The Tucker Carlson Show - Tucker on Macklemore’s Cancellation and the So-Called “Conservatives” Championing Censorship

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Macklemore says he loves Jewish people but opposes genocide. Fox News and Bob Kraft call him an antisemite. This is the party we elected to fight cancel culture?  Paid partnerships with: Dose: Daily supplements for the systems that support you. Use code TUCKER for 35% at https://dosedaily.co/tucker American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker.Dutch: Use code TUCKER for $50 off your vet care at https://dutch.com/tuckerTCN: Get your copy of ‘10 Things To Learn' only on https://TuckerCarlsonBooks.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last Friday was the year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's murder, and the internet was flooded with remembrance of Charlie, and unfortunately, even more so, all kinds of predatory people trying to use the memory of a fallen man for their own political or financial purposes. That's kind of always the case. We sat it out because that was depressing to see. But you did see people who knew him genuinely well and liked him and weren't trying to profit from his death raised the question, how do we honor his memory? and that is a completely fair question.

But it begins with a more fundamental question, which was what was his life about? If you were to remember Charlie Kirk, what are the first qualities of his that come to mind? Of course, are the personal qualities, enthusiasm and decency and energy and intelligence. But his beliefs, well, as someone who knew Charlie well, I would sum them up this way.

He believed all kinds of things. But the main thing he believed was Christianity. He was a sincerely religious man. He was a follower of Jesus. And politically, he believed a lot of things as well. Of course, he spent a life talking about them. But above all, he believed in free speech, the right of human beings to say what they think,

to share their deepest beliefs. And those two were directly related. Charlie Kirk believed in free speech because he believed in God. And because he believed in God, he believed that each person was created by God with a distinct soul. God does not create communities. God creates individuals. And because they are individuals, sovereign individuals created in the likeness of the creator, each one has an inherent right to say what he thinks, to his own

conscience, to make up his own mind and to express his conclusions. So that's where the belief in free speech comes from. That's reflected by the way in the founding documents of the United States. These are inherent rights. They're not given to us by the state. We are born with them. And the purpose of the state is to protect them. And Charlie Kirk was a eloquent defender of this idea and a great explainer of this

idea, not just eloquent and good at it, but really one of the very few left. There are not a lot of people explaining why free speech is important and what it is. but Charlie Kirk spent really the entirety of his public life doing that up until the day he was murdered. We could have picked a lot of clips to show you on the question of Charlie Kirk and free speech, but we just grabbed one, and it's as good as any. Here's Charlie Kirk, I think last year, but it could have been any year, explaining what free speech is and why he defends it. Watch. I was wondering if you could talk about where you draw the line with free speech, hate speech, and slander.

It's a terrific question. My position is that even hate speech should be completely and totally allowed in our country. The most disgusting speech should absolutely be protected. And it's not a viewpoint that is held by the left. The ACLU used to hold this viewpoint. The American Civil Liberties Union, they sued so that legitimate Nazis could march through downtown Skokie. You remember this? Back in the 80s and 90s.

Now, why would the ACLU do this? because they said as soon as you use the word hate, that is a very subjective term. Because then all of a sudden it is in the eyes or the, it is in the implementation of whomever has the power. So here's my belief. The more speech, the better. Well, exactly. So not only is it answered good, the question actually reveals a lot too. So the question was, what's your view of free speech, hate speech, and slander? And Charlie didn't explain the difference between those three categories, but it's worth just pausing for a moment. So there's free speech, which as described is inherent to every person. You have

an inherent right. You're born with this right. You will die with this right. Whether or not it's abridged it still exists to say what you think, to express your conscience out loud. There is a category called hate speech, which, as Charlie just said, effectively means speech, the people in charge hate. And there's a third category called slander, and that's a legal category. What's the difference between hate speech or ugly speech, speech I don't want to hear, and slander? Well, it's worth saying. The difference is slander is by definition untrue. That is the legal definition of slander.

It is factually incorrect. You are lying. You're lying about somebody or something. Free speech, and even this category called hate speech, those are true things. and therefore they cannot be abridged ever. Why? Because you have to have the right to tell the truth. And any society that doesn't protect that right collapses and is also, of course, morally stained. On what grounds are you suppressing something that's true? So slander is by definition a lie, but protected speech is true or it's believed by the person who utters it to be true. And that's a meaningful

distinction as well. I'm not lying. Of course, I've been wrong about a ton of things and will be again, but this is my sincere belief. I mean it. And that includes opinions, but also claims. I believe this is true. And so if you are ruling over people, which is to say human beings, if you consider the people you have care over or power over to be human beings, then by definition you can never prevent their right to say what they think is true. Of course. Because by definition, if you do that, you are not treating them as human beings because you don't consider them human beings. That's how you treat a slave. You don't have to listen to what a slave says because he's not a human being. So in the very same way, you can tell your dogs to stop barking. You can tell a slave to shut up because he doesn't have

that right because he's not fully human. So anybody in charge who tells you you're not allowed to say something that you believe is true is not treating you as a human being. He's treating you as a slave. That's how he sees you. And you should know that. Because underneath the impulse to censor other people, and it's always dressed up as something else, concern, protection, but what really underlies it, of course, is malice and contempt. I hate you. I don't consider you fully human. Therefore, I'm not going to allow you to speak. That is unmistakably the message of every attempt to censor speech. And as Charlie Kirk said, pretty well in the clip we just showed you, it is always employed

by the people in charge on their own behalf. In other words, censorship is the process of the people in charge telling you you're not allowed to criticize them. And of course, they're clever enough, almost never to say that, though. Increasingly, they are saying that. But in general, they don't. And so they dress it up and they say, well, there's some group that's somehow powerless and you can't criticize them because they don't have power and your criticism of them is cruelty and there's a power imbalance and you're punching down

and we're not going to allow that on their behalf. Well, whether or not that's actually true and we could debate it, the one thing you can be certain of is the group they claim to be protecting is just a proxy for them. It's just a proxy for them. Always attempts at censorship

are an attempt to protect the people in charge from criticism. And as famously been noted, if you want to know who is in charge, ask yourself who you're not allowed to criticize. That's just a fact. That's not a slur or a slander. That is a fact. Because, of course, you would never affect censorship except in defense of your own interests. And that is 100% of the time what happens.

Censorship is used to protect the powerful from criticism. to gird and protect their power. Of course, there's no other reason for it. And because the people in charge are usually in every age, no matter who they are, fairly clever and ruthless, that's how they got there, they will almost always find some fairly sophisticated way to hide that fact. And once again, they will tell you that your criticism of their behavior is somehow cruelty or out of bounds, but no, what it really is is a threat to their power. Of course. And so Charlie Kirk's prescription is the only prescription.

And he said this repeatedly. If you don't like speech you hear, there is only one way. They're not a myriad ways. There's one way to combat that. And it's with more speech. Tell me how I'm wrong. And in fact, he spent the last years of his life touring the country, effectively asking crowds that.

