Tucker Carlson, host of the Tucker Carlson Show on Fox News, joins me on the Christmas Eve edition of The Charlie Kirk Show. We talk about nicotine, Russia, war, and much more. Happy Holidays!
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00:02:18.000Do you think there's something to the effect that as America stopped consuming nicotine that all of a sudden our health outcomes got worse?
00:02:55.000And I'm not certain of the cause and effect there, but neither is anyone else because they're studiously not looking at it because they never assess their failures.
00:03:48.000Every functional organization, classically the military, but all organizations and all families figure out when something goes wrong, why did it go wrong?
00:05:18.000But it remains true that, like, everything they said would happen when they banned cigarettes and infringed on your civil rights by telling you what you could do in your own car, in your home, and in a private restaurant, etc., etc.
00:05:30.000The outcome was the opposite of what they said.
00:05:32.000And the last thing I'll say is they have no problem pushing, like, actual narcotics on the population.
00:06:07.000Nicotine is an appetite suppressant, and it also constricts your blood vessels, which of course sharpens thinking and allows a higher processing of information, whereas marijuana dilates your blood vessels and does the opposite.
00:06:20.000Are you insinuating, Tucker, that our population would push something really bad on us to try to make us easier to control?
00:06:27.000I mean, our government would not do that.
00:06:28.000I mean, I do think these are conspiracies of instinct.
00:06:32.000I mean, I spent my whole life in D.C., and I know the people, in some cases pretty well, personally, who run it and have for a while.
00:06:39.000And they're non-geniuses as a group, I would say.
00:06:43.000These are not creative people, not incredibly organized people.
00:06:47.000I wouldn't hire any of them, personally.
00:06:50.000So I don't think they're sort of getting together at Bohemian Grove or Bilderberg to plot anything, really.
00:06:55.000I think they go home and sit and sell in silence with their unhappy wives and then, you know, get loaded scrolling the internet like all losers.
00:07:26.000Or is it just that this is a group of mediocrity?
00:07:30.000Well, look, the whole system is designed, it's set up to thwart the creative and the energetic and the free thinking and to reward the conformists, the losers.
00:07:41.000I mean, like, if you really think about it, and this is not just the government, and it's also, sorry to rattle your cage, but it's the economy as well, the whole thing is set up to reward people who could not succeed in a true meritocracy.
00:08:03.000So what that is doing self-consciously, I mean, explicitly, is making space for people who couldn't occupy these positions otherwise, okay?
00:08:23.000Like, if I buy some family company, manufacturing company in Ohio, and sell off its parts and lever it up, load it up with debt, and then cash out, leaving the company in ruins, and its workers unemployed, and I go back to Martha's Vineyard with an extra $100 million, that's called private equity.
00:08:43.000There is no obvious value to the country in doing that.
00:08:47.000At the same time, people who have obvious contributions to make, and I would, much as I despise teachers, I'd have to be honest, we really need good teachers.
00:08:56.000That's like an essential thing to have in any society.
00:09:35.000It's the insurance companies and the pharmacy brokers who are getting rich.
00:09:39.000Like, that's a screwed up system, right?
00:09:41.000If you just think about it, why is it that people who aren't actually contributing all that much to your society are the ones who are getting the smallest benefit?
00:09:50.000The people who change your tire or plow your roads, fix your HVAC, build your home, fly your airplane?
00:10:04.000Where people are rewarded for unimportant tasks like high facility with accounting or the ability to like weave through a super complex bureaucracy or like I have a special skill at understanding Dodd-Frank.
00:11:08.000And so we should reestablish the connection between merit and reward.
00:11:14.000If you're doing something creative and important that helps people, I think you should be rewarded.
00:11:20.000And if you're some bureaucrat, if you're teaching a really interesting course on ancient history in a liberal arts college, you should make the most.
00:11:29.000It should not be the administrator who's figuring out how to comply with the ADA in the bathrooms.
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00:13:47.000And, you know, you often hear people talk about, you know, the American middle class is dying and all their problems and the price of eggs and all that stuff.
00:13:54.000And it's like, if you actually talk to middle class people, I'm not a middle class person, never have been one.
00:13:57.000but I know some and I'm interested because I think you need a middle class base in your country.
00:14:02.000You need a majority middle class country in order to have a democracy.
00:14:36.000I'm not exactly sure how to solve it, but as a professional talker, I believe, and as a Christian, I believe— We're not even allowed to, like, criticize— But that's the point.
00:14:44.000Saying the truth out loud in the beginning was the word.
00:14:47.000Saying the truth out loud is the first step toward fixing things.
