The Tucker Carlson Show - September 06, 2024


Vivek Ramaswamy & RFK Jr： Brazil Banning X, the New Russian Hoax, and the Kamala Harris Scam


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 39 minutes

Words per Minute

158.92131

Word Count

15,880

Sentence Count

1,154

Misogynist Sentences

16

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary

Learn English with Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg returns to California to celebrate the life and legacy of his late father, Ronald Reagan. He tells the story of growing up in Orange County, California, and how he was inspired by the people who still live there. He also talks about why California is the most beautiful place in the world, and why you should stay here. Steven Spielberg is a film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor. He is best known for his starring role in the movie, "Joker" and for his roles in the TV show, "Orange Is the New Black" and "Orange and Clover." Steven Spielberg was nominated for an Emmy, a Golden Globe, an Emmy and a Grammy. He was also nominated for a Peoria Award, an NAACP Image Award and an Emmy for his performance in the San Diego Comic-Con Hall of Fame performance. He's also the host of the HBO series, "Silicon Valley" and hosts the podcast, "The Office" and is a regular on HBO's Hard Knocks. He s also the co-host of the new show, The Office. and is the author of the book, What's Yours Truly? and and many other books, including . Steven Spielberg's new memoirs, I Am Who I Think You Think I Think I'm a Badass, which you should read and watch on Amazon Prime Video. If you haven t already, you should do so, you'll get a copy of that's coming out soon. It's a must-listenjoy this week's episode of his new movie, The Devil Next Door, coming out in theaters on October 19th, October 20th, 2019. You won't want to miss it! or miss it, you won't regret it, it's going to be better than the rest of the world's most beautiful state, right here in the next few days. You'll get the chance to watch it on Netflix, too! Thank you for listening to this episode of This Is My Life, Steven Spielberg, I'll be back in Los Angeles, Canada, Canada and New York City, New York, and much more! -- Thank you so much, I hope you enjoy it, I love you, I really appreciate you, bye. -- Steven Spielberg -- Amy Poehler, I'm so much. -- Tom Hanks, I do too much of it.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The most interesting and newsworthy television show of the year is coming here to TCN.
00:00:05.900 We are not bragging, that's actually true.
00:00:10.100 The president's been shot. I repeat, the president's been shot.
00:00:13.500 So our longtime producer Justin Wells and a team have been embedded, with no publicity at all,
00:00:18.600 with Donald Trump on the campaign trail for months.
00:00:21.660 They're the only crew capturing what is going on on the campaign, in real time, intimately.
00:00:27.680 They're with Trump as he campaigns for the presidency across the country.
00:00:31.520 And they've shot some amazing footage. It shows you what it's really like in there.
00:00:35.320 So if you're a member, you will soon be able to get this docu-series covering the historic campaign,
00:00:40.160 the fall of Joe Biden, never before seen footage from the assassination attempt
00:00:43.840 at the Butler Township, Pennsylvania, Trump rally, and a lot more.
00:00:47.100 It's going to pull back the curtain completely. They are embedded inside the campaign.
00:00:51.560 I can't wait to see it personally.
00:00:52.940 But to get it first, go to tuckercarlson.com, become a member.
00:00:56.480 The greatest television event of the year. We're proud to offer it.
00:01:00.920 Thank you very much.
00:01:25.800 It is a true joy to be here, I must say.
00:01:43.040 As a native Californian, it's hard to believe I'm here.
00:01:54.560 Oh, thank you.
00:01:56.860 No, it's funny.
00:01:58.200 I am thrilled to be in the state of California,
00:02:03.200 which I often make fun of and scold like an errant child, but I love.
00:02:08.100 I'm the product of it, many generations of Californians.
00:02:14.200 And I wound up running away and moving to the, as far from here as I possibly could.
00:02:19.240 But every time I come back, literally, I move diagonally across the country.
00:02:25.360 Next stop, Canada.
00:02:26.420 But every time I come back, I know, I know.
00:02:32.300 Every time I come back, I think, oh, I can't believe I left here.
00:02:35.580 It's just so great.
00:02:37.120 And you get such a different sense being here and meeting people who actually still live here,
00:02:42.300 who haven't run away, like terrified children like me.
00:02:45.540 You really get the sense that there are so many great and normal people still in California.
00:02:56.460 And the people who stayed, the actual Californians, people who were born in California.
00:03:06.880 I mean, there's an intensity to them.
00:03:09.400 I mean, it really is like, I was thinking tonight, I was with about 100 of them.
00:03:12.960 Some of my relatives are here.
00:03:15.420 And it really is like talking to, like, Cuban refugees.
00:03:19.140 They know what the stakes are.
00:03:22.760 They're not floating through life.
00:03:27.640 Oh, I'm going to.
00:03:29.080 Bless you.
00:03:30.520 No, when I was a child growing up in La Jolla, we had, I lived in San Francisco, I know,
00:03:37.000 LA, and then La Jolla.
00:03:38.140 And we would have entire afternoon conversations about the weather.
00:03:43.480 And I never realized, I thought it was a little weird, but I didn't realize how totally deranged
00:03:48.660 it was because our weather never changed at all.
00:03:51.960 It went from, like, 76 and partly cloudy to 77 and sunny and then returned to the former.
00:03:57.160 That was it.
00:03:57.600 We talked, that's all we talked about.
00:03:59.140 And now when I come to this day, particularly to Orange County, people are just in fuego.
00:04:04.160 Like, they know what's up.
00:04:07.100 And the people who've stayed here, a lot of them plan to stay here, period, and to make
00:04:12.720 the state better.
00:04:14.820 And what I realize, and bless you for your courage and determination and not being run out and
00:04:22.180 calling U-Haul and going to Idaho, though it's close and tempting.
00:04:25.580 But what I always think when I come back, I think two things in sequence, in order.
00:04:32.900 The first thing I think is, man, is the state screwed up.
00:04:36.800 And then the second thing I think is, you could fix it in about 20 minutes.
00:04:42.200 It's not hard.
00:04:43.600 This is not the Social Security problem or the national debt.
00:04:49.640 These are not complex math problems.
00:04:52.620 California has problems that are intentionally imposed on the state.
00:05:00.240 People worked hard.
00:05:02.140 They stayed up late thinking of new and diabolical and inventive ways to wreck the most beautiful
00:05:09.160 place God ever made.
00:05:10.400 And that's, like, the sickest thing I can imagine.
00:05:15.480 Why would you want to destroy something as beautiful as California?
00:05:19.320 I don't know.
00:05:20.000 I don't know the answer.
00:05:21.020 I don't think it's political.
00:05:22.000 I think it's spiritual.
00:05:23.960 But I do know that the antidote is really simple.
00:05:26.660 So the California that I grew up in, and when I was little, not far from here, I was in Anaheim
00:05:31.760 at five, and, like, every five-year-old in the state of California in 1974, I could not
00:05:36.880 wait to get to Disneyland.
00:05:37.900 And Anaheim was very much like Disneyland, and it was like the rest of the state that
00:05:43.980 I grew up in, it was clean, it was orderly, and it was fair.
00:05:49.060 It was the fairest state out of 50.
00:05:51.880 It was a pure meritocracy, California was.
00:05:55.040 You came to California because you had ambition or a vision, and in California, you were allowed
00:05:59.320 to make it real.
00:06:02.040 You worked hard.
00:06:02.740 You were smart.
00:06:03.380 You get rich in California, and a lot of people did from all over the country.
00:06:07.840 Yeah, they did.
00:06:09.620 And what is that?
00:06:11.060 That's fairness.
00:06:13.100 It's allowing people to reach their full expression as human beings.
00:06:16.980 That's fairness.
00:06:18.340 It's not penalizing people for who their parents were or how they look.
00:06:21.220 It's allowing people to truly blossom.
00:06:24.420 And California was the world headquarters of that.
00:06:27.400 And it had the greatest natural resources of any place literally on the planet.
00:06:30.740 It had the richest farmland.
00:06:32.020 It had the most beautiful beaches.
00:06:33.420 It had the prettiest mountains.
00:06:34.640 It had the most majestic trees.
00:06:35.980 Who has redwoods like we did?
00:06:37.120 Nobody.
00:06:38.340 We mock your trees.
00:06:40.920 We did.
00:06:41.520 We feel sorry for you.
00:06:43.680 Oh, look at my white pine, my oak.
00:06:45.540 Yeah, okay.
00:06:45.880 Does the word sequoia mean anything to you?
00:06:50.480 It was just incredible, the bounty of it.
00:06:52.880 It was insane.
00:06:54.700 Go up to Big Bear, up into the Sierras.
00:06:59.480 We would constantly have this debate, because I lived in both northern and southern California,
00:07:03.100 which is better?
00:07:03.740 And then I just said, they're both great.
00:07:06.100 And anyone who doesn't live here is to be pitied.
00:07:09.960 In this town where we are now, I think it's still the biggest municipality in Orange County,
00:07:14.840 I think, it was anyway, Anaheim, Anaheim was a reflection of the state and of the biggest
00:07:21.960 business in the town, which was Disneyland.
00:07:24.740 And Disneyland, the purity of Disneyland when I was a child is like incomprehensible to young
00:07:29.280 people now.
00:07:30.920 But it was a reflection of what California was like.
00:07:34.160 It was totally clean, not antiseptically clean, not hospital room clean, but just clean in the
00:07:39.380 way that a place is when it's owned by someone who cares about it.
00:07:41.740 And it was orderly, not in some kind of overbearing fascist way, but in the way that every human
00:07:47.480 desires.
00:07:48.220 There was an order to it.
00:07:50.780 And it was wholesome.
00:07:52.380 It was legit wholesome.
00:07:54.400 I'm not that old, but I remember in my seventh grade class, somebody whispering about his cousin
00:08:00.080 who had gotten high in the parking lot at Disneyland in Dunn Space Mountain.
00:08:04.280 And we were like, wow, wow, you were high at Disneyland.
00:08:10.060 Dude, be careful.
00:08:12.300 They don't allow that at Disneyland.
00:08:14.640 Okay.
00:08:15.180 It's Disneyland, dude.
00:08:17.620 I remember thinking that was totally shocking.
00:08:20.760 I'm sure there's like a fentanyl dispenser there now or whatever.
00:08:23.020 But at the time, that was like impossible to comprehend.
00:08:28.080 I remember being freaked out by it.
00:08:29.540 I'm never getting high at Disneyland.
00:08:31.540 They'll know because everyone at Disneyland is like a really upstanding, good person.
00:08:37.280 It wasn't just a theme park.
00:08:38.700 It was a metaphor for California.
00:08:39.880 It was like a really good state full of good people.
00:08:41.980 The cops weren't corrupt.
00:08:44.080 The LAPD was like, I know it's hard to believe now.
00:08:46.540 Everyone makes fun of it.
00:08:47.260 But at the time, it was the LAPD.
00:08:48.320 They were all like people who couldn't make it in Hollywood.
00:08:51.920 You know, they all looked like they were in like washed out of the Beach Boys or something.
00:08:55.480 Kind of handsome with little mustaches.
00:08:57.020 It was, sir, you were speeding.
00:08:59.140 Okay.
00:09:00.180 There's no chance you'd have to pay the guy off.
00:09:02.220 It's the LAPD.
00:09:03.660 The whole state was like that.
00:09:06.520 And it was a reflection of the people who ran the state.
00:09:10.080 Disney was founded by Walt Disney, who was an American and was a creative genius.
00:09:16.880 The guy who created the art owned the company.
00:09:20.860 The most creative person got the richest.
00:09:23.280 And that was before an economy that rewarded lawyers and accountants and DEI consultants
00:09:29.300 and politicians and bureaucrats.
00:09:31.240 People who lack any creativity whatsoever.
00:09:34.280 Who in a fair country would be painting your house at best.
00:09:38.360 And in fact, let me retract that as someone who spent a summer as a house painter and learned
00:09:48.100 that cutting and rolling is actually pretty hard.
00:09:52.620 There's no chance that Gavin Newsom could paint your house.
00:09:55.800 There's no chance.
00:10:00.100 He couldn't.
