Michael Knowles: Attacks on Christians, Norm McDonald, and Leaving Atheism for Catholicism

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I was so I was thinking about you this morning, and I haven't seen you since 2019.

I think that's correct.

I think so.

And what's interesting, looking back, that was only six years ago, is what a completely different world we live in.

So the last time I saw you, you had described, and correct me if I've messed up the details, I probably have.

Greta Thunberg

as you weren't even that mean.

You're like, she's clearly mentally ill, something like that.

Yeah, I said the left is exploiting this mentally ill Swedish child.

That's so obviously true.

So if you said that now, the only reason I'm bringing this up is just to

celebrate how much this country has changed and how much freer it is.

But so you said that in 2019, again,

it wasn't the Middle Ages.

We had air conditioning and air travel.

It was like the modern era.

And

you were banned from the conservative TV channel, which denounced you as, quote, disgusting for saying that.

Now it's like you don't even think twice about noting the obvious.

So I just want to say I'm glad to see you in this better world.

Well, thank you, Tucker.

It's good to be in this better world.

And you

heroically uncanceled me, actually.

There were a few people who helped out, but you were one of the people who really helped out when I was being ostracized to St.

Helena for

making what I felt was a benign observation yes and and you said that's ridiculous and you kind of forced me back through into TV well I mean I it what it certainly didn't require heroism it was just like that was so stupid I couldn't believe you know it's

I think it's also important to remember that this country went through a protracted moral panic that hurt so many people yes and that we've never really repented of that and we should.

Like I

interviewed one yesterday.

I won't even bore you with the story, but he was just another casualty of that five-year period where people were destroyed, driven to suicide in a lot of cases during our cultural revolution.

And the perpetrators were never punished for that.

They never even apologized.

They never even acknowledged.

They were never forced to acknowledge their wrongdoing.

And the people who called you disgusting for saying something was actually kind of compassionate.

That was my view.

It was kind of charitable.

No, for real.

Why are we exploiting this child who's clearly unwell?

She clearly is unwell.

Wielding children in politics generally is

unseemly, I think.

And when you're exploiting a truant in order to score some cheap point on the sun monster or something, I think is

disgraceful, as a matter of fact.

But you're the criminal for pointing it out.

And the fact that my former employer played along with that and called you disgusting.

I think that's the word they use, disgusting.

Yes.

And I think, look, I'm not saying I'm Fabio, but I wouldn't call myself disgusting.

I don't know.

But, you know, you mentioned this cultural revolution, and obviously you had all these ideological aspects.

It seemed downright Maoist.

And then it reached its apotheosis 2020, 2021, with an actual political lockdown of our whole country

by all of these same cultural and political forces.

Oh, that's smart.

I never thought of it that way.

And then

the fog just lifted.

It just something broke.

And now it seems like all of that, from the most ideological cultural level, all the way down to just, you know, being free to go out and like see Granny at Christmas.

Exactly.

It's over.

We should celebrate that.

We should.

How should we celebrate that?

I don't know, but I don't think I appreciate the good things enough.

I'm too focused on the sadness or things that are, you know, not exactly the way I think they ought to be.

And I don't think, speaking for myself, I take enough time to just be grateful for the good things.

And that is one of the best things.

And I very practically want to celebrate.

I came prepared today.

I don't know if you're familiar with this.

Yes, I am.

I said,

I try to mitigate all these little fun treats that I have, whether it's a donut, whether it's a tasty.

But I said, well, if Tucker, I would hate to be inhospitable.

So now I have a great excuse to celebrate with those.

You are always welcome to use an Alp here.

It's been a year this month.

I used the other product, Zin.

I didn't even know that it was wrong.

And it was one of those weird moments where you're sort of shocked into reality.

Somebody told me, I think it's true that the majority, like 70% of Zen users use the product rectally.

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Or somebody told me that.

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Cause it's got to be at least less than 10% of users.

No, I think it's 0%.

We actually don't allow it.

We don't allow it.

That's really good.

No, but this actually ties in.

The fact that we are living in an age now where you're allowed to have some nicotine again.

Oh, I know.

You remember you were allowed to have marijuana, fentanyl,

you were anything in between, but the one thing you couldn't have was you couldn't have a cigar.

You couldn't have a

pouch.

You couldn't have anything.

And now it's just like because it raises testosterone, whereas weed lowers it.

So it makes you less obedient, more free-thinking, happier, stronger.

And those are all, you know, the last qualities authoritarians want the population to have.

I was looking back because I was trying to figure out the morality of it.

I've smoked cigars since I was 15, and I was trying to figure out the morality.

Is this a vice?

And I said, well, I don't think so.

There's a story about Saint Pius X.

He was talking to a cardinal, called him in, offered him a cigar.

The cardinal said, I don't have that vice.

He says, it's not a vice.

You would have it if it were a vice.

You don't have vices.

And then there was the case of St.

Philip Neary, who one at the devil's advocate in his canonization process said that he might not be a saint because his body was corrupt

because part of his nose had worn away.

I said, no, no, no, it wasn't corrupted after he died.

It was corrupted while he was alive from all the nasal snuff that he did.

Yes.

And Pope Leo XIII, the most prolific pope ever, wrote the most encyclicals, apparently drank cocaine wine, van Mariani.

Is that true?

It is.

I've never tried it.

Along with Sherlock Holmes, cocoa wine.

Coca wine, yes.

Yeah.

I'd probably have written more books had I tried it, but I haven't.

It's funny.

Somebody told me a really interesting story recently about the number of cardinals, current Catholic cardinals who smoke cigarettes.

Yeah.

And I just love that.

I'm not Catholic, but I have always loved cigarette smoking.

I know you're not supposed to say that.

I know it's bad.

It killed a close relative of mine.

You know, I am aware of the health effects.

But I just thought, I don't know.

There's something about that.

And because it's Benedict XVI loved to smoke cigarettes, and he would have one or two a day.

When was he pope?

He was the pope before Francis.

So he was pope.

Oh, oh, Benedict the one was extinct.

He was a German pope.

Yes.

He would smoke a couple cigarettes a day.

And I thought, this is something beautiful.

This is another thing that's come back since our cultural revolution.

Wait, is that widely known?

You know, I don't know.

I'm sure they've tried to suppress that.

You know, they probably want to make him into like a kombucha drinking, hemp smoking person.

But no, he liked Marlborough Reds.

Good for him.

And he would smoke them.

This is the chief political virtue.

He would smoke them in moderation and with prudence.

And this is the thing.

We live in this crazy schizophrenic age where you have to be all one thing or all the exact opposite.

What does Aristotle tell us?

It's virtue is that mean right between the two extremes.

You can have a Marlboro red every once in a while.

Boy, if I could do that, I would still be doing it.

I have a friend who's over 80 who smoked two Marlboro lights, which men should not be smoking those, but whatever, the white ones, every day his whole life.

I think it was after a Bergefell they let men smoke Marlborough lights.

It was a little red part of the decision.

It was out by then.

So speaking of gender bending, what do you make of the shooting in Minneapolis?

Like, how should we think of it?

There's so many different threads there.

I don't really understand.

Did you read the manifesto of the diary?

So I took a look.

I saw they were in Cyrillic scripts.

Yes, Cyrillic.

My Cyrillic's not great, but

we had some translations done and you could read the writing on the magazines.

And the first thing that struck me, I mean, after the horror of it, you know, you just think the most vulnerable people of the church being attacked by this maniac.

The first thing that struck me was how apparently incoherent it all was.

Because it's an attack on a Catholic church, on these like innocent little kids in a Catholic church.

And then if you look on the guns and on the magazines, it's not just anti-Christian.

It's anti-Muslim.

It says, remove kebab.

It's anti-Jewish.

6 million wasn't enough.

It's nihilistic.

it's anti-gay.

The guy was a tranny.

And then there's the scariest part of it is on this page, there's a picture he drew of himself, and it's him looking in a mirror, and he's got the gun behind him.