Tell me how I'm wrong. Ask me anything. I'll defend any of my positions and I'll do so openly at length in public. And if he died for anything, it's that. In fact, he died doing that. And so if you wanted to honor his memory, of course, you would try to keep that dying tradition alive. No one seems to be doing that. But what you wouldn't do under any circumstances is do the thing that he devoted his life to fighting,

which is shutting down speech you don't like, with threats or censorship, or even with back of the hand dismissals and name calling. No, you would pause and take seriously the criticism, even if you think it's illegitimate, aimed at you or your beliefs, and explain why it's wrong and offer a counter vision of what you think is right. This was what the right used to refer to famously as the marketplace of ideas, because the idea was that the market itself was self-correcting. That was the beauty. It was an invisible hand in charge of the market. And it would find natural equilibrium if you just backed off and allowed that to happen. So if two people had opposing views, they would debate those views in public.

And then the people watching could decide which was valid on the basis of the strength of the arguments and the facts marshaled. That was the tradition of debate. In fact, that was the core of the Western tradition of discourse going all the way back to Athens. And that's what Charlie Kirk was upholding when he was murdered. And what's interesting is that the last presidential election, the 2024 election, though very few people said this out loud, really was a referendum in part on this because it was a reaction against what we now refer to as wokeism or cancel culture. Well, what are those things? Well, there are really two things. They're identity politics, the idea that on the basis of your bloodline, how you look, qualities you were born with, your genes, you are subject to different rules than other things. people. Certain groups get treated differently because of the nature of those groups. We are no longer

equal in our citizenship. Some groups are treated differently, usually better, but sometimes worse. And because that is true, because certain groups get special rights, certain groups are the only people who can use certain words, for example, literally. Because of that, we have to constrain the speech of everybody else, we need censorship in order to protect those groups. So to sort of move beyond the details of this or that specific controversy, that's a pretty accurate description of what wokeism and cancel culture were and are. And the truth is, most people find it tiresome, if not infuriating and immoral, to live in a country governed by rules like that, which are constantly changing, never fully explained to anybody, backed with by no

principles whatsoever other than the interest of the people in charge. And kind of no one likes that. Who likes that? In fact, it is so universally disliked that standard or shifting standard, whatever suits the people in charge, that even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, congresswoman from Brooklyn, who hopes to run for president in this upcoming cycle, who was, of course, a great and famous practitioner of identity politics and wokeism got elected to Congress on it, in fact. She was out there the other day kind of mildly denouncing it, saying, well, that was kind of silly in the same way that people who screamed at you for not taking the COVID Vax are now willing to say, yeah, we kind of went a little overboard, a little overboard, a little, got a little crazy,

it's like caught up in the moment. And that's their way of acknowledging that their past behavior was reprehensible to some extent, but also their way of avoiding any penalty for what they did by half admitting that what they did is wrong. And they do this because they don't really have an option. I mean, nobody would defend the federal government's response to COVID at this point. And nobody, no sane person, would defend wokeism circa 2022 at this point because it's just so obviously awful and absurd and childish and cruel and it hurt a lot of people. So the point is, if we're at a place where even Alexandria Kazi, of course,

Cortez is admitting that wokeism is pretty stupid at best. I think we can say conclusively that everybody's against it. The problem, however, is that not everybody is against it. And this gets to the question of why it exists in the first place. It doesn't exist because it's a remedy to some obvious injustice because there was just so much racism in America or so much anti-Semitism in America that someone had to act before people got hurt. that's just not true.

There, of course, is racism and anti-Semitism and all kinds of bad attitudes and hatreds and all of that. But that's not what these movements are about. Every single one of them is an effort by the people in charge to protect their own power, obviously. And that's just always true no matter who's in charge. And so every group that's in charge faces the temptation to dive head first into identity politics,

which, by the way, has the ancillary effect of dividing the country to the point where you can do. dominate the country. Fight amongst yourselves. But we sell you meme coins or invade Iran or whatever. So there's that, but it's also just kind of a classic move employed by the powerful against everybody else. And so Charlie Cook understood this. He understood that when he criticized wokeism or attacks on speech or identity politics, he wasn't simply speaking to the people who were then in charge. And we checked that clip you saw was from 2021. during the early Biden administration, Democrats were in charge.

He wasn't just criticizing them because he knew that in his own party, which was the Republican Party, there were people who, if they ever got power, would immediately embrace exactly the same worldview and employ exactly the same tactics against the entire country. He knew those people existed because even then they existed. And now, of course, they dominate completely the Republican Party. And we could spend hours going through the irony and pulling the clips of Republicans denouncing cancel culture. And then a year later, appearing on Fox News to champion cancel culture, literally the cancellation of people whose opinions they don't like. But we're not going to do that because it's just too easy and too depressing.

But instead, we just want to show you an example of what Charlie Kirk feared. And we're not guessing about this. Lots of people jump up and down about the legacy of Charlie Kirk and try and grab it for the room. but we are totally confident when we say that Charlie Kirk then and were he still with us now would oppose what you're about to see. So this is a Republican congressman from New York called Mike Lawler, and he's explaining his views on free speech. Watch. We have seen a rapid rise in anti-Semitism on these college campuses, and we need to crack down on it. This is not a free speech issue. This is hate speech. Chanting from the river to the sea was not aspirational. It was absolutely

vile and intended to undermine Israel and frankly call for its extermination. And that cannot be tolerated anywhere in this country. Oh, it cannot be tolerated. It's not free speech to have that opinion. It's hate speech. It absolutely can't be tolerated. Now, that man, Mike Lawler, who again is a Republican member of Congress. Congress, not one of the brighter ones, but still, apparently a member in good standing of the Republican Party serving in the House of Representatives, a little over a year after that, sponsored legislation with his Democratic colleague, Josh Gottheimer, to ban criticisms of the government of Israel, to encode in federal law the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which is, well,

seven out of 11 criteria are criticisms of the state of Israel, the government of Israel, the government of Israel and its behavior would be classified under federal law, anti-Semitism, and therefore a hate crime. It would be illegal, for example, under the definition that he tried to encode in federal law to describe what the Israelis are doing in Gaza as a genocide. But what if it is a genocide? What if it meets every definition of genocide? What if murdering 20,000 children could be proven, which it already has been? Would it be okay to say that?

No. not under that law, which thankfully did not pass, but it will someday if this trajectory continues. So here you have a Republican who, no doubt, would describe himself as a conservative, a constitutional conservative, trying to ban criticism of a foreign country, so it cannot be tolerated. And what's interesting is why? So this is not a blanket ban that Mike Lawler is trying to get into federal law where you can't criticize foreign countries. There are plenty of foreign countries Mike Lawler would like you to criticize.

In fact, there are countries Mike Lawler's destruction has called for himself, Russia, for example, or Iran, countries that his donors don't like. So what you're watching here, once again, is the most powerful people in the society, Mike Lawler's donors, or so repeat whatever they ask him to repeat, trying to encode their preferences and their advantages in our legal code. In other words, you take this 250-year-old country and you take the machinery of the country and you use it to your own benefit to protect you and to make you richer. That's exactly what you're seeing here. There's no principle at all involved in this in this. Michael Luller is saying it should not be allowed to criticize Israel, but you can criticize Russia. Again, why? Well, because Mike Loller's

donors love Israel and they hate Russia. Therefore, you can criticize the country they hate, but you're not allowed to criticize the country they love. Okay. So that's just like a total collapse of the rule of law, of decency, and of the thing that you really have to have in order to have a real country, which is a love of the truth.

