Ep 114 ｜ Why Tucker Carlson Hates 'Journalists' ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 2 minutes
Words per Minute
176.40839
Summary
On this episode of the Glenn Beck Podcast, host Tucker Carlson sits down with legendary journalist Carl Sagan to discuss his new book, The Long Slide: 30 Years in American Journalism, and how the corporate media is still trying to destroy him.
Transcript
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30 years ago, the world was a much different place.
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The Internet hadn't taken off, never mind the iPhone,
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and the media actually used to practice something called journalism.
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and privacy is quickly being replaced by a surveillance state,
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and nobody seems to notice, or maybe it's we don't care.
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Even worse, many in the media are happy to cheer it on,
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as long as it helps them score political points.
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Today's guest knows a good deal about these problems,
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He's written stories for some of the biggest names in American journalism,
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Esquire, Spectator, The New Republic, Politico, GQ, The New York Times.
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However, today, it would take an absolute Moses-style miracle
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for any of those organizations to ever print anything, any of his work again.
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And that's because they've chosen political sides, whether they admit it or not.
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As for privacy, between the government snooping on him and then social media,
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he can't even go to a fly-fishing store in Montana without somebody heckling him.
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Roving gangs have gathered at his house, knocked on his front door.
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At one point, it got so bad that he had to leave Washington, D.C.,
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And to top it all off, our own government may be spying on him right now.
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And I say may, giving them, oh my gosh, far too much credit.
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And as we'll discuss today, the corporate media is still trying to destroy him.
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He's got a new book out with Simon & Schuster, who hate him.
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The book is called The Long Slide, 30 Years in American Journalism.
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It's a reflection on his journalistic work over the last three decades,
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but also a look at what the media used to allow, used to admire, used to encourage,
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Today, on the Glenn Beck Podcast, Tucker Carlson.
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00:02:12.160
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00:02:20.860
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00:02:25.840
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00:02:42.120
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00:03:06.780
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00:03:11.900
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00:03:36.380
I'm sitting here looking at you in your cabin, and you have Roosevelt dead behind you.
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His family ran a newspaper in New York called the New York Journal of America, and one of the Hearst papers.
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And that was hanging on the wall in the newsroom when they closed in the mid-60s.
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I'm at our house in Maine where we've been all of our lives, and it's just filled with junk the family has collected.
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So I actually had that hanging in my bedroom as a child.
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I don't like some of the things he did, but Wilson is in a separate category.
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So you said your grandfather ran the paper for Hearst?
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So you must, I mean, you grew up knowing with Hearst, you saw the manipulation of newspapers, etc.
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You knew what it could be, at least, I'm assuming, with that kind of heritage.
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My great-grandfather was the publisher of the Dallas Morning News.
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I mean, I grew up around journalists my whole life.
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So that's one of the reasons I hate them so much.
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Just the technocratic, dishonest, careerist, stupid cowards.
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That's the, you know, when I was a kid, my dad worked for ABC News, and he would have
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his cameramen and the sound guy, and they were always over for dinner in the backyard,
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smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, telling stories about, you know, women and places
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And like, this guy punched me in the face, and I hit him back.
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I mean, they were just like, they covered riots.
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When I first worked at CNN, I was interviewed by Paula Zahn, who, as I was doing the interview,
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I'm watching her, and I'm realizing it's vacant.
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She's waiting for me to stop to ask the next question.
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I talked about, because it was a day that somebody had committed suicide, and they were
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And I said, my mother was a drug addict, and she committed suicide.
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And I could feel from her, I wonder if I can make him cry about this.
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And she made all of these questions that were just obviously trying to get me to cry.
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They're not really interested, and they're only interested in ratings.
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They're, well, they're, what they're, I mean, they're the Praetorian guard for the ruling
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They've inverted the most basic rule of journalism, which is hold the powerful accountable.
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And now they're, you know, they're all working for some oligarch.
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You know, it's just like, rather, the Washington Post, the New York Times is essentially owned
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by its subscribers who are, you know, like every non-profit executive on the Upper West
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I mean, it's just, they're trying to protect what they feel is slipping away, which is
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And the thing they hate most, of course, is democracy.
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I mean, the idea of voters, the white working class having power, like, completely freaks
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They are the Woodrow Wilson dream that the elites will rule and everybody else is just
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I mean, if they were good, if they were improving people's lives, if they were, I mean, during
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the progressive, I mean, you always have a ruling class because people are hierarchical.
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And during previous moments in American history, you had rich people running everything.
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I have a picture of him to my grandfather over my sink.
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Like, you know, he was from a very specific he was from the ruling class and he spent
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a lot of time thinking about, you know, how to how do we make people's lives better?
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It's people who are privileged looking downward and saying to themselves, I have an obligation
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And I would be happy to live under that system.
