Tucker Carlson responds to the planned livestreamed execution of Nidal Hasan and argues that a broader anti-Christian death cult is reshaping American politics
Tucker Carlson delivers a solo monologue on his channel examining the announced public execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, the devaluation of human life across the political spectrum, and what he describes as a neoconservative assault on the Christian moral order.
Summary
The episode opens by addressing Pete Hegseth's announcement that Nidal Hasan will be executed by firing squad and that the execution will be livestreamed. While acknowledging Hasan's guilt, Carlson argues that public executions degrade the people who watch them — drawing on Charles Dickens's 1849 essay on a public hanging in London — and that the enthusiasm for the spectacle reflects a broader cultural callousness.
He then widens his argument to cover Trump's dismissive response to the bombing of an Iranian girls' school, a Massachusetts governor celebrating abortion up to birth, the Ukraine war being praised for producing "valuable drone technology," and Trump posting videos of people being killed by wild animals on Truth Social. Carlson also highlights Markwayne Mullin's personal financial stake in a Kratom company while serving as a senior official with law-enforcement authority, presenting this as further evidence of institutional callousness toward human life.
Carlson argues that all of these are symptoms of the same underlying phenomenon: the replacement of a Christian moral order — which holds every human life as equally sacred — with what he calls Bolshevism, a system that uses killing as a form of secular blood sacrifice to acquire power.
He draws an extended analogy between how society was gradually conditioned to accept transgender identity as normal and how the public is now being similarly desensitised to civilian casualties and nuclear threats — arguing that normalisation of brutality follows the same social mechanism in both cases.
He closes by arguing that neoconservatives are openly working to change US nuclear doctrine to enable a first strike, and that Trump's UN speech threatening to "annihilate" Iran was a thinly veiled nuclear threat — and that the desensitisation of the American public to violence is preparation for exactly that outcome.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Announcement of a Livestreamed Execution
Tucker Carlson: If you've ever been around politicians or government bureaucrats who are about to deliver a statement or hold a press conference or give a speech, there's a sense in the room from the politician or bureaucrat that this is really important, the world is watching. But when you're not in that world, you realise nobody's watching. Nobody has any idea what the Secretary of the Interior said yesterday, what he's working on, even what his name is. People don't even know what the president says or sends out on his Truth Social or social media. Most of the stuff just kind of goes out into the ether and only Politico reporters read it.
But if there's one statement from an administration official that you might have caught because it was a little bit jarring, it was the announcement the other day from the Secretary — well, now of War, formerly of Defense — Pete Hegseth, that the man responsible for the massacre of military personnel some years ago, Nidal Hasan, is finally going to be executed. He's been under the death penalty for quite some time, and the process is reaching the end of its course. And then not only is he going to be executed, the execution is going to be livestreamed. You're going to get to watch his killing. They don't say that kind of thing very often, but Pete Hegseth did say it. Here's exactly what he said.
Pete Hegseth's Statement
Reporter: Major Hasan — this news that came down regarding firing squad. Can you tell us about how that came about and what led to that decision process?
Pete Hegseth: No brainer. Execution by firing squad. Army Major betrays his country, radical Islamist kills a bunch of Americans at Fort Hood. Of course we're going to do it at Fort Hood. We're going to do it on a Thursday, we're going to do it at one o'clock, which is when he did it, and it's going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad. It hadn't been since World War II since we've done that. Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was win. We know what it is. It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks. And so he's going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be. And we'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public, because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things.
Assessing the Announcement
Tucker Carlson: In general, it's not worth parsing these statements literally because they're not meant to be taken that way, though it is kind of hard not to pause on the phrase "we win" and ask the obvious question: how does executing this guy who's been in prison for more than a decade constitute a win? Win what? Against whom? He's a federal prison inmate who's going to die. You could argue the morality of that, but it's hard to see that his death will lead us any closer to a victory over what? None of this stuff is ever defined. You're not really supposed to think about what it means.
But consider for a moment the idea that the US government will publicly execute a prisoner. There are two levels on which to assess this: the effect on the prisoner and the effect on the rest of us.
For the first, it's pretty easy to make the case that this is a bad person. He is after all a mass murderer — an admitted mass murderer who murdered 13 people and shot 30-some others at a military base. He was a military officer. So as Pete Hegseth correctly said, this was not simply a murder, it was a betrayal of the country whose uniform he wore. There's something especially ugly about this crime. He wasn't fighting combatants. He was killing people just standing in a room who were unarmed. So it's awful what he did, and it's hard not to argue that the guy doesn't deserve to die for that. Of course he does. Of course he took 13 lives and wrecked many others. So on that level, okay.
But that's not really the question. There are a couple of other questions that aren't getting enough attention.
The Question of Self-Righteousness
Maybe the deepest question is: okay, he's guilty and needs to be punished. But as you assess that, ask yourself — am I guilty of anything that I haven't been punished for? Have I gotten away with anything? Not mass murder, of course. But there is a deep sense in which there aren't a lot of truly innocent people in the world. All of us get away with stuff, if we're being honest with ourselves — including the person you just heard say this and the person he works for as well.
And so while you always want justice to be done and wrongdoers to be brought to account, and certainly want the rest of us to be protected from murderers, you never want self-righteousness to creep into your assessment of other people. Because in the end, you may not be a mass murderer, but are you anyone to judge other people? No. You should always extend grace to everyone because, again, all of us — and if we're honest with ourselves, we know this is true — are getting away with things. Just a fact. And so it doesn't mean you shouldn't punish murderers. Of course you should. It just means dial back the self-righteousness a little bit. Because who are you? Who am I? Who are any of us to stand up and pretend we're God? We're not in a position to do that, and we should never forget that.
The Case Against Public Executions
But the second question, which hasn't gotten enough attention, is: okay, he's a bad guy, killed all these people, we're going to execute him. But do it in public?
We don't do that in this country, and we haven't in a very long time — 100 years. The last public executions in this country were in the 1930s. I think the last one was in the late 30s in the South, for rape. It was a real rape. The guy deserved it. But it was in public, and they shut down that process. No more public executions. In Europe, same thing. Hasn't been done in about 100 years. In Britain, it hasn't been done in 150 years.
And so you have to ask yourself why. You could say, well, these countries have just grown weak, they don't punish the guilty anymore. Yeah, maybe. But there's more than that. They continued executing people, but not in public. Why? Because they want to humiliate the condemned? Well, he's dying. No. The reason that we don't conduct public executions is because of the effect of the spectacle on the rest of us. Is it good for your society to have people gawk as a bound man is killed? Whether or not he deserves to be killed, that's a secondary question. Is it good for you to watch it? Probably not. Is pornography good for people? Does it enhance your sex life? Probably not. Is watching ugly things inherently virtuous? No.
But in the case of public executions, we know pretty well — because there's a long record of them, because they have been a staple of civilisation since the very beginning — there's a long record of what they do to people who watch them.
Charles Dickens and the Lesson of History
If you're interested in the topic, it's really worth taking 20 minutes and reading an essay — really a letter to the editor — that Charles Dickens, one of the most perceptive novelists ever to write in English, wrote in 1849 after seeing a public execution in London. Without getting boring about the details, it was a husband and wife, a pair of murderers who had killed a man who was actually the wife's boyfriend at one point, stolen his money, and buried him under the stones in their kitchen. They got caught and they were executed. No one really argued that they didn't deserve to be punished, maybe even executed, for what they did. Dickens didn't make that argument. He made the argument that doing it in public brought out something ugly and dangerous in the people who watched it — lowered them almost to the level of the people they were watching die. It incited bloodlust in them.
So you will hear the argument made by dumb people — and really dumb people are the only people with power right now — that this will deter crime. Well, is that true? Do videos of people getting killed deter violence? Have you ever seen a war movie? People get killed in the war movie. Is the lesson of the war movie that if you're at war you could be killed? No, of course not. Every person in the audience takes away the same lesson from any war movie, which is it's good to shoot bad guys. They incite an animal instinct in all of us, and that instinct will never die. We can either encourage it or we can do our best to suppress it, or encourage other people to suppress it within themselves. But the last instinct you ever want to encourage, if you want to keep your society orderly and happy, if you want brotherly love to reign, is bloodlust between citizens.
