The Tucker Carlson Show - Vivek Ramaswamy & RFK Jr: Brazil Banning X, the New Russian Hoax, and the Kamala Harris Scam

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Tucker Carlson Live Tour in Anaheim, CA. There’s something so poignant about the destruction of a place as beautiful as California. And then you talk to leaders like Bobby Kennedy and Vivek Ramaswamy and you realize there’s hope. Paid partnerships with: Jase Medical https://Jasemedical.com Promo code “Tucker” for extra discount  Heritage Foundation https://Heritage.org/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We're proud to offer it. Thank you very much. I feel like... It is a thank you... Thank you. Thank you. It is a true joy to be here, I must say. As a native Californian, I... It's hard to believe I'm here. Ah, thank you.

No, it's funny. I am thrilled to be in the state of California, which I often make fun of and scold like an errant child, but I love. I'm the product of it, many generations of Californians. And I wound up running away and moving to the, as far from here as I possibly could, but every time I come back, literally, I move diagonally across the country, next stop Canada, but every time I come back, I know, I know, every time I come back, I

think, oh, I can't believe I left here. It's just so great. And you get such a different sense being here and meeting people who actually still live here who haven't run away, like terrified children like me. You really get the sense that there are so many great and normal people

still in California. And the people who stayed, the actual Californians, people who were born in California, I mean, there's an intensity to them. I mean, it really is like, I was thinking tonight, I was with about 100 of them, so my relatives are here, and it really is like talking to Cuban refugees. They know what the stakes are. They're not floating through life. Oh, I'm going to. Bless you. No, when I was a child growing up in La Jolla,

we had, I lived in San Francisco, I know, LA and then La Jolla, and we would have entire afternoon conversations about the weather. And I never realized, I thought it was a little weird, but I didn't realize how totally deranged it was because our weather never changed at all. It went from like 76 and partly cloudy to 77 and sunny and then returned to the former. That was it. We talked, that's all we talked about. And now when I come to this day, particularly to Orange County, people are just in fuego. Like they know what's up. And the people who've stayed here, a lot of them plan to stay here, period, and to make the state better. And what I realize, and bless you,

for your courage and determination and not being run out and calling U-Haul and going to Idaho, though it's close and tempting. But what I always think when I come back, I think two things in sequence, in order. The first thing I think is, man, is the state screwed up. And then the second thing I think is, you could fix it in about 20 minutes. It's not hard. This is not the social security problem or the national debt. These are not complex math problems. California has problems that are intentionally imposed on the state. People worked hard. They stayed up late thinking of new and diabolical and inventive ways to wreck the most beautiful place God ever made. And that's like the sickest thing I can imagine. Why would you want to destroy something

as beautiful as California? I don't know. I don't know the answer. I don't think it's political. I think it's spiritual. But I do know that the antidote is really simple. So the California that I grew up in, and when I was little, not far from here, I was in Anaheim at five, and like every five-year-old in the state of California in 1974, I could not wait to get to Disneyland. And Anaheim was very much like Disneyland, and it was like the rest of the state that I grew up in. It was clean, it was orderly, and it was fair. It was the fairest state out of 50.

It was a pure meritocracy, California was. You came to California because you had ambition or a vision, and in California, you were allowed to make it real. You worked hard, you were smart, you get rich in California, and a lot of people did from all over the country. Yeah, they did. And what is that? That's fairness. It's allowing people to reach their full expression as human beings. That's fairness. It's not penalizing people for who their parents were or how they look. It's allowing people to truly blossom. And California was the world headquarters of that. And it had the greatest natural resources of any place literally on the planet. It had the richest farmland. It had the most beautiful beaches. It had the prettiest mountains. It had the most majestic trees. Who has redwoods like we did?

Nobody. We mock your trees. We did. We feel sorry for you. Oh, look at my white pine, my oak. Yeah, okay. Does the word sequoia mean anything to you? It was just incredible, the bounty of it. It was insane. Go up to Big Bear, up into the Sierras. We would constantly have this debate, because I lived in both northern and southern California, which is better, and then I just said, they're both great. And anyone who doesn't live here is to be pitied. And this town where we are now, I think it's still the biggest municipality in Orange County, I think.

It was, anyway. Anaheim. Anaheim was a reflection of the state and of the biggest business in the town, which was Disneyland. And Disneyland, the purity of Disneyland when I was a child is like incomprehensible to young people now. But it was a reflection of what California was like. It was totally clean, not antiseptically clean, not hospital room clean, but just clean in the way that a place is when it's owned by someone who cares about it. And it was orderly, not in some kind of overbearing fascist way,

but in the way that every human desires, there was an order to it. And it was wholesome. It was legit wholesome. I'm not that old, but I remember in my like seventh grade class, somebody whispering about his cousin who had gotten high in the parking lot at Disneyland in Dunn Space Mountain, and we were like, wow. Wow. You were high at Disneyland? Dude, be careful. They don't allow that at Disneyland, okay? It's Disneyland, dude. I remember thinking that was totally shocking. I'm sure there's like a fentanyl dispenser there now, whatever. But at the time, that was like impossible to comprehend. I remember being freaked out by it. I'm never getting high at Disneyland. They'll know because everyone at

Disneyland is like a really upstanding good person. It wasn't just a theme park. It was a metaphor for California. It was like a really good state full of good people. The cops weren't corrupt. The LAPD was like, I know it's hard to believe now, everyone makes fun of it, but at the time it was the LAPD. They were all like people who couldn't make it into Hollywood.

You know, they all looked like they were in like, washed out of the Beach Boys or something, kind of handsome with little mustaches. Sure, you were speeding. Okay. There's no chance you'd have to pay the guy off. It's the LAPD. The whole state was like that. And it was a reflection of the people who ran the state. Disney was founded by Walt Disney, who was an American and was a creative genius. The guy who created the art owned the company. The most creative person got the richest. And that was before an economy that rewarded lawyers and accountants and DEI consultants and politicians and bureaucrats.

People who lack any creativity whatsoever, who in a fair country would be painting your house at best. And in fact, let me retract that as someone who spent a summer as a house painter and learned that cutting and rolling is actually pretty hard. There's no chance that Gavin Newsom could paint your house. There's no chance. He couldn't. I can just picture him like covered in masking tape and latex and being like, what? How does this work? He, yeah, he can consume overpriced wine at the french laundry that's his only skill

and he can extort money from you with moral blackmail and it's not just california of course it's not just the united states it's the entire west but we have a system designed by people who in a fair country would have no shot at power or wealth. And so what they have done systematically is create a system to give themselves power and wealth at the expense of people who actually deserve it, which is to say hardworking, smart, creative people. And Disney is the perfect metaphor for this. So a company was created by a true artistic genius, like actually genius, who drew the cells himself,

who thought of things in his own brain and brought them to the world and changed the perception of America around the world, the Disney companies did. And he ran the company and owned it. And then gradually, like the state itself, Disney was taken over by lawyers and accountants and other bottom feeders, money worshipers, disgusting human beings who hated America.

And the town around Disney is still a cool town, but it's not recognizable from the place it was when I was a kid, and a lot of the state isn't. And so how do you fix that? I must say, as someone who spent his life on TV yapping about, you know, ideas, they sent their ideas on cable news, ideas with, you know, quotation marks around them, small ideas, more reflexes than ideas, but whatever. I don't really think this is an ideological problem. In other words, I don't think you have to be steeped in Austrian economics to fix a place like California or a country like America. You need really one thing, and that's love for the people who live here. It's true. And as the father of four or any parent in the room can tell you, what's the key to parenthood? Reading the right book about it?

Mastering the right parenting technique? I've never met a single parent in my life who reads a ton of parenting books who's a good parent. Not one. They're all weird. And their kids are weird. They have all these theories. Stop. No, you love your kids.