00:15:26.000Well, I happen to know, because I was there, that was made law in the bankruptcy bill.
00:15:30.000And that was led by Joe Biden, who later became the worst president in the history of the country.
00:15:35.000But at the time, when he was sentient, he was, of course, representing Delaware.
00:15:40.000Wilmington, Delaware was the credit card capital of the country in an exchange for adding that to the bankruptcy bill that you can discharge all kinds of debt, medical debt, all kinds of personal debt, like your landscaper.
00:15:53.000You don't have to pay your landscaper in a bankruptcy.
00:17:01.000Having experienced both, I can say nothing wrecks your sleep, nothing can hurt your marriage more than debt, faster than debt.
00:17:12.000I would say it's a bigger problem than sexual infidelity, which gets a lot of attention, which is bad.
00:17:16.000I'm not endorsing that either, obviously.
00:17:18.000But I'm saying if you were to actually look at the numbers on why people get divorced, debt is a bigger driver of divorce than sexual infidelity.
00:17:27.000And it's driven in this country primarily by credit cards.
00:17:29.000I mean, debt is the slavery of the free.
00:17:32.000The entire financial system is leveraged.
00:17:35.000Everything from the federal budget to how hedge funds operate to how we finance even the most simple things.
00:17:42.000I mean, you could go a step further and say the entire American economic project is on credit.
00:17:49.000Well, I don't think that's a stretch to say that, because it is.
00:17:52.000And it's a habit of mind, by the way, that is a relatively new development in the Christian world and in the Jewish and Muslim world.
00:17:59.000I mean, again, this was a precept of— It's one of the 613 laws of Judaism.
00:18:04.000And it was, you know, not allowed at various times during the Dark Ages, which are actually pretty light, it turns out, but another story entirely.
00:18:14.000It's one of those things that, you know, was the basis of, like, American politics for a long time.
00:18:20.000I mean, political leaders 150 years ago, really up until, you know— The First World War constantly talked about things like monetary policy, the banks, and debt, as you know, just as students of political history.
00:18:32.000And now it's totally vanished in favor of identity politics, race war, gender war.
00:18:38.000And that's, of course, intentional, right?
00:18:41.000You know, fight amongst yourselves, hate each other on the basis of characteristics that never change, immutable characteristics so you won't notice that the country's being looted.
00:18:47.000And I personally, I had an idea the other day that was not at all popular with the people I mentioned it to.
00:18:51.000They thought it was crazy, but I'm going to say it again because I kind of like it.
00:18:54.000It would be kind of fun to have a political party that was like the credit card party.
00:19:00.000And the only requirement for membership of the party would be that you would pledge at a certain date in the coming year to stop paying your credit card bills.
00:19:08.000And if you had, say, 100 million people in that party, it's sort of the old line about how you're afraid of the bank until you borrow enough that they become afraid of you.
00:19:16.000And I think it'd be sort of nice not to tank the banks or put anyone out of business or hurt anyone at all, but just as an expression of resistance and power.
00:19:26.000We owe you money, and if we didn't pay you back, then you would have to talk to us as adults and not just patronize us or stick your dogs on us.
00:19:34.000But you would have to, like, have a real adult conversation, as adults do with each other.
00:19:37.000You know, each with their point of view, and we can reach a negotiation.
00:23:51.000And at least where I was, you know, it didn't seem to look very much like Maine or Finland or any kind of, you know, northern conifer forest, which is my favorite landscape by far.
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00:25:40.000And I just know, having lived in the country for 55 years, that there are truly powerful forces arrayed against that happening.
00:25:48.000And at this point, really the only way they can stop it is with a true catastrophe.
00:25:52.000And there are a couple I won't even mention, some obvious ones.
00:25:55.000But one of them is war with the world's largest nuclear arm power, which is Russia.
00:26:01.000So they're really trying hard to do that.
00:26:04.000The Biden administration acting through NATO and the government of Ukraine, they have been trying to do that for almost three years.
00:26:10.000And they're really trying now, which is actually people should be arrested for that.
00:26:15.000You can't have a guy win the majority of the popular vote in an election in which he said repeatedly, I will stop the war, no more wars.
00:26:21.000And then the second he wins the majority of the popular vote, a mandate, a democratic mandate, you accelerate efforts to start a war that could very easily, in fact, it will, if not stopped, go nuclear and kill everybody.
00:27:18.000I just opened the floor, let him talk for an hour and a half in the hope that someone would hear it and be like, oh, wow, that's interesting.
00:27:44.000With the United States having spent most of his life here and has a million friends here since February of 2022, he's been like a criminal or whatever, but he knows everybody.