And in the mirror is a picture of a demon.

And that's scary enough.

Like a goat-headed demon.

Like a goat-headed Baphomet looking demon.

When you read, when you translate the Cyrillic, the first thing that's written, top left of the page is,

who am I?

And this is really jarring because you recognize that Moses at the burning bush, he asks God, who are you?

You know, who will I tell them that you are?

And God says, I am who I am.

I am.

You know, Christ says before Abraham was, I am.

This is his declaration that he's God.

I am.

And a great priest friend of mine, Father Rutler, once observed that when you know, when you're with God, you know who you are.

You know your identity.

Modernity thinks that you have to leave God and just totally go and make yourself a God and then you'll be truly yourself.

You'll find yourself.

That's not true.

You become much more yourself, much more perfectly yourself if you do what you're supposed to do and align yourself with God.

And when you don't identify yourself with I am, then you're left with this pathetic question, who am I?

So you see this obvious demonic influence there.

And what struck me too, with all of these apparent contradictions, it's anti-Christian and also anti-Muslim and Jew.

It's radically LGBT, but also kind of anti-gay.

It's anti-Trump, kill Trump right now, but it's also

has all these kind of far right-wing slogans.

And it reminded me, which is very important to remember, especially in our line of work, because you're constantly reading all this radical stuff.

Right, you're looking for the easy explanation.

Like, this is a representative of this group or this idea that I already dislike.

And now you've confirmed that I have every reason to dislike this group.

I mean, this is the effect of social media.

But this guy, it's like, obviously, I'm opposed to the training thing passionately, but

you realize that

demons, which are real, they're not under every rock, but they're real.

There is such a thing as spirits, and

they'll try to get you from any angle.

They'll try to get, if they think they're going to bang you from the right, they'll get you from the right.

If they're going to get you from the left, they'll get you from, they'll get you from up or down.

That's right.

All they want to do is devour you.

It's like Lewis and the screw tape lighters.

All that, just any tactic that will let them get a hold of you.

And it's so clear with this guy because you realize

this guy was being obsessed from every angle.

Wow.

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the fact that he drew a picture and that is one of the few things i saw from the manifesto pretty clear rendition too.

I mean, he was a decent artist

of himself looking in the mirror and a demon staring back at him.

I mean, that's like, that seems like a page one story.

Yes.

This guy was possessed or at least influenced by, in him, was some supernatural force causing him to murder kids.

And think about the two

opposing errors that have led to this just in the last quarter century.

In the 2000s, I remember it vividly because I fell away from faith during this time.

There was the new atheism, materialism, you know, God's a spaghetti monster.

Come on, there's nothing but flesh and blood.

We're just, you know, synapses firing.

It's a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.

That was one error.

I think that's fallen away.

Yeah.

And we fell in.

I don't think anyone believes that anymore.

No, but now we've fallen into the opposing error, which is to say, actually, the material world has nothing to do with who you really are.

Your body has nothing to do with who you really are.

Your true self is this purely immaterial thing.

So

if you're a man, you can really be a woman or what have you.

And those are opposing errors that oppose the real dignity of the human person who is both spirit, soul, and body.

Once again, something I hadn't thought of.

So we've

interesting.

Do you think that the fact that people live their lives digitally has allowed them to imagine that the body has no significance?

Precisely.

And this is the point that I think a lot of people have not made, which is that, of course, the trans ideology is in many ways deader than disco at this point.

The Democrats are running away from it.

Are they?

I think so.

They're downplaying it.

It really hurt them in 2024.

I think they realize we reached peak sexual madness in 2023.

They at least have to publicly back off.

However,

how did we get to that place?

You could say, well, it begins with feminism, you know, the idea that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Men and women are the same.

Goes into the LGBT movement, which says men and women are the same.

Goes into gay marriage, so-called, which says men and women are the same.

So two men and two women are the same as a man and a woman.

Leads into transgenderism, a man can be a woman.

Okay, I see that through line.

But just think about the technological aspect.

If I live my life on this little portal to hell that's in my pocket

all day long I'm seeing exactly where it goes.

If that's where I live in my own perception, then my body really doesn't matter that much, does it?

I'm not like the biggest

Achilles in the world, right?

I'm not some hulking Adonis.

I'm not an athlete, but it doesn't really matter.

I just live in this virtual world.

So is it so crazy to think that your body doesn't matter at that point?

I think that's my instinct has been for the last few years that physical reality does really matter, even as I feel like I've had a heightened spiritual awareness and the dead certain knowledge that there is a spiritual, an unseen realm that is acting on us all the time and that that's as real as anything.

I sincerely believe that.

But on the other hand, I do see a lot of like

ignoring of the physical reality around us.

Yeah.

This is why, by the way, you're not like everyone's becoming Catholic now.

You've noticed this strange phenomenon.

I think this is a big reason why.

It's people, the decline in religion has tapered off.

Other denominations and traditions are growing, but Catholicism in particular is exploding.

Why?

I think it's because it's a sacramental theology.

I never would have called that.

Isn't it?

Yeah, 20 years ago, could you imagine?

At all?

Certainly not.

No, the spotlight series had just come out and

You're just like, this church is too corrupt to continue.

And I'm not, I just want to say again, I'm not Catholic, but I strongly agree that there's a revival.

And I just see it all around me.

And I think this is why, you know, I mean, the words at the sacrifice of the mass are,

this is my body, which will be given up for you, you know, and which is, which is mocked.

You know, the phrase hocus pocus, like in magic, is a mockery of haucus denum corpus mem.

This is, this is my body.

You know, this, yeah, it's a kind of a hawk.

haucus corpus,

hocus pocus is, at least that's a popular etymology, and I'm persuaded by it.

so there's this there's always this mockery in all of the kind of false religions there's always this mockery of of the real sacrifice but in a lot of religious traditions and i don't cast aspersions i had a baptist grandpa you know the gnoles come from maine actually this is uh the ancestral homeland of the gnoles amazing yes yeah i haven't made it up very often but a lot of puritan in the line but a lot a lot of us had ancestors in maine and it's you know they left

it's kind of cold cold and barren and it is cold yes but i think the reason why the sacramental theology is kicking up again is because we say, huh, you know, I've been living in a computer for 20 years and I don't even remember if I'm a man or a woman anymore.

But maybe my body really has something to do with who I am.

And actually, maybe this whole religion is about God becoming man and taking on flesh and dwelling among us and broiling fish.

I mean,

the first thing you see our Lord doing when he comes back, you know, he's resurrected.

He's standing on the shores of the lake.

He's cooking fish for his friends and eating for breakfast.

For breakfast, which is a hardcore.

Do they they do that

it's only in japan do they do yes in maine it's lobster but but there's brook trout actually people eat them from with baked beans i think that's why i think there's just and and covid ties into this too because during covid you were told your grandma has to die alone and you can't see her you can't go to christmas she has to die alone in a hospital bed if you're lucky you can say goodbye on zoom

And people recoil against that because it's just contrary to human nature.

You know, human beings are, we're like the angels in one way because we have reason, we have intellect and will, and spirits are, you know, don't have bodies.

But we're like the animals in another way.

The animals don't have intellect and will.

They have instinct and appetite, but they're bodies, you know, and we're, we're kind of in the middle of those two things.

And you can't ignore the, you can only ignore the body for so long before people say, no, you know, I'm a man, actually.

Believe it or not, even in, even in modernity, I'm a man.

I want to, I want to do stuff.

What's a sacramental religion?

How is that, or theology?

How is that distinct?

What's a non-sacramental theology?

It would be like the kind of religion that says that, well, the kind of religion Obama pushed.

You remember Obama, he wouldn't talk about freedom of religion, not religion.

He'd say, oh, you have freedom of worship.

No, you're free to, we're going to sue nuns.

We're going to sue nuns.

We're going to persecute Catholics.

Biden's going to imprison pro-lifers for praying outside of abortion clinics.

But you can have your worship in your own head.