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I don't mind being, you know, ordered around by people who are more impressive than I am
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At heart, these people are just pure parasites just trying to take what they can from America
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That's one thing that, you know, I think you and I disagree on.
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I believe in the the pure freedom of the individual.
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You know, you don't I don't need to put a sign on the lawnmower.
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I think if if you fall off the roof and you're, you know, you know, just chipped by the lawnmower.
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But you just said a minute ago, you know, I don't mind being told, you know, what to
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I mean, I don't have a problem with the idea of experts.
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Let people do what they want to the extent that you can.
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What I'm saying is I don't have a problem with the idea of the platonic ideal of expertise or rulers or of a ruling class.
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I don't think, you know, we're all equal in ability.
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I'm not I'm not like a classic populist at all.
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I'm just incredibly angry at the dereliction of duty that I see among our ruling class.
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Like they don't feel an obligation to the people beneath them.
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And whenever you have I mean, this is like true for everything.
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If you hated your children, they'd be like unbelievably screwed up.
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Like you have to love the people you're in charge of.
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And that that's like that's it right there for me.
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Well, I mean, you know, if you listen to George Washington, that you're never going to get that love from people who are in power and governments not meant to love you.
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The problem is, is that these experts will say something.
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They've been wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong over and over and over again.
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And we know that Fauci is lying about his role in in the the the covid virus, or at least the virus that preceded it.
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And and yet we are forced to listen to that expert.
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We have other experts telling us that you have to listen to that expert.
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Well, no, I I'm sorry, but I've got a gut on me, too, and I don't believe them.
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At some point, though, when all the experts, all the people in charge turn out to be mediocre and clueless, then you have to ask yourself, is the system working?
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Like Mark Milley is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
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Anthony Fauci is the head, you know, covid responder in the country.
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So then you take three steps back and you think, well, because we have we have created this fake meritocracy with merit badges along the way to the top, none of which correspond to actual expertise.
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Like Fauci is not the most impressive physician we could have running our response to covid.
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Mark Milley is clearly not the person who should be running the United States military.
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We are not finding in a country of three hundred and forty million people the most qualified to do these jobs because we're using irrelevant criteria.
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Affirmative action, diversity, equity is a huge is a huge part of it.
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They are not finding the right people and teaching those people the right things.
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I mean, that's our ruling class is created by higher education.
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Those are, you know, our Sandhurst is Princeton.
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But don't you think that that comes from actually trying to teach the right things in their point of view instead of teaching people how to think?
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It's not I don't want to be taught what to think.
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You need to go to an institution of higher learning to show you how to think, how to be able to explore everything and get a balanced view.
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That's not happening anymore in our universities.
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That's what Mark Milley and Anthony Fauci have in common.
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They check in every morning to find out what the party line is.
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People who are independent minded, who are free thinkers, are being excluded from our system.
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I mean, I have dinner all the time with people who are really smart.
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Some of them are, you know, kind of genius level people.
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And I'm not this is not flattery, but you're one of the people who will say something that like other people haven't thought of before.
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You're willing to go out on the line and be like, actually, I, you know, I think Obama's a racist and no one had said that before.
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You had this weird flash of insight into the guy and you said it.
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What was the first response of everyone at the top of American society?
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He said something unapproved rather than saying, wait a second, that's kind of it is Obama racist.
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We should incentivize that kind of thinking, open minded thinking.
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We should we should identify the people who are thinking for themselves, who are having really interesting and cool thoughts and reward them for it.
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So you wind up with really mediocre people because people also think, you know, in 2008, I was or 2007.
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I was talking about a crash that was coming in and it is because I looked at things not through the prism of being taught, but just common sense.
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And you're relying on a system that I don't think is going to work.
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But I had one member of the media who I won't name here that is a is an individual that deals with money and deals with money issues.
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And I brought this up and the person afterward argued and argued and argued.
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And I finished the interview and he wouldn't even look at me.
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If I have it wrong, but please tell me where I have it wrong.
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He said, without looking at me, he said, you don't have it wrong.
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We have a responsibility to not say those things.
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And I was like, what kind of upside down world is that in journalism?
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That is that crystallizes everything that's wrong.
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It's do we allow people to tell obvious truths?
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And the first thing we do with those people is we call them crazy.
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I have this new rule where whenever I hear someone denounced as crazy and I don't think anyone's been denounced as crazy as much as you have.
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I pay special attention to what that person says.
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And by the way, some of them are kind of crazy.
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I don't you know, he doesn't have to have access to firearms.
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Because that person is much more likely than the rest of us who are fighting the herd instinct to see things really clearly.
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This doesn't you know, if my housekeeper is buying condos in Vegas on credit, maybe the housing market is too distorted.
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But if you I was a Russian studies major, I'm interested in Soviet history.
