Michael Knowles: Attacks on Christians, Norm McDonald, and Leaving Atheism for Catholicism

Six years ago Fox News denounced Michael Knowles as “disgusting” for making an obvious point, and then banned him from the air. He’s since been vindicated, to put it mildly. (00:00) The Left’s Exploitation of Greta Thunberg (08:02) The Minneapolis Catholic School Shooting (15:55) Why Is Catholicism Booming? (25:11) How Technology and Wealth Is Corrupting the Christian West (35:50) The Vatican 2 Council Controversy (46:52) Is There Salvation Outside of the Church? (1:28:32) Is Trump Really a Nationalist? (1:45:34) Is Putin Actually Evil? Michael Knowles is a Catholic political commentator, host of The Michael Knowles Showon DailyWire+, and the #1 national best-selling author of Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, as well as the viral blank book Reasons To Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide. He is also the founder of Mayflower Cigars, blending his love of faith, culture, and tradition with a passion for premium cigars. Paid partnerships with: Masa Chips: Get 25% off with code TUCKER at https://masachips.com/tuckerTecovas: Get 10% off at tecovas.com/tucker Cozy Earth: Go to https://CozyEarth.com/Tucker & use code TUCKER for up to 40% off joggers, pants, shirts - everything. TCN: Watch the full series as soon as it premieres: tuckercarlson.com/the911files Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

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• 0:30Tucker Carlson?

  So I was thinking about you this morning, and I haven't seen you since 2019. I think that's correct.

• 0:35Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 0:36Tucker Carlson?

  And what's interesting, looking back, that was only six years ago, is what a completely different world we live in. So the last time I saw you, you had described, and correct me if I've messed up the details, I probably have, Greta Thunberg as... You weren't even that mean. You're like, "She's clearly mentally ill," something like that.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  I said, "The left is exploiting this mentally ill Swedish child."

• 0:57Tucker Carlson?

  So obviously true. So if you said that now, that the only reason I'm bringing this up is just to celebrate how much this country has changed and how much freedom is. But so you said that in 2019. Again, it wasn't the Middle Ages. We had air conditioning and air travel. It was like the modern era. And you were banned from the conservative TV channel, which denounced you as, quote, "disgusting" for saying that. Now, it's like you don't even think twice about noting the obvious. So I just want to say I'm glad to see you in this better world.

• 1:51Tucker Carlson?

  Well, thank you, Tucker. It's good to be in this better world. And you?

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Heroically uncanceled me, actually. There were, there were a few people who helped out, but you were one of the people who really helped out when I was being ostracized to St. Helena for making what I felt was a benign observation. Yes. And, and you said, that's ridiculous. And you kind of forced me back through into TV.

• 2:14Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I mean, I, it certainly didn't require heroism. It was just like, that was so stupid. I couldn't believe, you know, it's, I think it's also important to remember that this country went through a protracted moral panic that hurt so many people.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:27Tucker Carlson?

  And that we've never really repented of that, and we should. Like, I interviewed one yesterday, I won't even bore you with the story, but he was just another casualty of that five-year period where people were destroyed, driven to suicide in a lot of cases during our cultural revolution. And the perpetrators were never punished for that. They never even apologized. They never even acknowledged. They were never forced to acknowledge their wrongdoing. And the people who called you disgusting for saying something was actually kind of compassionate.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  That was my view. It was kind of charitable.

• 2:56Tucker Carlson?

  No, for real.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  I strive for that. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:58Tucker Carlson?

  Why are we exploiting this child who's clearly unwell? She clearly is unwell.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Wielding children in politics generally is unseemly, I think.

• 3:08Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  And when, when you're exploiting a truant in order to score some cheap point on the sun monster or something, I think is, I think that's disgraceful, as a matter of fact.

• 3:18Tucker Carlson?

  But you're the criminal for pointing it out. And the fact that my former employer played along with that and called you disgusting, I think that's the word they use, disgusting.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Yes. And I think, look, I'm not saying I'm Fabio, but I wouldn't call myself disgusting. I don't know. That, but, but, you know, you mentioned this cultural revolution, and obviously you had all these ideological aspects. It seemed downright Maoist. And then it reached its apotheosis, 2020, 2021, with an actual political lockdown of our whole country.

• 3:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  By all of these same cultural and political forces.

• 3:49Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, that's smart. I never thought of it that way.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  And then the fog just lifted. It just, something broke. And now it seems like all of that, from the most ideological, cultural level, all the way down to just, you know, being free to go out and like see granny at Christmas.

• 4:04Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  It's over.

• 4:06Tucker Carlson?

  We should celebrate that.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  We should. How should we celebrate, Tucker?

• 4:09Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know, but I, I don't think I appreciate the good things enough. I'm too focused on the sadness or things that are, you know, not exactly the way I think they ought to be. And I don't think, speaking for myself, I take enough time to just be grateful for the good things. And that is one of the best things.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  And I very practically want to celebrate. I came prepared today. I don't know if you're familiar with this product.

• 4:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, I am.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  I, I said, I, I try, I try to, you know, mitigate all, all these little fun treats that I have, whether it's a donut, whether it's a tasty, but I said, well, if Tucker, I would hate to be inhospitable. So now I have a great excuse to celebrate with a.

• 4:47Tucker Carlson?

  You are always welcome to use an alp here. It's been a year this month. I was, I used the other product, Zen. I didn't even know that it was wrong. And it was one of those weird moments where you're sort of shocked into reality. Somebody told me, I think it's true that the majority, like 70% of, of Zen users use the product rectally. And.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  That can't be.

• 5:10Tucker Carlson?

  So he told me that. And I was like, are you serious? And he's like, yes. You should try it. And I was like, I don't know what this is, but I'm out. So we started, we started this, which I think is a really good alternative.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  That's good. I know. I agree. Cause it's gotta be at least less than 10% of users. No, I think it's 0%.

• 5:27Tucker Carlson?

  We actually don't allow it. We don't allow it.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  That's really good. No, but this actually ties in. The, the fact that we are living in an age now where you're allowed to have some nicotine again.

• 5:40Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  You remember, you weren't, you were allowed to have marijuana, fentanyl, you were anything in between. But the one thing you couldn't have was, you couldn't have a cigar, you couldn't have a, a pouch, you couldn't have anything. And now it's just like.

• 5:53Tucker Carlson?

  Cause it raises testosterone, whereas weed lowers it. So it makes you less obedient, more free thinking, happier, stronger. And those are all, you know, the last qualities. Authoritarians want the population to have.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  I was looking back because I was trying to figure out the morality of I've smoked cigars since I was 15 and I was trying to figure out the morality. Is this a vice? And I said, well, I don't think so. There's a story about Saint Pius X. He was talking to a cardinal, called him in, offered him a cigar. The cardinal said, I don't have that vice. He says, it's not a vice. You would have it if it were a vice. You have enough vices. And then there was the case of Saint Philip Neri, who won at the devil's advocate in his canonization process, said that he might not be a saint because his body was corrupt. And because part of his nose had worn away. I said, no, no, no, it wasn't corrupted after he died. It was corrupted while he was alive from all the nasal snuff that he did.

• 6:45Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  And Pope Leo XIII, the most prolific pope ever, wrote the most encyclicals, apparently drank cocaine wine, vin mariani.

• 6:54Tucker Carlson?

  Is that true?

• 6:54Speaker 03

  It is. I've never tried it.

• 6:56Tucker Carlson?

  Along with Sherlock Holmes, cocoa wine?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Cocoa wine, yes. Yeah, I'd probably have written more books had I tried it, but I haven't.

• 7:01Tucker Carlson?

  It's funny, somebody told me a really interesting story recently about the number of cardinals, current Catholic cardinals who smoke cigarettes.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:11Tucker Carlson?

  And I just love that. I'm not Catholic, but I have always loved cigarette smoking. I know you're not supposed to say that. I know it's bad. Killed a close relative of mine. You know, I'm aware of the health effects, but I just thought, I don't know, there's something about that.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  And because it's Benedict XVI loved to smoke cigarettes and he would have one or two a day.

• 7:29Tucker Carlson?

  When was he Pope?

• 7:30Speaker 03

  He was, he was the Pope before Francis. So he was Pope.

• 7:33Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, Benedict, the one we just had, yeah, the German Pope.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Yes. He would smoke a couple cigarettes a day. And I thought, this is something beautiful. This is another thing that's come back since our cultural.

• 7:42Tucker Carlson?

  Is that widely known?

• 7:43Speaker 03

  You know, I don't know. I'm sure they've tried to suppress that, you know, they probably want to make him into like a kombucha drinking hemp smoking person. But no, he liked Marlboro Reds and but.

• 7:53Tucker Carlson?

  Good for him.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  And he would smoke them. This is. The chief political virtue, he would smoke them in moderation and with prudence. And this is the thing, we live in this crazy schizophrenic age where you have to be all one thing or all the exact opposite. What does Aristotle tell us? It's virtue is that mean, right between the two extremes. You can have, you can have a Marlboro red every once in a while.

• 8:15Tucker Carlson?

  Boy, if I could do that, I would still be doing it. I have a friend who's over 80, who smoked two Marlboro Lights, which men should not be smoking those, but whatever, the white ones, every day his whole life.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  I think it was after a burger fell, they'd let men smoke Marlboro Lights. It was a little red part of that decision.

• 8:31Tucker Carlson?

  I was out by then. So, speaking of gender bending, what do you make of the shooting in Minneapolis? Like, how should we think of, there's so many different threads there. I don't really understand.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Did you read the manifesto?

• 8:45Tucker Carlson?

  I did not.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  The diary, so I, I took a look.

• 8:47Tucker Carlson?

  I saw they were in Cyrillic script.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Yes, Cyrillic, my Cyrillic's not great, but I, I, we had some translations done and you could read the writing on the magazines. And the first thing that struck me, I mean, after the horror of it, you know, you just think the most vulnerable people of the, of the church being attacked by this, by this maniac. The first thing that struck me was how apparently incoherent it all was. Because it's an attack on a Catholic church, on these like innocent little kids in a Catholic church. And then if you look on the guns and on the magazines, it's not just anti-Christian, it's anti-Muslim, it says, remove kebab, it's anti-Jewish, six million wasn't enough, it's nihilistic, it's, it's anti-gay, the guy was a tranny.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  And then there's, the scariest part of it is on this page, there's a picture he drew of himself, and it's him looking in a mirror, and he's got the gun behind him, and in the mirror is a picture of a demon. And that's scary enough.

• 9:46Tucker Carlson?

  Like a goat-headed demon.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Like a goat-headed, Baphomet-looking demon. When you read, when you translate the Cyrillic, the first thing that's written, top left of the page is. Who am I? And this is really jarring because you recognize that Moses at the burning bush, he asks God, "Who are you? You know, who will I tell them that you are?" And God says, "I am who I am. I am." You know, Christ says before Abraham was "I am." This is his declaration that he's God. "I am." And a great priest friend of mine, Father Rutter, once observed that when you're with God, you know who you are. You know your identity. Modernity thinks that you have to leave God and just totally go and make yourself a God, and then you'll be truly yourself, you'll find yourself. That's not true.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  You become much more yourself, much more perfectly yourself, if you do what you're supposed to do and align yourself with God. And when you don't identify yourself with "I am," then you're left with this pathetic question, "Who am I?" So you see this obvious demonic influence there. And what struck me too, with all of these apparent contradictions, it's anti-Christian, and also anti-Muslim and Jew. It's radically LGBT, but also kind of anti-gay. It's anti-Trump, kill Trump right now, but it's also has all these kind of far-right-wing slogans. And it reminded me, which is very important to remember, especially in our line of work, because you're constantly reading all this radical stuff.

• 11:08Tucker Carlson?

  Right, and you're looking for the easy explanation. Like, "This is a representative of this group or this idea that I already dislike, and now you've confirmed that I have every reason to dislike this group. I mean, this is the effect of social media. But this guy, it's like, obviously I'm opposed to the training thing passionately, but..."

• 11:24Speaker 03

  You realize that demons, which are real, they're not under every rock, but they're real. There is such a thing as spirits, and they'll try to get you from any angle. They'll try to get, if they think they're gonna bang you from the right, they'll get you from the right. If they're gonna get you from the left, they'll get you from up or down.

• 11:42Tucker Carlson?

  That's right.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  All they want to do is devour you. It's like Lewis and the Screwtape Letters. All that, just any tactic that will let them get a hold of you. And it's so clear with this guy, because you realize this guy was being obsessed from every angle.

• 11:58Tucker Carlson?

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• 12:42Tucker Carlson?

  You can eat just a single bag, as I do. It's a totally different experience. It's light, it's clean, it's genuinely satisfying. I have a garage full, and I can tell you they're great. The lime flavor is particularly good. We have a hard time putting those down. So if you want to give it a try, go to masa-chips, M-A-S-A-chips.com/tucker. Use the code TUCKER for 25% off your first order. That's masachips.com/tucker. Use the code TUCKER for 25% off your first order. For to shop in person in October, Masa is going to be available at your local Sprouts supermarket. So stop by and pick up a bag before we eat them all and we eat a lot.

• 13:17Speaker 04

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• 13:58Speaker 04

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• 15:11Tucker Carlson?

  The fact that he drew a picture, and that is one of the few things I saw from the manifesto, pretty clear rendition too. I mean, he was a decent artist of himself looking in the mirror and a demon staring back at him. I mean, that's like, that seems like a page one story.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:27Tucker Carlson?

  This guy was possessed, or at least influenced by, in him was some supernatural force causing him to murder kids.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  And think about the two opposing errors that have led to this just in the last quarter century. In the 2000s, I remember it vividly because I fell away from faith during this time. There was the new atheism. Materialism, you know, God's a spaghetti monster. Come on, there's nothing but flesh and blood. We're just, you know, synapses firing. It's a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. That was one error. I think that's fallen away.

• 15:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. I don't think anyone believes that anymore.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  No, but now we've fallen into the opposing error, which is to say, actually, the material world has nothing to do with who you really are. Your body, your body has nothing to do with who you really are. Your true self is this purely immaterial thing. So if you're a man, you can really be a woman or what have you. And those are, those are opposing errors that oppose the real dignity of the human person, who is both spirit, soul, and body.

• 16:26Tucker Carlson?

  Once again, something I hadn't thought of. So we've... Interesting. Do you think that the fact that people live their lives digitally has allowed them to imagine that the body has no significance?

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Precisely. And this is the point that I think a lot of people have not made, which is that of cour... The trans ideology is, in many ways, deader than disco at this point. The Democrats are running away from it.

• 16:48Tucker Carlson?

  Are they?

• 16:49Speaker 03

  I think so. They're downplaying it. It really hurt them in 2024. I think they realize we reached peak sexual madness in 2023. They at least have to publicly back off. However, how did we get to that place? You could say, well, it begins with feminism. You know, the idea that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Men and women are the same. Goes into the LGBT movement, which says men and women are the same. Goes into gay marriage, so called, which says men and women are the same. So two men and two women are the same as a man and a woman. Leads into transgenderism, a man can be a woman. Okay, I see that through line. But just think about the technological aspect. If I live my life on this little portal to hell that's in my pocket...

• 17:29Tucker Carlson?

  It is a portal to hell.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  All day long, I'm sitting...

• 17:31Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly where it goes.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  If that's where I live, in my own perception, then my body really doesn't matter that much, does it? I don't, you know, I'm not like the biggest, you know, Achilles in the world, right? I'm not some hulking Adonis. I'm not an athlete, but it doesn't really matter. I just live in this virtual world. So is it so crazy to think that your body doesn't matter at that point?

• 17:53Tucker Carlson?

  I think that's... My instinct has been for the last few years that physical reality does really matter, even as I feel like I've had a heightened spiritual awareness and the dead certain knowledge that there is a spiritual, an unseen realm that is acting on us all the time and that that's as real as anything. I sincerely believe that. But on the other hand, I do see a lot of like... Ignoring of the physical reality around us.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is why, by the way, you know, like everyone's becoming Catholic now. Have you noticed this strange phenomenon?

• 18:25Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  I think this is a big reason why. It's people, the decline in religion has tapered off. Other denominations and traditions are growing, but Catholicism in particular is exploding. Why? I think it's because it's a sacramental theology.

• 18:41Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I never would have called that.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Isn't it? Yeah, 20 years ago, could you imagine?

• 18:45Tucker Carlson?

  At all.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Certainly not.

• 18:46Tucker Carlson?

  No, the spotlight series had just come out and you're just like, this church is too corrupt to continue. And I'm not, I just want to say again, I'm not Catholic, but I strongly agree that there's a revival and I just see it all around me.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  And I think this is why, you know, I mean, the, the words at the sacrifice of the mass are, uh, this is my body, which will be given up for you, you know, and, uh, which is, which is mocked, you know, the phrase hocus pocus, like in magic is a mockery of hocustinem corpus meum. This is, this is my body, you know, this, uh, yeah, it's a kind of a hawk, hocus corpus, hocus, hocus pocus is, uh, at least that's a popular etymology and I'm persuaded by it. So there's this, there's always this mockery in all of the kind of false religions. There's always this mockery of, of the real sacrifice. But in a lot of religious traditions, and I don't cast dispersions, I had a Baptist grandpa, you know, the Knowles has come from Maine, actually, this is a, the ancestral homeland of the Knowleses.

• 19:39Tucker Carlson?

  Amazing.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, I haven't made it up very often, but a lot of Puritan in the line, but.

• 19:44Tucker Carlson?

  A lot, a lot of us had ancestors in Maine and it's, you know, they left.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  It's kind of all cold and barren and.

• 19:51Tucker Carlson?

  It is cold, yes.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  But I think the reason why the sacramental theology is kicking up again is because we say, huh, you know, it's, I've been living in a computer for 20 years and I don't even remember if I'm a man or a woman anymore, but maybe my body really has something to do with who I am. And actually, maybe this whole religion is about God becoming man and taking on flesh and dwelling among us and broiling fish. I mean, the first, the first thing you see our Lord doing when he, when he comes back, you know, he was resurrected.

• 20:18Tucker Carlson?