That's the key to parenting. And if you love your kids, you're probably not going to be a perfect parent. I certainly wasn't. But if you love them hard enough, you'll come back to the center every time. You will make over time the right decisions about how to raise your kids if you put your love for them at the center of the project. I love my child. What should I do? But it's not just parenting that requires that. It's all forms of leadership. From leadership on the battlefield, the officer for his men, in the corporate environment, the CEO for his employees, and in the political sphere. The leader for his people. A leader who loves the people he leads will not systematically mistreat them.

He will instead, over time, make basically the right decisions or decisions that are in the vicinity of the right decisions, which is good enough for me. He'll make mistakes because we all do, but he won't destroy them. They won't wind up in rehab or wind up living on the street, dying of fentanyl ODs or crapping on the sidewalk. He won't open the borders to people who aren't even from here, who break the law flagrantly, and then send the millions of dollars from the people who work hard legally to give them free phones and plane tickets and housing vouchers and free health care. What? No. Any more than he would let random strangers into his own house to take food from his own children

because he loves his own children first. That's why. And so the problem that you have, and it's once again for the eighth time particularly poignant for me as a product of the state, is someone who really loved it in a totally overbearing, arrogant way. Someone who actually may or may not have a bumper sticker that says there's no life east of I-5. Possible I had that. It's so insufferable. Someone should have beat me up for that.

I wish someone had. But anyway, the point is, I really love this date. And to see what's happened, you just, you fixate on it. And those of you who still live here, who haven't called U-Haul yet, I know that you fixate on it. And so the answer is only to find leaders who care about you, who love you, and who will provide the basic desires of the human heart. And in case you've forgotten what those are, here's what they are. Order. People hate chaos. They don't just hate chaos intellectually, they hate it viscerally. And they have every reason, in fact, they can't tolerate chaos. And they have every reason to hate it and be intolerant of it because what is chaos? Chaos is the most visible sign, not of disorganization or disorder, of evil. Chaos is evil. Evil brings chaos. What's the first thing God did? He brought

order out of what? Chaos. So if you were looking at chaos, a chaotic situation, anywhere, you were looking at a manifestation of evil. Whether the person creating the chaos knows it or not, that's irrelevant. Evil is happening in front of you, and it hurts people more than anything, okay? People need order and predictability, not fascism, okay? Order and predictability. It's not wrong to want that. It's essential to demand it, okay? The second thing they want is safety and predictability. It's not wrong to want that. It's essential to demand it. The second thing they want is safety and cleanliness. They don't want to get shot going to the grocery store. They don't want a home invasion. When their car gets broken into, they want the police to find the person who did it and punish him. And they want all these things

because those are the main functions of government. They're the reason we have a government. If your government can't even respond to a car break-in or an armed robbery or a home invasion or a belligerent mentally ill person crapping on the sidewalk in front of your house, that government has no legitimacy and shouldn't exist. That's the first order of government. To protect you from obvious threats. Not from nicotine pouches or climate change. Come on now. From the minimally ill guy crapping on the sidewalk.

That's the number one threat in your life. That's what scares your children. And any government, I'll re-say it, who can't protect you or doesn't care to protect you from that threat is not legitimate and has no right to exist. Period. And the third thing to restate

that every government owes its citizens who are the owners of that government, they're the owners of the government. The government has no legitimacy in a constitutional republic apart from the support of voters. Period. It has no legitimacy. The only legitimacy it possesses is your consent. I'm for this, therefore it's okay. One of the things that means is if you pass a ballot measure demanding something, they have to give it to you, period. And if they don't give it to you, if they get some judge to take it away from you, that's called tyranny, just so you know.

Sorry, I've seen that happen in the state of California quite a bit. And as a kid, when Howard Jarvis, when Prop 13 came through in 78, whatever you think of it, go Howard Jarvis. There was no thought in the state of California in 1978, I was nine years old, I remember this very well, that some judge could be like, oh, the majority of Californians wanted something, but I don't want it, therefore they can't have it. I mean, that would not have been allowed in the state. Because that's crazy. The only thing that matters in this or any other state is what the people who live there think. That's the only thing that matters in this or any other state is what the people who live there think. That's the only thing that matters. Because that's our system of government, right?

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were mostly peaceful, even as flames rose in the background? It was ridiculous, but it was also a metaphor for the way our leaders run this country. They're constantly telling you, everything is fine. Everything is fine. Don't worry. Everything's under control. Nothing to see here. Move along and obey. No one believes that. Crime is not going away. Supply chains remain fragile. It does feel like some kind of global conflict could break out at any time.

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and that is the hallmark of any functioning and happy society, is fairness. Fairness. Even small children understand when something's unfair. You gave my sister two cookies and you only gave me one. Yeah, you laugh. That'll affect you for the rest of your life. That'll affect the relationship between siblings more than anything else. Mom favors him. I don't like him. You want to wreck the relationship between your children, which is the worst thing you can do to children, favor one over the other. Because it's unfair. And kids have an acute sense of fairness that never goes away.

Because it's encoded in who they are. It's in their genes. They were born with it. We know when something's unfair. And the most unfair thing you can do is punish people who are trying their hardest and following the rules. And that would include every single person in this room from the state of California who is held in contempt and loathing by the people who run your state. And maybe it's occurred to you if you still live here, wait a second, I'm not conducting any home invasions. I didn't sneak in here illegally from a foreign country. I pay my freaking taxes. Why? On what grounds do you hate me? I should be getting the California Medal of Honor. Devin Newsom should be kissing my feet in the governor's office in Sacramento. Thank you, dutiful, ethical Californian, for making this place better,

for not throwing the garbage out of the window of your car, for getting car insurance, for not driving drunk, for not joining a street gang, for paying your taxes, for funding this whole grotesque charade we call the government. Thank you. But when the governor of the state of California and all the little creepy nameless minions beneath him, all the little puppets of the labor unions who actually run California, tell me if I'm lying, all of those people have total contempt for the productive, creative, dutiful, law-abiding

citizens of the state. And so they're moving to Idaho or Texas or Florida to improve those states. And in so doing, they're leaving the graves of their ancestors in the greatest state out of 50, California. They're abandoning the dreams that brought their ancestors to the state. And that dream was based on fairness, the promise that if you do the right thing, you will be rewarded. You will not be punished. They're leaving all of that behind. Because a small group of freaks want to punish them?

No. Sorry. Anyway, I'll stop with that. We have a lot more, but let me just say, I just want to say, I admire you, those who have stayed. I admire your principle. I admire your grit, your toughness, your perseverance, your resolve. I like it here. I grew up here and I'm not leaving. I don't care what kind of freak occupies the governor's mansion. That is such a cool attitude. That's a pioneer attitude. That's the attitude that drove your ancestors here in the first place. I'm kind of sick of Cleveland, Ohio. I'm moving to LA. That's why they came here. That's a cool attitude. And that's the attitude that's keeping you here.

And I just want to tell you from very far away that I admire it. So I want to introduce, we have a surprise guest by the way. But first I want to introduce and begin a conversation with someone I really admire, Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for president in the Republican primary and dropped out, endorsed Trump, and has been stumping for Trump, is close to Trump. But I've known him since long before he got into politics because he wrote a couple of amazing books.

And I talked, I interviewed him about the books, and I actually read the books. Not every cable news host reads the books. I'm just telling you that. Or any books ever. Or actually can read, to be totally honest, but whatever. And I don't read all the books, but I did read his books, and they were wonderful. And they were wonderful because he actually thought through what he believed in.

He put it all, it was totally transparent. It was like, I used to think this, now I think this, here's why. And I respect people like that. And I, so I kind of watched him flower as this political figure. And I heard people say, you know, he's just too articulate. This can't be real. And there is a kind of bias against people who are almost like supernaturally fluent in a language. It's like, you're so silver tongue is the phrase they use.

