00:01:22.000The second you have to feel the need to pretend that you're perfect, you become a liar and you become paradoxically even less perfect, in my opinion.
00:01:30.000You can listen to it in its entirety, members.charliekirk.com.
00:01:35.000Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:02:01.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:56.000Yeah, you know, it's, I guess it's different from a lot of other biographies because I think it's, you know, it's about Tucker Carlson, the man, obviously, and he gave me unprecedented access.
00:03:05.000I spent a lot of time with him over the last year working on this book.
00:03:09.000And he really, he hasn't seen a word, nor has he asked to.
00:03:12.000He's just totally trusted me and my judgment to tell his story, which is a great honor.
00:03:17.000But, you know, it's also about more than just him.
00:03:24.000You know, there's a lot of sort of immediacy in the book.
00:03:26.000I was with him when a lot of things were unfolding.
00:03:29.000And, you know, I really hope that readers walk away from it with a better insight into who Tucker is and where he came from and what he's like as a man, not just as a person on television or formerly on television.
00:03:40.000Well, a question I get most frequently is, how's he been?
00:03:46.000And so walk us through what we know that's in the book of when it came down, when Fox News decided to cancel his show.
00:04:05.000I think that this time away, he's been able to get a lot of perspective.
00:04:09.000He's been able to step away from the fray a bit and collect his thoughts.
00:04:15.000You know, I interviewed him twice after a show was taken off the air for the book, and I've spoken to him several times since then.
00:04:21.000And he's very anxious to get back to work.
00:04:24.000You know, obviously he has his Twitter show, but that's not the same.
00:04:28.000With the cease and desist letters from Fox, well, they've, from what I understand, they've sort of backed off on those because if they keep sending them, well, Tucker's just going to keep posting them online.
00:04:38.000And I think maybe for the first time ever, Fox has realized, well, first time in this drama that they're digging themselves into a deeper hole by doing that, that it's really not a good look for them to be trying to silence the most influential voice on the right at the moment.
00:04:54.000He's certainly anxious to get his next thing going, but he's unfortunately still under contract with Fox.
00:05:01.000And he told me that obviously he'd like to get out from under that as quickly and as easily as possible.
00:05:07.000So when you started this project, what was something that now with the book being published, the book is called Tucker, everyone should check it out, that surprised you, that you learned about Tucker, his story, his biography, the way he does his work.
00:05:19.000I think the level to which he's a very deeply literary man.
00:05:23.000He has a great appreciation for wonderful literature, great American literature, great Russian literature, anything you can think of, the great English writers.
00:05:31.000And he's first and foremost a writer, which I don't think I really understood at first.
00:05:35.000You know, he got his start in literature and in magazine writing.
00:05:41.000He's obviously a very talented and wonderful performer, but anyone who watched his show could tell that those A-block scripts, those famous monologues were all Tucker.
00:05:49.000That's very much a creative outlet for him.
00:05:52.000Secondly, I think just the nature of, you know, it was very wonderful to see how strong his relationship with his wife is.
00:05:59.000It's very sort of a storybook love affair.
00:06:02.000They've been together since they were 15 years old.
00:06:12.000His relationship with his wife and with his kids is probably the most precious thing in the world to him.
00:06:17.000So let's go through just some of the chapters here.
00:06:20.000You know, you talk about how he's been involved in the movement for quite some time.
00:06:26.000Talk about the kind of philosophical development of Tucker Carlson.
00:06:30.000You know, you could go find clips of Tucker 10 or 15 years ago advocating for a full-out invasion of Iraq, arguing that Cheney is telling us the truth.
00:06:42.000And now, 15 years later, it's the direct and polar opposite.
00:06:46.000And by the way, I've had intellectual and philosophical development, large in part thanks to Tucker, by the way.
00:06:51.000He's played such a profound role in that.
00:06:53.000But he's very open about this, but I'm sure you pinpoint this in the book.
00:06:57.000He used to be not just, you know, mildly, enthusiastic, bow tie-wearing, like full-force cheerleader for neoconservatism.
00:07:11.000And, you know, he's always been a kind of mischievous little scam.