What's true, what's objectively true, provably true, has to be, has to remain at the center of the project, has to remain at the center of your legal code. You can't convict people of a crime unless you can prove that they did it. you have to know the truth before you can punish someone. Therefore, if somebody says something true, you have to allow them to say it, period, whether you like it or not.

If someone walks up to you and says, you've gained 30 pounds and you have, that might be a rude thing to say. You might hate to hear it, but you cannot punish someone for telling the truth, even if it stings. But they're trying. they trying. And by they, we mean everybody in charge. And at this point, that means Republicans. But of course, it's hard to get censorship through the Congress because we do have this thing called the Bill of Rights and the first right enumerated in it. The very first is the right to say what you think is true. The First Amendment protects your right to say what you think is true and prevents the government from constraining that right in any way. And this has been debated for 200 years. And so we know

what the parameters are and they're very, very wide. So it's going to be pretty hard for any sitting member of Congress to vote for a Mike Lawler bill. So they have to find another way to prevent you from telling obvious truths that they find inconvenient or that their donors don't care for. So how are they going to do that? Well, through threats of violence, of course. It always comes to that through threats of violence, through intimidation, through making you afraid to say what you think is true? And so it's probably not surprising that the clip we're about to show you in just a moment comes from Nikki Haley. She's the former governor of South Carolina and has some appealing qualities for sure. Not everything about Nikki Haley is bad, but one thing about Nikki Haley is notable,

which is her very high tolerance for violence. So Nikki Haley was one of the very few Republican politicians who in the opening hours the George Floyd riots, when the city of Minneapolis was on fire and a police station was burning to the ground, cars were flipped over, people were being shot to death, women were being raped. Clearly things were getting out of control. This was mob violence, which is the scariest thing. And anyone who's ever seen it firsthand can confirm that. As she watched that on television, Nikki Haley sent on a tweet saying, in effect, you go, mobs. America needs this. the cleansing fire of rioting to burn the racism from our souls.

We're dressing it up in a more poetic way, but you can pull up the tweet because it's still on the internet. Nikki Haley saw the destruction of an American city by violence and approved of it. So someone like that who is willing to tolerate the killing of people who did nothing wrong for the larger good of purging racism from the American soul probably doesn't have a very difficult time saying something like this. Watch. When I get into office, the first thing we have to do, social media accounts, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms. Let us see why they're pushing what

they're pushing. The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name. That's, first of all, it's a national security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden, people have to stand by what they say. And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots. And then you're going to get some civility when people know their name is next to what they say. It's a national security threat

that you have opinions that Nikki Haley's donors don't like. Because the problem is Russian bots or Iranian bots, North Korean bots or donors don't like. The problem is not bots, of course. Nikki Haley's totally in favor of bots if they're, say, Israeli bots,

which dominate social media at the moment. I haven't heard many complaints from Nikki Haley about that. That's not a national. security threat. The national security threat is that you might express something true, and we can't find you to hold you accountable for that. So this kind of thinking can get you to, I don't know, North Korea pretty quick. In fact, probably unlikely that North Korean politicians have the balls to say something that open in public. Because if you have no right to express your

view anonymously online, why do you have a right to turn to your wife in bed with the shades closed and say something naughty about Israel. That could be a national security threat too. Anytime people say something out loud that Nikki Haley doesn't like, it's a national security threat. And we have to find out who's saying it. So as a practical matter, why would it be so important for Nikki Haley

to strip the shield of anonymity from people on the internet? Why do we have to know who you are if you criticize Israel? That's an interesting question. And the deeper question is, why would people fear saying what they think about Israel to the point where they wouldn't say it under their own name? That's a question worth asking too. Why are people so intimidated by Nikki Haley's donors that they don't want to express their views openly? Don't you want to live in a country where people just say what they think, where they're not afraid?

Or would you rather live in a country where people cower before the threats of figures like Nikki Haley and her national security concerns? And they just won't say what they think because they know they could be hurt for doing it. Well, Nikki Haley clearly prefers the latter. But by stripping the anonymity away from people online, it would allow, I don't know, some organized nonprofit group to hunt down anyone they find online expressing unimproved thoughts about Israel and hurt them, really hurt them. So this clip is from the woman. who changed her name, by the way, speaking of anonymity.

She had some kind of Eastern European name now. She has a kind of strange one syllable last name. Anyway, not using her real name. In any case, here is the woman who runs a group called Stop Antisemitism, which is a digital vigilante group. And that's not an overstatement, as you're about to see, but she's describing what her group does to people who criticize the Israeli government.

Watch this. We have featured more than 1,000 anti-Semites on our platform. 1,000. Not theorized about them, not quietly documented them, feature them publicly, clearly, and with evidence. The results speak for themselves. Approximately 400 of these Jew haters have faced real consequences, including firings, suspensions, and expulsions.

If you target Jewish students, your actions will not disappear into the darkness. We will shine a light on you that thanks to Google and SEO will follow you for the rest of your life. When you look for a job, when you look for a spouse, when you look for a nanny, when you look for anything, our work will always be documented. Again, thanks to Google and SEO. Huh. When you look for a job, when you look for a spouse, really? So what are we talking about here when she says when you target Jewish students? when you hate Jews. Well, of course, anyone who makes physical threats against anybody,

Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu doesn't matter. That person is committed a crime, and we have, well, layers of law enforcement agencies to deal with that, and they do, and they should. But that's not what she's talking about. She's talking about the IHRA International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism. And as noted, there are 11 examines. of anti-Semitism and seven are criticism of the Israeli government, which, to remind you, is a foreign government. It's not the U.S. government. By the way, criticism, including intemperate criticism of the U.S. government, is always and everywhere allowed and, in fact, encouraged in our schools by our government officials. You can accuse the U.S. government, our government,

the one that your ancestors died for, in any way that you like. You can accuse them of sending crack into black neighborhoods. And by the way, maybe they did. Who knows? We don't really know, but we know that it's perfectly fine to speculate about that. We know that it's hate to suggest the Israeli government might have been involved in the assassination of our president, John F. Kennedy in 1963, though there's evidence they were. But it's totally within bounds to suggest our CIA was also involved. That's totally fine. And it looks like they were involved, by the way, in that assassination.

And that's fine. And there's no penalty for acknowledging that. But to suggest that they might have worked in concert with the Israeli government, well, that will open you up to online vigilanteism like that, where you can't have a job, you can't have a spouse. Can you even live here? Hard to know. So when Nikki Haley calls for stripping the shield of anonymity

from people who dare to criticize her donor's favorite country, the reason she's doing it is so the woman you just saw on the screen can bat clean up and round up the people foolish enough to say what they really think and hurt them, not just in the short or medium term, but for life. No spouse for you, no job for you. Maybe you starve to death. That's okay because you're a hater. And of course, the great overarching irony of all of this is who's the hater? So if you go online and say, I think what the Israeli government is doing to children in Gaza is immoral because I'm not for killing children, you get screamed at and called a hater by someone who then tells you you can never get married

or have a job again. Who's the hater exactly? Of course. But the problem is because no one in authority has pushed back against any of this and because the temperature has risen to a point that sincerely is dangerous, it's accelerated. And so there's no doubt trying to be charitable about it that the woman you just saw from Stop Anti-Semitism believes that she's doing a virtuous thing. she believes she is saving Jewish people from Nazis.

