyranny is for private interest. | ||
| You can have an aristocracy, you know, government by lots of, you know, a small number of good people. | ||
| That will degrade into an oligarchy. | ||
| I think we've seen a lot of that in recent years. | ||
| Common good versus private interest. | ||
| And you can have a democracy and a democracy can be quite good. | ||
| You know, the virtue of the early American Republic, that can degrade into a kind of mob rule where it's just people pulling for their own factions and their own private interests. | ||
| And so you're going to have this cycle of revolutions that's going to go on. | ||
| What the framers of the Constitution tried to do was escape that cycle by instituting a mixed regime, no matter what they called it, a republic if you can keep it or a constitutional system or whatever. | ||
| And it has held pretty well. | ||
| It has been increasingly democratized. | ||
| So it's probably like leaned a little bit too much onto that side. | ||
| Trump, I think, now is trying to restore, and this is part of a program that had been going on for decades, restore a little bit more executive authority to balance the whole thing out. | ||
| But regimes fall. | ||
| You know, that's the norm in world history. | ||
| And so we are at a real risk of that if we don't correct some of the degradations in our own regime. | ||
| So what would that mean? | ||
| What degradations need to be corrected in order to forestall revolution? | ||
| Well, here's one. | ||
| The 17th Amendment. | ||
| I do feel like this country is much more volatile than people publicly acknowledge. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The 17th Amendment creates direct election of senators. | ||
| Today, we say, what would be wrong with that? | ||
| There's nothing wrong with more democracy. | ||
| Isn't that good? | ||
| Have you met the senators? | ||
| I've met a lot of senators. | ||
| It's the densest collection of douchebags and liars and sex freaks I've ever met in my life. | ||
| I mean it. | ||
| And just wait till you go to the house. | ||
| I work on television. | ||
| I feel like there are more normal house members, but the senate. | ||
| I mean, there are some exceptions who guys I like a lot, but only a handful. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Listen, some of my best friends are senators, but a lot of them. | ||
| I was just with, I'm friends with a couple of them. | ||
| And I say, well, these guys are freaks, man. | ||
| They're all freaks. | ||
| Like John Cornyn, what's his search history? | ||
| No, I'm serious. | ||
| You actually don't know John Cornyn. | ||
| If you had a hold of that guy's iPhone, like, what would you find? | ||
| Any of these people, Ted Cruz? | ||
| I love Ted. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| He's a good friend of mine. | ||
| But I'm just saying, I'll leave Ted out. | ||
| I'm not going to attack Ted. | ||
| I've always liked his wife, but I'm just, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, it's not working. | ||
| It's not, it's not, and think about how these guys got elected. | ||
| These guys, it used to be they would be elected by the states, which meant that the states had a role in the government. | ||
| You know, we're supposed to have states. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We don't really have states. | ||
| No, we're certainly. | ||
| They're kind of all vassals for this imperial blob of bureaucracy. | ||
| But why did we lose that? | ||
| Anton Escalia said this to me when I was a student. | ||
| I got to meet him a couple of times undergrad. | ||
| And he said, we asked him about states' rights. | ||
| He said, why are you asking me about states' rights? | ||
| I'm a Fed. | ||
| I'm a Fed. | ||
| What do I care about states' rights? | ||
| You got rid of your states' rights in the progressive amendments when you had the direct election of senators. | ||
| States' rights are done. | ||
| The civil rights movement killed it. | ||
| Civil rights movement killed the interpret the implementation of this. | ||
| I mean, every government office has a civil rights division now. | ||
| It's like Christopher Caldwell, an excellent guest on your show. | ||
| Wonderful. | ||
| Wonderful guy. | ||
| His book, Age of Entitlement, basically proves this thesis that there's a parallel constitution, which is in tension with the old constitution. | ||
| So you do have a crisis of regime that's coming up. | ||
| How does that play out? | ||
| I hope peacefully. | ||
| I really hope. | ||
| I think it can play out peacefully. | ||
| You know, some people on the right, they'll say, well, I want a civil war. | ||
| You heard this a lot during BLM and COVID. | ||
| Want a civil war. | ||
| On the left and the right, they say, I say, I don't want a civil war. | ||
| If there's a civil war, I'm going to have to like shoot my cousins. | ||
| Do you, do you know what you're saying? | ||
| I want a civil war. | ||
| Do you know what a civil war is like? | ||
| So, you know, Dante is one of my favorite writers. | ||
| Civil war ruined his life. | ||
| He said, it's like the worst thing that can happen because the whole point of a political community is to secure peace and order for the common good so that we can flourish. | ||
| And when you crack that, I mean, the whole political community is just an extension of a family. | ||
| The Spanish Civil War ended 85 years ago. | ||
| And you go to Spain now, they're still mad about it. | ||
| It still divides that country. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Greece, same way. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| We have to be angry that the communists were defeated. | ||
| The Bolsheviks who were killing priests in Russia. | ||
| Spain is a uniquely sad country. | ||
| It's a wonderful country and wonderful people, but oh my gosh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They had a, that was demonic, obviously. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| They began by shooting a statue of Jesus. | ||
| So that was kind of a sign. | ||
| But yeah, and every evil person in the United States joined. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What is the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? | ||
| Abraham Lincoln Brigade. | ||
| I remember when I was a kid, I heard that. | ||
| Some guy died. | ||
| He was in the Abraham Lincoln. | ||
| I said, oh, it's an Abraham Lincoln Brigade. | ||
| I looked into it. | ||
| I said, he was a communist. | ||
| Was Stalinist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| He was a Stalinist. | ||
| Like the entire American left was Stalinist. | ||
| This is why, talk about the changes in the 60s into the 70s. | ||
| You know, this is why they had to get Nixon. | ||
| They never forgave Richard Nixon because he got Alger Hiss. | ||
| Richard Nixon knew that there were actual communists in the government at the highest levels of the State Department helping to found the United Nations. | ||
| And he knew it. | ||
| And he believed Whitaker Chambers and he got him dead to rights. | ||
| They never forgave him for it. | ||
| That's totally true. | ||
| And they made up this whole fake scandal and took out the most popular president in American history. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| No, I know. | ||
| It's very distracting. | ||
| But anyway, I guess the point is a civil war has our own civil war. | ||
| It's only finally kind of cooling down. | ||
| And we're relitigating it. | ||
| Well, because Reconstruction never really ended. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Let's just humiliate the South and turn its cities into slums, which we've done. | ||
| So, yeah, no, it's all, we don't want a civil war. | ||
| We don't want a civil war. | ||
| So how do we avoid that? | ||
| Well, I think we need strong leadership, which we are getting in Trump. | ||
| We actually do have an executive on the right who's willing to do things. | ||
| This has been a big problem for the right because of ideologies that were essentially liberal, where the right said, you need to elect us so that we do nothing. | ||
| That was their explicit pitch. | ||
| If you elect me, I won't do anything because I want to principally, with great dignity and integrity and principles, give away all the power. | ||
| Because if I ever do anything, then the minute the Democrats come into office, they might do all the things they've been doing for 50 years. | ||
| So we can't have that. | ||
| Yeah, national review republicanism. | ||
| But even, I mean, Buckley, Buckley, at least, I mean, Buckley defended McCarthy, for goodness sake. | ||
| He did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He did. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| This is. | ||
| Then he turned on him, but yeah. | ||
| At a certain point, it was politically incorrect. | ||
| But you think of those early days, Brent Bozell, you know, who Ghost Row Conscience of a Conservative, an amazing book. | ||
| Well, Brent Bozel meant it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he was exiled. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because he really meant it. | ||