Like, that can't be real. You gotta be selling me something if you're that fluent. I mean, I think everyone kind of feels that way. And I just want to say, for the record, which is why I asked him, begged him to come tonight, he is real. He's totally sincere. Maybe they don't want to think that someone

that smart and that well-spoken is actually on the other side. This always used to happen to me. Like, liberals I knew would be, especially in the state, or relatives of mine in California, would be like, you don't really mean that. Come on. Like, I actually really do. Well, he really means it. And so I'm honored to have him, ladies and gentlemen,

Vivek Ramaswamy wow love you guys this is pretty cool this is a real California here I like this this is the good kind love you guys This is the real California here. I like this. Oh, yeah. This is the good kind.

Love you guys. Oh, it is the coolest state. Oh, it breaks my heart. Anyway, I'm so glad you're here. This is the good kind, yeah. So we were talking backstage. Well, I just said that I read your books. Oh, thank you.

I appreciate that. I spent so many years in TV selling other people's books that I'm never selling anyone's book again. And I wouldn't even bring up your book, except I love it. And it's called Truths? That's the new one that's coming out. Okay, so this is why I'm bringing this up right now. So I said, he said, I said, what have you been doing? I'm writing a book.

It's almost done or it's done. What's it called? Trues. Trues. Oh, what are the truths? And I said, what are the truths? And off the top of his head, he listed them. And I just thought it's so great.

You've got to hear this. What are the truths, Vic? God is real. There are two genders. Fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity. Reverse racism is racism. An open border is not a border. Parents determine the education of their children. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.

Capitalism lifts us up from poverty. There are three branches of government in the United States, not four. And the U.S. Constitution is the strongest and greatest guarantor of freedom in human history. So there's the ten. I love that! Now you don't have to buy the book. So you start with God is real. Yeah. Why?

So I think that's the ultimate truth. And, you know, I say this in particular, I put that first for a reason because, you know, a lot of people in thinking about, I ran for U.S. president. It was new to think about somebody who was not of the Christian faith, who was running for U.S. president, but is a person of deep faith. And I think the beauty of the country is it was founded by people who believed that God put them here for a purpose, right? This country was founded against the backdrop of divine providence. And so I think part of what's going on in the country is that,

especially young people, people my age, and I love a lot of young people here too. Our generation is so hungry for purpose right now. We are hungry for a cause. We're hungry for meaning. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, yet we can't even answer what it means to be an American. But I think part of that hole in our heart, it's what Blaise Pascal said. He's a famous scientist 400 years ago. He says that if you have a hole the size of God in your heart and God does not fill it, something else will instead. You think about wokeism or transgenderism or climatism or COVIDism or globalism or Zelenskyism or whatever the case may be. That's a bad one. But you see these things serially coming up over and over again. They're substitutes for the real thing. And I am a big fan of

the revival of faith in America. Not by force. The beauty of this country is you don't have to if it isn't natural to you. But the revival of faith in the real thing and true God. And I think if we revive faith in this country, we'd actually be much more united as a country as well. It's interesting. So you just spent, everyone makes fun of politics and considers politicians loathsome,

which they are. I can confirm that, yeah. But the one cool thing I like about campaigns is it does force people who want to hold power to go meet a lot of people and to get on the road and get to a lot of different places in this fast country. And you've just done that. So you said there is a revival of faith. Did you feel that on the road? Absolutely.

I mean, there is a hunger for even people who are questioning what their actual beliefs were. And sometimes when you do that, you actually emerge stronger on the other side of it. So I met a lot of people across the country. Say you're traveling in Iowa, meet a lot of evangelical Christians, have a fair question, ask a question of can a Hindu be president. That forced me to confront what a lot of my own beliefs were in a way that I wouldn't have if you weren't really pressed on it day to day. And I think one of the traps you can fall into, and at times I would catch myself falling into as well, is you treat conversations as pattern recognition, right? So it's like, okay, that's where I turn on the auto script that sounds like the best answer to this question. And I decided

halfway through the campaign, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to treat every conversation as a unique conversation. Probably talk to tens of thousands of people across this country. And, you know, I hope I contributed something, but I can tell you, I definitely emerged as a stronger human being and a stronger person because of it. And, you know, I think we don't do that enough in this country anymore. It's just, you don't have to agree with me on everything and I don't have to agree with you on everything, but the more we're able to just talk openly without a filter about questions like faith, about what our actual convictions are, about what it means to be a citizen of this country, one of the things that I learned is that this narrative of national division is actually a myth. I do believe that. And I'm not saying it's

some fake kumbaya kind of way that, oh, we're all united because we agree on everything, because we obviously don't. But I think most people in the country do share the same national values in common. The idea that you get to speak your mind, or you do, or I do, as long as our neighbor gets to in return. The idea that the people we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government, not some unelected bureaucrat as a hired hand issuing edicts from on high. I think most people in America agree on these things, or at least 80% do, and 20% are younger than me who were never taught those ideals in the first place, who we can bring along too. And so that was probably the number one thing I

took away from traveling the country is we had protesters at my events often. My rule of thumb was, unless they're being totally violent and disruptive, we'll give them a mic. They get to speak their mind as long as they sit down and listen to what everybody else has to say. And there were some beautiful moments that came out of that that I didn't expect during the campaign. And so I just do think in this true way, and if you take away one thing from my own experience in the campaign, it is that this myth of national division is just that. It is a myth. It serves certain interests of the people who perpetuate that myth.

But if we cut through that, I think we are actually far more united as a country than they will sell you. And I think in a few months, hopefully in about two to three months, we may be seeing that on a scale that people may not expect. I agree with that. This is, of course, everything is accelerating because of the election. Something happened yesterday that, you know, it's getting harder and harder to be shocked by what the Biden administration does. So much of it is unprecedented. But something did shock me yesterday where the Department of Justice, so-called, which is a grotesque, really, parody of a Department of Justice,

indicted two foreigners and named in the indictment three conservative podcasters, internet figures, all Trump supporters, as somehow connected to a foreign country. And immediately their content started disappearing from, say, YouTube. They pulled a big documentary off YouTube this morning because the Biden administration said that, yeah, it's beyond belief. So basically you have the Biden administration's Department of Justice shutting down criticism of the Biden administration. And I don't know if I'm going insane or I'm missing something. Is anyone noticing this? How is this allowed? So there's, I'm glad you brought this up.

There's definitely something really weird going on here. So I don't have any facts any different than what other people have read about this in the last 24 hours, but I do have a gut instinct about it that's pretty strong. And it comes from just basic pattern recognition of the last two election cycles, okay? But my background as an entrepreneur, I have not been paying super close attention to American politics until about 2016, and then much more in 2020, and then of course I'm in the thick of it now. But let me take those last two presidential elections. So this myth of, does it exist, some sort of foreign election attempts at interference? Of course it does. It happens worldwide. It happens here in the United States. But this idea of Russian election interference in particular, let's trace the history of that in each of the last two elections.

Let's go to 2016. The allegation of Russian election interference to support Donald Trump, when you double click on that, look at what was the actual foreign election interference there? It was actually U.S. election interference in the U.S. election through the Steele dossier, but laundered through the narrative of actual Russian interference. And actually, there was a Russian intermediary to perpetuate that attempt at election interference about Trump's Russia collusion hoax. That's in 2016. Now we get to 2020. Again, domestic election interference is the systematic suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. That didn't happen by Russian companies. It didn't happen by the Russian government. It happened by US social media companies acting at the direction of deep state actors in the US

government that suppressed probably a story whose suppression changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. But again, what did they say? They said, no, no, no, this was Russian disinformation. So now you're seeing a pattern. In 2016, there's domestic attempts at election interference, but they run it through a Russian smokescreen. In 2020, there's domestic election interference, but they run it through a Russian smokescreen. So this time around, when I see Merrick Garland in the Department of Justice sitting under the Biden administration, suddenly alleging election interference by the Russians, I don't have any facts other than to say my radar goes off and says, I want to know where that election interference is actually beginning.

A lot of those allegations that they were somehow helping Trump, I actually got curious. Actually, you could make strong arguments that a lot of these posts or whatever actually weren't helping Trump at all. But the fact that they called that Russian election interference again, just suggests to me that this may be part of a pattern of what we saw in 2016 and 2020. Well, yeah, thanks. So I don't really buy what they're selling on this. Yeah, Kamala's losing, which she is. She is.