Of course, her definition is deranged. Most people who are against killing children are also anti-Nazi by definition. Of course, violence against innocence was one of the signature crimes of the Nazi regime. That's why we're against the Nazis in the first place. We're not mad about their economic policy. Most of us don't even know what it was. We're mad because they hurt innocent people. And that's always in everywhere immoral.

And so there's probably a huge overlap between people who are, disgusted by what the Israeli government is doing in the territories it occupies, and people who are also disgusted by what the Nazi regime did in the territories it occupied. Probably almost 100% overlap between those two groups. But because no one will say that out loud and because extremists have been allowed to hijack the conversation, and because there isn't actually free speech on this topic, the free speech that Charlie Kirk so assiduously called for, the other side of the argument, which is moderate and temperate and fact-based and not hateful, which is universal rather than sectarian, which rejects identity politics in favor of universally applicable standards for every human being,

that side of the argument rarely gets an airing, if ever. And so the net result of this is to, with every passing day, make people crazier, angrier, and less restrained. And if that process continues long enough, you wind up with Mark Levin. Basically, in the clip, we're about to show you, calling for Crystal Knocht. Watch. For six months, I've been fighting these bastards, whether it's Tucker Carlson, or whether it's Nick Fuentes, and I've been looking over my shoulder looking for help. And you know what I found?

Nothing. Nothing. We're here today to do something about it. this. What do you mean we don't cancel people? We canceled David Duke. Donald Trump canceled David Duke. We canceled Pap Buchanan. We canceled the John Birch Society. We canceled Joseph Sobrin. We canceled pornography on TV. We cancel stuff all the damn time. Hitler admires, Stalin admires, Jew haters, American haters, Churchill haters. You're damn right. We're going to cancel them and deep platform them.

Whenever you hear that guy, Tug, you want to be serious because it does matter and it is important to explain what's wrong with what he said. But it's so disjointed and illogical. And there's always at least a line or two in there that doesn't make any sense at all. We canceled pornography on TV. You know, I think you've promoted pornography on TV as far as I know. Churchill haters. Just like throw it in there.

Jew haters. Okay, yeah, I'm against Jew haters. Churchill haters? you're not allowed to hate Churchill now? Was it like some British prime minister who screwed up at Gallipoli? I think it's okay to dislike Churchill? No, I kind of, let me check my passport and see if there's fine print in there about having to pledge loyalty to Churchill.

I don't recall that part of the American creed, Churchill haters. Where did that come from? Actually, you should think about it because if it's disqualifying to hate Churchill, Maybe there's more to Churchill than we've been told. Why are they defending Churchill? Hmm. Now, they've gotten pornography off TV. Mark Levins against pornography.

Sorry for the sidetrack there. It's just impossible to parse a Mark Levine speech without winding up on a cul-de-sac. But to the center of what he's saying, here you have. So the speech you just saw was given November 1, 2025. So that's almost exactly one year from Donald Trump's second election as president. which was the first Tuesday, of course, of November 2024. And if you can recall back almost two years and ask yourself, what was that election about?

And if you voted for Trump and if you're watching this, maybe you did. I did. What were you voting for? Well, probably a lot of things. Lower gas prices. No more foreign wars. But one of the things you were voting against, of course, was what we called cancel culture. The idea that if you disagree with someone, you just shut them down,

can't have a bank account, can't fly in an airplane. Can't have a job. Can't have a spouse. We're just going to cancel you. We're not going to rebut what you're saying. We're not going to explain why it's wrong. We're not going to offer a competing vision that entices you over to our side. We're going to smack you in the face as hard as we can until you shut up and never say it again.

In fact, we may hurt you as a lesson to everybody else. Hang you by your ankles. So pastors by will know, don't say that. That's what cancel culture is. And if there's one thing that virtually every single human being who voted for Donald Trump fewer than two years ago voted against its cancel culture. And here's Donald Trump's favorite pundit, a Fox News host in good standing, unlike some of us,

calling openly in a speech on camera for cancel culture, including canceling people who don't like Winston Churchill. But there's menace in his voice, of course. Damn it, bastards! Bastards! He wants to hurt people who disagree. with him. He's got what we used to refer to in right-wing world is

Antifa face. Screwed up in rage. I'm out of my parents, so I'm going to beat you in the face with a flagpole. Antifa face. Mark Levin. Maybe this is what power does to people. Maybe when they finally have the ability to hurt others, when they think they can finally make words they don't like go away,

shut up or I'll hurt you. They can't resist using them. the power to do that. It may be that power itself corrupts everyone who wields it. That's something we're thinking about. You don't want to believe that, but there's a lot of evidence that that's true. Given that the people we elected fewer than two years ago wound up behaving exactly like the people they replaced, except a little more aggressive and a little less disorganized, because of course the upside of dealing with liberals is they, you know, everything is like macromay and campfires. They can never really get it together. They argue amongst themselves.

but you elect these guys, and they're, of course, still disorganized and flaky and know they probably couldn't organize your daughter's birthday party very well, but they're a little better than the Kamala Harris team. So it's the same brand of politics, but a little harder-edged. What?

It's just remarkable to see it, and it makes you wonder, are there options? And if you care about speech, which is to say if you care about humanity, because there's no difference, we are defined by language, and our ability to use it. It's not the opposable thumb

that separates us from animals. It's our tongue. It's language. It's words. In the beginning was the word. As the opening verse of John says, and it's true. The word is the most important thing.

Words are the most important thing. They endure long past. Bullets or cannons or swords have been replaced by a new technology that kills people. But all that in the end is forgotten. words remain. Your words define you. And if someone takes away your words and your ability to articulate them, they've stripped you of your humanity. So in the end, it is the thing that we have

to defend. We have no choice. We have a moral obligation, an obligation, a duty to the people who follow us to defend it. But now the question is who will defend it? Because when the party that opposed free speech, got beaten by the party that promised to uphold free speech, and then less than two years later, both are united in their total opposition to free speech and are threatening people, openly threatening people, hurting people who disagree with them, and not even bothering to explain why they're wrong. You have to ask if both parties are against it, who's for it? And before you think too long, here's the answer. Everyone is for it, except the people in charge.