Again, you could make the case that plenty of Americans deserve the death penalty. For sure. But watching it makes Americans much more likely to hurt each other. And if you deny that, then you're denying an obvious reality — that people have bloodlust in them. And you probably don't want to incite it any more than you have to.
So it degrades the people who watch in the same way that pornography degrades people who watch, the same way that snuff videos degrade people who watch. Child pornography is illegal — even child pornography that's AI generated. Why is that? No child is being hurt. Because we collectively understand that watching something like that is bad for the people who watch. In fact, it may be dangerous. You can inspire people to become pedophiles if you expose them to enough child pornography. That's just true. Anyone who claims it's not true doesn't understand human nature and has some reason to lie about it.
So how are public executions different? Well, they're not. And it's not clear that Dickens understood that before he saw one. But after he saw one, he said no decent nation should allow this. This is worse than what heathens do, and our people are behaving as heathens do as they watch these people march to the gallows and swing. So he began a campaign to end it, and Parliament responded about 20 years later and ended it in Britain in the late 1860s.
So it ended for a reason. And we should think about why the idea of it is now being resurrected. It's important to pause and ask why the Secretary of War just suggested this now.
The Wheelchair Question and Markwayne Mullin
Whether he'll be able to pull it off is an entirely different question. There's reporting today that apparently the president had no idea that Nidal Hasan was in a wheelchair. He was struck a number of times by bullets, which ended his murder spree lo those many years ago, and he's been a paraplegic ever since. And do you really want to execute a paraplegic on camera? Not that it makes maybe a moral difference, but it looks kind of bad. So it's possible that Trump will shut this down.
But it's really interesting, in the meantime, the number of people who endorsed it — which is pretty much everyone in the administration. Markwayne Mullin, who — and it's not a minor fact — is the head of the Department of Homeland Security and also a committed neocon. And there is a connection between neoconservatism and the worship of violence, which we'll get into in just a minute. It's very obvious. Markwayne Mullin was asked about this and commands a lot of armed federal employees. He's one of the biggest ammo buyers in the United States. And so when asked, is it a good idea to publicly execute someone on a live stream, he said yeah, of course. That's probably not a coincidence — that someone like Markwayne Mullin, who believes that killing foreigners is a great idea just because they're foreigners or whatever, who has the kind of callous attitudes you'd have to have to support neoconservative foreign policy, would be for this.
It's also true that Markwayne Mullin is a part owner of a Kratom company. Without getting too far afield — what's Kratom? Well, Kratom is, as yet not banned by the feds, a substance that's sold in many convenience stores that acts on the brain much like opiates do. It's addictive, it's fatal in high doses, and in a lot of places completely legal. So this is the guy who runs the Department of Homeland Security, our second biggest law enforcement agency, who is personally invested in a drug that is addicting kids and killing kids in this country. He's already rich, by the way. So you have to ask yourself, what kind of person would invest in something that killed American kids — and not just invested in it, but has, according to news reports, personally lobbied throughout the administration to keep it legal so he can keep getting paid?
It's up to God to judge that behaviour, but I think we here on Earth can say that's not a guy you want to hand guns to or give the power of life and death over, because that is clearly a sign that this is a callous, cruel person who just doesn't care about other human beings. So that's the kind of person — and those are the kind of people — who think there's no problem at all with supporting public executions.
Is This the Conservative Position?
And what's interesting is, because this is a Republican administration and because there are still people out there who support them on the basis of the idea that they're conservative, you have to ask yourself: is this the conservative position? That you execute people in wheelchairs on camera for the — what — edification of your population? That bread and circuses are okay? These are people on whom it hasn't dawned that executing a guy on a live stream is not that different from, say, feeding people to the lions.
So is that the conservative position? Well, conservative, like so many other words in our language, doesn't have a precise definition. But you can turn to people who are widely recognised as conservative leaders and ask them what they think. And we found a clip from Charlie Kirk, because we checked. Kind of interesting to know what Charlie Kirk thought of this. He's not the end-all source of what's conservative, but the guy thought about it a lot. He was the single biggest conservative political leader in the United States. And he was asked about this not that long before he died. What do you think of the death penalty? It's worth watching his answer and paying close attention because there are some really interesting observations in it.
Charlie Kirk on the Death Penalty
Charlie Kirk: The death penalty is wrong. Well, that's a moral question. So you did answer correctly. It's political, but I would say in America I would oppose the death penalty for a very specific reason, because right now the trend is this current government will use any power we give them against us. And this is the Patriot Act argument, right? The moral argument, I'm totally on board. If we had a government that was ethical and understood duty...
Interviewer: You're saying you think the government's so far gone that they could...
Charlie Kirk: Practically, right now in America, I think we should oppose the death penalty. We should. Because they could start executing Charlie Kirk.
Interviewer: No, they wouldn't. They absolutely — I mean, they would. Maybe. I don't know if it's that far. I mean, it's pretty bad.
Charlie Kirk: I'm just saying, you know. No, no, it's that bad. They're not doing it yet, at least.
Interviewer: What, the death penalty part? Yeah, they barely carry out the death penalty at all.
Charlie Kirk: No, because right now, opposing the death penalty fits their agenda, which is to try to have compassion supersede justice. Right? But make no mistake, as soon as the actual Bolsheviks take over, they're going to want to bring back the guillotine. They're going to come to this table. The idea that Michael Knowles and Charlie could still be in a gulag on Elba — no, no, no, no. We got to wipe him out. He's still a threat. He's still breathing.
The Bolshevik Parallel
Tucker Carlson: Two things jump out of that clip. The first is his statement — not even a prediction, a statement of fact — there are people who want to kill me and if they have the power, they will. You're seeing that now. The second is the word he used to describe the people who use government power to kill people. He called them Bolsheviks. And that's more right than we acknowledge.
So one of the great lies of history is that the Bolsheviks who took over Russia and then the entire region in 1917 were ideologically motivated — that Bolshevism was an economic program. Well, of course it wasn't. They were agnostic on economics. The people who began that revolution — the Bolshevik Revolution was a revolution against Christianity and the Christian order. And it replaced God with what? Money and power. And it used violence as a kind of secular blood sacrifice, both to terrify the population into submission, but also for more power, because that's what a blood sacrifice does. You kill in order to receive power.
And so that word, which is not used often enough, kind of describes what we're living through now. This isn't ideological when people are calling for killing. And as you'll hear, it's much more common than it ever has been in this country. The idea that killing is itself a good thing — that there is something innately satisfying in killing, in taking life — that's not an ideology, of course. That's an ancient religion. It's the religion of blood sacrifice, which is still common around the world today. Wikipedia doesn't spell that out, but it is. The idea that you get powerful by killing is the oldest understanding of the supernatural.
But in modern terms — in modern secular terms, which of course are never really secular — it was the Bolsheviks who embodied this. Replace God with money and power. And of course, that's what they were after. And they gave themselves both money and power. How is that different from what we're watching now? Well, it's not that different, actually. Once you take out the window dressing of Marxism — Marx and Engels, what's the power of the proletariat, all the slogans that obscured what it actually was — it was a revolution against Christianity that began with the murder of the Christian regent of Russia, the Tsar and his family. You see it clearly. And how is that different? Well, it's different in scale and severity from what we're living through now, but the idea is not different at all. Overthrow the old moral order, which is rooted in Christianity, and replace it with blood, money, and power.
The Conservative Idea at Its Core
So that's not a conservative idea. The conservative idea, at its core — at least as it has always been — has always been equality. Well, how could you say that? Equality? Are conservatives racist? Well, yeah, probably some of them. But that's kind of not the point. The point is that at the root of the worldview we have called conservative for so long, and certainly at the root of the founding documents of this country, is the belief — the bedrock belief — that God, not just a higher power but the highest power, created every person. And because God created every person, people are imbued with what the documents call inalienable rights — rights that cannot be taken away. So while there's massive variation in ability, of course, and appearance, of course, there is no variation at all in moral value. Every human being has a soul. And so on the most basic level, we are all equal. It's the basis of the idea of citizenship, of course.