  Standing on the shores of the lake.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  He's cooking fish for his friends and eating.

• 20:21Tucker Carlson?

  For breakfast.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  For breakfast, which is a hardcore.

• 20:23Tucker Carlson?

  It's hardcore. Only in Japan do they do that.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  In Maine, it's lobster, but, but there's.

• 20:28Tucker Carlson?

  Brook trout, actually, people eat them for, with baked beans.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  I think that's why, I think there's just, and, and COVID ties into this too, because during COVID, you were told your grandma has to die alone and you can't see her, you can't go to Christmas, she has to die alone in a hospital bed. If you're lucky, you can say goodbye on Zoom. And people recoil against that because it's just contrary to human nature. You know, human beings are, we're like the angels in one way because we have reason. We have intellect and will and spirits are, you know, that don't have bodies. But we're like the animals in another way. The animals don't have intellect and will. They have instinct and appetite, but they're bodies, you know, and we're kind of in the middle of those two things. And you can't ignore the, you can only ignore the body for so long before people say, no, you know, I'm a man, actually, believe it or not, even in, even in modernity, I'm a

• 21:16Speaker 03

  man, I want to, I want to do stuff.

• 21:19Tucker Carlson?

  What's a sacramental religion? How is that or theology? How is that distinct? What's a non-sacramental theology?

• 21:24Speaker 03

  It would be like the, the kind of religion that says that, well, the kind of religion Obama pushed. You remember Obama, he wouldn't talk about freedom of religion, not religion. He'd say, oh, well, you have freedom of worship. You know, you're free to, we're going to sue nuns. We're going to sue nuns. We're going to persecute Catholics. We're going to, Biden's going to imprison pro-lifers for praying outside of abortion clinics, but you can have your, your worship in your own head. Close your eyes. You can think things in your own head, but you can't do anything. And that's not what religion is. Religion is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, it's a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves. And you do it in your whole life. And so a sacrament is the meeting of the material and the immaterial.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  The, the clearest example, the highest, you know, blessed sacrament is, is the Eucharist, which we believe, and, and certain Protestant traditions also believe is really Christ, you know, body, blood, soul and divinity, really, really present. And this is confounding to modern man or says, well, get me an electron microscope. Let me, I don't see, and actually there have been Eucharistic miracles where the appearance of the bread is, is not maintained and actually gives way to like cardiac tissue. That's a separate topic. Even in the, the ordinary sacrament.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  It's this meeting of the two things. When I go to confession, I confess my terrible sins. I get down on my knees in a box with a priest and the priest is acting in the person of Christ. It comes from scripture because Christ says to the apostles, "You have the power to forgive sins. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven, whose sins you retain are retained." That's a real authority.

• 23:00Tucker Carlson?

  He says that to the disciples.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Yes, and that's a real authority. It's not just a kind of abstract, you know, you can just forgive sins by, you know, spreading a message or something. He's saying you have an actual authority. You can retain sins if the person isn't really repentant. And that means that when I'm in there confessing in a box to a guy in a collar, I'm, God is actually forgiving my sins in the person of the priest, or not. But that's a, that's a meeting of something I can see and something I can't see.

• 23:29Tucker Carlson?

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• 24:13Tucker Carlson?

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• 24:34Speaker 00

  Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores.

• 24:47Speaker 00

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• 24:58Speaker 01

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• 25:05Speaker 06

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• 25:35Tucker Carlson?

  Can I ask you, as I've said, a Protestant, I love Martin Luther. I'm sure you hate Martin Luther, but I really love Martin Luther.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  He had some very funny prose. You know, he had really-

• 25:45Tucker Carlson?

  He was a spicy character.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:47Tucker Carlson?

  The real Martin Luther, not Michael Luther, who changed his name, and Michael Kang, who changed his name. But, um, but anyway, the actual, the German monk. But one of the things he didn't got rid of indulgences, thank God, in my view. But he also got rid of confession. And I don't understand why. That has always struck me as a mistake and such a great thing that Catholics do.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  And you know, I mean-

• 26:08Tucker Carlson?

  Do you know the answer?

• 26:09Speaker 03

  The Anglicans still have confession. C.S. Lewis confessed every week of his life.

• 26:13Tucker Carlson?

  I grew up in the Anglican church. I've never had that. I've never heard of it.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  These days, unfortunately, they used to say, the Episcopalians, it was twice the liturgy, half the guilt.

• 26:22Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, well, zero guilt.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:24Tucker Carlson?

  Zero. You only feel bad about feeling bad about yourself.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  I was, I was at the national prayer service at the inauguration when that Bishop Wrist lady decided to take the occasion to scold the president and vice president. You remember that?

• 26:37Tucker Carlson?

  Do I remember that? It's the head of my church. Yeah. Do I remember it? Like, every Episcopal, I know we're all texting each other, former Episcopal, but yeah, no, she, well, she, I loved that because then the world could see what it's really become. It's just, it's, it's repulsive. It's not Christianity. And she was just so obviously like-

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Furious.

• 26:57Tucker Carlson?

  In torment.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes.

• 26:59Tucker Carlson?

  This is not someone who's like- Experiencing God's forgiving love. This is someone who's filled with hate and they all are filled with hate. It's all a bunch of recovering alcoholic ladies with multiple divorces deciding they're lesbian, love the little outfits and then the priests are these kind of beta males or gay guys who love the outfits. The whole thing is fake.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, but what do you really think Tucker? Hold on. What do you really think about?

• 27:22Tucker Carlson?

  About the Episcopal Church?

• 27:24Speaker 03

  I'm joking.

• 27:24Tucker Carlson?

  How much time do you have?

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's. That is a similarly Lutheran or Hilaribellok like the Tupera.

• 27:33Tucker Carlson?

  Sorry, I totally get it. I'm not being very Christian, but no, no, I mean, it's had a huge effect on my life. So obviously I'm a little mad about it. I need to repent of my anger. But, um, but I was just delighted that the rest of the world could see what it has become because obviously, you know, the Episcopalians ran the country and did a great job. I would say much better job than the current people around the country are doing. And they had a wonderful taste. And so they built the prettiest churches, each with a red door. My whole life, we had a red door on our house, always, every house. Cause we're Episcopalians, you have a red door. And they're just, there's a lot that was good about them. And I think people haven't updated their files and they don't know what goes on inside. And not in every Episcopal church. One of my closest friends is an Episcopal priest and a sincere and wonderful man, Godfathered

• 28:18Tucker Carlson?

  one of my kids. But, um, in a lot of Episcopal churches, it's hateful menopausal ladies like that and their gay sidekicks. And it's just the saddest, ugliest, cruelest thing ever. And now everyone saw it.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  And everyone saw it. And the other thing about it is if you go, if you go to church and your church is, you know, some, some lady spouting off about, I don't know, like, you know, the latest migration policy and whining about Trump.

• 28:47Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  Then, then put aside the political issue. You just ask yourself, well, why am I going here?

• 28:53Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's exactly the question we ask.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  I get this. I get this six days a week. Why do I need to get this on the seventh day?

• 28:59Tucker Carlson?

  Especially when I could be in bed with my wife and my dogs.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:02Tucker Carlson?

  Ask me to get out of bed and like, take a shower at seven in the morning, which I hate doing. To go to church, which I, you know, I really feel like I should be doing, and this is what I get. There's nothing transcendent. It's all you and your little therapy session and you're like filled with hate. Like, no.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  But this is why I, this is how, in answer to your question, how did these things sort of decline? I think part of it is, it's, it's a spirit of liberalism that comes out and abstracts everything, first of all, away from time and place and community and family and body and just all like these really tangible things. It abstracts it all into outer space. And then on the other side of it, it brings everything down. That everything has to be totally, not even egalitarian. It's, it's like a kind of Harrison Bergeron handicapping of everything. You've just got to make, you've got to make the church like the world. And there's a great line from, I think it was Fulton Sheen, who says that if you wed the spirit of the age, you'll find yourself a widow in the next. And that's what these, and the Catholics are not guiltless in this, by the way, because after the Second Vatican

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Council, there was a liturgical reform to turn everything into some happy clappy sort of party. The priest then faces the people instead of facing God is, is, you know, leading us all in worship. And whatever, the Age of Aquarius, I guess demanded that in the 60s or something. But I think people have had enough of that. And I think people hate the disenchantment and the degradation of the world and just the, the physical ugliness of it. And we want to look up again.

• 30:28Tucker Carlson?

  When was the last time someone built like a cathedral? I mean, you go to downtown London, which has got to be the saddest place on the planet. And if I didn't have family there, I wouldn't go there. But I do, and so I do. And you go and you see that the prettiest buildings in the city were built before electricity or machines of any kind, actually.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  And it's, it's also tough to get around London now because my Arabic isn't very good. So I barely.

• 30:53Tucker Carlson?

  My Urdu. By the way, speaking of like, things you couldn't have imagined even two years ago, I read Elon is now calling for the repatriation of like, a lot of European, non Europeans out of Europe?

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:06Tucker Carlson?

  And I'm like, wow, which obviously, you know, I, I understand why he feels that way. But to say something like that, I would sort of casually drop that yesterday, I think. It's like, we're living in a different time.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Of course we are.

• 31:18Tucker Carlson?

  And it's not 2020 anymore.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  I, I just, I just hope that the return to sanity happens while Angela Merkel is still alive. So she gets to see the undoing of her policies to flood Europe. I mean, it's crazy.

• 31:29Tucker Carlson?

  To destroy it, to destroy Christian Europe forever.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  Well, you know, this was the part, I mentioned Hilaire Belloc, who has a similarly, sort of delightfully acerbic style to what.

• 31:37Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know, you're allowed to mention him?

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Bella, yes, Bella, are you allowed to say, Belloc is, uh, listen, he was buddies with Chesterton. Chesterton's slightly more clubbable, so I thought maybe you're allowed to mention Belloc. But, but Belloc said in his excellent book on the Crusades, he said, look, excellent, excellent, highly recommended reading. He's, oh, the, I can't even do justice to the vividness of his prose, this kind of both bloodthirsty and totally charitable way of writing. But he says, look, the Crusades were lost. We lost the battle of Hattine. It was 1187, that was, that it was done. And, and we flatter ourselves. We think that, that Islam is sort of done. He's writing this in the, what, twenties or thirties?

• 32:16Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Says, we think Islam is done and Christianity is strong. He goes, no. Islam remains intact. The only reason it seems like Christendom is on top is because we have certain technological and industrial advantages. He goes, once that passes away, he goes, our moral certitude is totally cracked up. We are in a much worse place than our opponents in the Crusades were.

• 32:37Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly. I think that's really prescient and wise and true. I mean, it's so obviously true. And it was the affluence born of technology that rotted the soul of the Christian West. I mean, wealth did this, just as it does to families. And I'm not against wealth. I mean, I haven't accrued much, but you know, I'm not, I'm not for poverty for sure. But I, it's also true that like generational wealth, like makes you into a horrible person. Fall is here, so is fall fashion. So let's talk about cozy earth, cozy earth pants and joggers are perfect when it starts to get chilly out. You can wear them at home, running, indoors, outdoors, even to work or on flights. And best of all, they are comfortable, really comfortable. We didn't know joggers could feel so we didn't know what joggers were.

• 33:21Tucker Carlson?

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• 33:57Speaker 00

  Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 34:16Speaker 01

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• 34:27Speaker 06

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• 34:57Speaker 03

  I mean, this is, I carry around a prayer card. And listen, I haven't, I haven't sold enough cigars yet that I'm too worried about generation.

• 35:03Tucker Carlson?

  I'm gonna ask you about the cigars, because I don't, I don't know. How did you wind up the cigar business? But hold on, but I, well, but I take it too seriously to address it parenthetically.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  I, so. I feel as though I've got a really nice life, you know, I've got a nice house. I've got this beautiful family. I have nice little doodads and things like that.

• 35:21Tucker Carlson?

  You have three sons.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Three sons, three sons. I cannot produce.

• 35:24Tucker Carlson?

  That's true wealth.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  It is true wealth and I can't produce a daughter, which means I'm going to go to a nursing home someday. If I don't, I need a daughter.

• 35:31Tucker Carlson?

  So that is the truest thing. I'm sad for you that you already know that at 35, that your final hours will be spent alone and your boys will be somewhere with some hot girl. Be like, you know, he was a good guy. Whatever happened to him?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  What was his name? Matt or Mark or something? Anyway, he.

• 35:47Tucker Carlson?

  Whereas if you had daughters, bedside vigil.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 35:50Tucker Carlson?

  Dad needs a catheter change, whatever it takes. Like they will do it.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  This is, that's actually why I need generational wealth is just to pay for my long-term care.

• 35:57Tucker Carlson?

  But you're going to have some Haitian lady who's out for a cigarette when you croak. You need some daughters, man.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  But you know, I carry around a prayer card of St. Jerome, who translated the Bible. It was also a great kind of a rhetorical pugilist and, and his great quote from letter 22, I think he would write all these letters to Roman noble women and, and it says, "Whenever you start to be enchanted by the pleasures of this world, it's not that you have to totally, you know, deny them all the time, but whenever you start to be enchanted, think about where you're going. Think about how this is all going to end up and try to be now what you will be hereafter." Easier said than done.

• 36:36Tucker Carlson?

  No, it's, yes, I couldn't agree. I don't have my phone or I would redo my favorite quote on that exact subject. Every New Year's, my wife and I go to church. We don't go to the service because it's an Episcopal church, but we go in the afternoon to say our prayers for the year. And every year, you know, you sort of, I always feel like I get a message or it's like something resonant, like this year's going to require this quality in order to get through it and thrive in it. And this year, man, the message was so clear, like this is all passing away. And to the extent that you love, you know, material things and take great, you know, undue pride in your own stupid accomplishments, like you're a fool, you're a fool.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  I think you can kind of see this with, with Trump now, actually. I think Trump is, and I probably, it happened after Butler, Pennsylvania, something seems to have changed in the way that he speaks. I was just there. I visited the White House to do some interviews and things just a week ago. And what's so amazing is you are at the peak of imperial power on earth. The absolute head of the strongest government maybe that has ever existed, technologically certainly that has ever existed. And you walk around and you think, you know, it's great and I'm glad to be here. Even this, it's a government building, first of all.

• 37:54Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  It's kind of drab, which is why Trump's trying to fix it up a little bit. And even this, even this will pass away. Four years. Well, even Trump's been kind of president for 12 years. He's been the dominant figure in public life for 12, his president will have been for eight. And you think even this is going to pass away and you're going to be sitting in your bed with your Haitian nurse.

• 38:12Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, it's totally true.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  What, what is this about?

• 38:16Tucker Carlson?

  And she's going to be like listening to some game show at high volume and you're going to want her to turn it down, but you've got a tube in your throat and you can't tell her.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  No, she doesn't speak English.

• 38:23Tucker Carlson?

  There's literally nothing you can do about it. You can't extend your life by one day. You have no power, actually.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:30Tucker Carlson?

  To control the things that matter. And most of our power is destructive power. You can kill people. That's why heads of state love killing people, whatever they say. They love it. Cause it makes them feel like God.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Obama would joke about it. And I got drones. I'm coming for you, Jonas Brothers.

• 38:44Tucker Carlson?

  They love it. They all love it. I've talked to a lot of them about it. They love it. And the clever ones try and hide the fact they love it. Well, you know, it's the burden of the office. But that's not how they feel. They take delight in it because it's an expression of power. But I mean, it is the weakest kind of, most transitory kind of power.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. And you know, the, the three.

• 39:04Tucker Carlson?

  Killing people.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  The three material things that people want, fame, money and power. And they're and I'm not saying I don't want them. I'm not saying I haven't enjoyed the modicum I've gotten of any of them. But one thing that happens when you get a little taste of each is you realize that it ultimately is unsatisfying.

• 39:22Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  It does. It's and I was talking to a friend the other day.

• 39:24Tucker Carlson?

  The prize is not worth winning.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Yes, right. Because you get there and you say, OK, well, now what do I want? And do you know the exact, I've done a scientific analysis, the exact amount of money, fame and power that will make you happy? Just a little bit more. Just a little bit more.

• 39:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Yeah. I got into it so young that I don't I don't feel that way at all anymore.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:48Tucker Carlson?

  I do think fame is not not something anyone should ever want. I don't see the upside in that at all. I don't know. Like, what could possibly be?

• 39:56Speaker 03

  I'll tell you the upside. Sometimes you'll get a free appetizer at dinner if someone likes your show or something. That's great. That's great. I like free appetizers.

• 40:03Tucker Carlson?

  I feel so obligated. What does that mean? Do I have to name my next kid after you? Like, I don't I don't like presents. You know what I mean?

• 40:10Speaker 03

  My next child, truffle French fry noodles. Yes. After. Yes.

• 40:15Tucker Carlson?

  It's so true. So but just to go back to the what's happening in the Catholic Church? I don't know. Is it happening in the church? Or is it happening under the sort of wings of the church, auspices of the church? Is it happening around the church? Or is the church itself like experiencing a revival?

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Well, it's, you know, we're all the mystical body of Christ. So it's, you know, it's at the level of the episcopate, you know, the bishops and the pope and every there's new pope. And but the laity too, we're all part of the body of Christ. And there is just something kind of happening. And I think even, you know, I have this doc series called The Pope and the Fuhrer, which is about, it's really about Pius XII, who was the, he was the pope during World War Two until 1958. And he's this image of the old school pope, you know, the papal tiara, arms extended.

• 41:02Tucker Carlson?

  You're supposed to feel bad about that Pope.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  You're supposed to.

• 41:05Tucker Carlson?

  He caused the war or something, right?

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it turns out, none of that is true. And so.

• 41:12Tucker Carlson?

  There was a famous play attacking him.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  This is how this is everything you need to know about Pius XII. There was a play that came out in 1963, so long after the war, after, five years after-

• 41:23Tucker Carlson?

  But right before the Papal Council, I noticed.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Right, yes, right around the time of the, of the Second Vatican Council.

• 41:27Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  How odd. Promoted by the KGB and communists and-

• 41:31Tucker Carlson?

  Interesting.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  The way that-

• 41:33Tucker Carlson?