That's the truth. People with power always oppose free speech. Everybody else, of course, clings to it like a life jacket. It's all they have in a country where people no longer have economic power, where the middle class hasn't been the majority of the country since 2015,

where the integrity of our elections is, well, up for debate in a world where AI can hack anything, anyone who thinks electronic voting is secure, hasn't thought about it very carefully. So in a world where people don't have economic power and they may or may not have political power, what power do they have? The power of their own conscience

and their inalienable right to express what's on their conscience. They have in the end only one thing and that's their words. And so anyone who seeks to take that away from them is a blood enemy. Make no mistake. And that gets us to the free speech

case of the moment, which is an unusually illuminating one. And it has to with a performer called Macklemore, you may or may not be familiar with, but he was scheduled to give a performance with Ed Shearren at Gillette Stadium recently, and he was canceled by Robert Kraft, owner of the Patriots, and owner of a number of stadiums who is, I think it's fair to say, a fairly fanatical devotee of the state of Israel. And not just devoted to the state of Israel, which it's fine, but devoted to hurting anyone who is not and slandering them as anti-Semites. And so he canceled this performer's appearance at his stadium and said anyone who criticizes the state of Israel. Of course, he dressed it up in false language, anti-Semites, Nazis, Jew haters,

are not allowed here. But what's interesting about this case is that the performer he canceled, Maclemore had a chance to speak for himself. So we want to read this to you. This is what he said on stage as he criticized the state of Israel's behavior in Gaza. And just to be clear, anyone who's not criticizing what Israel is doing in Gaza is either lying about it and there's some of that or just doesn't know anything about it. And there's a lot of that. Most people just don't know. But five minutes of reading about it and not just some like partisan anti-Israel take on it, but just the facts which have been gathered and widely disseminated, anyone who reads about it for five minutes cannot come away defending it

because there is no defense of murdering tens of thousands of children. It's always never we were wrong, whether Jewish children or Catholic children or Palestinian children, it doesn't matter. In any case, before we tell you what Robert Kraft and various news outlets said about this performer McElmore, here's what McElmore himself said because it matters. these are the words that got him canceled as a Jew hater, and we're going to read them. Quote, to all my Jewish brothers and sisters, criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you.

My message is for peace, love for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality. So I say free Palestine. I say free Lebanon, free Cuba. He goes on. To my Jewish brothers and sisters, criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide is no way a criticism of you, because, by the way, it's not. It's not. Criticism of the behavior of a secular government is not criticism of an entire people, many of whom disapprove, in fact, hate what that government is doing. And so don't

anyone lie to you. They are not the same thing. That is not Jew hate, despite with the IHRA definition may try to impose on you and this country's. legal code, they are not the same thing. And so that's what he said. So for saying that, we want to put on the screen how Fox News characterized that. Watch this. This is the headline of the story. Anti-Semitic rapper booted from performing at Gillette Stadium over free Palestine chant. Anti-Semitic rapper. Okay now. Now, it's actually worth going on here. You find yourself in middle age doing things you never thought you would do, which is like defending political rappers on your podcast, never thought I'd be here. But it's not a defense of anyone person. It's a defense

of the truth, of the literal meaning of words and the intent of the words and of reason. But above all, it's a defense of the inalienable right of every person to express his conscience, whether you or I like it or not. So the Fox News piece, and not to beat up on Fox News, but a lot of people, uncritical believe what they watch or read. And so here's how Fox News.com characterized this controversy. Quote, McClermore is learning the hard way that concert goers paying top dollar for stadium shows do not want a lecture on Middle Eastern geopolitics from the guy who wrote Thrift Shop. Oh, okay, so what does that tell you?

Concert goers, you're paid a lot for these tickets, aren't interested in McClamore's views on the Middle East. Well, we haven't pulled the topic, so of course we don't know. We watched a video of his performance on stage, and we noticed that the whole stadium seemed to be cheering him, as he said, Free Palestine. But what do we know? We're not pollsters.

What we do know is that the audience didn't make the decision. And in fact, there's a way to know what the audience thinks. And that's by continuing to allow McClmore to perform. And if he sells tickets, well, presumably the audience agrees, or they wouldn't be buying them. But the Fox News piece, in a very kind of clever, feline, incredibly dishonest way, frames this as a decision that the audience made. Concert goers, you paid high dollar for tickets.

Don't want to hear the lecture. Really? They're the ones who canceled him? They're the ones who said you can't perform at the stadium? Oh, no. One billionaire made that decision. And then he got in the line with a bunch of other billionaires who also won sports teams and said, we can't let this guy perform in our stadiums.

Is that the market at work? Is it actually the market at work? That's what they're telling you, which is his stadium. Really? Well, if that's going to be the standard, let's take a close look at how we got the stadium. Were there state or federal tax dollars involved in that? Was that purchase in any way subsidized by the public?

Yeah, I think so. Has any stadium in the last 30 years in the United States been a product of pure market capitalism? Or are they all subsidized by taxpayers? I don't know we're going to have to grok that one. But our guess is that every single stadium in the United States, including Gillette Stadium, which is owned by Robert Kraft, is subsidized by taxpayers against their will.

So it's not as simple as, oh, he owns it, or any of these people own anything. And we are strongly in favor of property rights, strongly, and justice. But that's not what's happening here. This is a veto by one guy, likely against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the American population. So don't tell me this is a product of the market at work. This is censorship by the billionaire Epstein class. And by the way, yes, he is mentioned in the Epstein files.

Look it up. So why would you defend that? You could argue about how to fix it. Not that easy to fix, really. There are some. And if this goes on long enough, there will be many who just call from taking the stadium away from Robert Kraft. We're not for that. You're not for anything radical or crazy, actually.

This is a hotbed of moderation. But we can tell you that if someone doesn't move to fix the current situation where a tiny group of totally immoral, monomaniacal people who have no actual connection to the United States or loyalty to it or love for it. and don't care at all about the founding documents and the spirit that they express, which is of individual sovereignty, if those people continue behaving like this, you're going to get a radical population. So maybe short term, Robert Kraft felt like he was doing a good thing, but getting this Jew hater off stage who just spent, you know,

five minutes on stage explaining how he loves Jews, but doesn't like the behavior of the Net and IHu government, And there's like a good thing to slander him as an anti-Semite. But long term, it's very foolish. And it's even more foolish to defend it, as many on the so-called right are. And that raises the question, what does it mean to be on the right? If you're defending censorship by billionaires who share none of your values, how are you conservative?

And how more precisely a year and five days after the murder of Charlie Kirk? Are you upholding his memory? Well, that's the question we had to ask ourselves, as we saw some we know very well and still like, but who appears every day on the Charlie Kirk show say something we found absolutely remarkable. And this is not a personal attack, and it's done with some reluctance. But you just have to say it out loud, this is where we are. We're talking about a man called Blake Neff, who worked for me for years, always liked him a lot, helped get him the job that he currently has.

But there was a pretty distressing. and highly revealing, which is why we're going to talk about it, profile of him in Politico recently. And there's a lot in there that we're not going to get involved with. But there was a passage that we do think is worth highlighting because it tells you a lot about the total rot at the center of the conservative movement as of September 2026.

