Tucker Carlson: America After Charlie Kirk

28:05You don't own them. So time after time, Charlie would call me or come to see me and let me know, wow, or show me text messages. These people are really mad that you're speaking. And I would always have the same thought. I feel pretty moderate, actually. I've never been an Israel hater. Obviously, I'm not an anti-Semite. I just don't want more wars, and I don't want a foreign country humiliating my country and telling us what our laws have to be. I mean, this seems like pretty basic America first stuff. And he would say, I totally agree with you, but they want you off the stage and I would always say no problem and he would say no it's important it's a matter of principle I want you to be there great by the way I'm not accusing anyone of being involved in that murder I'm not trying to mutter darkly or imply anything we don't there's a lot we don't know about who murdered Charlie and why but I I don't know and I'm not gonna pretend that I do but I think it's important to say that out loud because it's a fact and there are many liars out there trying bb netanyahu number one among them shamefully who are trying to distort the truth a truth that i know and can prove and the last thing i'll say about charlie is that his views were changing on topics that nothing with foreign policy you know the famous kind of red line third rail can't talk about it but it's possible that the subject that makes people even matter in washington new york and LA than having non-conventional foreign policy views is having non-conventional economic views men that really don't like that at all and Charlie's views on economics and on the way that wealth is distributed in the United States were changing fast really changing fast and and hardening not because he was a socialist hardly he was about as much of a socialist as I am not at all um but because he lived here and he spent a lot of time with young people and he couldn't help but notice because he was an observant and honest person that they're not thriving at all and that the chances they'll have lives comparable to the ones they had growing up are very small most of them won't have houses they won't own anything they'll be in debt and for that reason they won't get married or have children and so the people who are born here won't continue their legacy in the united states it's it's the end of our civilization and the root of a lot of this is spiritual, but the root is also economic.

30:27And it raises a question, a basic question of fairness. And I tried to address this in the speech that I gave for Charlie in July. I don't think I did a very good job, and it was misinterpreted, but I invoked Bill Ackman. And the point I was making had nothing to do with Bill Ackman being a criminal or even being an Epstein friend. I mean, I don't really know anything about that. I don't know much about, I'm not accusing Bill Ackman of a crime, And I'm not accusing him of, you know, being a sex creep or a Mossad agent or anything like that. I don't think that. I don't know that for sure. And I wasn't trying to say it.

30:59What I was trying to say is that Bill Ackman is not creative, not particularly intelligent. Bill Ackman is worth$7 billion. So you have to ask, like, how? And it seems to me that Bill Ackman is rich for the same reasons that a lot of other people I know are rich. because he's hyper-aggressive and he's well-connected. And my only point was, if you live in a society that awards the spoils to people on the basis of those two qualities, like the most aggressive, the best-connected people get the richest, that's a dysfunctional society. There should be a reward for creativity and decency and hard work, steadfastness, following the rules.

31:42Like, you should have to add to the sum total of your society, you'd think it's not an argument against the free market it's the argument against whatever we're living through right now this is really dark and ugly and if people like bill ackman are getting the richest what has bill ackman done shorted the market or something talk down herbal life i mean i'm not even saying that should be illegal all i'm saying is if that's one of the richest guys in your society you've got a very sick society i don't think bill ackman's like a drooling idiot or anything but like when was the last time you heard bill ackman say something constructive or creative?

32:14Like, never. So it's just bad. And it's not just about Bill Ackman, of course. I mean, he's just a minor player in the life of the world, but he's a kind of metaphor for how off track we've gone. And that doesn't seem like a socialist point. Once again, I'm hardly a socialist, and neither was Charlie Kirk. That seems like a Christian point. Fairness is at the root of the Christian story. People will be judged not by who their parents were or by how they look, but on their hearts, on themselves, on choices that they made, that's fair. So again, fairness is essential to the gospel, and it's essential to any working society.

32:53In a fair society or a society that its citizens believe is fair, people will comply voluntarily with the rules because they don't think the game is rigged. But in a society in which Bill Ackman, Bill Ackman, makes$7 billion and like the smartest, hardest working, most interesting, creative young people you know can never own a home, in a society like that, you're going to get Mom Donnie as mayor. You're going to get a lot of bad things because people will opt out of the society because they know it's not fair, it's rigged. That's the only point I was trying to make and Charlie, not surprisingly, made it much more eloquently, I thought, in an amazing interview, the last interview I did with him, late July of this year.

33:38Here's part of it. We know how to create wealth, but we don't know how to create it for the generation that needs it most. If you look at the economic conditions, you would think the other conditions surrounding it are like abject poverty. These are the problems that like third world nations have. I know. Our young people can't afford stuff and they have to finance their basic necessities. And yet we're the wealthiest nation in the history of the world on the planet. We have a$37 trillion GDP. We have the greatest companies and we have all this stuff to brag about. And yet all of our problems would beg the question.

34:09And it's like this inherent contradiction. We're super wealthy on one side, like a powerhouse juggernaut. And we are like an economic nightmare on the other side. How did that happen? So if there is such a thing as the left in the United States, if it still exists, you would think a message like that would at least get a hearing, a respectful hearing. Like, hey, what about wages? What about the ability of young people to just buy a little house with a little lawn in some subdivision? Isn't that kind of what they say they want? Empower the most vulnerable, the people who try hard and play by the rules.

34:50They called him a Nazi. They didn't care that Charlie Kirk in real life spent his time trying to stop war, trying to figure out how young people could buy a little house somewhere. Aren't those like left-wing goals? No, they didn't care at all. In fact, they hated that because they're for war, because they're for death, because they're for the inequality he described, because it leads to a volatile society that empowers them, of course. They're not a check on power, the professional left, the trans community. They're the shock troops of power. Charlie Kirk was a check on power. Charlie Kirk, inspired by his Christian faith, stood up to people fearlessly to say what he thought was true.

35:43And for that, I will always love and admire him. I want to go down to someone else who loved and admired him and knew him well and played a pretty, I think, important role in the final months of his life. And that is my old friend, Megan Kelly. Megan, thanks so much for coming on. Tucker, thanks for having me. That was a barn burner, man. You hit on some really important big points. I don't even remember what I said, but I meant it. So I just want to start. You had this experience last week that I've always prayed I never have. You were live when the news came in that our friend had been shot in the throat, and your reaction was captured for all time on camera, and I just want to start by playing it.

36:29I thought it was just an incredible moment that said so much about you and about him. So here it is.

36:37Oh, well, looks like we don't have a side. Well, in it, you said, the line that stuck out to me, your first reaction was, he was sent by God. That's the first thing you said. You'd not heard this news before. Why was that your gut reaction to his shooting? Because I had spent so much time with him over the past few years, just on the air, Tucker. You know, I never went out to dinner with Charlie. I didn't know him quite like that, like a personal friend. But I'd had him on the show more than 15 times. I'd been on his show repeatedly. I'd been to multiple Turning Point events and, you know, talked with him backstage quite a bit.

37:14Just done a lot with him professionally, a lot. And I mean, I wonder if he's been on anybody's show as much as he was on mine over the past couple of years. And I got to know his thoughts on virtually everything. And I saw what people are seeing now, how they were all infused with his Christian faith, that he was a truly happy warrior, that he gave almost everyone the benefit of the doubt, that he had a much more positive and optimistic outlook on humanity than I do. And I think than you do. I mean, I think we're a couple of cynical mofos. And Charlie wasn't. Charlie was he was like an angel. This picture that the left is painting of him in the news is totally foreign to my understanding of Charlie or to anything I've known.