She's losing in the states that matter. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona. It's amazing. So all of a sudden, the other side is being funded by Russia. Of all the countries that interfere in our elections, and there are many, Russia's at the bottom of the list, okay, in terms of effectiveness. But it's a little, they're literally going back to the Russia, Russia, Russia well again. Yeah, I think it's- This is not a super clever group, right? I think that, I think the problem is they are actually a super clever group. I think

that this is just the beginning of a volley. So this one's not going to land. I think the public, fool me once, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me thrice, shame on you, whatever the expression is. The reality is I think there's going to be some weird things that happen in the next two months. I think there

are going to be some, depending on what happens in the debate. So I'm going to the debate next week in Philadelphia. It's going to be Tuesday. I think there are going to be some, depending on what happens in the debate. So I'm going to the debate next week in Philadelphia. It's going to be Tuesday. I think it's going to be probably a Donald Trump demolition destruction of the other side. But don't cheer too much, right? Because I was at the last one, and that's actually, in some ways, was a trap. It was obviously a trap, right? They scheduled the earliest ever presidential debate in US history. Why did they do that? It was obvious. It was that they wanted to test Biden as a final trial balloon and they got a free option because if he did great, great, they turned the race upside down. But if Biden did as poorly as he did, they swapped him out. It was something unthinkable that became the obvious. So I think if we have another debate

smack down on Tuesday, if I was a betting man, I'd predict that's what we're about to have. I also would predict we're going to have some very strange things that happen on the back of that as well. And I think that in some ways the Republican Party has just been so behind on this. I'll probably make some people mad by lifting the curtain on this, but last year to make the Republican party debate stage, the final condition is we had to sign all the candidates, Ron McDaniel's requirement. I had some words to say that it had a certain, you know, outcome there, but she made us sign a beat Biden pledge. And so this is in July or August of last year. And I said, this is dumb. This is silly because we're not going to be running against Joe Biden. So we're going to spend

an entire year of financial, political, and messaging capital running against a candidate who is not the actual candidate we're going to run against, but it was the beat Biden pledge. That was just the dogmatic messaging of the Republican party. And what do you know, a year and a half later, we've wasted a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of credibility with the public. We even boosted the media's credibility because they got that last month where they got to criticize Joe Biden. So now when they're not actually going after Kamala, they still look even handed to the American public because they went after a Democrat most recently. In some ways, it was the worst of all worlds. And so I think we need to get better as a movement, I think as a Republican party on staying skeptical, on skating to where the puck is going. And I think ultimately the way

we're going to win this is actually not even by focusing on Kamala. That's sort of where I've landed on this is, you know, people say she's a communist or she's, you know, a socialist or whatever. I think that is giving her a little too much credit because it assumes she has an ideology. I agree. She doesn't have an ideology, right? She just doesn't. Most people in California here know her. She's just another cog, right? She's another cog in a machine. We're not running against a candidate. We are running against a system. And the way we're going to win this is forget who they put up. Kamala, if they make her the president before the election, who knows, whatever it is, it doesn't matter

if we actually win this by offering our own vision of who we are and what we actually stand for. Individual, family, nation, and God beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the courage to stand for it. But that's how we protect ourselves against what I think is going to be a complicated couple of months ahead is what I predict. So smart.

Well, how's this for crazy? Has there ever been a more volatile time in American politics? Not in our lifetimes. No one alive has ever seen anything like this. But long before things started to really fall apart, the Heritage Foundation saw it coming. Heritage has pulled together a coalition of over 100 right-leaning groups to develop a comprehensive plan for day one. That would include detailed policy proposals on the most pressing issues, the big ones, securing the border, controlling inflation,

cracking down on election fraud, protecting the rights of the individual, and saving the nation from being crushed by woke anti-human ideology. The team at Heritage has also developed a plan to dismantle the deep state that keeps this nonsense going and reclaim this nation from the small group of technocrats that's broken everything.

Heritage is also running a training and vetting program to identify effective conservatives to serve in the next presidential administration, people who will share your values, this country's values, and actually do the job. It can't just be the same pool of discredited people from Washington populating every administration. Heritage has a long head start,

and they put in a lot of work already, but they need your support to finish the job and to support the incoming president. You can go to heritage.org slash Tucker and contribute to this important work today. A lot depends on it. Heritage.org slash Tucker. cruise through Muskoka or down Toronto's bustling streets. From now until June 30th, lease a 2025 Volvo XC60 from 1.74% and save up to $4,000. Conditions apply. Visit your GTA Volvo retailer

or go to volvocars.ca for full details. At Desjardins Insurance, we know that when you're a building contractor, your company's foundation needs to be strong. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. And I don't, we talked about offstage, I won't bore everyone here, but what you're going to do next, but I think it's fair to predict that you will remain part of what you're part of now,

which is an effort to save the country. But I think we're falling for it, for sure. The idea that Kamala Harris is like an actual person. I'm sure she can fog a mirror, but beyond that, she's just a cipher. She'll be whatever you want her to be. Pay her enough, she'll be a radical vegan or She'll be whatever you want her to be. I mean, pay her enough, she'll be a radical vegan or anti-circumcision activist

or whatever, it doesn't matter. She might even build a wall. 100%. She'll claim she wants to. 100%. You know, she's a kind of sad puppet, clearly unhappy, terrified. I mean, I know benzodiazepine use

when I see it, and I'm like, that chick's had some Xanax, just vacant. She's afraid. She wakes up afraid every morning. And you can tell the people who are afraid, which is a lot of people. And she's chief among the fearful. But anyway, the Republicans fell for it. The leadership fell for it. They're falling for it now. And they also fell, and I hope you'll flesh this out a little bit, they fell for the idea that the media acts independently of the Democratic Party. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that that's a trap we have repeatedly fallen into over the last eight years. But I

just think this idea, it's not an accident that you get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. There are a lot of intelligent people who are, believe it or not, intelligent people. They have a high IQ brain power. They can make their own decisions. They're thinkers who are Democrats, people on the left, ideologues who people like you and I might disagree with, but some of whom you and I might actually be friends with because we respect them even though we disagree with them. It's not an accident that you get Joe Biden and then a Kamala Harris and then the next puppet they put up. Biden has cognitive deficits, right? Those are not a bug. They are a feature for the people who control him. Kamala Harris has a different kind of deficit. She has policy deficits, cognitive deficits,

you could argue. Those are also, again, not a bug. They're a feature for the people who actually operate the puppet. And so I think that it's going to be a losing game unless we see ourselves as running against that system. And I think this is actually going to be, let's assume victory here, right? Let's fast forward. It's not just winning the election. It's actually, are we actually going to do what conservatives, Republicans, when they've governed, have long failed to do. I think the real myth we've fallen into is this trap of believing that we can reform this system, that we're going to reform the deep state, that we're going to fire Christopher Wray or whoever

at the top of the FBI and put in a new figurehead on top, that we're going to reform the bureaucracy. And I think that reform is just a myth, right? It's impossible. We're not running against, it's not that Christopher Wray is an individual bad actor at the top of the FBI. He's just another cog in the system, just like Kamala Harris, just like Joe Biden. And so the question for us, the real test for us, I think, Tucker, is not going to be the election in November. It is going to be whether we have the spine to actually see through and do the hard thing that we've never done before.