00:07:14.000He's always been a little rap scallion who likes to poke the bear and mess with people.
00:07:18.000That goes back to when he was in high school and even before then, which I get to write about in the book, some instances of that.
00:07:24.000And really his big shift away from Beltway conservatism and neoconservatism was the Iraq war.
00:07:31.000He went to Iraq on assignment for Esquire magazine in 2003, where he was embedded with civilian contractors.
00:07:38.000And he was so horrified about what he saw there and what a disaster it was and what the Americans were doing and how they simply had no business being there.
00:07:47.000And he really marks that as being a huge shift away from Neoconservatism, which he described as, after that experience, realizing they were just liberals with guns, the most dangerous kind of liberal.
00:07:59.000And since then, you know, he's really evolved more into this.
00:08:31.000But even in the many conversations I had with him, there's a spiritual underlying to the way he sees the world, not just the American political struggles, but nature and human nature and everything around that.
00:08:44.000I think that he's certainly become more galvanized on certain issues in the era of Trump.
00:08:49.000And more, he's a guy who came from Washington, D.C. elites, you know, and now he's become a complete outcast and a kind of hero to the everyman, despite him having so many connections and knowledge of how Washington works.
00:09:04.000So we're going to get this clip for the next segment.
00:09:07.000One of my most memorable Tucker Carlson moments as a viewer was when they were teasing his new show.
00:09:13.000O'Reilly went out and it was the day after the election and it was like 7 a.m. Eastern, a day after the 2016 election.
00:09:20.000And it was Wednesday morning and it was on the couch and they're like, oh, Tucker, come on in because they had him scheduled because they were teasing like next week, this thing called Tucker Carlson tonight is going to be out.
00:09:30.000And Tucker, I think, had a 10 to 12 minute segment, which is one of the most profound pieces of television, I think, in the modern era, where the Fox and Friend hosts Kill Mead, Doocy, and I think it was Ainsley at the time.
00:09:43.000They were genuinely looking for somebody to make sense of this, right?
00:10:12.000You know, as some NPR, no, I'm sorry, some PBS hack called him the high priest of Trumpism, which I think was meant to be an insult, but I don't think that is an insult.
00:10:23.000I think there's some kind of truth in that to the extent that he really, you know, on his show, especially during the Trump presidency, he didn't really talk about Donald Trump a lot or directly, but he talked a ton about Trumpism and the things happening around Trump.
00:10:36.000He wasn't this sort of blind Trump cheerleader, but he clearly believed in the people who voted for Trump and he understood why they voted for him and by and large supported most of the things that they supported.
00:10:48.000I think that that's, you know, a really key into his popularity over the last few years at Fox, how he became so popular under the network, was his understanding of the grievances of so much of the country and why Donald Trump won the election despite all odds and despite what everyone in Washington and New York thought was going to happen.
00:11:08.000Yeah, I mean, one of the secrets to his success as the cable, you know, as his show came online was it was this remarkably articulate and deep way of translating and listening and then articulating what the elites considered to be nothing more than just white nationalist tribalism.
00:11:31.000And Tucker said, well, no, hold on a second.
00:11:33.000Let me explain this to you if you want to learn.
00:11:35.000The book is called Tucker by Chadwick Moore.
00:13:40.000I would agree with your characterization of people in media, absolutely.
00:13:44.000And not only is he a decent guy, he's a hilarious guy, you know, as you can imagine, and in person and hanging out with him.
00:13:53.000You're just in stitches half the time, but he is truly a decent man.
00:13:56.000And, you know, I think that something interesting I found out when I got to interview some of these people for the book is the man gives his phone number to basically everyone who stops him on the street.
00:14:06.000And it's a big source of where he gets content for his shows.
00:14:10.000So I talk to like, you know, waitresses, pilots, nurses, actors, just random people who had a random encounter with Tucker Carlson and he gave them his phone number.
00:14:38.000And one thing I saw that when I spent so much time with him is that he really goes through great lengths to humble himself, to remind himself every day that he's not God.
00:14:47.000Because when you're on cable news and you have that job, the job title is, I am God.