| He was mentally ill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And he went over after the Spanish Civil War. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| He raised his family in Franco-Spain. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| He meant it. | ||
| But, but that, look, there's always been this hodgepodge on the right of disparate groups, as you well know, that don't totally make sense together. | ||
| So you have the traditional conservatives. | ||
| Well, the fusionist coalition was the traditional conservatives and the libertarians and some warhawk Democrats who wanted to take down the Soviet Union. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And I think it made sense at the time. | ||
| It was a common enemy in the Soviet Union. | ||
| I was there for that. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I read commentary every month growing up. | ||
| We got it at home. | ||
| Yes, we did. | ||
| You don't have any copies around here anymore. | ||
| I don't know where. | ||
| I was raised on commentary. | ||
| I mean, we're like this Protestant family getting the official publication of the American Jewish Committee. | ||
| I read every issue, Arch Puddington, Ruth, Vissa, or whatever. | ||
| I think they all hate me now, but whatever. | ||
| I grew up reading. | ||
| I have one of my favorite lines recently was from Norman Pethoretz, who said, they said, you're the founder of neoconservatism. | ||
| He said, no, no, I'm so old that I'm now a paleo-neoconservative. | ||
| I'm too old for that. | ||
| And this is, you know, there's the paleos and the neos and the libertarians and the traditionalists and the this and obscure political monikers are the right-wing version of gender pronouns. | ||
| No, it's totally everyone's got his own thing. | ||
| And this is what I love about Trump. | ||
| Is Trump an ideologue? | ||
| No. | ||
| What kind of ism does Trump ascribe to? | ||
| Trumpism. | ||
| Trump. | ||
| Trumpism. | ||
| That's what he ascribes to. | ||
| Americanism, I guess. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| This is a man who has brought together a disparate coalition of like weirdo, crunchy hippies and bow tie-wearing traditionalists and libertarians and Silicon Valley tech futurists. | ||
| And like, it's the craziest coalition ever. | ||
| And he has brought them together and won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years as a Republican. | ||
| And it's an amazing thing to see in action because he's got a vision and he's just a force of nature. | ||
| And so the question, I think, on a lot of our minds, now, I think this is what all this Trump is dead discourse is about. | ||
| There was this viral meme that Trump died because he got a bruise on his hand or something. | ||
| He went to play golf one day. | ||
| They said he was dead. | ||
| No, he's still around. | ||
| He's around. | ||
| He's a high-verified. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He's still around. | ||
| And I think a lot of that is an anxiety of, wow, we got this reprieve from all the craziness and all the decay and all the division. | ||
| And we're actually, we won the popular vote. | ||
| You know, things are on track. | ||
| And what happens next? | ||
| When the patriarch's gone? | ||
| Well, I mean, you know, what happens in families when the it can be really hard. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It can be really hard. | ||
| I have a lot of confidence in G.D. Vance. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think he's quite clearly at this point set up the vice president as the successor. | ||
| I hope that's right. | ||
| It seems like in the cabinet meeting the other day, he said, look, Rubio's done a great job in the 15 jobs that he's doing in the admin. | ||
| At least. | ||
| At least 15. | ||
| But he said in the cabinet meeting the other day, and I noticed it. | ||
| And no one around me seemed to have heard this line. | ||
| He goes, Everyone's talking about what a great job Rubio was doing. | ||
| And he said, wow, Marco, you've just been amazing. | ||
| I frankly, I hope you never run for another office because I want you to do this for the rest of your life. | ||
| And I said, well, that seems like a win. | ||
| If those are the two most, not papabile, they're most like presidential abule, you know, of the, for 2028. | ||
| So that seems like he's saying, no, the vice president is my natural successor. | ||
| Trump drops these bombs in every conversation you have with him. | ||
| I don't interrupt. | ||
| I haven't interviewed him that many times because it's so difficult. | ||
| Dizzying. | ||
| They're dizzying because he does the weave famously. | ||
| But every time I've interviewed him, like three days later, I'll think, did he just say that right in the middle of the right? | ||
| Yesterday, he was doing an interview with the Daily Caller right in the middle of the interview. | ||
| He was talking about Israel and I love Israel and no one's done more for Israel than I've done. | ||
| And, you know, rooting for Zay is very pro-Israel, of course. | ||
| And then he goes, They used to own Congress or whatever. | ||
| He said that. | ||
| He goes, you know, the Israel lobbies totally control Congress like nobody else. | ||
| That's not true anymore. | ||
| I'm like, did you just say that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was amazing. | ||
| I remember in the interview or the press conference with Netanyahu, this was months ago. | ||
| And I don't think I was taken in by theatricality. | ||
| I think this was real. | ||
| When he said, and look, what we're going to do is the United States is going to take over Gaza. | ||
| And you look at Netanyahu and he's sort of like, he looks at Trump and he kind of looks nervously at the audience. | ||
| He's kind of laughing, but kind of not laughing. | ||
| And he's like, what is it? | ||
| He goes, we're going to take over Gaza. | ||
| We're going to build a big Trump casino there or whatever. | ||
| I don't know what he's going to do. | ||
| You know, hey, we're going to build it. | ||
| It's going to be beautiful. | ||
| It's going to be the Riviera of the Middle East. | ||
| And it was, it was, it was so apparently out of left field. | ||
| And I'm not even convinced he's totally sincere on that. | ||
| I think he's a great negotiator and he's working other angles. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| I was actually in the Middle East that day when that happened, and I was eating with a bunch of, you know, local residents who run the government in the country it was in. | ||
| And I'm like, dude, what? | ||
| You know, and I was actually sitting at the table and they played that. | ||
| Everyone's staring at this. | ||
| And I thought, I don't know, what the hell is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| What do we have to do with Gaza? | ||
| Like, my instinct is always like, we got nothing to do with this. | ||
| I'm out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm good. | |
| You know, it's like when girls fight, like, I don't want to get involved. | ||
| I'll take Monica. | ||
| I'll take the French Riviera. | ||
| I don't need the Gaza Riviera. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| But their reaction was, I have no idea if this is true or not, but it was so interesting. | ||
| They're sophisticated, very sophisticated. | ||
| And they're like, oh, no, no, that's an attack on Netanyahu. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| That was their gut reaction. | ||
| He's basically tweaking Netanyahu's. | ||
| It wasn't a haymaker. | ||
| It wasn't collaborating on that. | ||
| It was a little poke. | ||
| And I think. | ||
| Wait, do you think that too? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| I think it was a little poke. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| In the sense that it's in the cabinet meeting the other day, Trump was asked, I said, you promised that this war would be over permanently in five seconds after you were inaugurated. | ||
| And so when are we going to get a definitive conclusion to the war? | ||
| And he laughs. | ||
| Definitive conclusion. | ||
| He turns to Steve Wickoff. | ||
| He says, Hey, Steve, how long this conflict, this has been going on thousands of years, is it? | ||
| Yeah, there's no definitive conclusion. | ||
| We're just trying to stop the bloodshed. | ||
| We're trying to establish some kind of peace. | ||
| And it was this brilliant move because in what other way are you going to get the Israelis and the Arab League and the Iranian regime all united in not liking this one plan by suggesting we're going to go in and take it? | ||
| And so, you know, it's basically an intractable situation. | ||
| There will not be any permanent resolution probably until the second coming. | ||
| So what you want to do is just establish some modicum of political order. | ||
| What I would especially like to see happen is a preservation of the holy sites and pilgrimage access and all that. | ||
| We should demand that. | ||