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One of the things the Soviets did under Stalin and continue to do all the way through, you know, all the way through till 1991 is they would forcibly incarcerate people in mental institutions.
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And rather than just sending them to the gulag, but they would publicly denounce them as crazy.
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So for his own good, we had to pump them full of Thorazine and stick them in a cell.
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And they did it to people who were free thinkers.
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I feel like I'm not saying anyone's getting thrown into the gulag, but that impulse is on display in our society.
00:18:42.940
We have to care about whether things are true or not.
00:18:47.500
I can't believe we live in a world where I actually not only have to talk about body armor, but talk about the body armor that I bought for my kids and my grandkids.
00:18:58.640
My wife and I have had body armor for a while because my job kind of demanded it.
00:19:04.780
We're supposed to be worried about keeping food on the table and gas in the car in a 72 hour grab bag if we're really crazy.
00:19:18.480
You want to keep your family safe and secure during troubled times.
00:19:22.820
You might not know it, but body armor is legal in all 50 states.
00:19:30.800
And the people I bought the body armor for my kids and my grandkids is AR 500.
00:19:38.140
They have made body armor easy to buy, approachable, affordable.
00:19:44.460
And if you're unsure of what type of armor you might be needing or you just need some pointers based on your needs, they have you covered.
00:19:59.520
I just read on the air today, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's essay from 1974, I think, right before he was arrested and then exported.
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And I don't know the last time you read that essay, but Tucker, you should read it.
00:20:16.860
It is like it was written today for the United States of America.
00:20:26.740
I mean, and the sad thing was, you know, he lived out his days in Vermont and he was weird.
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I mean, of course, anyone that deep is going to be weird.
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And the Russians are weird and dark anyway and kind of solitary.
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But how could he have been living in Putney or wherever he was?
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He was like driving distance from where I live.
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Why didn't we you know, why wasn't he more famous?
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And I really think looking back, the United States missed a huge opportunity with the fall of the Soviet Union to rethink what the country is about, to sort of rededicate ourselves to our most, you know, essential values.
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And someone like Solzhenitsyn at that moment, because it's always when you win that you're at your most vulnerable.
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You know, getting hit in the face actually tends to make you better.
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The early church, Christian church, when it was persecuted, was at its sort of clearest and most faithful and probably closest to what it should have been.
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And as it succeeded and took over Europe and became the largest landowner, of course, it became decadent and made a reformation as a result of that.
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I do think it's when you win that you fall apart.
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And winning the Cold War, in retrospect, may have been like the worst thing that ever happened to the United States.
00:21:58.280
But that also goes to something that, you know, for conservatives, we never had to defend.
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And we always just thought everybody was with us.
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You know, we always thought that we all believe the same things about America.
00:22:11.460
And now I can tell you that most conservatives who are at all thinkers, we can run circles around the left because we're constantly thrown up against the wall and challenged.
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And, you know, you can't be called a racist fascist for very long before you go, well, what is it that I'm saying?
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Is there something that I am saying or that I do believe that is that way?
00:22:40.500
The upside of this moment, which is, you know, obviously the darkest since the Civil War, I would say, I think it's pretty clearly is.
00:22:48.080
The upside of it is people are traipsing up to the mental attic and discarding things they don't need and really taking stock, taking inventory.
00:22:59.260
It's really made most people weaker, but a small number of people much stronger and more purposeful and sharper and more decent.
00:23:08.100
The number of conversations I've had about God recently.
00:23:10.840
I mean, it's a little bit, I mean, you're publicly identified as religious, but I mean, I'm an Episcopalian.
00:23:20.460
You know, the last five dinners I've had in my barn, the conversation has gone toward God because people are really thinking about, you know, what comes after this.
00:23:38.780
And well, you know, it was during our founding.
00:23:42.560
That's what that's what kind of stuff that people talked about.
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You know, Franklin swore off unserious people around 19 around 17, 74, 75, because he said the times don't call for bon vivance.
00:24:04.420
And I think America is doing that maybe perhaps without even recognizing it.
00:24:09.180
Yeah, I here's my fear, and I think this every single day, is that people are going to get really radical.
00:24:28.340
If you convince people that their votes don't matter, they have no recourse and they become radical.
00:24:34.540
If you tell people that everybody, you know, that racial identity is the most important thing about you, identity politics demand that all of us identify by race.
00:24:46.380
You're going to get massive white identity politics.
00:24:52.540
Well, I tell you, it's I don't think anything that honestly, I don't think even most Democrats want that.
00:25:01.940
I'm talking about the my neighbors who are Democrats.
00:25:09.540
But you couldn't you can't tell me that this is designed to help our country.
00:25:14.520
There's no way because everything you talk to any psychologist, psychiatrist, anyone who studies humans and they all know you're pushing all of the buttons to make people swing out.