00:14:55.000And he stepped away from his hour on television and reminds himself that he's not, that he's just a person like billions of others who've existed before him and will surely exist after him.
00:15:05.000So talk about the impact that Tucker has made on the philosophical direction of the right.
00:15:09.000He moved the Overton window on things like war, the border, immigration, corporate power, the idea of chemical castration of children, you know, all just from little things to big things.
00:15:22.000Tucker Carlson, I believe, has in a good way radicalized the right.
00:15:28.000And I think that one area where he's still working to move the right, he certainly has, I think, among average people, maybe not necessarily our leaders, is talking about beauty and talking about architecture and talking about environmentalism, not from a crazy green energy climate change perspective, but keeping a beautiful planet.
00:15:47.000You know, conservatives, in his view, are meant to conserve things.
00:15:53.000And yet, we have leaders that have been said embrace this kind of libertarian idea that, as Tucker would say, the aesthetics of the dollar store are important and that we should all live in strip malls and horribly ugly environments.
00:16:06.000That's one of my favorite, personally, one of my favorite things about Tucker and writing this book was that, unlike anyone else on television, he could talk about these things.
00:16:13.000He could talk about architecture and beauty in a way that nobody else could because he deeply cares about these things and believes in them.
00:16:20.000And he tries to push the Republican Party to embrace those things as well.
00:16:24.000I think with many Republican voters, you don't have to convince them.
00:16:38.000They are currently raising money to start their own network.
00:16:41.000Tucker's executive producer, Justin Wells, tells me that on this new venture, you're going to see a lot more Tucker than you ever saw on Fox News.
00:16:50.000They are unfortunately still under contract with Fox, not they, but Tucker.
00:17:23.000Issue after issue, because it wasn't just the amount of people he was influencing, it's the lawmakers he was influencing, the influencers he was influencing, myself included.
00:17:33.000He moved me significantly on core issues that I used to parrot mindlessly.
00:17:38.000And he would say, Why do you believe that?
00:17:41.000And he would do it in a very persuasive way.
00:17:44.000And I am forever indebted to Tucker Carlson for myself personally and my continuing, ongoing education in politics and economics and philosophy.
00:19:15.000Fill out the quick form and they'll get you back with answers, andrewdtodd.com.
00:19:21.000Just to kind of continue on this, by the way, Donald Trump will be arraigned any second now.
00:19:25.000Will heard running for the presidency, CIA agent play cut 19.
00:19:29.000All right, we've heard the evidence, we've heard him call the Georgia Secretary of State and say, and ask this Georgia Secretary of State to do an illegal action.
00:19:41.000And this is the kind of baggage that six out of 10 Americans don't want to see in an election because six out of 10 Americans don't want to see Donald Trump be the Republican nominee.
00:19:54.000Sean, how should conservatives react to the arraignment, indictment of Donald Trump?
00:19:59.000They should be shocked and appalled and enraged.
00:20:03.000And the first thing you really have to do is put out of your mind that it's about Donald Trump.
00:20:09.000It doesn't matter if you love Donald Trump or you hate Donald Trump.
00:20:13.000What matters is that we have a completely corrupt and lawless Department of Justice working on behalf of the regime trying to imprison its primary political opponent for the crime of having said things that the ruling regime doesn't agree with.
00:20:27.000I mean, that's not just shredding the Constitution.
00:20:31.000That's pouring $4 a gallon gas on it and lighting it on fire and dancing around it.
00:21:24.000It fired us from our jobs for not getting a shot that didn't work.
00:21:28.000We're getting pretty close to the Republic about being done.
00:21:32.000And in a lawless law enforcement agency going after their political opponent and putting him in prison because he said things they didn't agree with, that's the end.
00:21:41.000Like if that can be allowed to happen, we don't have a republic anymore.
00:22:26.000You learn a lot about what the department charges and what it doesn't.
00:22:29.000Let's look at who they're not charging for nonsense, for being a foreign agent for influence peddling.
00:22:37.000They're not charging Joe Biden's dirtbag son, who we have dead to rights, according to his own writings, his own laptops, his bank account records, his own business partner in Devin Archer, selling influence and selling out the U.S. government so that he and daddy could get cash for it.
