The Tucker Carlson Show - Chaos Is Spreading Like Cancer. What Happens Next?

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Chaos spreads like cancer in Minneapolis. What happens next? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Take a look at some video, and we could have pulled all kinds of pieces of video, but here's just one. This is from Sunday night, and it gives you a sense of what the city of Minneapolis looks like now. This, again, is real, and it is just a flavor of what's happening there right now. Watch. So what you're looking at, what you're looking at? what you just saw in that tape is a group of federal agents, immigration officers, ICE agents, employed by the federal government, stuck in a hotel in Minneapolis, surrounded by what we're calling protesters, people who want to hurt them or screaming them, and they can't get out because
Starting point is 00:01:29 there's no one to call. The local police refused to come to their aid, and they can't move. Meanwhile, people are breaking windows and stealing and spraying graffiti. It's chaos. And this is in an American city. So if you've been experiencing the controversy over ice through a couple of clips to American citizens being shot to death by ice agents and you think that that's the entire story, you should know it's just part of it. What you're watching here is an unraveling of a city and people. potentially of a nation. And what's happening is much bigger than you may understand. It's certainly much more complicated. But its net effect is not complicated at all. We are watching the
Starting point is 00:02:21 destruction of the social fabric, of the government, and potentially of the nation. And so this is one of the more serious moments in our lifetime. And what we do next, how the administration response to this, how local officials, state officials in Minnesota respond to it will determine the course going forward. So the first thing to be totally clear on is that that series of images, that video you just saw represents the worst possible outcome. It represents chaos. Most Americans have never seen chaos before up close. They therefore lack an appreciation of its dangers. But To be clear, chaos is the worst thing. Chaos is worse than illegal immigration.
Starting point is 00:03:12 Chaos is worse than police brutality. Chaos is worse than anything. Chaos equals death. The death of people, the death of the weak, the death of countries. Chaos is also a dynamic force. It is a spiritual force. Of course, God created order out of chaos. Chaos is the realm of Satan.
Starting point is 00:03:33 but it is something that either expands or contracts. It never stays the same. And so left untreated, chaos is very much like melanoma. In the early stages, you can handle it. If you don't excise it, however, it becomes fatal. And chaos in this country is approaching our lymph nodes. So the question that we're getting considered over the next several minutes is, why is this happening and what do we do about it?
Starting point is 00:04:03 But you should know that of all the debates going on about immigration and who's in charge of this or that, the only real debate that matters right now is will this chaos grow and get worse and consume us all or will it not? So first the question of what to do about it. The Trump administration for whatever mistakes it is made up to now understands very well that this is peril for the country. And so the Trump administration has reached out to officials in Minnesota, the governor, the lieutenant governor, the chief of police, the mayor, Jacob Fry of Minneapolis, and made the following offer. They haven't done this publicly, but they have done this. There are four points to this. Here's what they are. Number one, state officials in Minnesota agree that ICE agents, federal agents on the scene,
Starting point is 00:05:04 will have police protection when they call. Currently, if an ICE agent calls in Minneapolis and says, say, I'm surrounded by people trying to kill me, the local police will not respond. That happened the other night in a restaurant in Minneapolis. Ice agents stuck in the restaurant. Couldn't get out, had to lock the doors. They were going to get killed if they went outside. called the local police, no response at all. Why is that? Because the local police have been instructed by the mayor and the governor and probably the lieutenant governor as well, do not respond. So American citizens in Minneapolis, if they work for the federal government and carry a badge, if they are agents of Donald Trump, do not have police protection. Number one, you have to stop that. You have to respond to 911 calls from federal officers. Number two, you have to do your best to protect them when they're off duty. You just saw it in the video. We
Starting point is 00:05:52 played. Ice officer stuck in a hotel surrounded by a screaming mob. No one will come to the raid. You can't do that anymore. Number three, jails in Minnesota have to respond to federal requests for deportation. If you have a convicted murderer who's an illegal alien or a child molester who's an illegal alien, and there are a lot of them, you can look their names up on the internet. And the feds ask, where is this guy? You can't just ignore them. You have to participate in federal law enforcement actions to that extent. You don't have to deport them yourself, but you have to tell us where they are. And in exchange for those three things, the federal government will substantially withdraw
Starting point is 00:06:36 federal law enforcement from Minneapolis and from the state of Minnesota. And at that point, crowd control, keeping riots from spinning completely out of control and burning down, say, your city, will be the job of local law enforcement. enforcement. So just to restate, these are the four points. Number one, you have to answer 911 calls from federal agents. Number two, you have to do your best to keep them from getting killed when they're off duty. Number three, the jails have to tell us where the rapists are. And number four, if you do that, will basically pull back and allow you to keep the situation from spinning out of control on your own. And some federal law enforcement will remain to protect federal assets. The federal courthouse, for example,
Starting point is 00:07:21 Can't burn that down, and that's the job of the feds to protect it. That happened, and the response from officials in Minnesota was, no, we're not doing that. So at that point, you have to ask yourself, well, why? Why would a state refuse to protect American citizens from murder, refuse to give the names or whereabouts of murderers and child molesters, and refuse to use its own cops to keep riots under? control. What could possibly be the answer? Because they want riots. That's why. Because they want the chaos. And this proves to you, if you're following this at home and trying to make sense
Starting point is 00:08:06 at all, where did this come from? Why did I shoot these people? This is proof that what you're watching is not a series of protests about immigration. What you're watching are the beginnings of a color revolution of a kind of insurrection against federal authority. And what you have to ask yourself, even if you disapprove of the Trump administration, even if you have some commitment to keeping illegal aliens here, is do you want that? Can you live with that? Can you live in a country of 50 states that don't agree on what the federal law should be and that allow Americans to get murdered in their cities because they have the wrong politics or they work for a politician they disapprove of.
Starting point is 00:08:54 And if you are okay with that, have you thought through its implications? And the number one implication is the country will fall apart. That's civil war. It's the definition of it. You have regions and internal government states that don't recognize federal authority, the authority of a government. over them all of Washington. And at that point, what you have is warring nations within the same borders. And then you have widespread violence.
Starting point is 00:09:27 Then you have killing at scale. Then you have civil war. And it's sort of depressing even to say that out loud. And you certainly don't want to encourage radical thinking by saying that. In other words, you don't want to kind of talk civil war into existence because there's nothing worse than civil war. Nothing more brutal because the stakes are the highest possible. Someone has to win and the other side has to give up completely. There has to be total surrender and total victory. And on the way to that, there's no accommodation in a civil war. One side has to completely dominate the other.
Starting point is 00:10:02 And a lot of people get killed in that. Do you want that? And of course, no decent person wants that. Not for a second. And so how do you stop it? we're going to discuss the options. But before we do, you should know that what you're watching is clearly, provably, an organized attempt to get us there to provoke chaos by elected officials. And it's hard to see that at first, because the video that you see, all the videos you see are of the participants, of the foot soldiers in this. This is one of those conflicts that people experience on social media.
Starting point is 00:10:45 So by definition, it's mostly limited to 30 second out of context clips. And what you see, and both sides see this, the left and the right, Trump voters and Trump haters, all see their version of the conflict. And it's almost always limited to the people who are actually in the streets participating. So you have the ICE officers, either hurting someone or getting hurt. Then you have the protesters doing what they do, which is get mad and hurt. destroy, stand in the way of things. But what you don't see are the forces that are directing both of those sides.
Starting point is 00:11:23 And it's important to remember from the beginning to the end that your perceptions as an American are being manipulated on purpose clearly by a whole bunch of interested parties. So most people don't wake up in the morning and decide to feel horrible, exhausted, foggy, disconnected from themselves. But it does happen. happen slowly. You're working hard, you're showing up, and then your energy disappears by midday. Your focus is dull, your weight won't move. A lot of people are told, that's just getting old. That's what it is. But that's not actually true. For many men and women, these are not personal
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Starting point is 00:13:20 So most people don't wake up in the morning and decide to feel horrible, exhausted, foggy, disconnected from themselves. But it does happen and it happens slowly. You're working hard, you're showing up, and then your energy disappears by midday. Your focus is dull. Your weight won't move. A lot of people are told, that's just getting all. That's what it is, but that's not actually true.
Starting point is 00:13:41 For many men and women, these are not personal failures. They are signals tied to your metabolism, your hormones, and nutrient imbalances that go undetected for years. You don't even know you're deficient. And that's why we're happy to partner with Joy and Bloaks, a company that was built for people who were all done guessing and ready to figure out what exactly is going on. And that starts with comprehensive lab work and a one-on-one consultation with a licensed clinician, an actual human being explains what's happening inside you and builds a personalized plan, which includes hormone optimization, peptide therapy, targeted supplements. So don't settle. Go to joinblokes.com slash Tucker.
Starting point is 00:14:18 Use the code Tucker for 50% off your lab work and 20% off all supplements. That's joy and blokes.com slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker. 50% off labs, 20% off supplements. Joy and blokes. Get your edge back. So if you're on the right and anti-chaust, it's very easy to focus on the Antifa elements of this. And they're there.