And it's that idea that is evaporating before our very eyes and being replaced by exactly what you would imagine it would be replaced by: total callousness for human life, because not all lives are created equal.
Trump at a Pro-Life Event
So it's interesting that this whole moment began — you could say this on a lot of issues — with exactly the opposite promises. So it's hard to believe this is real, but it is. Here's the current president at a pro-life event of some kind, explaining — well, really reading words other people wrote, but he read them — explaining why life itself is the most important thing.
Donald Trump: Together we must protect, cherish, and defend the dignity and the sanctity of every human life. When we see the image of a baby in the womb, we glimpse the majesty of God's creation. I notified Congress that I would veto any legislation that weakens pro-life policies or that encourages the destruction of human life.
The Destruction of Human Life
Tucker Carlson: The destruction of human life. So that's the key right there. Not simply whatever Trump believes personally — and he's obviously not opposed to abortion, that's pretty clear now — but the idea exists outside of Trump and outside of the moment in which we're currently living, because it's an eternal idea and it's true. We don't seek to protect just American life, or value just American life, or life that contributes meaningfully to GDP, or non-Palestinian life, or whatever. But life. Because every human being is inherently valuable. Life itself is valuable because we didn't create it. And sorry, AI guys, we're never going to be able to.
So that right there underpins the entire American project. And that's why it goes downstream to every interaction that you have with your government — or did until recently. That's why the police can pull you over for a broken taillight, but they have to be polite to you. They can't violate your rights because they didn't grant you your rights. God did. And you're a citizen of the United States, but you're also a human being. And once again, those rights are inalienable.
So when that goes away, the deal changes completely. When the people in charge no longer see other human beings as human and feel that they can kill them without apologising for it, everybody's in peril. Everybody's in peril.
How War Changes Us
Well, when does that happen? How could that happen? How could something so foundational — a belief that really kind of describes every part of our country, the belief that every life is sacred — how could that belief be overturned? Well, of course, by war. Things change fast in war. Attitudes change, realities change — famously on the ground — but we change. And that's what we don't perceive. We change as we watch the brutality of war. Our expectations change, our understanding of other people changes, even our views on the humanity of our fellow human beings change very, very fast. This is one of the reasons you don't want to have wars, if you can help it, because they make you callous and brutal. You become the monster you're fighting. This has been noted since ancient Greece. It's not a new concept, but every generation forgets it.
But if you doubt it, ask yourself: in, say, 1985 or 1995, during the 1980s and 90s, if the Secretary of then-Defense stood up and said, you know, we're going to execute this guy by firing squad — he wasn't fine — and we're going to do it in public, there would have been an outcry. What? No. Even people who are for the death penalty would say, no, you can't do that to us. You can't put this on a public medium where my kids can see it, any more than you can stream pornography, because we're not going to be degraded by you.
But nothing like that happened. There were, of course, people who were texting each other and saying, can you believe Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, said this. But there was no real attack on Pete Hegseth by anybody, because nobody in power saw it as shocking. No moral Rubicon was crossed in their minds. Now, why is that? Well, there are a lot of different reasons, but partly it's because war changes all of us. We see incredibly ugly things. And the more we see those things, the more we accept those things as normal.
Trump Then and Now
And that's why you could see a man like that — that video you just saw was shot in 2020 — become the man you're about to see. This is the same man, President of the United States, Donald Trump, responding to a question about the Iranian girls' school that the United States apparently bombed, vaporising over 100 little girls in class. His response reveals what appears to be a completely different man.
Reporter: Now that you're approaching a new phase in this conflict with Iran, can you now say whether you will hold anyone in your administration accountable for the strike on a school that killed more than 100 children on the first day of the war?
Donald Trump: No. If it was a fault — and as you know, that's under investigation — it's such a strange question to be asked at this stage. Talking about a long time ago. But nobody did that on purpose. I guess you'd have to say — what about the thousands of soldiers that they blew up when they opened their car door? What about the thousands of people that were killed by Iran? No, mistakes are made. A war is nasty. But I know it's under investigation and I could have a report for you tomorrow. I would ask Pete Hegseth that question because they have it under investigation.
The Mechanism of Victimhood
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, it's under investigation. Just like every time settlers shoot a Palestinian, including Christians, it's under investigation. Can't talk about it. Active investigation. Can't talk about it. Well, it's probably a lie. Maybe it's true. Who knows? But you don't need an investigation to reach a quick and certain response, and it's one rooted in your own decency as a human being. And the response is: that's awful. I hope we didn't do it. If we did it, we're going to apologise for it immediately, because girls are never a legitimate target — ever, in war or peace. You can't kill little kids, ever. And so we just want to say that we're really sorry about this. We're not at war with the children of Iran or any other country. God willing, we hope they never declare war on our children, because it's just awful. It's the worst thing. It's not hard to say that. And any normal person would say that, because that's the obvious conclusion.
But he didn't say that. And what did he say instead? He immediately went to: well, they were mean to us and you should be asking about that. And during the Iraq War — which another American president also started on behalf of Israel, we had no reason to have an Iraq War at all, they had nothing to do with 9/11, but whatever — during that war, Iranian-backed proxies killed American soldiers. Well, yeah, that's absolutely true. And whose fault is that? It was the fault of the American president who sent them into battle on behalf of the Israeli government. So that person — his name is George W. Bush — ought to be punished for that. All those people died because of a decision he made. But whatever. Trump, of course, would have said that five years ago, back when he was opposed to neocon forever wars, but won't say that now since he's leading one.
But it's interesting, the mechanism by which he defends the indefensible. What he says is: why are you asking me about this? Bad things have happened to us. And that illustrates one of the deep truths about people, which all of us should keep in mind. This is one of the reasons therapy tends to be so poisonous for people. And the principle is this: once you believe you are the victim, you lose empathy for other people. Narcissism makes it impossible to care about others. Once you start collecting wounds, once you start brooding about how you've been mistreated, the mistreatment of others means absolutely nothing to you. You become a monster to the extent you believe you are a victim.
This is exactly what's happening in Israel. It's a country which not that long ago had all kinds of decent, interesting people who disagreed with each other and debated the moral course of action all the time in public. That's no longer the country. There are still people like that in Israel. But overwhelmingly, the consensus in Israel is: we were hurt, we have always been hurt, and therefore we have no obligation whatsoever to care about what we do to other people.
But of course, it's not just Israel that's like this. We're all like this. People are like that. The more you consider yourself a victim, the less empathy you have for other people. It is a consistent and unchanging theme of human nature. And by the way, you see it in crime videos in this country and in other countries. People who believe they've been victimised — that they're the target of systemic hatred or whatever — tend to be unusually cruel in the way that they treat other people. It's just a fact.
So here you have Donald Trump basically saying: I don't have to apologise for a strike that almost certainly came from the United States or its ally Israel, that murdered all these little girls, because they were mean to us once. And really the outrage is what they did to us. No. The outrage is both. Killing innocents is always wrong, no matter who they are. Period. And if that's not true, then Charlie Kirk was really right to worry about where this impulse to kill people could lead. What's used against my opponent will be used against me. That is a fact. So we have to preserve the truth and say it out loud. It is always wrong to kill the innocent. And simply because you were harmed — or your family, or your nation, or your feelings were harmed by someone else — does not give you licence to hurt them. But of course, it's a very human thing. That's the truth.
The Failure of the Political System
So you would think in a normal country, one with a working political system, there'd be some pushback, because our system is designed to police itself through the adversarial relationship between the two parties. We only have two parties. Lots of other countries have a ton of parties. We have two. But the idea is that's enough, because they keep each other honest — they call each other out when they go too far in one direction or just into complete lunacy, as you just saw.