00:22:54.000In fact, he's getting a sweetheart plea deal where they make it all go away and he doesn't do any prison time so that they can protect Joe.
00:23:00.000So yeah, I will say the New York Times is right in that regard.
00:23:03.000You can learn a lot about a government by what it charges and what it doesn't charge.
00:23:06.000Yeah, and it's not charging the most obvious crimes.
00:23:29.000Why are Republicans putting up with this?
00:23:31.000Yeah, we have a problem where so many Republicans, it seems the bulk of the party and certainly its leadership, they're terrified of their own shadows.
00:23:38.000They don't have any balls and they don't have any spine.
00:23:40.000And so they go and they negotiate with themselves and decide, oh, we're not going to do anything that works.
00:23:44.000We're going to send out sternly worded letters and tweets.
00:23:47.000And the advice I would give to them is: look at how we won the Cold War.
00:23:50.000We didn't win the Cold War by saying, you know what, Russia's bad and the Soviet Union's bad.
00:23:55.000And if they nuke us, we're not going to return in kind because that just wouldn't accomplish anything.
00:23:59.000We looked at them and we said, if you even so much as look in our direction, we will nuke you and everything you love to the point that people will not be talking about you for thousands of years because we will have wiped your memory from the earth.
00:24:11.000That's how Republicans have to approach this because that's how Democrats approach this.
00:24:15.000Republicans send out sternly worded tweets and Democrats go and they try to put their chief political opponents in prison.
00:24:22.000So the first thing they need to do is go in and impeach Merrick Garland immediately.
00:24:26.000I don't even know why that hasn't been done yet.
00:25:15.000Yeah, they're not going to do any of that.
00:25:17.000But no, it's good to talk about, but they're not going to do that.
00:25:20.000So what do you have to say to the argument that some of these state attorney generals should start indicting Democrats or investigating them?
00:25:28.000It's perplexing to me why we don't have any current.
00:25:31.000I mean, let me give you a great example, Sean, something you guys covered beautifully in the Federalist, the outright charitable fraud of BLM.
00:26:26.000Well, yeah, that's why you're a bunch of losers and it's why you're losing and it's why we're losing our country.
00:26:30.000So I think change actually begins with Republican voters.
00:26:34.000We have to demand a much better class of leader in the Republican Party.
00:26:39.000And we got to stop sending back these idiots who just want to go up there and show up on TV and talk tough and send out mean tweets and call that the end.
00:26:49.000Like we actually need people who do their jobs.
00:26:52.000Like once Alvin Bragg went and said, Donald Trump, I'm going to try and put you in prison because you didn't commit federal campaign finance fraud in a private legal settlement.
00:27:03.000Every single Republican DA and AG in the country should be looking to find someone.
00:27:07.000They should be looking for a scalp and a head to put on a pipe.
00:27:12.000Well, and I and I've talked to, like, for example, I talked to a couple attorney generals over the weekend because they all, you know, AG stands for aspiring governor, right?
00:27:19.000So they all ask for our endorsement and our help.
00:27:22.000And I say, okay, how many Democrats have you indicted?
00:27:24.000They say, well, Charlie, we don't look at our lens through political stuff and, you know, really commitment to the rule of law.
00:27:35.000And BLM, and by the way, BLM had donors from all 50 states.
00:27:38.000So there's jurisdiction in every state, right?
00:27:41.000And by the way, you might say, oh, Charlie, you know, what's the precedent?
00:27:44.000They're going after Steve Bannon on the We Build the Wall stuff on a remarkably flimsy case of charitable fraud where they actually did build a wall.
00:27:52.000And, you know, there's some weird stuff in that.
00:27:53.000The point is they shouldn't go to jail for it.
00:28:15.000I think that it's the Mike Pence syndrome.
00:28:17.000I want to be a protected loser, controlled opposition, get me a book deal.
00:28:21.000I'll look stoically into the distance while I will be known as the guy that lost nobly while the country was incinerated by degenerate Marxists.
00:28:33.000They're the Washington generals to the Democrats, Harlem Globetrotters.