And whenever you get this kind of rot, you get people who literally can't hear themselves. And we're not, don't want to be too judgmental here, because a lot has happened in the last year, a lot of traumatic events for the staff of Turning Point. And so you always want to extend grace to them. I've tried to do that, even as they do things I disagree with,

and I know that Charlie would vehemently disagree with. And I've been frustrated by that, but haven't said a word. But the second that you give up on the very core of Charlie Kirk's message while continuing to occupy his studio under his name, name. I think it's important to say something. So that's what we're doing now. So I want to read this to you, this is a profile of Blake Neff from Politico. Neff confessed to grappling in a roundabout way with the possibility that his maximalist position on free speech has helped foster the conditions that have allowed rank conspiracism to flourish. I've reflected on this often, he said, sipping a Samor's

slavoured coal brew on a leather couch in the studio's green room. So let's just stop right there. a maximalist position on free speech. And this is not, by the way, that's not a Blake Neff quote. It's just to be completely fair. And we want to be fair. That's the anti-free speech politico author, Ian Ward's kind of clever framing here. But it's very common maximalist position. Well, there's no maximalist position on free speech any more than there is on pregnancy.

You either are for it or you are pregnant or you're not. free speech means acknowledging the inherent right of your fellow citizens, whether or not you like them, to say what they really think. Period. And if what they really think is repugnant to you, and if they have some version of events that you consider a poisonous conspiracy theory, there's not really anything you can do about it. In fact, there's literally nothing you can do about it under our system, and I would also argue under Christian precepts, other than rebut it and offer a competing vision that is more compelling to listeners. That's it. As Charlie Kirk said at the outset of this segment, more speech. But that's not the conclusion that many on the right are coming to.

Now, why? Probably because they spend way too much time on social media and they read every attack on themselves. and they get more paranoid. In fact, they become kind of a version of what they claim to hate, which is conspiracy nuts. But they get completely overheated. They feel like they're at war.

I'm at war! Never seen war, of course. But they think they're at war. They think they're under attack. And bit by bit, it completely corrods their decency, but also their sense of proportion. And they wind up abandoning

the principles they're there to uphold. so as they sit day after day underneath the sign that says Charlie Kirk on it, they wind up with views like this. And we're going to read this. And we're quoting. This is Blake Neff, the guy in the Charlie Kirk show. We got what we wanted on speech. And that means we also have to endure a lot of things that were tamped down on before. NFC's only two potential paths forward.

This is a verbatim quote. Either we have to make our peace with censorship and explain how we're going to do that or we have to explain how we're going to combat this without censorship, period, but we've got to confront it. And that's the point at which you just, you just feel like, well, we're done. We may have to make our peace with censorship. How would we do that? It's like saying, well, you know, I'm really mad. We may have to make our peace with genocide. We may have to kill, you know, didn't ever think I'd say it, didn't ever think I'd be here, we're going to have to kill them all. Maybe there's another way to do it. But it's possible we might have to make our peace with murdering all their kids.

just because it's that important. It's that bad. Didn't never think we'd come to this place, but here we are. So we're going to think about it. No. You can never make your peace with turning other people into slaves. You can never be the slave master because slavery is bad for them, but it's even worse for you. It is totally dehumanizing to every.

everyone involved to turn other human beings into something that is less than a human being. And that is exactly what censorship does each and every time. So even to float that possibility that you could, quote, make your peace with it, there will be no peace with censorship. You can't have peace with censorship because you are suppressing by definition what people believe is true. So if you want to eliminate, if you want to forestall even the possibility of peace, try to impose censorship. It's an oxymoron, make your peace with censorship. But that's where we are. Because people have lost any sense at all of what the principles, the ones that actually matter are.

And to restate, those principles are not, don't hurt other people's feelings or tell truths that billionaires don't like. Those truths are respect the inherent, the God-given dignity within every person, and that dignity is expressed through their ability to say what they think, not what you think. Other people have no obligation to repeat back what you think. They have an inherent right to say what they think, because their interests and their dignity and their humanity is every bit as important and every bit equal to yours. And even on the Charlie Kirk show, they seem to have forgotten that. And we hope they remember.

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she has been for 19 years a host on probably the most famous left-wing podcast one of the very first left-wing podcasts in the world, the young Turks. And that's Anna Kasparian, who we just spoke to a moment ago. Here she is. Anna Kasperian, thank you so much for doing this. Do you think we have free speech in the United States as of now? I think it would be wrong to say that we have free speech, considering the fact that we literally have the majority of our states passing laws

that would punish American citizens or organizations that are critical of Israel by denying them any public money or public grant. That's clearly a violation of our constitutional rights because it's literally the government getting involved and violating our freedom of expression. So no, at this current moment, I would not say that we actually fully have free speech here in the United States.

Yes. There's a way, though, that free speech is not just defined, as the Constitution defines it, which is a system where the government stays neutral on speech. But also, like, on a practice, level, if you are punished by organizations by saying denying you a job or housing or a right to a bank account or a right to live peacefully in your own home, then like in what sense do you have free speech? Well, I mean, that's true. Now, the argument is that if you are engaging in certain

speech, you can't expect that it comes without consequence. That's right. That you that you should expect a response that you might not like to that speech. And, you know, the big argument that you'll hear from those defending, say, Robert Kraft today would argue, well, Robert Kraft is the billionaire who owns the Gillette Stadium and he gets to decide what type of musical acts are able to perform there. Okay, I guess that's a fair point to make. But why don't we take a step back and look at how this intermingles with our democratic process? Because if I can recall, years ago, you had, you know, the world's elites getting together at the World Economic Forum to note that their plan moving forward is to ensure that no one owns anything. In fact,

all of us will just have to rent things. So there will be the owners who own the property and then the rest of us. And so if we're going to base free speech rights on property owners, you know, the wealthy elite being able to squash free speech because they happen to. to own things and we don't? Is that really a fair and just society? And do we have the economic conditions on the ground to ensure that there's a level playing field? So if one billionaire decides, no, I'm going to crush you because I don't like your comments about a foreign country, are we going to have other opportunities or other platforms, other means to put our work out into the world? You know, that's the real question here. Yeah. Well, and in some way, I mean, the nature

of our economies change, the economic structure of the United States has changed. obviously there's much more concentration at the top. But the truth is, rich people have always run this in every other country. I just think we have a different kind of rich people. Like previous generations of oligarchs felt like, well, you know, everybody has a right to say what he thinks. And if I disagree with you, I have got some obligation to explain why I make a countercase. I don't see that gracefulness at all in evidence now. It seems like our current leadership class, the current oligarchs who run everything, just decide, like if I disagree with you. I don't have to explain why. I don't have to convince people that you're wrong and I'm

right. I can just crush you and that's enough. Well, there used to be a middle, middleman, I guess, and that middleman used to be our government, right? The government would step in and provide protections or defend ordinary people. And I'm worried about the lack of will among our political elite to do what they know is the right thing to do in serving the American people. I mean, these are people who signed up to be public servants, yet all they do is serve moneyed interests who bribe them during their campaigns. And so just to give you one example, and I know you've been very critical of FDR, but not for the reason that I'm about to describe. You know, FDR was savvy enough to realize that following the Great Depression, communism, socialism was on the rise, and he very much wanted to protect a capitalistic society. So he realized if I don't step in and implement some of these economic policies that will help improve the quality of life for ordinary American workers, we're headed toward socialism. We're headed toward communism. And he didn't want that. And so same with Henry Ford. I mean, Henry Ford was the CEO who decided, you know what, it makes sense to give them my workers the weekends off. It makes sense for me to pay them enough money to be able to afford for.