  Literally promoted by communists.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  And the way that you know that it's all nonsense is, first of all, after, after the war and, and then after Pius XII died,

• 41:43Speaker 03

  everybody lauded him. Everybody. Not, not the communists, I guess, but secular, religious, Christians, Jews, everybody lauded this guy. He was an amazing hero. The chief rabbi of Rome converted to Catholicism right after the war-

• 41:57Tucker Carlson?

  What?

• 41:57Speaker 03

  And took his name, Eugenio. Eugenio Pacelli was the pope and he was Eugenio Zoli. He said this man was an amazing friend of Jews and all of humanity. He was just an amazing-

• 42:07Tucker Carlson?

  Because he was painted as a Nazi.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, Hitler's pope is what these ridiculous people, really promoted by communists, tell you. But the way that you know it's all nonsense is-

• 42:16Tucker Carlson?

  Was the point to influence the council?

• 42:18Speaker 03

  I, I think really, my kind of deep thesis on the, the Pius battles, which really exploded even in the 90s, much, much later, I see it as a kind of intra-Catholic battle. So in that way, I guess it would involve the Second Vatican Council and reforms afterward, which is, you had this man as a symbol of Catholic tradition and you had people within the church who didn't really like the tradition and maybe wanted to change things. And one thing about the church, you can't change anything. You're not, you can't, you get doctrine develops, but you don't change. And I think it was, it was a battle for the identity of the church. You know, in order to radically change everything, Pius XII had to be slandered and calumnaed.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  The fact that the chief evidence against this man is an eight-hour work of fiction that no one has ever fully staged, absolute garbage by this random playwright, Roque Hoth, Hoth, Hoth, or something, is promoted by the KGB, tells you everything you need to know because the facts are just totally contrary to that.

• 43:41Tucker Carlson?

  So what did happen? What did the government know? What did foreign governments know? There was a cover up. Why? It's been nearly 25 years and it's time Americans learned what actually happened. We're going to tell you, we're releasing one episode per week. You're not going to want to wait. If you're a member, you don't have to. You get all five episodes the day it drops, right then, ad free. Our first episode airs Thursday, 9/11, September 11th. You will not want to miss it. Join us now at tuckercarlson.com.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.

• 44:48Tucker Carlson?

  Interesting, but even now, lo these many years later, that the stench hangs in the air.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Yes, it's absurd. It will dissipate with time. You know, the church measures her years not in weeks and months, but in centuries.

• 45:00Tucker Carlson?

  No, no, no, that's right. It's just, that's just interesting. I know so little about it, but I, my instinct tells me strongly that it was, that was a pivot point in the history of the modern history of, of the church. What did, what was Vatican II, as we non Catholics call it?

• 45:19Speaker 03

  Well, listen, I'm a trad, a traditionalist in good standing. I attend the traditional Latin Mass. I have my, I have my totally unexpired trad card. But the trick here is, one can't criticize, one can't totally reject the council. This is an ecumenical council that was legitimately called by the church with dogmatic constitutions. So you don't just say, throw it out. And the funny thing is, People who talk about Vatican II prone against have never read the documents.

• 45:46Tucker Carlson?

  I certainly haven't. So what was it? Can you just summarize it for us?

• 45:51Speaker 03

  Well, yes, it was, it was an ecumenical council. There have been many of these.

• 45:54Tucker Carlson?

  What does that mean ecumenical council?

• 45:56Speaker 03

  The bishops all get together. So it's, this is like, you know, the real deal. This goes all the way back to antiquity. And the fact that we talk about this one council as kind of the biggest one in the whole church is silly. You don't talk about the spirit of the fourth lathering council. You don't talk about the.

• 46:11Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I think the reason that I'm fixated on it is because as someone who's kind of pro Catholic, I guess, I mean, I.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Catholic curious?

• 46:20Tucker Carlson?

  I'm not Catholic curious. I'm not going there. I'm a Luther man. But the idea that, you know, in 1950, the majority of like immigrant kids in our biggest cities were schooled in Catholic schools. And that, you know, went to church every week and like it provided order and well, Christianity, which I believe in. And like, I'm very in favor of that. And then post Vatican II, this is just my like ignorant overview, that all collapsed. And those, I don't know how many Catholic schools there were in 1965. They're probably less than half now. All those churches closed. There are lots of factors, but like, and then you have the molestation scandal, which was to some extent real and horrifying.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 47:04Tucker Carlson?

  And all these people leaving the priesthood and fewer people becoming religious. I don't know. It's hard not to see a connection between the two, but maybe I'm wrong.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Pope Benedict, when he stepped down, he, he kept writing and he, he wrote a non encyclical, but it was, it was.

• 47:19Tucker Carlson?

  He was the pope before Francis. He was the cigarette smoking German.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  Yes, the cigarette smoking German. He, he observed, he said, you know, part of what happened, because you have to distinguish between what the council actually said, which was relatively minor. It's pastoral council. It's, you know, and then there was this big reform that totally changed the mass and totally, you know, changed the smells and bells and the ornamentations, which, which matters because the way we worship dictates how we believe. There's a phrase, lex erandi, lex credendi. You know, if you, if you worship a certain way, obviously, that's going to change how you think about things.

• 47:54Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  It's going to change how you live your life. And, and he said, you know, the. The Catholic Church was swept up, just like every other institution in the entire West, was swept up in this cultural fervor of the 1960s. And in some cases, it helped impel that fervor. And it was like, I don't know, like a kind of a madness took over, all of these reforms. And then what happened is, the fever started to break. And so after Vatican II, you get John Paul I, who was Pope for 30 days, and then you get John Paul II. John Paul II, in my mind, is kind of like the Napoleon of the Catholic Church. He's a child of the church of the revolution, but he's also the undoing of the revolution,

• 48:39Speaker 03

  and is lauded, loved by conservatives, profoundly anti-communist, helped end the Cold War, really important man, now canonized a saint. After him, you get Benedict. And Benedict said something really brilliant, which has been, he's said many brilliant things, but this is a real antidote to the spirit of the age. He said, "There were kind of bad actors." I'm reading into this. "There were some bad actors who tried to use the Council, to exploit the Council, to say that everything that came before, that contradicts what we want to do in modernity, that's got to go. We've got to read the past only through the lens of where we are now." This is a broader cultural phenomenon. We do it with American history, we do it everywhere. Everything is just about us and looking back.

• 49:20Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  And what he said is, "No, no, no."

• 49:22Tucker Carlson?

  We do it generationally.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  We do it generationally.

• 49:25Tucker Carlson?

  You can't imagine your parents having sex.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:27Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, you wouldn't be here if they didn't.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Mine didn't.

• 49:29Tucker Carlson?

  I'm just saying.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  I don't know about yours, but mine didn't.

• 49:31Tucker Carlson?

  Every generation imagines it's inventing everything out of nothing.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  Yes. What Benedict said was, "No, no, there is a hermeneutic of continuity. The way we interpret the past is not by going in reverse. It's that whatever we think in our, with our limited store of reason, in modernity, with all of our fashions and temptations and novel aspects, we have to understand that as being in continuity with the past. And if we think there's been some radical break... We're probably wrong. Who's more likely to be wrong? The smartest, most serious men for 1950 years? Or like you? It's me, I'm more likely.

• 50:09Tucker Carlson?

  I agree.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  And so that, that is the, that was the fog breaking, I think.

• 50:15Tucker Carlson?

  But can I ask, like, what were the, were there meaningful changes made during that council?

• 50:19Speaker 03

  Yes, changes in the sense that there were certain pastoral elements that were, that were discussed and written into dogmatic constitutions. So an understanding of religious liberty. This is, this one is sometimes, Protestants love religious liberty and Catholics do too, properly understood. But this is sometimes considered somewhat radical because the church also believes error has no rights. Error non abet us.

• 50:43Tucker Carlson?

  What does that mean, error has no rights?

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Well, in liberal modernity, we say that every cockamamie idea, every deviant ridiculous behavior is some human right and we have to protect it with federal subsidies. And the church says, no, no. Error, when you, when you say things that aren't true, when you do things that are contrary to your flourishing and to nature, there's no like right to that. But of course, the rejoinder is, error has no rights.

• 51:07Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that is pretty anti-modern.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  It's quite anti-modern.

• 51:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, it's about as anti-modern as you can get.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  And you can say, people who err have rights. So I'm saying error has rights, but people who err. And the Catholic Church has a long history of toleration, contrary to what, you know, polemicists in the Enlightenment or what have you would say. But a long, long history of toleration, going all the way back to the earliest days of the Church, beautifully articulated by Gregory the Great, all the way up through the Middle Ages. It's, again, these are the stories that no one's taught in school anymore. However, you know, that could be misinterpreted as to saying that, like, I don't know, we have the right to some like, you know, Satanist display in the courthouse or something, as activists argue today. Totally ridiculous. What else does Vatican II contain? Vatican II.

• 51:53Tucker Carlson?

  Well, so here's my, here's my actual question. So. At the core of Christianity is a claim of exclusivity. Every human being, every human being on earth reaches God only through Jesus.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:07Tucker Carlson?

  Period. Doesn't matter. Like, nothing else matters. That's it. That's the one, that's your ticket. You can't board the train without it.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:15Tucker Carlson?

  Is, did that change?

• 52:17Speaker 03

  No.

• 52:18Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  The answer, the answer is no. Some of the confusion of this is-

• 52:22Tucker Carlson?

  Well, there's quite a bit of confusion about that.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Part of the confusion is, there's the claim in Latin, extriclem nul salus. There's no salvation outside of the church. The church does not change her view on that. However, people are always asked this question, you know, what about my Protestant grandpa? Or my, I don't know, my atheist dad, or my Jewish, or my Hindu, or my Muslim, or my whatever.

• 52:46Tucker Carlson?

  One of these is not like the others, but that's my view.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  The Protestants.

• 52:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I would say, yes.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  No, but if you take a really rigorous exclusive claim here, I'm gonna say, no, sorry. You're all, you know, you're all totally without any hope. And I guess what the council clarifies is that, you know, we pray for these people. There is no salvation outside of Christ. There is no salvation outside of the church. Salvation subsists within the church. However, it allows for some, as a pastoral matter, some greater dialogue in this modern world.

• 53:21Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, what's the difference between Jesus and the church?

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Well, Christ founds the church, and Christ is the bridegroom, and the church is the bride.

• 53:29Tucker Carlson?

  So Catholics, the official church position is unless you're a member of the church, you don't go to heaven?

• 53:34Speaker 03

  Well, this is something that would be sort of clarified at the Second Vatican Council. Or maybe not clarified. Maybe it's just, leads to more ecumenical dialogue or something like this. But that one could say, when you're baptized, you're a Christian. You might never receive any of the sacraments. You might never go to church. But you're baptized. That's, that's what delineates you as a Christian.

• 53:53Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  And so, we pray for the salvation of everyone. A good, a good example would be, because this is coming after the Second World War. So obviously, they're addressing the Jews in particular. And, you know, the council states clearly that, you know, the Jews are our elder brothers in faith. And, which is another line that's, you know, sort of used polemically in all sorts of ways. And so, you know, God doesn't revoke his promises to his people. And this can be taken into all different kinds of ideological-

• 54:22Tucker Carlson?

  That was the conclusion of the council?

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Well, that was, that's a statement of the council. But this, this comes from St. Paul.

• 54:29Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  You know, St. Paul says that God, for the, for the sake of the gospel, the, the Jews aren't with it, you know, but for the sake of their forbearers, you know, God loves the Jews and because the call of God and the gifts of God are irrevocable. So what does that mean? This means-

• 54:44Tucker Carlson?

  But Paul was a Jew, obviously. He was a Pharisee.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 54:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  What this means, and, and this gets back to what we were talking about at the top with sort of Aristotelian virtue as the mean between two extremes. There are two views on this. One is a view that says that, you know, you don't need Christ to be saved. And specifically, the Jews don't need Christ to be saved. And another view is that, you know, God's done with the Jews and forget about the Jews now, and it's just only the church. And what, what St. Paul is saying and what the council is clarifying is there's kind of a little bit of room for both. There is, you know, Christ is the Savior. He's the one Savior. He's the way, and the road is narrow, and He's the way and the truth and the life. And also, God doesn't hate the Jews, and God still has a plan for the Jews.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  And so this is something that the Catholic Church does that other denominations and ideologies don't always, they fall to one side or the other, is she brings in, well, what I would call the fullness of truth.

• 55:46Tucker Carlson?

  So what is that? So that means that there are people who can go to heaven without believing in Jesus?

• 55:52Speaker 03

  No. Though, a, one, one could sort of unwittingly be following Christ. And one could have a, I don't know, one, the firmness-

• 56:06Tucker Carlson?

  Unwittingly.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  Well, really, you can't. I mean, and actually, zoom out a little bit again to natural religion. This is another, this is another error that, well, was debated in antiquity and still comes up in modernity, which is the notion that- You know, these pagan, natural religions, they just have nothing of value. You know, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem? That sort of thing. And, but that's not really true, because, you know, natural religion does have something to recommend it. And I think Pope Francis got in trouble for recognizing that, that in all sorts of traditions, there is often a kernel of truth. There is at least some truth in it. And paganism is a kernel of truth. You think of C.S. Lewis, like Barfield and those guys, loved the myths.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  Because it tells us something about our human nature. And the First Vatican Council tells us that the existence of God can be known with certainty from human reason, looking at the created world. There is more to it. You gotta keep going, you know, that God also reveals himself.

• 57:06Tucker Carlson?

  But that you can be certain God exists just by looking at his creation?

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Yes, using your reason.

• 57:11Tucker Carlson?

  That's the truest thing ever.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 57:13Tucker Carlson?

  Right. Science gets you to God in the end, because there's no...

• 57:17Speaker 03

  I think so, you think so, Thomas Aquinas thinks so. But, but a lot of people in the modern world, they say, oh, no, religion is just, it's just kind of a private matter of judgment.

• 57:26Tucker Carlson?

  Well, they're children, they've never thought about it. I mean, that's...

• 57:28Speaker 03

  And think about, there was a new doctor of the church just named, just within the last few weeks. That would be John Henry Newman, greatest theologian in the English language. He was made a doctor of the church. And Newman's entire life was spent inveighing against liberalism in religion. You know, this kind of wishy-washy sense.

• 57:47Tucker Carlson?

  Who is Newman?

• 57:48Speaker 03

  Newman is great. He was a Protestant and very anti-Catholic. And then, then he became a Catholic, and then he became a cardinal, and then he became a saint.

• 57:57Tucker Carlson?

  He was American?

• 57:58Speaker 03

  No, British. He was British. I don't think we have any American doctors of the church yet. I'm working on it. But unfortunately, I have like a fifth grader's understanding of theology. So I don't think I'm gonna...

• 58:07Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I don't even have that. But I, I certainly, I believe, but in a child, a childlike way.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:16Tucker Carlson?

  But so Newman was a British Catholic theologian?

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Yes. And, and he became Catholic. And one of his conclusions, and it's something that we're coming to grips with today is, we, we can know things. We can actually know things. That this modern idea that religion is just a matter of private judgment, you know? And so, you're, you're a Shinto and I'm a Methodist. And it's like, whatever, man, who knows? You know, you just do you, and it's all good. And he says, no. Religion is a public thing. It's a scientific thing. We can know something about it. He wrote a great book. You look at the crises of the universities today, there's a remedy to it, which is a book that he wrote called "The Idea of a University." And in this book, he says, "You know, it's so crazy. We have these institutions that purport

• 59:00Speaker 03

  to universal knowledge, and increasingly, they won't even acknowledge God." But just on its face, even if you're like the most hardcore atheist you can imagine, how can you even pretend to universal knowledge while denying God the source and summit of all knowledge? What are we talking about then? We're talking about just like chemistry problems? You know, that's so silly.

• 59:24Tucker Carlson?

  We're talking about data, actually, just an accumulation of numbers.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  And what they say is, "No, no, no. Because we live in this world after the crackup of Christendom, where everyone has their own private ideas, you know, there's just no way of knowing anything for certain. So we're just gonna settle on certain economic matters. We're all gonna try to get rich. We're all gonna try to live in relative peace, and we're gonna leave that heady stuff. You do that on Sunday morning." And that's obviously impossible. Do you remember 20 years ago, there was this phrase?

• 59:51Tucker Carlson?

  It hasn't worked?

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Look around. Well, actually, looking around here, it's okay. But if you look in the cities, it's not so great. There was this idea that you can't legislate morality. Do you remember that?

• 1:00:04Tucker Carlson?

  I remember the idea. It was the operating thesis of the United States of America.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  And yet, not one person ever practically believed it.

• 1:00:12Tucker Carlson?

  Of course not.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  You can't pass a law about speeding. You can't pass a law about jaywalking without recourse to morality.

• 1:00:19Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  And when you come to that conclusion about practical morality, which is ultimately derived from your understanding of religion, you are going to impose a moral view on someone. It's maybe someone else is very pro-jaywalking. Maybe someone else deeply feels in their sincere religious beliefs that they need to jaywalk.

• 1:00:36Tucker Carlson?

  All rules are based on a moral code.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Yes, and they're exclusive. You can't violate the law of non-contradiction. Either you're gonna have a law against jaywalking, or you're not. Either you're gonna have a law against murdering babies, or you're not. And you're gonna, you're gonna impose that on people. That's just, that's how government, that's what government is.

• 1:00:55Tucker Carlson?

  Well, as soon as people started saying you can't legislate morality, they started giving everybody, very much including me, these moralizing lectures. The country got more rigid and moralistic. It's why you were described as disgusting for noting that Greta Thunberg is unwell. When it's obvious.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Her mother wrote a book about that.

• 1:01:12Tucker Carlson?

  Well, exactly, and sad, and she's worthy of compassion. But that, what happened to you is a result of this epidemic of shallow but highly aggressive moralizing that took the place of something that we had before.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Yes, and that's why I think, okay, now we're gonna get on our puritanical high horses about pronouns or whatever, you know, like which, where you must put rainbow flags, which is in front of every doorstep, everywhere in the country. We're gonna get on our high horse about that, but we're gonna, we're gonna shrug our shoulders when it comes to murdering babies, when it comes to the meaning of marriage, when it comes to whether our people can have borders in a nation. With that, oh, we can't know about that, but we can know about some ridiculous gnostic heresy about pronouns and identity or whatever. It's totally incoherent. And so what you're seeing, and this to me-

• 1:02:02Tucker Carlson?

