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00:01:01.000Without any further ado, a pretty legendary conversation with the legend himself, Tucker Carlson.
00:01:31.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:55.000I made a mistake, I should say, to say I wanted to talk with you on stage about all these different topics and issues.
00:02:00.000And I wanted to start by just saying you have had more impact on the way I view the news cycle and how I view what's happening in our country than anyone else.
00:02:12.000So you and I were kind of talking before this about what's really happening in this country.
00:02:17.000And I think one of the most important shows you did recently was on a Friday evening, about a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, when you talked about inflation and what it means for normal people in our country.
00:02:28.000We talk about this a lot on our podcasts and our program, that the creation of money, it's not a mistake, it's a tactic that is actually being used to try and temporarily satisfy our addiction to debt.
00:03:09.000That's accelerated dramatically because of modern monetary theory, which is the idea that you can basically, with no real consequences, ignore your balance sheet and just continue to print money.
00:03:22.000And I've always thought it was a weird theory, a bizarre theory, until recently when I realized that, yes, it will cause inflation.
00:03:30.000The people pushing it know that, and they're doing it because they're going to benefit from it.
00:04:26.000It disadvantages anybody who has followed the rules as were laid out at the beginning of time, which is, you know, be responsible with your money.
00:04:37.000The people who followed those instructions have been hurt by our monetary policy, and they're about to get a lot more hurt because the value of the money they saved will decline.
00:04:47.000Whereas the people who are living entirely on credit, and I don't mean the guy who bought the extra bass boat, I mean the guy, you know, who's really, whose whole business is leverage, those people will benefit.
00:04:58.000And that's a small group relative to the first group.
00:05:00.000So anyone living on fixed income, anyone living on savings, those people are about to get a lot poorer.
00:05:05.000The people who are facing insurmountable debt will ultimately find it surmountable because of inflation.
00:05:10.000So like it's, it's not that complex, really.
00:05:13.000Well, but what I have found so interesting is that you're one of the only people talking about this.
00:05:17.000And it might be one of the biggest thing actually.
00:05:21.000It's also, it impacts every single kind of facet of life.
00:05:26.000You were warning years ago, and I didn't take this seriously, honestly, when you said this a couple years ago, that a small group of people are getting way too powerful.
00:05:36.000They're getting rich at other people's expense.
00:05:38.000And now we have seen this year, Jeff Bezos is wealthier than any other person ever to exist in the history of the planet, nearing $200 billion.
00:05:45.000We have seen the billionaires have had a great year.
00:06:41.000On every level, from the sort of micro level, downtown Chicago, independent businesses are going under, big national, international retailers are managing to hang in there.
00:07:31.000Whereas a couple years ago, people would say, why would we need to break up these wonderful companies that are just doing such a great job for us?
00:07:37.000And we just start with the surveillance capitalism companies, right?
00:07:40.000Which are basically data companies who spy on all of us and we are the product.
00:08:01.000So, for example, this conversation we're having right now, and we put it up on YouTube, if we say something wrong or so that some guy in pajamas and Menlo Park doesn't like and they just make it disappear, I have no recourse I can take over at all.
00:08:14.000And so you're at complete and total mercy of these tech companies.
00:08:17.000Can you talk about kind of how big of a threat they actually pose?
00:08:20.000And it's the most basic of all threats.
00:08:24.000I mean, having control over information kind of makes the difference at every level over time.
00:08:33.000So if you don't know about something, if you don't have the capacity to understand something, even to think about something, then, you know, I can control you, right?
00:08:42.000I mean, that's why the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights protects the press because power over information is that central.
00:08:50.000And Google is the most powerful company in the history of the world.
00:08:55.000Way more powerful than Standard Oil ever.
00:08:56.000Way more powerful than the U.S. government.
00:08:58.000So, yeah, look, we should declare war on bigness without getting into the rat hole of the details where I spend my life, but I would say we should be philosophically opposed to concentrations of wealth and power this profound.
00:09:13.000The fact that Google is as big and powerful as it is, same with Facebook, is itself an argument against Google and Facebook.
00:09:28.000I mean, and at the same time, we should turn our attention to what really matters, which are the small things, like your own life, which we've all put on hold for the sake of these macro questions.
00:09:38.000I mean, one of the problems with an election year is everyone thinks in national or global terms, like in terms of trends and whatever.
00:09:45.000And it's very easy to forget that what actually matters and what you will contemplate on your deathbed is how you ordered your own life.
00:10:12.000That's the most kind of micro concern you can have, and yet it's the most profound.