Nobody's done it. Donald Trump in his first term is the closest we've gotten. But nobody's really stepped up and said, no, no, no, are we actually going to try to reform and massage this thing to incrementally window dress it and advance our own goals? Or are we actually going to get in there and shut it down? And I think that is the one answer that will save this country. And I'm

supporting Donald Trump because I believe he's the man who is going to be the best suited to get that job done. But the real test comes not in November, but after that to me. I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. And I'm thrilled to hear that. I think I spent 35 years living in Washington, so I have some appreciation for how rotten the system is. It's so rotten. It's like mind-boggling, actually. But in order to shut it down or in order to make the changes necessary to preserve the country, you're going to have to actually ignore the media. Yeah. And why can't Republicans do that? So I actually met,

I met Georgia Maloney when she came to the United States not that long ago. She's a good leader, so I had a good conversation with her. She gave me a tactic. I'm going to try it, you know,

if I'm in the position, if I'm in a comparable position ever. And I think anybody who is in a comparable position ever. And I think anybody who is in a comparable position of leadership should do the same thing. She says she doesn't read the newspaper. She says, I couldn't tell you what's on the front page of the newspaper. I couldn't tell you what's on television. I just talk to people. That's all I need to talk to. And then I make the decisions that actually need to be made. That'd be my recommendation to every Republican politician. I don't follow it. I have to admit. I only pick this up after my campaign.

But if I were to run my campaign again, if I was to go back in time and do it again, that'd probably be the number one thing that I would do too. You don't need to watch it. You don't need to see, you could participate in it. You could actually, you know, take a hostile interview anybody wants to. But whatever the headline is,

whatever the TV commentary is, social media commentary, in some way, don't even bother looking at it. Just talk to those tens of thousands of people across the country where you actually learn that that myth of division that you're fed, the whole thing was false. You can just call the bluff by literally switching it off and pretending it doesn't exist. I think it's actually a pretty good tactic.

Oh, I haven't had TV in many years, and I worked in TV. I don't think a lot of crack dealers leave it around the kitchen. You know what I mean? Yeah. This is an ugly product. I don't want it in my house. Um, but you know, I totally agree, but it's just interesting. Even now I know Republican leaders who probably pretty well-meaning people who, if they get attacked on Twitter or the New York Times or if Chuck Todd of NBC News, I mean, it's all like a joke, but if they say something critical of the politicians and we have to deal with this, why don't you just hoist the middle finger and laugh? I've never understood. We did some of that during the campaign.

Well, you did, for sure. But I think that, and I was surprised by what an effect some of that actually had. That was actually one of probably the unexpected successes that I did have in my campaign. I only got 8% of the vote in Iowa, but actually in taking down a lot of the media and exposing a lot of that corruption, I think that that's important work to continue to do. There's a risk. I mean, there's always, and here's what I would say. We talked about shining down the deep state.

We talked about taking on the media. Here's the honest truth. You're always taking some risk. It's just a question of which risk you're willing to take. So in the context of speaking back, in the context of when the media is attacking you or you're confronting a hard truth, one risk you might take is that you're going to be too unfiltered,

that you're just going to take your filter off, say too much, and say something that offends somebody. That's a risk. I've done it. I've made that mistake. I don't think you've ever made that mistake, but I've made that mistake. And that's one risk. You're always going to take that risk. The other risk is that you self-censor and you say that, okay, because I'm going to offend somebody, I'm actually going to restrict what I say and think three times before every utterance I make. Both of them are risks. The only question is which risk are you willing to take? Same thing with respect to reforming the government, right? I say, get in there and shut it down. Fine. What does that mean? I would fire 75 plus percent of all federal bureaucrats on day one. Shut down the FBI, the ATF, the CDC,

the Department of Education, just shut them the hell down. All right. But you're taking, I mean, just shut it down. Now you're taking a risk, right? I mean, am I going to tell you that's the exact perfect amount we need to cut? I can't tell you that. You might take either the risk that you're going to cut so much fat that you also cut some muscle or you're otherwise taking the other risk that you're not cutting enough fat you're a headed hydra you cut one off it grows right back it's just a question of which risk you're willing to take and there's times in american history where one of those might be the right risk or the other but right now i think we live in a moment where the risk you need to take and it's not just me

or tucker or donald trump or anybody else the risk every one of you needs to take is when you're the only person in a room who believes what you do, for God's sake, stand up and say it. Say it with a spine. Don't apologize for your beliefs. Say in public what you will say in private at the dinner table. And you might offend somebody. It's a risk you're taking, but take the risk. When we put Donald Trump back in the White House, hold him and J.D. Vance or me or anybody else who's part of it accountable to say, you said you want to get in there and actually drain the swamp and attack the deep state. By God's sake, get in there and actually do it. And you're going to take a risk. Is it going to be perfect? There's going to be some bumps along the way, but that's just the risk that we choose to take. And so

that's kind of where I land on this. It's not that I'm giving you some perfect answer but that's just the risk that we choose to take. And so that's kind of where I land on this. It's not that I'm giving you some perfect answer. It's just that that's the risk that I believe we need to take and I'm willing to take. And you've, well, you have taken that risk. And I just have to ask, sorry that there are people watching, but I'm going to anyway. What effect has that had on your personal life, your friendships, your family? Because people don't say what they really think because they worry about the cost. What's it been for you? Yeah, I mean, I think, so it's been different stages of it. Okay. So initially, so I'll tell you this, there's a lot of people in the campaign and there's a lot of things that I

would do differently too. So a lot of people who worked for me in past companies I've led, for example, or close friends, one of their frustrations that they've shared with me now in the six, eight months since is everybody got to see you as the fighter. That's great, but that's not the side of you that we know. There's more of you than that. And the risk you're taking there is my philosophy in the campaign was if somebody hits you, you hit them back ten times harder. I don't care if you're a Republican, Democrat, that's how we're going to run those. And at some point, that's the way you got to proceed in the first step. But I also preach to myself what I would teach my two sons is that the number one person who's

most responsible for whether or not you achieve your goal, it's not the only factor, but the number one factor of whether or not you achieve your goal. It's not the only factor, but the number one factor of whether or not you achieve your goal is actually you. And I set out to achieve a goal last year. I didn't achieve it. And I think that I could blame the media, I could blame a lot of the consultants, I could blame a lot of factors along the way, but you know at the end of the day I think that there's a lot that I would probably do differently as well to make sure that I'm able to allow the people of the country to see the whole of who I am. And that's one of the hardest things to do as a politician, because you ask about friends and

family. That's the thing that probably hurt my family the most is not that they couldn't deal with the insults or the dirtiness of partisan politics, but the sense that there's someone they know, but the impression that the public is given is of a very different person. That disconnect was probably the thing that was hardest on my wife and probably some of my closest friends. But they're tough and they can handle it and they were still supportive of what we did. And it's a process that bruises you a little bit. There's some sort of wounds and scars that never fully heal, but I got to thank my family who was, I got a three-year-old and now four-year-old son.

He was three during the campaign, came with me to every campaign event. My wife is a surgeon who did not actually sacrifice seeing one patient over the course of the year that she was supposed to see and still traveled with me for the entire campaign and during that pain. And you know what? Those are the, you know, they're the people that got me through it as well. I judge men by their wives and I liked you much more after meeting her, I have to say. That's fair. No, I do. I do. I'm very judgy that way. Was there any politics? So you came from business.

You had a really successful business career. And then you became so distressed after writing these books about what was happening in America that you wound up running for president. But you weren't a politician. You had contempt for politicians. Were there any you met who you were impressed by? Yeah, a good number, actually. Actually, I say this not in

some sort of like large scale flattery, but I actually have been more impressed by Donald Trump the more I've actually gotten to know him. And I say that because he's also somebody who, I know how hard it was for me to sort of make the truth. I mean, I lived a good life. Donald Trump lived a good life. But to be able to lay that down and actually say, no, no, no, this is my purpose and calling. I'm not going to stop at anything. I probably wouldn't have run for president if he hadn't done it first. So I got to give credit where credit's due there. I think when you think about other people who I respect, I like a guy like, take a Rand Paul or a Thomas Massey, right? Guys who, they're probably the ones who get closest to that

Georgia Maloney model of like not giving a crap about what the press has to say, but they're actually just going to step up and say it anyway. I've only gotten to know Thomas Massey a little bit more recently, but Rand Paul I've gotten to know over the course of the last couple of years. And his father, Ron Paul, I would give even greater credit to for blazing that trail. So yeah, there's a longer list of others I could probably give you, but not that much longer. But I would say there's a handful of people that gave me real inspiration that somebody with conviction that doesn't compromise on it can still drive change. And those would be some of the guys I'd give you. I strongly agree with you.