00:10:00.880 I can just picture him, like, covered in masking tape and latex and being like, what?
00:10:08.700 How does this work?
00:10:12.460 He, yeah, yeah.
00:10:14.340 He can consume overpriced wine at the French Laundry.
00:10:17.240 That's his only skill.
00:10:18.400 And he can extort money from you with moral blackmail.
00:10:23.040 And it's not just California, of course, it's not just the United States, it's the entire West.
00:10:30.540 But we have a system designed by people who, in a fair country, would have no shot at power or wealth.
00:10:38.540 And so what they have done systematically is create a system to give themselves power and wealth
00:10:43.360 at the expense of people who actually deserve it.
00:10:46.140 Which is to say, hardworking, smart, creative people.
00:10:49.340 And Disney is the perfect metaphor for this.
00:10:51.160 So a company was created by a true artistic genius, like actually genius, who drew the
00:10:56.640 cells himself, who thought of things in his own brain and brought them to the world and
00:11:01.980 changed the perception of America around the world, the Disney companies did.
00:11:07.740 And he ran the company and owned it.
00:11:10.100 And then gradually, like the state itself, Disney was taken over by lawyers and accountants
00:11:14.600 and other bottom feeders, money worshipers, disgusting human beings who hated America.
00:11:21.160 And the town around Disney is still a cool town, but it's not recognizable from the place
00:11:28.200 it was when I was a kid.
00:11:29.480 And a lot of the state isn't.
00:11:31.540 And so how do you fix that?
00:11:33.380 I must say, as someone who spent his life on TV yapping about, you know, ideas, they sent
00:11:38.980 their ideas on cable news, ideas with, you know, quotation marks around them, small eye
00:11:44.200 ideas, more reflexes than ideas, but whatever.
00:11:49.120 I don't really think this is an ideological problem.
00:11:53.700 In other words, I don't think you have to be steeped in Austrian economics to fix a place
00:11:58.020 like California or a country like America.
00:12:00.900 You need really one thing, and that's love for the people who live here.
00:12:04.160 It's true.
00:12:09.500 And as the father of four or any parent in the room can tell you, what's the key to parenthood?
00:12:14.380 Reading the right book about it?
00:12:18.320 Mastering the right parenting technique?
00:12:20.420 I've never met a single parent in my life who reads a ton of parenting books who's a good
00:12:24.200 parent.
00:12:25.200 Not one.
00:12:26.020 They're all weird.
00:12:27.300 And their kids are weird.
00:12:29.260 They have all these theories.
00:12:31.160 Stop.
00:12:31.560 No, you love your kids.
00:12:33.720 That's the key to parenting.
00:12:35.440 And if you love your kids, you're probably not going to be a perfect parent.
00:12:37.940 I certainly wasn't.
00:12:39.340 But if you love them hard enough, you'll come back to the center every time.
00:12:42.920 You will make, over time, the right decisions about how to raise your kids if you put your
00:12:47.560 love for them at the center of the project.
00:12:49.880 I love my child.
00:12:50.740 What should I do?
00:12:53.920 But it's not just parenting that requires that.
00:12:57.940 It's all forms of leadership.
00:13:00.660 From leadership on the battlefield, the officer for his men, in the corporate environment,
00:13:05.360 the CEO for his employees, and in the political sphere, the leader for his people.
00:13:11.440 A leader who loves the people he leads will not systematically mistreat them.
00:13:15.880 He will instead, over time, make basically the right decisions.
00:13:20.500 Or decisions that are in the vicinity of the right decisions, which is good enough for me.
00:13:26.400 He'll make mistakes, because we all do, but he won't destroy them.
00:13:31.800 They won't wind up in rehab or wind up living on the street, dying of fentanyl ODs or crapping
00:13:37.000 on the sidewalk.
00:13:37.760 He won't open the borders to people who aren't even from here, who break the law flagrantly,
00:13:43.200 and then send them millions of dollars from the people who work hard, legally, to give
00:13:48.500 them free phones and plane tickets and housing vouchers and free health care.
00:13:51.380 What?
00:13:51.680 No.
00:13:53.060 Any more than he would let random strangers into his own house to take food from his own
00:13:58.200 children, because he loves his own children first.
00:14:00.180 That's why.
00:14:00.760 And so, the problem that you have, and it's, once again, for the eighth time, particularly
00:14:13.200 poignant for me as a product of this state, is someone who really loved it in a totally
00:14:19.220 overbearing, arrogant way.
00:14:21.800 Someone who actually may or may not have a bumper sticker that said, there's no life,
00:14:24.720 east of I-5.
00:14:25.340 Possible I had that.
00:14:27.900 It's so insufferable.
00:14:29.320 Someone should have beat me up for that.
00:14:31.640 I wish someone had.
00:14:32.520 But anyway, the point is, I really love this state.
00:14:35.480 And to see what's happened, you just, you fixate on it.
00:14:40.340 And those of you who still live here who haven't called U-Haul yet, I know that you fixate on
00:14:45.020 it.
00:14:45.860 And so, the answer is only to find leaders who care about you, who love you, and who will
00:14:54.260 provide the basic desires of the human heart.
00:14:58.280 And in case you've forgotten what those are, here's what they are.
00:15:01.280 Order.
00:15:03.660 People hate chaos.
00:15:06.100 They don't just hate chaos intellectually, they hate it viscerally.
00:15:09.700 And they have every reason to hate it.
00:15:10.840 In fact, they can't tolerate chaos.
00:15:12.100 And they have every reason to hate it and be intolerant of it, because what is chaos?
00:15:17.560 Chaos is the most visible sign, not of disorganization or disorder, of evil.
00:15:22.520 Chaos is evil.
00:15:23.760 Evil brings chaos.
00:15:25.100 What's the first thing God did?
00:15:27.740 He brought order out of what?
00:15:29.940 Chaos.
00:15:31.180 So, if you were looking at chaos, a chaotic situation, anywhere, you were looking at a
00:15:36.380 manifestation of evil.
00:15:38.520 Whether the person creating the chaos knows it or not, that's irrelevant.
00:15:42.320 Evil is happening in front of you.
00:15:43.940 And it hurts people more than anything.
00:15:46.240 Okay?
00:15:46.580 People need order and predictability.
00:15:49.080 Not fascism.
00:15:50.200 Okay?
00:15:50.720 Order and predictability.
00:15:52.220 It's not wrong to want that.
00:15:53.800 It's essential to demand it.
00:15:56.080 Okay?
00:15:56.520 The second thing they want is safety and cleanliness.
00:15:59.320 They don't want to get shot going to the grocery store.
00:16:02.280 They don't want a home invasion.
00:16:05.760 When their car gets broken into, they want the police to find the person who did it and
00:16:08.860 punish him.
00:16:09.880 And they want all these things because those are the main functions of government.
00:16:13.580 They're the reason we have a government.
00:16:15.340 If your government can't even respond to a car break-in or an armed robbery or a home
00:16:21.440 invasion or a belligerent mentally ill person crapping on the sidewalk in front of your
00:16:25.140 house, that government has no legitimacy and shouldn't exist.
00:16:31.440 That's the first order of government.
00:16:34.080 To protect you from obvious threats.
00:16:37.560 Not from nicotine pouches or climate change.
00:16:43.480 Come on now.
00:16:44.500 From the mentally ill guy crapping on the sidewalk.
00:16:48.100 That's the number one threat in your life.
00:16:49.820 That's what scares your children.
00:16:52.240 And any government, I'll re-say it, who can't protect you or doesn't care to protect you
00:16:56.520 from that threat is not legitimate and has no right to exist.
00:17:02.200 Period.
00:17:02.640 And the third thing, to restate that every government owes its citizens who are the owners
00:17:11.160 of that government, they're the owners of the government.
00:17:14.140 The government has no legitimacy in a constitutional republic apart from the support of voters.
00:17:20.720 Period.
00:17:21.420 It has no legitimacy.
00:17:23.220 The only legitimacy it possesses is your consent.
00:17:27.340 I'm for this, therefore it's okay.
00:17:28.600 One of the things that means is if you pass a ballot measure demanding something, they
00:17:33.320 have to give it to you.
00:17:34.640 Period.
00:17:35.740 And if they don't give it to you, if they get some judge to take it away from you, that's
00:17:38.480 called tyranny.
00:17:39.240 Just so you know.
00:17:41.880 Sorry.
00:17:42.680 I've seen that happen in the state of California quite a bit.
00:17:45.200 And as a kid, when Howard Jarvis, when Prop 13 came through in 78, whatever you think
00:17:49.220 of it, woo, go Howard Jarvis.
00:17:51.320 There was no thought in the state of California in 1978, I was nine years old, I remember this
00:17:57.160 very well, that some judge could be like, oh, the majority of Californians wanted something,
00:18:01.760 but I don't want it, therefore they can't have it.
00:18:04.880 I mean, that would not have been allowed in the state.
00:18:08.520 Because that's crazy.
00:18:10.560 The only thing that matters in this or any other state is what the people who live there
00:18:14.540 think.
00:18:15.180 That's the only thing that matters.
00:18:18.340 Because that's our system of government, right?
00:18:21.000 Well, among the things you really can't live without are antibiotics.
00:18:24.920 They are life-saving.
00:18:26.400 Get an infection, you need antibiotics, or you could die.
00:18:29.800 But one of the things a lot of us have learned over the last few years is that most of our
00:18:33.660 antibiotics come from outside the country.
00:18:36.640 So that means to stay alive, many of us are depending on a supply chain from China.
00:18:43.080 So if you're in a family or people around you you care about, just remember that supply
00:18:49.180 chain from China could be the thing keeping them alive.
00:18:52.740 What if something went wrong with the supply chain from China?
00:18:55.960 Well, we don't have to imagine that.
00:18:56.940 We just saw that during COVID, the lunacy of COVID.
00:19:00.800 Foreign supply chains collapsed in some cases, leaving American consumers without products
00:19:06.520 they needed.
00:19:07.420 Products as simple as toilet paper, machine parts, and potentially antibiotics.
00:19:12.320 So this is something we're thinking about.
00:19:13.620 You're not crazy.
00:19:14.820 You're not some radical prepper to want to have a steady supply of life-saving medicine in
00:19:20.500 case something went wrong.
00:19:21.380 We spent a lot of time thinking about this because you need to.
00:19:25.980 You need an emergency supply, of course, of water, food.
00:19:29.840 Everyone knows that.
00:19:31.180 But also medication.
00:19:32.880 And here's the part you can do right now.
00:19:34.760 There's a company that can do this for you.
00:19:36.640 It's called Jace Medical.
00:19:38.260 You can get a Jace case from Jace Medical.
00:19:40.600 Super simple.
00:19:41.100 It's a pack of essential antibiotics to treat a long list of bacterial illnesses, including
00:19:45.800 UTIs, respiratory infections, skin infections, a lot of other common, potentially pretty serious
00:19:51.700 medical conditions that could threaten you and your family if there's ever a supply chain
00:19:55.900 problem.
00:19:56.520 It's worth having that stuff at home.
00:19:57.680 And it's not crazy expensive.
00:19:59.060 In fact, it's fast and it's simple.
00:20:01.260 You go to Jace Medical, J-A-S-E Medical.com, fill out a form that gets reviewed by a board
00:20:07.960 certified physician and your medications get dispensed by a licensed pharmacy at a fraction
00:20:13.480 of the regular cost.
00:20:14.680 So it's actually cheaper than normal.
00:20:15.780 And if you want it even cheaper, use the promo code Tucker at checkout for an extra discount.
00:20:21.800 So get prepared, not just for an emergency, but for the future.
00:20:26.840 JaceMedical.com, promo code Tucker.
00:20:29.560 But the third thing that people want, and that is the hallmark of any functioning and happy
00:20:49.180 society, is fairness.
00:20:51.660 Fairness.
00:20:53.280 Even small children understand when something's unfair.
00:20:57.000 You gave my sister two cookies and you only gave me one.
00:21:01.500 Yeah, you laugh.
00:21:03.440 That'll affect you for the rest of your life.
00:21:07.140 That'll affect the relationship between siblings more than anything else.
00:21:11.160 Mom favors him.
00:21:12.240 I don't like him.