Close your eyes.

You can think things in your own head, but you can't do anything.

And that's not what religion is.

Religion is, as St.

Thomas Aquinas says, it's a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves.

And you do it in your whole life.

And so a sacrament is the meeting of the material and the immaterial.

The clearest example, the highest blessed sacrament, is the Eucharist, which we believe, and

certain Protestant traditions also believe, is really Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity, really, really present.

And this is confounding to modern man man who says, well, get me an electron microscope.

Let me see, I don't see, and actually, there have been Eucharistic miracles where the appearance of the bread is not maintained and actually gives way to like cardiac tissue.

That's a separate topic.

Even in the ordinary sacrament, it's this meeting of the two things.

When I go to confession, I confess my terrible sins.

I get down on my knees in a box with a priest, and the priest is acting in the person of Christ.

It comes from scripture because Christ says to the apostles, you have the power to forgive sins.

Whose sins you forgive are forgiven, whose sins you retain are retained.

That's a real authority.

He says that to the disciples.

Yes.

And that's a real authority.

It's not just a kind of abstract, you know, you can just forgive sins by, you know, spreading a message or something.

He's saying you have an actual authority.

You can retain sins if the person isn't really repentant.

And that means that when I'm in there confessing in a box to a guy in a collar,

God is actually forgiving my sins in the person of the priest or not, but that's a meeting of something I can see and something I can't see.

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Can I ask you,

as I've said, a Protestant.

I love Martin Luther.

I'm sure you hate Martin Luther, but I really love Martin Luther.

He had some very funny prose.

You know, he had really fun.

He was a spicy character.

Yes.

The real Martin Luther, not Michael Luther, who changed his name, Michael King, who changed his name.

But anyway, the actual German monk.

But one of the things that he got rid of indulgences, thank God, in my view, but he also got rid of confession.

And I don't understand why that has always struck me as a mistake and such a great thing that Catholics do.

And do you know, I mean, do you know the answer?

The Anglicans still have confession.

C.S.

Lewis confessed every week of his life.

I grew up in the Anglican church who never had that.

You never heard of it.

These days, unfortunately, they used to say the Episcopalians, it was twice the liturgy, half the guilt.

Yeah, well, zero guilt.

Yes.

You only feel bad about feeling bad about yourself.

I was at the national prayer service at the inauguration when that bishop wrist lady decided to take the occasion to scold the president and vice president.

Do you remember that?

Do I remember that?

That's the head of my church.

Yeah.

Do I remember it?

Like every Episcopalian, I know we were all texting each other, former Episcopalian, but yeah, no, she, well, she, I loved that because then the world could see what it's really become.

It's just, it's, it's repulsive.

It's not Christianity.

And she was just so obviously like

in torment.

Yes.

Yes.

This is not someone who's like experiencing God's forgiving love.

This is someone who's filled with hate.

And they all are filled with hate.

It's all a bunch of recovering alcoholic ladies with multiple divorces, deciding they're lesbian,

love the little outfits.

And then the priests are these kind of beta males or gay guys who love the outfits.

The whole thing is fake.

Yeah, but what do you really think, Tucker?

Hold on.

What do you really think about it?

About the Episcopal Church?

How much time do you have?

Yeah, that's

because That is a similarly Lutheran or Hilaire Belloc-like vituperation.

I'm not big very Christian.

But no, no.

I mean, it's had a huge effect on my life.

So obviously I'm a little mad about it.

I need to repent of my anger.

But I was just delighted that the rest of the world could see what it has become because obviously, you know, the Episcopalians ran the country and did a great job.

I would say much better job than the current people running the country are doing.

And they had a wonderful taste.

And so they built the prettiest churches, each with a red door.

My whole life, we had a red door on our house, always, every house, because we're Episcopans.

You have a red door.

And there's a lot that was good about them.

And I think people haven't updated their files and they don't know what goes on inside.

And not in every Episcopal church.

One of my closest friends is an Episcopal priest and a sincere and wonderful man, Godfather, one of my kids.

But

in a lot of Episcopal churches, it's hateful menopausal ladies like that and their gay sidekicks.

And it's just the saddest, ugliest, cruelest thing ever.

And now everyone saw it.

And everyone saw it.

And the other thing about it is,

if you go to church and your church is, you know, some lady spouting off about, I don't know, like, you know, the latest migration policy and whining about Trump.

Exactly.

Then, then put aside the political issue, you just ask yourself, well, why am I going here?

Well, that's exactly the question we ask.

I get this six days a week.

Why do I need to get this on the seventh day?

Especially when I could be in bed with my wife and my dogs.

Like she just asked me to get out of bed and like take a shower at seven in the morning, which I hate doing, to go to church, which I, you know, I really feel like I should be doing.

And this is what I get.

There's nothing transcendent.

It's all you and your little therapy session and you're like filled with hate.

Like, no.

But this is why

this is how, and in answer to your question, how did these things sort of decline?

I think part of it is it's, it's a spirit of liberalism that comes out and abstracts everything, first of all, away from time and place and community and family and body and just all like these really tangible things.

It abstracts it all into outer space.

And

then on the other side of it, it brings everything down.

that everything has to be totally not even egalitarian.

It's like a kind of Harrison Bergeron handicapping of everything.

You've just got to make, you've got to make the church like the world.

And there's a great line from, I think it was Fulton Sheen who says that if you wed the spirit of the age, you'll find yourself a widow in the next.

And that's what these, and the Catholics are not guiltless in this, by the way, because after the Second Vatican Council, there was a liturgical reform to turn everything into some happy, clappy sort of party.

The priest then faces the people instead of facing God as,

you know, leading us all in worship.

And

whatever, the age of Aquarius, I guess, demanded that in the 60s or something.

But I think people have had enough of that.

And I think people hate the disenchantment and the degradation of the world and just the physical ugliness of it.

And we

want to look up again.

When was the last time someone built like a catheter?

I mean, you go to downtown London, which has got to be the saddest place on the planet.

And if I didn't have family there, I wouldn't go there.

But I do.

And so I do.

And you go and you see that the prettiest buildings in the city were built before electricity or machines of any kind, actually.

And it's also tough to get around London now because my Arabic isn't very good.

So

there's that.

My urgent.

By the way, speaking of like things you couldn't have imagined even two years ago, I read Elon is now calling for the repatriation of like a lot of European, non-Europeans out of Europe.

Yes.

And I'm like, what?

Which obviously, you know, I understand why he feels that way.

But to say something like that, I would just sort of casually drop that yesterday, I think.

It's like, we're living in a different time.

Of course we are.

And it's not 2020 anymore.

I just hope that the return to sanity happens while Angela Merkel is still alive.

So she gets to see the undoing of her policies to flood Europe.

I mean, it's crazy.

To destroy it, to destroy Christian Europe forever.

Well, you know, this was the part I mentioned Hilaire Belloc, who has a similarly sort of delightfully acerbic style to what

are you allowed to mention him?

Yeah, is Belloc, are you allowed to say?

Belloc is, listen, he was buddies with Chesterton.

Chesterton's slightly more clubbable, so maybe you're allowed to mention Belloc.

But Belloc said in his excellent book on the Crusades, he said, look, excellent, excellent, highly recommended reading.

I can't even do justice to the vividness of his prose, his kind of both bloodthirsty and totally charitable way of writing.

But he says, look, the Crusades were lost.

We lost the Battle of Hatin.

It was 1187.

That was it.

It was done.

And we flatter ourselves.

We think that Islam is sort of done.

He's writing this in the 20s or 30s.

Yeah.

He says, we think Islam is done and Christianity is strong.

He goes, no.

Islam remains intact.

The only reason it seems like Christendom is on top is because we have certain technological and industrial advantages.

He goes, once that passes away, he goes, our moral certitude is totally cracked up.

We are in a much worse place than our opponents in the Crusades were.

Exactly.

I think that's really prescient and wise and true.

I mean, it's so obviously true.