| I mean, that's not even, it's like, no one owns Jerusalem. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| But there's easier said than done in a messy neck of the woods. | ||
| Oh, and you're paying for it. | ||
| You can just be like, look, our first demand is Christians need to be able to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Well, you know, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It seems to me that the holy sites still seem to be okay. | ||
| In Gaza, there was unfortunately the attack on St. Porphyrius, which I grant was accidental. | ||
| I don't think it was. | ||
| I don't see why, from a strategic perspective, it would be beneficial to the Israelis to particularly stick a finger in the eye of the Christians when America is your last political protection. | ||
| I've done a lot of it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| I think it's self-destructive behavior, but what I care about is the effect on Christians, and that's just not good at all. | ||
| Well, and you have to ask yourself, too, okay, what's the conclusion? | ||
| You could either have the state of Israel take over Gaza again, had Gaza from what? | ||
| 67 until 05, then just gave it away in 05. | ||
| Hamas gets elected. | ||
| Hamas runs it for a little bit. | ||
| And then there's the October 7th attack. | ||
| Israel's going to say, now, okay, this is an unacceptable security risk. | ||
| We're not dealing with this anymore. | ||
| So you could have Israel take it over. | ||
| That's going to be probably an unsatisfactory resolution. | ||
| You could have the Arab League take it over, some of Egypt take it over. | ||
| I don't know that they really want to do it. | ||
| No one wants to touch that hot potato. | ||
| And then Trump just drops out of the air. | ||
| And he says, yeah, we're taking it. | ||
| And we're going to develop condominiums. | ||
| And we're going to ship all of the residents to South Sudan. | ||
| That was floated, I think, in the Israeli government. | ||
| South Sudan, the one place on earth that's less pleasant than Gaza. | ||
| And I don't think that's going to work out well at all. | ||
| And what is, I think Trump is totally sincere in what he says. | ||
| He goes, my solution here is not some permanent answer that will totally make the Israelis happy and totally irritate all the Arabs and the Persians. | ||
| My answer is not going to totally make the Israelis unhappy and totally satisfy Egypt or whatever, the Arab League. | ||
| It's, I just want some semblance of peace, which is where I feel totally vindicated on this. | ||
| I've said for years, when everyone is calling Trump the N-word, you know, they always call him the N-word, a nationalist? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Always. | ||
| They call him the N-word. | ||
| And I said, I don't really think he's a nationalist. | ||
| He loves the nation. | ||
| He's a great patriot. | ||
| He supports strong borders. | ||
| But I said, I don't think he's really a nationalist. | ||
| I think he's kind of an imperialist. | ||
| He wants to acquire Greenland and invade Canada. | ||
| I don't think that's not generally what yeoman farmers do. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, that's a Teddy Roosevelt move. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think his vision of America first is that America will take due care to prioritize her national interests, part of which is accepting the political reality that we're the global hegemon, and we need to maintain some modicum of world order. | ||
| And this goes back to the really ancient conception of the political order, which is that the purpose of empire is to just have peace and order. | ||
| This is, you know, this is in the Aeneid in book six of the Aeneid. | ||
| Aeneas goes down to his dad in the underworld and the dad gives him this whole view of what's going to happen to Rome. | ||
| And he says, you know, look, different peoples are given different arts. | ||
| The, I don't know, the Greeks are good at making souflaki. | ||
| The Chinese are good at making bad soup. | ||
| And the Romans. | ||
| Awful soup. | ||
| Awful. | ||
| I've never even tried. | ||
| The pangolin is good, but I've never tried the bat. | ||
| He says the Romans, their art is to govern. | ||
| And governing is not like fun. | ||
| It's not the most glorious necessarily thing. | ||
| In some ways, it'd be more fun to be a writer. | ||
| It'd be more fun to be a poet. | ||
| It'd be more fun to go. | ||
| But that's what the Romans are given is to govern. | ||
| And it's just a job in the world and someone's got to do it. | ||
| And you just need to establish relative peace and protect the rights of nations and just keep on keeping up. | ||
| Do you think we're suited for that? | ||
| I think Trump is quite suited for it as an individual, as a national leader. | ||
| Is America suited for it? | ||
| It's not how we started. | ||
| We weren't looking for it when the country began, but we got it. | ||
| I mean, I totally agree. | ||
| Someone's got to be dad. | ||
| I mean, that is absolutely just the nature of man and there's no getting around it in shirking it doesn't make it go away. | ||
| So I completely agree with that. | ||
| That's where I do agree with the neocons, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, kind of, yeah. | ||
| But in a different way, like, because the neocons, at their most extreme, would say, we have an obligation because of the demands of history with a capital H to spread liberal democracy around the world. | ||
| It's the whole thing. | ||
| Well, that's just stupid. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But like the smart, like I remember David Brooks, who was impressive, I know it's hard to believe, but at one point, when I knew him 30 years ago, he was smart. | ||
| And he would say, look, someone's got to take control because there has to be order at the center. | ||
| And that's not stupid. | ||
| Where I began to really hate the neocons, where my whole politics began to revolve around opposing them as an ideology, not as individuals, but just the idea is bad. | ||
| Some of the individuals. | ||
| John Pedaris. | ||
| But no, it's when I went to Iraq. | ||
| And the main takeaway for me is we're not good at it. | ||
| We're just like leaving aside the dumb spread democracy and all that nonsense, turned Baghdad into Belgium was stupid. | ||
| But what's not stupid is the idea that you can't have disorder because it metastasizes. | ||
| And I'm getting there, my assessment and has not changed in 25 years is we're not suited for this at all because we don't have the self-confidence required to do it because our society at its core is really thin. | ||
| There's nothing really there, actually, other than some distorted version of capitalism, which is kind of disgusting. | ||
| Do you think that was true, say, in the 50s and 60s, and it's changed? | ||
| I think the fight, you know, the Cold War, the battle against the Soviets gave a kind of clarity and purpose. | ||
| But even then, you know, the U.S. sided with the Viet Minh, actually, in 1954 at Dien Ben Phu against the French. | ||
| Like there was never really a kind of consistent that's little known. | ||
| Yeah, but not even great in strategy, but like a consistent worldviewer instinct. | ||
| Like the English, for all their many faults, at the height of empire, the height of the Victorian period, like they really believed they were superior. | ||
| Now we deride that as racist. | ||
| But you have to have that. | ||
| You have to believe my way is the better way, or why are we doing this in the first place to extract minerals? | ||
| Like that's not over time. | ||
| People can't sustain that. | ||
| You really have to have an evangelical spirit. | ||
| And we don't have that. | ||
| Well, and think about what Trump's been knocked for, especially in the recent Alaska summit. | ||
| He's been knocked for shaking hands with Putin and being nice to him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think, well, hold on. | ||
| We've tried the other way. | ||
| Bush, W. Bush, tried to talk a little tough or tried to be sweet and then talk tough. | ||
| And Putin invaded Georgia. | ||
| And then Obama, oh man, he talked tough. | ||
| After the reset failed and Hillary Clinton couldn't spell a simple word in Russian, then that failed and he talked really tough. | ||
| Oh, boy, was he tough. | ||
| And Putin invaded into Crimea. | ||
| And then you had Trump and everyone just kind of chilled. | ||
| And then you had Biden. | ||
| Man, no one talked tougher than Biden, huh? | ||
| Oh, didn't he have such moral clarity? | ||
| And Putin invaded further into Ukraine. | ||
| But the World Order collapse. | ||
| The clarity thing is the clarity. | ||
| If you think that Joe Biden was a better leader or a better man than Vladimir Putin, like, I don't even know what to say to you. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| There's by no measure, by no measure, did Joe Biden's country, the people he solemnly swore to help and defend, did they thrive? | ||
| No, they withered. | ||
| Putin, who's been there for 25 years, his country's improved. | ||
| The people are happier. | ||
| They like him, actually. | ||