38:06And I watched Charlie on his show too. I know the things they say he said that were controversial. They just fundamentally choose to misunderstand and misinterpret him. I mean, he was, you need look no further than Erica in order to see that he was real. Like her goodness, her love, their love story, her strength in the wake of his death. That's the woman he loved. And that's a woman who loved him. Why? Because he was some devil figure? the opposite. These two were as wholesome as you could find. And everything he said was from his love of humanity and his belief that they could do better. I mean, I am much more like, no, they can't.

38:50Let's move on without them. Like we've got to, you know, and Charlie, I mean, in all of these college campus exchanges, whenever talking about most people, he would feel like everyone was, could be redeemed. And if he could just get to them, if he could just talk to them, if he could just buoy them up with hope, they would do better. They could see themselves as Charlie saw them, as God sees them. And I just ran into that optimism and that positivity from Charlie so often that I really did see him as God's messenger, Tucker, as an angel sent to us. and it's like we didn't deserve him. I feel like he's gone now because we didn't deserve him.

39:34Man, you are too deep for cable news. No wonder you left. That's just such a beautiful summation and so insightful. I'm not sucking up, I mean it. I wish I had said half of that in my open. But why is that so provocative? I've been thinking about this since he was murdered. Like what of all the people that we know in our business, you know, the kind of let me give you my opinion business. I think it's fair to say he was the kindest. I mean, for real. And in private, too. Even people he was really mad at, he would always say, well, I know I understand where that person is coming from. It's like, wow.

40:10His decency was a challenge to me who struggles to be that. Why was that so offensive to people? Because it was power. Sure. It's so much more powerful, frankly, than negativity and anger. It's infectious. It's a contagion. It's like a magnet for people, whether they like him or not. They're drawn to him and he was converting people. So he was a huge threat. I've been asking myself this question a lot over the past week, you know, let's take the accused shooter in this case. Yes. And let's say, okay, this, this was, it was motivated exactly as the authorities say. And he was, he thought Charlie is quote too hateful.

41:00And this is a guy who's into furries and he's into trannies and he's living with one and you know, all the things. Why would Charlie have been targeted by this guy for that? Why would it be Charlie? You say all the same things. I say all the same things. Most of the people in our space and in conservative or independent media say those things. Why? Why Charlie? And sadly, I think it's this factor. It's this magnetism from him, this positivity, this aura, like that this angel-like aura around him that was so incredibly threatening, way more threatening than the rest of us because it was powerful and it was winning people over.

41:41It was converting people at a rapid rate and not just any people, but young people, you know, the people who had never been converted before the people for whom people who talk like you and talk like me had never even tried. They weren't even players on the field. It was, they were seated in the whole battle. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, we're not seating them. I'm going to start at 18 to speaking to them in a way that they can hear and understand me. And I'm going to practice it, you know, for the past 13 years, he practiced. He went out campus after campus. In the beginning, he wasn't as good as he was in the end.

42:14He was good, but he wasn't as good. And so it was a skill he developed over time that made him more and more threatening, more and more effective. And you look at the numbers just in the presidential election. It's not an overstatement to say that Donald Trump has Charlie to thank for his election in November, 2024, swinging the youth vote by nine points. We've never seen anything like it in the past hundred years. You don't swing the youth vote toward a Republican, nothing in modern presidential politics. So he was a really integral, hugely important player, even though he was so understated and projected zero ego.

42:54So you didn't see him like that. He didn't have sort of the swagger of that in most of his public appearances. He was quick to subjugate himself to whomever he was talking to, but he was way more important than he ever let on. And I think that's why he was perceived as such a threat. That's why him saying the things others would say carried an extra layer of threat, yet both to this shooter and to Charlie's many detractors. And I just want to add as a period to this as a footnote, I guess, to this, Tucker, you have a lot of it too. And it is the reason why Charlie is not the only one who's been threatened or was threatened to cut ties with you or not platform you.

43:40I too have gotten that, especially since you've been more outspoken on Israel. And I couldn't care less the amount of pressure they put on. I'm like, what are you talking about? This is madness. Why would you want to silence such a powerful, important voice just because you disagree with them on one subject, one on which we've all watched you sincerely evolve as you grapple with principles you've been espousing for years, like America First, like what's happening to Christians, like what's best for us and our kids here? How do I keep them safe? That's my number one priority. And I've been just absolutely disgusted and recoiled from people who have tried to pressure me on it.

44:20It, of course, never happened. But I know from speaking to Charlie, he felt it too. You've heard it from Charlie that he felt, and there is a layer here of nefarious pressure to have certain narratives go only one way that must be called out and must be fought. Well, I should have said in my open that when Charlie was denounced as anti-Semitic and, quote, dangerous by the American Jewish Committee, you were too. that that that was a press i don't know if you've ever even seen it and i just remember when i read that at the time thinking okay these are like two of the most pro-israel basically pro-israel people on the internet i don't understand so i do i maybe we show this offline but let's just have it now i don't get that why would you attack there are definitely people who hate israel who are not anti-semites or people who are anti-semites there's a whole range and then there are like people who have like you know religious reasons for wanting to blow up israel those are all threats why would they be attacking you and charlie and honestly i feel like me i mean what is that why attack people who are pretty reasonable who don't want to get into a fight on the topic who just want to like have their country thrive why denounce them as dangerous anti-semites what is that and let me just underscore for your audience what i had said I mean, the sum total of what I had said when they started coming for me, just to show the absurdity of this.

45:47I had said on Piers Morgan that Israel was losing the PR war, that they had lost the Democrats and the independents and were starting to lose the Republican Party in America. And it was time to wrap it up, which was a quote from Donald Trump, who had said it a year earlier when he was still a candidate. Time to wrap it up. That's what I said about Israel. and then at turning point at the student action summit with Charlie, we talked all about Epstein in my appearance there. It was all about Pam Bondi, frankly. And we talked about whether he might possibly be an asset for someone. And I said he might be.

46:20And Israel, yeah, would make sense to me. Didn't know, but that's one of the things we should consider and look at. And that will conclude the list of things I said about Israel, that after two years of going on the air and defending them every week, turned some weird crowd into she's an anti-Semite. So, I mean, F these people because it's a lie. It was even more of a lie about Charlie who had said even less than me. He had said nothing, like absolutely nothing. And they use those terms about him because he was on the other side of me when we had that discussion and because he hosted you and because he had the nerve to invite Dave Smith in a debate because he allowed one side to be represented and he had the Israel side fully represented too.

47:08So this was just such an unfair accusation. And I don't know why these very ardent advocates don't accept friendship when you offer it, when you've proven that you are genuinely a friend. I've said openly, Tucker, I don't want to debate. I'm on their side. There's no reason to put somebody on this show so they can convince me that Israel's right. I'm on their side. I agree with that. But in response to those comments and then ultimately having Marjorie Taylor Greene on where we criticized AIPAC. I mean, who defends a lobbyist group? They treated me like I was Mehdi Hassan. Not everybody, you know, but like the loudest Israel defenders.