Starting point is 00:14:44 People shooting videos of themselves in their cars saying, this is war. We have to kill the other side. And that's designed to scare you, of course. But it's also easy to lose sight of what you're looking at. If you actually look at the Antifa participants, and all of this. What do you see? You see sad people,
Starting point is 00:15:11 screwed up people. You ever seen mugshots of Antifa? I mean, they're all kind of pasty and lumpy and transvestites. They look drug addicted. They've got tattoos on their faces. It's not an attack on them at all. It's merely an acknowledgement that these are not life's winners. These are people who 100 years ago would probably
Starting point is 00:15:33 be middle class Americans engaged in the workforce and married and doing something, but for a bunch of different reasons, this is what we have now, which is a lot of extremely frustrated young people who are not physically or psychologically healthy at all, who are spiritually dead, and who have been brainwashed, hypnotized, convinced somehow to give their lives up in the service of what? Destroying things. what you have very obviously is a spiritual problem and these are perpetrators but they're also victims and it's so important to remember that you should feel horror and fear these are people to be afraid of they're genuine extremists they would kill you for sure but they're also your
Starting point is 00:16:17 fellow Americans who are themselves dying in some true sense it's sad what you're watching It's sad. This is all downstream from decades of cultural and political destruction. Of course, this is the sort of terminus of it or the last stop before the end. But try, if you can, to remember the humanity of everyone involved here, including the people doing really bad things. Including, by the way, the ICE officers who wound up in an impossible situation, maybe made a bad judgment.
Starting point is 00:16:53 And the people on the other side, too, these are all Americans. What you should always keep in mind is that somebody is directing all of this. There are forces directing this. There are forces, in other words, that profit from chaos, that seek chaos. And what forces would those be? Well, there are two. One is the out-of-power political class that wants power. That's why you abet chaos.
Starting point is 00:17:18 That's why you have color revolutions. That's why people are shot in the square. They're literally killed in order for a group of people to assume power. extra democratically. You create chaos because you want to tear down the current system and assume control of the new system. It's the Bolshevik model, but it's much older than that. And this is always true. Every revolutionary movement spends almost no time trying to convince voters to adopt their program and instead tries to destroy the entire system to make voting itself pointless or illegitimate,
Starting point is 00:17:58 to make the machinery of the old system broken to the point where it just can't be used anymore, so then a new system can be built that they run. Okay? So there's that. But there are also other forces, and one of them would be, let's just say, federal agencies, including and especially the agencies with guns,
Starting point is 00:18:20 who understand that the more chaos there is, the more control they have. And this is not alleging a conspiracy. It's merely noting human nature and the nature of organizations. Organizations, by definition, exist for their own enlargement to accrue power to themselves. That's the real reason, all human organizations from the church bake sale committee to the CIA. That's the real reason they exist because that's how people are. People get together. they have a mission, but the real mission is to bring to themselves more power and control.
Starting point is 00:18:54 So if you're an American law enforcement agency or intelligence gathering agency, chaos is an opportunity for you to get more power. So those are the two groups fundamentally who are benefiting from the chaos. The rest of us are not only not benefiting, we are watching all the good things. that we have on the brink of being eliminated. So let's start with the first group that benefits from this destruction, from what could be a much larger and much more destructive version of the 2020 George Floyd riots, which really helped no American whatsoever, certainly didn't help black people, but made these same groups much
Starting point is 00:19:46 more powerful. Who are these people now? Well, first among them is the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, the man who ran for vice president a year and a half ago. This is a guy who is in the middle of the biggest political scandal in a state's history. It's the Somali welfare scam that has just been exposed. And a month ago, Tim Walz was in disgrace. And now Tim Walz, and now Tim Walz, is the leader of the insurrection against the Orange Man. So you can see already the benefit is there. So it probably shouldn't surprise you that Tim Walz is on television and social media constantly encouraging the kind of violence that you've been watching on Instagram.
Starting point is 00:20:34 Here's one example, Tim Walz. We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody's going to write that children's story about Minnesota. Someone's going to write that story about Minnesota. Now, he's referring to Anne Frank, of course, the little Jewish girl who was killed in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding for more than a year with her family
Starting point is 00:21:04 and the secret alcove from the Nazis. It's a story that most American children are very familiar with. And it's the most terrifying possible thing you could ever say to a population that the president of the United States and his armed agents are going to kill you like they did Anne Frank. So the people I'm opposed to are not simply Nazis in some theoretical sense. They're coming here to round you and your children up and take them to a death camp. That's what the governor of Minnesota is saying in public in the middle of the most volatile rioting his state has seen maybe ever, maybe even more than what we saw five years ago. Maybe even scarier than that. And here's the governor saying it's worse this time to the death camps.
Starting point is 00:22:04 Why would you say something like that in order to calm things down? know in order to gin up fear, which is, of course, the fastest way to control people by terrifying them, making them so afraid that they will believe anything you tell them, they will follow any command you give them. And, you know, like the Japanese in the South Pacific, they'll jump off the cliff into the sea because they've been so convinced that the invading army is going to eat them and rape their children that they will die before they submit. That is what he is telling his people in the state.
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Starting point is 00:23:47 and runs right through Easter. Download Hallow for free at hallow.com slash Tucker. So, just to be clear, two Americans were killed by ICE officers, and we can debate whether or not that was justified. It was sad, and everybody should admit it was sad and bad. It's always sad when Americans die, period. But watching that, the deaths of those two people would make any normal person say,
Starting point is 00:24:17 whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's cool this down. And by the way, to restate, to its great credit, the Trump administration has had that response and has gone to Tim Walls and said, whoa, let's cool this down. Tim Walz's response? No, because he's benefiting from it. That's why. And by the way, another point that I think should be clear to everybody at this moment,
Starting point is 00:24:42 anyone in Washington still advocating for some new foreign war on behalf of a foreign power, by definition doesn't care about this country. If you're still pushing the White House to launch a war on Iran, on a regime change war later this month on Iran, as your own country is devolving into chaos, that I don't think we need to guess about where your priorities are. You just don't care about the United States and what happens to it. Of course, we knew that.
Starting point is 00:25:14 This morning, Lindsay Graham is tweeting about the brave Kurds as the United States comes unraveled. And Lindsey Graham's concern is about the Kurds. Now, at some point, we're going to have to think about how did Lindsay Graham and people like Lindsay Graham wind up running our Congress? How they wind up with all of this authority? How did we ever put people like that in charge of us who in a moment of crisis are tweeting about the brave Kurds, whoever they are? But there still are, as of right now, people in Washington, Mark Levin. and many others who are so indifferent to what happens to what is supposedly their country
Starting point is 00:25:57 that they are still focused on some other neocon adventure in the Middle East on somebody else's behalf. It's nothing to do with us at all. Until this is solved, until the chaos is quelled, until there's some broad agreement on where we go next, we don't only have no time for a new neocon war. That is destruction, clearly. And by the way, it is in a moment like this that foreign powers looking at us sense weakness, vulnerability.
Starting point is 00:26:31 Oh, you've got aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf planning a new strike on the Ayatollah in Iran? Oh, gold is over $5,000 an ounce. Ooh, it looks like the dollars in trouble. Now is the time to move. Weakness invites aggression. and we are not in a strong place right now because our nation itself, the actual United States,
Starting point is 00:26:51 the place that we supposedly care about most, is not in a strong place. It can be, we can fix this, but until we do, no. Anyone is still talking about any of that nonsense? Gaza, Iran, should be called out immediately as someone who just doesn't care about Americans.
Starting point is 00:27:10 But someone who really does care about what happens next, noted, is Tim Walsh, because he's benefiting from them. And the more protesters who are killed in Minnesota, the more powerful Tim Wals knows he will be. And the happier the people organizing this and paying for it will be. Because the point is not to push back against ICE overreach. The point is to tear it all down. That is absolutely the point.
Starting point is 00:27:41 And thankfully, there is someone in Minnesota who's even less responsible. and even more obvious about what's actually going on than Tim Wals, who's not a stealthy character. He has a lot of trouble hiding obvious facts about himself in case you haven't watched him. But there is someone who's even worse or more revealing on camera, and that would be the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan. Watch this. If you are sick and tired of your government being ransacked by Donald Trump and his minions, literally taking away health. care from your neighbors, stealing food off of the table from seniors and children, and generally being uncool with the fact that our neighbors are being disappeared. P.S. without due
Starting point is 00:28:27 process, it is just called kidnapping. Then show up and use your voice, put your body on the line and use nonviolent direct action, which is one of the most important tools in our toolbox to say, I am not okay. I will not go silently into the night. So that's the, Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota Peggy Flanagan. Use your bodies. Put your bodies on the line. She is encouraging citizens in her state to risk their lives on behalf of folks and their neighbors. Who is she talking about? She's talking about people who have no legal or moral right to be here in the first place. She's talking about foreign national citizens of other countries who are living off the
Starting point is 00:29:17 largesse of the federal and state governments here who are being supported by American taxpayers and in a lot of cases who've committed violent crimes, murder, sex crimes. This is not propaganda. These are facts. The Trump administration, whatever its faults, has come out and given you a list to these people, their names, what they did. That's who she's talking about, these folks, these neighbors. And she's saying you as a native-born American should risk your life to protect them.