I've spent my whole life really despising politicians, not just on principle but also personally, as people. And I feel that way about most of them still, with a lot of evidence. But I have to say, I look around and there are more people I admire, I can't believe I'm saying this, in politics than really at any time I can remember. And I think there's so much pressure, downward exerted pressure on all of us to obey, to repeat the lies, to get in line, that the people who refuse to do that are extraordinary people. And our special guest

tonight, who I'm about to ask on, is one of those people and he's in the rare position of, typically, you know, a public career begins and people are so impressed by the person and then they see his flaws and he falls from grace.

The person we're about to invite on is the only person I've ever met who spent, I don't know, 20 years being denounced pretty much every week by every single news organization in the world as a dangerous, mentally ill lunatic, making totally unsupported, anti-scientific claims about totally safe medical products. And this man, in the face of opposition that no politician I've ever seen ever seen, including from within his own tribe and family,

he persisted in saying what he thought was true. And I've known this man for a while, and I've admired him for a long time. And what's amazing is to wake up in a country that in some ways is not getting better, but to wake up in a country that all of a sudden has stopped mocking this man as a crazy person, and has started to realize that the lone brave voice may have been right all along. And so it's an honor to introduce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So we had this conversation last week that I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people

on camera, but the conversation that we had are the things that you said to me last week, I will not forget. And from an outsider's perspective, it seems like your public career has not only not ended in some way, it's beginning in a new way, in a really powerful way. And you described three issues that are central not just to your politics but to your life. And if I'm remembering correctly, I think they were slowing down the number of people who are killed abroad in wars. Okay, we have a lot of wars opposing the pointless ones. Protecting the natural environment that God created for us to enjoy, nature, and protecting the health of children. And I think those are the three things you mentioned. I'm wondering if you could just expand on that.

I love you. I got into, my career was, most of it was spent in environmental protection. And I went to work in 1983 for a blue-collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen who mobilized to reclaim the Hudson River from its polluters. And they were people who were capitalists. They came from an industry that was 350 years old. It's the oldest commercial fishery in North America on the Hudson River. And they saw this industry destroyed not because it had any

intrinsic flaws, but because a large company, the General Electric Company, had been able to use its political clout to do something illegal, which was to dump its toxic PCBs into the Hudson River. And when I first started working on the Hudson, there were 2,500 families working on the river, enriching our culture, our palette, our economy, the life of the Hudson Valley connecting us to our history, to our landscapes, to the waterways and ten, twenty thousand generations of human

beings that were here before there were laptops. They were using the same fishing methods that were taught by the Algonquin Indians to the original Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam and then passed down through the generations. And all of a sudden, they couldn't fish anymore because there were plenty of fish in the Hudson. They were loaded with toxic PCBs, and the state of New York said, you can't eat them. And they recognized that, you know, these were capitalists. They were people, small business people, and they realized that that government was in cahoots with the polluters and that if they wanted to reclaim the river for themselves they were going to have to do it themselves.

They went to the government agencies, the Corps of Engineers, the Conservation Department, the Coast Guard, and they were given the bum's rush. They were told, these are important people. We can't force them to comply with the law. And they came to the conclusion the only way they were going to restore the river is if they confronted the polluters directly. They found an ancient navigational statute called the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act that allowed

people to prosecute polluters and then collect bounties. And they started suing polluters. They They hired me as their attorney in 1984. We brought cases against over 500 successful cases on the Hudson. We forced polluters to spend about $5.5 billion remediating the river, and today the Hudson is the richest waterway in the North Atlantic. And my experience was different than a lot of environmentalists who have a kind of look but don't touch. My experience was about people who their communities were absolutely, the people who were part of that commercial fishery, it dictated the purity of the Hudson's, the abundance of the fishery dictated their livelihoods, their property values, their recreational values. It was their social safety net. If you lost your job, you could still fish. You could feed your family.

And that was something that the state of New York, the Constitution of the state says the people of the state own the rivers, they own the waterways of the state. They're not owned by the conservation department, they're not owned by the General Electric Company, they're not owned by the big polluters, they're owned by the people.

Everybody has a right to use them. And nobody can use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. Every child in New York has a constitutional right to throw a plug into the river and bring out a striped bass and bring it home and feed it to their family. That was the essential, you know, that lesson that I learned there about agency capture then allowed me to kind of understand, have a model or a blueprint for the things that I saw when I started studying the pharmaceutical industry. And so those are critical issues. The other is I came into this campaign,

three major issues. One was the censorship. And you and I feel the same way. And any government that can silence its critics has a license for any kind of atrocity. Can I just repeat that? Any government that can silence its critics has a license for any kind of atrocity. Put that on your refrigerator, because that's true. Hamilton, Adams, and Madison said that we put the freedom of speech in the First Amendment, because all the other rights are dependent on it. And sure enough, when the

government found out, discovered that it could censor our speech in early 2020, silenced doctors, silenced mothers, silenced people who were, you know, people scientists, who were saying, wait, there are other alternatives to what you're doing. Lockdowns aren't going to work. The masks have no science behind them. The social distancing has no science. Those people were silenced. They were marginalized. They were vilified.

They were demonized. And as soon as the government figured out that it could get away with that, it went after all of our other constitutional rights. The first thing it did is it went after the other leg of the First Amendment, which is freedom of religion. It closed every church in our country for a year with no scientific citation. It went after the third leg of the First Amendment, which is freedom of assembly, with these very bizarre social distancing regulations that, again, they now admit were not science-based.

They went after, then, the Fifth Amendment, which is property rights. They closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation, no scientific citation, no notice and comment rule making, no public hearings, all the things that I've been suing governments and corporations for That our— That government officials have to go through before they deprive us of rights. And none of that happened. And they went after the Seventh Amendment, which bans jury—which—the Seventh Amendment gives us the right to jury trials. The 7th Amendment is very simple. It says no American shall be denied the right of a trial before a jury of their peers in case their controversy is exceeding $25. That's all it says.

There's no pandemic exception. And by the way, the framers of the Constitution knew all about pandemics. There were two epidemics during the Revolutionary War, one of them a malaria epidemic that decimated the armies of Virginia, and then a smallpox epidemic that decimated the armies of New England at the very time when Benedict Arnold, who was our greatest general, conquered Montreal. So we were in the inner city of Montreal. We controlled Montreal, which meant we controlled Canada. And he had to withdraw his troops because he could not hold the city because so many of his troops were down in a smallpox.

Otherwise, Canada today would be part of the United States, but for that smallpox epidemic. And the framers all knew that. And when they gathered ten years later, nine years later, in Philadelphia to ratify the Bill of Rights, between the end of the Revolution and the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1792, there were epidemics in every city. They killed tens of thousands of people. Malaria epidemics, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid, cholera. So they all knew about epidemics, yet they did not put an epidemic exception in the Constitution. They wrote that document for hard times.

No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. Nothing hits like playoff hockey. The road to the cup starts on FanDuel. Your home for live bets all playoffs long.

With new features like live SGPs, build a parlay, any game, any period. Or stack multiple matchups onto one slip with Same Game Parlay Plus. What's better than playoff hockey? Overtime playoff hockey. Get more from the game with live overtime markets. Download FanDuel today and get more playoff action with North America's number one sportsbook. Please play responsibly. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. One of the things you bring that up, Bobby, and I think one of the things we often fall into the trap of in an election year is to see, let's take the most important of those amendments, the First Amendment, through a partisan lens. Do we have a Democratic Party that has been using social media companies to silence speech through the back door that they could not through the front door? Absolutely we have.