47:47And to turn around and call Charlie Kirk an anti-Semite is such a disgusting smear. And you're right, he's young. You know, he was young and wasn't used to being attacked like that by people who supported him and people whose donations are actually really important to the ongoing existence of his organization. And it took a lot for him to say no to them. And it took a lot for him to be honest about the fact that his opinions had evolved. And let's face it, Charlie was like an unofficial spokesperson for the youth of America, in particular conservative youth. And I don't know if people have checked, but they no longer support Israel.

48:23Everybody under 30 is against Israel. Charlie was 31. And so as a friend, he's he's saying to them as same way I as a friend of saying, I am telling you, you've lost Dems independence and you're starting to lose Republicans. You need to wrap it up. You've had a two year long leash. I know you want your hostages back, but this cannot go on until you have every hostage. That's just not going to you're going to lose every friend you have. And that's what he was saying, because that's what he was hearing from his constituency. And so what he did to them was brave and noble to the donors who were very, very pro-Israel.

49:00It was brave and it was noble. He did not deserve to be smeared over it. And look, I, like you, have zero belief that this had anything to do with his death, but it's part of the larger narrative that you're making, that he was a truth teller, that he was a fearless truth teller, and that there were a lot of pockets when he turned to them and said those truths that grew extremely uncomfortable than whether it was some too online, disgusting, messed up 22-year-old in Utah or, you know, somebody who couldn't stand his messaging that was very frank around race or around Islam, whatever. Take your pick.

49:39He said the hard picks, hard truths on all of these things. I think a lot of people have to have a really ugly conversation with themselves now in the wake of his death about whether they added to the hate surrounding him. And for Benjamin Netanyahu, who really tormented Charlie, we talked about it many times, he tormented Charlie and his advocates tormented Charlie. For him to run around saying that Charlie died for Israel is just too much. It's just disgusting. And as his friend, I feel morally bound to say that. That statement was out of line. No, I agree with you. And I never talk about Bibi Netanyahu.

50:11I don't really, I don't think much about him. I don't, I just don't. I I had the opportunity to interview him a couple months ago and I declined. I'm just, I'm just not, no, I just don't want to. I didn't want to platform him. I didn't actually, frankly, want to do all the work that I would have to do to sufficiently interview him in a way that would be, you know, tough as I do when I have any foreign leader in my crosshairs. I just wasn't interested. Whatever. For him to do what he did was wrong. It was deeply, it was a moral wrong to sit out there and read part of Charlie's letter and try to have the final say on Charlie's pronunciations about Israel.

50:46And he knew that they weren't the full story. And he's a foreign leader. He's not an American leader. So how dare he? You know, at best, you come out there, you say, I'm so sorry for this loss. My prayers to his family. That's it. He was out of line, Tucker. And I, as not even a Netanyahu critic, saw it very clearly and talked about it today on the show, too. Can I ask you about next steps? I'm always wary of people who want to. I just want to ask you about two issues. uh one are hate speech laws which i'm paranoid about but i think we should be and two um is the effort by one person in congress marjorie taylor green to get the federal government to ban sex changes for children and she can't seem to get that done so are we going to get hate speech laws do you think pan bondi seems to suggest we are and two are we ever going to ban the mutilation of kids so on the hate speech uh comments that was an absolutely ridiculous comment she made today i mean it was absolutely foolhardy i there's just no way she doesn't know what she said is legally unsound she's there's just no way she was attorney general of the state of florida and became u.s attorney general and doesn't know that so it does worry me because does that mean she's actually pushing for a policy change because there's just no way she doesn't already know what she said is wrong.

52:01There's been reams of Supreme Court precedent on it. And she knows that. So is this about policy change? She tried to wiggle off of her original point as the day went on, as incoming came almost universally from the right, that she had said something very, very wrong constitutionally and vile as a moral principle. And we've been fighting against this for decades on the right. Like, what is she saying? She sounded like a Merrick Garland. She sounded like an Attorney General Kamala Harris would have put in place. And so she tried to pivot off of it as the day went on and tried to make it smaller.

52:35And you know, all I'm saying is violent threats, criminal threats are going to be punished. Well, yes and no. It depends on the threat. There's actually only a sliver of threats that is actionable under the law. So you're getting closer, but you're not quite there. You're giving, again, still too wide a berth to attacking free speech. But yeah, it is true that certain threats, true threats can be ruled unconstitutional. You could go after somebody. So she does worry me. And, you know, I'm not Trump was asked about it. He kind of made a funny joke about it going after the ABC news interviewer who asked him the question.

53:10But I think Trump will see that there's so much resistance to this on the right that he won't let her do that. He won't let her push for it. He won't let the Republicans do it. I just have to think Trump reads his base better than she does. Yeah, I agree with that. And speaking of reading your base, and I've got to thank the president's for this. I don't know why Speaker Mike Johnson has held it up, but I mean, we don't let kids get tattoos or smoke cigarettes, but we do let ghoulish doctors who are getting money for doing it mutilate children. Like why can't Marjorie Taylor Greene get a hearing on this legislation?

53:45I don't understand it. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, like this, they chalk this up to, oh, it's a spending resolution. We're just going to continue you know, the spending that's in place, right? It's like, okay, you're funding mutilations of children. And not just the mutilations that are done with surgeries, you're funding with these, you know, puberty blockers into cross-sex hormones, sterilization of minors who cannot possibly consent to that. And not just sterilization, but actually the end of all potential for sexual pleasure. How does a 12-year-old understand that he's sacrificing that with your weird experiments on him?

54:16It is truly a moral scourge, what we're doing to our children. And I don't actually, I'm sorry to say, I don't have a lot of faith that that's going to get a ban at the federal level, which means it'll be left to the states, which means if you live in a blue state, it's it's go, you know, have at it. Go ahead and mutilate children and sterilize them and deprive them of sexual pleasure because it makes you feel good. It's not dissimilar to the left saying Trump shouldn't add additional law enforcement. They shouldn't accept additional law enforcement where he wants to send it because it's racist to let black people live.

54:49It's racist to let them live in peace. It's not to be carjacked in these inner cities, which are predominantly African-American. That's what the left is telling us, that it's racist for Trump to send those troops or even volunteer. And they're saying the same that what's what's good for children, what's what's kind, what's the honorable thing to do is to let deranged parents chop off children's healthy body parts and sterilize them because that's what that's what an evolved person would do. And so that's another thing that this angel sent to us would speak very frankly about and threaten all these people who have a constituency, whether it's someone with a last name Pritzker, who actually has money invested in the transing of children.

55:32that governor's cousin is one of the big funders of all these school pushes on the trans issue, or somebody who just gets Jones out of saying they're going to open the prisons and let black people not get arrested for the crimes because they just think that's beneficial, I guess, somehow to other black people who are usually their victims, nevermind the race of the victim. It's not beneficial to any of us. In any event, I don't have hope on that front. We're going to keep fighting. But if they don't ban it at the federal level, which I don't think they're going to, we're never going to get all 50 states to ban it.

