Over the weekend, Tucker Carlson gave what some are calling the most important speech he has ever given. Carslon’s speech was to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Heritage Foundation. Carlson began by thanking the Heritage Foundation, who gave him his first job, and Father [Paul] Scalia for his invocation, encouraging the crowd to pray for the country.

“It reminded me that I don’t pray enough for the country, and I should, but the answer is to include the country in your prayers, and thank you for reminding us.”

Carlson continued:

The story of the last decade is the collapse of leadership, not of the population.

The people remain noble and decent. So far as I can tell, I still live here. I’m never leaving. We have good people. We have terrible people in charge. And not just of our government, but of the institutions that I grew up in, the Episcopal church, my high school, I can just go on and on and on. They’re all run by weak people.

And it’s the same in marriage. Weak husbands cause angry wives. Weak leaders cause an angry country. That’s true. And to see someone who’s not a weak leader at the helm of Heritage just thrilled me. So, I wanted to come for that reason, just being totally blunt with you.

And the second reason is to pay homage and to give some measure of thanks to Ed Feulner for giving me my first job, which changed my life.”

Tucker went on to describe his first job, working as a fact-checker and copy editor at Policy Review, the quarterly magazine of The Heritage Foundation. “That job absolutely changed my life. I was paid $14,000 a year, plus a hundred-dollar bill for Christmas,” he said. He continued, pointing out the strain and pressure on people who have lived through the false narratives about George Floyd, Covid, and Ukraine,

“I would say two things that I think we’re thinking about. The first is, you look around, and you see so many people break under the strain, under the downward pressure of whatever this is that we’re going through.

And you look with disdain and sadness as you see people you know become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards, you see them going along with a new, new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs.

If there’s a single person in this room who hasn’t seen that through George Floyd and COVID and the Ukraine War, raise your hand. Oh, nobody? Right. You all know what I’m talking about.”

 

Carlson went on to share that he was struggling and sad over how many people went along with the herd mentality,

“I’m not mad at people; I’m just sad. I’m disappointed. How could you go along with this? You know it’s not true, but you’re saying it anyway. Really, you’re putting your pronouns in your email. You’re ridiculous. But no one else thinks it’s ridiculous.”

“So, you reach that place, and you feel, and this is one of the reasons, Father [Paul] Scalia, I was actually overcome a little bit with emotion as you prayed because I realized that I was so upset by the behavior of some people I love, frankly, in a country I revere and always have, that I wasn’t praying for the country. That’s on me, and we all should be.”

Carlson also encourages his audience to remember that good is at work alongside bad. And that, like the apostle Paul on trial, we cannot conform to evil,

“There’s a counterbalance to the badness. It’s called goodness. And you see it in people.

So, for every ten people who are putting he and him in their electronic JP Morgan email signatures, there’s one person who’s like, “No, I’m not doing that. Sorry. I don’t want to fight, but I’m not doing that. It’s a betrayal of what I think is true. It’s a betrayal of my conscience, of my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy. I am not a slave. I am a free citizen, and I’m not doing that. And there’s nothing you can do to me to make me do it.”

And I hope it won’t come to that, but if it does come to that, here I am. Here I am. It’s [the apostle] Paul on trial. Here I am. And you see that in people, and it’s a completely unexpected assortment of people.”

He also spoke about how off the rails the political discussion has become, moving away from conversations where everyone wanted good outcomes to conversations that are inherently evil,

“When I started at Heritage, the presumption was, and this is a very Anglo-American assumption, that the debates we’re having are rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed-upon outcomes….If you have people who are saying, “I have an idea. Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate children.” I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. What? That’s nothing to do with politics. What’s the outcome we desire here? An androgynous population? Are we arguing for that? I don’t think anyone could defend that as a positive outcome, but the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that.”

“But when the Treasury secretary stands up and says, “You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion.” Well, that’s like an Aztec principle, actually. There’s not a society in history that didn’t practice human sacrifice. Not one. I checked. Even the Scandinavians, I’m ashamed to say. It wasn’t just the Meso-Americans. It was everybody. So that’s what that is.

Well, what’s the point of child sacrifice? Well, there’s no policy goal entwined with that. No, that’s a theological phenomenon.

And that’s kind of the point I’m making. None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history, decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, “Hey, let’s tear it down,” what you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.

A friendly Q & A between Tucker Carlson and Heritage Foundations President, Kevin Roberts followed Carlson’s speech. Just days before Carlson broke ties with Fox News, Roberts offered him a job.

Roberts: But all seriousness, Tucker, thank you. What a great message.

Carlson: Oh, thank you. It was heartfelt.

Roberts: Things go south at Fox News, there’s always a job for you at Heritage.

Carlson: Well, you’ve saved me before; so, thank you.

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