Starting point is 00:29:43 And the scary thing is, it's working. It's working. So what are we looking at? We're looking at the Biden administration in four years, let and say 20 million people illegally from around the world. 20 million people whose identities they didn't know, whose identities they didn't want to know, actually. And there's nothing you can do about it. Who are these people? We still don't know in a lot of cases.
Starting point is 00:30:13 Here's a fact. Hasn't been reported. So 2021, we withdraw from Afghanistan after 20 years. Biden famously screws it up, but we lose Bogram and U.S. military personnel or suicide bomb die on the way out. Planes take off, people clinging to them. It's a disaster. No one's ever punished for it. The only person is punished for it, of course, is Stu Scheller, the Marine Corps colonel who complained about it.
Starting point is 00:30:38 No one else is punished. It's fine. Move on. But it produced, as these things always do, an awful lot of refugees. And some of them were legitimate, I guess, people who'd helped the United States over 20 years in Afghanistan, interpreters, people who worked at the embassy, work with the U.S. military, et cetera, some of them weren't. But where did they go? Well, they didn't just all come to Bethesda, Maryland.
Starting point is 00:31:04 A lot of them were moved to processing centers, camps in what they call the region. And some of them came to the Gulf. And all six countries in the Gulf, the Persian Gulf, the Sunni countries are allies of the United States. And so one of those countries held a bunch of these people voluntarily as a favor to the United States, the Biden administration. And this is a fact. And so they call up Biden administration, we got all these people and bring them to the United States. And we're going to take biometrics on them to find out who they are. And there's some record of who they are, biometrics.
Starting point is 00:31:37 And the Biden administration says, oh, no, no, no, we don't want you to do that. do not take biometrics of these people before sending in the United States. Why would the Biden administration not want to know who these people were? Why no bio? That's a fact, by the way. But why'd they do that? Unclear. Unknown.
Starting point is 00:31:57 Think about it for a second. That's not a good sign. That's not a government working on behalf of the interests of its own people. It's not a government trying to help its own country at all. That's the opposite. That's so reckless and crazy. you have to ask like, well, why did they do it? And again, the answer is unclear.
Starting point is 00:32:15 We can only guess, but we know they did it. And they did some version of it with about 20 million people. So those people show up here. They're just here now. And the assumption has been, well, those people are, at worst, just new Democratic voters. And there's going to be a series of laws passed in the future that will allow them to vote. Their children will be born here. of course, they're birthright citizens.
Starting point is 00:32:41 They can vote, and we're going to change the balance of the demographic balance of the country, so we will always have power. That's always kind of been the darkest suspicion of what's happening. But that's not actually the darkest suspicion. You could think of a few more, actually. Why would you do that? It makes it a little uncomfortable if you start to think about it. Why would you move people in?
Starting point is 00:33:04 There's no record of who they are, no way to know who they are. You've got to suspect some of them are bad people, and some of them have turned out to be bad people. people. Like, what are your plans going forward? 20 million, really? But that's where we are. That's where we are. Let's hope that those suspicions prove to be false. Like, what's the purpose of this? By the way, a lot of these people who grew up in war zones and have different feelings about violence than, say, your average suburban American does and a different willingness to use violence than your average American does. Your average American has never seen violence,
Starting point is 00:33:37 never seen chaos. In any case, that's where we are. And here you have Peggy Flanagan saying there's nothing the federal government can do, which includes not just the Trump administration, but like people in every other state, there's nothing they can do about it. And if they try to take a single one of these people out of the country, no matter what this person is like, no matter how much you're taking in welfare benefits at a time
Starting point is 00:34:04 where the U.S. economy's in trouble. And of course, we don't need new low-skilled labor in the United States because AI, obviously, what are these all these people going to do? there's no reason for this. Nothing about this helps anyone else in the country, but according to Peggy Flanagan, there's literally nothing you can do. And anyone who tries to do anything about it is going to get stopped physically by her voters. Lay down your bodies. This is being orchestrated, not just by NGOs and donors, whoever they are, but by the elected officials of the state of Minnesota.
Starting point is 00:34:47 I do have a message for our community, for our city, and I have a message for ICE. To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy, are being terrorized, and now somebody is dead.
Starting point is 00:35:27 That's on you. And it's also on you to leave. Now that was about a month ago, Jacob Frye, mayor of Minneapolis, who, by the way, has nothing to do with Minnesota at all. He's not from there. He moved there after law school. he's basically an outside agitator who's taking control of the political mechanisms of the 43rd biggest city in the United States. Federal law enforcement, get out, he says.
Starting point is 00:36:00 Do you have a right to say that, really, if you're the mayor of an American city? Certainly understand feeling like you don't want federal agents in your city, okay, but do you have a right, an actual right to say that? No, you don't. because we have all agreed that there is a federal government over all of us. And if you're saying that into the camera, what are you doing? You're trying to start a war. And that's exactly what they're trying to do. And once again, every protester, no matter how misguided or crazed, deranged, extreme,
Starting point is 00:36:40 a lot of them are really extreme, no matter how many foot soldiers die in this, Jacob Fry, as long as they keep dying, gets more powerful. This guy's the mayor of Minneapolis. It doesn't even have 500,000 people, not even a half a million people live in Minneapolis, okay? And yet every American knows this guy's name. Why?
Starting point is 00:37:05 Because of this. So typically, it used to be, like in a functioning system, a mayor would come in and if he improved the city, he would become famous and if he wrecked it, he would become infamous. But the job description was improve the place, you're in charge of it. We elected you to make this place better.
Starting point is 00:37:24 Those rules don't apply. Instead, people are rewarded for that kind of talk, which is why he's doing. The guy's just an opportunist. He's like from suburban D.C. or somebody just shows up here and starts lecturing Minnesotans and Minneapolis, you know,
Starting point is 00:37:40 Twin Cities residents about what are, history is or whatever. No. This guy's an opportunist leveraging the destruction of his own city and the suffering of its own people in order to accrue power to himself. That's just a fact. But it tells you this is not a situation. However, they may have mishandled it, the Trump administration created. Donald Trump ran on the promise that we're going to get these people out. They have no right to be here. they're not making the country better. That's not racism.
Starting point is 00:38:13 It's just a fact. That's an overwhelmingly popular sentiment with the public or was before all of this. And the state doesn't want to comply. You hate to search for civil rights analogies because that whole thing was so fraudulent that you don't even appeal to it as a source of moral authority. On the other hand, it is a fact that Bull Connor is not considered a hero, at least in American textbooks. The guy George Wallace, the guy who stands in the schoolhouse. Doran says federal troops out, we don't remember him as a champion of states' rights. In fact, the whole concept of states' rights was made highly unpopular by that behavior.
Starting point is 00:38:56 Because, of course, the media swung behind the feds. And 60 years later, the opposite is true. And almost none of that really, really matters long term. The only thing that really, really matters is how do we keep the country? from spinning apart. And this kind of stuff is guaranteed to break it up and to cause real violence. That was Jacob Fry.
Starting point is 00:39:22 He's the one that the White House called and said, look, if you'll just respond to 911 calls when our federal officers call for help because they're going to be killed, if you'll just try to protect them in restaurants, as you would any other American, if you'll just give us the address of say a convicted murderer
Starting point is 00:39:43 we're hoping to get out of our country, then we'll leave and you can take over. This is a guy who turned that down. Again, you can't make the point enough. This is happening because they want it to happen. Just like every big thing in the life of any country happens. This is just a sad fact. Not because some group of people decide it should happen
Starting point is 00:40:00 or because it's ordained by history to happen, but because the people in charge want it to happen. By the way, we have whatever than real numbers, 80 million illegal aliens in the country in the first place because both parties want it. Of course. So at a macro level, this is manipulation of the public. That's true.
Starting point is 00:40:15 If you really wanted a country where only citizens live or people with the permission of the government, only people who are following the law get to live there and reap the benefits of living there. If you really wanted that, you could have fixed this decades ago. You'd make it really simple. You would just enforce two things. One, you're not allowed to hire people who are here illegally. You go to employers and say, no. And you would check their documents, just like your documents get checked. You can't get on a plane without a real ID.
Starting point is 00:40:46 Why? Because they want to know who you are. All these illegals are working for American businesses using fake documents. And everybody knows that fake. Social Security cards, driver's licenses, real driver's licenses now. Because a lot of states just give driver's licenses to illegals. Fake birth certificates. It's all fake.