00:25:32.640
I mean, when you tell people, oh, by the way, you know, we're we're withdrawing from Afghanistan, but the war's not over.
00:25:38.400
The war is here and it's against white supremacy or people who don't want mandatory vaccination.
00:25:45.460
And DHS, by the way, is leading the charge to, you know, hunt down the fifth column within.
00:25:55.000
And which they're saying out loud, you're the Taliban.
00:26:01.060
You know, you are going to create Tim McVeigh's like I'm the least paranoid person.
00:26:16.720
And I'm starting to feel a little bit paranoid.
00:26:22.340
What if you're already paranoid and you didn't have, you know, a wife and four kids and four
00:26:32.020
And you turn on the TV and Joy Ann Reed is calling you a white supremacist and calling
00:26:43.280
And by the way, you can't get a job because of your skin color.
00:26:46.740
Your kids can't get work because of the way they look.
00:26:52.240
And at some point, some crazy person is going to do something awful that will be used as
00:27:07.400
I've started talking again about Martin Luther King and his rules of nonviolence, you know,
00:27:14.400
just to make sure that we're doing everything we can to stop it.
00:27:23.540
Take that same person that you were talking about.
00:27:26.440
Now, take a government that is colluding with social media and a nefarious guy, again,
00:27:33.880
fiction writing, who wants somebody to do something.
00:27:38.460
All you have to do is change the algorithm to keep feeding him more and more.
00:27:50.060
I mean, I've never believed in any conspiracy theory of any kind whatsoever.
00:27:56.760
And now everybody I know, left and right, looks first to some kind of plot behind everything.
00:28:10.600
And I don't mean like elaborate Illuminati type conspiracies.
00:28:14.100
But like Biden isn't capable of running the country.
00:28:18.800
Like you, you push a senile guy on the country.
00:28:25.760
You accelerate the craziness the second he wins.
00:28:31.700
The second he wins, they're like, no, they're intentionally dividing the country against itself.
00:28:37.160
People, this vaccine mandate stuff is there's no health justification for this.
00:28:42.520
It is dividing families and ending friendships.
00:28:46.180
It is clear, so obviously, an effort to divide people against each other.
00:28:51.700
So you look at this and you're like, what the hell is going on?
00:28:54.640
Why would the U.S. government want Americans to hate each other?
00:28:57.880
And it changes the way you think about everything.
00:29:00.560
You don't take anything at face value because you can't because they never stop lying.
00:29:05.200
So after a while, it changes the mindset of the entire population.
00:29:13.740
And there's just a really dark way of looking at the world.
00:29:17.060
That is the pre that is the kind of breeding ground of like actual civil.
00:29:22.040
Oh, so I mean, I really did my homework on civil war and revolutions.
00:29:33.440
And what's really frightening for me on the right is if you look at Donald Trump, he was not a he was not the problem.
00:29:45.820
People, people could not take it anymore that they weren't being listened to, that the people would go in and not do what they say.
00:29:54.640
So he's destroyed and they become more radical.
00:30:02.340
That leaves people in a position of saying, well, if he couldn't get the job done, if he couldn't stop them, then we need somebody really tough to stop them.
00:30:12.760
And this just keeps jacked up over and over and over again until you have a country that none of us want to live in.
00:30:24.080
I mean, you I don't think any of us understood the degree to which all of our systems were essentially voluntary.
00:30:29.780
So two weeks ago, the administration decides to re up the moratorium on rent collection, on eviction.
00:30:37.640
And they say you can't evict someone from your property because that person doesn't pay you.
00:30:41.960
So this is, you know, you're you're avoiding property rights.
00:30:45.060
What does the Supreme Court have to say about this?
00:30:46.640
The Supreme Court says, well, you can't do this.
00:30:56.200
So Maxine Waters is asked and she's like, OK, the Supreme Court doesn't like it.
00:31:06.800
And the Biden administration did that and they got away with it because who's going to stop them?
00:31:11.060
Once people start thinking like that, you know, we're importing two million people from foreign countries.
00:31:16.320
We don't even know their identities, but we're just getting them in and flying into your neighborhood because we want to change the, you know, the electoral balance in the country.
00:31:23.880
So once people start to realize that, oh, wait, I don't need to obey.
00:31:29.800
Honestly, like, why am I participating in this?
00:31:34.600
I mean, you can see that anarchy is a lot closer than we think it is.
00:31:38.760
Once the veil drops and, you know, might makes right and the guy with the most power or the most ammunition gets to do exactly what he wants, then everybody feels that way.
00:31:51.220
I think we're understating what they're destroying right now.
00:31:54.300
I really think it's going to be very hard to put civil society back together after the Biden administration.
00:32:09.260
Now, you were you never about your job being able to do it.