00:21:13.120 You want to wreck the relationship between your children, which is the worst thing you
00:21:16.100 can do to children?
00:21:17.060 Favor one over the other.
00:21:19.160 Because it's unfair.
00:21:20.980 And kids have an acute sense of fairness that never goes away.
00:21:24.880 Because it's encoded in who they are.
00:21:27.020 It's in their genes.
00:21:27.720 They were born with it.
00:21:28.620 We know when something's unfair.
00:21:31.340 And the most unfair thing you can do is punish people who are trying their hardest and following
00:21:35.560 the rules.
00:21:36.940 And that would include every single person in this room from the state of California who
00:21:41.760 is held in contempt and loathing by the people who run your state.
00:21:46.700 And maybe it's occurred to you if you still live here, wait a second, I'm not conducting
00:21:51.040 any home invasions.
00:21:52.620 I didn't sneak in here illegally from a foreign country.
00:21:55.500 I pay my freaking taxes.
00:21:57.320 Why?
00:21:57.960 On what grounds do you hate me?
00:21:59.260 I should be getting the California Medal of Honor.
00:22:05.280 Gavin Newsom should be kissing my feet in the governor's office in Sacramento.
00:22:09.520 Thank you, dutiful, ethical Californian, for making this place better, for not throwing
00:22:20.560 the garbage out of the window of your car, for getting car insurance, for not driving
00:22:26.960 drunk, for not joining a street gang, for paying your taxes, for funding this whole grotesque
00:22:31.820 charade we call the government.
00:22:33.360 Thank you.
00:22:38.060 But when the governor of the state of California and all the little creepy nameless minions
00:22:43.000 beneath him, all the little puppets of the labor unions who actually run California, tell
00:22:50.360 me if I'm lying, all of those people have total contempt for the productive, creative,
00:22:57.460 dutiful, law-abiding citizens of the state.
00:22:59.900 And so they're moving to Idaho.
00:23:01.820 Or Texas, or Florida.
00:23:03.760 To improve those states.
00:23:05.560 And in so doing, they're leaving the graves of their ancestors in the greatest state out
00:23:09.100 of 50, California.
00:23:10.880 They're abandoning the dreams that brought their ancestors to the state.
00:23:14.600 And that dream was based on fairness, the promise that if you do the right thing, you
00:23:18.080 will be rewarded.
00:23:18.760 You will not be punished.
00:23:20.660 They're leaving all of that behind.
00:23:23.080 Because a small group of freaks want to punish them?
00:23:28.520 No.
00:23:31.820 Sorry.
00:23:35.060 Anyway, I'll stop with that.
00:23:36.600 We have a lot more.
00:23:37.600 But let me just say, I just want to say, I admire you, those who have stayed.
00:23:41.340 I admire your principle.
00:23:45.000 I admire your grit, your toughness, your perseverance, your resolve.
00:23:49.100 I like it here.
00:23:50.160 I grew up here.
00:23:50.940 And I'm not leaving.
00:23:51.840 I don't care what kind of freak occupies the governor's mansion.
00:23:54.480 That is such a cool attitude.
00:23:57.740 That's a pioneer attitude.
00:23:59.160 That's the attitude that drove your ancestors here in the first place.
00:24:02.920 I'm kind of sick of Cleveland, Ohio.
00:24:04.620 I'm moving to L.A.
00:24:06.200 That's why they came here.
00:24:08.000 That's a cool attitude.
00:24:09.620 And that's the attitude that's keeping you here.
00:24:11.460 And I just want to tell you from very far away that I admire it.
00:24:15.660 So I want to introduce.
00:24:17.540 We have a surprise guest, by the way.
00:24:22.740 But first I want to introduce and begin a conversation with someone I really admire.
00:24:28.460 Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for president in the Republican primary and dropped out, endorsed
00:24:42.780 Trump, and has been stumping for Trump, is close to Trump.
00:24:46.580 But I've known him since long before he got into politics because he wrote a couple of amazing
00:24:50.280 books.
00:24:51.380 And I talked, I interviewed him about the books.
00:24:53.180 And I actually read the books.
00:24:55.120 Not every cable news host reads the books.
00:24:57.100 I'm just telling you that.
00:24:58.820 Or any books ever.
00:25:01.580 Or actually can read, to be totally honest.
00:25:04.000 But whatever.
00:25:06.120 And I don't read all the books.
00:25:07.280 But I did read his books.
00:25:08.380 And they were wonderful.
00:25:09.560 And they were wonderful because he actually thought through what he believed.
00:25:13.860 And he put it all, it was totally transparent.
00:25:15.260 It was like, I used to think this, now I think this, here's why.
00:25:17.940 And I respect people like that.
00:25:19.540 And I, so I kind of watched him flower as this political figure.
00:25:23.140 And I heard people say, you know, he's just too articulate.
00:25:26.720 But this can't be real.
00:25:29.240 And there is a kind of bias against people who are almost like supernaturally fluent
00:25:33.140 in a language.
00:25:34.540 It's like, you're so silver tongue is the phrase they use.
00:25:38.380 Like, that can't be real.
00:25:39.560 You've got to be selling me something if you're that fluent.
00:25:42.560 I mean, I think everyone kind of feels that way.
00:25:44.860 And I just want to say, for the record, which is why I asked him, begged him to come tonight,
00:25:49.560 he is real.
00:25:50.880 He's totally sincere.
00:25:54.000 Maybe they don't want to think that someone that smart and that well-spoken is actually
00:25:59.980 on the other side.
00:26:00.700 This always used to happen to me.
00:26:02.380 Like, liberals I knew would be, especially in the state or relatives of mine in California,
00:26:05.100 be like, you don't really mean that.
00:26:06.840 Come on.
00:26:08.160 Like, I actually really do.
00:26:11.860 Well, he really means it.
00:26:13.280 And so I'm honored to have him, ladies and gentlemen, Vivek Ramaswamy.
00:26:19.580 Wow.
00:26:21.400 Love you guys.
00:26:23.900 This is pretty cool.
00:26:30.860 This is a real California here.
00:26:32.400 I like this.
00:26:33.040 Oh, yeah.
00:26:33.760 This is the good kind.
00:26:34.540 This is the good kind.
00:26:37.400 I love you guys.
00:26:42.880 Oh, it is the coolest state.
00:26:46.120 Oh, it breaks my heart.
00:26:47.160 Anyway, I'm so glad you're here.
00:26:48.380 This is a good kind, yeah.
00:26:50.360 So we were talking backstage.
00:26:54.580 Well, I just said that I read your books.
00:26:56.500 Oh, thank you.
00:26:57.260 I appreciate that.
00:26:58.780 I spent so many years in TV selling other people's books that I'm never selling anyone's
00:27:02.880 book again.
00:27:03.220 And I wouldn't even bring up your book, except I love it.
00:27:07.200 And it's called Truths?
00:27:09.160 That's the new one that's coming out.
00:27:10.380 Okay.
00:27:10.700 So this is why I'm bringing this up right now.
00:27:13.020 So I said, he said, I said, what have you been doing?
00:27:15.020 I'm writing a book.
00:27:16.580 It's almost done or it's done.
00:27:18.080 What's it called?
00:27:18.780 Truths.
00:27:19.500 Truths.
00:27:19.880 Oh, what are the truths?
00:27:21.120 And I said, what are the truths?
00:27:22.860 And off the top of his head, he listed them.
00:27:24.360 And I just thought it's so great.
00:27:25.320 You got to hear this.
00:27:25.980 What are the truths, Vivek?
00:27:26.920 God is real.
00:27:33.840 There are two genders.
00:27:41.760 Fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.
00:27:48.980 Reverse racism is racism.
00:27:51.660 An open border is not a border.
00:27:58.040 Parents determine the education of their children.
00:28:02.300 The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
00:28:08.960 Capitalism lifts us up from poverty.
00:28:11.220 There are three branches of government in the United States, not four.
00:28:17.980 And the U.S. Constitution is the strongest and greatest guarantor of freedom in human history.
00:28:26.980 So there's the 10.
00:28:28.040 I love that.
00:28:29.000 Now you don't have to buy the book.
00:28:30.020 So you start with God is real.
00:28:35.000 Yeah.
00:28:35.280 Why?
00:28:36.420 So I think that's the ultimate truth.
00:28:38.740 And, you know, I say this in particular.
00:28:40.700 I put that first for a reason because, you know, a lot of people in thinking about, I ran for U.S. president.
00:28:45.580 It was new to think about somebody who was not of the Christian faith, who was running for U.S. president, but is a person of deep faith.
00:28:53.500 And I think the beauty of the country is it was founded by people who believed that God put them here for a purpose.
00:28:59.520 This country was founded against the backdrop of divine providence.
00:29:04.040 And so I think part of what's going on in the country is that especially young people, people my age, and I love a lot of young people here too, our generation is so hungry for purpose right now.
00:29:19.620 We are hungry for a cause.
00:29:21.680 We're hungry for meaning.
00:29:23.220 We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, yet we can't even answer what it means to be an American.
00:29:28.720 But I think part of that hole in our heart, it's what Blaise Pascal said.
00:29:33.940 He's a famous scientist 400 years ago.
00:29:35.880 He said that if you have a hole the size of God in your heart and God does not fill it, something else will instead.
00:29:42.580 You think about wokeism or transgenderism or climatism or COVID-ism or globalism or Zelenskyism or whatever the case may be.
00:29:54.340 That's a bad one.
00:29:55.200 But you see these things serially coming up over and over again.
00:29:58.800 There's substitutes for the real thing.
00:30:00.720 And I am a big fan of the revival of faith in America.
00:30:05.220 Not by force.
00:30:06.560 The beauty of this country is you don't have to if it isn't natural to you.
00:30:10.440 But the revival of faith in the real thing, in true God.
00:30:14.120 And I think if we revive faith in this country, we'd actually be much more united as a country as well.
00:30:20.240 It's interesting.
00:30:21.140 So you just spent...
00:30:23.440 Everyone makes fun of politics and considers politicians loathsome, which they are.
00:30:29.640 I can confirm that.
00:30:30.720 But the one cool thing I like about campaigns is it does force people who want to hold power to go meet a lot of people and to get on the road and get to a lot of different places in this vast country.
00:30:43.580 And you've just done that.
00:30:44.880 So you said there is a revival of faith.
00:30:48.600 Did you feel that on the road?
00:30:50.520 Absolutely.
00:30:51.160 I mean, there is a hunger for even people who are questioning what their actual beliefs were.
00:30:56.760 And sometimes when you do that, you actually emerge stronger on the other side of it.
00:31:01.000 So I met a lot of people across the country.
00:31:02.640 Say you're traveling in Iowa, meet a lot of evangelical Christians, have a fair question, ask a question of can a Hindu be president.
00:31:09.240 That forced me to confront what a lot of my own beliefs were in a way that I wouldn't have if you weren't really pressed on it day to day.
00:31:17.120 And I think one of the traps you can fall into, and at times I would catch myself falling into as well, is you treat conversations as pattern recognition, right?
00:31:26.800 So it's like, okay, that's where I turn on the auto script that sounds like the best answer to this question.
00:31:32.700 And I decided halfway through the campaign, I'm not going to do that.
00:31:35.440 I'm going to treat every conversation as a unique conversation.
00:31:38.740 Probably talk to tens of thousands of people across this country.
00:31:41.180 And, you know, I hope I contributed something, but I can tell you I definitely emerged as a stronger human being and a stronger person because of it.
00:31:50.120 And, you know, I think we don't do that enough in this country anymore.
00:31:53.000 It's just, you don't have to agree with me on everything, and I don't have to agree with you on everything.
00:31:56.660 But the more we're able to just talk openly without a filter about questions like faith, about what our actual convictions are, about what it means to be a citizen of this country, one of the things that I learned is that this narrative of national division is actually a myth.
00:32:15.440 I do believe that.
00:32:16.580 And I'm not saying it's some fake kumbaya kind of way that, oh, we're all united because we agree on everything, because we obviously don't.
00:32:24.120 But I think most people in the country do share the same national values in common.
00:32:29.700 The idea that you get to speak your mind, or you do, or I do, as long as our neighbor gets to in return.