  Well, they just replaced Christianity with a much less forgiving religion.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:02:05Tucker Carlson?

  A much harsher, crueler, less compassionate religion.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  And false religion.

• 1:02:10Tucker Carlson?

  Well, of course, definitely false, but in its effects, you could tell it was bad because it didn't elevate people or forgive people. It wasn't kind to people. It was cruel and unyielding and vicious.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:02:25Tucker Carlson?

  And, I mean, all these people got destroyed, literally driven to suicide.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  If you don't like the God who loves you, just wait till you meet all the other gods.

• 1:02:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  Cause you got, everyone's gotta worship something. You know, Bob Dylan was right about that.

• 1:02:38Tucker Carlson?

  So how did you go? So you said that you were an atheist when you were at Yale, I guess?

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Oh, from, no, when I was 13. I was confirmed at 13.

• 1:02:46Tucker Carlson?

  In the Catholic Church?

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  In the Catholic Church. And before my confirmation, I told my mother, I said, you know, I don't believe it. Christopher Hitchens, he's so smart, and, you know, Richard Dawkins, and I'm really taken, I'm such a-

• 1:02:56Tucker Carlson?

  You thought Richard Dawkins was smart?

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Listen, I was 13, okay? Come on, come on. And actually, the new atheism really appealed to punk 13-year-olds who thought they were smarter than they are. That is the ideal audience for the new atheism.

• 1:03:07Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  I think so. And I told her, I said, I don't wanna be confirmed. My mother-

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  She's, she's, ah, you're going through a phase. You, ah, kid, you're going through a phase.

• 1:03:19Tucker Carlson?

  Wise woman.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Wise woman. She goes, receive the sacrament. She wasn't even like a super duper religious, but she said, receive the sacrament. You're gonna regret it if you don't, and you're gonna come to your senses in a few years. She was totally right. So I did that. I was away from the church, would have called myself an atheist, or at least an agnostic for 10 years.

• 1:03:36Tucker Carlson?

  Can I just ask, what did you think was cool about? I mean, Hitchens was, I knew him well, it was, you know.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Very clever.

• 1:03:41Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, lots of good things about, about Hitchens, but his life was so sad that he was not really an advertisement for atheism, I didn't think.

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:50Tucker Carlson?

  But like, what did you think was cool about that whole?

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  Well, I thought religion was for stupid people.

• 1:03:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  I thought religion was for stupid people. And I, of course, didn't know anything and hadn't read anything and my brain was.

• 1:04:02Tucker Carlson?

  You hadn't lived.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  I hadn't, hadn't lived, but I, I was quite wrong, but I was never in doubt. And so I.

• 1:04:09Tucker Carlson?

  Been there.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. I, I said, look, I just don't, I don't see God. Bad things happen to good people and, you know, science has microscopes. And anyway, and getting, actually getting back to the point on the reforms of the church and everything changing. It was kind of weak, liturgically. There were all these sappy effeminate hymns that were like, you know, about eagle's wings and stuff. That was not really appealing to a young boy and all this nonsense.

• 1:04:35Tucker Carlson?

  The eagle's wings got you, huh?

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  My God, God is such, you know, it wasn't even cool in the seventies when those.

• 1:04:40Tucker Carlson?

  No, I know. Oh, I was there.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and so, so I said, well, look, it's just so obvious. Social proof, all the smart people are atheists. And then I get to college and everyone's an atheist. And many people are much smarter than me in college. But I did notice the smartest people believed in God.

• 1:04:58Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:59Tucker Carlson?

  At Yale?

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  Yes. There weren't a ton of Muslims, though there were a couple. But across the board, the Muslims, the Jews, Protestants, the Catholics were.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  Smarter. They seemed smarter. And maybe their IQs weren't even higher, but they just seemed more with it. They made better arguments than some stupid spaghetti monster nonsense from Christopher Hitchens. And I said, huh? And then I was presented with an argument for the existence of God.

• 1:05:24Tucker Carlson?

  What an interesting observation.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there weren't even that many of them there, but you kind of say, oh, well, it's a little bit the wheat from the chaff, you know?

• 1:05:32Tucker Carlson?

  They'd have to be the braver section of the population, too.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  This is one of the arguments to go to a liberal college is even, even just in your own politics, if you can make it through and not be swept along the tide of liberalism, and you make it through to the end, you will have heard every argument, you will have heard every refutation of everything you believe, you will either give up some of your beliefs, maybe some you should, or you will become much stronger in your beliefs, which is what happened to me. I left Yale much more right wing than I went in, without question. And I'm not the only one. So I was presented with an argument from a guy who's smarter than me. And he said, you think God doesn't exist? What about the ontological argument? And not, I won't be tedious with the, but the argument is basically, God's the maximally

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  great being. That's this definition. He has all the great making characteristics, none of the corrupting characteristics. It's better to exist than not to exist. We would all agree with that. We'd go off ourselves right now if we disagreed with that. Therefore, God exists. That's it. That's the argument. And Bertrand Russell, a great logician atheist, famously threw his tin of tobacco in the air. He would have had Alps if it had been around at the time. He famously threw his Alps, his tobacco in the air, he said, by golly, the ontological argument is sound. It's easier to think there's a flaw in the argument than to actually point out the flaw. And I said, well, darn, I can't refute

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  that. Then I read Lewis. Let's see if Lewis.

• 1:07:03Tucker Carlson?

  So who is this person that said that to you?

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  This is my roommate, actually.

• 1:07:06Tucker Carlson?

  Whatever happened to him?

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  Oh, he's my best friend. Still, yeah, yeah. Very, very close.

• 1:07:11Tucker Carlson?

  And he's a Christian?

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And he, he was a great old Catholic, raised kind of mega church Protestant. And then he reverted to the church. He was confirmed in the church later on. And, but well, you know, he and I, and some other people were kind of. Going through this together, you know, so I would say 18 to 23, I was, I was really dragging my feet, you know, I said, oh, C.S. Lewis makes good arguments, Chesterton makes good arguments, maybe I should read the Bible at some point, that might be smart, I'll do that later. And I'm going through, I finally, you know, seriously read the Bible at 23, I said, oh, this is, this is true, this is right, you know, first you have to accept that God exists, then you say, okay, well, is, is Jesus who he says he is? If he's not,

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  that's going to lead me in one direction, if he does, it's going to lead me in another direction. Then you have to ask yourself, well, is the church, what kind of church did he establish? That's going to, and there were plenty of Protestants along the way who were really helpful in my return and thinking. So, you know, I, it was very helpful this whole period, but I took the long road, I took the long route, I could have just, you know, Norm McDonald, the comedian?

• 1:08:17Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  Of course, greatest comedian probably ever. I didn't know him, really, but he and I, we would write each other, long letters on, on Twitter DMs for, for weeks. This is the strangest thing, because I saw he was following me on Twitter, and he wasn't following a lot of people, and I was a huge fan of his, so I didn't even want to message him, I was so, and one time he, he sent out a tweet, and it sounded kind of despairing. Now we know he was dying of cancer.

• 1:08:43Tucker Carlson?

  Very sick.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  I thought, I thought he was suicidal or something. I just sent him a note, I said, I feel bad if I didn't. I said, hey, Norm, a huge fan of yours, if I can be of any help, I don't know that I can, but I'd be happy to. And we started writing each other these letters, and

• 1:08:58Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, for, for weeks, every night, just for weeks, long essays, really.

• 1:09:04Tucker Carlson?

  To Norm McDonald on Twitter DM.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  It's weird. It's, this is one of the strangest

• 1:09:08Tucker Carlson?

  Great.

• 1:09:08Speaker 03

  Every night, and he, he would do this thing where he'd say, Michael, I can't do a great Norm, say, I, I, it would be prideful for me not to take you up on your offer, because, Michael, I'm not an educated man. You're an educated man, I'm, I have an undergraduate degree, I'm not an educated man, I didn't really go to college. And, and then he would, he would do this thing where he'd make it seem like he's just some old chunk of coal, not, and then he'd use a word that I didn't know. He was certainly much better read than I am, and loved the Russian novelists, and we were talking about religion, basically the whole time. And he said to me, I don't know his, I still don't know his particular, the particulars of all of his religious

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  views, but he said, yeah, for me, I, I told him how I converted or reverted. And he said, oh yeah, for me, I just, I've just always known the Bible's true. I just always knew. I just, I'd read it. I just knew. So anyway, that's it. And I thought, well, that's, that's the better, that's the better way. You know, it's, it's like Christ to Thomas the Apostle. He says, you know, blessed are you, you've seen and believed, but blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed. And, and that was Norm. And yeah, that's another example too, of you think, okay, the whole culture and all these smart people are atheists. Norm is one of the smartest pop culture figures that's been around decades. Yes. And, but he knew, it's just like, everyone kind of knows, deep down.

• 1:10:33Tucker Carlson?

  Everyone kind of knows. That's totally right. And that's why they're mad.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:10:39Tucker Carlson?

  People feel judged.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  They feel judged.

• 1:10:41Tucker Carlson?

  I never feel judged by like, the earth is flat, people, you know, I don't think the earth is flat, but I don't, it doesn't bother me that you do. You know what I mean?

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  I get a kick out of it. I'll go down the.

• 1:10:52Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, whatever. It's not a threat. I don't, because I, I know in my heart, it's probably not, it's probably not flat. You know what I mean?

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  But.

• 1:11:02Tucker Carlson?

  The ancient Greeks. No, I remember thinking that even in early high school with the question of abortion and, you know, people just get hysterical about it, like hysterical, how dare you judge me? And all this is like, whoa, I wasn't even really judging you, but like clearly you're judging yourself.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Tucker Carlson?

  Cause you know that you took a life and I, you know, there are all kinds of extenuating circumstances. I get it. But in the end, you, you killed the kid.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  And that's how.

• 1:11:26Tucker Carlson?

  And you know that you did.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  The devil gets you this way because he says, and before you commit the sin, he says, it's no big deal. It's no big deal. It's nothing. It's, it's a clump of cells. It's nothing. It's your freedom. It's your body. It's your choice. It's your, it's come on, it's no big deal. You're not going to feel bad about it. I mean, she's got to do it. And then you do it. And then the one second later he's in your, he says, you'll never be forgiven. You can, you can never admit this is wrong. The second you do, you are damned walking the earth. You are done. You're done. And I think that explains a lot of modern behavior.

• 1:11:57Tucker Carlson?

  Totally right. It's totally right. If you ever watched a shout your abortion event, it's always like fascinating, weirdly fascinating to me and I always feel so bad for the girls because they, but they never really can muster enthusiasm for the abortions they had because, and you can see it right in their faces. It's like, oh, I feel so sorry for them. Can you imagine?

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Well, this, you know, to make it fully religious, Peter Crayft made this observation that even the language of the abortion, this is my body, is a satanic inversion of the Eucharist. This is my body, which will be.

• 1:12:29Tucker Carlson?

  But everybody know, I guess it's sort of, I'm just tying to the Norm McDonald observation, which is, gosh, the truest thing. You read it and you're like, oh, wow, that's true. Even that was certainly my experience in reading and even things I was like, oh, I don't like that, but I still thought that's true.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:43Tucker Carlson?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  So you know, you all know, because everyone does have a conscience, even if it's darkened by sin and.

• 1:12:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  A little bit and drugs and porn and, you know, like dumb classes.

• 1:12:52Tucker Carlson?

  Mine was shiny like stainless steel, but yes, I can imagine there are others who had darkened consciences.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Yes. And, but, but you all kind of know. And then the other impulse, which is, you know, centuries in the making, well, it really goes back to the fall, but especially politically with liberalism, is this notion that we are really to be gods. Ultimately, we are in control. No gods, no kings, only men, and we, we decide.

• 1:13:15Tucker Carlson?

  So I never fell for that. That's so obvious.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  I fell for it. I totally fell for it.

• 1:13:19Tucker Carlson?

  Really? Then I never thought that was, for all my many problems and lies I believed and lies I unwittingly repeated and all my many sins, I never bought the we're gods thing because we can't extend our lives, really. And if you can't do that, then you have no power.

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  Tucker, you clearly don't read the news. We're on the brink. We're this close to curing death. I see it every day in the headlines. They've been trying it since Pharaoh, but they're, they're this close now. Don't you know?

• 1:13:46Tucker Carlson?

  You know, it's like salmon farming. Salmon farming is my favorite idea because it was something I just thought, because I, obviously I love to catch, saying I'm a fisherman.

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Tucker Carlson?

  I love Atlantic salmon fishing. There, you know, it's hard to catch them. There aren't that many of them. And so the idea was people love to eat salmon. Let's just, let's just have a salmon farm. Out there, just make a giant net, just breed them right there in the ocean. Like there's no downside. It cures the problem.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Tucker Carlson?

  And salmon farms have basically destroyed wild salmon. Both through the pollution for crossbreeding with the salmon and, and you know, they don't spawn. And they've, I mean, we're in danger of like

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  We don't spawn either, by the way.

• 1:14:20Tucker Carlson?

  No, exactly. No, but we're like in danger of losing Atlantic salmon as a species because of salmon farming. People are just starting to figure this out and, but it's like, it's a species of the same lie. I'm in control of nature. Oh shit, we'll just salmon farm like, duh. You know what I mean? We'll just, whatever it is.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  We have done that. We have now exercised an increase in control over how we spawn through contraception.

• 1:14:46Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly right.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  We, oh, now we're in control now. This is going to lead to versing. We're going to die off. I mean, we have a global population collapse on the horizon.

• 1:14:55Tucker Carlson?

  So if you ended up like extending human life to 150 years, like the last 80 years of the life would just be like a living hell.

• 1:15:04Tucker Carlson?

  Do you know what I mean? I mean, for one thing, I've always thought, this is like one insight I did have when I was young, which is the problem with getting old is not like bladder control and it's not even dementia. It's, it's instead it's remembering your youth and how much has changed. And it's the burden of the past becomes unbearable. And any old person will tell you this. In their moments of lucid thought, they'll tell you like, I'm just, I can't believe how fast it went. And they're, they're crushed by that.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Tucker Carlson?

  So imagine living to 150.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  And think about when they're all promising this, and there are people on the right who are really into this too, radical life extensionists. And they say, Michael, if you could take the pill to live for 500 years, would you do it? I said, not a chance.

• 1:15:47Tucker Carlson?

  Dude, I won't take an Advil. Like pills are bad. Okay. Pills are just, let's just start there. Pills are bad. Anyone who wants you to take a pill, fuck off. Okay. That's like, that's how I feel. So I just, I strongly feel that way. But why would you want to live to 150?

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  Of course. And this is the understanding. I mean, You know, the curse, you know, when we fall out of the garden is that we die. But is that really a curse? If you live in a world that's fallen, it's full of like murder and rape. I don't think it's, it's actually a great mercy.

• 1:16:15Tucker Carlson?

  It depends what you think happens next, I guess.

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  Yes, that's true. And people are, I think, also increasingly aware that something might happen next. You're kind of clinging on to this hope that, well, I hope this is all there is, you know? And I just turned to worm food and take a dirt nap, you know? And I, I don't think that makes sense at all. And the smartest people in history didn't think it made any sense.

• 1:16:36Tucker Carlson?

  I don't think anyone in history has really thought that.

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:16:39Tucker Carlson?

  Until Hiroshima, which was the ultimate expression of godlike power. And that, that, that is what killed.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  I am, I am the destroyer of worlds. I'm become death, you know?

• 1:16:49Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Tucker Carlson?

  So what, okay, so if all these young people are becoming Catholic of all unfashionable things, like that's where the most unfashionable, you know, but by the standards of 30 years ago, becoming a Catholic.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  It's crazy. It's crazy.

• 1:17:04Tucker Carlson?

  It's insane.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. This is why I think, you know, the, the vice president is probably the most famous convert in recent years. And people, his political enemies were always saying, oh, he's cynical. He's just changing his views with the times, whatever. I think, hold on, you're telling me a guy who had a tough upbringing, who graduates, yeah, law school, wants to start, is in Silicon Valley, then goes back, he wants to launch a political career in Ohio. The way he thinks he's going to do that is by becoming Catholic? You think that's going to help you? No, it'd be, that's like the craziest thing to do if, if you were thinking cynically or opportunistically.

• 1:17:39Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it's a radical move, I guess. And again, I'm not promoting it, I'm not doing it. But I just, as an observer, I'm like, wow, that's pretty wild. So I guess here's my question, it's a political question. If people, if young people are converting to Catholicism, like what else about their views is changing?

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Everything.

• 1:17:58Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  Everything.

• 1:17:59Tucker Carlson?

  So that's my sense.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Well, on the political level, and I think this also touches on part of the conversions, we're beginning to realize that history didn't start in 1965. History didn't start in 1865. History didn't start in 1776 or even 1620.

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  We're part of something that's much bigger and much broader and much more beautiful. You know, and even just in our political order, we used to call it Christendom. Now we call it the West and there has been an attack on that going back many decades now. I think of Jesse Jackson marching down Stanford, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. And, and people are beginning to realize, you know, it's not that I just want to preserve my town or my 90s liberalism or my what, I want to preserve this great cultural patrimony that I've, I've been given and that cultural patrimony has to go deeper than, than just aesthetics and it has to go deeper than just abstract ideology, you know, cult and culture come from the same root word. So what, what you worship is going to define your culture.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  And so what's the, what's the bottom? What's the foundation? What's the ballast for all of that? I think people, you know, even beyond questions of conviction of the Holy Spirit and rational arguments and all that, they're just saying, well, you know, this thing's pretty sturdy. It's been around a long time. Belloc again, Belloc keeps coming to mind. He had this line, he says, I am, he said more eloquently, he said, I'm required as a matter of faith to hold that the church is divinely instituted, but for those who doubt it, one proof of its divine institution is that no other group conducted with such navish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight. Obviously true.