Starting point is 00:41:03 And that's easily provable. But no one really wants to deal with that. And the other thing we do is like, how about no benefits for you? You're not a citizen. you're not allowed to be here. You're breaking the law. Why should I pay for your health care, your kid schooling, housing vouchers, whatever? We're not doing any of that anymore. Easy fix. Talk about self-deportation. End of the month, you depopulate a lot of the illegal population. But we haven't done that. Why?
Starting point is 00:41:30 Because there's, of course, a bipartisan conspiracy to have what we have now. And that's what you're seeing in Minneapolis. Why is this happening? Because the Democratic establishment sees this as the path back to power. And oh, the cost is just destroying our society. That's why. So just keep that in mind as you watch. What you're seeing through this very narrow aperture on the screen of your phone is just a scene in a much larger movie that has a totally different plot. And the movie is called color revolution.
Starting point is 00:42:02 But they're not telling you that in the credits. They're like, look at this atrocity. Okay. And by the way, some of them are atrocities. And this is in no way a justification for shooting any unarmed person, particularly for shooting a woman. That's awful. And if you don't feel that that's awful, then your soul is degrading.
Starting point is 00:42:17 Make sure you think that's sad because it is fundamentally. The question is, why did it happen? And it happened because of people like Jacob Frye and Governor Walsz and Lieutenant Governor Peggy. That's why it happened. So this is clearly about power, moving power from one group. to another group, and the people inspiring violence want the power, and they're willing to watch others die in order to get it. It's a very familiar formula. People are like this. It's the worst thing about them, but it's just a fact. Not about civil rights. It's not about the folks or the
Starting point is 00:42:55 neighborhood. It's about taking power from someone else. But underneath it all is also an ideology, and it's the same ideology that has ruled this country for generations. And it's many things. It's secular, of course. It's instinctively pro-chaos. It's instinctively anti-beauty. But above all, it is opposed to two things, and that is Christianity and whites. Now, why is that? It's a tough one. You know, as a non-theologian, I'm not going to speculate. Only noting that because, as someone who's lived here for a long time, I've marinated in it for decades. The two things are ruling classes
Starting point is 00:43:39 object to the most strenuously they don't always say it aloud though often they do Christianity not religion Christianity specifically
Starting point is 00:43:47 and white people kind of interesting and again you can draw your own conclusions as to why that might be why those would be your
Starting point is 00:43:55 operating hatreds in a country that for 230 out of 250 years was majority white and Christian
Starting point is 00:44:06 who knows, right? But those clearly are the things that people like Tim Walls, people like Peggy Flanagan, people like Jacob Frye hate the most. And we know that because they can't stop themselves from telling you. Here's an interview she did with a local radio station several years ago in which she explained that as a Native American, she's a Native American somehow. Affluent suburb, but Native American.
Starting point is 00:44:42 Peggy Flanagan feels just very deeply. Listen. Unfortunately, Minnesota Nice too often means that we gloss over the deep inequities that exist in our states. We're one of the happiest states in the country. Our schools and healthcare systems are at the top of the list, on all the list that you want to be on top of. We've got a really incredible state.
Starting point is 00:45:09 If you're white, if you are a person of color, if you are indigenous, if you are an immigrant or refugee, the opposite is true. As a Native American woman, it is not lost on me that I work in a system that was created in many ways to eliminate and erase. me and our community as a whole. So I'm not interested in just making policy change here and there. But we also need to be in a place where we call white supremacy, white supremacy. So you can sit and like parse this. Like how Native American is Peggy Flanagan? How a gibboa is she really? But it's not really even worth having that argument.
Starting point is 00:46:03 What's so much more important to understand is the hostility. And boy, can you feel it. As a Native American woman, the system was designed to erase me. Really, your lieutenant governor. I don't, you seem pretty visible, actually, for an invisible person. Right. It's absurd. It's felt rather than reasoned.
Starting point is 00:46:21 But it's no less significant because it's irrational because it's clear. It's heartfelt. This is someone who really doesn't like the whites. A lot of them are that. way, including a lot of the whites. That's its whole separate question. Like, there's no hatred quite so durable and profound as self-hatred. The self-hater is the one you really have to worry, but they're the true extremists, which, by the way, does in part explain why all this violence in the whitest cities. This isn't happening in Miami. It's not happening in Baltimore,
Starting point is 00:47:03 actually. It's not happening in Detroit. It's not happening in Memphis, the most dangerous city in the country. They sent federal troops to Memphis, to Trump administration, to Washington, D.C. These are all majority black cities. Didn't respond like this. But it's the very few remaining majority white cities that we have in this country. They're the hotbeds of this kind of radicalism and intensity. It's just a fact. Certainly not an attack on white people. I'll never add my voice to that chorus, because there's enough of it. But it's noticing it. So why is Minneapolis so much more radical than Baltimore? It's way nicer than Baltimore.
Starting point is 00:47:41 You're less likely to get carjacked. But the political intensity, oh, there's no comparison. You're never going to get lectured about ice brutality or, no, you can't deport the Somali child molester. You're never going to get that lecture in Baltimore ever or Gary, Indiana or even Washington, D.C., except from a professional class white, but in cities like Portland, Oregon, Portland, Maine, Minneapolis, Minnesota, St. Paul, you're definitely going to get that lecture. Because self-hatred is a stronger emotion than hatred. And of course, that fact has been leveraged by ambitious white ladies like Peggy Flanagan for a long time. And Elizabeth Warren, why they was telling you how American Indian they are when
Starting point is 00:48:33 obviously they're not. I'm American Indian. and I'm a gibboa. My Ojiboy name is Proud lady or whatever. They're making up this absurd stuff. Settle down, Peggy. Why are they telling you that? Of course, because it's so resonant. It's so powerful to the self-hating white.
Starting point is 00:48:51 Oh, you holy person. I mean, it's like hilarious, but it's also scary. Because in that self-hatred are the roots of true extremism. Just lay down in front of the train tracks. Lay your body down. As Peggy said, that's the short-term problem. The long-term problem is, ooh, if you keep, if you're trafficking in race hate and then you get power, what happens to the people you hate? Well, they could be in trouble.
Starting point is 00:49:22 That's when you've got a Hutu-Tutsi situation on your hands. Actually, I mean, this is the history of the world. We shouldn't think we're exempt. So this kind of stuff is really, really dangerous and is the undercurrent. of this whole debate over ice. So we hate the whites and we hate the Christians. Hmm. And that, of course, was the main reason you saw that church invaded the other day in Minneapolis
Starting point is 00:49:51 in the Twin Cities. What did they do? They were just in the middle of a church service. The world's only really nonviolent religion. But they got threatened. Their kids got threatened and screamed at. And what happened? After that.
Starting point is 00:50:08 Well, the Trump administration tried to indict five people. But they couldn't because they couldn't find a judge to sign the order. It was basically nullification by judge. No, it was a church. We're not going to do anything about it. So you'd think people hassled in church. They have nothing to do with anything. The prisoners in that church were threatened by lunatics.
Starting point is 00:50:31 It's on video. We're not guessing. That's not a crime, really? Well, let's go now to the chief law enforcement officer in the state of Minnesota. Mr. Keith Ellison, the longtime black separatist, talk about anti-white activists, Keith Ellison, who leveraged white guilt to become the attorney general of the state of Minnesota. Listen to him explain why, of course, no one's going to get indicted for screaming at Christians in the middle of a church service, for threatening Christians in prayer. Watch this.
Starting point is 00:51:03 And the FACE Act, by the way, is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights to be protected. And so that people, for a religious reason, you know, cannot just use religion to break into women's reproductive health centers. Right. So how they are stretching either of these laws to apply to people who protested in a church over the behavior or the perceived behavior of a religious. leader is beyond me. Oh, Keith Ellison, who's the attorney general of the state, charged with enforcing the laws of the state, can't get his head around the concept of universally applicable standards,
Starting point is 00:51:51 principles, or laws. Oh, no, that doesn't apply to people I don't like. They're not protected by that law. Well, no, anti-Semitism is wrong. Racism is wrong. Anti-white hatred is not wrong. Okay. It's the same way of thinking. This is what tribalism leads to. The tribalist mind cannot understand the concept of universally applicable standards or principles. They don't exist.
Starting point is 00:52:20 So whatever's good for my team is just good. And if it's good for your team, then it's not good. Okay. That's the attitude. It's not just Keith Ellison, by the way, who has that attitude. A lot of people in Washington have that attitude. So just to restate, the country is built In fact, it is explicitly built. It's designed. This documents articulate this on the idea that certain standards, rights, as they're called, apply to every human being by virtue of the fact they're human because they're given by the creator by God to people. They cannot be taken away inalienable.
Starting point is 00:52:54 And they always reside with the individual no matter what. This was the case that the civil rights protesters made it first. they didn't mean it, turns out. But it's still nonetheless true. We believe that all people are subject to the same standards because they're people and protected by the same laws. But Keith Ellison can't even comprehend that. He says to the Face Act, which is designed to protect abortion clinics as they kill kids. That was designed to keep religious people away from abortion clinics.