00:28:04.000And he just said, you know, they're accelerating this and without being boring in the one sentence, the key misunderstanding of Putin is that he's a dictator with absolute power.
00:28:50.000If there are continued attacks by the Biden administration on Russian soil, and enough Russians get killed, they just murdered one yesterday in Moscow with a bomb, then Putin has no choice but to act in some way that shows his rivals in the military, his population in Russia, that he's not letting his his population in Russia, that he's not letting his country get taken over, that he's fighting back.
00:29:39.000I'm just saying if they end up killing Putin, which they've tried to do repeatedly, then you've got this nuclear stockpile that's 6,000 nuclear weapons Where do they go?
00:30:04.000When you talk to some of the war hawks and you criticize the vertical escalation, at the core is actually this embedded belief that Putin is very rational.
00:30:13.000And they'll say, oh no, Putin won't do nuclear war.
00:30:16.000And essentially what they're saying is like, okay, we can do interior missile launches into Russia, but the Warhawks say, but Putin will never actually respond in nuclear war.
00:30:25.000So we're betting on the restraint of Putin, the man that we're told is a madman.
00:30:32.000That is the argument from the neocons in D.C. It's hard for me at 55, having lived in D.C. since 1985, I finally fled, but I spent my whole life there.
00:33:18.000The weapons used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less than a hundredth as powerful as the weapons that all these seven nations now possess.
00:33:27.000So everything is at stake, and anyone who would even risk that, like Dan Crenshaw or other morons like that, should be laughed off the stage, in fact, jeered off the stage.
00:33:36.000You have no right to have a position of authority because you are taking my family's life and putting it at risk for no good reason.
00:33:42.000So you can, like, seem cool on Twitter or get some job at, you know, AEI or some stupid think tank or, like, get accolades from Bill Kristol or whatever your motive is, it's not good enough.
00:33:53.000It doesn't justify putting 350 million lives at risk.
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00:36:34.000It'd be easy to give up, but you know I'll never give up on giving the truth to girls and women who the other side want to choose death for their baby.
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00:37:43.000I believe we see a lot of actors on the news networks and not necessarily journalists speak in their mind.
00:37:49.000I want to know how much control the news hosts have over what they say on the networks and was there ever anything that you were extremely passionate about but could not talk about on air?
00:38:00.000I have every incentive to be mean to Fox.
00:39:54.000I was wondering, I go to a very liberal college, and if there's any advice that you have to give to a college student trying to put conservative ideas back on the college campus, what would it be?
00:40:05.000Yeah, I mean, there's no one better than Charlie Kirk, who didn't even go to college, which is so great.
00:40:10.000We're an unrecognized chapter, so we're not allowed to be a chapter on St. Mary's campus.
00:40:16.000You know, I mean, I think it's worth getting kind of aggressive.
00:40:19.000Like, you're paying money to go there.
00:41:49.000And so I think it's super important to say to them, look, you have no legitimacy, you're a criminal, and I'm in charge now because I'm paying for this.
00:41:59.000And so you're my employee, and I'm not going to lord it over you or make fun of you or whatever, but you better obey.
00:42:07.000Because what you're doing is really wrong.
00:42:09.000And if you just say that calmly and smile, I mean you throw them off because they're used to like lecturing you all the time about everything.
00:42:19.000And the last thing I'm going to say is, be cheerful.
00:42:21.000The divide is really between people whose lives are miserable, that's why they embrace the politics of death, and people whose lives are really happy and they want to keep them that way.
00:43:35.000My question this evening is, as someone who unfortunately is going to have to move to Washington, D.C., what is the area...
00:43:45.000homeless problem there as it's kind of threefold with drugs and the debt crisis as well as just lacking social services without the conservative perspective being kind of transitioning to that democratic approach of increased taxpayer-funded social services stuff like that i mean stop paying for it is the truth As a sober person, a long-time sober person, I have true empathy for addiction, of course.
00:44:54.000And you should say that, speaking of no moral high ground, if you're a homeless advocate, encouraging people like the denomination, I won't even name it, that I grew up in, all the tents in Washington where I spent my life that the homeless are living in are provided by I'll say at the Episcopal Church.
00:45:10.000And it's like, are you really helping homelessness?
00:45:54.000I don't want to be self-righteous about it, but...
00:45:56.000I'll just say one of the reasons I left D.C. was the homeless thing because it made me so mad to think of members of Congress walking from Union Station, which is the prettiest train station in the United States, totally destroyed by homelessness and drugs, and stepping over the bodies of their fellow Americans dying of fentanyl to go vote for Ukraine.