00:32:42.920
I work for a family, the Murdoch family, that has been totally consistent and very serious about protecting free speech.
00:32:55.120
I doubt it sometimes, but I don't know what I know is they're not going to be bullied into taking me off the air.
00:33:03.480
It's the thing that I'm most grateful for my professional life.
00:33:05.980
On the other hand, God knows where the world is going.
00:33:10.220
I feel like I feel like at this point I fell into this job.
00:33:17.440
And that was basically an accident or was through the kindness of Rupert Murdoch.
00:33:21.120
And I found myself in this position at a certain time of life where I can say what I really think is true.
00:33:33.380
You know, you and I have not always agreed on things.
00:33:35.820
But I have to tell you, you are one of the only people in the media on, you know, traditional corporate media that is telling the truth.
00:33:55.220
They don't pay people like us a lot of money because we're so talented.
00:34:03.900
And in today's world, you I know what you're going through.
00:34:09.840
I think you're one of the bravest men in America today.
00:34:16.340
So I live in the woods, obviously, and I like that.
00:34:19.220
That's I love nature and I like living in the woods.
00:34:34.420
So I don't I just feel like it was a it was a it was an accident that I wound up here.
00:34:39.140
It doesn't bother me that the Atlantic magazine doesn't like me.
00:34:45.560
You know, I have so little respect for them that their opinions are irrelevant to me.
00:34:49.660
And as long as my wife and our producers and my friends and my children and my dogs still like me,
00:34:55.220
that I'm happy and I think they do with each passing day.
00:34:58.780
It's obvious that the party who usurped power is falling apart.
00:35:03.380
The problem is they're taking the entire country and world with them.
00:35:07.800
That's why I expect maybe possibly some shortages, you know, of a few things, maybe food.
00:35:17.400
It's a big threat and threat of more lockdowns, inflation, instability all around the world.
00:35:25.000
The food supply chain is very fragile always, but even more so now.
00:35:30.580
When that happens, it won't be long before food disappears from grocery stores.
00:35:40.520
That's why you need a bare minimum of a four week food supply of emergency food from my Patriot supply.
00:35:46.600
They're the largest Patriot preparedness company, and they've been in the business for a long time.
00:35:54.220
Millions of families rely on them for food that stays fresh for up to 25 years in storage.
00:36:01.200
It gives you a wide variety of hearty meals, totaling 2,000 calories every single day.
00:36:06.840
Right now, you can save 25% off each four week food kit you order.
00:36:26.040
People are calling you a fascist, and you hate immigration, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:36:37.960
I think we're on the same page, but I could be wrong, because it appears as though we're polar opposites.
00:36:47.240
I want people who want to be an American and know what that means.
00:36:54.760
I think the more the merrier of those people who are coming here because they don't have the ability to do what you can only do in America and wants to play by the constitutional rules.
00:37:08.040
We have most Americans don't want to do that now.
00:37:14.000
And from Afghanistan, the way this is looking, we're just, who's on that plane?
00:37:19.580
I don't even know who's on that plane, and I don't think we know who's on that plane.
00:37:30.580
I mean, I think of, look, if you're running America, you need to think of it like your house.
00:37:36.440
You're always willing to have house guests and get them a drink and do what, you know, you want to be hospitable.
00:37:45.180
Like having people, we have house guests constantly.
00:37:50.880
But you don't take anyone off the street like you really care because your kids live there, too.
00:37:58.220
So ultimately, their welfare is the most important thing.
00:38:02.200
So I'm not going to invite a child molester to my house because I have four children.
00:38:06.480
And so you need to approach this with maximum care as if you actually gave a crap about your house and the people who live there.
00:38:15.680
And so I feel like right now in American history, you know, this country is too divided.
00:38:27.920
I try not to say things that are, you know, inflammatory for their own sake.
00:38:33.800
And one of the reasons they are is because Americans haven't decided what unites us.
00:38:44.360
Used our unum used to be the Bill of Rights and it's not anymore.
00:38:50.940
So until we can decide corporately together what it is that holds us together, we can't have a single more person.
00:39:01.140
I don't think I think we need to just like stop and say, OK, totally happy to have the best people in the world move here.
00:39:07.940
But we need to figure out what it is that unites us because countries don't hang together just because it's a physics principle.
00:39:15.820
I mean, centrifugal force is real and a continental country will spin apart into its component elements.
00:39:38.860
And endless waves of new people is a terrible idea.
00:39:49.940
Ilhan Omar is rescued from a refugee camp in Kenya.
00:39:53.280
And she comes here and we don't convince her that this is a good country.
00:40:00.280
We're not good at assimilating immigrants anymore.
00:40:02.820
So in 2016, I started something called the Nazarene Fund that went for the persecuted Christians and Yazidis in Syria and Iraq and moving them mainly to Australia.