00:10:18.000So, I think if you're a whatever it is, you know, whatever the category is, conservative, you know, traditional, liberal, libertarian, or anybody who's not fully with the current program, your main concern ought to be, you know, do I have a happy personal life?
00:10:43.000And so, do you think I completely agree, but it seems as if the Republican Party is doing their best not to embrace that?
00:10:49.000And so, they're just pure corporate shills.
00:10:51.000I mean, their values are the values of corporate America.
00:10:54.000I mean, one of the my challenges, I hope in 2021 is to clean up my vocabulary, sweep away the words that are not precisely descriptive and, in fact, counterproductive.
00:11:05.000And one of them is left and liberal, right and conservative.
00:11:08.000I mean, those terms just, they had a great deal of meaning when I was growing up during the Cold War.
00:11:13.000It was a war between left and right, collectivist versus freedom, you know, market capitalism versus communism.
00:11:19.000No, what we're fighting now is man versus the behemoth.
00:11:23.000It's the individual versus corporate power, period.
00:11:26.000And almost everything that I find repulsive about modern American society, starting and beginning with the pollution and distortion of gender roles and abortion, which are the things I find most destructive because it's tampering with the very formula, with the recipe for a successful civilization.
00:13:05.000So the real threat that we face now, I mean, the left, I'm not, you know, I don't like the left, and I've spent my whole life arguing against the left, but I know the left.
00:13:15.000I know, you know, because I grew up with them.
00:13:33.000And it's efficiency, corporate efficiency that we should be afraid of.
00:13:37.000And so what I think, if I could just say it's phenomenal, but this is the struggle right now on the right or whatever, the conservative America.
00:13:48.000And what I've found is that the people that would oppose you in what you're saying, which in a different time I might have because I was completely steeped in Hayek and Milton Friedman, who I still have appreciation for me too.
00:14:05.000Tons of insights, but there was almost a dogmatic, quasi-religious undertone in the conservative movement.
00:14:12.000Thou shalt never speak ill of anything ever in the economy if it has to do with the corporation or free market capitalism.
00:14:18.000Like that was one of the commandments of the conservative movement.
00:14:22.000And if you said it amazingly, instantaneously, you're a Marxist.
00:14:24.000Well, no, actually, I can make some points about being a Marxist.
00:14:28.000And I think you pioneered that in a lot of different ways.
00:14:31.000But anyone who would disagree with what you're saying, I question how could they come to that conclusion?
00:14:37.000Is it because they're being funded or is it because...
00:14:39.000Well, they maybe haven't thought about it or they don't have.
00:14:42.000I mean, look, I can't, you know, other people's motives are very hard to assess.
00:14:45.000I can describe my own, and they're very simple.
00:14:48.000Anybody who threatens my family or the structure from which I've derived the overwhelming majority of the satisfaction and joy in my life, that's my family, my wife and children.
00:15:14.000But if you make it impossible for my kids to get married, I'm at war with you because you're threatening, well, first of all, my ability to pass on my genes.
00:15:23.000Like, this is the most basic, this is the most basic human drive is to pass on your genes, is to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
00:16:26.000And yet, that's the basis of everything for them.
00:16:30.000So why is it so offensive to say out loud, like, oh, I don't know, like before you destroy the patriarchy, tell me why it existed since the beginning of recorded time.
00:16:42.000Did every society, like in the history of man, decide to come up with the same structure just to like oppress people because they got off on oppressing people?
00:16:51.000Kind of hard to believe that they, you know, sprouted all over the earth in pretty much the same way with some exceptions, but not really many.
00:16:58.000Maybe there's something innate about that.
00:17:00.000And maybe before we destroy it, we should consider the consequences of destroying it.
00:17:03.000And of course, the consequences are on display right now, which is like total atomization, alienation, spike in suicide rate, drug addiction, no one gets married.
00:17:12.000It's like super depressing and dystopian.
00:17:47.000And what I find interesting is that we're entering this post-political moment where you mentioned this when we were kind of chatting earlier.
00:17:55.000Glenn Greenwald and myself and you, we're all kind of agreeing on the same sort of problems all the time.
00:18:02.000Where if you actually believe in freedom of speech, family formation, Western civilization, you could call it, then we're all allies against this kind of corporatist America that we're all living in.
00:18:16.000But here's where I think the conservative movement went wrong is for the last decade, especially is, and you saw this in kind of what Mitt Romney said in 2012 when he's running for president, when he said, corporations are people, my friend, almost this kind of corporate idolatry that existed, that the corporate masters are on our team and they're always going to be kind of looking out for us.