00:32:35.080 The idea that the people we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government,
00:32:42.420 not some unelected bureaucrat as a hired hand issuing edicts from on high.
00:32:48.260 I think most people in America agree on these things, or at least 80% do, and 20% are younger than me who were never taught those ideals in the first place, who we can bring along to.
00:32:58.140 And so that was probably the number one thing I took away from traveling the country, is we had protesters at my events often.
00:33:05.320 My rule of thumb was, unless they're being totally violent and disruptive, we'll give them a mic.
00:33:10.460 They get to speak their mind as long as they sit down and listen to what everybody else has to say.
00:33:15.140 And there were some beautiful things, beautiful moments that came out of that that I didn't expect during the campaign.
00:33:20.940 And so I just do think in this true way, and if you take away one thing from my own experience in the campaign,
00:33:26.660 it is that this myth of national division is just that.
00:33:29.740 It is a myth.
00:33:31.140 It serves certain interests of the people who perpetuate that myth.
00:33:34.120 But if we cut through that, I think we are actually far more united as a country than they will sell you.
00:33:40.840 And I think in a few months, hopefully in about two to three months, we may be seeing that on a scale that people may not expect.
00:33:48.560 I agree with that.
00:33:50.420 But this is, of course, everything is accelerating because of the election.
00:33:56.180 Something happened yesterday that, you know, it's getting harder and harder to be shocked by what the Biden administration does.
00:34:04.840 So much of it is unprecedented.
00:34:06.260 But something did shock me yesterday where the Department of Justice, so-called, which is a grotesque, really, parody of a Department of Justice,
00:34:16.980 indicted two foreigners and named in the indictment three conservative podcasters, internet figures, all Trump supporters,
00:34:27.100 as somehow connected to a foreign country, and immediately their content started disappearing from, say, YouTube.
00:34:37.680 They pulled a big documentary off YouTube this morning because the Biden administration said that, yeah, it's beyond belief.
00:34:45.680 So basically you have the Biden administration's Department of Justice shutting down criticism of the Biden administration.
00:34:53.260 And I don't know if I'm going insane or I'm missing something.
00:34:57.360 Is anyone noticing this?
00:34:58.700 How is this allowed?
00:34:59.940 So there's, I'm glad you write this up.
00:35:02.400 There's definitely something really weird going on here.
00:35:04.900 So I don't have any facts any different than what other people have read about this in the last 24 hours.
00:35:09.440 But I do have a gut instinct about it that's pretty strong.
00:35:13.300 And it comes from just basic pattern recognition of the last two election cycles.
00:35:17.520 Okay.
00:35:18.320 But my background is an entrepreneur.
00:35:20.040 I have not been paying super close attention to American politics.
00:35:23.260 Until about 2016 and then much more in 2020.
00:35:25.840 And then, of course, I'm in the thick of it now.
00:35:27.720 But let me take those last two presidential elections.
00:35:30.820 So this myth of, does it exist some sort of foreign election attempts at interference?
00:35:35.120 Of course it does.
00:35:35.720 It happens worldwide.
00:35:36.520 It happens here in the United States.
00:35:37.800 But this idea of Russian election interference in particular, let's trace the history of that in each of the last two elections.
00:35:43.980 Let's go to 2016.
00:35:45.100 In 2016, the allegation of Russian election interference to support Donald Trump, when you double click on that, look at what was the actual foreign election interference there.
00:35:55.600 It was actually U.S. election interference in the U.S. election through the Steele dossier, but laundered through the narrative of actual Russian interference.
00:36:06.800 And actually, there was a Russian intermediary to perpetuate that attempt at election interference about Trump's Russia collusion hoax.
00:36:13.680 That's in 2016.
00:36:14.400 Now we get to 2020.
00:36:16.700 Again, domestic election interference is the systematic suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
00:36:23.340 That didn't happen by Russian companies.
00:36:24.940 It didn't happen by the Russian government.
00:36:26.360 It happened by U.S. social media companies acting at the direction of deep state actors in the U.S. government that suppressed probably a story whose suppression changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
00:36:39.340 But again, what did they say?
00:36:40.720 They said, no, no, no.
00:36:41.580 This was Russian disinformation.
00:36:43.220 So now you're seeing a pattern.
00:36:45.200 In 2016, there's domestic attempts at election interference, but they run it through a Russian smokescreen.
00:36:51.200 In 2020, there's domestic election interference, but they run it through a Russian smokescreen.
00:36:56.920 So this time around, when I see Merrick Garland in the Department of Justice sitting under the Biden administration, suddenly alleging election interference by the Russians,
00:37:07.600 I don't have any facts other than to say my radar goes off and says, I want to know where that election interference is actually beginning.
00:37:15.300 A lot of those allegations that they were somehow helping Trump, I actually got curious.
00:37:21.280 Actually, you could make strong arguments that a lot of these posts or whatever actually weren't helping Trump at all.
00:37:26.800 But the fact that they called that Russian election interference again just suggests to me that this may be part of a pattern of what we saw in 2016 and 2020.
00:37:34.680 Well, you think?
00:37:35.200 So I don't really buy what they're selling on this.
00:37:37.480 Yeah, Kamala's losing, which she is.
00:37:42.520 She is.
00:37:43.260 She's losing in the states that matter.
00:37:48.680 Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona.
00:37:51.780 It's amazing.
00:37:53.360 So all of a sudden, the other side is being funded by Russia.
00:37:56.400 Of all the countries that interfere in our elections, and there are many, Russia is at the bottom of the list, okay, in terms of effectiveness.
00:38:03.040 But it's a little, they're literally going back to the Russia, Russia, Russia well again.
00:38:09.240 Yeah, I think it's right.
00:38:10.220 This is not a super clever group, right?
00:38:11.760 I think that, I think the problem is they are actually a super clever group.
00:38:16.700 I think that this is just the beginning of a volley.
00:38:19.440 So this one's not going to land.
00:38:20.800 I think the public, fool me once, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me thrice, you know, shame on you, some of whatever the expression is.
00:38:28.200 The reality is I think there's going to be some weird things that happen in the next two months.
00:38:32.800 I think there are going to be some, depending on what happens in the debate.
00:38:35.540 So I'm going to the debate next week in Philadelphia.
00:38:38.080 It's going to be Tuesday.
00:38:38.980 I think it's going to be probably a Donald Trump demolition destruction of the other side.
00:38:45.660 But don't cheer too much, right?
00:38:49.020 Because I was at the last one, and that's actually in some ways was a trap.
00:38:52.640 It was obviously a trap.
00:38:54.300 They scheduled the earliest ever presidential debate in U.S. history.
00:38:58.740 Why did they do that?
00:38:59.420 It was obvious.
00:39:00.760 It was that they wanted to test Biden as a final trial balloon.
00:39:04.600 And they got a free option.
00:39:05.600 Because if he did great, great.
00:39:06.920 They turned the race upside down.
00:39:08.400 But if Biden did as poorly as he did, they swapped him out.
00:39:10.580 It was something unthinkable that became the obvious.
00:39:13.860 So I think if we have another debate smackdown on Tuesday, as I, if I was a betting man, I'd
00:39:18.880 predict that's what we're about to have.
00:39:20.720 I also would predict we're going to have some very strange things that happen on the back
00:39:25.460 of that as well.
00:39:27.300 And I think that in some ways the Republican Party has just been so behind on this.
00:39:31.400 I'll probably make some people mad by, you know, lifting the curtain on this.
00:39:34.600 But last year to make the Republican Party debate stage, the final condition is we had
00:39:39.780 to sign all the candidates.
00:39:42.240 Ron McDaniel's requirement.
00:39:44.180 I had some words to say that it had a certain, you know, outcome there.
00:39:48.460 But she made us sign a Beat Biden Pledge.
00:39:54.720 And so this was in July or August of last year.
00:39:57.760 And I said, this is, this is dumb.
00:40:00.300 This is silly because we're not going to be running against Joe Biden.
00:40:03.360 So we're going to spend an entire year of financial, political, and messaging capital
00:40:08.900 running against a candidate who is not the actual candidate we're going to run against.
00:40:12.000 But it was the Beat Biden Pledge.
00:40:14.060 That was just the dogmatic messaging of the Republican Party.
00:40:17.500 And what do you know, a year and a half later, we've wasted a lot of money, a lot of time,
00:40:21.200 a lot of credibility with the public.
00:40:22.460 We even boosted the media's credibility because they got that last month where they got to
00:40:26.560 criticized Joe Biden.
00:40:27.680 So now when they're not actually going after Kamala, they still look even-handed to the
00:40:31.220 American public because they went after a Democrat most recently.
00:40:34.560 In some ways, it was the worst of all worlds.
00:40:37.640 And so I think we need to get better as a movement, I think as a Republican Party, on
00:40:41.980 staying skeptical, on skating to where the puck is going.
00:40:46.240 And I think ultimately the way we're going to win this is actually not even by focusing
00:40:49.640 on Kamala.
00:40:50.540 That's sort of where I've landed on this is, you know, people say she's a communist or she's,
00:40:55.480 you know, a socialist or whatever.
00:40:57.440 I think that is giving her a little too much credit because it assumes she has an ideology.
00:41:04.120 I agree.
00:41:04.920 She doesn't have an ideology.
00:41:06.320 Right.
00:41:06.560 Right.
00:41:06.760 She just doesn't.
00:41:07.980 Most people in California here who know her, she's just another cog.
00:41:11.900 Right.
00:41:12.120 She's another cog in a machine.
00:41:13.780 We're not running against a candidate.
00:41:15.720 We are running against a system.
00:41:18.620 And the way we're going to win this is forget who they put up.
00:41:22.280 Kamala, if they make her the president before the election, who knows, whatever it is,
00:41:25.000 it doesn't matter if we actually win this by offering our own vision of who we are and
00:41:31.300 what we actually stand for.
00:41:34.100 Individual, family, nation, and God beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the
00:41:42.300 courage to stand for it.
00:41:43.340 But that's how we protect ourselves against what I think is going to be a complicated
00:41:48.320 couple of months ahead is what I predict.
00:41:51.380 So smart.
00:41:52.300 Well, how's this for crazy?
00:41:53.540 Has there ever been a more volatile time in American politics?
00:41:57.340 Not in our lifetimes.
00:41:58.660 No one alive has ever seen anything like this.
00:42:01.300 But long before things started to really fall apart, the Heritage Foundation saw it coming.
00:42:07.040 Heritage has pulled together a coalition of over 100 right-leaning groups to develop a
00:42:11.380 comprehensive plan for day one.
00:42:13.120 That would include detailed policy proposals on the most pressing issues, the big ones.
00:42:17.480 Securing the border, controlling inflation, cracking down on election fraud, protecting
00:42:22.560 the rights of the individual, and saving the nation from being crushed by woke anti-human
00:42:27.640 ideology.
00:42:29.080 The team at Heritage has also developed a plan to dismantle the deep state that keeps this
00:42:33.180 nonsense going and reclaim this nation from the small group of technocrats that's broken
00:42:37.960 everything.
00:42:38.440 Heritage is also running a training and vetting program to identify effective conservatives
00:42:44.500 to serve in the next presidential administration, people who will share your values, this country's
00:42:50.340 values, and actually do the job.
00:42:52.340 It can't just be the same pool of discredited people from Washington populating every administration.
00:42:59.440 Heritage has a long head start, and they put in a lot of work already, but they need your
00:43:03.060 support to finish the job and to support the incoming president.
00:43:06.920 You can go to heritage.org slash Tucker and contribute to this important work today.
00:43:11.960 A lot depends on it.
00:43:14.120 Heritage.org slash Tucker.
00:43:16.200 And I don't, we talked about offstage, I won't bore everyone here, but what you're going
00:43:33.780 to do next, but I think it's fair to predict that you will remain part of what you're part
00:43:40.160 of now, which is an effort to save the country.
00:43:42.200 But I think we're falling for it, for sure.
00:43:45.360 The idea that Kamala Harris is like an actual person, I'm sure she can fog a mirror, but
00:43:49.400 beyond that, she's just a cipher.
00:43:52.540 She'll be whatever you want her to be.