56:06I think it'd be worth reading a daily roll call of people standing in the way of that, because that's the kind of crime that historians will reel in horror that we allowed. I think your remarks about Charlie at the beginning were like some of the wisest I've ever heard. And I'm actually going to look at the tape because I was so impressed by what you said and moved by it. So Megan Kelly, thank you for taking time late at night to do this. I appreciate it. Great to be with you as always. Thank you. All right. Well, we have someone joining us now who I'm just really, really grateful to have. Someone who has been famous for decades for a different skill and in the last 10 years has really emerged as a consistent voice of wisdom online.

56:55And never interviewed him before, but really happy to, I don't think. Scott Adams joins us now. Scott, thanks very much for doing that. Thanks for having me, Tucker. Yeah. We talked once before, quite a few years ago. And it was on Fox News, and I've just erased that whole part of my brain. It's like CTE or something. I can't really remember what I did there. I think I'm ashamed of some of it. But anyway, tell us what you think the lesson of Charlie Kirk's life and death are. What strikes you immediately? Well, you know, one of the big questions is how did somebody get to that place where it seemed perfectly reasonable for them to get a gun and shoot a living human being?

57:43Yes. And some people know in your audience that I'm also a hypnotist. I'm a trained hypnotist. And so I tend to look at these situations through that filter. And through that filter, you can see a really clear cause and effect. You know, starting around, let's say 2016, there was wall-to-wall Hitler, Hitler, Nazis, 24 hours. Before that, there had been other Republicans who had been accused of being Hitler. But I think that everybody treated it like hyperbole. You know, it's a political insult, and it's the most common one, so you don't take it too seriously. But imagine being a young kid and growing up when the news, the people in nice clothing would go on TV, and they would say, in all seriousness, he's basically Hitler, the Nazis are coming.

58:35And you would create a mass hysteria. Now, a mass hysteria would be worse than TDS or Trump derangement syndrome, because that would be sort of what happens to an individual that could have TDS. But if you have a lot of people who have TDS and they start talking to each other, pretty soon you've got a mass hysteria. And the mass hysteria created this, what I call a Hitlerian bubble, meaning that a lot of people are living in what they think is a reality that is just completely Hitlerized. They see Hitler everywhere. They see it in Trump. They see it in his lieutenants. And this is different. So this is not like what we've seen before.

59:20All it takes to completely brainwash somebody to believe ridiculous things, even things that their observations should tell them are not true, all you need is people in good suits whose job makes them seem incredible to say day after day, it's the repetition that matters, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, and you convince people that they're living in the hellscape and they better do something about it so so the main thing i saw was that um and it you know what once the bubble is formed um it's hard to get out you mean you can't talk people out of it there's no amount of information that will change their mind cognitive dissonance will kick in if you if you show them a counter example and the weird thing about Charlie, who I'd never met, by the way.

1:00:14I didn't have the pleasure. The weird thing is that when I started hearing all the accusations, and there were a lot of them, I said to myself, well, I'll bet some of these might be a little bit true. So I started to look for the original quotes, et cetera. None of them are true. And there were a lot of them. They were all either a made-up quote or a quote and a context and nothing else. And when you hear people talking about it, especially the young people, they'll say things like, he was a bad hater person, but there's no example. So that's sort of the sign that it's a mass hysteria because they can't give reasons and they don't seem too interested in the reasons.

1:00:59They're just sure that something has to be done. Now, on top of that, for the young people, there's probably also an economic pressure. They might feel that life doesn't have a positive path. So that might be playing into this a little bit as well. But I do wonder what will happen. And I predict that there's going to be another big bubble of psychological distress when the people who have said such bad things about him in public, realize that none of it was true. Because over time, it looks like he's going to be talked about so much that we'll finally have a complete body of information about him so we can understand them.

1:01:39And it won't happen to most people. Most people will just have cognitive dissonance. They'll still believe he was Hitler Jr. But there will be some people, you know, not a big percentage, were going to realize that they did something so shameful that it will haunt them for the rest of their lives, that they were part of saying something terrible about one of the best people that we've witnessed. I mean, he genuinely was a high character and person, and you could see in everything he did. So there's something big coming up. But then another thing that happened that was fascinating to me because I didn't expect it, which was the Democrats have always had what I'd call a machine, which is that since they worked with the media, they had the media in their pocket, you would see it happen when they'd have some, all right, our message this week are these words, and then everybody would say the same words, and then the media would just pump it out.

1:02:42So it was like this big, well-functioning machine, and then they had the NGOs and all the funding tricks, etc but when charlie kirk died you could almost feel this massive energy being released you know he he sort of controlled it but when it was released you know his his mortal coil was no more i feel like that energy just went into people and suddenly tens of millions of people simultaneously obviously said, what can I do? What can I do right now? That's different. People don't say, I'm going to stop everything. Tell me what to do. I'm going to go to church. A lot of people did. I'm going to say stuff on social media.

1:03:30I'm going to hunt down the people who said bad things and cancel them, but I'm going to do something. We're going to figure out how to start another chapter of TPUSA. And all of that's happening. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down, the vigils, et cetera. If anything, the energy, it might be growing. And I've never seen anything like it in my life. I've never seen the Republicans turn into their own machine. and now it is a machine. And it's going to be incredible. So, you know, I was thinking yesterday, it sounds like a joke, but it's quite serious. The thing that protects the Democrats from, you know, also having some kind of problem like this is that they don't have any leaders that are worth taking off the board.

1:04:22I mean, if you said to me, somebody's got a plot to take Tim Walsh off the board, I would say, oh, no. No. If you're a Republican, you ought to keep him there because he's not doing a good job. You know, you're Jasmine Krakas, you're Chuck Schumers. I say, please keep them right where they are. They're doing a great job. Nobody needs to harm them. But on top of that, I don't believe that Republicans, conservatives ever even think that way. I've never heard one say anything suggesting violence, like not even in just a casual conversation, the joking way you might do it in private, nothing like that.

1:05:05And I think it has to do with the fact that overall, the conservatives, the Republicans, MAGA people tend to look at Democrats almost as if they're clowns. They say things that literally make me laugh. No joke. I sound like Biden there, but But I literally, that frightened me a little bit. I literally will watch the news and watch Republican, you know, prominent people talking because I think it's funny. And when they watch, when the left watches the right, they think they're watching monsters. Yes. So you can imagine how somebody would want to kill a monster, but nobody wants to kill a clown.

1:05:50Well, maybe somebody does, but, you know, so far Republicans have not wanted to kill any clowns. And I do think, well, first of all, the cancellations we're seeing, I have a little bit of mixed feelings about it because my point of view is that the people involved who are getting canceled are themselves brainwashed. And I don't mean that in sort of the, I don't know, the hypothetical way or anything. I mean, actually, literally, they've been exposed to the strongest brainwashing you could have, which is about eight years of wall-to-wall Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. And Charlie's one of the generals.

1:06:30So if you can't get to the Hitler, you're thinking, well, maybe one of the generals will be less protected. And that was the case. But I feel a little bit bad for them because they're victims too. but at the same time the way society works you can't let them get away with that so you know there has to be some some reckoning and i am enjoying i have to say being a canceled person myself i am enjoying the uh schadenfreude or the uh you know the the catharsis of seeing that it can go both ways at least for now uh and by the way i do think that the violence goes in both directions, but I don't think that there is an equivalent to a massive machine that's been creating a situation that guaranteed there would be violence.