Is that something we need to hold them accountable for? Absolutely. But I think that if we're to, and this is one of the things I love about you, Tucker, is you're willing to challenge people 360 degrees. I don't care if you're Republican or not. I had conversations with a number of Republicans in the last week who are railing appropriately

against Brazil for its banning of X, which is preposterous, actually. This is a major Western, supposedly allied nation. The very people who claim that we want to stand for human rights and democracy abroad have nothing to say when it comes to Brazil banning a social media platform. But then I challenged some of these same people, because I know what their views are on this question, to say, gee, it sounds like a pretty bad idea for a government of a supposedly free country that just bans outright a social media platform because they don't like the way that it operates. And here's the part where we challenge our own people. That's exactly what the U.S. government has done

with respect to a platform that I don't love that much. I don't like many aspects of it all, TikTok. But I do think that we live in one of these moments where the trap in an election year, this is one of the things I loved about your candidacy, Bobby, is leaving the Democratic Party to run as an independent allowed you to do what more of us in either party need to be doing is question the orthodoxies of both parties and go back to first principles of what's in the

U.S. Constitution. And you've got to have the same shoe fit the other foot, whether you're a Democrat or Republican. And that's one of the things I loved about the way you ran your campaign, man. Thank you. I saw Vice President Harris this week gave a statement where she said that, she said two things. She said one, that Elon Musk better watch out because if he abused free speech on Twitter, that he would get that privilege taken away from him. It's not a privilege. Yeah.

And it isn't a privilege, as you know. It's a right. And she said, he gave a press conference in which he said that these companies need to be does not protect disinformation and misinformation. But that's not right. The First Amendment protects disinformation. And it protects misinformation. And it protects lies.

It protects all speech. It was not written for the speech that we all want to hear. It was written to protect the speech that nobody wants to hear. And we have a Democratic Party, the party I grew up in, and the word liberal is a derivative of the term for free speech. So that was the central core of this party. When I was growing up, my father, my uncle loved this country so much because they loved the freedom to debate, have conversations. This idea that the free flow of information was the sunlight, it was the soil, it was the water for democracy, and without it, democracy would wither and die. They knew that.

Oh, I have a case right now against the Biden administration, and I was just granted an injunction in the federal courts. Kennedy versus Biden. And Judge Doty, the federal judge in that decision, wrote in the earlier decision, he wrote a 155-page decision that details what we now know about the Biden White House's censorship program. And what Doty details in this is that 37 hours after he took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, which includes the First Amendment,

he had opened up a portal and ordered the social media companies, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, to begin censoring his political critics on medical information, but also other information as well, including criticism of the Ukraine war. And I was the first person that they began, that they ordered Facebook to censor. Facebook actually pushed back at one point and said, you know, Facebook complied and took down my entire Instagram account with almost a million followers. But they couldn't find a single factual misstatement, error, on my Instagram account.

And Facebook, during the email exchange, which we now have, pushes back at one point and says, this is actually not factually erroneous. And so they had to coin a new word, which was malinformation, which is information, factual assertions that are technically correct, but are nevertheless inconvenient for the government. And they ordered Facebook to censor misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

So that portal which they opened, the Biden White House turned over to the FBI to manage. So you have the FBI participating in the censorship of American citizens engaging in political speech. The FBI then invited the CIA, CISA, which is a group that you may not have heard of, but it is the center of the censorship industrial complex, the DHS, the IRS, which I don't know what they were censoring, and NIH, CDC, and FDA to participate in this censorship project. And I now have an injunction against the Biden White House from doing that to me anymore. But it's troubling to me for the very reason Vivek just mentioned about what happened in Brazil. And Tucker, you and I talked about this. We're seeing an emergence now of totalitarianism in all the Western democracies,

like nothing that I could have ever imagined. Europe no longer has free speech. Europe has, is now, the European Union is officially censoring information on the internet. And, you know, the head of the European Commission, a man named Thierry Breton, recently sent a letter to Elon Musk saying that if he aired an unedited version, a live interview with President Trump on X, he would be fined as much as 6% of the value of the company. And then France, a week later,

arrests Pavel Derov, the founder of Telegram, when he lands on a gas stop, a fuel stop, in France. This is particularly alarming because France had as robust a passion and tradition for free speech as we had in this country. During the French Revolution in 1789, the French Republic adopted all of these very, very strong laws guaranteeing freedom of speech. And then in the 1880s, they passed another slew of laws, again, protecting free speech.

And they guarded that and nurtured that as much as we did in this country, as much as any country in the world. So to see France do this, and by the way, there's no reason for them to arrest him because he's a citizen of Abu Dhabi. France has an extradition agreement with Abu Dhabi so they can extradite him. But furthermore, the European Union already is censoring content. So they want an extra step to arrest and punish this person and put him in prison to send a message to all of us that, you know, about who's in charge. And that is terrifying to me. I have so many Democratic friends. You know, Jimmy Dore was on here earlier. Fantastic.

And he was talking about January 6th. And what I say is people broke the law on January 6th. If you broke the law, you should be punished. But was the republic threatened on January 6th? And even if a building was burned down, it's not the end of the republic. It is not. And you have the U.S. military there. You have these agencies. We have institutions in our country that are still functioning. We have a Congress, etc., that would resist the violent overthrow of an American government.

And I don't think we were close to a violent overthrow of an American government. And I don't think we were close to a violent overthrow of the American government. But those attacks on free speech, to me, are a genuine existential threat to democracy and to the Republic. Amen.

So the question is, I think you've correctly described, and I hope you will say it every time you speak publicly, and I hope to do the same, that we're watching the transformation of the free world into a totalitarian system.

I don't think that's an overstatement. And so the questions for each of you, to start with you, Vivek, how do we stop that? Because if we don't, then we're done. Yeah, so I agree with everything Bobby said. I think there's two steps to stopping it that I want to highlight, though.

I do worry about what's happening in England. I do worry about what's happening in Brazil and France and other allied, supposedly free nations. But I worry most about when it's happening right here at home in the United States of America. And so the best step to stopping the rise of this authoritarianism around the world is to first stop it permanently here in the United States of America. And I do think that that is especially important even for the world, because as much as you correctly laid out France's history, even if you look at even France, but let alone the other countries, none of those other countries put the First Amendment first, right? So we can preach to other countries about their failure to respect free speech, but

our whole national identity, like who we are as Americans, the existence of this country, the fact that we all call ourselves American, that only means something in reference to our actual rights that we have given the people of this country since 1776. So it goes to the heart of our own national identity itself. So the first thing I would say, Tucker, is yes, are we seeing it around the world? Yes. But fixing the problem starts right here at home. The second thing I would say,

and this is the harder part, is that as much as the three of us here were in lockstep alignment on being free speech absolutists on this stage, as much as we can point our finger at the government and its overreach of working with corporations and working through backdoor government regulation and backdoor action to suppress and silence speech, that only works if you have a population that is willing to comply. And I think that there's another half of this problem that if we're being really honest with ourselves, we have to talk about, which is,

what is it inside each of us that makes us, as so many are, want to bend the knee to that new regime? And we can complain about the regime all we want. We're missing the other half of the problem unless we also fill that void that causes people to bend that knee, right? If you don't pledge allegiance to the American flag, you're going to pledge allegiance to a different flag instead. If you don't believe in God, you're going to believe in a new false idol instead. And so I think that that's the harder part we need to fix in this country is that revival of purpose and meaning and grounding ourselves in our identity as Americans. And I think if we do,

if we get that part right, if we as a citizenry, we as individuals say, no, no, no, nobody's going to tell me or shame me or threaten me to do anything other than express my opinion and tell you who I am and what I believe, then I think the government part will actually solve itself along with it. And so some of that's not just on the government, it's on us. And they put the second amendment after the first amendment for a reason. It's the one that puts the teeth into all of the others. And that too is part of what our founding fathers envisioned since 1776. That's what I think. Bobby, are you hopeful that the tide of totalitarianism can be turned and if so how I think it all depends on this election is I don't think and I you know I try not to bad mouth other candidates because I don't I just just, I think, you know, my approach is to try to dampen the

vitriol and the anger and the hatred. I think we have to stop hating each other. But I don't, from the statements that Kamala Harris makes and that her vice president makes. I don't think they have a clear vision of what the country's supposed to look like. I don't think they understand the First Amendment. I don't think they understand the Constitution. I saw Kamala at the convention, and she gave a speech that was very bellicose

and belligerent. It was a kind of speech that was very bellicose and belligerent. It was a kind of speech that was written by neocons and the CIA. The first time in history they had a CIA former director speaking right before her, Leon Panetta. They had military people speaking at the Democratic Convention. The Democratic Convention was a Democrat with the anti-war party. They were the pro-Constitution party. They were the party that was against Wall Street and representing the little guys, the cops, the firefighters, union and labor people. And I talked to you about this on the show last week.

