Tucker Carlson Best Moments - Elites and Education

The person who's brave wins, period. And in a moment like this, the stakes are higher. It's not just a matter of like being the next guy who invents something cool and then figures out a way to sell it. No, it's do you want your children to be able to live here? Do you want to have grandchildren at all? And if you're not brave, that won't happen. And that's very clear at this point. And I could, boy, I could bore you with a lot of dark stats, but I'm not going to, because you know them. And so be brave. And by the way, there's nothing easier. I mean, the biggest failure of the conservative movement is the world that we have now, none of which is conservative, and it's getting more left-wing by the day. The biggest success of the conservative movement is persisting and existing. It's still here, which is kind of incredible, given the firepower brought to bear against it. And it's so important for there to be an intellectual option to the tiny suite of options available to your average young person. Like, I just can't get over how narrow and stultifying their program is. It's like, whine about your identity, whine about your identity. It's like, they're not offering anything. Live alone, childless, in some drywall-clad pod in a big crime-ridden city, and work for some stupid bank until you die. But you get weed, whoa! Yes, and we have DoorDash, no way! Yeah, that's the future they're promising. So, I mean, they don't actually have a lot to offer. And I think that the institutional conservative movement, Heritage, ISI, some others that haven't totally disgraced themselves like AEI, which has really disgraced itself in my opinion. I don't know if I was clear enough about that. But the few that persist in kind of trying to defend Western civilization, they offer a real option. And I just know from the ISI kids rotating through my office, I mean, cheap labor, but we did exploit them. But I know that there's like some random kid in some random town who hears about, somebody's like, wait, what's that, what's that? And then he winds up at ISI or Heritage or other institutions on the right and learns more and his life has changed and America's improved. It's always worth telling the truth, even if you feel like nobody's listening. Every prophet was vindicated in the end, throughout the Hebrew Bible, every single one. And a lot of them got stoned to death. In fact, I think the majority. But in the end, they were like, I mean, do you know how Jeremiah's neighbors felt about him? Loathing. Now we revere him. So like, it's just, it's worth telling the truth no matter what. But then last year, I read the biography, which I would recommend to everyone in this room of Peter Rangel, who was the leader of the revolutionary white forces during the Russian revolution, the civil war, rather, that came after the revolution. And he was a Baltic German living in Russia and a general worked for the Tsar. The war ends where Russia ceases its hostilities with Germany, he comes back to St. Petersburg and the country's in complete chaos. And the Bolsheviks have decided that, it's discontent within the army that we need to inflame and we need to get the army. I don't know if this sounds familiar to anyone here, but get the guns and the people wield the guns. We need them. So the first thing they do is destroy all discipline in the Tsar's army, complete. So Peter Rangel has just been on the front for four years. He comes back into St. Petersburg, totally civilized city, two hour drive from Helsinki. I mean, it is Europe, okay? Whatever anyone tells you. And he's wandering through and soldiers are going crazy in the streets and they're raping women. They're stealing a gunpoint, soldiers in uniform in a monarchy, which had not had any behavior like this at all. And Peter Rangel just can't even believe it. These are his soldiers. He's a general. And so he's completely freaked out and he goes into a movie theater and everyone in the movie theater is completely absorbed in the movie. Like there's no revolution happening outside. And Peter Rangel thinks these people are insane. So he goes back, he's like, I gotta get to Moscow. So he takes the train to Moscow. I have to tell the Tsar, this country's falling apart. He's very close to the Romanovs, the family. You should read this. It's just out in English translation in the last three years. It's an unbelievable book, lost to history until recently. Two English speakers. So he goes back to Moscow and he's close to the Romanovs. And so he goes into the imperial court and he knows all the relatives and there are millions of them, hangers on. And he notices about 80% of the women in the Romanov family are wearing red ribbons in solidarity with the Bolsheviks who wound up, of course we know how it ends, murdering them, murdering them in the basement at dawn. So wait, what? Peter Rangel says, how is it that this country is being devoured by a violent revolution and the people who can afford movie tickets, that is kind of our middle class, are refusing even to acknowledge that it's happening and the ruling class against whom it is aimed are sympathizing with it. And if this doesn't remind you of BLM, I don't know what does. I'm reading this in my portion. Like midnight, I couldn't go to sleep. I was like, wait, I live in that country. That's happening now. This is a revolution. Its aim is to hurt you. Yes, that would include physically in the end, sorry. If someone tells you you're not allowed to speak, if someone tells you your children are not your children. These are not ideological differences. This is not, oh, I prefer this capital gains rate. These are totalitarian measures that treat you as non-human. Human beings, free citizens get to say what they think. Slaves must be quiet. That's the distinction. So all this like, oh, it's in the first amendment. No, yeah, it precedes the first amendment. As our founding documents make clear, these are natural rights that distinguish the citizen from the slave, the human from the subhuman. We can't consider slaves fully human or we wouldn't enslave them. So anyone treating you as a slave considers you less than human. I think the turnout, it's like we've just had all these massive changes in