00:18:35.000And the Boston Consulting Group guy said that?
00:18:47.000The shipping our jobs and many other things overseas.
00:18:51.000But the issue, what you're talking about is a return to actual conservatism, which is faith first, then family, duty to country, and not necessarily this kind of overindulgent, like we need more piles of plastic from China, stuff we're never going to use.
00:19:08.000We're going to put in our garage to get people to take away and put in these storage units mentality that has infected us the last couple decades.
00:21:09.000The addiction thing, I mean, it don't even get me going, but like as someone who, you know, is now sober, I've thought a lot about it personally.
00:21:18.000But you watch the whole country get addicted to things, like real things too, not just nicotine, which I'm still proudly addicted to, but like opioids or something where there's no kind of happy endgame.
00:21:31.000And this happens on a mass scale and hundreds of thousands of people die and nobody says anything about it.
00:21:35.000Not just like, well, why did the Sacklers pump this garbage into West Virginia?
00:21:38.000But the more basic question, why did the people of West Virginia take it?
00:21:52.000And it's because their most basic needs, which are not food and shelter, but like some deeper needs, are being not just unmet, but completely ignored.
00:22:00.000So once you start meditating on that for a moment, you're like, the way we structure this whole deal is off.
00:22:06.000It's not actually helping anyone at all.
00:22:10.000And I think one of the main drivers, and you mentioned this, is the hyper-feminization of our country.
00:22:14.000And someone who wrote a great book about this is Elizabeth Warren.
00:22:19.000And it was, she was talking about how sending both the mother and the father by almost mandatory decree into the workforce is going to actually make people less free.
00:22:30.000And poorer, by the way, and more worried about money.
00:22:33.000So you get on, I mean, I grew up in a world, again, I'm 51, so I'm not, you know, 81, but I grew up in a country where it was very normal for people, middle class, not just rich people, middle class people, to raise their own children.
00:22:45.000Like you didn't axiomatically automatically hire someone from a third world country to raise your children.
00:23:20.000To go be a partner in some law firm in Manhattan or something.
00:23:22.000But America tells my daughters, I have three daughters, like the highest level of attainment, not just materially, but spiritually, is to work at some creepy investment bank that doesn't know your last name or care if you die.
00:23:33.000That's the most important thing you could do to serve global capital.
00:23:35.000In fact, I believe Sheryl Sandberg wrote a whole book on this called Lean In.
00:23:39.000The most important thing you can do to self-actualize is to work for some creepy multinational doing something pointless.
00:23:46.000And if you do that and give up the promise and your biological imperatives, the promise of a family and children, I don't know, you win.
00:23:54.000And every living human being knows that's not a win, it's a loss.
00:23:57.000And if that happened to your kids, you would weep.
00:24:26.000You don't need to be from some, you know, out-of-step sect to believe this.
00:24:33.000You just have to be human and acknowledge what people actually want as opposed to what a very small group of super unhappy people are telling you you should want.
00:24:42.000What I think the danger is, though, is now the multi-trillion dollar corporations have found a partner that they've been looking for for many decades, which is the social woke activists.
00:25:02.000And so there was always kind of incongruency with the multi-trillion dollar corporations and the Republicans because the corporations were kind of saying, wait, why is it that all of your daughters are getting married when they're 23?
00:25:20.000Because of Trump, largely, by the way, because of the reaction to Trump, all of a sudden there's been this realignment politically where the SJW kind of social disintegrationist nihilists, if you will, who have theological beliefs towards the world, they have found these corporations that actually have shared interests.
00:27:44.000So I guess where President Trump, who I consider to be a friend, he didn't actually capitalize on this strongly enough.
00:27:52.000And I sent endless memos to the White House and to the campaign, you know, people that I knew as many that would listen to me, is Joe Biden is the corporate candidate.
00:28:34.000I couldn't agree with that analysis more.
00:28:37.000There were people on the campaign who decided Joe Biden is ahead in the polls because he's got control of the critical retired rap star vote.
00:28:44.000And we need to win as many retired rap stars as we possibly can and do pressers with them.
00:29:08.000Offer your voters something real, which is protection from the bad guys, and it's not hard to identify them.
00:29:16.000And they will be so excited that you will win.
00:29:19.000And one of the things that normal people really appreciate, normal people being a euphemism for those who can't afford bodyguards, is the ability to go to the grocery store without getting raped.
00:29:30.000The biggest landslide in American history was 1972, Richard Nixon, a guy who had a fraction of the charm of Donald Trump, who had a fraction of the intuitive understanding of voters of Donald Trump.