1:07:23If you just keep saying Hitler and you're selling it not as hyperbole, but you're selling it as absolute fact, the people who don't have access to alternative theories are going to believe that and they're going to act on so and i like the fact that there's a little mutually assured destruction uh the the left is getting to see a little bit of payback uh reminding that the that the republicans aren't going to take infinite abuse you know there's going to be a point where it's going to come back i kind of like that um but i just uh you know overall i wouldn't be proud of it you know the cancellations.

1:08:05I do believe that they're brainwashed victims. And I do wonder. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I thought your description of brainwashing seems accurate. It's very distressing to think that could happen in our free republic, you know, the free and brave United States. I thought the people were more independent minded than that. So that's sad. It's probably just human, though, a weakness that we all share, the susceptibility to propaganda. But why would you want to hypnotize a population or a portion of it? Usually there's a goal in mind. What's the goal here? Well, power. Democrats know that they can win an election that way.

1:08:50If they had better ideas and better policies and charismatic leaders, I imagine that's what they'd go with. But Trump Trump enters the contest, and you have the most charismatic leader with sensational ideas, according to at least his base, what are you going to do? He's the common sense guy. Are you going to say, we really do want the border open? We really do want a little bit more crime in our urban centers? What are you going to do? You don't have any kind of a rational attack to the common sense president who's been here before and knows how to get this stuff done so it's just all they have um and i don't know that it's i don't know that it's intentional that they did it so hard that it guaranteed violence i don't think violence was the intention i think just winning elections was the intention yeah that sounds right so thank you for this by the way last question where do you foresee this going?

1:09:54Well, you know, it's unpredictable because the cognitive dissonance will cause people to think in a way that's non-standard. That's exactly what it is. So there might be a lot more of that coming. But one of the things that's going to happen is it might be the last, what would you call it, the last straw that makes the entire Democrat situation collapse. because if you look at their situation, they're running out of money. They don't have good leaders. They don't have ideas that can beat the competing ideas. And they don't have momentum. They don't have the podcast world. The conservatives have that pretty nailed down.

1:10:34Basically, they have the best talent for just about everything right now. Just an amazing amount of talent in the right side of the world. But then you add on top of that the emotions and the feelings that people got because of Charlie Kirk's death, and that was probably the only thing missing, was no matter what, I'm going to get to the voting booth. You could have a hurricane, and conservatives are going to crawl through glass to get to the voting booth. So I suspect we will see a number of votes from the Republicans like we've never seen before. It could be sensational. Scott Adams, I really am grateful that you took time to do this.

1:11:24You look great. Thank you very much. Godspeed. Thanks, Chuck. Thanks. I got a text earlier today from someone I sort of know saying, Cenk Uygur? Why is he on your show? The Young Turks guy? Isn't this a tribute to Charlie Kirk? Why would you have some like screamy lefty on your show? Well, precisely because Charlie Kirk's life work was speaking with not just two, but with people he disagreed with vehemently. I thought that our next guest, who's run the Young Turks for probably almost 20 years now, I think you can correct me if I'm wrong, who is one of the most visible daily broadcasters on the left.

1:12:06the fact that he had this kind of amazing exchange with Charlie Kirk, well, a couple of them, but one pretty recently, I thought it'd be worth hearing what he thought. So it is with pride that we announced our next guest. Thank you, Cenk, for coming on. No problem, Tucker. Thanks for having me on. I think it's important that we have a moment like this where we try to bring the country together. Amen. I so strongly agree. You had this kind of famous exchange with him, I think it was 2018 at Politicon and it got super heated and bitter. And it was like, I don't know, things were viral in 2018, but it was viral.

1:12:45And then you came back to a TPUSA event and I was amazed and impressed both that he invited you and that you came and you still disagreed on some things, but it was, I mean, the tone was completely different. Can you explain that and better and great, I thought. Yeah. So first of all, in 2018, that was a Politicon that I debated you.

1:13:11We got along pretty well, as I remember. We did. We did. And Charlie was debating my nephew, Hassan, Hassan Piker. But I couldn't help myself because that's who I am. And in the middle of their debate, I said something to Charlie when I wasn't on stage. I was in the crowd. And he yelled at me i live like a capitalist every day chank uh and then we by the way some people then thought that it was a racial slur no that was just my name uh he was just slightly mispronouncing it um so uh then actually something happened in between uh that moment and turning point usa um america fest so we were at the rnc in 2024 and uh charlie came by at our booth and said hey do you guys want to talk and we were a little bit taken aback by that we were really surprised by it and uh anna and i uh anna casperians my co-host on the antirx yes uh talked it over and said yeah yeah we would like to talk and so he came on the show and so we had our disagreements so for the it's interesting that you have me on here you know partly uh for the reasons that uh You know, your friend texted you about how well, that's strange.

1:14:29Right. Left and right. And so I don't agree with everything that you, Megan and Scott said about Charlie. I'm sure. Right. But but I think that's what makes it more interesting. So the willing that the willingness to talk to us, even though we were so entrenched on different sides. Right. And so then when we started the conversation, what wound up happening is surprise this. so did we still have our disagreements about the black pilot line this that and other thing of course we did right uh but when we started talking about corporate rule he agreed and i remember like i want to go back and watch the first interview we did with him at the rnc there because i was kind of shocked by it it's like really you're also worried about corporations having too much power and and right because that tucker you can understand that was a that was a left-wing position for a long time in this country it was but but the battle has been joined and so that is an incredible development in american politics that mainstream media i think has chosen to ignore because it seemed convenient for them uh then we got into a specific topic um which was banning private equity from buying residential real estate.

1:15:52And the idea behind that is private equity is the biggest bankers in the world, basically. They're the biggest financial institutions. And they've started to buy all of our homes. Now that creates a huge number of problems. Number one, it drives up housing prices. That is why they are artificially high, because so much more demand has come into the market. And I went to Wharton Business School, so this is not complicated. though this is econ 101 supply and demand right and so uh secondly what the number one uh wealth creation asset that the american family has is their homes that is how we created the greatest middle class the world has ever seen and they're taking that from us and they're going to turn us all into renters and then we're going to be indentured servants to them okay and the way that they are doing this is they are giving collectively billions of dollars to our politicians so this issue connects actually the the money and politics issue connects to everything connects to corporate rule compare it connects to capitalism by the way which i want to get back to connects to israel because it isn't about israel or any other particular lobby being uh evil or dastardly or in charge.

1:17:11It's the money that's in charge. And so if big pharma, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, et cetera, give money to our politicians, well, then they pass absurd laws like we're not allowed to negotiate drug prices. What in the world? In capitalism, you're not allowed to negotiate prices, right? And we talked about that and he said, you're right, that is absurd. And we on the right already believe that that it's absurd and that it's against capitalism fantastic so look you're right we've been around a long time on the young turks we were actually the longest running show in internet history and in that time we've had you know we've been on for 23 years we've had about 21 to 22 years of hardened battle right fighting back and forth fighting back and forth, right?