• 1:19:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. The best thing I ever heard from a practicing Catholic in the last five years, I was, there was no one around, it was a very close friend of mine and I, and it was going on about Catholicism. I was like, okay, but that Pope is just, I just can't, I won't even tell you what I said, but it was hostile because that's how I felt. And he goes,

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  Are you sure you're not Catholic?

• 1:20:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. It was the greatest thing ever. He goes, yeah, I totally agree, but he's not the worst Pope we've had.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:20:09Tucker Carlson?

  It was like completely non-defensive. This happens.

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  It's like, let me tell you about the ninth century.

• 1:20:16Tucker Carlson?

  I think that's right. If you want to win people over, don't be defensive.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  Yes, totally.

• 1:20:20Tucker Carlson?

  Don't, don't tell me that there's no, that what I'm seeing isn't real.

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:24Tucker Carlson?

  Be honest.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  Of course, of course. I mean, it is.

• 1:20:27Tucker Carlson?

  Okay. But I'm, I don't know that I've talked to too many Catholics about Catholicism. Maybe they all feel that way, but I thought that was just a wonderful response.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  Totally. You know, we have to remember that the Pope is fallible, except when he's infallible. And sometimes, sometimes God gives us bad Popes to make us really grateful for good Popes. And the other point I'll mention on Francis, because you know, obviously I had some questions about the Francis pontificate.

• 1:20:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  I reverted during the Francis pontificate. This trend started during Francis.

• 1:20:57Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  It might have been in reaction against many of the things that Pope Francis was said to stand for. I don't know exactly how it worked. That's above my pay grade. But that's, you think of like the progress of the church and our whole civilization, and we think of it as just like a straight line. But it's, I think it's a little bit more kind of like this, you know, and the papacy goes to heaven for a little bit, and there's some king is like arresting the Pope. And you know, it's like kind of a little bit more circuitous, but it's always pointed in the same direction.

• 1:21:25Tucker Carlson?

  So there's not, it just reminds me of God using Pharaoh, blinding Pharaoh to the truth in order to save the Jews from slavery.

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33Tucker Carlson?

  Which is what's described. And I always imagine that there's a direct line between the quality of the leadership and the, and the quality of the people.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Of course. This is why I can't get.

• 1:21:44Tucker Carlson?

  But that's not always true. So as America becomes more prosperous, the people become weaker and sillier.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:21:52Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, that's how I grew up. I grew up in the, you know, richest country in history. And, but there was a steady decline in the quality of, of thinking, certainly, and of behavior.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  And of leadership.

• 1:22:02Tucker Carlson?

  And of leadership.

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, was it, is it H.G. Wells who said, uh, democracy is the theory that, was it, no, who was, I forget who it was, who said, uh, democracy is the theory that the common people know what do you, what they want and deserve to get it good and hard? Is this why I can't get into, I have many, I love the populist movement. I was so into the rise of Trump. I remain into the rise of Trump. I think this has been the healthiest political awakening in my lifetime. I think I'm all about it. But I can't, I can't throw too many stones merely at the leadership class because one, the civil authority is there for our own good. It's, it's, uh, in that way appointed by God, uh, in a certain sense. And also, we kind of get the government that we deserve. And if you don't know anything

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  about your country, and you don't care about your civic life, and you're just gonna be greedy, you're either gonna. On the left side of things, just indulge in weird social stuff that's purely selfish. And on the right side of things, you can engage in economic selfishness and no one cares about the common good and no one cares about the body politic.

• 1:23:04Tucker Carlson?

  Then that's kind of where we are right there.

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  Yes, and you're gonna get crappy leadership a lot of the time. And sometimes you get a, sometimes you get a second chance.

• 1:23:11Tucker Carlson?

  So it's just like greed, greed and lust is your choices?

• 1:23:14Speaker 03

  Yes, and this, look, this is, this is classic political philosophy going all the way back, which is that greed, avarice, is the beginning of evils in the city. And it's natural and you, you have to.

• 1:23:26Tucker Carlson?

  Worship of money is the root of all evil.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:23:30Tucker Carlson?

  So, okay, have you noticed, I mean, I have a lot of young people work for me, I have children and all that, but like every month or two, I'll run into like a younger person, like in an airport or something, and always strike up a conversation. And they'll say things that, you know, super nice or whatever, but like you just feel like, wow, the attitudes are, people are getting by my middle age standards, pretty freaking radical.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  It's crazy. I was talking.

• 1:23:57Tucker Carlson?

  Hey, you've had this experience.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  For sure. I have always been the most right wing person in any.

• 1:24:03Tucker Carlson?

  Me too, me too.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  And I.

• 1:24:05Tucker Carlson?

  I've always been the radical. I'm like, man, I better shut up because my thoughts are not welcome in public at all. And all of a sudden, I'm like feeling a little bit more moderate.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, that's good. Listen, now, now we can go on TV and say, look, I'm the moderate. Okay.

• 1:24:18Tucker Carlson?

  I've never felt moderate in my life.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  I, I was talking to a professor who is very, very right wing. And he said, Michael, it's the craziest thing. For the first time in my life, I'm being outflanked by my students. I'm being outflanked. He says, never happened before. And now, part of this, obviously, is like a pendulum was like so far over here, you know, trans your kids and kill the ones that you don't trans. It's gonna fly back in the other direction, the, which is good. That's a healthy impulse. This is where, however, one must have a solid foundation with proper authority and guardrails and everything.

• 1:24:54Tucker Carlson?

  I agree with that.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  Because you, you need to make sure that you don't fall into the, the same error on the other side. You want to, you want to get back to sanity and reason and be fully in command of your will and your intellect.

• 1:25:03Tucker Carlson?

  And you don't want to center your views on hating people.

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  You certainly don't want that. You need charity. I mean, you know, same pulses. If you don't have charity, you got nothing.

• 1:25:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, well, every wedding service in the country.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:25:14Tucker Carlson?

  One Corinthians 13. So, no, I think that's exactly right. But I just wonder, as like a political matter, here's a few of the things that I sense. People feel free to say what they think in a way that is so inspiring and great and refreshing, but also a little shocking because what they think is like not what they're supposed to think at all, or have been supposed to think.

• 1:25:38Tucker Carlson?

  I feel like there's a recognition that the whole, like, let's put women in charge of everything, just didn't work.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  Cracker Barrel didn't work out?

• 1:25:45Tucker Carlson?

  It didn't work. Female leadership just didn't work. I mean, I guess I wanted it to work. I don't know how I felt about it, but it didn't work. And people feel free to say that. There's also, I have noticed from talking to younger people, a recognition that the democracy just kind of isn't working, or our conception of democracy. I don't meet really anybody who uses the term democracy non-ironically.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:26:09Tucker Carlson?

  Do you?

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  Well, when you go back to the framers of our Constitution, you'll recognize that they use the phrase democracy in a derisive way and as a warning of impending peril. Because even the notion that our country is a liberal democracy, that is a self-conception that came up in the 20th century. It started a little bit in the 30s. It really took off after the World War, and then it reaches its peak in the 80s. That's when it gets escape velocity. We're not a liberal democracy. We're, we have a democratic element, a healthy democratic element to our country. And actually, in large part, I think it comes in because of Tocqueville's great book, Democracy in America.

• 1:26:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  Best study of America ever. But, but even there, our regime is a mixed regime. Our regime has a strong democratic element. As it was initially instituted, it has an aristocratic element in the Senate, and it has a monarchical element in the President. So you even think today, of all the kings around the world. The President of the United States probably has more practical, monarchical authority than, say, King Charles, right? Adrian Vermeule made this point the other day. I'm pretty sure the President of the United States is a more robust king than like the King of Norway or whatever. And so our regime, this was intentional, by the way, and it's outlined as the ideal regime in the Summa Theologia, but it goes all the way back to Polypius, this notion

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  that there's a cycle of regimes because it's a fallen world and so maybe you have a monarchy, but it's going to degrade over time and it's going to become a tyranny. What's the difference between a monarchy and a tyranny? A monarchy is for the common good, tyranny is for private interest. You can have an aristocracy, you know, government by lots of, you know, a small number of good people, that will degrade into an oligarchy. I think we've seen a lot of that in recent years. Common good versus private interest. And you can have a democracy, and a democracy can be quite good, you know, the virtue of the early American republic, that can degrade into a kind of mob rule where it's just people pulling for their own factions and their own private interests. And so you're going to have this cycle of revolutions that's going to go on. What the framers of the Constitution tried to do was escape that cycle by instituting

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  a mixed regime, no matter what they called it, a republic if you can keep it, or a constitutional system or whatever. And it has held pretty well. It has been increasingly democratized, so it's probably like leaned a little bit too much onto that side. Trump, I think, now is trying to restore, and this is part of a program that had been going on for decades, restore a little bit more executive authority to balance the whole thing out. But regimes fall, you know, that's the norm in world history. And so we are at a real risk of that if we don't correct some of the degradations in our own regime.

• 1:28:46Tucker Carlson?

  So what would that mean? What degradation seem to be corrected in order for stalled revolution?

• 1:28:50Speaker 03

  Well, here's one. The 17th Amendment.

• 1:28:52Tucker Carlson?

  I do feel like we're, this country's much more volatile than people publicly acknowledge.

• 1:28:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. The 17th Amendment creates direct election of senators. Today, we say, what would be wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with it. It's more democracy, isn't that good?

• 1:29:04Tucker Carlson?

  Have you met senators?

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  I've met a lot of senators.

• 1:29:08Tucker Carlson?

  It's the densest collection of douchebags and liars and sex freaks I've ever met in my life. I mean it.

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  And just wait till you go to the House.

• 1:29:15Tucker Carlson?

  I worked in television. I feel like there are more normal House members, but the Senate, I mean, there are some exceptions who guys I like and a lot, but only a handful.

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  I like the press. Listen, some of my best friends are senators, but a lot of them.

• 1:29:29Tucker Carlson?

  I was just with, I'm friends with a couple of them and I say, well, these guys are freaks, man. They're all freaks. Like John Cornyn, what's his search history?

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  No, I'm serious. I actually don't know John Cornyn.

• 1:29:40Tucker Carlson?

  If you had a hold of that guy's iPhone, like what would you find? Any of these people, Ted Cruz?

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  I love Ted.

• 1:29:47Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  I love, he's a good friend of mine.

• 1:29:49Tucker Carlson?

  He is. Okay. But I get, but I'm just saying, I'll leave Ted out. I'm not going to attack Ted. I've always liked his wife, but I'm just, I don't know. Yeah, it's not working.

• 1:29:57Speaker 03

  It's not, it's not. And think about how these guys got elected. These guys, it used to be they would be elected by the states, which meant that the states had a role in the government. You know, we're supposed to have states.

• 1:30:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  We don't really have states.

• 1:30:08Tucker Carlson?

  No, we certainly don't.

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  They're kind of all vassals for this imperial blob of bureaucracy. But

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  why did we lose that? Antonin Scalia said this to me when I was a student. I got to meet him a couple of times undergrad. And he said, we asked him about states rights. He said, why are you asking me about states rights? I'm a fed. I'm a fed. What do I care about states rights? You got rid of your states rights in the progressive amendments when you had the direct election of senators. That's states rights are done.

• 1:30:34Tucker Carlson?

  The civil rights movement killed it.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Civil rights movement killed it. Interpret the implementation of this. I mean, every, every government office has a civil rights division now. It's like a Christopher Caldwell, an excellent guest on your show.

• 1:30:44Tucker Carlson?

  Wonderful, wonderful guy.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  His, his book, Age of Entitlement, basically proves this, this thesis that there's a parallel constitution, which is in tension with the old constitution. So you do have a crisis of regime that's coming up. And

• 1:30:59Tucker Carlson?

  How does that play out?

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  I hope peacefully. I really hope. I think it can play out peacefully. You know, some people on the right, they'll say, we, I want a civil war. You heard this a lot during BLM and COVID. So I want a civil war. On the left and the right, they say, I don't want a civil war. If there's a civil war, I'm going to have to like shoot my cousins. Do you, you know what you're saying? I want a civil war. Do you know what a civil war is like? So you know Dante is one of my favorite writers. Civil War ruined his life. He said, it's like the worst thing that can happen because the whole point of a political community is to secure peace and order for the common good so that we can flourish. And when you crack that, I mean, the whole political community is just an extension of a family.

• 1:31:38Tucker Carlson?

  The Spanish Civil War ended 85 years ago. And then you go to Spain now, they're still mad about it. It still divides that country.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:31:47Tucker Carlson?

  Greece is the same way.

• 1:31:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have to be angry that the communists were defeated. The Bolsheviks who were killing priests and raping.

• 1:31:54Tucker Carlson?

  Spain is a uniquely sad country. It's a wonderful country, wonderful people, but oh my gosh.

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:00Tucker Carlson?

  They had a, that was demonic, obviously.

• 1:32:02Speaker 03

  Obviously.

• 1:32:04Tucker Carlson?

  They began by shooting a statue of Jesus. So that was kind of a sign, but yeah, and every evil person in the United States joined.

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  And yes, what is the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?

• 1:32:14Tucker Carlson?

  Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  I remember when I was a kid, I heard that if some guy died, he was in the Abraham Lincoln. I said, oh, is it Abraham Lincoln Brigade? I looked into it. I said, he's a communist.

• 1:32:22Tucker Carlson?

  Was Stalinist.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:32:23Tucker Carlson?

  Stalinist, like the entire American left was Stalinist.

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  This is why, talk about the changes in the 60s into the 70s. You know, this is why they had to get Nixon. They never forgave Richard Nixon because he, he got Alger Hiss. Richard Nixon knew that there were actual communists in the government at the highest levels of the State Department, helping to found the United Nations. And he knew it and he got him dead and he believed Whitaker Chambers and he got him dead to rights. They never forgave him for it.

• 1:32:49Tucker Carlson?

  That's totally true. And they made up this whole fake scandal and took out the most popular president in American history.

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:32:55Tucker Carlson?

  No, I know. It's very distra- but anyway, the, I guess the point is a civil war has, if our own civil war, it's only finally kind of cooling down.

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  And we're relitigating it.

• 1:33:06Tucker Carlson?

  Well, cause reconstruction never really ended.

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:33:08Tucker Carlson?

  Let's just humiliate the South and turn its cities into slums, which we've done. So yeah, no, it's all, we don't want a civil war.

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  We don't want a civil.

• 1:33:16Tucker Carlson?

  So how do we avoid that?

• 1:33:18Speaker 03

  Well, I, I think we need a strong leadership, which we are getting in Trump. We actually do have an executive who, on the right, who's willing to do things. This has been a big problem for the right because of ideologies that were essentially liberal, where the, the right said, you need to elect us so that we do nothing. That was their explicit pitch. If you elect me, I won't do anything because I want to principally, with great dignity and integrity and principles, give away all the power. Because if I ever do anything, then the minute the Democrats come into office, they might do all the things they've been doing for 50 years. So we can't have that.

• 1:33:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, it was National Review Republicanism. I was there for that.

• 1:33:57Speaker 03

  I mean Buckley, Buckley at least, I mean Buckley defended McCarthy for goodness sakes.

• 1:34:01Tucker Carlson?

  He did. He absolutely did.

• 1:34:03Speaker 03

  This is

• 1:34:03Tucker Carlson?

  Then he turned on him, but yeah.

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  At a certain point, it was politically incorrect. But, but you think of those early days Brent Bozell, you know, who Ghost wrote Conscience of a Conservative, an amazing book.

• 1:34:15Tucker Carlson?

  Well Brent Bozell meant it. Right. So he was exiled. Cause he really meant it. He was mentally ill. Okay.

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  And he went over in the, after the Spanish Civil War.

• 1:34:24Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know. Raised his family in Franco Spain. No, I know. He meant it.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  But, but that, look, there's always been this hodgepodge on the right of disparate groups, as you well know, that like, don't totally make sense together. And so you have the traditional conservatives, well, the fusionist coalition was the traditional conservatives and the libertarians and some warhawk democrats who wanted to take down the Soviet Union.

• 1:34:46Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:34:46Speaker 03

  And I think it made sense at the time. It, you know, common enemy in the Soviet Union.

• 1:34:50Tucker Carlson?

  I was there for that.

• 1:34:51Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:34:52Tucker Carlson?

  And I read commentary every month growing up. We got it at home. Yes, we did.

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  You don't have any copies around here anymore. I don't know where.

• 1:34:58Tucker Carlson?

  I was raised on commentary. I mean, we're like this Protestant family getting the official publication of the American Jewish Committee. I read every issue, Archibald Tyn, Ruth, Visser, whatever. I think they'll hate me now, but whatever. I grew up reading that.

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  One of my favorite lines recently was from Norman Pudhoretz, who said, he said, "You're the founder of neoconservatism." He said, "No, no. I'm so old that I'm now a paleo neoconservative." I'm too old for that. And this is, you know, there's the paleos and the neos and the libertarians and the traditionalists and the this is in it. And obscure political monikers are the right wing version of gender pronouns.

• 1:35:32Tucker Carlson?

  No, it's totally right.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  Everyone's got his own thing. And this is what I love about Trump. Is Trump, is Trump an ideologue?

• 1:35:40Tucker Carlson?

  I know.

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  Do you, what, what kind of ism does Trump ascribe to?

• 1:35:43Tucker Carlson?

  Trumpism.

• 1:35:44Speaker 03

  Trump, Trump is, that's what he ascribes to. Americanism, I guess. I don't know. This is a man who's brought together a disparate coalition of like weirdo crunchy hippies and bow tie wearing traditionalists and libertarians and Silicon Valley tech futurists. And like, it's the craziest coalition ever.

• 1:36:00Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  And he has brought them together and won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years as a Republican. And it's, it's an amazing thing to see in action because he's got a vision and he's just a force of nature. And so the question, I think on a lot of our minds, now, I think this is what all this Trump is dead discourse is about. There was this viral meme that Trump died because he got a bruise on his hand or something. He went to play golf one day, they said he was dead.

• 1:36:20Tucker Carlson?