00:40:15.800
And they have Australia is really good at assimilation.
00:40:19.820
You have to speak the language, everything else.
00:40:24.640
This on Monday, I called the head of the fund and I said, how can we help?
00:40:31.220
I mean, because, you know, there are Christians there.
00:40:35.120
We I'm trying to raise 20 million dollars in the next two days to be able to get these people out.
00:40:44.760
We have three to five thousand Christians that are verifiable Christians because that was put on their paperwork, their paperwork.
00:40:53.440
If you know papers, please, our our sanctioned government somehow or another allowed that to happen beginning in 2009.
00:41:03.720
And so now these people are the ones who said openly in a very dangerous place.
00:41:11.200
So they're not coming to the United States, but they are going to a country that will accept Christians and people from Afghanistan.
00:41:26.380
I mean, one of one of the reasons that I've always been willing to defend Assad, who clearly is a bad guy in a lot of ways, is that the Assad family created a refuge for Christians in Syria.
00:41:45.800
So I don't think it's weird for me to be interested in the plate of Christians around the world.
00:41:53.660
But I'm I'm for helping the Christians because I am Christian and this is a majority Christian country.
00:42:09.300
And so, yes, the Obama administration, by the way, excluded Christians.
00:42:27.220
And they should have to live with that, in my opinion.
00:42:29.540
But anyway, no, I'm look, I'm totally for that.
00:42:32.880
But I just my first concern is the United States.
00:42:36.300
And I mean, housing prices are so out of control.
00:42:41.540
Our family's pretty affluent by, you know, national standards, I guess.
00:42:50.900
If you're not my kid and you know, your dad is an HVAC guy, like you're not buying a house,
00:43:06.160
I think that's a completely no one else is asking that question.
00:43:12.820
We have three hundred and forty million probably higher than that, actually.
00:43:15.600
But I don't know, like in the next 10 years, how many people do we want?
00:43:25.360
Somebody that believes that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
00:43:29.600
endowed by their credit with certain inalienable rights.
00:43:31.400
And governments are instituted among men to protect those rights.
00:43:39.060
Let me give you something from the Atlantic, because I know you're not reading it.
00:43:44.200
You are you're called a fascist because of the Hungarian prime minister.
00:43:55.820
OK, try to not think of the United States in this.
00:43:58.300
Under the new emergency legislation, his far right party can effectively govern unchallenged, bypass both parliament and existing laws.
00:44:09.500
It permits people to hand out jail terms for those deemed to be spreading misinformation, though.
00:44:15.800
Other countries have imposed their own emergency measures to combat the crisis.
00:44:19.320
Hungary's are by far the most far reaching and the most permanent, though.
00:44:23.940
The Hungarian government insists these measures will only last as long as the crisis does.
00:44:28.460
The duration is entirely up to the prime minister.
00:44:34.120
You have you have said Hungary is more free than than we are in many ways.
00:44:44.520
And I look, I don't speak Hungarian, just to be clear.
00:44:48.220
And you can't understand the country adequately or really at all until you speak the language, period.
00:44:54.480
So and I've learned that from traveling around the world.
00:44:59.480
And so I'm not here to defend the Hungarian government.
00:45:02.440
I can only tell you what I saw, which is you have a country in which the press is much more balanced than here.
00:45:09.520
The majority of the press in Hungary opposes the regime, opposes Viktor Orban's government.
00:45:13.680
The majority, but not 98 percent on one side, as you have here.
00:45:22.280
If you criticize the regime in this country with a big platform, and I don't need to tell you this, you need armed bodyguards, period.
00:45:31.060
If you put a poster in your window in a store in downtown New York opposing, I don't know, mandatory vaccines or Black Lives Matter, they'll shut your store down.
00:45:42.100
They'll break your windows. That is not true in Budapest at all.
00:45:46.440
So on the most basic level, there is a lot more freedom there.
00:45:50.220
And by the way, if you want to know how the political system works, Viktor Orban is up in April.
00:45:59.020
So no one has ever claimed that an election in Hungary was unfair.
00:46:03.640
I mean, there's far more evidence of voter fraud in the United States than there is in Hungary.
00:46:08.300
So I don't know what again, I'm I don't live there.
00:46:13.020
Yeah. And you're not on is not a it's it's fair to compare not without defending, isn't it?
00:46:26.220
Unlike a lot of the people at the Atlantic, I don't have another passport.
00:46:35.080
So I am as thoroughly American and as thoroughly stuck here as anyone has ever been.
00:46:46.340
What's interesting, though, is what a threat the reality of Hungary is.
00:46:51.240
I mean, I would just suggest to your audience go to Budapest for a week.
00:46:54.140
How many drug addicts do you see living on the sidewalk?