00:29:40.000And he still won more electoral votes than anybody has ever won.
00:29:46.000And he had only one real issue, which is law and order.
00:29:48.000The crazies are trying to make the world dangerous.
00:29:53.000You had a year where the crazies were making measurably America more dangerous, which means a crappier place to live for normal people.
00:30:01.000And you didn't run on that because you had people in your campaign who were like so guilty about their own pampered upbringings and how they got into prestigious colleges fraudulently or whatever.
00:30:10.000They were working out their own interior guilt trips on the country because that's what they do.
00:30:15.000They feel bad about their unearned privilege.
00:30:17.000So they're like, oh, we can't say anything about the destruction of American society because I feel guilty that, you know, whatever, my dad paid to get me to Ivy League school.
00:30:49.000And I think that he was undercut at every turn by people who didn't.
00:30:53.000And I think the framing very well could have been: Joe Biden is the representation of every institution that has betrayed you and funded by others.
00:31:02.000And he did that kind of brilliantly in 2016 with Hillary Clinton.
00:31:06.000And Joe Biden was actually a bolder manifestation of that.
00:31:11.000I mean, Joe Biden didn't even pretend to be supported by grassroots Americans or by middle-income earners.
00:31:17.000It was, I'm going to take as much money as I possibly can raise in my Zoom fundraisers, and we're going to lock the country down again.
00:31:24.000Well, yeah, he ran a campaign through a Chinese software product that's being used.
00:31:35.000I mean, Joe Biden doesn't sort of exist as an independent force.
00:31:38.000He's just purely a puppet for larger forces, obviously.
00:31:42.000He's despised by a lot of the people around him.
00:31:45.000It was just so clear what was going on and so dark, so cynical and dystopian and scary.
00:31:52.000You know, it makes the hair on your arms go up just to describe it.
00:31:55.000And nobody was willing to really say what was going on.
00:31:59.000Part of the sad thing for me, I think there, I think there was voter fraud.
00:32:03.000I think macro there was massive voter fraud in that the tech companies shut down one side completely.
00:32:10.000I mean, that's putting a thumb on the scale if they're, I mean, that's fraud.
00:32:14.000They rigged the election, but out in the open.
00:32:17.000And I'm willing to entertain any other possibilities.
00:32:20.000But I do think the sad thing about that conversation, which is an important conversation, is that to some extent it does distract us from what we are arguing.
00:32:33.000Let's have that conversation, shall we?
00:32:36.000And we haven't because the very people who would like to keep the party unchanged are distracting us with things that are relevant, but they're not the whole conversation.
00:32:47.000Like, why didn't anybody in the Republican Party go after Google?
00:32:53.000Like, you can't have a democracy where a company that's wholly aligned with one side is shutting down conversation in the middle of a presidential campaign.
00:33:01.000You can't have a democracy under those circumstances.
00:33:03.000The Republicans were being disadvantaged by it.
00:33:21.000Well, yeah, the chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, who's a senator who shall remain nameless from Utah, Mike Lee, basically, and he didn't do it alone, but he did it with others for sure.
00:33:34.000But made certain, he protected Google basically for the past four years.
00:33:39.000When, you know, that's in, that's basically a direct attack on the interests of his voters.
00:33:44.000And I don't know how he's been allowed to get away with that.
00:34:08.000And I've heard a lot of people say, so I know a lot of people who share my view, of course, because they text me all the time, and they're like, Mike Lee's been bought off by Google.
00:35:10.000I think, with respect to Mike Lee, who I do think should answer for the crimes he's committed, but I do think that he did that because he sincerely believes the greatest.
00:35:21.000I mean, I just think he's got a philosophical difference.
00:35:23.000Yeah, and I think, though, that if I were to explain it for him, which I wouldn't agree with this, I think he would say it's my ideology.
00:35:52.000But I think that if you allow ideology to be the only kind of compass of which you navigate public policy, then we're no different than leftists then.
00:36:04.000Well, try to raise your kids like that.
00:36:06.000I mean, life is impossible to predict.
00:36:34.000I mean, this is what every parent, I hope, would tell a kid.
00:36:38.000Ideology doesn't allow room for that because it has the answers already.
00:36:44.000So in real life, you know, you get leukemia and die and you don't kind of expect to and you forgot to buy insurance or, you know, one of your kids gets addicted to drugs.
00:36:51.000And like, I don't know, what's the kind of roadmap for that?
00:38:14.000And ideology is basically a lie that tells you, it's the theory of everything you come up with when you're getting high freshman, you're in college.