1:18:04And as anybody who's seen me online knows, I can get emotional. I can get passionate. Yeah. And I'm not a wilting flower. I fight back for sure, right? So what was amazing, though, was all of a sudden I didn't have to fight back. That on those issues, not every issue, and not on all the culture wars, but on these economic issues, we have begun to agree. and why because the average guy is getting screwed yes period it doesn't matter if you're on the left or the right you're both going to get screwed you're both going to have higher housing prices you're both going to have lower wages you're both going to have higher drug prices and the people that brought you that is the donor class and so when we agreed to that then i said okay well now conversation has become productive we're not just yelling at each other for the first time ever we are talking to one another and more importantly we are listening to one another so we did it again at the dnc and then charlie invited me to america fest and i went there and again we disagreed on gun rights we disagreed on some trans issues uh but we wound up agreeing on dick cheney and mitch mcconnell uh for example neither one of us like him i agree and you know tucker i'll say this there's a lot more to talk about in that context but um if you told me you are going to go to a massive right-wing conference in the year 2025 um and what's going to happen is the crowd in unison is going to boo Dick Cheney.

1:19:47If you told me that when we first started the Young Turks and we're railing against Dick Cheney, don't go into Iraq. Don't go into Iraq. Cheney's lying, right? And people are yelling back, support the troops. You're for Saddam and all this stuff. If you told me, oh, don't worry, in 27 odd years, that crowd will be booing Dick Cheney. And that crowd will be booing Mitch McConnell because they realize that the corporate class, the donor class is in charge and they hate it. I would have said, Oh, my God, that must be a beautiful day in America. Well, so this is what I admire about you. You're totally sincere about your principles.

1:20:25Like you almost don't care who's agreeing with you. You believe in the idea, the principles. So you're willing to make common cause with people you don't agree with in everything. You're not partisan. And the second thing I should just I just want to say it out loud is that Young Turks, whatever you think of your politics, has had a stated commitment to nonviolence from the very beginning, and you mean it. And I just want to say that for people who don't know that, and I want to thank you for that, because I think it's really important. And anyway, so let me ask you, how were you treated at AmFest, at Charlie's event?

1:21:00Yeah. By the way, thank you for saying that, Tucker. And the principle of nonviolence extends through everything. So do not be violent to each other. Violence is intellectual surrender. that's saying I can't win the debate with my mind, so I have to act like an animal and try to defeat that person physically, but that means you're surrendering and you're giving up. It's the most immoral thing you could do. It's also the weakest thing you could do. Yes, I agree. But that's not just on an individual level. That's also on a societal level. So when we go to war, that is, in a sense, weakness, saying we could not use our minds to resolve this issue.

1:21:39We could not resolve this issue as fellow human beings. So now we're going to kill each other. So that is why we're anti-war. And that is why one of the most encouraging developments of my life is how anti-war, the right wing movement, has become. So that another great day in America. So it's still plenty of things we disagree on. Yes. But agreeing on anti-war, agreeing on how the donor class is robbing both of us blind. And those are huge developments. Right. so now how was I treated at AmFest? I've got to be honest with you. And so the reason why I preface it by saying I got to be honest with you is because sometimes when we go and talk to the right wing, and as you said, we haven't moved on a thing, right?

1:22:24So folks come to us, and I have a simple principle, take the win. Okay. Take the win, exactly. Like, so, okay, now you agree with me that anti-war is the right position. Is my correct answer that I still hate you? No, that is not the correct answer. The correct answer is, oh, thank God. Exactly. Right? And now we'll work on the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. But for now, at least we had no agreements before. Now we have had a number of really important agreements. But nevertheless, I had my share of critics on the left. You're platforming it. I went to his conference. I wasn't platforming him.

1:23:08He was platforming me, right? And second of all, stop with all the nonsense talk of platforming people, okay? I agree. Just listen to one another. Talk to one another. That's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. But what if you disagree? And of course you're going to disagree. It's America. We're free. We have no two human beings are the same. Of course we're going to disagree on some issues. So if you can't handle that, then you can't handle politics. You can't handle media. You can't handle America. Right. So, OK, so with that giant preface, I'll say the people there honestly were universally wonderful.

1:23:49So they were. And so you can say, oh, well, you know, ha ha, that means Jenkson with the right wing. No, I'm just telling you what happened. If they were jerks, I would tell you that they were jerks, but they weren't. okay and and i've got to say like this cancel culture it's not exclusively left-wing no i know tell me about it i mean yeah the efforts that some people made to keep me from speaking at the next tp usa thing people i agree with on a lot of things by the way i don't disagree with seth dillon and everything mr free speech guy trying to cancel me but i was like shocked by it Like they really hassled Charlie and just drove him to, you know, to really fret and drove him to anxiety over this.

1:24:35Oh, no, no, no. That impulse is a human impulse and we need to resist it. Yeah. So I love what you guys said about hate speech and how it's unacceptable to pass laws on that. Not acceptable. Yeah. Under no circumstances. So and this is what I say on that topic. So Charlie said some things about Islam that, you know, having grown up Muslim, I'm atheist now, but my family's Muslim, my background's Muslim, I'm proud of it. He said some things about Islam that I was not a fan, right, to say the least. I bet. So you know what I did in return? I made my case. So what? Right? Like, why is it so, like, debilitating if someone says something that you find offensive?

1:25:21I've said things that I'm sure others have found offensive. You have. Charlie has. Megan has. So what? Then you say something back. Okay? We don't cancel. We don't kill. And killing is the most extreme form of cancel culture. So I despise cancel culture. And I have the honor of being having been canceled by almost every part of the political spectrum. I know. Man, what that was that was really inspiring. And I'm going to text back the person who texted me. Did you watch that? That was wonderful. And I so appreciate you're doing this. Thank you. And I hope you don't take too much abuse for it. And I'm sure you will.

1:26:06But I guess you don't care. So good for you. Thank you. That'll bounce off me so quick. I'll just say this one last thing, Tucker. I mean, the idea of making laws against hate speech in honor of Charlie Kirk. No, I know. Okay, that's like if I passed away and they're like, in honor of Cenk, we're all going to go on a diet. Tell me about it. Or the Tucker Carlson no pizza law. No, I agree. I agree. Come on. That is the opposite of what I've did in my life. and regulating speech is the opposite of what Charlie did in his life. So let's all keep talking to one another. Let's all keep listening to one another and hopefully use this moment not to create further tragedy, but to begin to end the tragedies.

1:26:55I'm proud to agree with that, you know, really, really strongly. So thank you for saying it very much. Thank you, Doug. Great to see you. Thanks. You too. so we want to end tonight um the way we began by talking about charlie's faith and the effect on all of us from a spiritual perspective uh of his life and particularly his death there were reports that this sunday church attendance was up dramatically um as people suddenly felt stirrings within them that this you know had cosmic significance and that god is real and this is a reminder that he is, which he is. Josiah Trenum is a Christian minister, and we are honored to have him now to put this in a broader spiritual context.

1:27:42Thank you very much for coming on, Father Trenum. So how would you say we should think about where this goes from here? Like, people seem to have a heightened spiritual awareness in the days after Charlie Kirk's murder. How should we proceed? Well, thanks a lot, Tucker, for having me on. I appreciate your interest and desire to bring a priest into this conversation. I think it's valuable. I would say up front, we should be very careful to make any sort of conclusion from this during this very intense time of mourning. You know, we Christians have a tradition, 2 ,000-year-old tradition, on how to respond to death, and we take our time.