But of course, no one really called Trump out on that. There's no groundswell demand from Democrats that Trump apologise for killing all those girls in a girls' school. Different politicians may mention it. That's bad. But no one's marching in the streets over it. There are no no-kings demonstrations against killing schoolgirls in Iran. Now, why is that? Well, there's only one conclusion: because they're not really against it. Because they don't believe in the only precept that makes that wrong. And what's that? Equality. Every human soul has identical value. Again, the idea this country is based on no longer has the support of its leaders in either party.
Well, how do you know that? You know that because they don't ever challenge Trump on that. It's all about his corruption. Okay, yeah, it's bad. Is it worse than the US president coming out and saying it's okay to kill the innocent? Nothing is worse than that. Nothing is more dangerous to all of us than that. And yet the Democratic Party, at least at its leadership level, is not opposed to that.
Governor Maura Healey and Abortion Up to Birth
And if you don't believe it, watch something that got completely lost. It's just kind of an amazing moment that we would like to put in a time capsule somewhere so our descendants can look at it in horror and say, boy, we're a lot better than we used to be. Those were the dark ages. This is Governor Maura Healey of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announcing passage of a bill in that state which would allow abortion up to birth.
Governor Maura Healey: We're here today to take another step to protect and strengthen abortion protections and to make sure that patients get the care that they need. To be clear, abortion is on the ballot this November in Massachusetts and around the country, and the role of governors is really, really important. And I'm proud as governor that I've been able to work with the legislature to make sure that we stand up for women, mothers and fathers and families in making health care decisions for themselves in consultation with licensed and trained professionals. My opponents are anti-abortion. One of my opponents, Mike Minogue, is proudly anti-abortion. But the bottom line for people in Massachusetts — if you care about women's health, if you care about making sure that women are able to access the health care that they need in consultation with their doctors — to be clear, I stand with women. My opponents do not.
The Callousness of Celebrating Abortion
Tucker Carlson: Everything about that is depressing and sad. The delusion of the people behind her, imagining they've been liberated from something they haven't. But for longtime connoisseurs of American politics, the first thing that jumps out is the way the governor describes the bill. She doesn't dress it up. She doesn't say this is health care, abortion is health care, it's vital health care. She doesn't say it's reproductive freedom. She calls it what it is. It's abortion.
People didn't used to talk like that at all. Why? Because everybody recognises that abortion is awful. No one wants to hear the details of abortion. If we were to play video of a late-term surgical abortion right now, you'd turn away. In fact, we might be taken down because it's so brutal. And everyone kind of senses that. And even under circumstances where normal people think, okay, I guess abortion is allowed, only a ghoul would celebrate that, because it is death. And there's kind of no way around that. You can get mad and scream at people for imposing the patriarchy or your religious values. It's got nothing to do with patriarchy or religious values. You're ending a life. Science attests to that. It's indisputable.
So the only way to get the public to accept it, of course, is to dress it up as something else, to lie about it, to cloak its reality in euphemism. And that's what generations of pro-choice politicians have done. "I'm not pro-abortion. It should be safe, legal, and rare," said Bill Clinton. "But there are extenuating circumstances when the 12-year-old daughter of the migrant farm worker gets pregnant. And you want to deny her a future? Of course she needs access to this life-saving care." Okay, okay, okay. It was all a lie, of course, but at least they were paying me the compliment of lying to me.
Maura Healey didn't. This is abortion. We're for abortion up to the moment of birth. And my opponent, the Republican, is bad because he's, quote, anti-abortion. Aren't we all anti-abortion? Some of us think it could be necessary and therefore should be allowed under certain circumstances when a doctor and her clergy person of choice says, talk it through. No — we're just for abortion. More abortion, the better. We've got a million a year, but that's not enough. So we're not going to lower gas prices or make it easier for your kids to go to college or buy a home or make your life better in any way, but the one thing we're going to do is give you more abortion.
And guess who responded? Nobody. A small group of evangelicals and passionate Catholics who follow this stuff online were upset. They've been upset for 50 years since Roe v. Wade. But nobody else. It didn't even rate. Yeah, Maura Healey doing her women's thing. That is another marker of our collective callousness. And it's bipartisan.
Both Parties and the Refusal to Acknowledge Humanity
Yes, there is a guy posing as the president who doesn't make any of the key decisions, but whatever, he calls himself president. He just got us into an unwinnable war that is tanking our empire and our economy. Okay, he deserves the blame. But if we're being honest about how we got here in the first place, we have to say it is the refusal of the leadership of both parties to acknowledge the humanity of every person that got us here — that allowed the Biden administration to fund genocide, actual genocide in Gaza.
And so there's no restraint. There is no part of the system that is working to correct these impulses. There's no constituency for treating human beings as human beings. The system is so completely out of whack that everybody with power agrees that if you are inconvenient or annoying, you can be killed. If you're an Iranian schoolgirl, if you're a baby in the womb who's unfortunate enough to be in the belly of a woman who doesn't want a baby, if you're a Palestinian and you don't have a seat at the UN and no one really cares what you think because there's no incentive to care — because what can you do for me — it's okay to kill you. And both parties feel that way.
And trust me, if you're not a billionaire, if you don't have your own private lobby in the Congress, if you don't have Trump's cell phone, that could be very bad news for you. Because whatever they're doing to an eight-month-old in utero, or the Palestinians, or the Iranian schoolgirls — why wouldn't they do that to you? Who's going to stop them?
This is the point that Charlie Kirk made: that Bolshevism is a replacement of the Christian social order — an order which was open to non-Christians, thankfully, since its inception, but that was based on the humanity of every person because God created them. So when that goes away, what does your society become? Of course, vicious and cruel, and obsessed with money and power. And that's exactly what we're seeing now. What we're seeing is Bolshevism, which is non-ideological and not the same as Marxism — which is absurd and no one even cares about anymore.
How War Accelerates the Process
All of this accelerates, however, during war. And how does that work? Well, as noted, part of it is the nature of war — it results in the deaths of innocents. And if you look at that enough on a screen, it's like if you look at pornography enough, or bestiality videos all day — after a while, it starts to seem normal. We are shaped by the worlds around us, of course. So if you're living in a country that's blowing up schoolgirls, the first time you hear about it, it shocks you. The fifth time you hear about it, you're like, yeah, war is hard. Mistakes are made in war, as Trump said. Civilians die in war, it's very unfortunate. But they did a lot of bad stuff to us. Really? The Iranian schoolgirls did? Okay.
But there's another mechanism by which the rest of us become monsters. And that is the fear that is instilled in us by our leaders on purpose, in order to control us and to get us to comply with what is very obviously an anti-human agenda. And what's interesting, having seen this many times, is how often the leaders employ this tactic. It's like since the beginning of time: be afraid, be very afraid, and do what I say. But how those leaders, even as they tell these lies and push this propaganda, become besotted by it themselves. They start to believe it. They start to become paranoid. You see this in Benjamin Netanyahu all the time. He gets up and gives these gassy speeches about how everyone wants to kill us all the time. And it's like, actually, people are pretty mad at you now that you committed genocide and blew up southern Lebanon and levelled all these churches. What do the Christians have to do with this? So they're pretty mad. You're the least popular country in the world. But you can envision another path where Israel sought peace with its neighbours. Like, 60 years ago, yeah, okay, we took Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but we're not giving them back — let's figure out a way to live together. That never happened.
But it's not just the Israelis who are like this. It's everybody. So how do you get like that? You get like that by telling yourself again and again and again: everybody else hates me, we are under constant threat, we are never safe, kill them before they kill us. It's a kind of brain disease that, again, does not just happen in Israel, though that's the most obvious example because it's been going on for so long. It happens here in the United States. And even the people spewing this nonsense are susceptible to being swayed by it.
The Geography of Safety
So the number one fact about the United States, as in any country, is a geographical fact. The first thing to know about a country is where it is on the globe, who lives there, and what are the resources. Those are the actual facts of a country. And a lot of the stuff is just an overlay. Well, you have this kind of system, it's a bicameral system, they're Marxist, they're capitalist — shut up. Do they control the Strait of Hormuz or not? How much oil do they have? How close are they to their historic rivals? Is there a mountain range or an ocean defending them from invasion? These are the basic questions that somehow get lost in all of this.