  No, he's still around.

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  He's around.

• 1:36:22Tucker Carlson?

  I've verified that, yes, he's still around.

• 1:36:24Speaker 03

  And I think a lot of that is an anxiety of, wow, we got this reprieve from all the craziness and all the decay and all the division. And we were actually, we won the popular vote, you know, things are on track. And what happens next?

• 1:36:38Tucker Carlson?

  When the patriarch's gone? Well, I mean, you know, what happens in families when the?

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Tucker Carlson?

  Um, it can be really hard.

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:36:47Tucker Carlson?

  It can be really hard. I, I have a lot of confidence in J D Vance.

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  Yes, I, I think he's quite clearly at this point set up the vice president as the successor.

• 1:36:56Tucker Carlson?

  I hope that's right.

• 1:36:57Speaker 03

  It seems like in the cabinet meeting the other day, he said, look, Rubio's done a great job in the 15 jobs that he's doing in the admin.

• 1:37:03Tucker Carlson?

  At least.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  At least 15. And, but he said in the cabinet meeting the other day, and I noticed it and I, no one, no one around me seemed to have heard this line. He goes, everyone was talking about what a great job Rubio was doing. And he said, wow, Marco, you've, you've just been amazing. I frankly, I hope you never run for another office because I want you to do this for the rest of your life. And I said, well, that, that seems like a win. If those are the two most, not papable, they're most like presidential obele, you know, of the, for 2028. So that seems like he's saying, no, the vice president is my natural successor.

• 1:37:32Tucker Carlson?

  Trump drops these bombs in every conversation you have with him. I, I don't, I don't, I haven't interviewed him that many times because it's so difficult.

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  Dizzying.

• 1:37:41Tucker Carlson?

  We've been dizzying because he does the weave famously, but every time I've interviewed him, like three days later, I'll think, what, did he just say that right in the middle of the, right?

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yesterday, he was doing an interview with the Daily Caller. Right in the middle of the interview, he was talking about Israel and I love Israel and no one's done more for Israel than I've done and, you know, rooting for Israel, he's very pro-Israel, of course. And then he goes,

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  They used to own Congress or whatever.

• 1:38:04Tucker Carlson?

  He said that. He goes, you know, the Israel lobby is totally control Congress like nobody else. That's not true anymore. I'm like, did you just say that?

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was amazing. I remember in the

• 1:38:16Tucker Carlson?

  What?

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  The interview or the press conference with Netanyahu, this was months ago. And I don't think I was taken in by theatricality. I think this was real. When he said, and look, what we're gonna do is, the United States is gonna take over Gaza. And you look at Netanyahu and he sort of, he looks at Trump, he kind of looks nervously at the audience. He's kind of laughing, but kind of not laughing. And he's, what is it? He goes, we're gonna take over Gaza. We're gonna build a big Trump casino there, whatever. I don't know what he's gonna do. You know, hey, we're gonna build, it's gonna be beautiful. It's gonna be the Riviera of the Middle East. And it was, it was, it was so apparently out of left field. And I'm not even convinced he's totally sincere on that. I think he's a great negotiator and he's working other angles.

• 1:38:55Tucker Carlson?

  It was weird. I was actually in the Middle East that day when that happened. And I was eating with a bunch of, you know, local residents who run the government in the country it was in. And I'm like, did, what, you know, and I was actually sitting at the table and they played that. Everyone's staring at this. And I thought, I don't know, what the hell is that?

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:39:14Tucker Carlson?

  What do we have to do with Gaza? Like, my instinct is always like, we got nothing to do with this. I'm out.

• 1:39:19Speaker 03

  I'm good.

• 1:39:19Tucker Carlson?

  You know, it's like when girls fight, like, I don't want to get involved.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  I'll take Monica. I'll take the French Riviera. I don't need the Gaza Riviera.

• 1:39:25Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly right. But their reaction was, is I have no idea if this is true or not, but it was so interesting. They're sophisticated, very sophisticated. And they're like, oh, no, that's an attack on Netanyahu.

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:39:37Tucker Carlson?

  That was their gut reaction. He's basically tweaking Netanyahu.

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  It wasn't, it wasn't a, you know, a haymaker. It wasn't, he wasn't clobbering on that. It was a little poke. And I think-

• 1:39:48Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think that too?

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  Yes, I think it was a little poke.

• 1:39:50Tucker Carlson?

  In what way?

• 1:39:52Speaker 03

  In the sense that it's, in the cabinet meeting the other day, Trump was asked, he said, you promised that this war would be over permanently in five seconds after you were inaugurated. And so when are we going to get a definitive conclusion to the war? And he laughs. Definitive, definitive conclusion. He turns to Steve Wykow, he says, hey Steve, how long this, this, this conflict, this has been going on thousands of years, is it? Yeah, there's no definitive conclusion. We're just trying to stop the bloodshed. We're trying to establish some kind of peace. And it's this brilliant move because in what other way are you going to get the Israelis and the Arab League and the, and the Iranian regime

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  all united in not liking this one plan? It's by suggesting, we're gonna go in and take it. And, and so, you know, it's, it's a, it's a basically an intractable situation. There will not be any permanent resolution probably until the second coming. So what you want to do is just establish some modicum of political order. What I would especially like to see happen is a preservation of the holy sites and, you know, pilgrimage access and all that.

• 1:40:54Tucker Carlson?

  But we should demand that. I mean, that's not even, it's like, no one owns Jerusalem. Sorry.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. But there's easier said than done in a messy neck of the woods.

• 1:41:05Tucker Carlson?

  Well, and you're paying for it. You can just be like, look, our first demand is Christians need to be able to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  So of course, of course.

• 1:41:11Tucker Carlson?

  Well, you know, I don't know.

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  I don't know. It seems to me that the, the holy sites still seem to be okay. In Gaza, there was unfortunately the attack on Saint Perfurius, which I grant was accidental. I don't think it was, I don't, I don't see why from a strategic perspective, it would be beneficial to the Israelis to like particularly stick a finger in the eye of the Christians when America is your last political protector.

• 1:41:36Tucker Carlson?

  There's been a lot of it. I don't know. I don't understand it. I think it's self-destructive behavior, but, but what I care about is the effect on Christians and that's just not, not good at all.

• 1:41:44Speaker 03

  Well, and you have to ask yourself too, okay, what's the conclusion? You could either have the state of Israel take over Gaza again. Had Gaza from what, 67 until 05, then just gave it away in 05. Hamas gets elected. Hamas runs it for a little bit. And then there's the October 7th attack. Israel's gonna say now, okay, this is an unacceptable security risk. We're not dealing with this anymore. So you could have Israel take it over. That's going to be probably an unsatisfactory resolution.

• 1:42:11Speaker 03

  You could have the Arab League take it over, some of Egypt take it over. I don't, I don't know that they really want to do it. No one wants to touch that hot potato. You could have, and then Trump just drops out of the air and he says, yeah, we're taking it and we're going to develop condominiums and we're going to ship all of the residents to South Sudan. That was floated, I think, in the Israeli government, South Sudan, the one place on earth that's less pleasant than Gaza. And I don't think that's going to work out well at all. And, and what, what is, I think Trump is totally sincere in what he says. He goes, my solution here is not some permanent answer that will totally make the Israelis happy and totally irritate all the Arabs and the Persians. My answer is not going to totally make the Israelis unhappy and totally satisfy Egypt or whatever, the Arab

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

  League. It's, I just want some semblance of peace, which is where I feel totally vindicated on this. I've said for years, when everyone is calling Trump the N-word, you know, they always call him the N-word, a nationalist?

• 1:43:07Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  Always. They call him the N-word. And I said, I don't really think he's a nationalist. He loves the nation. He's a great patriot. He supports strong borders. But I don't think he's really a nationalist. I think he's kind of an imperialist. He wants to acquire Greenland and invade Canada. I don't, that's not generally what like yeoman farmers do.

• 1:43:25Tucker Carlson?

  No, no, that's a Teddy Roosevelt move.

• 1:43:28Speaker 03

  Yes. I think his vision of America first is that America will take due care to prioritize her national interests, part of which is accepting the political reality that we're the global hegemon and we need to maintain some modicum of world order. And this goes back to the really, a really ancient conception of the political order, which is that the purpose of empire is to just have peace and order. This is, you know, this is in the Aeneid and book six of the Aeneid, Aeneas goes down to his dad in the underworld and, and the dad gives him this whole view of what's going to happen to Rome. And he says, you know, look, different peoples are given different arts. The, I don't know, the Greeks are good

• 1:44:10Speaker 03

  at making soufflaki. The, the Chinese are good at making bad soup and the Romans.

• 1:44:16Tucker Carlson?

  Awful soup.

• 1:44:17Speaker 03

  Awful. I have not, you know, I've, I've never even tried. The pangolin is good. I've never tried the bat. He says, the Romans, their art is to govern. And it's, it's not, governing is not like fun. It's not the most glorious necessarily thing, you know, in some ways it'd be more fun to be a writer, be more fun to be a poet, be more fun to go, but that's what the Romans are given is to govern. And it's just a job in the world and someone's got to do it. And you just need to establish relative peace and protect the rights of nations and just keep on keeping on.

• 1:44:47Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think we're suited for that?

• 1:44:49Speaker 03

  I think, I think Trump is quite suited for it as a, as an individual, as a national leader. Is America suited for it? It's not how we started. We weren't, we weren't looking for it when the country began, but we got it.

• 1:45:01Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, I, I totally agree. Someone's got to be dad. I mean, that is absolutely just the nature of man and there's no getting around it with, in shirking, it doesn't make it go away. So I completely agree with that. That's where I do agree with the neocons, I guess.

• 1:45:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, kind of. Yeah. But, but in a different way, like, cause the neocons at their most extreme would say, we have an obligation because of the demands of history with a capital H to spread liberal democracy around the world.

• 1:45:29Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's just stupid.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 1:45:31Tucker Carlson?

  But like the smart, like I remember David Brooks, who was impressive. I know it's hard to believe, but at one point, when I knew him 30 years ago, was smart. And he, he would say, look, you know, someone's got to take control because there has to be order at the center. And I, that's not stupid. Where I began to really hate the neocons, where my whole politics began to revolve around opposing them as an ideology, not as, not as individuals, but just the idea is bad.

• 1:45:59Speaker 03

  Some of the individuals, some of them.

• 1:46:02Tucker Carlson?

  John Pateras. But, uh, no, it's when I went to Iraq. And the main takeaway for me is we're not good at it.

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:10Tucker Carlson?

  We're just like leaving aside the dumb spread democracy and all that nonsense, turn Baghdad into Belgium was stupid. But what's not stupid is the idea that you can't have disorder because it metastasizes. And getting there, my assessment, and it has not changed in 25 years, is we're just not, we're not suited for this at all, because we don't have the self-confidence required to do it, because our society at its core is really thin. There's nothing really there, actually, other than some distorted version of capitalism, which is kind of disgusting.

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  Do you think that was true, say, in the 50s and 60s, and it's changed?

• 1:46:45Tucker Carlson?

  I think the fight, the Cold War, the battle against the Soviets, gave a kind of clarity and purpose. But even then, you know, the US sided with the Viet Minh, actually, in 1954, at Dien Bien Phu, against the French. Like, there was never really a kind of consistent, that's little known, yeah, but not even grand strategy, but like a consistent worldview or instinct. Like, the English, for all their many faults, at the height of empire, the height of the Victorian period, like, they really believed they were superior. Now, we deride that as racist, but you have to have that. You have to believe my way is the better way, or why are we doing this in the first place? To extract minerals? Like, that's not,

• 1:47:29Tucker Carlson?

  over time, people can't sustain that. You really have to have an evangelical spirit, and we don't have that.

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  Well, and, and think about what Trump's been knocked for, especially in the recent Alaska summit. He's been knocked for shaking hands with Putin, and, you know, being nice to him. And I think, well, hold on, we've tried the other way. Bush, W. Bush, tried to talk a little tough, or tried to be sweet, and then talk tough. And, and Putin invaded Georgia. And then Obama, oh, man, he talked tough. After the reset failed, and Hillary Clinton couldn't spell a simple word in Russian, then that failed, and he talked really tough. Oh, boy, was he tough. And Putin invaded into Crimea. And then you had Trump, and everyone just kind of chilled. And then you had Biden, man, no one talked tougher than Biden, huh? Oh, didn't he have such moral clarity? And Putin invaded further into Ukraine. The world order collapsed.

• 1:48:17Tucker Carlson?

  Moral clarity thing is the clearest. If you think that Joe Biden was a better leader or a better man than Vladimir Putin, like, I don't even know what to say to you. That's insane. There's by no measure, by no measure, did Joe Biden's country...

• 1:48:31Tucker Carlson?

  The people he solemnly swore to help and defend, did they thrive? No, they withered. Putin, who's been there for 25 years, his country's improved, the people are happier. They like him, actually.

• 1:48:43Speaker 03

  The war's been a little tough on Putin.

• 1:48:44Tucker Carlson?

  Of course it's been tough, of course it's been tough.

• 1:48:47Speaker 03

  I'd be curious about public opinion today, this far into the war.

• 1:48:50Tucker Carlson?

  Well, actually, it's measured a lot. Yeah, look it up. And you can say, oh, that's all a lie. Okay, well, show me one.

• 1:48:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:57Tucker Carlson?

  Go there. And look, I'm not moving to Russia, but I mean, Putin has been the most effective leader in my lifetime. I can't think of a more effective one.

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  He's been a very stable leader for Russia.

• 1:49:10Tucker Carlson?

  But why is he more evil than Joe Biden?

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, well.

• 1:49:14Tucker Carlson?

  I can't even conceptualize that, like.

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  You know, you could say, look, I don't know his, I don't know his religious views, but he's promoted Christianity within Russia.

• 1:49:24Tucker Carlson?

  Aggressively.

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  Yes, to combat liberalism and all these other forces. Joe Biden has imprisoned pro-lifers and sued nuts.

• 1:49:32Tucker Carlson?

  Well, exactly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, whatever.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  But I guess the reason that I kind of pull away a little bit from.

• 1:49:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  The, this is kind of neocon-y to me, is the sort of the purely good and evil.

• 1:49:43Tucker Carlson?

  I totally agree with that.

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  And to me, I think, well, look, I'm on the side of my country, even if Joe Biden is running it, which is a great pity of his. And I am because it's.

• 1:49:53Tucker Carlson?

  Dude, I'm with you.

• 1:49:54Speaker 03

  Of course. Patriotism is an extension of filial piety, just like, just like, you know, all liberalism comes down to saying, screw you dad, like I hate my mom or whatever. And I think, no, no, we are called to respect our parents and to love our countries. And Russia has interests that are not aligned with ours. And they have missiles pointed at us. And you think, well, okay, Putin, for all of his sins, Putin is defending the interests of Russia. And I think there was a sense, look, Biden would say he was defending the interests of the United States or NATO or whatever. He didn't do a very good job at it, at the very.

• 1:50:26Tucker Carlson?

  By the way, NATO, yeah, exactly.

• 1:50:28Speaker 03

  And this is why, this is why you'll notice Trump doesn't use this good and evil language all the time. And the way he talks about Putin, he says, look, Putin has interests, he has hard interests.

• 1:50:35Tucker Carlson?

  That's how I feel.

• 1:50:36Speaker 03

  And I have hard interests. And I'm good, if I can be a little diplomatic with him, I'm going to do it. I'm reminded of, do you remember the Jeffrey Goldberg article in The Atlantic? Which said, uh, it was the Obama doctrine. This is back in 2016.

• 1:50:49Tucker Carlson?

  Never forget it.

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  This piece, and it, what's so funny now is.

• 1:50:53Tucker Carlson?

  It was a fascinating piece.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  Fascinating piece.

• 1:50:55Tucker Carlson?

  Goldberg is a liar. I know him and one of the most dishonest people I've ever met. Um, truly dishonest, but a very talented pro stylist.

• 1:51:04Speaker 03

  Yes. And the, it's like a.

• 1:51:05Tucker Carlson?

  An interesting reporter. Oh, I read, I read every word of that piece.

• 1:51:09Speaker 03

  In that piece, they are lauding Obama for saying things like Russia's always going to have.

• 1:51:13Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I remember. Oh, I remember.

• 1:51:15Speaker 03

  Russia's, they're always going to have escalatory power. Trump says the exact same thing and all these.

• 1:51:19Tucker Carlson?

  By the way, Obama, who I think kind of wrecked America, can't, comes off as pretty reasonable in that piece. Just being honest.

• 1:51:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:51:27Tucker Carlson?

  If you read that piece now and just like take Obama out and just put another name in there. It's like, I kind of agree with most of this.

• 1:51:33Speaker 03

  And Trump is saying most of those.

• 1:51:34Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  And there's one big difference. Trump can actually implement it and Obama couldn't really implement it.

• 1:51:40Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, of course.

• 1:51:41Speaker 03

  The world order was fraying under him. And so it is so ironic that these people who, you know, accused Trump of being like a KGB agent or whatever, that these people would, would knock Trump for saying the same thing that they were, they were parroting for years.

• 1:51:54Tucker Carlson?

  They're all just children. Like, these are not, they're the people who told you that Russia was a gas station with nuclear weapons. People like John McCain, like 95 IQ and his sad idiot daughter. I mean, these are just like not.

• 1:52:07Speaker 03

  I've just gotten along with the.

• 1:52:09Tucker Carlson?

  No, no, I know. She's fine. She's fine. I mean, McCain was charming in his, I mean, I love McCain actually. Well, when I, when I knew him, um, well, but very charming guy, but like.

• 1:52:19Speaker 03

  He did.

• 1:52:19Tucker Carlson?

  Not a serious person at all.

• 1:52:21Speaker 03

  Killed the repeal of Obamacare, which is very difficult to get over.

• 1:52:24Tucker Carlson?

  But he just wasn't serious. He's just, he was just a shallow wasp.

• 1:52:27Speaker 03

  And he was, he was one of the last of the true hawkish anti Russia, you know, coming out of the Cold War, though he was younger. Just you've, you just got a bomb. You just, you just gotta, you know, implement your will.