| The war has been a little tough on Putin. | ||
| The war has, of course, it's been tough. | ||
| Of course it's been tough. | ||
| I'd be curious about public opinion today, this far into the war. | ||
| Well, actually, it's measured a lot. | ||
| Yeah, look it up. | ||
| And you can say, oh, that's all a lie. | ||
| Okay, well, show me one go there. | ||
| And look, I'm not moving to Russia, but I mean, Putin has been the most effective leader in my lifetime. | ||
| I can't think of a more effective one. | ||
| He's been a very stable leader for Russia. | ||
| But why is he more evil than Joe Biden? | ||
| Well, I can't even conceptualize that. | ||
| You know, you could say, look, I don't know his religious views, but he's promoted Christianity within Russia. | ||
| Aggressively. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| To combat liberalism and all these other forces. | ||
| Joe Biden has imprisoned pro-lifers and sued nuts. | ||
| Well, exactly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I guess the reason that I kind of pull away a little bit from the this is kind of neoconnie to me is the sort of the purely good and evil sacred. | ||
| I totally agree with that. | ||
| And to me, I think, well, look, I'm on the side of my country, even if Joe Biden is running it, which is a great pity if he is. | ||
| And I am because it's with you. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Patriotism is an extension of filial piety. | ||
| Just like just like, you know, all liberalism comes down to saying, screw you, dad, like I hate my mom or whatever. | ||
| And I think, no, no, no, we are called to respect our parents and to love our countries. | ||
| And Russia has interests that are not aligned with ours. | ||
| And they have mispointed at us. | ||
| And you think, well, okay, Putin, for all of his sins, Putin is defending the interests of Russia. | ||
| And I think there was a sense. | ||
| Look, Biden would say he was defending the interests of the United States or NATO or whatever. | ||
| He didn't do a very good job at it at the very end. | ||
| By the way, NATO. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And this is why you'll notice Trump doesn't use this good and evil language all the time. | ||
| And the way he talks about Putin, he says, look, Putin has interests. | ||
| He has hard interests. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's so I think. | |
| And I have hard interests. | ||
| And if I can be a little diplomatic with him, I'm going to do it. | ||
| I'm reminded of, do you remember the Jeffrey Goldberg article in The Atlantic, which said it was the Obama doctrine? | ||
| This was back in 2016. | ||
| forget it. | ||
| This piece. | ||
| And what's so funny now is it was a fascinating piece. | ||
| Fascinating piece. | ||
| Goldberg is a liar. | ||
| I know him and one of the most dishonest people I've ever met. | ||
| Truly dishonest, but a very talented pro-stylist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And an interesting reporter. | ||
| Oh, I read that. | ||
| I read every word of that piece. | ||
| In that piece, they are lauding Obama for saying things like, Russia's always going to have a statement. | ||
| Oh, I remember. | ||
| Oh, I remember. | ||
| Oh, Russia's always, they're always going to have escalatory power. | ||
| Trump says the exact same thing. | ||
| And all this piece of people. | ||
| By the way, Obama, who I think kind of wrecked America, comes off as pretty reasonable in that piece, just being honest. | ||
| I mean, if you read that piece now and just like take Obama out and just put another name in there, it's like, I kind of agree with most of this. | ||
| And Trump is saying most of that. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| And there's one big difference. | ||
| Trump can actually implement it. | ||
| And Obama couldn't really implement it. | ||
| Of course, the world order was fraying under him. | ||
| And so it is so ironic that these people who accuse Trump of being like a KGB agent or whatever, that these people would knock Trump for saying the same thing that they were parroting for years. | ||
| Well, they're all just children. | ||
| Like these are not. | ||
| They're the people who told you that Russia was a gas station with nuclear weapons. | ||
| People like John McCain, like 95 IQ and his sad idiot daughter. | ||
| I mean, these are just like not. | ||
| I've just gotten along with the Dr. McCain. | ||
| She's fine. | ||
| I mean, McCain was charming in his way. | ||
| I mean, I love McCain, actually, when I knew him well, but a very charming guy. | ||
| But like a serious person at all. | ||
| He killed the repeal of Obamacare, which is very difficult to get over. | ||
| But he wasn't serious. | ||
| He was just a shallow wasp. | ||
| And he was one of the last of the true hawkish anti-Russia, you know, coming out of the Cold War that he was younger. | ||
| Just you've, you just got a bomb. | ||
| You just got to, you just got to, you know, implement yourself. | ||
| He was this deep. | ||
| I mean, I spent a lot of time talking to the guy on the road, traveled to various countries with him, knew him, I think, as well as I've ever known a politician. | ||
| And there was so much to like about the guy. | ||
| He just really was a charming, very aristocratic bearing, hilarious, vulgar in a way that I always enjoy. | ||
| But if you pushed him on any issue, like he hadn't spent 15 minutes thinking about anything. | ||
| Yeah, you know, this is something you notice on Capitol Hill generally is there are some people who are very intelligent and decently well-read. | ||
| A lot of them, though, their skill is not doing a lot of reading. | ||
| You know, that's not the skill that's like... | ||
| Dude, I went to boarding school. | ||
| I know what that is. | ||
| That's like memorize three famous quotes, throw them out like you've read the whole book. | ||
| And that was McCain, man. | ||
| He, on any question, including the foreign policy questions he was supposedly an expert on, he knew nothing. | ||
| To say Russia's a gas station with nuclear weapons, like you're, you're an idiot. | ||
| This is the nation of, you know, like Tolstoy. | ||
| Like, I'm the winner of policy. | ||
| St. Petersburg, right? | ||
| All right. | ||
| There's no city in Europe. | ||
| There's certainly no city in the United States that approaches their two main states. | ||
| Well, this is what was fascinating. | ||
| I mean, I'm now remembering. | ||
| It's just a fact. | ||
| And the fact that you got to interview Putin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when you listen to that interview, this is a man. | ||
| Say what you will about his yarn that he spun. | ||
| It was a very compelling yarn. | ||
| He had a view of his own country that was a very strong view. | ||
| And I wonder, look, Trump, in his own way, tells a story about America. | ||
| He hugs the flag. | ||
| He kisses the flag. | ||
| He's got it really in his gut. | ||
| How many American statesmen today, after all these decades of just dissolution and hatred of country, how many of them can tell a compelling story about what the country is, why we ought to love the country beyond mere filial piety and where we're going? | ||
| How many of them are there? | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I mean, because the, you know, who are the American people? | ||
| That's, that's the question. | ||
| And that's what really bothers me as someone who is not a race guy. | ||
| And I don't think your DNA should determine the course of your life or the nation you live in. | ||
| I just don't, I'm American. | ||
| I'm from California. | ||
| I don't feel that way. | ||
| However, all of history suggests I'm wrong. | ||
| Because when Putin talks about Russia, he's talking about the Russian people whose DNA you can map. | ||
| And they're the indigenous populations. | ||
| He's not talking about the Chechnyans or not. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, by the way, he gets along with them really well. | ||
| Well, that's the other thing. | ||
| He's got 20% Muslim population. | ||
| He's promoting Christianity, but the Muslims all like him. | ||
| Like, how do you do that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Don't try that at home. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| And it's a skill that is, I mean, this is why I keep coming back to empire is because our country looks more like an empire than it does like a yeoman republic. | ||
| Russia certainly looks like an empire. | ||
| You know, it's got all spanning a continent and it has all these peoples. | ||
| And so on this question, which is. | ||
| Well, we don't even know who lives here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Trump said to me recently, we think there are about maybe 50 million people here illegally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 50 million? | ||
| I mean, but who no one knows? | ||
| The president of the United States doesn't really know. | ||