00:46:57.460
Do you feel like you're going to get stabbed riding the subway?
00:47:02.860
Is there soul destroying modernist architecture just wrecking the landscape?
00:47:10.880
Are there all kinds of weird chemicals in the food that castrate men?
00:47:20.960
But it's not necessary to have all that crap in your society.
00:47:26.400
We don't need rapists wandering around pushing people in front of subway cars.
00:47:30.820
We don't have to live across from a homeless encampment where people are shooting heroin as your kids walk to school.
00:47:43.780
There's no crime on the scale that we have in Hungary.
00:48:00.680
Michael Chertoff said to me years and years ago, this is before social media and everything else.
00:48:11.140
We got off the air and I said, let me email something to you.
00:48:14.300
And he went, he just smiled and shook his head.
00:48:22.700
And he said, no, if people knew about email and digital communication, I don't think anyone would have it.
00:48:34.820
I don't think I think we've come to a place to where we have convinced ourselves we cannot live or function without it.
00:48:46.240
I remember being on the air 25, 30 years ago saying, I'm not giving my I'm not giving the government my fingerprint.
00:48:57.620
We're we're we have retinal scans so we can get on the airplane faster.
00:49:05.340
You have been hit by the NSA and they've been they unmasked you.
00:49:12.100
They've admitted that they unmasked you, which is not an easy thing.
00:49:16.100
They would have to have all kinds of reasons for it.
00:49:18.860
Do you actually think, though, that you're going to find out what really happened?
00:49:27.580
I mean, look, the only way it stops is if the media decide that, you know, we can't allow this.
00:49:35.220
I mean, there's a principle at stake that we must defend.
00:49:37.180
And of course, they're not in the business of defending principles.
00:49:40.060
They're in the business of destroying them and acting on behalf of the party in power, because that's where they think they're, you know, they're future lies.
00:49:51.520
And I'm, you know, as a practical matter, I was annoyed because I was trying to get an interview with Putin, which I thought would be really interesting.
00:49:57.920
I'm not a Putin worker, but why wouldn't you want to interview Putin?
00:50:02.240
And, you know, it completely spooked the Russians, so now I don't get my interview with Putin.
00:50:09.080
I mean, they leaked it to news organizations that I was trying to set up this interview to make me seem like I was some Russian stooge or whatever.
00:50:19.400
I mean, anybody who thinks that Russia is the primary threat to America is like an idiot, and I don't care what you think anyway.
00:50:25.580
If you think that's just too stupid for me, I can't deal with it.
00:50:29.600
But there's kind of no other way to look at it based on the evidence.
00:50:34.200
And, you know, but you have to ask yourself, why would, again, the U.S. government want to divide the population against itself, whip up hysteria, start witch hunts, hurt American citizens?
00:50:48.480
I mean, why aren't we turning that against our enemies?
00:50:54.400
It's like, you can't treat me like that, but they can and they will until people decide, no, we're not doing that anymore.
00:51:01.100
Let me let me end here with some questions of just about where we're headed now, what what we should be doing.
00:51:10.540
First of all, the Democrats are pushing everything they can to fix the election and change the way we vote.
00:51:23.000
But if that doesn't happen, where should the Republicans be going?
00:51:30.480
I mean, you know, you have an interesting balance, and I think we have the same feeling.
00:51:37.000
Nationalism is not bad unless it's unless it is you will be an American and it becomes right.
00:51:46.520
Logistic populism isn't bad unless it's just out of control.
00:51:54.360
Those those two things are bad as long as they're balanced with principles that are, you know, our founding documents.
00:52:03.040
Where is the Republican going and what's the right balance and what should it be concentrating on?
00:52:14.980
I mean, I do think, like, as a foreign policy question, every decision ought to at a top line question ought to be, how does this serve the interest of the United States?
00:52:29.740
But that clearly has to be the guiding force behind everything that we do abroad.
00:52:37.520
And we hope that it helps other people in the process because we're generous, open hearted people.
00:52:44.240
So the U.S. government has to act on behalf of the population of the United States.
00:52:48.440
Populism is an expression of frustration that reminds us that this is a republic.
00:52:56.580
Our representatives in Washington ought to be acting on our behalf.
00:53:01.280
When you ignore it, it gets much more intense, which is what they've done.
00:53:06.020
I think the Republican Party at this stage has a really clear mission, and that's to protect its people.
00:53:12.800
Every power center in the country is on one side.
00:53:17.720
You know, every big corporation, all education, K through, you know, doctorate, it's all on one side.
00:53:27.460
The church, this kills me to say it, but many churches are also on that side, the leadership.
00:53:33.120
And so really the only power available to people who dissent is probably 45 percent of the country is this party, the Republican Party.
00:53:47.700
They have to defend their people because their people have no other means of defense.