00:43:54.960 I mean, pay her enough, she'll be a radical vegan or anti-circumcision activist or whatever,
00:44:00.440 it doesn't matter.
00:44:00.900 She might even build a wall.
00:44:02.680 A hundred percent.
00:44:03.180 It's a thing she wants to.
00:44:04.500 A hundred percent.
00:44:06.800 You know, she's a kind of sad puppet, clearly unhappy, terrified.
00:44:11.680 I mean, I know benzodiazepine use when I see it, and I'm like, that chick's had some Xanax,
00:44:17.020 just vacant.
00:44:19.200 She's afraid.
00:44:20.260 She wakes up afraid every morning, and you can tell the people who are afraid, which is
00:44:23.760 a lot of people, and she's chief among the fearful.
00:44:26.140 But anyway, the Republicans fell for it, the leadership fell for it, they're falling for
00:44:30.880 it now, and they also fell, and I hope you'll flesh this out a little bit, they fell for
00:44:35.960 the idea that the media acts independently of the Democratic Party.
00:44:40.080 Yeah, I think so.
00:44:41.420 I mean, I think that that's a trap we have repeatedly fallen into over the last eight
00:44:46.100 years, but I just think this idea, it's not an accident that you get Joe Biden and
00:44:51.460 Kamala Harris.
00:44:51.940 There are a lot of intelligent people who are, believe it or not, intelligent people,
00:44:56.500 they have high IQ brain power, they can make their own decisions, they're thinkers, who
00:45:00.600 are Democrats, people on the left, ideologues, who people like you and I might disagree with,
00:45:04.340 but some of whom you and I might actually be friends with, because we respect them even
00:45:07.200 though we disagree with them.
00:45:09.400 It's not an accident that you get Joe Biden, and then a Kamala Harris, and then the next
00:45:14.180 puppet they put up.
00:45:16.340 Biden has cognitive deficits, right?
00:45:18.720 Those are not a bug.
00:45:20.420 They are a feature for the people who control him.
00:45:23.640 Kamala Harris has a different kind of deficit.
00:45:25.980 She has policy deficits, cognitive deficits, you could argue.
00:45:29.320 Those are also, again, not a bug.
00:45:31.400 They're a feature for the people who actually operate the puppet.
00:45:35.860 And so I think that it's going to be a losing game unless we see ourselves as running against
00:45:41.420 that system.
00:45:42.460 And I think this is actually going to be, let's assume victory here, right?
00:45:45.800 Let's fast forward.
00:45:47.640 It's not just winning the election.
00:45:49.880 It's actually, are we actually going to do what conservatives, Republicans, when they've
00:45:54.680 governed have long failed to do?
00:45:57.160 I think we've fallen, the real myth we've fallen into is this trap of believing that we
00:46:01.000 can reform this system.
00:46:03.140 That we're going to reform the deep state.
00:46:05.680 That we're going to fire Christopher Wray or whoever at the top of the FBI and put in
00:46:10.220 a new figurehead on top.
00:46:11.660 That we're going to reform the bureaucracy.
00:46:15.320 And I think that reform is just a myth, right?
00:46:18.060 It's impossible.
00:46:18.900 We're not running against, not that Christopher Wray is an individual bad actor at the top
00:46:23.040 of the FBI.
00:46:23.640 He's just another cog in the system, just like Kamala Harris, just like Joe Biden.
00:46:28.420 And so the question for us, the real test for us, I think, Tucker, is not going to be
00:46:31.940 the election in November.
00:46:33.920 It is going to be whether we have the spine to actually see through and do the hard thing
00:46:39.280 that we've never done before.
00:46:41.340 Nobody's done it.
00:46:42.400 Donald Trump in his first term is the closest we've gotten.
00:46:45.300 But nobody's really stepped up and said, no, no, no.
00:46:47.460 Are we actually going to try to reform and massage this thing to incrementally window
00:46:51.760 dress it and advance our own goals?
00:46:54.040 Or are we actually going to get in there and shut it down?
00:46:58.580 And I think that is the one answer that will save this country.
00:47:02.660 And I'm supporting Donald Trump because I believe he's the man who is going to be the
00:47:07.800 best suited to get that job done.
00:47:09.760 But the real test comes not in November, but after that, to me.
00:47:13.740 I mean, I couldn't agree with you more.
00:47:15.360 And I'm thrilled to hear that.
00:47:16.720 I think I spent 35 years living in Washington.
00:47:19.460 So I have some appreciation for how rotten the system is.
00:47:23.160 It's so rotten.
00:47:24.440 It's like mind boggling, actually.
00:47:27.220 But in order to shut it down or in order to make the changes necessary to preserve the
00:47:31.500 country, you're going to have to actually ignore the media.
00:47:37.900 And why can't Republicans do that?
00:47:41.240 So I actually met Georgia Maloney when she came to the United States not that long ago.
00:47:47.340 She's a good leader, so I had a good conversation with her.
00:47:49.560 She gave me a tactic.
00:47:50.500 I'm going to try it if I'm in a comparable position ever.
00:47:55.680 And I think anybody who's in a comparable position of leadership should do the same thing.
00:47:59.120 She says she doesn't read the newspaper.
00:48:00.780 She says, I couldn't tell you what's on the front page of the newspaper.
00:48:03.180 I couldn't tell you what's on television.
00:48:04.980 I just talk to people.
00:48:06.240 That's all I need to talk to.
00:48:07.240 And then I make the decisions that actually need to be made.
00:48:09.660 That'd be my recommendation to every Republican politician.
00:48:12.360 I don't follow it.
00:48:13.780 I have to admit, I only pick this up after my campaign.
00:48:17.860 But if I were to run my campaign again, if I was to go back in time and do it again, that'd
00:48:22.260 probably be the number one thing that I would do too.
00:48:24.540 You don't need to watch it.
00:48:25.440 You don't need to see.
00:48:25.860 You could participate in it.
00:48:26.740 You could actually, you know, take a hostile interview anybody wants to.
00:48:29.960 But whatever the headline is, whatever the TV commentary is, social media commentary,
00:48:34.740 in some way, don't even bother looking at it.
00:48:37.060 Just talk to those tens of thousands of people across the country where you actually learn
00:48:41.940 that that myth of division that you're fed, the whole thing was false.
00:48:44.380 You can just call the bluff by literally switching it off and pretending it doesn't exist.
00:48:49.780 I think it's actually a pretty good tactic.
00:48:51.780 Oh, I haven't had a TV in many years and I worked in TV.
00:48:55.760 You know, I don't think a lot of crack dealers leave it around the kitchen.
00:48:58.880 You know what I mean?
00:48:59.800 Yeah.
00:49:01.000 This is an ugly product.
00:49:02.080 I don't want it in my house.
00:49:03.040 But, you know, I totally agree.
00:49:04.920 But it's just interesting, even now, I know Republican leaders, probably pretty well-meaning
00:49:10.720 people, who if they get attacked on Twitter or the New York Times or if Chuck Todd of NBC
00:49:19.840 News, I mean, it's all like a joke, but if they say something critical of the politicians
00:49:24.540 and we have to deal with this, why don't you just hoist the middle finger and laugh?
00:49:28.240 I've never understood.
00:49:30.460 We did some of that during the campaign.
00:49:32.180 Well, you did it, for sure.
00:49:34.340 But I think that, you know, I was surprised by what an effect some of that actually had.
00:49:39.980 That was actually one of probably the unexpected successes that I did have in my campaign.
00:49:44.620 I only got 8% of the vote in Iowa, but actually in taking down a lot of the media and exposing,
00:49:49.400 you know, a lot of that corruption, I think that that's important work to continue to do.
00:49:54.640 There's a risk.
00:49:55.500 I mean, there's always, and here's what I would say.
00:49:56.940 We talked about shutting down the deep state.
00:49:58.100 We talked about taking on the media.
00:49:59.540 Here's the honest truth.
00:50:02.060 You're always taking some risk.
00:50:05.160 It's just a question of which risk you're willing to take.
00:50:07.000 So in the context of speaking back, in the context of when the media is attacking you
00:50:10.500 or you're confronting a hard truth, one risk you might take is that you're going to be too
00:50:15.840 unfiltered, that you're just going to take your filter off, say too much, and say something
00:50:20.780 that offends somebody.
00:50:22.020 That's a risk.
00:50:22.980 I've done it.
00:50:23.540 I've made that mistake.
00:50:24.300 I don't think you've ever made that mistake, but I've made that mistake.
00:50:29.280 And that's one risk.
00:50:30.220 You're always going to take that risk.
00:50:31.280 The other risk is that you self-censor and you say that, okay, because I'm going to offend
00:50:35.620 somebody, I'm actually going to restrict what I say and think three times before every utterance
00:50:40.880 I make.
00:50:41.440 Both of them are risks.
00:50:42.580 The only question is which risk are you willing to take?
00:50:45.660 Same thing with respect to reforming the government, right?
00:50:47.660 I say get in there and shut it down.
00:50:49.140 Fine.
00:50:49.320 What does that mean?
00:50:50.060 I would fire 75 plus percent of all federal bureaucrats on day one.
00:50:54.240 Shut down the FBI, the ATF, the CDC, the Department of Education.
00:50:58.980 Just shut them the hell down, all right?
00:51:01.720 But you're taking, I mean, just shut it down.
00:51:04.020 Now you're taking a risk, right?
00:51:06.780 I mean, am I going to tell you that's the exact perfect amount we need to cut?
00:51:09.940 I can't tell you that.
00:51:11.520 You might take either the risk that you're going to cut so much fat that you also cut some
00:51:15.600 muscle or you're otherwise taking the other risk, that you're not cutting enough fat,
00:51:19.840 you're an eight-headed hydro, you cut one off, it grows right back.
00:51:22.420 It's just a question of which risk you're willing to take.
00:51:25.120 And there's times in American history where one of those might be the right risk or the
00:51:28.080 other.
00:51:28.320 But right now I think we live in a moment where the risk you need to take, and it's not just
00:51:32.100 me or Tucker or Donald Trump or anybody else, the risk every one of you needs to take
00:51:36.460 is when you're the only person in a room who believes what you do, for God's sake, stand
00:51:41.300 up and say it.
00:51:42.180 Say it with a spine.
00:51:43.400 Don't apologize for your beliefs.
00:51:46.080 Say in public what you will say in private at the dinner table.
00:51:50.060 And you might offend somebody.
00:51:51.120 It's a risk you're taking, but take the risk.
00:51:52.640 When we put Donald Trump back in the White House, hold him and J.D. Vance or me or anybody
00:51:58.020 else who's part of it accountable to say, you said you want to get in there and actually
00:52:02.080 drain the swamp and attack the deep state.
00:52:04.600 By God's sake, get in there and actually do it.
00:52:08.080 And you're going to take a risk.
00:52:09.100 Is it going to be perfect?
00:52:09.960 There's going to be some bumps along the way, but that's just the risk that we choose to
00:52:14.400 take.
00:52:14.840 And so that's kind of where I land on this.
00:52:16.500 It's not that I'm giving you some perfect answer.
00:52:18.860 It's just that that's the risk that I believe we need to take and I'm willing to take it.
00:52:22.020 And you have taken that risk.
00:52:24.600 And I just have to ask, sorry that there are people watching, but I'm going to anyway, what
00:52:28.080 effect has that had on your personal life, your friendships, your family?
00:52:31.240 Because people don't say what they really think because they worry about the cost.
00:52:37.100 What's it been for you?
00:52:39.460 Yeah, I mean, I think so it's been different stages of it.
00:52:42.820 Okay.
00:52:43.080 So initially, so I'll tell you this, a lot of people in the campaign, there's a lot of things
00:52:49.780 that I would do differently too.
00:52:50.820 So a lot of people who worked for me in past companies I've led, for example, or close friends,
00:52:55.380 one of their frustrations that they've shared with me now in the six, eight months since
00:53:00.420 is, is everybody got to see you as the fighter.
00:53:04.060 That's great.
00:53:04.680 But that's not the side of you that we know.
00:53:06.880 There's more of you than that.
00:53:08.880 And the risk you're taking there is, my philosophy in the campaign was if somebody hits you, you
00:53:14.120 hit them back 10 times harder.