And it was the affluence born of technology that rotted the soul of the Christian West.

I mean, wealth did this, just as it does to families.

And I'm not against wealth.

I mean, I

haven't accrued much, but, you know, I'm not for poverty for sure.

But I, it's also true that like generational wealth like makes you into a horrible person.

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I mean, this is, I carry around a prayer card.

Listen, I haven't sold enough cigars yet that I'm too worried about generation.

I'm going to ask you about the cigars because I don't, I don't know, how did you win up the cigar business?

But all that, but

I take it too seriously to address it parenthetically.

So

I feel as though I've got a really nice life.

You know, I've got a nice house.

I've got this beautiful family.

I have nice little doodads and things like that.

You have three sons.

Three sons.

Three sons.

I cannot produce.

It is true wealth.

It is true wealth.

And I can't produce a daughter, which means I'm going to go to a nursing home someday if I don't.

I need a daughter.

True.

So

that is the truest thing.

I'm sad for you that you already know that at 35, that your final hours will be spent alone.

And your boys will be somewhere with some hawker.

I'll be like, you know, he was a good guy.

Whatever happened to him.

What was his name?

Matt or Mark or something.

Anyway, he whereas if you had daughters, bedside vigil.

Yes.

Dad needs a scatheter shade, whatever it takes, like they will do it.

That's actually why I need generational wealth is just to pay for my long-term care.

No, you're going to have some Haitian lady who's out for a cigarette when you croak.

You need some daughters, man.

But, you know, I carry around a prayer card of Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible.

It was also a great kind of a rhetorical pugilist.

And

it's a great quote from letter 22, I think.

He would write all these letters to Roman noble women.

And it says,

Whenever you start to be enchanted by the pleasures of this world, it's not that you have to totally, you know, deny them all the time, but whenever you start to be enchanted, think about where you're going.

Think about how this is all going to end up and try to be now what you will be hereafter.

Easier said than done.

No, it's

yes, I couldn't agree.

I don't have my phone, or I would read you my favorite quote on that exact subject.

Every New Year's, my wife and I go to church.

We don't go to the service because it's an Episcopal church, but we go in the afternoon to say our prayers for the year.

And every year, you know, you sort of, I always feel like I get a message or it's like something resonant, like this year is going to require this quality in order to get through it and thrive in it.

And this year, man, the message was so clear, like this is all passing away.

And to the extent that you love

material things and

take great, you know, undue pride in your own stupid accomplishments, like you're a fool.

You're a fool.

I think you can kind of see this with Trump now, actually.

I think Trump is, and I probably, it happened after Butler, Pennsylvania.

Something seems to have changed in the way that he speaks.

I was just there.

I visited the White House to do some interviews and things just a week ago.

And what's so amazing is you are at the peak of imperial power on earth, the absolute head of the strongest government maybe that has ever existed, technologically certainly that has ever existed.

And you walk around and you think, you know, it's great and I'm glad to be here.

Even this.

It's a government building, first of all.

Exactly.

It's kind of drab, which is why Trump's trying to fix it up a little bit.

And even this, even this will pass away four years.

Well, even Trump's been kind of president for 12 years.

He's been the dominant figure in public life for 12.

His president will have been for eight.

And you think even this is going to pass away.

And you're going to be sitting in your bed with your Haitian nurse as you watch.

What is this about?

And she's going to be like listening to some game show at high volume and you're going to want her to turn it down, but you've got a tube in your throat and you can't tell her.

No, she doesn't speak English.

Literally nothing you can do about it.

You can't extend your life by one day.

You have no power, actually,

to control the things that matter.

And most of our power is destructive power.

You can kill people.

That's why heads of state love killing people, whatever they say.

They love it.

Because it makes them feel like God.

Yeah, Obama would joke about it.

I got drones.

I'm coming for you, Jonas.

But they love it.

They all love it.

I've talked to a lot of them about it.

They love it.

And the clever ones try and hide the fact they love it.

Well, you know, it's the burden of the office.

But that's not how they feel.

They take delight in it because it's an expression of power.

But, I mean, it is the weakest kind of, most transitory kind of power.

Yeah, of course.

And, you know, the three killing people.

The three material things that people want, fame, money, and power.

Yeah.

And they're, and I'm not saying I don't want them.

I'm not saying I haven't enjoyed the modicum I've gotten of any of them.

But one thing that happens when you get a little taste of each is you realize that it ultimately is unsatisfying.

Yeah.

It does.

And I was talking to a friend the other day.

Surprise is not worth winning.

Yes.

Right.

Cause you get there and you say, okay, well, now what do I want?

And do you know the exact, I've done a scientific analysis, the exact amount of money, fame, and power that will make you happy?

Just a little bit more.

Just a little bit more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I got into it so young that I don't, I don't feel that way at all anymore.

But I do think fame is not something anyone should ever want.

I don't see the upside in that at all.

I don't know.

Like, what could possibly be

the upside?

Sometimes you'll get a free appetizer at dinner if someone likes your show or something.

That's great.

That's great.

I like free appetizers.

I feel so obligated.

What does that mean?

Do I have to name my next kid after you?

Like, I don't like presents.

You know what I mean?

My next child, truffle French fry knoles.

Yes.

After, yes.

It's so true.

So, but just to go back to what's happening in the Catholic Church, I don't even know, is it happening in the church or is it happening under the

sort of wings of the church, auspices of the church?

Is it happening around the church?

Or is the church itself like experiencing a revival?

Well, it's, you know, we're all the mystical body of Christ.

So it's, you know, it's at the level of the episcopate, you know, the bishops and the pope and everything.

There's a new pope,

but the laity too, we're all part of the body of Christ.

And there is just something kind of happening.

And I think even, you know, I have this doc series called The Pope and the Fuhrer, which is about, it's really about Pius XII, who was the...

He was the Pope during World War II until 1958.

And he's this image of the old school pope, you know, the papal tiara, arms extended.

You're supposed to feel bad about that pope.

You're supposed to.

Cause the war or something, right?

Yeah.

And it turns out

none of that is true.

And so

there was a famous play attacking him.

This is how, this is everything you need to know about Pius XII.

There was a play that came out in 1963.

So long after the war, five years after.

But right before the papal council, I noticed.

Yes, right around the time of the Second Vatican Council.

Right.

How odd.

Promoted by the KGB and communists.

Interesting.

The way that...

Literally promoted by communists.

And the way that you know that it's all nonsense is, first of all,

after the war and then after Pius XII died,

everybody lauded him.

Everybody.

Not the communists, I guess, but secular, religious, Christians, Jews, everybody lauded this guy.

He was an amazing hero.

The chief rabbi of Rome converted to Catholicism right after the war and took his name, Eugenio.

Eugenio Pacelli was the pope, and he was Eugenio Zoli.

He said this man was an amazing friend of Jews and of all of humanity.

He was just an amazing friend.

He was painted as a Nazi.

Yeah, Hitler's Pope is what these ridiculous people, really promoted by communists, tell you.

But the way that you know it's all nonsense is.

What was the point to influence the council?

I think really.

My kind of deep thesis on the pious battles, which really exploded even in the 90s, much, much later, I see it as a kind of intra-Catholic battle.

So in that way, I I guess it would involve the Second Vatican Council and reforms afterward, which is

you had this man as a symbol of Catholic tradition, and you had people within the church who didn't really like the tradition and maybe wanted to change things.

And one thing about the church, you can't change anything.

Doctrine develops, but you don't change.

And I think it was a battle for the identity of the church.

You know, in order to radically change everything, Pius XII had to be slandered and calumniated.

The fact that the chief evidence against this man is an eight-hour work of fiction that no one has ever fully staged, absolute garbage by this random playwright, Rolk

Holkhuth or something,

is promoted by the KGB, tells you everything you need to know because the facts are just totally contrary to that.

The official story on 9-11 is a complete lie.

The 9-11 report is a joke.

You have the CIA following two men all over the planet and eventually even to America, right?