Starting point is 00:53:27 They can't pray on the sidewalk outside an abortion clinic. Got it. in no way protects religious people from being threatened in church by my voters. I don't even know what you're talking about. Okay. And by the way, this is the mindset that has rendered useless except for political activism, huge swaths of our judiciary. This is why no one gets punished for left-wing activism.
Starting point is 00:53:56 And yet people who gather outside the Capitol with their little pocket constitutions end up doing five years in prison on January 6th, having committed no crime at all, other than wandered too close to the so-called people's house, because it's just a totally different set of principles. Like, whose side are you on? Your team doesn't have the benefit of protection under the law. You don't have the right to exist. This is their thinking.
Starting point is 00:54:23 You should know this, by the way. And this is why what we're looking at now will determine not just the course of political power over the next two years or between now and the midterm. They want to shut the country down before the midterms so they can take power in the midterms. Obviously got it. But the course of our lives going forward, because if people who don't believe in universal principles or rights take control and you're on the wrong side, you have no rights, none. Will they feel guilty about hurting you?
Starting point is 00:54:51 Of course not. You just heard him say that. Why do Christians have protection? They're Christians. It's not like they're abortionists. They're not like Canaanite priestesses. They have protection, but like people praying in church. So just keep in mind, no matter what happens going forward, that the instincts, the hatreds of the people on the other side can be distilled to don't like whites, don't like Christians, and white Christians are the worst possible combination.
Starting point is 00:55:25 So those people who have been in our government's crosshairs for an awful long time should wake up and remember, or the stick. are really high for you. Talk about a disfavored group. And that leads to the last point that is worth making in all of this, which is there is another group that benefits from chaos and that's entrenched institutional interests. It's one of the reasons, you know, Apple gave so much money to the Black Lives Matter protest, because like in some sense, it's good for them because they're here no matter what. But government agencies with guns always have an interest, just an inherent interest, regardless of who's running them at the time. But as an organization, they have an interest in increasing their powers. And so if you're thinking that this is going to move toward more
Starting point is 00:56:17 confrontation, it's going to get more extreme before it pulls back. Obviously, we're praying, literally praying for this to, like, calm down. But let's say it doesn't. You have to ask yourself, like who are the people who are armed, who have the authority to, say, point a gun at a fellow American, take the life of a fellow American because they're doing it on behalf of the government. It's the law. Just trying to keep order here.
Starting point is 00:56:43 That's what we shot you. And there are a lot of Trump voters who have kind of suspended these thoughts because they're rooting for Trump. But it doesn't matter how much you love Trump voted for him or if, like me, you campaigned in multiple states with Trump. It's not an attack on Trump.
Starting point is 00:56:59 to note that, oof, you should not trust the government. I mean, like, why would you? I mean, in order, I think most people who voted for Trump would say, I'll speak for myself. What do you believe in most? Well, God, my family, decency, kindness, my neighbors, my ancestors, the founding principles of our country, like maybe in order. and one of those founding principles of our country is like don't always trust the government. Fair. It's fair. And don't forget that. You'd be a fool to forget that. And the institutions that are
Starting point is 00:57:38 fighting back against people you're worried about might be the ones oppressing you at a certain point. So you'd be crazy not to ask obvious questions like, okay, is the uniformed U.S. military or its leaders sort of on the side of the rule of law? We never have to think about that. Most Americans have never thought. about that. Then you look at January 6th, which was, among other things, part of the most effective largest false flag operation in the last 10 years. There have been quite a few, but that was definitely one of them. And the U.S. military, National Guard played a role in that. We've never been held to account for that. That should make you a little bit uncomfortable, right? In fact, the whole first Trump term should make you uncomfortable.
Starting point is 00:58:23 So Trump voters are like, no, we have to trust the government. Really? Was that the lesson of the first Trump term we have to trust the government? Was it really? When the government, his own federal agencies tried to send Trump and his kids to prison for the rest of his life of their lives with the Russiagate hoax. Was that actually the lesson there? And then you have January 6, the false flag of January 6th. And then two years later, you have armed FBI agents in his wife's underwear drawer. And they're there because we really believe Trump may have violated the espionage act. No one believed Trump violated the espionage act.
Starting point is 00:58:57 You have to be a moron. No sane person thought that. But they did it anyway. no one's ever punished for that. So the people telling you to trust the government, you probably shouldn't trust. And it's always the same people. It's kind of funny.
Starting point is 00:59:14 They don't want any disclosure. The funniest is all the people who are telling you have to hate Muslims. Oh, hate the Muslims. Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin, hate Muslims. Why aren't those same people calling for full disclosure of the 9-11 documents? It's kind of weird, isn't it? If you really wanted to prove that Muslims are bad, You would want all the 9-11 documents disclosed, wouldn't you,
Starting point is 00:59:35 to see you could sort of play out the horrifying details that led to those fabled 19 Arabs with box cutters committing the biggest act of terror in American history. Why would you ever want to keep any of that secret? Has Mark Levin ever called for the full disclosure of the 9-11 docs? Shut up, conspiracy theorist. Well, why wouldn't you? That would kind of make your case the Muslims are bad, wouldn't it? Just put a nail in the coffin of all the jihadis in America.
Starting point is 01:00:01 Ben Shapiro on that? Oh, shut up, conspiracy terrorist. So just keep in mind when people tell you, trust the government, maybe there's another agenda there. I mean, you hear two facts you should know, not trying to sow paranoia or anything like that, but they're national guard units, national guard units in the United States,
Starting point is 01:00:22 in various states that are actively recruiting right now the children of illegal aliens. Why would you do that? The National Guard exists for number of purposes, but one of them is to keep order in the United States. So you're intentionally recruiting people with no ties whatsoever to the United States and giving them the power to shoot your fellow Americans as long as the government declares it an emergency? Is that really the group you'd be targeting the children of illegal aliens? So here to end are the three potential options for stopping the chaos in Minnesota.
Starting point is 01:01:01 And there may be others, but these are the three that come immediately to mind for the Trump administration. Clearly, state officials in Minnesota have a vested interest, as explained, to increase the chaos, to increase the casualties, to increase the destruction. Their city burns, it's a win for them. Their protesters die. It's a win for them. Those are all martyrs. Their holy names will never be forgotten. They want this, obviously.
Starting point is 01:01:24 So what does the administration do to end the chaos? Three things, potentially. The first just kind of keep doing what they're doing, but more so. So invoke the Insurrection Act, you're hearing a lot. It was just evoked the Insurrection Act. That'll fix it. It's been invoked a lot. It certainly has in American history.
Starting point is 01:01:42 What would that mean? Well, it would mean sending more troops there. I think over 3,000, maybe 3,500 federal troops in Minneapolis in area right now. It's a lot. It's not working. You could invoke the Insurrection Act. That would sound scary. Would it change the,
Starting point is 01:02:01 actual conditions on the ground. Maybe if you sent enough of them, you sent the 101st airborne like Eisenhower did at Central High School in Little Rock, 1996, maybe that would work. But you'd have to send a lot and you'd have to put in no-nonsense posture and one of the chances people get killed very high, but you could try it. And then you would have to kind of deal with the aftermath, but maybe it would be worth it. Two, you could, and this is, and this is, makes some sense too. You could target the people in charge of this rather than their foot soldiers. Because if you think about it for a second, punishing the human waves that have been mobilized by the Attorney General, the governor, the mayor, and the lieutenant governor probably isn't the right way. When you have war crimes tribunals, you don't put infantrymen on trial. You put their commanding officers on trial.
Starting point is 01:02:55 Who gave the order to do this? They're the culpable party, of course. So you could arrest. the governor, the lieutenant governor, the mayor, and the attorney general, and you would have grounds to do that, ample grounds to do that. The lieutenant governor has been coordinating, according to the ICE signal chat, apparently has been coordinating attacks on federal officers. If that is indeed her, if the alias on the signal chat is the lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, it looks like it is, she's a conspirator in this. You could arrest her. They could arrest the governor on the same grounds. They could arrest the attorney general. They could arrest the mayor. And that's a possibility. So go after the people who are fomenting chaos, not just their agents. Not the kind of sad, pasty-faced tattoos on the neck people, but the actual generals in this war, and it is war. The downside would be what then? There's no
Starting point is 01:03:57 jury in the state that's going to convict him. No one who goes after the Trump, administration, almost nobody or their agents is ever convicted. We have jury nullification. It's the law of the land, basically, in all blue states. And the third possibility is that you quarantine Minnesota effectively. You say, okay, you want to live with Somali fraudsters, foreign-born murderers, tons of child blesters, people convicted of child rape, and you want to call them folks and your neighbors, and you want to pay for their lives. Go ahead, but we're not paying for it. The U.S. government federal tax funds are not going to be used to pay for child molesters and murderers to get food stamps, housing vouchers,
Starting point is 01:04:47 Medicaid, whatever. We're cutting you off. And you want to live like an autonomous zone, be one. Pay for it yourself. And that might be very effective because in the end, money is power and people like Fry and Walls and Lieutenant Governor Peggy and the Black Separatist Attorney General, they want the money. So that might bring them to heal. And it would be completely fair. And you could tell the public, look, I'm against any kind of violence. This is clearly going to cause more violence. We're going to pull back. Any federal officers there, they can police their own state and we'll see how long they last. We're going to have a financial siege of Minnesota. Just cut off the money. Good luck. The problem, of course, is that you will
Starting point is 01:05:37 immediately find a federal judge who says, as they always do, when the Trump administration does something, you can't do that. And so for it to work, you'd have to say, well, we're ignoring the federal order. So at almost any turn, and this is why it's a pretty clever and diabolical trap that these Democratic politicians have laid, at almost any turn, the Trump administration is unless you can think of something else, likely to have to say, I'm sorry, we can't go along with this. We know these are the preexisting rules, but no. How about no?