00:53:15.480 I don't care if you're a Republican, Democrat, that's how we're going to run those.
00:53:18.560 And at some point, that's the way you got to, you got to proceed in the first step.
00:53:22.360 But I also preach to myself what I would teach my two sons is that the number one person who's
00:53:31.740 most responsible for whether or not you achieve your goal, it's not the only factor, but the
00:53:35.820 number one factor of whether or not you achieve your goal is actually you.
00:53:41.160 And I set out to achieve a goal last year.
00:53:43.660 I didn't achieve it.
00:53:44.680 And I think that I could blame the media.
00:53:46.120 I could blame a lot of the consultants.
00:53:47.580 I could blame a lot of factors along the way.
00:53:51.300 But, you know, at the end of the day, I think that there's a lot that I would probably do
00:53:55.980 differently as well to make sure that I'm able to allow the people of the country to
00:54:00.060 see the whole of who I am.
00:54:01.600 And that's one of the hardest things to do as a politician because you ask about friends
00:54:04.480 and family.
00:54:05.540 That's the thing that probably hurt my family the most is not that they couldn't deal with
00:54:11.020 the insults or the dirtiness of partisan politics, but the sense that there's someone they
00:54:16.120 know, but the impression that the public is given is of a very different person.
00:54:20.900 That disconnect was probably the thing that was hardest on my wife and probably some of
00:54:25.720 my closest friends.
00:54:26.720 But, you know, they're tough.
00:54:28.180 They can handle it.
00:54:28.800 And they were still supportive of what we did.
00:54:30.320 And it's a process that bruises you a little bit.
00:54:34.600 There's some sort of wounds and scars that never fully heal.
00:54:38.660 But I got to thank my family who was, I got a three-year-old and now four-year-old son.
00:54:44.500 He was three during the campaign, came with me to every campaign event.
00:54:47.420 My wife is a surgeon who did not actually sacrifice seeing one patient over the course of the year
00:54:54.280 that she was supposed to see and still traveled with me for the entire campaign and during
00:54:58.020 that pain.
00:54:59.480 And you know what?
00:55:00.440 Those are the, you know, they're the people that got me through it as well.
00:55:03.920 I judge men by their wives and I liked you much more after meeting her, I have to say.
00:55:08.600 That's fair.
00:55:09.520 No, I do.
00:55:10.360 I do.
00:55:10.920 I'm very judgy that way.
00:55:11.920 Was there any politician, so you came from business, you had a really successful business
00:55:18.720 career, and then you became so distressed after writing these books about what was happening
00:55:24.160 in America that you wound up running for president.
00:55:26.120 But you weren't a politician, you had contempt for politicians.
00:55:29.320 Were there any you met who you were impressed by?
00:55:32.500 Yeah, a good number, actually.
00:55:35.600 I'm actually, I say this not in some sort of like large-scale flattery, but I actually
00:55:40.720 have been more impressed by Donald Trump the more I've actually gotten to know him.
00:55:45.700 And I say that because he's also somebody who, I know how hard it was for me to sort
00:55:50.220 of make the, I mean, I lived a good life, Donald Trump lived a good life, but to be able
00:55:54.860 to lay that down and actually say, no, no, no, this is my purpose and calling, I'm not
00:55:57.960 going to stop at anything.
00:55:58.960 I probably wouldn't have run for president if he hadn't done it first, so I got to give
00:56:02.660 credit where credit's due there.
00:56:05.100 I think when I think about other people who I respect, I like a guy like, take a Rand Paul.
00:56:10.720 Or Thomas Massey, right?
00:56:13.240 Guys who, they're probably the ones who get closest to that Georgia Maloney model of like
00:56:19.540 not giving a crap about what the press has to say, but they're actually just going to
00:56:24.040 step up and say it anyway.
00:56:25.460 I've only gotten to know Thomas Massey a little bit more recently, but Rand Paul I've gotten
00:56:29.460 to know over the course of the last couple of years.
00:56:31.680 And his father, Ron Paul, I would give even greater credit to for blazing that trail.
00:56:36.640 So, yeah, there's a longer list of others I could probably give you, but not that much
00:56:43.360 longer.
00:56:44.440 But I would say there's a handful of people that gave me, you know, real inspiration that
00:56:49.720 somebody with conviction that doesn't compromise on it can still drive change.
00:56:53.340 And those would be some of the guys I'd give you.
00:56:54.820 I strongly agree with you.
00:56:56.200 I've spent my whole life really despising politicians, not just on principle, but also personally,
00:57:01.340 as people.
00:57:04.740 And I feel that way about most of them still with a lot of evidence.
00:57:09.080 But I have to say, I look around and there are more people I admire, I can't believe I'm
00:57:14.980 saying this, in politics than really at any time I can remember.
00:57:18.780 And I think there's so much pressure, downward exerted pressure on all of us to obey, to
00:57:24.960 repeat the lies, to get in line, that the people who refuse to do that are extraordinary
00:57:30.320 people.
00:57:31.520 And our special guest tonight, I'm about to ask on, is one of those people.
00:57:38.080 And he's in the rare position of, typically, you know, a public career begins and people
00:57:43.880 are so impressed by the person and then they see his flaws and he falls from grace.
00:57:48.300 The person we're about to invite on is the only person I've ever met who spent, I don't
00:57:54.280 know, 20 years being denounced pretty much every week by every single news organization
00:58:00.160 in the world as a dangerous, mentally ill lunatic, making totally unsupported, anti-scientific
00:58:10.060 claims about totally safe medical products.
00:58:13.700 And this man, in the face of opposition that no politician I've ever seen, ever seen, including
00:58:23.020 from within his own tribe and family, he persisted in saying what he thought was true.
00:58:29.640 And I've known this man for a while and I've admired him for a long time.
00:58:34.620 And what's amazing is to wake up in a country that in some ways is not getting better, but
00:58:40.620 to wake up in a country that all of a sudden has stopped mocking this man as a crazy person
00:58:47.620 person.
00:58:48.620 And has started to realize that the lone brave voice may have been right all along.
00:58:55.220 And so it's an honor to introduce Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:59:04.620 So we had this conversation last week that I've had a lot of conversations with a lot
00:59:09.860 of people on camera, but the conversation that we had are the things that you said to
00:59:13.800 me last week, I will not forget.
00:59:16.240 And it's from an outsider's perspective, it seems like your public career has not only
00:59:22.720 not ended in some way, it's beginning in a new way, in a really powerful way.
00:59:26.920 And you described three issues that are central, not just to your politics, but to your life.
00:59:37.580 And if I'm remembering correctly, I think they were slowing down the number of people who
00:59:42.820 are killed abroad in wars, okay, we have a lot of wars, opposing the pointless ones, protecting
00:59:52.140 the natural environment that God created for us to enjoy, nature, and protecting the health
00:59:59.260 of children.
01:00:00.260 And I think those are the three things you mentioned, I'm wondering if you could just
01:00:04.720 expand on that.
01:00:06.720 Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: You know, I, I got into,
01:00:21.720 and my career was, most of it was spent in environmental protection.
01:00:28.060 And I went to work in 1983 for a blue collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen
01:00:36.720 who mobilized to reclaim the Hudson River from its polluters.
01:00:43.240 And they were people who were capitalists.
01:00:47.360 They came from an industry that was 350 years old.
01:00:52.700 It's the oldest commercial fishery in North America on the Hudson River.
01:00:58.000 And they saw this industry destroyed, not because it had any intrinsic flaws, but because a large
01:01:07.520 company, the General Electric Company, had been able to use its political clout to do something
01:01:14.360 illegal, which was to dump its toxic PCBs into the Hudson River.
01:01:21.200 And I, when I first started working on the Hudson, there were 2,500 families working on
01:01:27.360 the river enriching our culture, our palate, our economy, the life of the Hudson Valley connecting
01:01:35.640 us to our history, to the, to our landscapes, to the waterways, and 10, 20,000 generations
01:01:45.300 of human beings that were here before there were laptops.
01:01:48.480 They were using the same fishing methods that were taught by the Algonquin Indians, the original
01:01:55.480 Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam, and then passed down through the generations.
01:02:01.020 And all of a sudden, they couldn't fish anymore, because there were plenty of fish in the Hudson.
01:02:07.380 They were loaded with toxic PCBs, and the state of New York said, you can't eat them.
01:02:13.680 And they recognized that, you know, these were capitalists.
01:02:17.860 They were people, small business people.
01:02:21.700 And they realized that, that government was in cahoots with the polluters.
01:02:27.860 And that if they wanted to reclaim the river for themselves, they were going to have to do
01:02:33.160 it themselves.
01:02:34.160 They went to the government agencies, the Corps of Engineers, the Conservation Department,
01:02:38.480 the Coast Guard.
01:02:40.520 And they were given the bum's rush.
01:02:42.260 They were told, these are important people.
01:02:45.800 We can't force them to comply with the law.
01:02:49.180 And they came to the conclusion, the only way they were going to restore the river is if
01:02:53.060 they confronted the polluters directly.
01:02:55.500 They found an ancient navigational statute called the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act that
01:03:02.120 allowed people to prosecute polluters and then collect bounties.
01:03:09.080 And they started suing polluters.
01:03:11.060 They hired me as their attorney in 1984.
01:03:15.180 We brought cases against over 500 successful cases on the Hudson.
01:03:22.860 We forced polluters to spend about five and a half billion dollars remediating the river.
01:03:27.380 And today, the Hudson is the richest waterway in the North Atlantic.
01:03:30.180 And my experience was different than a lot of environmentalists who have a kind of look but don't touch.
01:03:46.060 My experience was about people who, their communities were absolutely, the people who were part of that commercial fishery.
01:03:55.740 It dictated the purity of the Hudson's, the abundance of the fishery, dictated their livelihoods, their property values, their recreational values.
01:04:05.260 It was their social safety net.
01:04:07.860 If you, you know, if you lost your job, you could still fish, you could feed your family.
01:04:13.540 And that was something that the state of New York, the Constitution of the state says the people of the state own the rivers,
01:04:20.540 they own the waterways of the state, they're not owned by the Conservation Department,
01:04:24.980 they're not owned by the General Electric Company, they're not owned by the big polluters, they're owned by the people.
01:04:29.860 Everybody has a right to use them, and nobody can use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others.
01:04:43.540 Every child in New York has a constitutional right to throw a plug into the river and bring out a striped bass and bring it home and feed it to their family.
01:04:53.540 Amen.
01:04:55.540 That was the essential, you know, that lesson that I learned there about agency capture then allowed me to kind of understand,
01:05:09.220 have a model or a blueprint for the things that I saw when I started studying the pharmaceutical industry.
01:05:18.180 And so those are critical issues.
01:05:24.180 I came into this campaign, three major issues.
01:05:29.940 One was the censorship.
01:05:32.340 And you and I feel the same way.
01:05:36.660 And any government that can silence its critics has a license for any kind of atrocity.
01:05:45.220 Put that on your refrigerator, because that's true.
01:06:02.980 And, you know, Hamilton, Adams, and Madison said that we put the freedom of speech in the First Amendment, because all the other bill rights are dependent on it.
01:06:15.460 And sure enough, when the government found out, discovered that it could censor our speech in early 2020, silenced doctors, silenced mothers, silenced people who were, you know, people scientists, who were saying, wait, there are other alternatives to what you're doing.
01:06:33.220 Lockdowns aren't going to work, lockdowns aren't going to work, the masks have no signs behind them, the social distancing, has no signs.
01:06:41.380 Those people were silenced.
01:06:42.820 They were marginalized, they were vilified, they were demonized.
01:06:47.380 And as soon as the government figured out that it could get away with that, it went after all of our other constitutional rights.
01:06:55.540 The first thing it did is it went after the other leg of the First Amendment, which is freedom of religion.
01:07:02.820 It closed every church in our country for a year with no scientific citation.
01:07:09.380 It went after the third leg of the First Amendment, which is freedom of assembly, with these very bizarre social distancing regulations that, again, they now admit were not science-based.
01:07:21.860 They went after, then, the Fifth Amendment, which is property rights.
01:07:27.380 They closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation, no scientific citation, no notice and comment rulemaking.