| We've got facial recognition technology, but somehow we can't know who lives here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so when you talk about my country, our people who are, you can't even visualize who they are. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And this, this gets, I mean, you just said, look, I'm not a race guy. | ||
| I'm not a race guy, of course. | ||
| But when you say. | ||
| I'm a sexist, not a racist. | ||
| I always say that. | ||
| No one believes me. | ||
| I think about sex all the time, actually. | ||
| But when you, when you think with this quote, what is America now? | ||
| You know, in 2025, there was this line where it's, America's just an idea, you know, or diversity is our strength or what all these kind of slogans from the 90s and 2000s. | ||
| You think, well, no, it's not. | ||
| A country is not just an idea. | ||
| There is a crucial aspect, but it's not like an idea floating in outer space. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| And so there has to be a real grappling with, okay, well, look, a country is also geography. | ||
| You know, like there is no America without the rivers, for instance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| You know, it's not, the rivers aren't just an idea. | ||
| You're speaking to a fly fisherman now, Mr. Knowles. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's not a country without trout. | ||
| It's not, it's not a country without the oceans. | ||
| And it's, it's not a country without people. | ||
| And this, this also is where. | ||
| If someone can just like show up from Delhi and like start lecturing me about American values, can't even speak American English and no one says anything like, hey, son, settle down. | ||
| You just got here. | ||
| Don't start lecturing someone whose family's been here 400 years about what America is. | ||
| Then there's kind of no America actually at that point. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And so this is where even the grappling. | ||
| It's scary. | ||
| Even the grappling with ethnicity, you know, like what we've come out of this very liberal period where we have been told there's no such thing as ethnicity or race or anything like that. | ||
| Except it, but simultaneously, it's the most important thing. | ||
| All that matters is race, but it doesn't exist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And the reality is, again, to this kind of via media, it's okay. | ||
| It's okay when Joe DiMaggio hit a home run. | ||
| It's okay that the Italian Americans in New York got a special little thrill out of that. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| They say, that guy kind of looks like me. | ||
| And he hit that home run. | ||
| That's kind of, that's fine. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with recognizing that there are differences between peoples. | ||
| There are two simultaneous errors, which we fall into. | ||
| It seems actually at the same time, which is we say ethnicity means nothing at all whatsoever, and ethnicity is totally deterministic and means everything. | ||
| And the reality is, I mean, this is where our Christian heritage, Christianity, which animates the whole civilization comes in. | ||
| You say, no, we are in a very real way all children of God. | ||
| Like in a very real way, there's only one race, the human race, or whatever like the liberals like to say. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| And also, there is vibrant diversity among peoples. | ||
| And that's fine to acknowledge. | ||
| God created that. | ||
| God created that. | ||
| As long as that is ordered toward charity, as long as a proper love of that which is similar to one is not ordered toward cruelty and is ordered within charity for the common good. | ||
| Yeah, that's called having a country, of course. | ||
| We're not allowed to say that now. | ||
| Yeah, I just feel like it's gotten, I don't know, they've been so tough on whites for so long. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| So cruel to whites that I think like there's a crazy backlash coming. | ||
| Without question. | ||
| It's a well-deserved backlash. | ||
| It's already happening. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And, you know, as Tucker, you know, I'm part Sicilian. | ||
| A non-white people. | ||
| A racially liminal people. | ||
| We Sicilians. | ||
| I love Sicilians. | ||
| Children of the Mesojorno. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And so you get to kind of look at it, which is, I mean, even early on, I got these WASP ancestors and I got some Irish ancestors in there. | ||
| The Italians came in a little bit later. | ||
| And so there's a little mixing of all of Europe in there. | ||
| And the reality is, in order to have a sense of a country, you do need to have some kind of a sense of a common people. | ||
| And so to your point on the guy from Delhi, it's not even that the guy from Delhi can't be like quite American three generations from now, but you can't just like land in a place and because you read a book about America or because you watched a YouTube video, you just totally get America. | ||
| To have a country is to have a lived experience that has passed sometimes ineffably, you know, without words from generation to generation. | ||
| I'm looking around your house here. | ||
| I mean, there's like pretty old stuff and you just kind of do it. | ||
| And there are habits that are inculcated in people. | ||
| And there are inclinations that the American people have observed by Tocqueville back in the 19th century that they're not even aware of, that it takes some random Frenchman to come in and notice it. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| You got to be very careful. | ||
| But I just want to be clear since I have a million Indian friends and actually like India a lot as a country. | ||
| You hate the Indians. | ||
| I'm like probably the most pro Indian right-winger you'll ever meet, but sincerely, but it's not even lecturing, but showing up and lecturing me about what it is to be an American. | ||
| It's showing up and attacking whites. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And boy, did you see a lot of that? | ||
| And not just, it wasn't just Indians, but like people would, immigrants would show up, you know, taking all these benefits from the country and the permanent population here and then start immediately attacking whites. | ||
| Now, they attack whites because they were encouraged to do that by a ruling class. | ||
| Like they got into Stanford. | ||
| Schools and 100%. | ||
| And then they get to Stanford and it's like, oh, you want to succeed? | ||
| You have to attack the whites. | ||
| And they just, they're status oriented. | ||
| All immigrants just like want to fit in and want to do the get the merit badges that this society demands they get. | ||
| And one of those merit badges required them to denounce whites. | ||
| And I felt like that is the most destructive thing that you could ever do. | ||
| You know, I have a solution to this, though. | ||
| My solution to this, we're always told, you know, it's all just got to be kind of organic from the culture and the people. | ||
| And that's politics is purely downstream of culture and whatever. | ||
| I have a little more of a classical political view of that. | ||
| I think people respond to incentives. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| When you mention these institutions, I think, and Trump is very good at this, taking beating up Harvard, I think was a brilliant political attack. | ||
| You see some of that in Florida, taking in some of the universities. | ||
| It's happening around the country. | ||
| I'll give you a Pete Buttigieg. | ||
| I don't know Pete Butigic. | ||
| The fake gay guy. | ||
| I have a friend who thinks he's a fake gay. | ||
| My gay producer is always like, he's not gay. | ||
| He was with a girl like 20 minutes ago. | ||
| And like, he wants to be the Democratic nominee. | ||
| It's like, time for a gay guy. | ||
| He's playing the long game. | ||
| I mean, that is, that's going down. | ||
| Look. | ||
| Well, it's suffering for your art. | ||
| Say that. | ||
| He look, just because I don't know him, I know a hundred Pete Buttigieg's. | ||
| I know this character. | ||
| Oh, the kind and he went to the elite school and then he goes to McKinsey and then he does the checks. | ||
| And I think finds some benighted Midwestern town that he can just like become mayor of. | ||
| I'm a mayor now. | ||
| Talk about the great, I was talking to a big Democrat figure. | ||
| And he said, you know, say what you will about Pete. | ||
| He's the greatest careerist we've ever seen. | ||
| You're mayor of this tiny town. | ||
| You become the secretary of transportation. | ||
| But of course, but the town kind of sucks. | ||
| Actually, he didn't do a good job. | ||
| He didn't have the college. | ||
| But I've always wanted to interview him. | ||
| He's never agreed to interview, but I'm going to ask him like some very specific questions about gay sex and see if he can even answer. | ||
| I doubt he even knows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where does it gay dude? | |
| Stop. | ||
| Think about Pete Buttigieg. | ||