American society. And I think a lot of people who currently have positions of authority are worried, are very anxious about preserving them. And so, for example, there is this weird taboo. It is not weird, actually. It does make a kind of sense about expressing any kind of sympathy or affection for the white working class. Like, why is that? But it's particularly the white working class. And I happen to live among them, so I see it a lot. But like, the one thing you could never say in Georgetown when I was a kid is like, you could feel sorry for everybody in the most obscure orphans of Bhutan. But like, the Archie Bunker world was like, they deserve to die. And now, of course, they are dying and that's not accidental at all. They were left to die and their deaths were hastened, I think, by a leadership class that really hates them. And it's like, why? What'd they do wrong? Anyway, at best, they were like, chewed with their mouths open or something. But like, they didn't actually commit any real sins. And I think that a lot of people in our leadership class are like, it's almost like seeing a first cousin you didn't grow up with, who is like, taking a different path. Anyone who has first, I have this, with like, first cousins that are just like, very different from you and you run into them and you're like, ooh, there's something awful about it. They kind of look like you, but they're different. It's one of the, it's almost like certain simians freak us out, because they have like, human eyes. It's too close. And so I think in order to lead, you need to be secure, both with yourself, you need to have an ordered personal life and an ordered stable family. I think it's absolutely essential. I would never hire, I would never take life advice from someone whose children hated them. I wouldn't. Why would I? Do you know what, do you know what I mean? Would you take real estate advice from a homeless person? No. So I think they are very caught up in like, things that don't matter at all, like dumb credentials and what stupid school you went to. No offense, I don't care. It's immaterial. What I care about is what you produce. I care about the fruits of the tree, and they don't. And so they're very anxious people, perhaps, and very loathsome. So it's essential not to be afraid to die. And once you decide, I'm really not afraid to die, nothing scares you. Like what's scary at that point? Bring it on. Oh, you're gonna criticize me on Facebook. You're gonna bring suit against me. You're gonna arrest me. You're gonna kill me. So what? Go ahead. But the media never raised these questions. They never raised basic economic questions ever. And they attack anybody who does. And moreover, they protect some of the worst people in the world from scrutiny because they have power. That is like a complete, that's like a scientific inversion. That's like an X-ray of what journalism is supposed to be. And I would recommend one of the greatest essays I've ever read was by George Orwell, written as part of a book he wrote called Down and Out in Paris and London. But he winds up in a hospital in Paris in the 30s during the Depression with tuberculosis. George Orwell was a man of famous and proven physical courage. Shot in the throat by a sniper standing guard during the Spanish Civil War, on the wrong side, unfortunately, but whatever, he was trying. And didn't mention it in his diary. Didn't mention it in his diary. I mean, this is a man who had, you know, went to Eton, you know, in 1913, grew up rough in the way that the British upper classes used to raise their boys, in a martial way, actually. And he winds up in this hospital for the indigent, and he's in a huge bay, like the size of this room, filled with metal cots, and people around him are dying. But they're not dying of anything interesting. They haven't been shot in the throat by a sniper, but they ain't been moving their mouths around. They're dying of like diarrhea and the flu. And he describes in this wonderful essay how horrible it is. And he has this line there, he says, you know, there's so many tears shed for guys who die, you know, during the Great War, which is only 10 years before, 20 years before, going over the top of the trench and getting mowed down by a 50-caliber. And he goes, that's very sad. Obviously, he grew up in a world where all the men were killed that way. But he goes, that's kind of nothing compared to the way the people around me are dying. Like, it's gonna be bad no matter what. You might as well die with your shoes on doing something you believe in. That was Orwell's conclusion. In the end, he died of tuberculosis, hold on. But whatever, he didn't get to choose. None of us do get to choose, but we can have the mindset that frees us from the anxiety over something that we can't change, that's gonna happen. And at very best, we can imbue it with meaning. That's the point. That's the choice we have. We're gonna die. Should it mean something? Should our life mean something? That's the only choice we get to make. The rest of it is out of our hands. The key to being brave is brooding about death. All anxiety and all fear stems from those basic, of all fears, which is the fear of death, which is inborn. You feel it from the moment you arrive, because you know it's gonna end on some level. My deepest child on our fifth birthday burst into tears, and I said, why? All my other more shallow children were psyched for the cake. My deep child said, well, I don't want it to end. And I said, what? My life? I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I could drown in these waters. They're too deep. I did start crying. Yes, I did. Okay, I'll admit it. But anyway, but whether we articulate it or not, that is the root of all anxiety. So I will stop with that and just say, take heart, take heart. Your bravery is scarier to the other side than any weapon you could marshal. They melt in the face of it. They've only advanced this quickly because they've met no resistance at all, because everybody is a cucked coward. Oh, I don't wanna make anybody mad. Yeah, really? You know, it stops here. If you had 10% of the population take that posture, this crap would end immediately. That's it. That's all it takes. And I hope that we will. Anyway, thank you very much.