So the most basic fact about the United States is it's separated from the rest of the world by the two biggest oceans on the planet. And so that's a pretty good thing. It's an inherently safe country. And it's a dangerous country only to the extent that our leaders want it to be. All things being equal, this is the safest country in the world and remains so. It's not, but it's not because our leaders have intentionally made it dangerous to keep us on edge and control us. But it's still safe. This country has never been invaded, and God willing, never will be. Pretty hard to invade it. How are you going to invade it? How do you get the troops over here? Maybe by drones now. But this country is very, very safe. It has a vanishingly small number of terror attacks — too many, but not as many as they told us were coming. Do you remember that after 9/11? We're never going outside again. No more commercial air travel. And by the way, you cannot see the 9/11 files — they're classified forever. Okay. Any case.
Trump and the Ballroom Drone Port
They whipped themselves into a frenzy. George W. Bush and all the dumb people around him whipped themselves into a frenzy, which was designed to terrify the population, but in the end terrified them. You're seeing the same thing with Trump right now. This is an amazing clip that got almost no attention, or the right kind of attention. Here is Trump explaining why he needs a ballroom.
On some level you may suspect he needs a ballroom because he wants more monuments to himself — he's like a sad guy who doesn't like himself and he's 80 and so he wants to leave behind gilded statues so you never forget that he existed. Okay, obviously that's true. But there's another reason, and he kind of talked about it in this clip.
Reporter: Are you worried about the ballroom funding, Mr. President? There's speculation that the ballroom is being built...
Donald Trump: I'm building the ballroom. You saw it yesterday, right? Yeah. We're building a great ballroom, it's been needed. It's a very military complex. The roof is actually a drone port. The roof of the ballroom is a drone port and it gives great safety to everything below. We're building a really great ballroom, but it's also a military — a strong military position for our people. The roof is actually a drone port. That's the cool thing, it's a drone port. The drones go out.
The President's Safety and the Lie of Unequal Value
Tucker Carlson: It's so stupid it's unbelievable. The president of the United States is very unsafe. We just haven't spent enough in the federal budget to protect the president of the United States.
I should probably spend too much, actually. I mean, the core requirement of leadership is that — one hopes you don't have to, but — you are willing to lay down your life for the people you lead. It's the father's first job, of course. Most important job. There's a home invasion? Honey, will you get the home invasion? No, you're the dude. Go deal with the home invader. It's true in the military. It's true in every structure. The leader is the person willing to lay down his life for the people he leads.
And so, of course, you want to keep the president safe. Of course, he's elected by the people. He's a person. You don't want him to face undue risk. But the idea that the president's life is worth a lot more than your life is a lie. And we should call it out as a lie. His life is worth exactly as much as mine and yours and everyone else in this country. Every single person has identical value to the president of the United States. That's why we're not slaves. He's not a king. He wasn't appointed by God. He was appointed by us. So the idea that we need more protection for the president — oh, stop, you narcissist.
But it also suggests that this is a guy who's been convinced that we are under serious peril and is now doing his best to convince us of that. And that paranoia makes us much more easy to control. You'll accept things you would not accept otherwise if you think your life is at stake.
Two Ways to Rule
So what is this? Well, of course, you know what it is. It's the only other way to rule a population. There are two ways to rule a population. One is by consent. Happy families are ruled by consent. There's someone in charge called the dad, but he doesn't impose things on his family that they hate or that are bad for them. Of course, it's a subtle dance. And in every happy family it's the same — a subtle dance. Find out what people want, mix that with what you think is good for them, and come to a decision. But it's not totalitarian in any sense. People who attempt to run any structure in a totalitarian way have an unhappy and unstable structure. Fact. So we've always had at least the appearance of a government run by consent. The people want this. That's why we're doing it. That's one way to do it — historically the way that we have run this country.
The other way to do it is to rule by fear. It's to terrify the crap out of everyone so they do what you say. And that's a much more traditional and long-standing form of government. In fact, that's the form of government of most countries at most times in history. And it's popular because it works. You can terrify people into doing what you say. And this probably has been the rule for all of history. It was probably the rule in the caves.
Christianity and the Cross
But it ended in the West in 33 AD with the rise of Christianity. How did that happen? Here's how. The early Christian church existed within the Roman Empire. Jesus lived within the Roman Empire. And the Roman Empire ruled by fear. It was a huge slave population. They probably didn't have a choice. And one of the ways they instilled fear was by torturing people to death in the most gruesome possible way. And in fact, in the 2000 years since, very few people — even the most diabolical minds on the internet — have devised a form of death by torture more gruesome or more painful than crucifixion, which consisted of hanging a man by his arms, attaching him to a wooden crossbar with nails and letting him just die there. And the process took days, sometimes several days. And he was hung naked in full public view along a busy thoroughfare, so everyone could see this guy writhing in unending agony for days until he died. It was such a horrible form of execution that it was effective.
And it was, by the way, not meted out to everybody. There were lots of ways the Romans executed people, but the people whose deaths they hoped would make a statement — a powerful statement to the rest of the population — were crucified. And they were convinced to crucify Jesus. And a lot of other people, by the way, including two people with him that day.
What makes it different? What makes it different is that the followers of Jesus took that symbol — that cross, that torture device — and didn't run away from it, but embraced it as the symbol of their religious faith, of their faith in Jesus. And that cross, for 2000 years, that torture device has been the symbol of the Christian church and of Christianity itself and of belief in Jesus. Think about that. Imagine if a new religion started next week and it took as its symbol the electric chair or the rack or some other unimaginably horrible torture device. Why would you do that? Well, you would do that probably to send the very clear message inherent in the symbol, which is: we are not afraid. The worst thing the temporal world has for us is slow torture by nails and a cross. And that doesn't scare us at all.
And so it was at that moment — that's inherently destabilising to temporal authorities. That's the worst you got? I'll put it on the side of our churches. I'll wear it on a pendant around my neck. Your torture? It means nothing. Nothing you do can scare me, because this is not the end. And that has been the position of faithful Christians ever since, for 2000 years. Paul, the author of a lot of the New Testament, wrote a bunch of his letters while chained to a wall in a prison. And they're cheerful, by the way.
So you can't intimidate people like that. In fact, people like that intimidate the people in charge. There is nothing scarier to people who seek to rule by fear than someone who is not afraid. They're not afraid of you fighting back. I've got my AR-15. Yeah, they've got drones. They're not afraid of you at all. The only thing that puts fear in their hearts is your fearlessness. And the only thing that gives people true fearlessness is a belief that this is not the end, but instead the beginning.
And so if you want to rule the world by fear, the very first thing you have to do is extinguish Christianity. And Bolsheviks of every age — going back to the first century and extending through the French Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, and yes, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the current revolution that we're watching, the AI revolution — all of them have as their aim extinguishing this one religion. Not all religions. That religion. The religion that put a torture device on the side of its buildings and called it holy and said to temporal leaders: there is nothing you can do or say to us that will make us afraid. So they have to extinguish that, and they're trying hard to do it. They won't succeed, obviously.
Neoconservatism as an Attack on Christianity
In the process of doing that, they are changing our society. And by "they," we mean adherents of a very specific worldview, and that's neoconservatism — which apparently is supposed to be like an anti-Semitic slur, but the truth is a lot of neoconservatives are not Jewish. You don't need to be Jewish to be a neoconservative. Some of the most famous aren't. It's not synonymous with Judaism, actually. Sorry. But it is anti-Christian. Neoconservatism is an attack on the Christian order and Christianity itself, and you know that by its aggressively callous attitude toward the taking of innocent human life. So aggressive and so callous that after a while, if you've watched it for 20 years, as some of us have, you begin to suspect that the taking of human life — especially innocent human life, people with no role in anything, who made no decision worthy of the death penalty — that killing them is the point. That this is some kind of blood sacrifice ritual. They derive some kind of deep charge from this.