| If we controlled the universities, if we controlled the culture, and if the incentives in the corporations and all of the DEI offices, we can rename them, if all the incentives were not to be like America-hating, gay, liberal, elderly. | ||
| Pete Buttigieg, I am convinced. | ||
| This is, look, this is purely my gut telling me this. | ||
| He would be like waving the stars and bars, doing dips. | ||
| Like whenever incentive were there, he would go to it. | ||
| And so I think this is where the Trump, a little more muscular view of politics comes in. | ||
| He says, no, forget about this stupid, like, oh, everything's just going to be organic. | ||
| That's never how culture has changed. | ||
| We're going to go in. | ||
| I'm going to pummel Harvard into the dirt. | ||
| I'm going to go in. | ||
| I'm going to pummel these bureaucracy, the Kennedy Center, whatever, and I'm going to create new incentives such that the best and the brightest and the most ambitious are incentivized to like our country and do good stuff. | ||
| It's totally right. | ||
| I'm at the inauguration January 20th, sitting there and it was indoors for some, I can't remember why, but I'm sitting there chatting away, of course, Setex Laura Ingram, gossiping about Fox. | ||
| And all of a sudden I look up and there's Jeff Bezos sitting like right in front of me. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What's Jeff Bezos doing here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then all these people fire and cook shy. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I noticed all of a sudden after the inauguration, after the election, really, my phone starts ringing from news networks that have never been interested in talking to me before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden, some of the big corporations that we work with with my show, they're more interested in helping us. | ||
| And, you know, they want to make sure our experience. | ||
| I said, oh, this is what power is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it is incumbent upon statesmen on the happy occasions that they get power through from the people that they actually use it in a good way and make hay while the sun shines. | ||
| So we have a couple of viewer questions. | ||
| We've never done this before, but it's the internet. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Lots of people asked this one, my producer said. | ||
| Michael Knowles, do you miss working with Candace Owens? | ||
| Well, you know, I still see Candace all the time because, you know, I'm the godfather to Candace's daughter. | ||
| Actually, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm the godfather of Candace's daughter. | ||
| I'm very good friends with her husband. | ||
| And I, you know, it's kind of weird for a million guy to hang out with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We're have many Mayflower cigars over the time. | ||
| And I still, I don't see Candace at work, obviously, anymore, but I do see her at church. | ||
| She actually goes to the earlier Mass than I do because she converted. | ||
| You know, she came into the church like a year or something ago. | ||
| And in fact, I was the godfather to her daughter before she came into the church. | ||
| And then all those smells and bells just kept pulling her in. | ||
| And there was one time I was invited to the baptism of their next kid and I just couldn't make it. | ||
| It was, I was visiting my grandma or something. | ||
| And people kept telling me, like, no, you should really come. | ||
| I was like, no, look, I mean, I love the farmer family, but I'm going to go see my granny, whatever, you know. | ||
| And they kept saying, I said, what's this about? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They have like a kid every six months. | ||
| So like, they'll have another one soon. | ||
| And, but, but then I thought it was because she was being baptized and she wasn't telling anybody. | ||
| So anyway, she came in. | ||
| And now at least, uh, now at least I get to see her at Mass. | ||
| So people love her. | ||
| It is wild. | ||
| She has actual star quality. | ||
| She has this thing. | ||
| She could tell me something. | ||
| She could tell me something not only that I don't agree with. | ||
| She could tell me something about myself that you tell me I had blonde hair and I would I would just the whole time, I'd just be like, go on, tell me everything. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| I mean, I was telling this off there, but I was going to say it. | ||
| I was in Oslo, Norway last week, salmon fishing with my kids. | ||
| I'm coming, walking back from dinner with one of my kids in downtown Oslo. | ||
| And this guy comes up and goes, Tucker Carlson, yes. | ||
| You know Candace Owens. | ||
| I was like, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He goes, tell her that I love her. | |
| And I was like, how famous do you have to be where people will come up to you on the street just because you know somebody else? | ||
| Where people will come up to another very famous guy. | ||
| No, nothing to do with me at all. | ||
| Where you say, hey, you know, hi, I'm Tucker, by the way. | ||
| No, no, it didn't. | ||
| No, I was so impressed by it that I, it didn't hurt my feelings at all. | ||
| I, you know, that is unbelievable. | ||
| But yes, the main thing that he liked about me was that I knew Candace Owens. | ||
| I was like, wow, that, that's devotion. | ||
| So I was impressed. | ||
| I called her. | ||
| I said, wow, man, you're really at another level. | ||
| Got to start trying that at restaurants. | ||
| Hey, can I get a free dessert or something? | ||
| I know Candace Owens. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Not my birthday, but. | ||
| Okay, this is an interesting one. | ||
| This is a question. | ||
| I think I've inadvertently led my two sons, ages 25 and 23, to have a mindset to put off having a family. | ||
| I think I've made a mistake. | ||
| How do I convince them to hurry up, get married and have kids? | ||
| The question, the answer that I would, or the evidence that I would need here is how old the kids are. | ||
| 23 and 25. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 23 and 25. | ||
| Yeah, you should get serious. | ||
| I mean, these days you'd be like a child groom at that age, but you need to start getting serious. | ||
| I guess the reason is this. | ||
| I had a kid at 25. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, people used to get married. | ||
| I have a good friend, very successful guy, though. | ||
| He struggled for a long time. | ||
| Six kids, got married at 20 or 19 or something and started spitting out kids right away. | ||
| And the way to maybe present this to your sons is we screw up everything in modern life. | ||
| We just get everything perverted or inverted wrong. | ||
| And we now view marriage as the capstone to our lives. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We say, I've lived now that I've lived, now that I've had sex with 100,000 people and I've made a million dollars and now that I've done everything, traveled all over the world. | ||
| Now I'm going to get married. | ||
| Now that I have drug-resistant chlamydia. | ||
| Now that I have drug-resistant chlamydia and my brain is half melted, now I'm going to get married. | ||
| And you think, okay, that's not what marriage is. | ||
| Marriage is when two people leave their families, come together and become one flesh and do something together. | ||
| And so it's really supposed to be more like the beginning of your life. | ||
| But here's a real practical reason why you shouldn't do it that way. | ||
| I married my high school sweetheart. | ||
| You married your high school sweetheart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I did. | |
| And highly recommend it. | ||
| And I've seen many, many good marriages where people marry their high school sweetheart because it's like our bones. | ||
| You know, when you grow, your bones are kind of agile and malleable and they grow. | ||
| And then they harden. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then it's really hard when two people harden into their own ways to mash that together. | ||
| But if you're still kind of young and a little more malleable, even in your 20s, you're starting to really harden your views. | ||
| You need to do that in such a way that you're fused together. | ||
| I mean, to me, the notion of divorce. | ||
| Many get really rigid too as they get older living alone. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Get weird. | ||
| Oh, so weird. | ||
| It gets weird. | ||
| And I'm entirely opposed to divorce. | ||
| I would not divorce under any circumstances. | ||
| I know people do it. | ||
| I know it happens. | ||
| It's a fallen world. | ||
| But it seems to me that if you're a whole set person and you marry someone and you sign a prenup and you keep separate bank accounts and you just, you're kind of setting yourself up to prepare for when you're just going to crack apart. | ||
| But if you do it a little bit younger and you're just totally in mesh. | ||