• 1:52:42Tucker Carlson?

  This deep. I mean, I spent a lot of time talking to the guy on the road, traveled to various countries with him, knew him, I think, as well as I've ever known a politician. And there was so much to like about the guy. He just was charming. Very aristocratic bearing, hilarious, vulgar in a way that I always enjoy. But if you pushed him on any issue, like he hadn't spent 15 minutes thinking about anything.

• 1:53:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, this is something you notice on Capitol Hill generally is there are some people who are very intelligent and decently well read. A lot of them, though, their skill is not doing a lot of reading. You know, that's not the skill that's like

• 1:53:19Tucker Carlson?

  Dude, I went to boarding school. I know what that is. That's like memorize three famous quotes, throw them out like you've read the whole book.

• 1:53:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:53:27Tucker Carlson?

  And that was McCain, man. He on any question, including the foreign policy questions he was supposedly an expert on, he knew nothing. To say Russia's a gas station with nuclear weapons, like you're, you're an idiot.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  This is the nation of, you know, like Tolstoy.

• 1:53:42Tucker Carlson?

  Like, I've got the Winter Palace.

• 1:53:43Speaker 03

  Dostoyevsky.

• 1:53:44Tucker Carlson?

  St. Petersburg, great, all right. There's no city in Europe, there's certainly no city in the United States that approaches their two main cities.

• 1:53:52Speaker 03

  This is what was fascinating. I mean, I'm now remembering.

• 1:53:55Tucker Carlson?

  It's a fact.

• 1:53:56Speaker 03

  And the fact that you got to interview Putin.

• 1:53:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:58Speaker 03

  And when you listen to that interview, this is a man, say what you will about his yarn that he spun. It was a very compelling yarn.

• 1:54:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  He had a view of his own country. There was a very strong view. And I wonder, look, Trump, in his own way, tells a story about America. He hugs the flag, he kisses the flag, he's got it really in his gut. How many American statesmen today, after all these decades of just dissolution and hatred of country, how many of them can tell a compelling story about what the country is, why we ought to love the country beyond mere filial piety, and where we're going? How many of them are there?

• 1:54:34Tucker Carlson?

  It's hard. I mean, because the, you know, who are the American people? That's, that's the question. And that's what really bothers me as someone who is not a race guy. And I don't think your DNA should determine the course of your life or the nation you live in. I just don't, I'm American. I'm from California. I don't feel that way. However, all of history suggests I'm wrong. Because when Putin talks about Russia, he's talking about the Russian people.

• 1:55:03Speaker 03

  Whose DNA you can map and they're the indigenous population.

• 1:55:05Tucker Carlson?

  He's not talking about the Chechenians, right?

• 1:55:06Speaker 03

  He's not, no.

• 1:55:07Tucker Carlson?

  No, by the way, he gets along with them really well.

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:09Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's the other thing. I mean, he's got 20% Muslim population. He's promoting Christianity, but the Muslims all like him? Like, how do you do that?

• 1:55:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:55:15Tucker Carlson?

  Don't try that at home. That's hard.

• 1:55:17Speaker 03

  And, and it's a skill that is, I mean, this is why I keep coming back to, to empire is because our country looks more like an empire than it does like a yeoman republic. Russia certainly looks like an empire, you know, it's got all, it's spanning a continent. It has all these peoples. And, and so on the, this question, which is-

• 1:55:31Tucker Carlson?

  But we don't even know who lives here.

• 1:55:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:34Tucker Carlson?

  Trump said to me recently, we think there are about maybe 50 million people here illegally.

• 1:55:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:39Tucker Carlson?

  50 million? I mean, but who, no one knows, the President of the United States doesn't really know. We've got facial recognition technology, but somehow we can't know who lives here.

• 1:55:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:55:46Tucker Carlson?

  And so when you talk about my country, are people who, you can't even visualize who they are.

• 1:55:51Speaker 03

  Yes. And, and this, this gets, I mean, you just said, look, I'm not a race guy.

• 1:55:54Tucker Carlson?

  I'm not a race guy, actually.

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  But when you-

• 1:55:56Tucker Carlson?

  I'm a sexist, not a racist. I always say that. No one believes me.

• 1:55:59Speaker 03

  I think about sex all the time, actually.

• 1:56:02Tucker Carlson?

  I do, too.

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  I, but when you, when you think, what is America now, you know, in 2025? There was this line where it's, America's just an idea, you know, or diversity is our strength, or what, all these kinds of slogans from the nineties and 2000s. You think, well, no, it's not, a country's not just an idea. There is a critical aspect, but it's not like an idea floating in outer space. What are you talking about? And so there has to be a real grappling with, okay, well, look, a country's also geography. You know, like there is no America without the rivers, for instance, okay? You know, it's not, the rivers aren't just an idea.

• 1:56:34Tucker Carlson?

  You're speaking to a fly fisherman now, Mr. Knowles.

• 1:56:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not a country without trout. It's not, it's not a country without the oceans. And it's, it's not a country without people. And, and this, this also is where-

• 1:56:44Tucker Carlson?

  If someone can just like show up from Delhi and like start lecturing me about American values.

• 1:56:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:56:52Tucker Carlson?

  Can't even speak American English and no one says anything like, hey, son, settle down. You just got here. Don't start lecturing someone whose family's been here 400 years about what America is. Then there's kind of no America, actually, at that point.

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  Of course. And, and so this is where even the grappling-

• 1:57:09Tucker Carlson?

  It's scary.

• 1:57:09Speaker 03

  Even the grappling with ethnicity, you know, like what, we, we've come out of this very liberal period where we have been told there's no such thing as ethnicity or race or anything like that. And-

• 1:57:20Tucker Carlson?

  Except it, but simultaneously it's the most important thing.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:23Tucker Carlson?

  All that matters is race, but it doesn't exist.

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  Yes. And the reality is, again, to this kind of via media.

• 1:57:31Speaker 03

  It's okay. It's okay when Joe DiMaggio hit a homerun. It's okay that the Italian Americans in New York got a special little thrill out of that. It's okay. They say, oh, that guy kind of looks like me. And he hit that homerun. That's kind of, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with recognizing that there are differences between peoples. The, there are two simultaneous errors, which we fall into. It seems actually at the same time, which is we say ethnicity means nothing at all whatsoever. And ethnicity is totally deterministic and means everything. And the reality is, I mean, this is where our Christian heritage, Christianity, which animates the whole civilization comes in, you say, no, we are in a very real way, all children of God. Like in a very real way, there's only one race, the human race, or whatever like the liberals like to say.

• 1:58:14Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:58:15Speaker 03

  There is, there is, that is true. And also there is vibrant diversity among peoples, and that's fine to acknowledge.

• 1:58:20Tucker Carlson?

  God created that.

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  God created that.

• 1:58:22Tucker Carlson?

  Created different peoples.

• 1:58:23Speaker 03

  As long as that is ordered toward charity, as long as a proper love of that which is similar to one is, is not ordered toward cruelty or, and is ordered within charity for the common good, yeah, that's called having a country, of course. When, is, we're not allowed to say that now?

• 1:58:41Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I just feel like it's gotten, um, I don't know. They've been so tough on whites for so long.

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  Yes, of course.

• 1:58:48Tucker Carlson?

  So cruel to whites that I think like, there's a crazy backlash coming.

• 1:58:53Speaker 03

  Without question.

• 1:58:54Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, well deserved backlash.

• 1:58:55Speaker 03

  It's, it's already happening.

• 1:58:57Tucker Carlson?

  Is it?

• 1:58:57Speaker 03

  I think so. And you know, as Tucker, you know, I'm part Sicilian.

• 1:59:01Tucker Carlson?

  Not a non-white people.

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  A non-white, racially liminal people, we Sicilians.

• 1:59:06Tucker Carlson?

  I love Sicilians.

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  Children of the Mesopotamia, yes. And so you, you get a kind of look at it, which is, I mean, even early on, I get these WASP ancestors and I got some Irish ancestors in there. The Italians came in a little bit later. And so there's a little, little mixing of all of Europe in there. And

• 1:59:23Speaker 03

  The reality is, in order to have a, like, a sense of a country, you do need to have some kind of a sense of a common people. And so to your point on the guy from Delhi, it's not even that the guy from Delhi can't be like quite American three generations from now, but you can't, you can't just like land in a place. And because you read a book about America or because you watched a YouTube video, you just totally get America. To have a country is to have a lived experience that is passed, sometimes ineffably, you know, without words from generation to generation. I'm looking around your house here. I mean, there's pretty old stuff and you just kind of do it. And there are habits that are inculcated in peoples.

• 2:00:07Speaker 03

  And there are inclinations that the American people have, observed by Tocqueville back in the 19th century, that they're not even aware of, that it takes some random Frenchman to come in and notice it.

• 2:00:16Tucker Carlson?

  I totally agree.

• 2:00:16Speaker 03

  You've got to be very careful.

• 2:00:17Tucker Carlson?

  And I just want to be clear, since I have a million Indian friends and actually like India a lot as a country.

• 2:00:24Speaker 03

  You hate the Indians.

• 2:00:25Tucker Carlson?

  I'm like probably the most pro Indian right winger will ever meet, but sincerely. But it's not, it's, it's not even lecturing, showing up and lecturing me about what it is to be an American. It's showing up and attacking whites.

• 2:00:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Tucker Carlson?

  And boy, did you see a lot of that. And not just, it wasn't just Indians, but like people, immigrants would show up, you know, taking all these benefits from the country and the permanent population here, and then start immediately attacking whites. Now, they attack whites because they were encouraged to do that by a ruling class. Like they got into Stanford.

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  The schools.

• 2:00:57Tucker Carlson?

  Hundred percent. And then they get to Stanford and it's like, oh, you want to succeed, you have to attack the whites. And they just, they're status oriented. All immigrants just like want to fit in and want to do the, get the merit badges that this society demands they get. And one of those merit badges required them to denounce whites. And I felt like that is the most destructive thing.

• 2:01:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:01:17Tucker Carlson?

  That you could ever do.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  You know, I have a solution to this, though. My solution to this, we're always told, you know, it's all just got to be kind of organic from the culture and the people. And that's, politics is purely downstream of culture and whatever. I have a little more of a classical political view of that. I think people respond to incentives.

• 2:01:33Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly right.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  When you mention these institutions, I think, and Trump is very good at this, taking, beating up Harvard, I think was a brilliant political attack. You see some of that in Florida, taking in some of the universities. It's happening around the country. I'll give you a Pete Buttigieg. I don't know Pete Buttigieg.

• 2:01:49Tucker Carlson?

  The fake gay guy?

• 2:01:52Speaker 03

  I have a friend who thinks he's a fake gay.

• 2:01:53Tucker Carlson?

  My gay producer was always like, he's not gay. He was with a girl like 20 minutes ago and like, he wants to be the Democratic nominee. It's like time for a gay guy.

• 2:02:03Speaker 03

  It's playing the long game. I mean, that is, that's going, look.

• 2:02:05Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it's suffering for your art. I'll say that.

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  He, look, just because I don't know him, I know 100 Pete Buttigieg's. I know this character.

• 2:02:15Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I do too.

• 2:02:16Speaker 03

  And he went to the elite school and then he goes to McKinsey and then he does the checks. And I think.

• 2:02:21Tucker Carlson?

  Then find some benighted Midwestern town that he can just like become mayor of.

• 2:02:25Speaker 03

  I'm a mayor now. Talking of the great, I was talking to a big Democrat figure. And he said, you know, say what you will about Pete. He's the greatest careerist we've ever seen. You're mayor of this tiny town. You become the secretary of transportation.

• 2:02:37Tucker Carlson?

  But of course, but the town kind of sucks. Actually, he didn't do a good job. If it didn't have the college, but I've always wanted to interview him. He's never agreed to interview, but I'm going to ask him like some very specific questions about gay sex and see if he can even answer. I doubt he even knows.

• 2:02:51Speaker 03

  Where does?

• 2:02:52Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, no, totally.

• 2:02:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't.

• 2:02:54Tucker Carlson?

  You're not gay dude. Stop.

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  Think about Pete Buttigieg. If we controlled the universities, if we controlled the culture, and if the incentives in the corporations and all of the DEI offices, we can rename them. If all the incentives were not to be like, America hating, gay, liberal.

• 2:03:14Tucker Carlson?

  Totally.

• 2:03:14Speaker 03

  Pete Buttigieg, I am convinced, this is, look, this is purely my gut telling me this. He would be like waving the stars and bars, doing dip. Like whatever incentive were there, he would go to it. And so I think this is where the Trump, a little more muscular view of politics comes in. He says, no, forget about this stupid, like, everything's just going to be organic. That's never how culture has changed. We're going to go in, I'm going to pummel Harvard into the dirt. I'm going to go in, I'm going to pummel these bureaucracy, the Kennedy Center, whatever. And I'm going to create new incentives such that the best and the brightest and the most ambitious are incentivized to like our country and do good stuff.

• 2:03:50Tucker Carlson?

  It's totally right. I'm at the inauguration, January 20, sitting there and it was indoors for, so I can't remember why. But I'm sitting there chatting away, of course, that ex Laura Ingraham, ah, gossiping about Fox. And all of a sudden I look up and there's Jeff Bezos sitting like right in front of me.

• 2:04:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:04:06Tucker Carlson?

  What's Jeff Bezos doing here? And then all these people firing.

• 2:04:08Speaker 03

  Jim Cook, Sundar Pichai.

• 2:04:13Tucker Carlson?

  Wow.

• 2:04:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. I noticed all of a sudden after the inauguration, after the election, really, my phone starts ringing from news networks that have never been interested in talking to me before.

• 2:04:26Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:26Speaker 03

  And all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden, some of the big corporations that we work with, with my show, they're more interested in helping us. And, you know, they want to make sure our experience, I said, oh, this is what power is.

• 2:04:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:38Speaker 03

  And it is incumbent upon statesmen, on the happy occasions that they get power from the people, that they actually use it in a good way and make hay while the sun shines.

• 2:04:49Tucker Carlson?

  So we have a couple of viewer questions. We've never done this before, but, you know, it's the internet.

• 2:04:54Speaker 03

  I'm in.

• 2:04:55Tucker Carlson?

  Okay. Lots of people asked this one, my producer said. Michael Knowles, do you miss working with Candace Owens?

• 2:05:03Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I still see Candace all the time. You know, I'm the godfather to Candace's daughter.

• 2:05:09Tucker Carlson?

  Actually?

• 2:05:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I'm the godfather of Candace's daughter. I'm very good friends with her husband. And, you know, it's kind of weird for me.

• 2:05:15Tucker Carlson?

  I really like her husband.

• 2:05:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have many Mayflower cigars, you know, over the time. And I still, I don't see Candace at work, obviously, anymore. But I do see her at church. She actually goes to the earlier mass than I do, because she converted. You know, she came into the church like a year or something ago. And in fact, I was the godfather to her daughter before she came into the church. And then all those smells and bells just kept pulling her in. And there was, it was one time I was invited to the baptism of their next kid. And I just couldn't make it. It was, I was visiting my grandma or something. And people kept telling me, like, no, you should really come. I was like, no, look, I mean, I love the former family, but I'm, I gotta go see my granny, whatever, you know. And they kept, I said, what's this about? I don't know. They have like a kid every six months. So like, they'll

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  have another one soon. And, but, but then I thought it was because she was being baptized. And she wasn't telling anybody. So anyway, she came in and now at least, now at least I get to see her at mass. So.

• 2:06:11Tucker Carlson?

  People love her. It is wild.

• 2:06:14Speaker 03

  She has actual star quality. I, she has this thing. It, she could tell me something. She could tell me something, not only that I don't agree with, she could tell me something about myself that, she'd tell me I have blonde hair and I would, I would just, the whole time, I'd just be like, go on, tell me everything.

• 2:06:33Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it's wild. I mean, I was telling this off air, but I was just gonna say it. I was in Oslo, Norway, last week, salmon fishing with my kids. I'm coming, walking back from dinner with one of my kids in downtown Oslo and this guy goes, Tucker Carlson? Yes. You know Candace Owens? I was like, yes. He goes, tell her that I love her. And I was like, how famous do you have to be where people will come up to you in the street just because you know somebody else?

• 2:06:58Speaker 03

  Where people will come up to another very famous guy.

• 2:07:01Tucker Carlson?

  No, nothing to do with me at all.

• 2:07:02Speaker 03

  Another very, you say, hey, you know, hi, I'm Tucker, by the way.

• 2:07:05Tucker Carlson?

  No, no, I didn't know. I was so impressed by it that I, it didn't hurt my feelings at all. I, you know.

• 2:07:10Speaker 03

  That is unbelievable.

• 2:07:11Tucker Carlson?

  But yes, the main thing that he liked about me was that I knew Candace Owens. I was like, wow, that, that's devotion. So I was impressed. Very, I called her. I said, wow, man, you're really at another level.

• 2:07:23Speaker 03

  Gotta start trying that at restaurants. Can I, hey, can I get a free dessert or something?

• 2:07:27Tucker Carlson?

  I know Candace Owens. Not my birthday, but, um, okay, this is an interesting one. This is a question. I think I've inadvertently led my two sons, ages 25 and 23, to have a mindset to put off having a family. I think I've made a mistake. How do I convince them to hurry up, get married and have kids?

• 2:07:44Speaker 03

  The question, the answer that I would, or the evidence that I would need here is how old the kids are.

• 2:07:49Tucker Carlson?

  23 and 25.

• 2:07:50Speaker 03

  You go, okay, 23 and 25. Hmm. Yeah, you should get serious. You should, I mean, these days you'd be like a child groom at that age, but you need to start getting serious. I guess the reason is this.

• 2:07:59Tucker Carlson?

  I had a kid at 25.

• 2:08:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, people, people used to get married. I have a good friend, very successful guy, though he struggled for a long time, six kids, got married at 20 or 19 or something and started spitting out kids right away. And the, the way to maybe present this to your sons is.

• 2:08:17Speaker 03

  We screw up everything in modern life. We just get everything perverted or in wrong. And we now view marriage as the capstone to our lives.