Ford vehicles. These are people who don't just think about their personal benefits and what benefits them in the short term. They have long-term goals that goes beyond their own self-indulgence. And we just don't have much of that right now, either in our political elite or certainly not among the billionaire oligarchs who we're unfortunately being ruled by right now. Yeah. There's not a lot a longitudinal thinking. It seems like there's a kind of a day trade worldview in force. So you've always been on the left from the progressive left. I don't think you're much of a Republican voter or haven't been anyway. I think it's fair to say. But I noticed that I think it's complicated. It's complicated. It's complicated. It's complicated. It's complicated. Right.

Well, it's complicated for everybody all of a sudden. So I'm with you on the complexity. But on the question of free speech. So I saw the Biden administration as totally opposed to free speech. They're pressuring social media companies to shut down people's accounts for disagreeing with them on COVID or lots of other topics. And I really believe that the Trump coalition was put there in part to defend free speech, free expression, free exchange of ideas, including those you disagree with. And yet it seems like a lot of its leaders pivoted almost immediately to a Biden-like position on speech, where if I don't like you, I'm going to cancel you when they had just run against what they called cancel culture like 20 minutes before. Am I imagining that?

No, you're not imagining it. And the fact of the matter is regardless of which political side is doing it and both political sides do it. Yes. It's an attempt to hide something from the public, information that they don't want the public knowing about. And I think a big red flag, especially from the government, is when they say they're doing something in the name of safety. So in the case of the Biden administration, we want to keep you safe. We don't want you to get COVID disinformation in the case of the Trump administration. And by the way, also to some extent with Biden on the Israel issue, there were efforts and have

been efforts to essentially say we got to keep our Jewish community safe. As a result of that, we can't let you say certain things that are critical of the Israeli government, which obviously makes no sense. and we shouldn't be conflating the Jewish population with a foreign country. But, you know, Israel likes to hide behind human shields in their own way. So they intentionally make that conflation.

But yeah, the word safety, once you hear the word safety, and by the way, I've seen every political faction use similar arguments, even on the far left, you know, stifling free speech on college campuses in some cases because students feel unsafe. And I'm sorry, in that particular context, You are going to an institution to learn, obviously, but also to be made uncomfortable. Like, you're not growing, you're not learning until you're actually being confronted with ideas

that challenge your own. Sure. And it's also a misread of the human condition. You're never safe. I mean, the future is not assured. And resistance to your narcissism is just like a fact of life for everybody. And it ought to be. And that's how you become an adult, right?

Right. I mean, of course. So you actually want. confrontation because it draws you out of your own stupid little universe. But I just wonder if the left did it with cancel culture and wokeness or whatever you want to call it, but that whole movement that we suffered through for so many years. And now the right is doing exactly the same thing. They just picked a different victim. It was black people. Now it's Jewish people. It'll be somebody else. It's always a cover for protecting the people in charge. Then like, who actually will defend

free speech? Well, there are always been very. very loud voices that have been consistent on protecting free speech. You know, Glenn Greenwald happens to be one of them. He's undeterred in that mission. And in fact, the one area where he and I might have a disagreement on free speech is whether or not corporations are considered people with protected speech and thus can provide unlimited campaign bribes to politicians. Like he has defended that Supreme Court ruling.

I have a different perspective on that. But in terms of actual individuals, practicing their free speech, he's always been consistent. And whether the cancel culture proponents like it or not, we do still have constitutional rights. And if someone is willing to take some issue to the court, I do believe that the courts tend to side appropriately based on what our constitutional rights happen to be. But that can be a costly way of pushing back and defending your free rights. And it becomes an even bigger problem when again, you literally have the gun on a state-by-state case passing laws.

I mean, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, literally went to Florida to sign state legislation that made it clear. If you're criticizing Israel, we're not going to give you any government money. No grants for you. Or even if it's a government institution, we're going to strip you of your funding. That's ridiculous, especially since this has to do with criticizing a foreign country. You can criticize our country as much as you want. And I like that.

That's what we should have. But we shouldn't have certain protections for a foreign country that violate our free speech rights. We are strongly pro dog on this show. We make no secret to that. Dogs are one of the great blessings of this life. And to keep them healthy, we recommend Dutch. It's the solution to skyrocketing veterinary costs. Why are those costs so high?

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Dutch.com slash Tucker. We live in an age defined by technology, AI. And the promise, of course, is that this is progress, but has it been? Well, you've also seen amidst all this progress the total destruction of our social fabric, an epidemic of unhappiness, a spike in the suicide rate. So as we get closer to the promise of technological progress, our lives will all become better and easier, less work, more automation, we get farther away from what gives our lives purpose and meaning, what gives us joy.

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is secretly everybody kind of hated that. And it takes a few years for people to admit it because people are due benefit from shutting down public conversations about this or that. But like ordinary people hate it. And now she has to admit that. Very few people were admitting that now about our current explosion of identity politics around Israel. But my sense is that deep down though they may be afraid to say it, most people really resent this. Do you think that? Oh, I absolutely, I know for a fact that people resented, but people are terrified. Right now. And for me, the reason why I'm a loudmouth about things like this is because I know that when people see an individual public figure go out there,

unafraid to just say what needs to be said. It kind of gives them permission. It gives them a little more comfort to come out and say what they want to say. And we do need to foster that kind of environment. And I can't emphasize this enough. We can't give the censorious people, regardless of where they fall in the political spectrum or on the issue of Israel, we cannot give them an inch under any circumstance.

So like for me, when they come at you with a bad faith allegation, the left falls for this almost every time, and I'm trying to get them to think a little more savvy. They're not looking for an apology. And in fact, if you do apologize, when you haven't really said anything wrong to begin with, they see that as an admission of guilt.

So don't give them an inch. Don't play their game. Don't play their game. As long as what you actually said wasn't coming from a place of hate where you're trying to get people hurt, you're just sharing your perspective on something. Don't let the bad,

faith actors convince you that maybe apologizing will make like this crazy mob go away. The mob is not going to go away unless you ignore them and double down, in fact. So. Well, you've, you, yeah, you got a congressional medal of honor for you for that. I mean, that's definitely the way you approach it. And God bless you for that. Graham Platner, what just happened to the political candidate in the state of Maine Graham Platner earlier this year, seems like a pretty good example of what you're describing. Can you, now that we've had a month or two to assess it, what was that, do you think? Well, okay, so let me back up and give you my perspective on Grand Platner and the entirety of his campaign.

So I'm in a kind of black-pilled place in life where, you know, the midterms are coming and everyone thinks it's like, it's going to make all the difference. It's not going to make all the difference. Our political system's broken. and I don't really have a dog in this fight, believe it or not. So when Graham Platner came on the scene, I'm like, same old, same old, yes, you're going to do all these wonderful things for working class Americans. I don't believe anybody, okay? And then the tattoo thing happened, you know, and I side-eyed him because I'm like,

how do you have, like, at some point he realized the tattoo he got the skull and bones. He realized that it was like a Nazi symbol. He even admitted that. And then he kept it on his person for years until he ran. for Congress and it became an issue. I thought that was weird, but whatever. For me, it's not disqualifying necessarily. I just didn't buy his story.