| It's unthinkable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I also think, you know, young men especially are really concerned about the economy, which has like basically been designed to exclude them. | ||
| And they feel like they're not going to be able to succeed and provide for their children the lives that they had from their parents. | ||
| Just as a math question, getting married is like, it just, there's a lot of research on this is the single most effective thing you can do to be more successful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes, of course. | ||
| I was talking to a buddy of mine, even with the kids, you know, when I had my, it took us a couple of years. | ||
| And then we had our first kid. | ||
| I said, oh, I hope I hope I have enough money. | ||
| I hope I, you know. | ||
| Oh, you will. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| My friend said that babies are like little money bags. | ||
| You just, you just make more. | ||
| You just make it work. | ||
| You were, yes. | ||
| When I had my first, I was working at the Weekly Standard, hard to believe I ever worked there, but for Bill Crystal, I know it's so shocking. | ||
| But you know, he was a teacher of mine. | ||
| We have that, we have that in common. | ||
| Bill Crystal was a teacher of yours. | ||
| I did one of these fellowships, like a summer fellowship. | ||
| He taught me, I don't know, like Machiavelli or something. | ||
| And to think now, I mean, now his publications have taken shots at me over the years. | ||
| And I just think, man, where did you lose the plot, buddy? | ||
| No, what happened? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's distressing, but I think he kind of collapsed inside as a person. | ||
| Depressing. | ||
| It can happen, but you have to be on guard against it. | ||
| But anyway, I remember I had this editor called Richard Starr, who was such a nice man. | ||
| And I had this child at 25. | ||
| And he goes, your life's going to change. | ||
| And I was like, everyone says that. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| And he goes, when you have a child, especially when you're young, you realize you will do whatever it takes to provide for that child. | ||
| You need to rob a fucking liquor store. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I was like, wow, that's so true. | ||
| It even made not that I ever robbed any liquor stores, but like I said, I might still. | ||
| When we got married, I was a little older. | ||
| I was 27 when we got engaged, 28, we got married. | ||
| I kind of wish we'd gotten married younger. | ||
| We were kind of moving. | ||
| We're long distance, all that stuff. | ||
| And it's all works out in Providence, but it's one regret I had. | ||
| We should have got my wife says it too. | ||
| We should have got married younger and started having kids younger. | ||
| And I remember, though, I started my show after I got married or right around the time I got married. | ||
| And I thought, man, thank goodness I'm not single in this career in particular because you're probably, can you imagine you just, all you do is just like stay up late and go drink and screw around. | ||
| And that's not, and when you're married and you have kids, you have a sense of purpose that you're doing things for something. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And if you're under like real stress, if you have, you know, performing in public or whatever, any job where you're like under pressure and you're feeling on a tightrope all the time. | ||
| But if you didn't have a wife, I don't know how you would do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They all melt down. | ||
| I mean, you know, you need a wife. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You do. | ||
| I mean, even my wife will, she'll sometimes say, I'll do my show. | ||
| She'll listen to my show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She'll go, you know, Matt, you were a little bit kind of live over there. | |
| You kind of went a little squishy. | ||
| I'll be like, man, you're the, you know, she's like the rock solid one. | ||
| And she's the only person I'll ever let write some of my show. | ||
| She gets it. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not, she was no political nerd or anything like that, but she has a very conservative disposition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And she just has this gut instinct. | ||
| When, when moms go right-wing, boy, they're not dicking around at all. | ||
| You know, I've seen that a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Members of Congress who I respect 100% have wives who are like, what? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, I can think of a couple of them. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Last question. | ||
| It's kind of a weird one. | ||
| Michael, do you detest boomers as much as Tucker seems to? | ||
| I was born in 1951. | ||
| What's the main thing I ought to do or stop doing to help improve life here in the United States? | ||
| So this is a boomer, I take it. | ||
| This is a boomer. | ||
| This is a boomer. | ||
| Baby boomer, 1946, 1964. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think. | ||
| The boomers have attracted a lot of ire. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Rightly so. | ||
| My defense of the boomers is they came from somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They came from somewhere. | ||
| So even, I mean, you know, our grandparents' generation. | ||
| And they're human beings. | ||
| I don't mean to talk about them like they're animals. | ||
| No, but things went really screwy during the boomer generation. | ||
| You think? | ||
| You might have noticed. | ||
| And I think what it has come down to is an ideological selfishness. | ||
| I'm not even saying a lot of boomers, like they have all this stress and anxiety for their kids and the future. | ||
| And, you know, so it's not, it's not like even a personal selfishness. | ||
| It's an ideological selfishness that says, hey, I'm going to, you know, do what you want. | ||
| Hey, follow your bliss. | ||
| Do what makes you happy. | ||
| And I would say that came from a good place for a lot of the boomers who are a little hippy-dippy, whatever. | ||
| I don't think that's helpful to kids. | ||
| I actually think a little bit more clarity is better. | ||
| Clarity is charity. | ||
| And I think a little bit more on the guardrails, a little bit more of saying, hey, son, don't just follow your bliss. | ||
| You're doing something. | ||
| Ideological selfishness. | ||
| Boy, that is, I've never thought of that. | ||
| That is really smart because it is, of course, it's true that boomers, which again is everybody born between, you know, the end of World War II and just before Woodstock. | ||
| There are a lot of nice people who really care about their kids and grandkids. | ||
| But they. | ||
| But it's ideological. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They can't even. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| If I were to say that right is right and wrong is wrong, well, I'd be, that would be, I don't know, authoritarian or judgmental. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you think, well, you have to make judgments in life. | ||
| And sometimes parents actually do know what's best for their kids. | ||
| And you just need to, I think, state, not have the confidence to state that. | ||
| Have the confidence to help your kid, even if it might make him angry in the short run. | ||
| Let me, that's a really smart point. | ||
| Let me just end by asking you, because I'm legit interested. | ||
| How did you get into the tobacco business? | ||
| Can I offer you one? | ||
| I don't want to make you smoke at 10 o'clock in the morning, but I'm going shooting after this. | ||
| I'm going to burn one of these. | ||
| Okay, great, I can't wait. | ||
| I have loved cigars since I was 15, which is a little old to start in New York as an Italian American. | ||
| But I was, you know. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| If I ever get rich, I'm going to start a nicotine for the children foundation just to make sure that they have enough. | ||
| I'm serious. | ||
| It's a charity. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's a lot of course. | ||
| I was 15 and I never liked cigarettes. | ||
| I never liked, but I loved cigars. | ||
| And a family friend gave me one when I was 15. | ||
| I really liked it. | ||
| And I would go grocery shopping in the Bronx in the Italian neighborhood. | ||
| And they had these guys rolling the cigars. | ||
| And I was too young to buy them. | ||
| So they would just give them to me. | ||
| They'd give me four a week. | ||
| And I got into it. | ||
| I smoked them. | ||
| I really wrote my college admission essay about how much I love cigars. | ||
| I called it the Count of Monte Cristo. | ||
| Because I said, write about something you're passionate about. | ||
| I'm very passionate about cigars. | ||
| They let you into Yale one of the cigars, they know. | ||
| I probably wouldn't have worked out today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Better than writing about my company. | ||