And you don't tell the FBI.

9-11 Commission, cover.

So what did happen?

What did the government know?

What did foreign governments know?

There was a cover-up.

Why?

It's been nearly 25 years.

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We're going to tell you, we're releasing one episode per week.

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Right then, ad-free our first episode airs thursday 9 11 september 11th you will not want to miss it join us now at tuckercarlson.com

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Interesting.

But even now, loathies, many years later, that the stench hangs in the air.

Yes, it's absurd.

It will dissipate with time.

You know, the church measures her years not in weeks and months, but in centuries.

No, no, no, no, no, that's right.

It's just, that's just interesting.

I know so little about it,

but my instinct tells me strongly that it was, that was a pivot point.

in history of the modern history of of the church.

Like what did, what was Vatican II, as we non-Catholics call it?

Well, listen, I'm a trad, a traditionalist in good standing.

I attend the traditional Latin Mass.

I have my totally unexpired trad card.

But the trick here is one can't criticize, one can't totally reject the council.

This is an ecumenical council that was legitimately called by the church with dogmatic constitutions.

So you don't just say, throw it out.

And the funny thing is,

People who talk about Vatican II are pro and against have never read the documents.

I certainly haven't.

So So what was it?

Can you just summarize it?

Well, yes,

it was an ecumenical council.

There have been many of these.

What does that mean, ecumenical council?

Bishops all get together.

So this is like, you know, the real deal.

This goes all the way back to antiquity.

And the fact that we talk about this one council as kind of the biggest one in the whole church is silly.

You don't talk about the spirit of the Fourth Lateran Council.

You don't talk about the...

Well, I think the reason that I'm fixated on it is because

as someone who's kind of pro-Catholic, I guess, I mean, I

Catholic curious.

I'm not Catholic curious.

I'm not going there.

I'm a Luther man.

But the idea that, you know, in 1950,

the majority of like immigrant kids in our biggest cities were schooled in Catholic schools

and that, you know, went to church every week and like it provided order and, well, Christianity, which I believe in.

And like, I'm very in favor of that.

And then post-Vatican II, this is just my like ignorant overview, that all collapsed.

And those, I don't know how many Catholic schools there were in 1965, they're probably less than half now.

All those churches closed.

There are lots of factors, but like, and then you have the molestation scandal, which was to some extent real and horrifying.

Yep.

And all these people leaving the priesthood and fewer people becoming religious.

I don't know.

It's hard not to see a connection between the two, but maybe I'm wrong.

Pope Benedict, when he stepped down,

he kept writing and he wrote a non-encyclical, but it was

the Pope before France.

He was the cigarette-smoking German.

Yes, the cigarette-smoking German.

He observed, he said, you know, part of what happened, because you have to distinguish between what the council actually said, which was relatively minor.

It's a pastoral council.

It's, you know.

And then there was this big reform that totally changed the mass and totally, you know, changed the smells and bells and the ornamentations, which matters because the way we worship dictates how we believe.

There's a phrase, lex orandi, lex lex credendi.

You know, if you worship a certain way, obviously, that's going to change how you think about things.

Of course.

It's going to change how you live your life.

And he said, you know,

the Catholic Church was swept up, just like every other institution in the entire West, was swept up in this cultural fervent, this cultural fervor of the 1960s.

And in some cases, it helped impel that fervor.

And it was like a, I don't know, like a

kind of a madness took over that all of these reforms.

And then what happened is the fever started to break.

And so after Vatican II, you get John Paul I, who was pope for 30 days, and then you get John Paul II.

John Paul II, in my mind, is kind of like the Napoleon of the Catholic Church.

He's a child of the revolution, but he's also the undoing of the revolution and is lauded, loved by conservatives, profoundly anti-communist, helped end the Cold War,

really important man, now canonized a saint.

After him, you get Benedict.

And Benedict said something really brilliant, which has been an, he said many brilliant things, but it's a real antidote to the spirit of the age.

He said, there were kind of bad actors.

I'm reading into this.

There were some bad actors who tried to use the council, to exploit the council, to say that everything that came before that contradicts what we want to do in modernity, that's got to go.

We've got to read the past.

only through the lens of where we are now.

This is a broader cultural phenomenon.

We do it with American history.

We do it everywhere.

Everything is just about us and looking back.

Of course.

And what he said is, no, no, no.

We do it generationally.

We do it generationally.

You can't imagine your parents having sex.

Yes, of course, you wouldn't mind it.

I don't know if you are minded.

Every generation imagines it's inventing everything out of nothing.

Yes.

What Benedict said was, no, no.

There is a hermeneutic of continuity.

The way we interpret the past is not by going in reverse.

It's that whatever we think

with our limited store of reason in modernity with all of our fashions and temptations and novel aspects we have to understand that as being in continuity with the past and if we think there's been some radical break

we're probably wrong who's more likely to be wrong uh the smartest most serious men for 1950 years or like you

me i'm more likely i agree right and so that that is the that that was the fog breaking i think but can i ask like what were the changes were there meaningful changes made during that council?

Yes.

Changes in the sense that there were certain pastoral elements

that were discussed and written into dogmatic constitutions.

So an understanding of religious liberty.

This one is sometimes,

Protestants love religious liberty, and Catholics do too, properly understood.

But this is sometimes considered somewhat radical because the church also believes error has no rights.

Error no nabet use.

What does that mean?

Error has no rights.

Well, in liberal modernity, we say that every cockamame idea, every deviant, ridiculous behavior is some human right, and we have to protect it with federal subsidies.

And the church says, no, no.

Error, when you say things that aren't true, when you do things that are contrary to your flourishing and to nature, there's no like right to that.

But of course, the rejoinder is error has no rights.

Well, that is pretty anti-modern.

It's quite anti-modern.

Yes.

It's about as anti-modern as you can get.

And you can say people who err have rights.

So I'm not saying error has rights, but people who err.

And the Catholic Church has a long history of toleration, contrary to what, you know, polemicists in the Enlightenment or what have you would say.

But a long, long history of toleration, going all the way back to the earliest days of the church, beautifully articulated by Gregory the Great, all the way up through the Middle Ages.

It's, again, these are the stories that no one's taught in the school anymore.

However,

you know.

That could be misinterpreted as to saying that, like, I don't know, we have the right to some like, you know, Satanist display in the courthouse or something, as activists argue today.

Totally ridiculous.

What else does Vatican II contain?

Vatican II.

Well, so here's my son.

Here's my actual question.

So

at the core of Christianity is a claim of exclusivity.

Every human being,

every human being on earth reaches God only through Jesus.

Yes.

Period.

Doesn't matter.

Like nothing else matters.

That's it.

That's the one, that's your ticket.

You can't board the train without it.

Did that change?

No.

Okay.

The answer is no.

Some of the confusion of this is there.

Well, there's quite a bit of confusion about that.

Part of the confusion is there's the claim in Latin, extra ecclesium nulla salus.

There's no salvation outside of the church.

The church does not change her view on that.

However, people are always asked this question, you know, what about my,

you know, Protestant grandpa or my, I don't know, my atheist dad.

or my Jewish or my Hindu or my Muslim or my white.

Can they go to heaven?

One of these is not like the others, but that's my view.

The Protestants.

Yeah, I would say, yes.

But

if you take a really

rigorous, exclusive claim here, and you say, no, sorry, you're all, you know, you're all totally without any hope.

And I guess what the council clarifies is that,

you know, we pray for these people.

There is no salvation outside of Christ.

There is no salvation outside of the church.

Salvation subsists within the church.

However, it allows for some, as a pastoral matter, some greater dialogue in this modern world.

Wait, no striatate.

What's the difference between Jesus and the church?

Well, Christ founds the church, and Christ is the bridegroom, and the church is the bride.

So Catholics, the official church position is unless you're a member of the church, you don't go to heaven.

Well,

this is something that would be sort of clarified at the Second Vatican Council, or maybe not clarified.