00:28:36.000I wrote about this like 15 years ago, 14 years ago, during the Obamacare nonsense in the Senate when McConnell and Cornyn decided, oh, no, no, we're going to let them pass it.
00:28:44.000We're going to have some good amendments to make it look bad and then we'll run against it.
00:28:47.000And the problem is these idiots, they don't actually want to win.
00:29:01.000And I'll tell you quite honestly, I'm not interested in a party or members of that party who aren't interested in winning because winning is all there is in politics.
00:29:09.000Because when you lose, this is what happens.
00:29:12.000You get people like Mark Howe getting thrown in prison, being tried on federal charges because he prayed outside of an abortion clinic.
00:29:19.000Okay, you get kids in Wisconsin hauled away by cops because they were preaching the gospel at a public event.
00:29:28.000So the thing is, you either understand that the entire republic is at risk and that all of our freedoms are at stake right now, or you're worthless.
00:29:37.000That's the litmus test now for whether you should be elected to anything, is whether you understand what time it is in America right now.
00:30:08.000And I wish more than anyone that we could go back to a time where we only looked at the law, where we had one standard of justice, where there weren't different rules based on different people.
00:30:21.000I wish we could bring it back, but we're sure as hell not bringing it back until the other side feels the same pain that they're inflicting on us.
00:30:29.000And to believe that somehow we can just pat ourselves on the back and say, well, we're better than them.
00:30:33.000And magically everything will go back to, you know, it's going to be 2002 again.
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00:32:13.000Your tweet, Sean, is very interesting, which really inspired us about relitigating the 2020 election since Jack Smith's indictment seems to criminalize Trump's ability to redress his grievances.
00:32:32.000It's assault on us being able to vote.
00:32:33.000And it just kind of blows my mind, given all the whining from the left about democracy this and democracy that, democracy dies in darkness.
00:32:43.000They're taking a gun to democracy's head and they're pulling the trigger with this indictment because how on earth can you possibly have a country if you can't even say, hey, I'm going to follow the exact process for adjudicating election dispute and then have them say, yeah, that's actually a federal crime now.
00:33:02.000Yeah, I mean, you have a really brilliant tweet here that I want to read.
00:33:05.000The 2020 election was rigged and they're trying to throw Trump in prison before the 2024 election because they're not confident they'll be able to rig that one.
00:33:14.000And so let me ask you, Sean, just kind of looking at all the Republican contenders, are you impressed or disappointed generally by how Republicans running for the presidency have reacted to the administrative state striking Donald Trump?
00:33:27.000Yeah, I've been, you know, fairly disappointed with the primary campaign writ large, because from my view, the only thing that matters right now is taking down the completely corrupt deep state, administrative state, whatever you want to call it.
00:33:45.000We have this entire cabal of people who have no accountability, were elected by no one, can't be fired, but they have all this power.
00:33:56.000I care about gas prices, all that stuff.
00:33:59.000But unless you can actually have a functioning rule of law where people are able to control their own government, you don't have a country.
00:34:06.000And I've just been kind of annoyed in general at the whole primary field that doesn't seem to grasp that we're facing an existential crisis right now.
00:34:14.000And I get that a lot of them don't like Trump.
00:34:19.000You got to move past whether you love Trump or hate Trump and actually address the root problem here because the left is taking advantage of people's hatred of Trump to ram through things that will forever change the nature of the country and that we'll never be able to get back ever again.
00:34:34.000Yeah, criminalizing the First Amendment and obliterating the First Amendment being chief among them.
00:34:39.000I want to play a piece of tape here and get your reaction.
00:34:42.000This is a narrative that is growing, Sean, comparing half the country, not just comparing, but saying this is al-Qaeda ISIS.
00:34:51.000This is happening on multiple cable networks with multiple different types of people, obviously coordinated in symmetrical messaging to try to justify a Patriot Act 2.0, play cut 128.
00:35:02.000When I first learned about the indictment, I had a long conversation with a friend of mine, Ryan Riley, and I told him how proud I felt to be an American at that moment, much in the way that I did when I learned that our military had killed Osama bin Laden.