00:39:37.000And if they're not, like, maybe it didn't work.
00:39:39.000Well, and that's one of the main issues is that you have an entire political party that is hiding behind ideology, Republicans, and there are some things that aren't going well.
00:39:48.000And they say, but no, but the principle, free trade works.
00:40:08.000And that is such a violation of what is true fundamentally, a truth that we didn't create and can't change, that it will never work.
00:40:17.000And so one of the things that reassures me as I look at a society that's gone completely off the rails is that it can't endure because nothing that's this untrue can persist.
00:40:36.000When Facebook tells me there are 72 gender categories, I'm like, it doesn't bother me that much because it's like there actually aren't there two.
00:40:43.000And ultimately, nature is going to win because you can't beat nature.
00:42:02.000There's something very deep going on with the climate stuff which I find hilarious but also threatening.
00:42:07.000Like earth worship yeah no, but I I'm more of an earth worship, like I actually love nature, I spend, I try to, I live, I mean, I'm outside all day long that's, I've organized my life to be outside.
00:42:16.000Okay, that's how strongly I feel about nature.
00:42:23.000They think they're in charge of nature.
00:42:27.000So actually we have climate cycles that not only are they well known, they formed the earth.
00:42:32.000I live in a place in Maine on a glacial lake.
00:42:34.000A glacier is a chunk of ice formed by climate change that cut a trench through the mountains, in fact, created the mountains in a lot of cases, into which water flowed when it melted, and now that's the lake I live on.
00:42:48.000So that's Climate change, there's a physical, there's physical evidence of its existence going back to the cooling of the earth.
00:42:56.000It's clearly happening again now, but we imagine A, we're responsible for it, and B, we can control it.
00:43:03.000You'd really have to be some sort of like crazed narcissist to believe that.
00:43:13.000But these people who really do think the galaxy, you know, centers on them, that they're the sun in our solar system, like they're like, oh no, we did this.
00:43:32.000And anything that suggests I'm not must be squelched immediately.
00:43:36.000So I kind of want to end on that note.
00:43:37.000And this is something you've said before in your speeches that I've heard you say, which is the true framing of what we're going through in our country is a theological debate, a worship of God or a worship of man.
00:43:48.000And can you talk about your faith, how important it is to you?
00:43:52.000And because what we have in our country more than anything else is people that have been told almost evangelistically to believe in secular, nihilistic, hedonistic self-indulgence.
00:44:03.000And by the time they get 19 or 20, they are the most miserable generation in American history.
00:45:04.000The second thing is, if you don't recognize that and you imagine that you're in charge of everything, you will be humiliated, proved wrong, and super unhappy in the meantime.
00:45:17.000And the third thing is, the only unchanging fact of life is its end, is death.
00:45:23.000And I just think it's amazing we've constructed this entire society, you know, that considers everything fair inquiry or didn't until recently.
00:45:30.000And that's the one topic nobody ever talks about.
00:45:53.000But I just, I can't believe that you could have a society, the West more broadly, that's at its core secular, which is another way of saying ignores the key fact of life, which is death.
00:46:04.000And then I'm thinking, well, how can that work?
00:46:55.000Last thing I'll say: I was a fearful flyer from, I grew up in California, went to boarding school on the East Coast, so I had to fly all the time across the country.
00:47:04.000And I started to get freaked out by flying.
00:47:06.000I was on a couple bad flights, whatever.
00:47:50.000I came home, I quit drinking, I had a fourth child.
00:47:54.000My life just totally changed because of that one event.
00:47:58.000But the main thing that happened in addition to those two things was I stopped being afraid to fly.
00:48:03.000And the reason I stopped being afraid to fly was I had been forced to face for 20 minutes, like the thought, really the certainty I was going to die.
00:48:59.000So, in a small, very small bore way, that's what's going on with society at large.
00:49:05.000If you have hundreds of millions of people who've never addressed directly the core fact of their life, which is imminent and fast-approaching death, of course, they're completely freaked out and superstitious and neurotic and weird and irrational and just like hopped up, right?
00:49:33.000That's going to create a pretty screwed up generation very quickly.
00:49:36.000For sure, but it's also pretending that their core fear isn't real or displacing that with like fake fears.
00:49:43.000No, all of your fears come from, in the end, the certain knowledge that all of us is born with that we're going to die, that there's a time limit on this, on this adventure.
00:54:31.000As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:54:34.000If you guys want to get in the running to win a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine, type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider, hit subscribe, screenshot it, and email it to us directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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