| Were my parents big donors? | ||
| They were not. | ||
| Safe to say they were not. | ||
| And I, so the story of this company, I wanted to start that for a long time because despite my swarthy appearance, I do have this kind of wasp Mayflower ancestry. | ||
| And I said, I want it to be Mayflower. | ||
| I want it to be patriotic, but I don't want it to just be like, you know, I don't know, guns and fried chicken cigars. | ||
| I want it to be a little more elevated. | ||
| But there's this paradox with the Mayflower, which is kind of like the founding stock. | ||
| On the one hand, they're blue blood elites. | ||
| On the other, these are salt of the earth people. | ||
| Yeah, they're rugged, rugged, weirdos. | ||
| And I said, I like that paradox because cigars are a luxury, but they're also very accessible. | ||
| You can have an amazing cigar for like $12. | ||
| And so I said, I want it to be that. | ||
| And I wanted to work with a particular company. | ||
| When I was a kid, my mother, shortly before she died, gave me a box of Oliva cigars, Oliva Series O Robusto for Christmas. | ||
| We did not have a lot of money, and this was a really nice present. | ||
| When she died unexpectedly, I still had half the box. | ||
| And I said, all right, well, this is, these are special. | ||
| I need to save them for special occasions. | ||
| Graduate high school, get married, first kid, that kind of thing. | ||
| Maybe I'll give some to my kids if I have any left over. | ||
| This is providential. | ||
| I was trying to start the cigar company. | ||
| It was kind of tough. | ||
| Daily Wire was allowing me to kind of explore this and use the platform to start a cigar company. | ||
| I said, oh, great. | ||
| But what do I know? | ||
| I don't know anything about starting that. | ||
| I'm backstage at a TV show, and a guy calls out to me and says, Hey, Knowles, you're a cigar guy, right? | ||
| I said, Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He's like, Oh, yeah, I got the cigar. | ||
| You got to come by this cigar club that I'm a member of. | ||
| I said, Oh, that's a great idea. | ||
| I don't know him. | ||
| He goes, Yeah, I'll give you one of mine. | ||
| It's a, it's an Oliva, Rebanded Olivia. | ||
| I said, Do you know Oliva cigars? | ||
| He said, Yeah. | ||
| I said, I can't get in touch with them. | ||
| He goes, I'll put you in touch. | ||
| Well, that's fortuitous. | ||
| 15 minutes, we have the deal for production and distribution for a test cigar. | ||
| Only because of a happenstance of business. | ||
| It couldn't, it basically couldn't have worked with any other company. | ||
| We go through it, we blend. | ||
| I'm blending meticulously. | ||
| I wanted to go to Nicaragua, had a little trouble getting into the country of Nicaragua. | ||
| I'm blending it for long distance. | ||
| All this. | ||
| We finally launch it. | ||
| How hard is it to get to the right blend? | ||
| If you're obsessive, if you're horrifically obsessive, I was such a terrible person to work with. | ||
| That's the way to be. | ||
| But you have to be. | ||
| Because I said, with those, I said, look, this is something I care about. | ||
| I'm not really doing this primarily to make money. | ||
| I'll make money other ways. | ||
| I'm doing this because this is a thrill. | ||
| I've wanted to do it for 15 years. | ||
| And I landed on a blend, a Connecticut blend, which is the Mayflower Dawn. | ||
| It was kind of the more mainstream one. | ||
| The Mayflower Dusk, which is an Ecuador Habano wrapper. | ||
| That was really blended just for my tastes. | ||
| And a double Maduro, the Mayflower Dream, comes from a painting by William Holsall of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor. | ||
| And it's an orange sky. | ||
| And you can't tell if the sun is rising or setting on America. | ||
| I love this ambiguous painting. | ||
| Is it, and we get in a tomorrow or is the light going out? | ||
| And I said, that's what I wanted to be: dawn, dusk, and dream. | ||
| We get the cigars. | ||
| The cigars are made at the same factory that made the box that my mother gave me. | ||
| No way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How do you plan that? | ||
| Talk about Providence. | ||
| How do you plan that? | ||
| That's wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so you smoke them all the time. | ||
| You smoke your own brand. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| They were actually made for my taste. | ||
| And they are, I say, with no false modesty and true humility, they're exquisite. | ||
| And so we've got three lines now. | ||
| I even made the, I was, I was so brutal about it. | ||
| I made these little mini ones. | ||
| I call them Mayflower Compacts. | ||
| They're little petite coronas. | ||
| That's pretty funny. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And they're, but they're a premium hand rolled long filler, so it's not a cigarillo or something. | ||
| I just love them. | ||
| And they sold out immediately. | ||
| It was a good problem to have because I sold like four months supply in one day and was out of stock for Black Friday, out of stock for Christmas. | ||
| We're picking up production. | ||
| Now we're in retail stores. | ||
| This brings us all the way back to the top of our conversation because one of the reasons I started this company is I want people, especially guys, to get out in the physical world and spend time together and speak the best conversations I've had in my life are over cigars. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And I want them to do that, not be in their rooms, not be just on Zoom. | ||
| I want them to be in this and to recognize, you know, thus passeth the glories of the world, Sigtranse Gloria Mundi. | ||
| 45 minutes, you have your conversation and it's over and you can light another one, maybe tomorrow. | ||
| But I think it's instructive and it's whatever people say about the health effects of cigars. | ||
| I have always found, I think this quote, was it George Burns or someone, that I've taken more out of cigars than cigars have taken out of me. | ||
| Oh, I feel that way very, very strongly about tobacco. | ||
| Can you just like start a cigar company and start selling them? | ||
| Do you have to go through FDA hoops or? | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
| And through sheer providential blessing, I was able to leapfrog over a lot of that. | ||
| It still took me over a year, basically, to go from beginning the deal to launching. | ||
| To get them into stores is almost impossible. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because of all these stupid regulations. | ||
| If I started a pot company, I'd probably be in 57 states in the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, for sure. | |
| Yes. | ||
| It's very different. | ||
| Certain states, I just can't do business in. | ||
| I wish I could. | ||
| I have stores begging me for them. | ||
| I just can't. | ||
| I can't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| The regulations are so brutal. | ||
| I mean, certain places are trying to ban smoking just like forever. | ||
| Massachusetts, you know, tried to set a date after which you could just never buy tobacco. | ||
| So, it kept aging with you. | ||
| I mean, crazy, crazy stuff like that. | ||
| California is awful on the regs. | ||
| And so, we're trying to sneak them out as best we can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It does seem like tobacco should be part of the backlash. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Is it? | ||
| Well, it's the American crop. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Helped build the country. | ||
| Washington grew it. | ||
| Where did it come from? | ||
| The American South. | ||
| The American Indians. | ||
| And, oh, originally, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, it's not native to Europe. | ||
| It's native to North America. | ||
| And you know who really discovered it? | ||
| It was Christopher Columbus. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I grabbed the Taino Indians. | ||
| They would smoke them up their nose, which I don't think I've ever tried. | ||
| But, yes. | ||
| The two things he took away, in addition to corn, tobacco and syphilis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't sell syphilis. | ||
| Or have it. | ||
| Michael Knowles, that was great. | ||
| Tucker, thank you for having me. | ||
| And I really, really appreciate it. | ||
| And it's great to see you after six years. | ||
| Totally vindicated. | ||
| You're not the disgusting one, Michael Knowles. | ||
| Thank you, Tucker. | ||
| And thank you for your help. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| It was nothing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So, it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show. | ||
| On one level, that's not surprising. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive. | ||
| The way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel. | ||
| Subscribe, hit the little bell icon to be notified when we upload and share this video. |
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