01:07:38.740 No public hearings, no public hearings, all the things that I've been suing governments and corporations for for 40 years, all the indicia of democracy that government officials have to go through before they deprive us of rights, and none of that happened.
01:08:06.500 And then they went after the Seventh Amendment, which the Seventh Amendment gives us the right to jury trial.
01:08:17.620 The Seventh Amendment is very simple. It says, no American shall be denied the right of a trial before a jury of their peers in case there are controversies exceeding $25.
01:08:27.620 That's all it says. That's all it says. There's no pandemic exception.
01:08:32.820 And by the way, the framers of the Constitution knew all about pandemics.
01:08:39.940 There were two epidemics during the Revolutionary War.
01:08:42.900 One of them, a malaria epidemic that decimated the armies of Virginia, and then a smallpox epidemic that decimated the armies of New England at the very time when Benedict Arnold, who was our greatest general, conquered Montreal.
01:09:00.020 So we were in the inner city of Montreal. We controlled Montreal, which meant we controlled Canada, and he had to withdraw his troops because he could not hold the city because so many of his troops were down with smallpox.
01:09:12.020 Otherwise, Canada today would be part of the United States, but for that smallpox epidemic.
01:09:18.420 And the framers all knew that. And when they gathered ten years later, nine years later, Philadelphia to ratify the Bill of Rights, between the end of the Revolution and the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1792, there were epidemics in every city that killed tens of thousands of people, malaria epidemics, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid, cholera.
01:09:46.420 So they all knew about epidemics, yet they did not put an epidemic exception in the Constitution. They wrote that document for hard times.
01:10:07.420 One of the things, you bring that up, Bobby, and I think one of the things we often fall into the trap of in an election year is to say,
01:10:16.620 let's take the most important of those amendments, the first amendment, through a partisan lens.
01:10:21.620 Do we have a Democratic Party that has been using social media companies to silence speech through the back door that they could not through the front door?
01:10:29.620 Absolutely, we have. Is that something we need to hold them accountable for? Absolutely.
01:10:33.420 Absolutely. But I think that if we're to, and this is one of the things I love about you, Tucker, is you're willing to challenge people 360 degrees, I don't care if you're Republican or not, is, you know, I had conversations with a number of Republicans in the last week who are railing appropriately against Brazil for its banning of X, which is preposterous, actually.
01:10:56.420 A major Western, supposedly allied nation, the very people who claim that we want to stand for human rights and democracy abroad have nothing to say when it comes to Brazil banning a social media platform.
01:11:09.420 But then I challenge some of these same people, because I know what their views are in this question, to say, geez, it sounds like a pretty bad idea for a government of a supposedly free country that just bans outright a social media platform because they don't like the way that it operates.
01:11:25.420 And here's the part where we challenge our own people. That's exactly what the US government has done with respect to a platform that I don't love that much. I don't like it. I don't like many aspects of it at all, TikTok.
01:11:36.420 But I do think that we live in one of these moments where the trap in an election year, this is one of the things I loved about your candidacy, Bobby, is leaving the Democratic Party to run as an independent allowed you to do what more of us in either party need to be doing is question the orthodoxies of both parties and go back to first principles of what's in the US Constitution.
01:11:57.420 And you've got to have the same shoe fit the other foot, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, and that's one of the things I loved about the way you ran your campaign, man.
01:12:05.420 Thank you. I saw Vice President Harris this week gave a statement where she said two things.
01:12:19.420 She said one that Elon Musk better watch out because if he abused free speech on Twitter that he would get that privilege taken away from him.
01:12:35.420 It's not a privilege.
01:12:37.420 Yeah.
01:12:39.420 And it isn't a privilege, as you know, it's a right.
01:12:44.420 And she said, he gave a press conference in which she said that these companies need to be punished for putting disinformation and misinformation and hate speech up on the internet.
01:13:01.420 And the thing is, and Vice President candidate Waltz said the First Amendment does not protect disinformation and misinformation.
01:13:17.420 But that's not right.
01:13:20.420 The First Amendment protects disinformation and it protects misinformation and it protects lies.
01:13:29.420 It protects all speech.
01:13:31.420 It was not written for the speech that we all want to hear.
01:13:36.420 It was written to protect a speech that nobody wants to hear.
01:13:40.420 And we have a Democratic Party, the party I grew up in.
01:13:54.420 And the word liberal is a derivative of the term for free speech.
01:14:01.420 So that was the central core of this party.
01:14:05.420 When I was growing up, my father, my uncle loved this country so much because they loved the freedom to debate and have conversations.
01:14:16.420 This idea that the free flow of information was the sunlight, it was the soil, it was the water for democracy.
01:14:31.420 And without it, democracy would wither and die.
01:14:33.420 They knew that.
01:14:34.420 Oh, I have a case right now against the Biden administration and I was just granted an injunction in the federal courts.
01:14:45.420 Kennedy versus Biden.
01:14:46.420 And Judge Doty, the federal judge in that decision, wrote in the earlier decision, he wrote a 155-page decision that details what we now know about the Biden White House's censorship program.
01:15:01.420 And what Doty details in this is that 37 hours after he took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, which includes the First Amendment,
01:15:16.420 He opened up a portal and ordered the social media companies, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, to begin censoring his political critics.
01:15:28.420 And on medical information, but also other information as well, including criticism of the Ukraine war.
01:15:35.420 And I was the first person that they began, that they ordered Facebook to censor.
01:15:42.420 Facebook actually pushed back at one point and said, you know, Facebook complied and took down my entire Instagram account with almost a million followers.
01:15:53.420 But they couldn't find a single factual misstatement error on my Instagram account.
01:16:00.420 And Facebook, during the email exchange, which we now have, pushes back at one point and says, this is actually not factually erroneous.
01:16:11.420 And so they had to coin a new word, which was malinformation, which is information, factual assertions that are technically correct, but are nevertheless inconvenient for the government.
01:16:30.420 And they ordered Facebook to censor misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.
01:16:39.420 So that portal which they opened, the Biden White House turned over to the FBI to manage.
01:16:46.420 So you have the FBI participating in the censorship of American citizens engaging in political speech.
01:16:55.420 The FBI then invited the CIA, CISA, which is a group that you may not have heard of, but it is the center of the censorship industrial complex.
01:17:06.420 The DHS, the IRS, which I don't know what they were censoring, and NIH, CDC, and FDA to participate in this censorship project.
01:17:22.420 And I now have an injunction against the Biden White House from doing that to me anymore.
01:17:37.420 But it's troubling to me for the very reason Vivek just mentioned about what happened in Brazil.
01:17:43.420 And, Tucker, you and I talked about this. We're seeing an emergence now of totalitarianism in all the Western democracies.
01:17:52.420 Like, nothing that I could have ever imagined.
01:17:54.420 Europe no longer has free speech.
01:17:57.420 Europe has, is now, the European Union is officially censoring information on the Internet.
01:18:04.420 And, you know, the head of the European Commission, a man named Thierry Breton, recently sent a letter to Elon Musk saying that if he aired an unedited version, a live interview with President Trump on X,
01:18:23.420 he would be fined as much as 6% of the value of the company.
01:18:28.420 And, and then France, a week later, arrests Pavel Derov, the founder of Telegram, when he lands on a gas stop, a fuel stop in France.
01:18:50.420 In France, this is particularly alarming because France had as robust a passion and tradition for free speech as we had in this country.
01:19:02.420 During the American Revolution, or during the French Revolution in 1789, the French Republic adopted all of these very, very strong laws guaranteeing freedom of speech.
01:19:13.420 And then in the 1880s, they passed another slew of laws, again, protecting free speech.
01:19:19.420 And they guarded that and nurtured that as much as we did in this country, as much as any country in the world.
01:19:25.420 To see France do this, and, and by the way, there's no reason for them to arrest him because he's a citizen of Abu Dhabi.
01:19:34.420 France has an extradition agreement with Abu Dhabi so they can extradite him.
01:19:41.420 And furthermore, the European Union already is censoring content.
01:19:46.420 So they went an extra step to arrest and punish this person and put him in prison,
01:19:52.420 to send a message to all of us that, you know, about who's in charge.
01:19:57.420 And that is terrifying to me.
01:20:01.420 I have so many Democratic friends.
01:20:04.420 You know, Jimmy Dore was on here earlier.
01:20:08.420 Fantastic.
01:20:10.420 And he was talking about January 6th.
01:20:13.420 And what I say is, people broke the law on January 6th.
01:20:17.420 If you broke the law, you should be punished.
01:20:20.420 But was the Republic threatened on January 6th?
01:20:24.420 And even if a building was burned down, it's not the end of the Republic.
01:20:32.420 It is not.
01:20:33.420 And you have the U.S. military there.
01:20:35.420 You have these agencies.
01:20:37.420 We have institutions in our country that are still functioning.
01:20:41.420 We have a Congress, et cetera, that would resist the violent overthrow of an American government.
01:20:47.420 And I don't think we were close to a violent overthrow of the American government.
01:20:52.420 But those attacks on free speech, to me, are a genuine existential threat to democracy and to the Republic.
01:21:07.420 Amen.
01:21:09.420 So the question is, I think you've correctly described, and I hope you will say it every time you speak publicly, and I hope to do the same, that we're watching the transformation of the free world into a totalitarian system.
01:21:27.420 I don't think that's an overstatement.
01:21:29.420 And so the questions for each of you, start with you, Vivek.
01:21:33.420 How do we stop that?
01:21:35.420 Because if we don't, then we're done.
01:21:38.420 Yeah, so I agree with everything Bobby said.
01:21:41.420 I think there's two steps to stopping it that I want to highlight, though.
01:21:46.420 I do worry about what's happening in England.
01:21:49.420 I do worry about what's happening in Brazil and France and other allied, supposedly free nations.
01:21:55.420 But I worry most about when it's happening right here at home in the United States of America.
01:22:01.420 And so the best step to stopping the rise of this authoritarianism around the world is to first stop it permanently here in the United States of America.
01:22:14.420 And I do think that that is especially important even for the world.
01:22:18.420 Because as much as you correctly laid out France's history, even if you look at even France, but let alone the other countries, none of those other countries put the First Amendment first, right?
01:22:29.420 So we can preach to other countries about their failure to respect free speech, but our whole national identity, like who we are as Americans, the existence of this country, the fact that we all call ourselves American,
01:22:40.420 that only means something in reference to our actual rights that we have given the people of this country since 1776.
01:22:48.420 So it goes to the heart of our own national identity itself.
01:22:50.420 So the first thing I would say, Tucker, is yes, are we seeing it around the world? Yes.
01:22:53.420 But fixing the problem starts right here at home.
01:22:55.420 The second thing I would say, this is the harder part, is that as much as the three of us here were in lockstep alignment on being free speech absolutists on this stage,
01:23:07.420 as much as we can point our finger at the government and its overreach of working with corporations and working through backdoor government regulation and backdoor action to suppress and silence speech,
01:23:20.420 that only works if you have a population that is willing to comply, okay?
01:23:28.420 And I think that there's another half of this problem that if we're being really honest with ourselves we have to talk about,
01:23:33.420 which is what is it inside each of us that makes us, as so many are, want to bend the knee to that new regime?
01:23:43.420 And we can complain about the regime all we want, we're missing the other half of the problem,
01:23:48.420 unless we also fill that void that causes people to bend that knee, right?
01:23:53.420 If you don't pledge allegiance to the American flag, you're going to pledge allegiance to a different flag instead.
01:23:57.420 If you don't believe in God, you're going to believe in a new false idol instead.
01:24:00.420 And so I think that that's the harder part we need to fix in this country is that revival of purpose and meaning and grounding ourselves in our identity as Americans.
01:24:11.420 And I think if we do, if we get that part right, if we as a citizenry, we as individuals say,
01:24:16.420 no, no, no, nobody's going to tell me or shame me or threaten me to do anything other than express my opinion and tell you who I am and what I believe,
01:24:24.420 then I think the government part will actually solve itself along with it.
01:24:28.420 And so some of that's not just on the government, it's on us.
01:24:31.420 And they put the Second Amendment after the First Amendment for a reason.