Final thing, though, was the allegation of forcible rape, which I understand when someone has been raped and they're terrified to go to the authorities because sometimes it ends up backfiring when you go to the authorities. It's insult to injury and you go through a terrible time. if you don't have hard evidence, people are going to deny you or blame you. It's awful. So I can understand that. But the woman who accused him of forcible rape, who she had been dating for two years, by the way, decided, I'm not going to go to the authorities after he allegedly forcibly raped me.

I'm just going to come out and talk about it in public as the primary for Platner's race approaches, thus forcing him to. drop out. And then we never heard from her again. Did she ever go to the authorities? Is she comfortable with the fact that if, in fact, she was allegedly raped by Graham Platner, well, now he's free to go wherever he wants to go, do whatever he wants to do, and potentially rape someone else? Exactly. And so for me, Tucker, I think the reason why she didn't go to the authorities and instead came out and told the entire world about what allegedly happened is because I don't believe it actually happened. I just don't. And the reporting on it, intentionally omitted details that I think the public should have known about.

You think. Right. Namely the fact that she sends him a, the way their interaction started that night, she sends him a text message about how she needs a glute massage. But they omitted that from the reporting. I just, to me, it looks like a fishy story to say the list. The glute being the butt muscles. Yes.

Yeah. Pretty provocative text. I mean, look, I wasn't there. You know, I wasn't dating Grand Platinum. I don't know. but that seems that seems like a relevant detail to me here's my take on it was less sophisticated than yours but i was just trying to take a big picture assessment so here's a guy who's who's clearly going to beat susan collins one of the most mediocre she's a joke of course

susan collins um probably not an evil person but like susan collins come on now he's going to beat her he's a conventional democrat in some ways but the big issue in which he disagrees with his party's leadership is Israel. And he just says it. He's like, what's happening in Gaza's a crime because it is a crime. And it's that issue that torpedoes his candidacy because his own party, including the state party in Maine, turns against him on orders from their donors. That seemed to be what happened to me, but maybe I'm missing something. I mean, if you do take a step back and you look at the specific candidates who have been hounded and treated poorly throughout the. their primaries and even after they won their primaries, you'll notice that there is a through

line. And that through line is criticism of Israel, criticism of U.S. financial support for Israel's wars, genocides, atrocities, things like that. And you can't argue that you want to be a public servant who genuinely believes in an America First agenda when you're okay with doing things like merging the IDF with the U.S. military. or continuing this like gravy train that we can't afford. We like we are literally going deeper and deeper and deeper into debt in order to pay for Israel's weapons. Trump just signed off on another $3 billion for 2,000 pound bombs for Israel. They're not even paying for it.

We're going to go into debt to provide it for them. And that is an injustice. And these are the types of things they don't want us talking about. They want us to shut up. There is nothing in my commentary right now that even touches on. the Jewish identity, right? It's about morality. It's about finite resources. It's about doing what's right for the American people as a member of the political class. And somehow that is considered like incredibly outrageous, dangerous, and offensive to say. And other candidates who have said

things like this tend to be the ones who are targeted maniacally by people like Laura Lumer, who by the way, last June, I don't know if people know this, was bitching about the fact that not enough Americans hate Muslims. So maybe we need another 9-11. Yeah. So what does that make you think when somebody who's a very powerful player, for some reason at this moment within our political process, calls for another 9-11?

I mean, that seems like an extraordinary thing to say. not only is it extraordinary. I think the bigger picture, I think the overarching issue that I'm struggling with is what, like, what is my identity? Because I've always identified as American. I've always identified it as American, right? Like, I love this country.

I want to defend this country. I want to live here for the rest of my life. My family, my brother is raising his four kids here. I want them to thrive. I want everyone to thrive. But there are so many different things happening simultaneously right now, Tucker, that makes me think, oh, my God, like, we are surrounded by people who don't really see this as their country. Like, they just, it's like a commuter country. Like, you come in, you take what you need, and then you go.

And so when you have someone like Laura Lumer saying, maybe we need another 9-11, disgusting. Okay. When you see the willingness of our lawmakers to sell out our own country, put us deeper and deeper, into debt on behalf of a foreign country. It just, it's disgusting, it just feels like everything here is being exploited for other purposes. Yes. And I'm angry about it.

And I know other Americans are angry about it. Elaine Chow, Elaine Chow turns out to have worked for the Chinese government while serving in the Trump administration. That was a huge story that was broken by the Daily Caller. I just reported on it yesterday on our show. How is that okay? How is that okay? Yeah.

I just forget it. She's a two-time cabinet secretary and two separate administrations. Her husband was Senate Majority Leader and she's working for China. And of course, there will never be any attempt to hold Elaine Chow accountable for that, ever. It's crazy. But at least, I guess here's the point of my thoughts today on this specific topic. At least we can still acknowledge it, report the truth about it, try to call other people's attention to it, rally support for some kind of solution to. to it. That's why speech is important. And I just wonder, given that all of our conversations

take place digitally and the digital platforms are owned by people who clearly are not committed to the concept of free speech. Like, how long does this last? I don't know, but I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to stop. And I'm willing to, I mean, there have already been consequences for me personally and I haven't stopped and I'm going to keep going. Yes. Because the ability to express yourself is one of the most precious rights that we have in this country. And I don't think that we should give it up willy-nilly. I think some people have been willing to do that. But honestly, if it takes sacrificing potentially everything, I'm going to keep speaking my mind. Yes. I know no other way. It's torture to not be able to

speak your mind. I can't imagine living in that type of society. So look, there are consequences already. Luckily, I work for Jank Yugar, and Jank Yugar really does believe in free speech. Yes, he does. We have some big fights on the show time to time, and he's never once retaliated against me because we disagree. And I just love that I'm lucky enough to work for him. But even if he ended up firing me for speaking my mind, where there's a will, there's a way. And if it means that I have to do menial work to make ends meet in order to continue being able to speak my mind, I'm going to keep speaking my mind. But here's what I would say to the audience, because this is really important.

How about we don't give into these people anymore? How about we have each other's backs as Americans? Yes. You get what I'm saying? Oh, yes. So like the whole McElmore debacle, I think the way that that played out was kind of fantastic because there's a lot of rage among Americans who don't think he said anything wrong. Even Jesse Waters.

He's like, what did he said? He said free Palestine. I don't think that's hate speech. And so people have. Macklemore's back. And in fact, Ed Sheeran, being a coward in this scenario, has now lost like half a million followers on social media because he didn't stand up for what was right. And so I love to see that. Let's do more of that. Let's have each other's backs because you're not just defending one person. You're defending the whole concept of freedom of expression. Amen. Boy.

And on that note, thank you. Thank you for everything you've done to preserve and expand the boundaries of speech at cost to yourself. And I really think you'll be, whatever you're going through now, I think you'll be rewarded for it in the end. I believe that. So Anna Casparean, thank you very much. Thanks, Tucker.