That's not a slur. That's not just the nastiest thing we could say about the neocons. That's a considered opinion based on years of observation. And we could give you a million examples, but we'll just point to the arch neocon — no longer with us — Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Lindsey Graham and January 6th
So January 6th happens. Whatever you think of January 6th, I think decent people can agree that the government would have been wrong to respond by murdering a bunch of unarmed Americans who, misguided as they may have been, wound up in the US Capitol. But that's not Lindsey Graham's view. Listen to the account of a law enforcement officer who was there. Listen to him describe what Lindsey Graham said about the protesters.
Officer: And then there's Lindsey Graham, another Republican who later joined the endeavour to whitewash January 6th in earnest. Former DC police officer Michael Fanone says in a meeting with officers who responded to the attack, Graham told them this:
"You guys should have shot them all in the head. We gave you guys guns and you should have used them. I don't understand why that didn't happen."
Tucker Carlson: Now, in a normal country in which love of people and the belief in the fundamental humanity of every person was real, that would have been — I mean, you know, people get taken out of office for sex scandals or for investing in companies they're regulating, which is all fair. But calling for the murder of your fellow Americans — unarmed people who, however wrong they may have been, thought they were exercising their constitutional rights — calling for them to be shot in the head. Talk about a disqualifying statement. There should have been an investigation immediately by the Republican Party, by the Congress, maybe by courts. What? Calling for the killing of unarmed people. Isn't that a crime? Well, it's certainly a moral crime. But nobody even noticed at all. So hard have our hearts become. And of course, his fellow neocons didn't notice because that's the whole program.
So again, to restate: neoconservatism has geopolitical aims — we need to be tough on this country and blow up the Iranian government and Putin is our enemy — and they dress it up. But at its core, neoconservatism is an attack on Christianity, on the belief that all people have souls and are united in that. That people cannot be treated like animals or objects. That there are limits to human power. Some things you can't do. You're not allowed to do them. Neoconservatism is a rejection of that. And that, by the way, is the basis of Western civilisation. So neoconservatism, of course, isn't a defence of Western civilisation. It is a direct assault on it in all of its precepts that make it Western — that make it different from the East or from what Dickens called the heathen world. It is an attack on Christianity.
And most people who espouse it probably don't know that. And it's sad to say, but also true, that a lot of the people who are spouting these ideas and calling for murdering this or that person are actually nice people. And I know that because I know them. And that would include Lindsey Graham. He's one of the most charming people ever. No one would turn down a dinner invitation from Lindsey Graham because he was hilarious and fun to be with. Sorry, that's just a fact. But the ideas themselves are diseased. And how sad is it to watch people you know and like personally espouse those ideas in public with moral certainty?
Ukraine and the Indifference to Death
Now, one of the reasons you know that killing is the whole point — not saving life, but extinguishing it — is by the studied indifference of advocates of the Ukrainian government to how many Ukrainians have died. So if you really believe that it's worth fighting a war against a country you can't beat, which would be Russia, then you have to answer why you believe that. And they will always say, well, because this is wrong and we need to protect the sovereignty of Ukraine, and they'll give a speech all of us have heard many, many times. But you would think anyone giving that speech would be giving it on behalf of the Ukrainian people. So there would be a point at which they might ask: how many Ukrainians have died in this effort to save Ukrainians?
And yet not only do they not ask that question, they don't care at all. They don't ask it privately. They don't know. If you press them privately — like, in a gentlemanly way, how many people have died in this war? — no idea. They don't care. So if you don't care about the deaths of other people, it's fair to assume over time — like five years — that you probably applaud them. And how sad is that to see? How sad to see the total distortion of decent people by these ideas, which again at root are an attack against the core precepts of Christianity.
So here's an example from Fox News just the other day.
Fox News commentator: But for me, the way they innovated drone technology in order to take out what's fuelling the Russian war machine is phenomenal. To be writing about this in war journals forever. The Ukrainians have modernised modern war before our very eyes.
Brian: I'm not so sure that's a positive. I mean, there are 30,000 young men on each side that are dying every single month. Every single month. We should not be using these kids as guinea pigs.
Tucker Carlson: If you've seen the videos, the war is good — a war other people's sons are fighting, and now their daughters apparently, and their sons with Down syndrome, and their fathers in their mid-50s. The entire population is fighting and losing a war in Eastern Europe at the behest of leaders in the West and thought leaders like the one you just saw. And they're being decimated. The historic nation is gone and will not be rebuilt. It'll be repopulated by people from South Asia. Just a fact. So that's a tragedy. But you look at that — it's an avoidable tragedy that we caused — and your conclusion is what? We're getting valuable drone technology out of watching other people's kids die?
By the way, since I know everyone on that set, I can tell you they're all super nice people who love their kids and have good values and go to church. They're not monsters at all. But that idea is monstrous. And it is being repeated uncritically at every level of our leadership. That the upside of war is Raytheon shareholders make money? Can you hear yourself? This is disgusting. And no nation that puts that as a priority — killing people in exchange for a rise in defence tech stocks — can long endure. It's too disgusting.
And ultimately, a nation like that, that allows itself to become totally callous to human life, that celebrates an infanticide bill or looks at the Ukraine war and says we're getting valuable drone technology — a society like that will destroy itself. It won't be destroyed from the outside. It'll be destroyed from within, because people will lose all love for each other. The sympathy that binds the nation together — the idea that, oh, you're an American, we're in an airport in Frankfurt but you speak with an American accent, I don't know who you are, maybe you're a different colour or whatever, we're American, we're in this together on some level — that dies. And Americans lose sympathy for each other, and therefore cohesion, and therefore the country collapses. That's exactly where that goes, and is indeed going.
Christina Pike and Glenn Beck
Here's a clip that just kind of says it all. So there was a woman called Christina Pike — I think that's her name. She's a murderer. Not defending her, never would. She killed somebody and she's been sentenced to death. And however you feel about women being executed — for the record, against it. Our duty exists to protect women. Sorry, that's patriarchal. Not supposed to send them to go die in war with their limbs blown off by landmines, or be executed. Just against it. Sorry, call me whatever you like. Liberals, of course, are totally for it.
But the point is, whatever you think of the idea that this woman was executed or sent to be executed, any normal person would pause when learning that the prison failed twice to execute her. Now, this is not the first botched execution in human history. There have been many, and they're famous. Why are they famous? Because in civilised countries — Britain, for example, at one point in history — civilised countries looked at botched executions, particularly repeated botched executions, and said, wait a second, maybe there's a message here for us.
And you can look it up, and they're fascinating to read about. There are a number of instances from English history, American, Australian — the civilised countries — in which a condemned man dropped through the trapdoor of the gallows and the rope broke, and in some cases broke twice. And spectators at the execution who had come to gawk — come for the most ghoulish possible motives — said, whoa, wait a second. The rope broke twice. Maybe there's a message there. Maybe we're not in charge of the universe. Maybe God himself is weighing in on this question. And in a number of instances, which you can read about, the crowd at the execution pressured authorities by yelling at them to stop trying to kill this guy and acknowledge that maybe something else was going on here. And in some cases, they just let the guy go. Sorry, we tried to kill you twice and it didn't work. Clearly, there's something going on. God has a say in this too.
So this woman, Christina Pike, apparently they tried to kill her twice and it didn't work through lethal injection. And they're probably going to try it again. So a longtime conservative and religious commentator commented on this the other day — a very nice guy, by the way, Glenn Beck, jovial, seems kind to his family. But the callousness, the cruelty, the wanton cruelty expressed in this clip should make you wonder about our future unless we pull back from this.
Glenn Beck: Executions work. You know, it's like — what's her name? Ricky, you know, who's like, I can't use my arms anymore because you... Yeah. Yeah. That was the point. You know, you weren't supposed to use your arms or your legs or any other part of your body. That was the point when they were trying to execute you. Yeah. Krista Pike. So she says she's confused now. Well, she was supposed to be brain dead. I mean, she was supposed to be dead, dead. And then when she didn't die, they said she was brain dead. And then she came back. Of course she's confused. Of course she's confused. She was supposed to be dead. And I'm sorry, but I told you — I told you the minute it happened — they're going to make a case that this is cruel and unusual punishment and you botched it, and so she shouldn't be executed yet. No, I don't know why we rushed her to the hospital. We were trying to save her? You're executing her. Execute her. Do it again.