Maybe it's just...

leads to more ecumenical dialogue or something like this.

But that one could say, when you're baptized, you're a Christian.

You might never receive any of the sacraments.

You might never go to church.

You're baptized.

That's what delineates you as a Christian.

And

so we pray for the salvation of everyone.

A good example would be, because this is coming after the Second World War, so obviously they're addressing the Jews in particular.

And

the council states clearly that

the Jews are our elder brothers in faith, which is another line that's sort of used polemically in all sorts of ways.

And so, you know, God doesn't revoke his promises to his people.

And this can be taken into all different kinds of ideological theory.

That was the conclusion of the council?

Well, that's a statement of the council.

But this comes from St.

Paul.

Okay.

You know, St.

Paul says that

for the sake of the gospel,

the Jews aren't with it, you know, but for the sake of their forebears, you know, God loves the Jews because the call of God and the gifts of God are irrevocable.

So what does that mean?

This means

Paul was a Jew, obviously.

He was a Pharisee.

Yes.

What this means, and this gets back to what we were talking about at the top with sort of Aristotelian virtue as the mean between two extremes.

There are two views on this.

One is a view that says that, you know, you don't need Christ to be saved.

And specifically, the Jews don't need Christ to be saved.

And another view is that, you know, God's done with the Jews and forget about the Jews now and it's just only the church.

And what

St.

Paul is saying and what the council is clarifying is there's kind of a little bit of room for both.

Christ is the Savior.

He's the one Savior.

He's the way.

And the road is narrow and he's the way and the truth and the life.

And also, God doesn't hate the Jews.

And God still has a plan for the Jews.

And so this is something that the Catholic Church does that

other denominations and ideologies don't always,

they fall to one side or the other.

She brings in, well, what I would call the fullness of truth.

So what is that?

So that means that there are people who can go to heaven without believing in Jesus?

No.

Though

one could sort of unwittingly be following Christ

and one could have a, I don't know,

the firmness.

Unwittingly.

Well, really, you can't.

I mean, actually.

Zoom out a little bit again to natural religion.

This is another error that, well, was debated in antiquity and still comes up in modernity, which is the notion that

these pagan natural religions, they just have nothing of value.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

That sort of thing.

But that's not really true because

natural religion does have something to recommend it.

And I think Pope Francis got in trouble for recognizing that in all sorts of traditions, There is often a kernel of truth.

There is at least some truth in it.

In paganism, there's a kernel of truth.

You think of C.S.

Lewis, Barfield, and those guys loved the myths because it tells us something about our human nature.

And the first Vatican Council tells us that the existence of God can be known with certainty from human reason, looking at the created world.

There is more to it.

You got to keep going, you know, that God also reveals himself.

But that you can be certain God exists just by looking at his creation.

Yes.

Using yourself.

That's the truest thing ever.

Yes.

Right.

But in material.

Science gets you to God in the end because there's no.

I think so.

You think so.

Thomas Aquinas thinks so.

But a lot of people in the modern world, they say, oh, no, religion is just

kind of a private matter of judgment.

Well, they're children.

They've never thought about it.

I mean, that's.

And think about there was a new doctor of the church just named, just within the last few weeks.

That would be John Henry Newman, greatest theologian in the English language.

He was made a doctor of the church.

And Newman's entire life was spent inveighing against liberalism in religion.

You know, this kind of wishy-washy sense.

Who is Newman?

Newman is great.

He was a Protestant and very anti-Catholic.

And then

he became a Catholic, and then he became a cardinal, and then he became a saint.

And he was American?

No, British.

He was British.

I don't think we have any American doctors of the church yet.

I'm working on it, but unfortunately, I have like a fifth grader's understanding of theology.

So I don't think I'm going to.

I don't even have that.

But

I certainly believe, but in a childlike way.

Yes.

But so Newman was a British Catholic theologian.

Yes.

And he became Catholic.

And one of his conclusions, and it's something that we're coming to grips with today, is

we can know things.

We can actually know things.

That this modern idea that religion is just a matter of private judgment, you know, and so

you're a Shinto and I'm a Methodist and it's like, whatever, man, who knows?

You know, you just do you and it's all good.

And he says, no, religion is a public thing.

It's a scientific thing.

We can know something about it.

And he wrote a great book.

You look at the crises of the universities today.

There's a remedy to it, which is a book that he wrote called The Idea of a University.

And in this book, he says, you know, it's so crazy.

We have these institutions that purport to universal knowledge.

And increasingly, they won't even acknowledge God.

But just on its face, even if you're like the most hardcore atheist you can imagine, how can you even pretend to universal knowledge while denying God, the source and summit of all knowledge?

What are we talking about then?

We're talking about just like chemistry problems?

You know, that's kind of, that's so silly.

We're talking about data.

We're talking about an accumulation of numbers.

And what they say is, no, no, no.

Because we live in this world after the crackup of Christendom, where everyone has their own private ideas, you know, there's just no way of knowing anything for certain.

So we're just going to settle on certain economic matters.

We're all going to try to get rich.

We're all going to try to live in relative peace and we're going to leave that heady stuff.

You do that on Sunday morning.

And that's obviously impossible.

Do you remember 20 years ago, there was this phrase.

Oh, it hasn't worked?

Look around.

Well, actually, looking around here, it's okay.

But if you look in the city, it's not so great.

There was this idea that you can't legislate morality.

Do you remember that?

Remember the idea?

It was the operating thesis of the United States of America.

And yet, not one person ever practically believed it.

Of course not.

You can't pass a law about speeding.

You can't pass a law about jaywalking without recourse to morality.

Of course.

And when you come to that conclusion about practical morality, which is ultimately derived from your understanding of religion, you are going to impose a moral view on someone.

Maybe someone else is very pro-jaywalking.

Maybe someone else deeply feels in their sincere religious beliefs that they need to jaywalk.

All rules are based on a moral code.

Yes, and

they're exclusive.

You can't violate the law of non-contradiction.

Either you're going to have a law against jaywalking or you're not.

Either you're going to have a law against murdering babies or you're not.

And

you're going to impose that on people.

That's just that's how government, that's what government is.

Well, as soon as people started saying you can't legislate morality, they started giving everybody, very much including me, these moralizing lectures.

The country got more rigid and moralistic.

It's why you were described as disgusting for noting that Greta Thunberg is unwell when it's obvious.

Her mother wrote a book about it.

And exactly.

And sad, and she's worthy of compassion.

But

that, what happened to you is a result of this like epidemic of shallow, but highly aggressive moralizing that took the place of something that we had before.

Yes.

And that's why I think, okay, now we're going to get on our puritanical high horses about pronouns or whatever, you know, like which where you must put rainbow flags, which is in front of every doorstep

everywhere in the country.

We're going to get on our high horse about that.

But we're going to, we're going to shrug our shoulders when it comes to murdering babies, when it comes to the meaning of marriage, when it comes to whether a people can have borders in a nation.

Oh, we can't know about that, but we can know about some ridiculous Gnostic heresy about pronouns and identity or whatever.

It's totally incoherent.

And so, what you're seeing, and this to me.

Well, they just replaced Christianity with a much less forgiving religion,

a much harsher, crueler, less compassionate religion.

And false religion.

Well, of course,

definitely false, but in its effects, you could tell it was bad because it didn't elevate people or forgive people.

It wasn't kind to people.

It was cruel and unyielding and vicious.

And I mean, all these people got destroyed, literally driven to suicide.

If you don't like the God who loves you, just wait till you meet all the other gods.

Yes.

Because everyone's got to worship something.

You know, Bob Dylan was right about that.

So how did you go?

So you said that you were an atheist when you were at Yale, I guess?

No, when I was 13.

I was confirmed at 13.

In the Catholic Church.

In the Catholic Church.

And before my confirmation, I told my mother, I said, You know, I don't believe it.

Christopher Hitchens, he's so smart.

And, you know, Richard Dawkins, and I'm really taken.

I'm such a you thought Richard Dawkins was smart?