1:28:32This is day seven. This is day seven. Usually for 40 days, we mourn very, very seriously. In the Orthodox tradition, for instance, when a bishop or a major leader of the church dies, he's not replaced until the 40 days is done. and that's not just out of respect for the person in this case. Mourning Charlie, really processing what his loss means is very necessary to do and it takes time to do that and we're not going to be able to make good decisions about the future without calming down and processing what we've gone through. So this is the time I think that we should be very careful. We should mourn.

1:29:19We should consign all bad memories to the memory hole. Bad experiences is what we do for our loved ones when they die. There's no benefit in remembering the bad. We instead honor the good and try to imitate the good. We try to, in the person's name, do good. So this is my first thought, is really, we should mourn, we should be who we are, and this is what Christian people do. We should take our time about this. I'm unfamiliar with this. I'm embarrassed to say I don't know enough about it, but I sense that it's rooted in something important and wise. Can you explain a little more why 40 days and what Christians have done traditionally during that 40 days?

1:30:09What does it mean to mourn seriously? Yeah. Well, I share your sense of it not being something common anymore, which is why I'm presenting it, because it is so universally human, actually, and it's not just Christian. The number 40, of course, is humongous in the Holy Scriptures. It's absolutely humongous. and the 40 days of Christ fasting, for instance, in the desert. 40 is a very important length of time that allows us to truly not make immediate reactions that we would regret. And right now, everything is so raw. Everyone who knows and loves Charlie, like you, this is a very dangerous time.

1:30:56It's a very dangerous time. You're being very courageous, and you're actually processing this with people who have known and respected Charlie, which is a fantastic thing to do. But a lot of people who are in the conservative political movement are raging. They're very angry. I was watching a clip from Matt Walsh yesterday, and I saw that Matt was just out there saying that he is just overcome with anger. I think that's understandable, completely understandable. I have felt that, yes. I'm sure. I'm sure. But for us to respect this Christian tradition, to pray, typically in the Orthodox and the Catholic tradition, both during the 40 days, we do good in that person's name.

1:31:44We actually do alms. We do charity in that person's name. In fact, you're doing that. Maybe you weren't intentionally trying to do it in a traditional Christian way, but that is what you're doing by trying to help Erica and support her. I was very, very happy to see that you're doing that because it's what we do. It's what we do in this period. We usually also pray for the person. We don't think that a person, when they die, they've made the transition to the next life instantaneously. There are some in the Protestant tradition who think that. Not all Protestants think that, but there are some.

1:32:22But the vast majority of Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, and some like the Anglicans, we actually pray for the souls of the departed. And we think, we use the image of the story of Lazarus and the rich man from the Gospels, where Lazarus is the poor beggar. He's neglected by the rich man. And when he dies, what happens? An angelic escort comes and picks him up and takes him on the journey to the bosom of Abraham. For us, that is a journey. This process is a journey for Christians of going towards the kingdom of God. But we don't think that it's instantaneous. And so we're collaborating. It's part of what our funerals are too.

1:33:06Our funerals are us gathering around the person and asking the Lord in his great mercy to receive our brother or our sister and place them in paradise until we can see them again. And we're also learning the lesson of sobriety. We're learning the lesson of death. We have to think about death and stare it in the face because one of the great reasons we are so undeveloped, spiritually speaking, as a nation is because we don't face death. Yes. One of the reasons that we have an incredible revival going on all over the United States right now is because of COVID. COVID faced, it caused us to face death.

1:33:50We had been hiding it. We've moved our old people, our parents, and the sick into old folks' homes and hospitals, and they die there, usually not surrounded by their family members. And then some Christian traditions now even do funerals without the body. That is just nuts. It's just nuts. And it steals. It steals from us the very, very important process of mourning and facing death. And it changes you. You know, in the Orthodox tradition, in the Orthodox Christian tradition, the funeral service was written by one of the great theologians of the church. His name is St. John of Damascus. He lived from 650 to 750.

1:34:29An incredible hymnologist, incredible scholar. He actually was a very important political figure at the time that Islam, his father and grandfather, governed the city of Damascus. and when it was taken over by Islam in the 7th century, the Muslims left the Christians in place for about 50 years because Muslims were Bedouin peasants. They didn't have cities. They didn't have development, and they couldn't run a city like Damascus, so they let the Christians do it for about a half a century, and then about 706, that was it, and no more Christians in leadership, and he became a monk at that time, John of Damascus, and he wrote this incredible funeral service for one of his dear brothers, and it's used to this day for the last 13 centuries and it's a deep reflection on the misery of death where John is looking into the grave and he is contemplating how horrible it is for a Christian person to die and hit to see his soul be removed from his body which is what death is it's the separation of the soul from the body it no longer animates the body and it's lifeless and to see the body decay.

1:35:42And he says it happens to the rich and to the poor exactly the same way. All of the human differentiations that we make to honor the rich and to neglect them, all gone, all gone, all normalized, all brought to the dust by death. So I don't mean to belabor this, but I think it's important for us. It's important, of course, for the immediate family, for all of Charlie's close family and friends to take their time, not expect that they're going to be able to just bounce back instantaneously and get right back at Turning Point's work. No doubt they will eventually, but I hope that they'll take the time right now to pray, to mourn, to think deeply about the future and about how they can honor Charlie's name.

1:36:33This is my hope. I think that's such a profound thing to say. And anyone who has been present at the death of loved ones, I think it confirm that it's one of the most powerful and obviously crushingly sad, but also beautiful and inspiring things. I mean, it absolutely changes you. And it's hard to remain an atheist after something like that. And we have been robbed of that experience. So what are the signs of hope that you see now? You know, I would say before Hope, the sorrow of what has happened to Charlie is so illustrative of a descent into a level of violence that, at least in my lifetime, and I'm only two years older than you.

1:37:20I was born in 67. I think you were born in 69. Yes. You're a San Franciscan. I'm an Angeleno, born and raised in Los Angeles. I have never seen anything like this, Tucker. I have never seen anything like the violence that exists today in our towns. When I grew up in Pasadena, I, as a young boy, I went walking to school. My mother let me stay out every night until the lights went on. When the lights went on, I had to be home for dinner. If I wasn't home for dinner, I was in trouble. But she had no worries. She had no worries. No, in this last period, 10, 15 years especially, violence has just absolutely exploded.

1:38:00You know, Charlie reposed on the 10th of September. Of course, the next day was the horrible, you know, remembrance of 9-11. He died on 9-10. We have 9-11. This coming December is going to be the 10-year anniversary of the terrible terrorist attack right here in the Inland Empire, just 10 miles from where I am right now, when 14 people were murdered and 22 people wounded by a Pakistani Muslim couple that thought that they would do something for Islam by shooting their co-workers. They were from a mosque one mile from me right now. That mosque already had two of their members in prison because of terrorist ambitions.

1:38:49My own parish, just four months after that, was visited in the middle of a Sunday liturgy by a group of Muslim young men who thought it would be fun to bring bullhorns in the middle of our service and come outside the church and scream Allahu Akbar at our church. and then and this is of course muslim terrorism but now we also have this uh rise of uh very very serious leftist violence and the whole country i think is reeling from the assassination attempts on our president and now an attack on on charlie who wasn't a politician at all so i would say that if we're going to look for hope, it can't be fake.