Tucker Carlson: If that's conservative, most decent people will be out. Make a case that what she did was worthy of the death penalty. Okay. But to mock her because she's paralysed and was brain dead and now she's back — shut up and kill her? As a human being? There's a fellow American who obviously gave up a lot of her rights by murdering someone. Not defending her in any way. But to look at the case and feel that it's outrageous that anyone would feel sympathy for this one — well, she's a person. And a woman, by the way. Aren't you a man? Isn't your duty on this earth to protect women? Apparently not. Giving up that duty. Send them to the front lines in Ukraine. We'll get valuable drone technology out of it.
Glenn Beck's opinion on whether this woman is executed again will probably have no material effect on the outcome. But it's a window into his total degradation and the degradation of the rest of us who sort of nod along and say, yeah, yeah, she killed someone. I've never committed any crime at all. I've been treated totally justly. I've been punished for every bad thing I've done. Who can say that?
Again, it's not an argument against the death penalty, though you can make a pretty good argument against the death penalty, and we probably should. It's an argument against callousness and self-righteousness. And it's an acknowledgement that if you engage in callousness and self-righteousness long enough, you'll be their victim. What goes around comes around. That is a fact of nature and of theology.
So slow down, Mr. Self-Righteous Guy, mocking the woman whose arms are paralysed. She's not suffering enough. Do you even know anything about the crime? Or are you just taking joy in the suffering of another human being?
The Trump Rally and the Punched Protester
So if you talk this way enough, if our leaders talk this way enough, if they encourage callousness toward fellow Americans — do you think it changes the behaviour of Americans? Well, of course it does. If you tell people that the people who oppose you are not fully human, they're just Palestinians, you can kill them, 75,000 of them, who cares? Then after a while, they're going to behave like that's true.
Take a look at this tape. This is from a recent Trump rally. Yes, he's still doing rallies. And a protester in the back — sure, we disagree with her on a lot of things, she seems to be American — gets up with a shirt that says something like "release the Epstein files." Watch what happens to her when she does that.
Donald Trump: Paid protests. These are paid protests. So they're all paid. They get paid by the lefties in order to destroy our country. They're scum.
Tucker Carlson: Just punch her in the face. Trump calls her scum. Punching women in the face?
Again, it's remarkable the extent to which the conservative leadership has internalised the most repulsive and untrue lie of the feminist movement, which they purport to oppose — and that is that the sexes are identical and have identical roles and identical obligations. That's not true anywhere in nature. It's not true in the animal kingdom, among plants, and it's definitely not true among people. It is materially different to punch a woman in the face than it is to punch a man in the face. And in a lot of ways, our legal code reflects that obvious truth.
And so you should be, as a man, upset to see a woman — even if you despise what she's saying — punched in the face by a man. Your impulse should be to protect her. Period. That's your job. Nature ordains that. It's not up to you. And any society that loses touch with that unchanging fact has lost its honour. What's worth defending? If you're sending women to go die on the front lines, what's the point of the military in the first place? I thought it was to protect the women and the children. Now they get to go die? That's equality? No, it's degradation.
And any normal person feels that instantly. Show a hundred men a video of a man getting punched in the face and they'll say, you go, get him, I don't know what he did, but yeah. They support it. How about a woman having her nose broken? No normal man finds that appealing. They recoil, because it's disgusting inherently.
But we have gotten to a place where some woman says "release the Epstein files" — which is hardly a left-wing trope. If that's left wing, then we need to redefine the terms. It's left wing? I don't want to know anything more about Epstein. I think he was drinking grape soda and eating pizza. No doubt about it. And anyone who says he wasn't is a liberal. Yeah, that's not really how the terms are defined, actually. But whatever — she gets up and says, release the Epstein files, and some guy punches her in the face. And the president of the United States says, you're scum.
What the hell is going on? Because again, this is the president. We're not just singling out Trump, who's hardly the worst offender here. But he is the president — the most powerful president in the world, we were told, until we learned he has no power at all. But whatever, he's still symbolically important. And he is encouraging violence against this person for making a totally normal — in fact, you could argue conservative — point at this rally.
What message are we being trained to receive? Well, you don't really have to overthink it. We're being trained to believe that violence against other people, including our fellow Americans, is totally fine. It's normal. It's the same message that the Bolsheviks went out of their way during the Russian Civil War and in the years after to deliver to the Russian people. It's totally normal to execute people, to crucify them — which the Bolsheviks did — to murder all your clergy. It's like totally normal. This is just how the state works. Fall in line, and we'll do it to you.
Trump's Truth Social Post
Are we really being trained to believe that? Is that just paranoia? I don't know. Take a look at President Trump's Truth Social post from today. This is real, by the way.
Well, I mean, there are probably many levels of meaning there. But on the most obvious level, that was video of human beings getting killed by wild animals — like in the Coliseum. That was people, just a kind of jump cut of people being eaten by lions and tigers. Some apparently are AI generated, some are real. Doesn't matter. The president sent that out with reference to nothing, as a non sequitur. Oh, by the way, here's some video of people getting killed by big cats. Huh?
There's a kind of chaotic quality to Trump that's appealing under certain circumstances, but that's not chaotic. That's a constructed video of people getting eaten by wild animals. What could possibly be the point of sending that out over your social media channels? Well, there are probably many points. But the most obvious one is: I would like to desensitise you to cruelty, suffering, and death. Now, why would they want to do that? Why would your leader ever want you to be desensitised to human suffering and death? I don't know, but it can't be good. It doesn't portend a rosy tomorrow. It's not good news for you.
Tulsi Gabbard's Nuclear Warning
And then you have to ask, where is this going? So we've been thinking about this for a full year — a little more than a year, actually, since early last summer. Tulsi Gabbard, who was the Director of National Intelligence, put together a video that decried the horrors of nuclear war. Of course, only two bombs have ever been dropped against populations, in the summer of 1945 in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and hundreds of thousands of people were incinerated, and many died later of radiation-related illness. And Tulsi Gabbard has been saying for many, many years — over 10 years — that her main concern as a public official, member of Congress, and then a member of Trump's cabinet, is that we are moving toward a nuclear exchange.
So last summer, in her capacity as a Trump official, she put together this little video that just said: hey, just to remind you, nuclear explosions are the worst thing. They kill the most people. They have the longest lasting effect. It's a freaking nightmare. Nothing is worse than a nuclear exchange. It very easily has the potential to eliminate all life from this planet — not just human, but all life — and make it unusable for millions of years. And so we should know that, so we exercise restraint and make wise decisions to avert it. That's it. That's all she did.
And two things happened almost immediately after. One, Trump exploded in rage — including to me, so I know that happened. He was outraged. She went, what is she doing? I don't know — making a point that you made for years and years and years, citing your uncle, the MIT professor. Nuclear war is the worst thing. You don't know how destructive a nuclear weapon is. Trump often said this in private and in public. Nuclear war is the worst thing. It's scarier than people know. So here you have your Director of National Intelligence just repeating what you have said many times, and it outrages you. Why is that? What has changed? Well, the Butler shooting, for one, and maybe other things.
But Trump was outraged. And so critically was the entire neoconservative mob — the cheerleaders for endless war, the death cult. Here is an amazing analysis by Ben Shapiro. And every time we play a Ben Shapiro clip, we feel a little guilty, because why are we elevating this guy? But still, he reveals unintentionally the entire program — not his podcast, the failing podcast, but the program, the plan. Unintentionally. So here is Ben Shapiro's response to Tulsi Gabbard saying nuclear war is not good.
Ben Shapiro: Tulsi Gabbard, of course, has presidential aspirations of her own, and she put out a very bizarre video that I think speaks to the horseshoe theory connection between the isolationist right and the Howard's-in left, which sound almost identical. This video made a lot of waves for good reason, mainly because many of the things she's saying here are pretty egregious. Here is Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI.