Listen, I was 13.

Okay, come on.

Come on.

And actually, the new atheism really appealed to punk 13-year-olds who thought they were smarter than they are.

That is the ideal audience for the new atheism.

Really?

I think so.

And I told her, I said, I don't want to be confirmed.

My mother,

she's, she's,

you're going through a phase.

You kidding, you're going through a phase.

Wise woman.

Wise woman.

She goes, receive the sacrament.

She wasn't even like super duper religious, but she said, receive the sacrament.

You're going to regret it if you don't, and you're going to come to your senses in a few years.

She was totally right.

So I did that.

I was away from the church, would have called myself an atheist or at least an agnostic for 10 years.

Can I just ask, what did you think was cool about, I mean, Hitchens was, I knew him well.

He was, you know, pretty clever.

Yeah, lots of good things about Hitchens, but his life was so sad that he was not really really an advertisement for atheism.

I didn't think

what did you think was cool about that whole

well, I thought religion was for stupid people.

Yeah.

I thought religion was for stupid people.

And I, of course, didn't know anything and hadn't read anything.

And my brain was

hadn't lived, but

I was quite wrong, but I was never in doubt.

And so I've been there.

Yes, yes.

I said, look, I just don't, I don't see God.

Bad things happen to good people.

And, you know, science has microscopes.

And anyway, and getting, actually getting back to the point on the reforms of the church and everything changing,

it was kind of weak liturgically.

There were all these sappy, effeminate hymns that were like, you know, about eagle's wings and stuff that was not really appealing to a young boy.

And all this nonsense.

The eagle's wings got you, huh?

Like, oh, God, it was such, you know, it wasn't even cool in the 70s when those.

And so, so I said, well, look, it's just so obvious.

Social proof.

All the smart people are atheists.

And then I get to college and everyone's an atheist.

And many people are much smarter than me at college.

But I did notice the smartest people believed in God.

Really?

Yes.

Yes.

There weren't a ton of Muslims, though there were a couple.

But across the board, the Muslims, the Jews, the Protestants, the Catholics were

smarter.

They seemed smarter.

Maybe their IQs weren't even higher, but they just seemed more with it.

They made better arguments than some stupid spaghetti monster nonsense from Christopher Hitchens.

And I said, huh.

And then I was presented with an argument for the existence of.

What an interesting observation.

Yeah.

There weren't even that many of them there, but you kind of say, oh, wow, it's a little bit the wheat from the chaff, you know?

They'd have to be the braver

section of the population, too.

This is one of the arguments to go to a liberal college is even just in your own politics.

If you can make it through and not be swept along the tide of liberalism, you make it through to the end, you will have heard every argument.

You will have heard every refutation of everything you believe.

You will either give up some of your beliefs, maybe some of you should, or you will become much stronger in your beliefs, which is what happened to me.

I left Yale much more right-wing than I went in, without question.

And I'm not the only one.

So I was presented with an argument from a guy who's smarter than me.

And he said, you think God doesn't exist?

What about the ontological argument?

And I won't be tedious with the argument, but the argument is basically God's the maximally great being.

That's this definition.

He has all the great-making characteristics, none of the corrupting characteristics.

It's better to exist than not to exist.

We would all agree with that.

We'd go off ourselves right now if we disagreed with that.

Therefore, God exists.

That's it.

That's the argument.

And Bertrand Russell, a great logician, atheist, famously threw his tin of tobacco in the air.

He would have had Alps if it had been around at the time.

He famously threw

his tobacco in the air.

He said,

by golly, the ontological argument is sound.

It's easier to think there's a flaw in the argument than to actually point out the flaw.

And

I said, well, darn, I can't refute that.

Then I read Lewis, C.S.

Lewis.

So who is this person who said that to you?

This is my roommate, actually.

Whatever happened to him.

Oh, he's my best friend.

Still this day.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, very, very close.

And he's a Christian?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he was a cradle Catholic, raised kind of megachurch Protestant.

And then he reverted to the church.

He was confirmed in the church later on.

And,

but, you know, he and I and some other people were kind of going through this together.

You know, so I would say 18 to 23, I was, I was really dragging my feet.

You know, I said, oh, C.S.

Lewis makes good arguments.

Chesterton makes good arguments.

Maybe I should read the Bible at some point.

That might be smart.

I'll do that later.

And I'm going through,

I finally, you know, seriously read the Bible at 23.

I said, oh, this is, is

this is true this is this is right you know first you have to accept that god exists then you say okay well is is jesus who he says he is

if he's not that's going to lead me in one direction if he does it's going to lead me in another direction then you have to ask yourself well is the church

what kind of church did he establish that's going to and there were plenty of protestants along the way who were really helpful in my return and thinking so you know i i it was very helpful this whole period but i took the long road i took the long route i could have just you know norm mcdonald the comedian Of course.

Of course, greatest comedian probably ever.

I didn't know him, really, but he and I, we would write each other long letters on, on Twitter DMs for, for weeks.

This is the strangest thing because I saw he was following me on Twitter and he wasn't following a lot of people.

And I was a huge fan of his.

So I didn't even want to message him.

I was so, and one time he sent out a tweet and it sounded kind of despairing.

Now we know he was dying of cancer.

Very sick.

I thought he was suicidal or something.

I just sent him a note.

I said, I feel bad if I didn't.

I said, hey norm uh huge fan of yours if i can be of any help i don't know that i can but uh

i'd be happy to and we started writing each other these letters and uh really yeah for for weeks every night just for weeks long essays really

to norm mcdonald on twitter dm it's weird it's this is one of the strangers right every night and he

He he would do this thing where he'd say, Michael, you know, I can't do it, right, Norm.

He'd say,

it would be prideful for me not to take you up on your offer.

Because, Michael, I'm not an educated man.

You're an educated man.

I'm having an undergraduate degree.

I'm not an educated man.

I didn't really go to college.

And then he would do this thing where he'd make it seem like he's just some old chunk of coal.

And then he'd use a word that I didn't know.

He was certainly much better read than I am and loved the Russian novelists.

And we were talking about religion basically the whole time.

And he said to me,

I don't know his, I still don't know his particular, the particulars of all of his religious views, but he said, you know, for me, I, uh, I told him how I converted, reverted.

And he said, oh, yeah, for me, I just, uh, I've just always known the Bible's true.

I just always knew.

I just, I'd read it.

I just knew.

So anyway, that's it.

And I thought, well, that's,

that's the better, that's the better way.

You know, it's, it's like Christ to Thomas the Apostle.

He says, you know, blessed are you.

You've seen and believed, but, uh, but blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.

And that was norm.

And that's another example, too, of you think, okay, the whole culture and all these smart people are atheists.

Norm is one of the smartest pop culture figures that's been around for decades.

Yes.

But he knew.

And it's just like,

everyone kind of knows deep down.

Everyone kind of knows.

That's totally right.

And that's why they're mad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

People feel judged.

They feel judged.

I never feel judged by like

the earth is flat people.

You know, I don't think the earth is flat, but I don't, it doesn't bother me that you do.

You know what I mean?

I'm gonna kick out of it.

I'll go down the yeah, whatever.

It's not a threat.

I don't, because I just, I know in my heart, it's, they're probably not, it's probably not flat.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

But the ancient Greeks thought that.

No, I remember thinking that even in early high school with the question of abortion and, you know, people just get hysterical about it, like hysterical.

How dare you judge me?

And all this is like, whoa, I wasn't even really judging you, but like, clearly you're judging yourself.

yeah because you know that you took a life and i you know there are all kinds of extenuating circumstances i get it but in the end you you killed the kid and that's how you know that you did the devil gets you this way because he says and before you commit the sin he says it's no big deal it's no big deal it's nothing it's it's a clump of cells it's nothing it's your freedom it's your body it's your choice it's your it's come on it's no big deal you're not going to feel bad

that means you just got to do it and then you do it and then that one second later he's in your ear he says you'll never be forgiven you can You can never admit this is wrong.