1:39:38It can't be fake. We have to assess where we are. And violence, as a sin, violence has a very special, serious place. You know, if you read the patriarchal histories in the opening books of the Bible, if you read Genesis, for instance, chapter 6, this is the account of God regretting that he had made the human race. What could the human being have possibly been doing to make God regret having made us? And the consequence, Moses tells us, is that he sent a worldwide universal flood. Moses articulated the reason. The reason God did that and had to start over with Noah. And in fact, he made Noah a second Adam.

1:40:19He gave the same commission to Noah that he gave to Adam. Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth, rule it, and subdue it. Why did he do that? it says because the world had become full of violence. Yes. When you attack another man, when you attack another man, you attack God. Because every human being, as you were just saying so beautifully, is made in the image of God. And so to attack a human is a direct divine offense. Violence is extremely serious. I'm not surprised that we have this level of violence in a culture that murders unborn children at the rate that we do and have sustained it for the decades that we have yes really is any violence uh surprising do we have do we have hope that's what you asked me so forgive me but that's the background that is how black it is yes that is how black it is do we have hope and what's the future.

1:41:18I would say that without a belief that God is merciful and that he loves the human race and that there's no sin so great that if we repent of it, he will not send his love and forgiveness. Without that belief, certainly we have no future. The statistics are horrible for our country. We an ideology that is hopeless, atheism, strict secularism, which is running our country now. It is extremely hopeless. Yes. And without a major reconsideration on the part of our people, a return to classic American virtues, a recovery of Christian faith, without that, certainly we're doomed. but we know we know from christian history that repentance is possible and it usually takes in a national sense in a personal sense it's up to us to repent and to believe in a national sense it takes leadership leadership that is willing to address the important things at the heart of a national national catastrophe we have been living through national catastrophe we have lost our faith in God.

1:42:38All of our institutions have been captured by strict secularism. Our law is godless. Our universities exclude God. Our country has gone down a very, very serious, deep hole. If we're going to get out, if we're going to have hope as a nation, we need leadership, leadership in the likes of George Washington. I think our forebears, our forebears, are ashamed. My grandparents, they're ashamed of where we are, Tucker, as a nation. Our relationship to faith, our explicit commitment to God, our excluding him from everything that's important in America. We have to repent, and we need someone. Give us, God, someone like a King David.

1:43:30Give us someone like my patron saint, Josiah, who was the last great king of Israel, who himself lived at a terrible time. His father and his grandfather were both awful kings who had completely apostatized, abandoned the heritage of Israel, led the people to copy the pagan practices of the surrounding nations. And forgive me, we're way worse than pagans. I always tell people, look, don't call the secular nonsense that's going on in America pagan. That's an insult to the pagans. The pagans believed in the divine order. They believed in the gods. Okay, we don't believe that there are gods. There is one God.

1:44:11But the pagans at least knew they were accountable to the divine order. They were accountable to the gods and that they had to live with respect to the wishes of the gods. To call America, which has no reference, most of our leaders make no reference to God at all. They act as though they are not accountable to God's law. And I think that's far, far worse than paganism and a full-blown insult to pagans to call it pagan. Unless we have a leader who's going to address this, it needs to be addressed directly. We need to repent and we need to recover our faith. If we do that, times of refreshing will come from God.

1:44:51We can be changed. A new day can arise, but it's not going to be with a little fix. It's not going to be with a little something here or a little something there. I've never seen, I've been a priest for almost 33 years. I've never seen the radical interest in faith that we're seeing right now. I'll tell you, if I use my parish just as a little example, I have maybe, I don't know, little more than a thousand active parishioners that are here regularly. And over the years of my ministry, I've catechized, I've instructed and prepared people for baptism, you know, maybe 20, 30, 40, a really great year would be 40 people.

1:45:36I have over 200 people in catechism right now. And this is happening all across the country. People are moving towards God, moving towards faith. If this continues and it translates into lives that are rooted, lives that are where faith is important, where true repentance has happened, where this quest for just biological life as though that's somehow the sum total of value is rejected. You know, if you study the scriptures, there's three types of life that are described in scriptures. There's biological life. In Greek, it's called dios, from where we get biological, right? There's the life of the soul.

1:46:25Many Americans don't even know that that exists. That's called psiki. It's the life. It's the most noble part of you, right? Even the Greek pagans, to use this again, knew that. The body is like a chariot, and the soul is like the charioteer. leading the person in nobility so that the body does virtue. The body does something beautiful, right? If you don't think you have psiqui, if you think you're just a body and you don't have a soul, which, by the way, is the worldview of the major tech titans of our country. This is why someone as noble as Elon Musk is becoming would stand up and speak to the protesters in England when they were saying, what can we do?

1:47:06What's our future? And he said what? He said, technology and AI. I promise you, Tucker, technology is not going to save us. No, it's not going to save us. And to say that is such is so hopeless. If we are soulless and we have greater technology, then the soulless are going to use that greater technology to oppress us. Of course, we need we need to affirm what all reasonable human beings in civilized countries, except the modern nuts, secular West, if we don't recognize that a human being is more than his body, he has more than veos, more than biological life, he has the life of his soul, psiki, and then there's something that's most important, which is eternal life.

1:47:50Aeonia Zoe, it's called in the scriptures. Eternal life. This is the life of God's kingdom. These are the three fundamental lives. Two of them we have stopped talking about for many decades and the consequences have been tragic. What a wonderful explanation. Charlie Kirk was very interested in Orthodoxy, as I'm sure you know, and he was knowledgeable on it too. I'm not, but I know that, but I'm interested. But he was very interested in it. Were you aware of that? He interviewed a friend of mine, Father John Strickland, who's a very respected Orthodox priest and a Russian scholar who's published extensively on Russian history.

1:48:35And Charlie was very interested in that. And I watched that interview and a few comments that he made afterwards in which he actually got very much into the mind of us Orthodox Christians and explained why so many people are converting to Holy Orthodoxy. And I thought actually he was spot on, very much spot on. He said, people are becoming Orthodox because they want something that is time-tested. They want something that's substantial. They want something that actually informs culture, something that isn't just a plaything and can be categorized over just here. Orthodox Christianity, traditional Christianity in general, it is a lifestyle.

1:49:14It impacts everything because Christ is king, and he's king over every aspect of our life and over civilization. This is common knowledge. Europe, of course, you take a train through Europe, Every town you go through, you're going to go through a town that has the best land given to the church, and the church is going to be the highest building. Because everyone knew, if you don't enthrone worship at the center of your community, if you don't make the heavenly attachment to your earthly life, you're robbing yourself of significance, and you're trivializing yourself to just be limited to time. the best thing that can happen in america is that people go to church root themselves in the one holy catholic and apostolic church because the river of life comes from the altar out the doors of the church and vivifies society and do we ever need to be vivified today beautiful father thank you and and before you go i'm gonna i'm gonna spell your name for anyone who's made it to the end of this i never do this but i think what you said is is so wonderful that i know that people we're going to want to follow up.

1:50:23J-O-S-I-A-H Trenham T-R-E-N-H-A-M Senior Pastor and Director of your church. So I know that people will want to know more about you and now they can. So thanks very much for joining us. I appreciate it. Keep going, Dr. Keep going. Thank you very much. Well, we're going to. And we're going to. We will keep going. We'll see if this format works. I kind of like it. Thanks a lot for joining us for an hour and 15 minutes. We'll be back soon.