Starting point is 01:06:13 We're going to get to that place. Or what is obviously their intent, this color revolution, which will hurt a lot of people, destroy a lot of property, and change the country forever. Obviously, that's going to play out. What will happen? Praying for peace, as always, praying for an end to chaos, but unknown. So this is one of the most significant moments, also one of the most complex moments, and one of the most distorted moments, any of us have lived through in a long time.
Starting point is 01:06:45 And so to help make sense of it, we're proud to have someone who I think of as one of the greatest journalists, really, of our time. Certainly one of the clearest observers and most honest observers I know. And that's Michael Schellenberger who joins us. Now, Mike, thanks so much for doing this. I'm just going to stand back and let you assess what you think we're watching right now in Minneapolis. Sure. Well, it's great to be with you, Tucker, and I wholeheartedly agree this is a issue of great significance. I should start by saying that the people involved in it on the left are very familiar to me. I spend many decades on the radical left. I've participated in nonviolence civil disobedience multiple times. I've led nonviolence. civil disobedience most recently to save the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.
Starting point is 01:07:35 I'm also somebody that takes physical security extremely seriously. I've been in war zones ever since I was 17 years old. I'm very aware of the fact that your physical environment is something that you must be aware of at all times. You must know whatever situation you're in at all times. and that physical security starts with knowing the situation you're going into and the situation around you. So context is everything. And one of the things that I found disturbing about the media coverage of this is that they're stripping all the context away. And so you just see a particular moment of Alex Prattie on the ground.
Starting point is 01:08:16 You're missing a broader context here. You know, I think it's really important to understand that these are incredibly well-organized. efforts to interfere with law enforcement operations by a very sophisticated group of individuals, of nonprofits, of people that have the support from Democratic officials in the state of Minnesota. We saw a manual that they have created for activists to disrupt law enforcement operations. That manual describes how people should, for example, call 911. on ICE officers and deceive the 911 dispatchers into thinking that they're reporting a kidnapping by armed men, that is exceedingly dangerous.
Starting point is 01:09:08 I can't emphasize it enough. You're provoking confrontations between different law enforcement officials with malintensions, an intention to get people hurt to create disruption and violence. So I think the important thing to know about both Renee Good and Alex Pretty, these deaths are obviously tragic. I actually view both of them as victims of the left and this broader strategy to create violence and chaos as a way to ostensibly disrupt ICE operations. I think there's a larger strategy here, which we should talk about. But the context is that they're interfering in law enforcement operations. And the claim that they were simply
Starting point is 01:09:48 observing is dishonest. And you can see Alex Prattie waving traffic in from the middle of the street, he then intervenes when an ice officer is engaging with a woman. Now, I say all this with, you know, no, I'm not defending the behavior of any of these ice officers. You know, if I, you know, have you pressed me, I think that this was not great behavior. I think we can all look at it and see a lot of things that we think are inappropriate. This is a force of ICE agents that was not well prepared. I don't think it was well managed. And other things can be true, which is that Alex Prattie put himself right in front of that officer, stepped into the street, got himself involved in this altercation that he didn't need to be involved in, certainly not to film it. So they are clearly intervening. And of course, Renee Good, you know, drives perpendicular into blocking the street.
Starting point is 01:10:45 Her partner was outside the vehicle, taunting ICE agents. I think it's just obvious that these are behaviors aimed at. interfering with law enforcement operations. And again, that's not justification for the behaviors of the ICE agents or anything else. But I think this effort to kind of strip away all that context and suggest that somehow these were, you know, observers or journalists that were keeping safe distance. It's just false. It's just not the case. I think the other part, the other point I wanted to make about this is that there's two separate strategies that people should be aware of that left-wing activists use. One is nonviolent civil disobedience. Incredible tradition from Henry David Road to Mahatman Gandhi to Martin through King to nonviolent civil disobedience. I was involved in. The first priority is to keep people safe and prevent any physical altercations or any conflict with law enforcement.
Starting point is 01:11:37 Those efforts, in fact, should and do use a lot of communication between the protest leaders and law enforcement to avoid any physical violence. The whole strategy is to be arrested. That's the point of it, but to be arrested in a peaceful way. What we're seeing in Minneapolis is not that strategy. It is a strategy aimed at provoking an overreaction. It's much more similar to the guerrilla strategy that was developed by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to overthrow the Cuban government, which is to make an attack and then get an overreaction from your opponent that hurts many people on your side, deliberately, in order to foment a larger revolution or reaction.
Starting point is 01:12:20 Notably, that tactic, you know, it's a neutral tactic can be used by anybody. It was used by Osama bin Laden in attacking the United States on 9-11 to trigger an overreaction. That's precisely what occurred. So I think that the tragedy here is both the deaths of these two individuals who I think are used as cannon fodder by the left-wing leaders of this movement. I mentioned before there was a manual that was being used. We now know there was a signal group that had at least 1,000 people in it. We now know there's Democrat leaders in Minnesota had been calling for people to put their bodies on the line. That was the specific language of the lieutenant governor.
Starting point is 01:12:56 And we've now seen other evidence come out. For example, there's a young reporter on the scene named Haley West. She was, she documented on video how she was being followed by anti-ice left activists in Minneapolis. And when she confronted them, they said that they had her driver's license or sorry, they had her license. They had her license plate in their database, and she said, well, we're not ICE. And the response from one of those leaders, I found so disturbing. It was basically, I think he said, get the F out of here. He was just basically commanding her to leave.
Starting point is 01:13:32 He has no right to do that. He's not law enforcement. These are people acting as though they have a private militia. That is a breakdown of order. The definition of having a functioning state is that it is, is the state is defined, at least by one of the great sociologists, as the legitimate monopoly on violence. Well, they are trying to take the policing powers away from the state, take it upon themselves as self-appointed left-wing activists. That's just straight up thuggery or gangsterism.
Starting point is 01:14:06 And what's so disturbing about it is that you sort of say, well, we don't see them using weapons or it's not armed. Well, they've created an entire malicious structure with a, communication system, legal system, a policing effort. They're somehow able to run license plates. They're able to get information from rental car companies. It's incredibly well organized. And I think they got what they wanted in the sense that they got two people killed.
Starting point is 01:14:35 They have successfully persuaded the media to focus extremely narrowly on a particular moment and eliminate the broader context of the ways in which the left is using people as cannon fodder, the way in which the left is getting people killed. I think it's shameful. I think it's disturbing. It's frightening. I think that the Trump administration needs to exercise great care, greater care,
Starting point is 01:15:01 so as to not actually participate in the radical left's agenda to sow more discord, to create more violence. Because I think so far, they've succeeded in doing that. they've made the issue around, you know, ICE rather than about the fact that they've effectively got, you know, a malicious structure organized in Minneapolis that is taking over normal policing functions and then sending out, you know, people to basically get hurt and killed and disrupt operations that look at a legal level, you know, one might agree or disagree with what the, with President Trump, with his policies on migration, with
Starting point is 01:15:43 ICE enforcement, but the Constitution is very clear. There's a supremacy clause. Whenever there's a conflict between federal law and state law, the federal law applies. There's no sort of debate about any of that. And so I fear that, unfortunately, we're in a situation where the Trump administration finds itself in a bind, where it's got a situation in Minneapolis that's spiraled out of control. But if it now runs away or backs off, then, of course, there's the risk of of sending the message that really anything goes and that state and local authorities should have supremacy over federal law, and I think that's
Starting point is 01:16:21 an extremely dangerous precedent. It feels in some ways like the bill is coming due on a tab that we've been running for a long time, where states have been in open violation of federal law for decades as sanctuary cities, for example, sanctuary states, the state of Oregon decriminalizes fentanyl, lots of states decriminalize marijuana, but all of the
Starting point is 01:16:44 of this is in contradiction, contravention of federal law, nobody does anything about it at all. So should it really shock us if there's a city that decides to have its own militia, its own private army? Like, that's not like a new development, really, is it? Well, no. And I think, I'm sure you've had the experience, too, where we remember back to 2020. And obviously, the killing of George Floyd is different than the killing of Alex Pretti. But there's so many different similarities to this.