• 2:08:26Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 2:08:27Speaker 03

  We say, I've lived, now that I've lived, now that I've had sex with 100,000 people, and I've made a million dollars, and now that I've done everything, traveled all over the world, now I'm going to get married.

• 2:08:37Tucker Carlson?

  Now that I have drug resistant chlamydia.

• 2:08:40Speaker 03

  Now that I have drug resistant chlamydia and my brain is half melted, now I'm going to get married. And you think, okay, that's not what marriage is. Marriage is when two people leave their families, come together and become one flesh, and do something together. And so it's really supposed to be more like the beginning of your life.

• 2:08:56Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  But here's a real practical reason why you shouldn't do it that way. I married my high school sweetheart. You married your high school sweetheart.

• 2:09:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, I did.

• 2:09:02Speaker 03

  And highly recommend it. And I've seen many, many good marriages where people marry their high school sweetheart because it's like our bones, you know, when you grow, your bones are kind of agile and malleable and they grow.

• 2:09:14Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:15Speaker 03

  And then they harden.

• 2:09:16Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:16Speaker 03

  And then it's, it's really hard when two people harden into their own ways to mash that together. But if you're still kind of young and a little more malleable, even in your twenties, you're starting to really harden your views.

• 2:09:32Speaker 03

  You need to do that in such a way that you're fused together. So to me.

• 2:09:37Tucker Carlson?

  No, that's, that's right.

• 2:09:38Speaker 03

  The notion of divorce.

• 2:09:40Tucker Carlson?

  Men get really rigid too, as they get older, living alone.

• 2:09:42Speaker 03

  Yes, get weird.

• 2:09:44Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, so weird.

• 2:09:45Speaker 03

  Weird. And you, I'm entirely opposed to divorce. I would not divorce under any circumstances. I know people do it. I know it happens. It's a fallen world. But it seems to me that if you, if you're, if you're a whole set person and you marry someone and you sign a prenup and you keep separate bank accounts and you just, you're kind of setting yourself up to prepare for when you're just going to crack apart. But if you do it a little bit younger and you're just totally enmeshed.

• 2:10:11Tucker Carlson?

  All the way.

• 2:10:11Speaker 03

  It's unthinkable. Yeah.

• 2:10:13Tucker Carlson?

  I also think, you know, young men especially are really concerned about the economy, which has like basically been designed to exclude them. And they feel like they're not going to be able to succeed and provide for their children the lives that they had from their parents. Just as a math question, getting married is like, it just, there's a lot of research on this, is the single most effective thing you can do to be more successful?

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, of course. I was talking to a buddy of mine, even with the kids, you know, when I had my, it took us a couple of years and then we had our first kid. I said, oh, I hope I, I hope I have enough money.

• 2:10:47Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, you will?

• 2:10:48Speaker 03

  Yes. My friend said that, that babies are like little moneybags. You just, you just make more, you just make it work. You are, yes.

• 2:10:58Tucker Carlson?

  When I had my first, I was working at the Weekly Standard, hard to believe I ever worked there, but for Bill Kristol, I know it's so shocking, but.

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  You know, he was a teacher of mine. We have that, we have that in common.

• 2:11:09Tucker Carlson?

  Bill Kristol was a teacher of yours?

• 2:11:11Speaker 03

  I did one of these fellowships, like a summer fellowship. He taught me, I don't know, like Machiavelli or something. And to think now, I mean, now his publications have taken shots at me over the years. And I just think, man, where did, where'd you lose the plot, buddy?

• 2:11:27Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know what, what happened. I don't know. It's, it's, it's distressing, but, but I think he kind of collapsed inside as a person. Depressing. It can happen, by the way. You have to be on guard against it. But anyway, I remember I had this editor called Richard Starr, who was such a nice man. And I had this child at 25 and he goes, your life's gonna change. And I was like, everyone says that. What do you mean? And he goes, when you have a child, especially when you're young, you realize you will do whatever it takes to provide for that child. Do you need to rob a fucking liquor store?

• 2:11:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:11:56Tucker Carlson?

  No problem. And I was like, wow, that's so true.

• 2:11:59Speaker 03

  It even made me.

• 2:11:59Tucker Carlson?

  Not that I ever robbed any liquor stores, but like.

• 2:12:01Speaker 03

  But you might, you might, I might still. I, when we got married, I was a little old. I was maybe 27 when we got engaged, 28 when we got married. That's my, I kind of wish we'd gotten married younger. We were kind of moving, we're long distance, all this stuff. And it's, it's all works out in providence, but it's, it's one regret I have. We should have got, my wife says it too, we should have got married younger and started having kids younger. And I remember though, I started my show after I got married, or right around the time I got married. And I thought, man, thank goodness, I'm not single. In this career in particular, because you're probably, can you imagine, you just, all you do is just like stay up late and go drink and screw around. And that's, and when you're married and

• 2:12:41Speaker 03

  you have kids, you have a sense of purpose, that you're doing things for something.

• 2:12:47Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, of course. And if you're under like real stress, if you've, you know, the kind of performing in public or whatever, any job where you're like under pressure and you're feeling like on a tight rope all the time. But if you didn't have a wife, I don't know how you would do that.

• 2:13:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:00Tucker Carlson?

  They all melt down. I mean, you know, you need a wife.

• 2:13:04Speaker 03

  Yes, you do. I mean, even my wife will, she'll sometimes do my show, she'll listen to my show. She'll go, you know, man, you were a little bit, kind of lib over there. You kind of went a little squishy. I'd be like, man, you're the, you know, she's like the rock solid one. She's the only person I'll ever let write some of my show. She gets it.

• 2:13:23Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 2:13:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not, she was no political nerd or anything like that. But she has a very conservative disposition.

• 2:13:29Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:30Speaker 03

  And she just has this gut instinct.

• 2:13:31Tucker Carlson?

  When moms go right wing, boy, they're not dicking around at all. I've seen that a lot.

• 2:13:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:38Tucker Carlson?

  Members of Congress who I respect 100% have wives who were like, what? No.

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:13:44Tucker Carlson?

  You know what I mean? Yes. No, I can think of a couple. Okay, last question. It's kind of a weird one. Michael, do you detest boomers as much as Tucker seems to? I was born in 1951. What's the main thing I ought to do or stop doing to help improve life here in the United States?

• 2:14:01Speaker 03

  So this is a boomer, I take it?

• 2:14:02Tucker Carlson?

  This is a boomer. Yeah, 1951. Baby boom, 1946, 1964.

• 2:14:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:07Tucker Carlson?

  I think.

• 2:14:08Speaker 03

  The boomers have attracted a lot of ire.

• 2:14:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 2:14:11Speaker 03

  Rightly so. My defense of the boomers is they came from somewhere.

• 2:14:16Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:16Speaker 03

  They came from somewhere. So even, I mean, you know, the, our grandparents' generation.

• 2:14:20Tucker Carlson?

  And they're human beings. I don't mean to talk about them like they're animals.

• 2:14:22Speaker 03

  No, but things went really screwy during the boomer generation.

• 2:14:27Tucker Carlson?

  You think?

• 2:14:27Speaker 03

  You might have noticed. And I think what it has come down to is an ideological selfishness. I'm not even saying, a lot of boomers, like they have all this stress and anxiety for their kids and the future. And you know, so it's not, it's not like even a personal selfishness. It's an ideological selfishness that says, hey, I'm gonna, you know, do what you want. Hey, follow your bliss. Do what makes you happy. And I would say that came from a good place for a lot of the boomers who were a little hippy dippy, whatever.

• 2:14:56Speaker 03

  I don't think that's helpful to kids. I actually think a little bit more clarity is better. Clarity is charity. And I think a little bit more on the guardrails, a little bit more of saying, hey, son, don't just follow your bliss. You're doing something

• 2:15:09Tucker Carlson?

  Ideological selfishness. Boy, that is, I've never thought of that. That is really smart because it is, of course, it's true that boomers, which again is everybody born between, you know, the end of World War II and yeah, just before Woodstock. Um, there are a lot of nice people who really care about their kids and grandkids, but they, but it's ideological.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  Yes, they, they can't even, what are you talking about? If I were to say that right is right and wrong is wrong. Well, I'd be, that would be, I don't know, authoritarian or judgmental. Yes. Yeah. And you think, well, you have to make judgments in life. And sometimes parents actually do know what's best for their kids. And you just need to, I think, state not have the confidence to state that, have the confidence to help your kid, even if it might make him angry in the short run.

• 2:15:53Tucker Carlson?

  Let me, that's a really smart point. Let me just end by asking you, because I'm legit interested. How did you get into the tobacco business?

• 2:16:03Speaker 03

  Can I offer you one? I don't want to make you smoke at 10 o'clock in the morning, but

• 2:16:07Tucker Carlson?

  I'm going shooting after this. I'm going to burn one of these.

• 2:16:09Speaker 03

  Okay, great. All right.

• 2:16:10Tucker Carlson?

  Can't wait.

• 2:16:10Speaker 03

  I have loved cigars since I was 15, which is a little old to start in New York as an Italian American. But I was, you know,

• 2:16:18Tucker Carlson?

  Totally. If I ever get rich, I'm going to start a nicotine for the children foundation just to make sure that they have enough. I'm serious.

• 2:16:23Speaker 03

  Charity. You know, I mean, there's

• 2:16:24Tucker Carlson?

  I couldn't agree more.

• 2:16:26Speaker 03

  I was 15 and I never liked cigarettes. I never liked, but I loved cigars. And I, a family friend gave me one when I was 15. I really liked it. And I would go grocery shopping in the Bronx, in the Italian neighborhood. And they had these guys rolling the cigars. And I was too young to buy them. So they would just give them to me. They'd give me four a week. And I got into, I smoked them. I really, I wrote, wrote my college admission essay about how much I loved cigars. I called it the Count of Monte Cristo. Because I said, write about something you're passionate about. I'm very passionate about cigars.

• 2:16:54Tucker Carlson?

  They let you into Yale, one of the cigar essay?

• 2:16:58Speaker 03

  I probably wouldn't have worked out today. Yeah. Better, better than writing about my

• 2:17:01Tucker Carlson?

  Your parents big donors?

• 2:17:03Speaker 03

  They were not. Yeah. Safe to say they were not. And I, so the story of this company, I wanted to start that for a long time because despite my swarthy appearance, I do have this kind of WASP, Mayflower ancestor. And I, I said, I wanted to be Mayflower, wanted to be patriotic, but I don't want it to just be like, you know, Guns and fried chicken cigars. I want it to be a little more elevated, but yeah. And this is paradox with the Mayflower, which is kind of like the founding stock. On the one hand, they're blue blood elites. On the other, this is, these are salt of the earth.

• 2:17:33Tucker Carlson?

  People. Yeah, they're rugged.

• 2:17:34Speaker 03

  Rugged weirdos.

• 2:17:35Tucker Carlson?

  Oh.

• 2:17:36Speaker 03

  Booted out of England. Yeah. And I said, I like that paradox because cigars are a luxury, but they're also very accessible. You can, you can have an amazing cigar for like $12, you know?

• 2:17:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 2:17:48Speaker 03

  And so I said, I want it to be that. And I wanted to work with a particular company. When I was a kid, my mother, shortly before she died, gave me a box of Oliva cigars, Oliva series O robusto for Christmas.

• 2:18:02Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:02Speaker 03

  We did not have a lot of money and this was a really nice present. When she died unexpectedly, I still had half the box. And I said, well, this is, these are special. I need to save them for special occasions. Graduate high school, get married, first kid, that kind of thing. Maybe I'll give some to my kids if I have any leftover. This is providential. I'm, I was trying to start the cigar company. It was kind of tough. You know, Daily Wire was allowing me to kind of explore this and use the platform to start, start a cigar company. So great. But what do I know? I don't know anything about starting that. I'm backstage at a TV show and a guy calls out to me, says, hey, Knowles, you're a cigar guy, right? I said, yeah, yeah. He's like, oh, yeah, I got the cigar. You gotta come by this cigar club that I'm a member of. I said, oh, that's a great idea. I don't

• 2:18:45Speaker 03

  know him. He goes, yeah, I'll give you one of mine. It's a, it's an Oliva, re-banded Oliva. I said, do you know Oliva cigars? He said, yeah. I said, I can't get in touch with them. He goes, I'll put you in touch. Well, that's fortuitous. 15 minutes, we have the deal for production and distribution for a test cigar, only because of a happenstance of business. It couldn't, it basically couldn't have worked with any other company. I, we go through it, we blend. I'm blending meticulously. I wanted to go to Nicaragua, had a little trouble getting into the country of Nicaragua. I'm blending it for long distance. All this. We finally launch it.

• 2:19:19Tucker Carlson?

  Now, how hard is it to get to the right blend?

• 2:19:22Speaker 03

  If you're obsessive about, if you're horrifically obsessive, I was such a terrible person to work with.

• 2:19:29Tucker Carlson?

  That's the way to be.

• 2:19:29Speaker 03

  But you have to be, because I said with those, I said, look, this is something I care about. I'm not really doing this primarily to make money. I'll make money other ways. I'm doing this because this is a thrill. I've wanted to do it for 15 years. And I landed on a blend, a Connecticut blend, which is the Mayflower Dawn. It's kind of the more mainstream one. The Mayflower Dusk, which is an Ecuador Hibana wrapper. That's, that was really blended just for my tastes. And a double Maduro, the Mayflower Dream. Comes from a painting by William Halsall of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor. And it's an orange sky. And you can't tell if the sun is rising or setting on America. I love this ambiguous painting. Is it, are we getting it tomorrow? Or is the light going out? And I said, that's what I want it to be. Dawn, dusk, and dream. We get the cigars.

• 2:20:13Speaker 03

  The cigars are made at the same factory that made the box that my mother gave me.

• 2:20:17Tucker Carlson?

  No way.

• 2:20:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. How do you plan that? Talk about providence. How do you plan that?

• 2:20:22Tucker Carlson?

  That's wild.

• 2:20:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so-

• 2:20:26Tucker Carlson?

  Do you smoke them?

• 2:20:27Speaker 03

  All the time.

• 2:20:28Tucker Carlson?

  You smoke your own brand?

• 2:20:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. They were made, actually made for my taste. And they are, I say with no false modesty and true humility, they're exquisite. And so we've got three lines now. I even made the, I was so brutal about it. I made these little mini ones. I call them Mayflower Compacts. They're a little petite coronas.

• 2:20:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, that's pretty funny.

• 2:20:48Speaker 03

  Thank you. And they're, but they're premium hand rolled long filler. So it's not a cigarettiere or something. I, I just love them. And they, they sold out immediately, which is a good problem to have because I sold like four months supply in one day. And was out of stock for Black Friday, out of stock for Christmas. Fine, we're picking up production. We're now we're in retail stores. This brings us all the way back to the top of our conversation. Because-

• 2:21:13Speaker 03

  One of the reasons I started this company is I want people, especially guys, to get out in the physical world and spend time together and speak best conversations I've had in my life are over cigars.

• 2:21:25Tucker Carlson?

  I agree.

• 2:21:25Speaker 03

  And I want them to do that, not be in their rooms, not be just on Zoom. I want them to be in this and to recognize, you know, thus passeth the glories of the world, sic tron sic gloria mundi. Forty-five minutes, you have your conversation and it's over and you can light another one, maybe tomorrow, but, but I think it's instructive and it's whatever people say about the health effects of cigars, I have always found, and I think this quotes, was it George Burns or someone, that I've taken more out of cigars than cigars have taken out of me.

• 2:21:56Tucker Carlson?

  I feel that way very, very strongly about tobacco. Can you, can you just like start a cigar company and start selling them? Do you have to go through FDA hoops or?

• 2:22:05Speaker 03

  It's, it's so hard and through sheer providential blessing, I was able to leapfrog over a lot of that. It still took me over a year, basically, to go from beginning the deal to launching. To get them into stores is almost impossible.

• 2:22:22Tucker Carlson?

  Why?

• 2:22:22Speaker 03

  Because of all these stupid regulations. If I started a pot company, I'd probably be in 57 states in the country.

• 2:22:28Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, for sure.

• 2:22:28Speaker 03

  Yes, it's very different. Certain states I just can't do business in. I wish I could, I have stores begging me for them. I just can't, I can't.

• 2:22:34Tucker Carlson?

  Why?

• 2:22:35Speaker 03

  The regulations are so brutal. I mean, certain places are trying to ban smoking just like forever. Massachusetts, you know, tried to set a date after which you could just never buy tobacco. It kept aging with you. So crazy, crazy stuff like that. California is awful on the regs and so we're trying to sneak them out as best we can.

• 2:22:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. It does seem like tobacco should be part of the backlash.

• 2:23:03Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 2:23:04Tucker Carlson?

  Is it?

• 2:23:04Speaker 03

  Well, it's the American crop first.

• 2:23:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 2:23:06Speaker 03

  Helped build the country. Washington grew it.

• 2:23:08Tucker Carlson?

  Where did it, where did it come from?

• 2:23:10Speaker 03

  The American South.

• 2:23:11Tucker Carlson?

  The American Indians.

• 2:23:12Speaker 03

  And originally, that's right.

• 2:23:13Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, it's not native to Europe. It's native to North America.

• 2:23:16Speaker 03

  And you know who really discovered it was Christopher Columbus.

• 2:23:19Tucker Carlson?

  I know.

• 2:23:19Speaker 03

  I've read the Taino Indians, they would smoke them up their nose, which I don't think I've ever tried, but yes.

• 2:23:24Tucker Carlson?

  The two things he took away, in addition to corn, tobacco and syphilis.

• 2:23:31Speaker 03

  And I don't sell syphilis.

• 2:23:33Tucker Carlson?

  Or have it. Michael Knowles, that was great.

• 2:23:37Speaker 03

  Tucker, thank you for having me.

• 2:23:38Tucker Carlson?

  And I really, really appreciate it. And it's great to see you after six years totally vindicated. You're not the disgusting one, Michael Knowles.

• 2:23:47Speaker 03

  Thank you, Tucker, and thank you for your help.

• 2:23:48Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, my gosh. It was nothing. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit, follow, and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter. Telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.