Tulsi Gabbard: I recently visited Hiroshima in Japan and stood at the epicentre of a city that remains scarred by the unimaginable horror caused by a single nuclear bomb dropped in 1945, 80 years ago. This attack obliterated the city, killed over 300,000 people, many dying instantly while others died from severe burns, injuries, radiation sickness, and cancer that set in in the following months and years.
Ben Shapiro: Yes, dropping an atomic weapon has massive consequences. Yes, there is carnage that emerges from dropping a nuclear weapon. Everyone knows this and no one is taking that lightly. But why is she dropping this? It's such a strange thing. This happened in 1945. It is now 80 years later and she is dropping a video about how terrible the dropping of the A-bomb was. This kind of bizarre retcon of American history — where America was the bad guy in World War II because we dropped an A-bomb, actually two A-bombs, in order to end World War II — that is historical revisionism of the highest order.
Ben Shapiro's Unintentional Revelation
Tucker Carlson: So it's pretty funny. First he's like, yeah, well, this is what happens when you're a fringe character — like the horseshoe theory. If you're a total wacko lefty, a Marxist, or if you're like a total right-wing extremist, a Nazi, you agree on everything. Only the fringes agree. Unlike me — Ben Shapiro sits squarely in the middle of American public opinion. What's the percentage of Americans who are okay with a nuclear exchange? Not very high. Outside the Daily Wire and the White House and the Israeli embassy, pretty small, actually. Most people are sort of against exterminating all human life. So that's not a fringe position. That's the position of the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. The fringe players are the ones who think it's okay. And in that group is Ben Shapiro.
Which leads to the second point, which is amazing. A guy with outsized verbal skills but not a super high IQ is an amazing vehicle for actually revealing the truth unintentionally. And that's exactly who he is. So he says, why is she bringing this up 80 years later? Like, why is this relevant? I don't know. Maybe because you want the United States to use nuclear weapons on behalf of Israel, which obviously he does. And by the way, if it's irrelevant, why are you upset about it? If she's just doing some kooky little piece on World War II, why be mad about it? Why devote precious airtime on the Daily Wire to denouncing it? Because she's getting in your way, that's why.
Tulsi Gabbard, whatever you think of her, knew early that neocons want a nuclear exchange — which they do openly now. They want a nuclear exchange. Most people don't want a nuclear exchange. Tulsi Gabbard called that early, and that's why they're attacking her now. Think about that for a minute. In what world could you openly — and now they are openly — call for a nuclear exchange? Only a world that had gone completely crazy. Well, how did that world go crazy? Through words. That's how the world always goes crazy.
Words Become Reality
So here's how it works. You can speak reality into existence. You can make things true by repeating them. It is often noted that a lie repeated often enough will be accepted as the truth. What's too seldom noted is that the lie will actually in some sense become true simply through words — otherwise known as spells or incantations. This is sort of recognised as a witchcraft principle. It's almost never acknowledged as just a human principle. If you keep saying something long enough, it is likely to happen. Trump believes this, but you can see it all around you.
Do you remember the first time you heard of gay marriage in the 80s? No matter how liberal you are, you're like, well, that's not going to happen. Gay marriage? What? Like Steve meets Steve? People made fun of it. Liberal Democrats made fun of it. In fact, all Democrats opposed it. In fact, they voted to ban it. That's how much they opposed it. This wasn't that long ago. I remember it. I was there for the vote. So this wasn't in the 1920s. This was like 20 minutes ago. This was in the 2000s. The state of California had a referendum that banned gay marriage. The state of California. Can you imagine if you woke up tomorrow and it's like, oh, by the way, California voters just banned gay marriage? You'd be like, what? Well, that's clearly false. Well, they did. Less than 20 years ago, they did. And now, of course, it's like you're a freak for saying there's something wrong with gay marriage. What are you, like a weirdo? Some kind of extremist?
So in 20 years, whatever you think of it — it's not an argument either way — just acknowledging that's what happened. Well, how did that happen? Just by saying there's nothing wrong with this. It's great. And over a pretty short period, people just accepted it.
Do you remember the first time you heard the idea that a man could become a woman? Again, no matter how liberal you are, the first time you heard that, you're like, what? A man can become a woman how? By wishing it so? Isn't sex determined at the DNA level? How can you change your DNA? And even if you didn't judge transgender people — then called trannies — you were dead certain that there's no chance that this could ever be widely adopted. There would never be like a boy on your daughter's soccer team, because that's insane. And then in a couple of years — again, not even taking a side on the question, just acknowledging what happened — because people kept saying, no, no, this is normal, most people accepted that it was normal.
That's exactly what's happening now. That's why Ben Shapiro was outraged that Tulsi Gabbard would criticise dropping nuclear bombs on civilian populations — because he would like to do it. And in fact, they plan to do it. And in fact, they are changing the internal American nuclear doctrine in order to make it easier to do. That's why they're doing that. It's not like they expect to be hit with a nuclear weapon and have trouble responding — that's already in the nuclear doctrine. The only reason they're changing the nuclear doctrine is so they can drop a nuclear bomb in what we used to call a first strike against a non-nuclear armed nation, and thereby risk total annihilation of the global population — 8.3 billion people. And they're doing it in public.
And almost everything we're seeing — the encouragement to feel callous about other human beings, not to love your fellow human beings, the encouragement to become monsters — is preparation for that. Because there is a small and determined group of people who see nuclear war as both inevitable and a fulfilment of some kind. And now we're getting into theological territory, but it's no less powerful a motivator of human behaviour than any other motive. And that's absolutely real.
Trump's Nuclear Threat at the UN
And we know it's real because the president of the United States just threatened a nuclear strike at the United Nations.
Donald Trump: But I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before — maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East, or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness for generations? But I believe we'll make a deal right after the election.
Tucker Carlson: Just to be totally clear, in case anyone tries to lie to you about what you just heard the president say — he is not threatening the use of conventional weapons, because there is no conventional weapon in the US arsenal that can achieve anything like what he just described. The total annihilation of a civilisation, of a nation, for centuries, with no hope of recovery, and an instantaneous annihilation that does not allow time for them to respond. There's only one thing he could possibly be describing, and it's the thing he is describing: a first strike with nuclear weapons. After which, it's hard to know what would happen, but it's pretty likely we would be down the road to a total annihilation of everyone on Earth.
So to be clear, that's crazy. That's reckless. That's a crime. Casually threatening the extermination of the world's population is a crime. If you were to talk like that to the clerk at 7-Eleven, you would be arrested for threatening to murder him. And when the president of the United States talks that way about exterminating the entire population of the Earth — or even of the 90 million Iranians — that is a crime.
And it's only because we have been trained by successive generations of leaders in this country to accept casual brutality against the innocent, that we've been encouraged to hate each other on the basis of our differences, to dehumanise each other sufficiently, that a Trump supporter — and we're willing to give the benefit of the doubt here — is probably a decent, law-abiding man who loves his kids, and is willing to punch a woman in the face in public on camera because she dared to demand the release of the Epstein files. How deranged have we become? Utterly deranged.
The Only Off-Ramp
And where is this headed? To total extermination of the species. Because that's the terminus. That's where it ends. That's where it always ends. And the only relief from this — the only possible relief from this, the only off-ramp from the cycle of attack and counterattack, of blood grudges — is the off-ramp offered in the Sermon on the Mount, where you do not respond with violence, where you do not keep a grudge, where you remember that as much as you hate your enemy, God provides him sun and rain too, and God created him too, that we are all human. That's not liberal claptrap. That's the only thing that keeps us from mutually assured annihilation at the hands of lunatics like this and Benjamin Netanyahu and others. That's exactly where we're heading, with the encouragement of every institution in American life.
Don't forget the stakes. This country was founded on true equality — not of ability, not of outcome, but of humanity. And when you give that up, the logical end is what you just heard. And that's an end for all of us.