Starting point is 01:17:17 I mean, the first one is that they're looking to create autonomous zones. Recall that they created an autonomous zone in Minneapolis, but they also created one in Seattle. The political leadership in Seattle, the mayor and the city council, allowed that autonomous zone to exist. And so these autonomous zones are essentially, I mean, they're illegal seeding of power from the state, are democratically elected and controlled state to unelected left-wing activists, militias, and, you know, two kids got killed. You know, two black kids got killed in the Seattle Autonomous Zone. It took the, you know, they didn't even shut it down after the first kid was killed.
Starting point is 01:18:01 They only shut it down after the second kid was killed. And so now we're doing it again. I, you know, I think it's very hard for, you know, people to understand how important it is to have order. And I was slow to come to this because, of course, when you focus on that specific incident, you ignore the broader context. But when you go and essentially turn over several city blocks, when you allow, you know, riots night after night as Minneapolis did after the killing of George Floyd, you are abdicating your responsibility as responsible, you know, political officials who were duly elected by the people to keep them safe. it's essentially undermining not just lock, but also Hobbs, which says that we need to, the first function of the state is for physical security. And so you're seeing a very disturbing, I think, partnership between these radical left activists who are interfering in law enforcement operations, working with elected Democrat officials to essentially, you know, end or sort of pull back from providing basic security. to citizens and residents, it's hard not to look at this and feel like you're headed or
Starting point is 01:19:16 we're headed towards some kind of civil conflict or civil war. You know, heaven forbid, but I think it's just, I can't underscore how dangerous and reckless the current situation is. You know, people, you know, the mark of a civilized society is that we protect our vulnerable, and we're obviously failing to do that. Well, Kay, I mean, I've seen it in person. The first victims of chaos are the defenseless or the weakest, of course. And so, yeah, everything about it is evil and certainly uncivilized. I wonder what the goal is. So clearly, you know, acquiring power is the short-term goal.
Starting point is 01:19:56 But, like, what's the vision for the country that activists like this have? Like, what are they working toward? Yeah, well, that's the right question. I think it's pretty clear. It's an agenda to essentially unmake Western civilization. The left has obviously not disguised it. It's had the goal, it's viewed Western civilization as having committed the sins of indigenous genocide, slavery, you know, leading up to, in this story, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons. It will all end in, you know, climate change, apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse.
Starting point is 01:20:35 So these are extremely radical views that come from the assumption, an a priori assumption. I mean, this goes back to Rousseau and through Marx and other radical thinkers, that, you know, Western civilization is evil, that all of the problems that we have from inequality to suffering are a result of a particular system that we have, that there's some radically different system we can put in place, you know, whether it's anarchism or communism, or some other system they want to name, where there won't be these problems. So it's an extremely radical agenda. You know, when I was on the radical left, that was a very important. very specific thing separate from the Democratic Party. We thought the Democrats were sellouts.
Starting point is 01:21:16 We were all, you know, fairly far to the left of the Democrats. I think what we've seen that's maybe the most understudied and under theorized issue in political science is the radicalization of the Democratic Party. And so you used to see the, you know, mainstream Democrats distancing themselves from this kind of radical behavior. Well, now they're participating in it. They're legitimizing it. It's an extremely radical agenda. It's notable that in both the George Floyd and the Minneapolis case, the argument that's being made by the left is that there's too much policing, that there's too much law and order. And as you pointed out, I mean, we see it everywhere. I mean, you know, you lower the penalties and the consequences and the enforcement of laws
Starting point is 01:22:03 around all sorts of crimes using drugs in public, camping in public, public defecation, you know, even things like, you know, reducing traffic stops. I think you were one of the first people to report on this actually results in more death. It results in more crime. And so, you know, I had a public safety officer from Denver, actually, who said to me, he said, you know, he said, Mike, it's pretty simple. You get what you allow. And so as soon as you stop enforcing certain laws, you get more of those crimes. It happens right away. And so this is a very, you know, it's a very radical movement.
Starting point is 01:22:38 It's not a reformist movement. No one's talking about reform. It's clear that people that are doing this, you know, believe in open borders, believe in mass migration. They're doing this to, you know, undermine, you know, controlling our own borders. They're obviously, you know, want to get rid of Trump at a minimum. But I think more maximally, you know, if you get a Democrat as president, I think we're going to see, you know, a kind of this kind of anarchy and chaos at the physical reality level, and then at the level of the internet, in terms of speech, you're going to get increasing censorship. So with this kind of chaos that gets
Starting point is 01:23:15 created in the neighborhoods, the only way you can sustain that is by controlling information and making people think it's something that it's not. This obviously worked in terms of fueling the drug and homelessness epidemic. I think it's also working now to make people think that somehow, you know, the underlying problem is law enforcement. I mean, it's so absurd. And that was the ideology that, you know, was behind Black Lives Matter, you know, an organization that, you know,
Starting point is 01:23:40 false spread disinformation led people to believe that police brutality was increasing and also that there was greater use of, there were more police shootings of black Americans and white Americans. That was disproven by Harvard professor Roland Fryer. We knew that also just police killings, like all killings had been going down since the 70s,
Starting point is 01:24:00 So the entire thing was based on a lie. And so I think that's the fundamental. You see the lie, there's many lies stacked on top of each other. One of the big lies is that civilization somehow hurts vulnerable people. Well, civilization is what protects vulnerable people. You know, this idea that law enforcement is as fascist. I mean, it's so offensive. The comparisons between ICE and, you know, the Gestapo, the Nazis.
Starting point is 01:24:28 I mean, you're comparing, you know, someone. pointed out, it's like, migrants get, you know, illegal migrants get $3,500, you know, and a flight back home. They have all their rights protected. They have a better due process than I think any country in the world has ever offered migrants. We allow in more migrants than the other country in the world.
Starting point is 01:24:48 The United States is the most anti-racist nation that's ever existed. So when they compare ICE to Nazis, I don't think it's just hyperbole, or at least if it started as hyperbole, it's become something much more dangerous, which is that it's basically saying that ice officers and other law enforcement are worthy of being killed because the only proper treatment of Nazis, as, you know, 80 years of Hollywood films and television and movies have shown, is to murder them. You know, that's what Quinn Tarotino's Inglorious Bastards is saying, and there's heroism and excitement and glory in that promotion of that idea. So you put those two things together that the only proper treatment of Nazis and fascists is to murder them. And then you call law enforcement officials, your political opponents, Nazis and fascists.
Starting point is 01:25:40 Well, we shouldn't be surprised that we see two assassination attempts on President Trump, you know, the murder of Charlie Kirk. And now, you know, essentially turning, you know, left-wing, naive left-wing activists into cannon fodder, essentially for these very radical, goals. Unfortunately, it just keeps getting worse, and I'm afraid we haven't hit the bottom yet. I don't know where the bottom is, but I don't think there's any question about what their goals are. I mean, maybe I'm too pedantic, but to hear people who worship violence describe themselves as nonviolent activists grates on me, since I believe in nonviolent protest as a Christian strongly, I don't know if these same people were organizing protests against shoveling hundreds of millions to the Ukrainian war machine. I don't remember that part.
Starting point is 01:26:32 I mean, do they have a history of opposing? There's a lot of state violence that the United States sponsors around the world. And I think it's immoral. I think it's a crime. But I don't hear these people worrying about that at all. Right? No, I mean, yeah, it's an amazing. It's a great point.
Starting point is 01:26:49 I mean, they're not, they're doing, their focus is on attacking the basic structures of civilization. And maybe the most basic structure is security, it's physical security, it's law and order. Another is maintaining your borders. If you don't have, you know, borders that are well maintained, then you don't have a nation. It's just that simple. I mean, I'll say something else, Tucker, which is that, you know, I think a year ago, shortly after the 2024 elections, I found with many people on the left, both ones that I know personally and also just, you know, reading, there was a moment of an, it seemed like we were headed towards a moment of introspection. There was some sense among, you know, mainline Democrats that they had been misled by the media, which had claimed that Biden was fine, for example, and the border was, they were doing everything they could to close the border.
Starting point is 01:27:44 You know, you kind of get into January, February, Trump closes the border. We know that Biden was not fine. And I think there was some efforts to rethink things. Sadly, that moment has passed, and I think Democrats are more radicalized than ever. They're more certain than ever about what they believe. They're really a very black and white way of thinking about these things. There's a real desire to, I think they get swept up in this desire to feel like heroes fighting against fascists and Nazis. It's just their comfort zone.