01:24:33.420 It's the one that puts the teeth into all of the others.
01:24:36.420 And that too is part of what our founding fathers envisioned since 1776.
01:24:41.420 That's what I think.
01:24:43.420 Bobby, are you hopeful that the tide of totalitarianism can be turned?
01:24:49.420 And if so, how?
01:24:52.420 I think it all depends on this election.
01:24:56.420 I try not to badmouth other candidates because I think my approach is to try to dampen the vitriol and the anger and the hatred.
01:25:16.420 I think we have to stop hating each other.
01:25:19.420 But I don't, from the statements that Kamala Harris makes and that her vice president makes,
01:25:31.420 I don't think they have a clear vision of what the country's supposed to look like.
01:25:36.420 I don't think they understand the First Amendment.
01:25:39.420 I don't think they understand the Constitution.
01:25:41.420 I saw Kamala at the convention and she gave a speech that was very bellicose and belligerent.
01:25:50.420 It was a kind of speech that was written by neocons and the CIA.
01:25:56.420 The first time in history they had a CIA former director speaking right before her, Leon Panetta.
01:26:07.420 They had military people speaking at the Democratic convention.
01:26:11.420 The Democratic convention was the, you know, was a Democrat with the anti-war party.
01:26:16.420 They were the pro-Constitution party.
01:26:19.420 They were the party that was against Wall Street and representing the little guys, the cops, the firefighters, union and labor people.
01:26:30.420 And I talked to you about this on the show last week.
01:26:35.420 In the 2020 election, roughly 50% of the people in this country voted for Donald Trump.
01:26:45.420 But that group that voted for Donald Trump represented 30% of the wealth in our country.
01:26:51.420 The 50% of the people that voted for Joe Biden represented 70% of the wealth.
01:26:58.420 There's been an inversion now where the Republican Party has become the party of the common man, of working people, of the middle class.
01:27:06.420 And the Democratic Party has become the party of Wall Street, of the military industrial complex, of big pharma, big agriculture, big tech, the big banking systems.
01:27:25.420 And all of it, you know, what Donald Trump calls the deep state, which is this web of financial interest that is unnecessarily a little conspiracy.
01:27:36.420 But it's a conspiracy of self-interest that functions together in tandem to shift wealth upward, to clamp down totalitarian controls,
01:27:48.420 and to transform this country from the world's exemplary democracy into a corporate kleptocracy and a very, very oppressive oligarchical system.
01:28:01.420 The kind of system that we fought a revolution to overthrow in 1776.
01:28:09.420 Wow. Bless you for saying that.
01:28:13.420 Okay, I have a final question for each of you, and it's one of the reasons that I'm fascinated by you both, respect you both, and I'm grateful that you're here.
01:28:23.420 Neither one of you needs to be doing this.
01:28:26.420 You both just ran. You both dropped out. You both kept going.
01:28:30.420 Again, you're not doing it for the money. You're not doing it for the adulation. The media hates you both.
01:28:35.420 It doesn't make your life... No, it's true. It doesn't make your life less complicated.
01:28:40.420 It's incredibly tiring and, at some points, tiresome, but you persist both. Why?
01:28:50.420 Gratitude.
01:28:51.420 I think that my parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago.
01:28:57.420 And in a single generation, what have I found in multi-billion dollar companies?
01:29:02.420 My wife lived the American dream. We're raising two boys in Ohio, thankfully, with God's blessings, healthily and happily.
01:29:10.420 It is my sense of gratitude to this country to have made possible what my parents or me growing up would have never imagined was possible.
01:29:19.420 And, you know what, I've been given a lot of thought to this idea of, obviously, we say it a lot, making America great again.
01:29:28.420 And, you know, of course, there's a nostalgia in that, right?
01:29:32.420 The country that my parents came into, we used to talk about the melting pot back in the 1990s.
01:29:37.420 This notion of assimilating into one country, which had a common identity, that's now become a microaggression.
01:29:43.420 So there's certain elements of what we missed from the 1990s, the idea that the best person gets the job, regardless of their skin color,
01:29:50.420 or the idea that, you know what, you get to speak your mind as long as I get to in return.
01:29:55.420 These basic quaint ideas, we want to bring that back. But, for me, I think that's not good enough, actually.
01:30:02.420 I think that we, in some ways, part of America isn't just making America great again.
01:30:07.420 I think this is what Donald Trump means it when this second time around.
01:30:11.420 You can hear it between the lines of what he says, it's what moves me, too, is,
01:30:15.420 I want to make America greater than it's ever been before, actually.
01:30:19.420 I think our best days as a country can still actually be ahead of us.
01:30:25.420 As a relatively young person, you know, I hope my best days are still ahead of me.
01:30:31.420 I don't take that for granted. Every day is a blessing.
01:30:34.420 And if we wake up tomorrow, that's a gift, too. But I hope my best days are ahead of me.
01:30:39.420 And I do think it's also going to take some people from the next generation to make a country whose best days are ahead of us, too.
01:30:46.420 And so, I don't know what form that's going to take for me in the next step.
01:30:50.420 But whatever it is, we're going to keep going and each play our part.
01:30:54.420 And if we each do, I think that not in some fake politician way, but in a true way, I think we are going to make America greater than it's ever been before.
01:31:04.420 And that's what we're shooting for in November.
01:31:07.420 Thank you.
01:31:09.420 Bobby, it has been a long slog for you, and you are more energetic and energized than ever, it seems to me.
01:31:16.420 Why are you doing this?
01:31:18.420 Well, I talked to you a moment ago about what I see as a devolution of American democracy and how it's turning into something that is, I would describe as a totalitarian system.
01:31:33.420 And I see, because of what I've been doing for 20 years working on chronic disease issues, and what I did for 20 years before that working on environmental issues, I see how these powers, these economic aggregations, can commoditize everything.
01:31:52.420 That they commoditize the water, they commoditize, they steal it from the public.
01:31:58.420 They turn it in, when General Electric dumped PCBs in the Hudson, it was privatizing all the fish in the Hudson, and turning them into its own private property.
01:32:08.420 That they privatize our landscapes, the Purple Mountains Majesty.
01:32:12.420 And then when I started fighting on public health issues, I saw how they're privatizing our children.
01:32:18.420 They're literally stealing their health.
01:32:21.420 We have, we have in this country now, the sickest children in the world.
01:32:27.420 We have the highest chronic disease burden of any nation on earth.
01:32:34.420 When my uncle was president, we were spending, we had 6% of Americans had chronic disease.
01:32:41.420 Today, almost 60% do.
01:32:44.420 And when my uncle was president, I was a boy, we spent zero on chronic disease in this country.
01:32:51.420 Today, we spend $4.3 trillion.
01:32:53.420 And that money is going upward into the pockets of certain people.
01:32:59.420 And mainly it's the pharmaceutical industry.
01:33:02.420 The most valuable asset in America today is a sick child.
01:33:12.420 Because if you can get a child sick when they're very young and get them dependent on Ozempic and Adderall and insulin and seizure medication, you have now a client for life that is spending, is generating thousands of dollars potentially a week in revenue for these interests.
01:33:37.420 And so I see how they're commoditizing everything.
01:33:40.420 They're stealing everything we value.
01:33:43.420 And ultimately, that comes from them being able to overrun our constitutional rights.
01:33:48.420 And I saw it during COVID.
01:33:50.420 I saw the whole thing in miniature, you know, compressed time.
01:33:56.420 Exactly what they're up to.
01:33:58.420 And I remember in 2020, in August, I was in Berlin.
01:34:04.420 I was giving a speech to 1.3 million people who had come from all over Europe.
01:34:11.420 It was like Woodstock.
01:34:12.420 But for political freedom.
01:34:14.420 Because they saw what was happening with these mandates.
01:34:17.420 It came from every nation in Europe to protest them.
01:34:21.420 And I gave a speech.
01:34:23.420 I ran into an NBC film crew there.
01:34:27.420 And they were all wearing masks.
01:34:30.420 And they said to me, why aren't you wearing a mask?
01:34:33.420 You're in this big crowd shaking hands.
01:34:35.420 Aren't you scared of dying?
01:34:37.420 And I said, there's things that scare me a lot more than dying.
01:34:42.420 And they said, like what?
01:34:52.420 And I said, like losing my constitutional rights.
01:34:55.420 Like having my children grow up in an America where they cannot speak freely and criticize their political leaders.
01:35:12.420 And I, we had a whole generation in 1776 of people, of men and women who gave their fortunes.
01:35:25.420 They gave their property.
01:35:26.420 They gave their status and their lives to giving us this constitution.
01:35:33.420 To giving us this incredible gift.
01:35:36.420 And we became the template for the rest of the world.
01:35:40.420 In 1776, we were the only democracy on earth.
01:35:46.420 By 1865, there were five.
01:35:49.420 By the time my uncle was president, there were about 130.
01:35:54.420 And by the end of the 1960s, there were 190.
01:35:57.420 All based on the American model.
01:35:59.420 So we truly were the exemplary democracy.
01:36:03.420 We were the hope, the light for the whole world.
01:36:06.420 And, you know, today we've lost our, we've lost our role as a model.
01:36:15.420 Nobody wants the system we have.
01:36:17.420 We've lost, we're no longer a moral authority.
01:36:22.420 We've eroded this through this dynamic.
01:36:25.420 And I, you know, I don't want that for my children.
01:36:28.420 I want my children to grow up with a hope, with a love for this country that I had.
01:36:32.420 And I'll say one other thing.
01:36:37.420 In 2013, there was a poll where they asked young Americans under the age of 35, are you proud to be an American?
01:36:53.420 85% said yes.
01:36:56.420 The same poll taken six months ago, 17% said yes.
01:37:02.420 We have a whole generation that's lost their pride in being an American citizen.
01:37:08.420 And they've lost hope for their own futures.
01:37:11.420 And we had a generation in 1776, 20,000 of them died.
01:37:19.420 A huge number, it would be like a million people today, that give us our constitution.
01:37:26.420 And, you know, they said to us that every generation must water the tree of liberty with its own blood if you're going to hold on to this.
01:37:38.420 So, it's not something that I want to do.
01:37:46.420 I have a really good life, and I had a great family that loved me.
01:37:51.420 I still have a nuclear family that loves me.
01:37:55.420 But, and I have a big, big family now too.
01:38:01.420 But I, you know, I didn't, I really, I didn't feel like I had a choice.
01:38:16.420 I felt like I had, I have to do this, the same reason people left their homes in 1776 to do something for an idea.
01:38:26.420 And I want to keep that idea for my kids.
01:38:33.420 Well, God bless you for that.
01:38:35.420 And God bless you, Vivek.
01:38:36.420 What an amazing experience, a wonderful experience this has been.
01:38:40.420 And thank you.
01:38:41.420 And thank you.
01:38:49.420 The big tech companies censor our content.
01:38:52.420 I hate to tell you that it's still going on in 2024, but you know what they can't censor?
01:38:56.420 Live events.
01:38:57.420 And that's why we are hitting the road on a fall tour for the entire month of September, coast to coast.
01:39:04.420 We will be in cities across the United States.
01:39:06.420 We'll be in Colorado Springs with Tulsi Gabbard.
01:39:09.420 Salt Lake City with Glenn Beck.
01:39:11.420 Tulsa, Oklahoma with Dan Bongino.
01:39:13.420 Kansas City with Megan Kelly.
01:39:15.420 Wichita with Charlie Kirk.
01:39:17.420 Milwaukee with Larry Elder.
01:39:18.420 Rosenberg, Texas with Jesse Kelly.
01:39:21.420 Grand Rapids with Kid Rock.
01:39:23.420 Hershey, Pennsylvania with J.D. Vance.
01:39:25.420 Redding, Pennsylvania with Alex Jones.
01:39:27.420 Fort Worth, Texas with Roseanne Barr.
01:39:29.420 Greenville, South Carolina with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
01:39:32.420 Sunrise, Florida with John Rich.
01:39:34.420 Jacksonville, Florida with Donald Trump Jr.
01:39:37.420 You can get tickets at TuckerCarlson.com.
01:39:40.420 Hope to see you there.
01:39:41.420 Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson Show.
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