In the 2020 election, roughly 50% of the people in this country voted for Donald Trump. But that group that voted for Donald Trump represented 30% of the wealth in our country. The 50% of the people that voted for Joe Biden represented 70% of the wealth. There's been an inversion now where the Republican Party has become the party of the common, of the military-industrial complex, a big pharma, big agriculture, big tech, the big banking systems, and all of the, what Donald Trump calls the deep state, which is this web of financial interests that is not necessarily a little conspiracy, but it's a conspiracy of self-interest that functions together in tandem to shift wealth upward, to clamp down totalitarian controls, and to transform this country from the world's exemplary democracy

into a corporate kleptocracy and a very, very oppressive oligarchical system, the kind of system that we fought a revolution to overthrow in 1776. Wow. Bless you for saying that. Okay, I have a final question for each of you, and it's one of the reasons that I'm fascinated by you both,

respect you both, and I'm grateful that you're here. Neither one of you needs to be doing this. You both just ran. You both dropped out. You both kept going. Again, you're not doing it for the money. You're not doing it for the adulation. The media hates you both just ran, you both dropped out, you both kept going. Again, you're not doing it for the money, you're not doing it for the adulation, the media hates you both. It doesn't make your life, no, it's true,

it doesn't make your life less complicated. It's incredibly tiring and at some points tiresome, but you persist both. Why? Why? Gratitude. I think that my parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago. And in a single generation, what have I found in multi-billion dollar companies? My wife lived the American dream. We're raising two boys in Ohio, thankfully, with God's blessings, healthily and happily. It is my sense of gratitude

to this country to have made possible what my parents or me growing up would have never imagined was possible. And you know what? I've been giving a lot of thought to this idea of, obviously, we say it a lot, making America great again. And, you know, of course there's a nostalgia in that, right? The country that my parents came into, we used to talk about the melting pot back in the 1990s, this notion of assimilating into one country, which had a common identity, that's now become a microaggression. So there's certain elements of what we missed from the 1990s, the idea that the best person gets the job regardless of their skin color or the idea that, you know what, you get to speak your mind as long as I get to in return. These basic quaint

ideas, we want to bring that back. But for me, I think that's not good enough, actually. I think that we, in some ways, part of America isn't just making America great again. I think this is what Donald Trump means it when this second time around. You can hear it between the lines of what he says. It's what moves me too is, I want to make America greater than it's ever been before, actually. I think our best days as a country can still actually be ahead of us. As a relatively young person, I hope my best days are still ahead of me. I don't take that for granted. Every day is a blessing.

And if we wake up tomorrow, that's a gift too. But I hope my best days are ahead of me. And I do think it's also going to take some people from the next generation to make a country whose best days are ahead of us too. And so I don't know what form that's going to take for me in the next step. But whatever it is, we're going to keep going and each play our part. And if we each do,

I think that not in some fake politician way, but in a true way, I think we are going to make America greater than it's ever been before. And that's what we're shooting for in November.

Thank you. Bobby, it has been a long slog for you, and you are more energetic and energized than ever, it seems to me. Why are you doing this? Well, I talked to you a moment ago about what I see as a devolution of American democracy and how it's turning into something that is, I would describe as a totalitarian system. And I see, because of what I've been doing for 20 years, working on chronic disease issues, and what I did for 20 years before that, working on environmental issues, I see how these powers, these economic aggregations,

can commoditize everything. If they commoditize the water, they commoditize, they steal it from the public. They turn it in. When General Electric dumped PCBs in the Hudson, it was privatizing all the fish in the Hudson and turning them into its own private property. If they privatize our landscapes, the Purple Mountains, majesty. And then when I started fighting on public health issues, I saw how they're privatizing our children.

They're literally stealing their health. We have in this country now the sickest children in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden of any nation on earth. When my uncle was president, we were spending, we had 6% of Americans had chronic disease. Today almost 60% do. And when my uncle was president, I was a boy, we spent zero on chronic disease in this country. Today, we spend 4.3 trillion. And that money is going upward into the pockets of certain people. And mainly, it's the pharmaceutical industry. The most valuable asset in America today is a sick child.

Because if you can get a child sick when they're very young and get them dependent on Ozempic and Adderall and insulin and seizure medication, you have now a client for life that is spending, is generating thousands of dollars, potentially a week, in revenue for these interests. And so I see how they're commoditizing everything. They're stealing everything we value. And ultimately, that comes from them being able to overrun our constitutional rights. And I saw it during COVID. I saw the whole thing in miniature, you know, compressed time, exactly what they're up to. And I remember in 2020, in August, I was in Berlin. I was giving a speech to 1.3 million people

who had come from all over Europe. It was like Woodstock, but for political freedom, because they saw what was happening with these mandates. It came from every nation in Europe to protest them. And I gave a speech. I ran into an NBC film crew there, and they were all wearing masks. And they said to me, why aren't you wearing a mask? You're in this big crowd shaking hands. Aren't you scared of dying?

And I said, there's things that scare me a lot more than dying. And they said, like what? And I said, like losing my constitutional rights. Like having my children grow up in an America where they cannot speak freely and criticize their political leaders. We had a whole generation in 1776 of people, of men and women, who gave their fortunes, they gave their property, they gave their status and their lives to giving us this Constitution, to giving us this incredible gift. And we became the

template for the rest of the world. In 1776 we were the only democracy on earth. By 1865 there were five. By the time my uncle was president, there were about 130, and by the end of the 1960s, there were 190, all based on the American model. So we truly were the exemplary democracy. We were the hope, the light for the whole world. And, you know, today we've lost our role as a model. Nobody wants the system we have. We're no longer a moral authority. We've eroded this through this dynamic. And I, you know, I don't want that for my children. I want my children to grow up with a hope, with a love for this country that I had.

I'll say one other thing. In 2013, there was a poll where they asked young Americans under the age of 35, are you proud to be an American? 85% said yes. The same poll taken six months ago, 17% said yes. We have a whole generation that's lost their pride in being an American citizen, and they've lost hope for their own futures.

And we had a generation in 1776, 20,000 of them died, a huge number, it'd be like a million people today, that give us our Constitution. And, you know, they said to us that every generation must water the tree of liberty with its own blood if you're going to hold on to this. It's not something that I want to do. I have a really good life and I had a great family that loved me. I still have a nuclear family that loves me. But, and I have a didn't feel like I had a choice. I felt like I have to do this. It's the same reason people left their homes in 1776,

to do something for an idea, and I want to keep that idea for my kids. Well, God bless you for that. And God bless you, Vivek. What an amazing experience, a wonderful experience this has been. Thank you. And thank you. The big tech companies censor our content. I hate to tell you that it's still going on in 2024, but you know what they can't censor? Live events.

And that's why we are hitting the road on a fall tour for the entire month of September, coast to coast. We will be in cities across the United States. We'll be in Colorado Springs with Tulsi Gabbard, Salt Lake City with Glenn Beck, Tulsa, Oklahoma with Dan Bongino, Kansas City with Megyn Kelly, Wichita with Charlie Kirk, Milwaukee with Larry Elder, Rosenberg, Texas with Jesse Kelly, Grand Rapids with Kid Rock, Hershey, Pennsylvania with J.D. Vance, Redding, Pennsylvania with Alex Jones, Fort Worth, Texas

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