Starting point is 01:28:16 It's where they just, they're there. I mean, they don't want to leave there. And so I'm afraid that all of that, that moment of potential awakening or reckoning with just how radicalized the left had gone, I think that's all gone now. And you can see it in people like Gavin Newsome, who at first, you know, had conversations with Charlie Kirk and with, you know, people on the right as a way to try to under,
Starting point is 01:28:42 apparently try to understand, obviously in a performative way. but nonetheless, there was some sense in which that was good politics a year ago. That's all gone now. And now we're back to, I just think, a really profoundly anti-civilization, anti-American, hatred that is giving them pleasure, that they makes them feel important, it makes them feel powerful, it gives their lives meaning and purpose. And, you know, for me, it's just a huge concern because that's part of the, forces that are leading us to, I mean, I think we just have to be honest about it. That
Starting point is 01:29:18 appears to be what's leading us towards civil war. Yes. And I do think people who are for civilization underestimate the seriousness of these people. I mean, they're serious and they're not stupid at all. I watched yesterday an anti-ice protest form in a small town, thousands of miles, over a thousand miles from Minneapolis and it was not on social media and every woman in the town received a text about it right and that's how it was organized
Starting point is 01:29:53 and so that make I watched it so that makes me think this is this is not about those poor sad people getting killed and I just want to say again how sad I felt watching those videos I really did I mean it too but it's not really about that
Starting point is 01:30:10 is it? Well, no, except for the part of the fact that this is clearly the kind of, this is what they wanted. I mean, they were inciting this. They're telling people to interfere with law enforcement operations, knowing full well how dangerous that is. And so I think it's a mistake to view these things as unintentional. I'm not saying that we're going to find messages with them saying, we hope somebody gets killed. But the recklessness that they were advocating. I mean, again, it's like night and day when you look at the tactics being used by the anti-ice left right now, and then you look at the really noble tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, it's day and night. They really have nothing to do with each other. The tactics that are
Starting point is 01:30:55 being used in Minneapolis now are just much more similar to what's being used for, you know, guerrilla warfare, for example, rather than in the tradition of King Gandhi and Thoreau. I think the Trump administration is in a very very very important. tough spot right now. I think they know they are. I think for political and humanitarian reasons, for reasons of love of country, I'm being sincere, they want to fix this, but they, you know, but it's very, it's complex at every turn. So what would your advice be to the White House right now? Well, I thought they made a good step forward in trying to put somebody with a lot more experience in charge. I thought it was just outrageous that the Secretary of Homeland Security,
Starting point is 01:31:43 Christy Noem, just got up there and trashed Alex Pretty. You know, clearly it was... I agree. Yeah, it was just obviously what she was saying was false. And I don't understand it. I mean, I found it, you know, dehumanizing and gross. I think good and pretty are victims of the left and that should have been what they said. And, you know, look, it's just, I think there's a lot of ways. Can I ask you to pause for one second? All of us should have reverence in the face of death. We didn't create life. We can't. We're not capable of it. And when it ends, and I don't care who it is, we have to bow before the mystery of death and take it seriously. You can never mock someone. You know what I mean?
Starting point is 01:32:35 There has to be, even if it's your enemy, you have to take it seriously. And decent civilized people, Christian people do take it seriously. And that's not trashing someone like that, especially if it's untrue. That is not the way. I just have to say that. I feel that. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's very hard for people, certainly in the heat of the moment, to deal with the fact that many things can be true at the same time.
Starting point is 01:33:01 It was... Yes, that's right. Look, the ICE operations were just not, obviously, they were not well organized, and they've recruited a lot of people that don't have the experience they need. I mean, whenever things go terribly wrong, including like in Uvalde, New Mexico, or elsewhere, I think everyone wants to blame the individual officers. And they certainly have responsibility. But they're part of an institution, and the higher responsibility goes to the people in those institutions who had a job of training them. and preparing them for that context. I think Alex Prattie also has responsibility.
Starting point is 01:33:37 It's very, there's a lot of demagoguery on this issue where I pointed out on X, I'm like, I think that women should have the right to walk through any neighborhood in America, in scantily clothed. And I've fought to make that happen. In California, that's one of the problems, is that it's not safe to walk anywhere.
Starting point is 01:33:55 And increasingly in other parts of the United States, it's not safe to walk anywhere. I'm also a father of a daughter. I'm a professor now. I actually took my students, undergraduate students, 19-year-old students, to interview people on the street here in Austin.
Starting point is 01:34:11 They told stories of witnessing homicide, drug dealing, assault is extremely, they're living in extremely violent, dangerous circumstances. And I take that responsibility very seriously of making sure those students are safe and understand my surroundings. And that means that Alex Pretty also has
Starting point is 01:34:30 responsibility. And it's certainly not speaking ill of the dead to say that I think he had no idea. I think he had a sense of entitlement that they were somehow he should be able to interfere in a law enforcement operation and have no consequences. You know, again, it's not a justification for what happened to him. But I think people need to understand that you are responsible ultimately for own physical security. And the first part of that physical security is where you put yourself. And that, you know, people, because of Hollywood, I think they sometimes think that your security is all about, your ability to fight once you're in a dangerous situation or how to react in those situations.
Starting point is 01:35:07 No, it's actually about not being in that situation in the first place. And we've got a situation here where you've got leading Democratic officials in Minnesota. You have major NGOs in Minnesota. You have very skilled organizers that create manuals and have lawyers awaiting who are encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations. it's grossly irresponsible. So many things are true at the same time. And I, you know, we just have not seen, you know, I think we have not seen the left.
Starting point is 01:35:44 We have not seen Democrats. And sadly, I don't think we saw the Trump administration at its best over the last few days. I think there is time to turn it around. And I think Tom Homan is somebody that should bring that experience. I have my own views of how to, kind of what should be the policies around migration and what to do about it. But I think the administration is pursuing a strategy to focus on the criminal element.
Starting point is 01:36:10 I think 64% of all of the ICE arrests and detainees since Trump took office had been people with either a criminal prosecution or charges against them. I think that like to see that number be even higher and much more caretaking in these operations, much more focused. you know, I think you've got to find a way to get local police and state involved from the beginning. Otherwise, I kind of wonder whether it should be done at all. Again, you have federal supremacy, but, you know, we're trying to be practical here, too. So I hope it's a wake-up call for everybody. I know there was some calls between the president and the governor and the mayor. You know, president was, I think, I will say, again, I think the president was elected on a particular agenda, and it would be really a bad
Starting point is 01:36:59 precedent for a president's agenda to be undermined by people that are pursuing a strategy to essentially, you know, break the law, violate the law, you know, undermine that strategy because, you know, we're a republic and, you know, the president was democratically elected and there's a lot of policies that a Democratic elected president might have that you don't like, but I think saying the president, the precedent whereby you're going to abandon your policy the agenda because you've encountered violent resistance, I worry about that a lot as a precedent. And I'm sure the Trump administration is as well. But I think you should be able to do both.
Starting point is 01:37:39 I think you should be able to pursue your agenda and do a better job of protecting and maintaining security in those areas. You can imagine, though, that it might soon become impot. I mean, I don't know how you could continue doing the same thing if you're bumping up against local law enforcement that won't protect federal officers, local elected officials, statewide elected officials who are promoting the conditions that inevitably produce violence. I mean, it seems like if they keep doing what they have been doing without changing it at all, we're going to get a lot more Alex Prettys. And so should, I mean, is there like a dramatic change in their approach that you think,
Starting point is 01:38:28 would work? I mean, if I were advised, you know, I'm not advising them, but if I were advising them, I'd say you need to keep pursuing the agenda you were elected to pursue. You just need to pursue it in a better way, in a more, you know, practical, safer way. I mean, I think it's so interesting, Tucker, also I think under-remarked upon is that the last time we saw, I think, this level of federal state clash was when, you know, Kennedy and Johnson were desegregating institutions in the South and they face significant resistance. Yes. And they did not hesitate to use force to send out the National Guard to protect children and
Starting point is 01:39:08 students as they desegregated educational institutions. I think most people also recognize that some of those efforts did go too far. For example, the forced busing, you know, and you start to get to, you start to have to kind of a practical view of this. I mean, at the end of the day, I think public opinion is paramount. And as Lincoln says, with public consent, you can do anything. Without it, you can't do anything. So I think the administration has to keep that in mind.
Starting point is 01:39:36 It is amazing. I mean, there's a very large percentage support. I think somewhere around 70% support for closing the border, which the president did. But when you start to get these ice raids, you know, I think support for those, you know, goes down to something like 40%. I know the president's approval rating on immigration has significantly declined. You know, the president probably not going to change his ways at this point, but I do think showing some genuine empathy and compassion. I mean, you felt the need to do this special on this, which I think is really important.
Starting point is 01:40:11 I agree on. I felt the need to respond to it as quickly as I could. The president needs to address the country. I just think you need an Oval Office address at this point to, you know, explain to the public what he's trying to do, you know, that it hasn't always been perfect, that he has, you know, you know, feels the pain of these deaths. And the same time, you know, he's pursuing a particular policy agenda that he was elected to pursue. And it would be dangerous to not pursue that because of, you know, both mistakes at the federal level, but also through this violent aggression by these radicalized left groups.
Starting point is 01:40:48 You know, I think we need to hear from him in a really, with a serious address from the Oval Office as soon as possible. Yeah. Michael Schellenberger, thank you for your. wise assessment of all of that. And I'm grateful, especially right now. Thank you. Thank you, Tucker.

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