00:53:52.240
And if you abandon your people, then your people decide, well, no one's going to defend me.
00:53:59.280
The people will get super radical if they feel cornered and they feel like, you know, I'm under attack and no one's come to save me.
00:54:06.760
You know, God knows what I'll do at that point.
00:54:09.620
And I've told a million Republican office holders, the problem is that a lot of them are weak.
00:54:21.360
I really make an effort to highlight brave people because I think this is a moment that demands bravery.
00:54:27.960
You know, people, the individual standing up in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square and saying, no, you're going to have to run me over.
00:54:34.120
Probably 95 percent of the people we find and put on the air are women.
00:54:49.260
And I thought to myself, that's about the 20th woman in a row.
00:55:00.700
We know sperm counts are the lowest ever recorded.
00:55:03.740
We know testosterone is the lowest ever recorded.
00:55:14.740
We're not going to be able to continue the species, but that's not a subject of concern or interest to you.
00:55:22.560
So someone like Ben Sasse, who I consider really smart and thoughtful and a decent person, I'm sure he's a good dad and whatever.
00:55:35.460
I disagree with Mitt Romney, but I think Mitt Romney is like not a bad guy at all.
00:55:39.660
I mean, if he was I'd let him babysit my children.
00:55:45.300
Roger Wicker of Mississippi, I think he's probably a good guy.
00:55:51.280
And they've decided I'm not, you know, the other side is ascended.
00:55:56.740
I'm not going to push any buttons that, you know, might infuriate them.
00:56:01.700
They're just they're not they're not lion hearted.
00:56:04.120
And this is a moment when you need people who aren't, you know, vicious, lashing out, crazy that I hate that.
00:56:10.160
But who are legitimately strong will say, here are my principles.
00:56:16.060
And by the way, I'll die for them because that's what principles are.
00:56:21.720
But like people should be allowed to say what they really believe.
00:56:24.360
That's called freedom of speech is guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights.
00:56:39.800
But a lot of really angry women right now, have you noticed?
00:56:42.880
And I think a lot of them are angry because their men are weak.
00:56:50.400
And I've been married to the same woman for 30 years.
00:56:53.000
And if you want to make her mad, you know, weak men.
00:56:55.680
This is true for a lot of I have three daughters.
00:56:59.180
Weak men make them mad because it's it's wrong.
00:57:05.520
You know, all the true basic human things are the one of the things we're not allowed to talk about.
00:57:12.580
But the way that people really are nature, nature itself is so offensive to our leaders because it challenges their totally unnatural program.
00:57:22.280
There's nothing less natural than neoliberalism.
00:57:26.740
But at its core, nature is about sex differences.
00:57:36.980
Their difference is the central fact of the natural world.
00:57:41.980
And if something falls out of balance in that relationship between male and female, everything else is affected by it, everything.
00:57:53.020
And so at the core of the volatility and the craziness and the and the too rapid to digest change that's going on is this weird lack of balance between men and women.
00:58:06.020
I don't think this is not just a cultural phenomenon.
00:58:09.960
You know, the massive increase in trans identifying kids.
00:58:14.580
It's not just a result of propaganda from the schools.
00:58:27.740
Now, you could be totally for it or you can be totally opposed.
00:58:30.900
It doesn't even matter how you feel about it as a phenomenon.
00:58:44.460
And I'm hardly a genius and I'm not a scientist.
00:58:56.920
You know, I don't I don't even have an operative theory on it.
00:59:00.400
I mean, you know, everyone you ask who's thought about it says, well, I think there are plastics in the food.
00:59:06.560
I can't I don't have the tools to to assess that.
00:59:34.760
I'm just I'm just noticing what is very, very obvious.
00:59:39.420
And there was just a remarkable book written about this by a former New York Times reporter who I interviewed.
00:59:43.820
He said, you know, our food is so engineered, just like everything else in our world.
00:59:54.820
I remember as a kid on hosting Crossfire in my 20s, defending GMOs and like, well, there's nothing wrong with GMOs.
01:00:02.820
But that was like a right wing position to defend GMOs.
01:00:12.900
I was like a, you know, you could get me to say the things I thought I had to say.
01:00:17.400
Now that I'm older, I still don't know much about GMOs.
01:00:22.380
You're engineering food because it's more efficient.
01:00:30.060
No human population in history has ever eaten this stuff.
01:00:56.120
We have done the biggest experiment on humankind and we have all just adopted it, except for
01:01:03.500
the kids of the people that run Silicon Valley.
01:01:12.300
I mean, I think that has done so much damage all around the world.
01:01:19.400
The Taliban used Twitter to to organize, to go into different cities and take them over.
01:01:32.120
It's I mean, we're just being led around by a nose ring.
01:01:51.820
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