The second you do, you are damned walking the earth.

You are done.

You're done.

And I think that explains a lot of modern behavior.

It's totally right.

It's totally right.

If you ever watched a shout your abortion event, it's always like fascinating, weirdly fascinating to me.

And I always feel so bad for the girls because they, but they never really can muster enthusiasm.

for the abortions they had because, and you can see it right in their faces.

It's like, oh, I feel so sorry for them.

Can you imagine?

Well, this, you know, to make it fully religious, Peter Craif made this observation that even the language of the abortion, this is my body, is a satanic inversion of the Eucharist.

This is my body, which everybody knows.

I guess it's sort of, I'm just tying to the Norm McDonnell observation, which is, gosh, the truest thing.

You read it and you're like, oh, wow, that's true.

Even.

That was certainly my experience in reading it.

Even things I was like, oh, I don't like that, but I still thought that's true.

Yes.

100%.

So you know, you all know, because everyone does have a conscience, even if it's darkened by sin and

a little bit and

drugs and porn and, you know, like dumb classical

shiny like stainless steel.

But yes, I can imagine there are others who had darkened consciences.

Yes.

And but you all kind of know.

And then the other impulse, which is, you know, centuries in the making, well, it really goes back to the fall, but especially politically with liberalism, is this notion that we are really to be gods.

Ultimately, we are in control.

No gods and no kings, only men, and we decide.

So I never fell for that.

That's so obvious.

I fell for it.

I totally fell for it.

Really?

Then I never thought that was for all my many problems and lies I've believed and lies I've unwittingly repeated and all my many sins.

I never bought the word God's thing because we can't extend our lives, really.

And if you can't do that, then you have no power.

Tucker, you clearly don't read the news.

We're on the brink.

We're this close to curing death.

I see it every day in the headlines.

They've been trying it since Pharaoh, but they're this close now, don't you know?

You know, it's like salmon farming.

salmon farming is my favorite idea because it was something i just thought because i i obviously i love to catch salmon i'm a fisherman yeah i love atlantic salmon fishing they're you know it's hard to catch them there aren't that many of them and so the idea was people love to eat salmon let's just let's just have a salmon farm out there's make a giant net just breed them right there in the ocean like there's no downside it cures the problem yeah and salmon farms have basically destroyed wild salmon

both through the pollution and through crossbreeding with the salmon and and you know they don't spawn um and they've i mean we're in danger of like we don't spawn either by the way no exactly no but we're like in danger of losing atlantic salmon as a species because of salmon farming people are just starting to figure this out and but it's like it's a species of the same lie like i'm in control of nature oh shit we'll just salmon farm like yeah duh you know what i mean we'll just whatever it is

we have done that we have now uh exercised increasing control over how we spawn through contraception that's exactly right we Oh, now we're in control now.

This is going to lead to flourishing.

We're going to die off.

I mean, we have a global population collapse on the horizon.

So if you ended up like extending human life to 150 years, like the last 80 years of the life would just be like living hell.

Do you know what I mean?

I mean, for one thing,

I've always thought, this is like one insight I did have when I was young, which is the problem with getting old is not like bladder control and it's not even dementia.

It's, it's instead, it's remembering your youth and how much has changed and it's the burden of the past becomes unbearable.

And any old person will tell you this in their moments of lucid thought, they'll tell you like, I'm just, I can't believe how fast it went.

And they're, they're crushed by that.

Yeah.

So imagine living to 150.

And think about when they're all promising this, and there are people on the right who are really into this too, radical life extensionalists.

And they say, Michael, if you could take the pill to live for 500 years, would you do it?

I said, not a chance.

Dude, I won't take an Advil.

Like, pills are bad.

Okay.

Pills are just, let's just start there.

Pills are bad.

Anyone who wants to take a pill, fuck off.

Okay.

That's like, that's how I feel.

So I just, I strongly feel that way.

But why would you want to live to 150?

And this is the understanding.

I mean,

you know, the curse, you know, when we fall out of the garden is that we die.

But is that really a curse?

If you live in a world that's fallen, it's full of like

rape.

I don't think it's actually a great mercy.

It depends what you think happens next, I guess.

Yes, that's true.

And

people are, I think, also increasingly aware that something might happen next.

They're kind of clinging on to this hope that, well, I hope this is all there is, you know, and I just turn to worm food and take a dirt nap, you know?

And, and

I, I don't think that makes sense at all.

And the smartest people in history didn't think it made any sense.

I don't think anyone in history has really thought that

until Hiroshima, which was the ultimate expression of godlike power.

And that is what kills me.

I am the destroyer of worlds.

That's exactly.

death.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So what, okay, so if

all these young people are becoming Catholic of all unfashionable things, like that's probably the most unfashionable, you know, but by the standards of 30 years ago, becoming a Catholic.

Crazy.

It's crazy.

It's insane.

Yeah.

This is why I think

the vice president is probably the most famous convert in recent years.

And

people, his political enemies are always saying, oh, he's cynical.

He's just changing his views with the times or whatever.

I think, hold on.

You're you're telling me a guy who had a tough upbringing, who graduates Yale Law School, wants to start, is in Silicon Valley, then goes back, he wants to launch a political career in Ohio.

The way he thinks he's going to do that is by becoming Catholic?

Do you think that's going to help you?

No, it'd be, that's like the craziest thing to do if you were thinking cynically or opportunistically.

Well, it's a radical move, I guess.

And again, I'm not promoting it.

I'm not doing it, but I just, as an observer, I'm like, wow, that's pretty wild.

So I guess here's my question.

It's a political question.

If people, if young people are converting to Catholicism, like what else about their views is changing?

Everything.

Okay.

Everything.

So that's my sense.

Well, on the political level, and I think this also touches on part of the conversions, we're beginning to realize that history didn't start in 1965.

History didn't start in 1865.

History didn't start in 1776 or even 1620.

We're part of of something that's much bigger and much broader and much more beautiful, you know, and even just in our political order, we used to call it Christendom.

Now we call it the West.

And there has been an attack on that.

Going back many decades now, I think of Jesse Jackson marching down Stanford, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.

And people are beginning to realize, you know, it's not that I just want to preserve my town or my 90s liberalism or my what I want to preserve this great cultural patrimony that I've been given.

And that cultural patrimony has to go deeper than just aesthetics.

It has to go deeper than just abstract ideology.

You know, cult and culture come from the same root word.

So what you worship is going to define your culture.

And so

what's the bottom?

What's the foundation?

What's the ballast for all of that?

I think people, you know,

even beyond questions of conviction of the Holy Spirit and rational arguments and all that, they're just saying, well, you know, this thing's pretty sturdy.

It's been around a long time.

Belloc, again, Belloc keeps coming to mind.

He had this line.

He says,

I am,

he said it more eloquently.

He said, I'm required as a matter of faith to hold that the church is divinely instituted.

But for those who doubt it, one proof of its divine institution is that no other group conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.

Obviously true.

Yeah, the best thing I ever heard from a practicing Catholic in the last five years, I was, there was no one around as as a very close friend of mine tonight, and he was going on about Catholicism.

I was like, okay, but that pope is just, I just can't, I won't even tell you what I said, but it was hostile because that's how I felt.

And he goes, you sure you're not Catholic?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was the greatest thing ever.

He goes, yeah, I totally agree, but he's not the worst pope we've had.

Yes.

I was like, completely non-defensive.

This happens.

It's like,

let me tell you about the ninth century.

I think that's right.

If you want to win people over, don't be defensive.

Yes.

Don't tell me that there's no, that what I'm seeing isn't real.

Yeah, yeah.

Be honest.

Of course.

Of course.

I mean, it is.

Okay, but

I don't know that I've talked to too many Catholics about Catholicism.

Maybe they all feel that way, but I thought that was just a wonderful response.

Totally.

You know,

we have to remember that the Pope is fallible except when he's infallible.

And

sometimes God gives us bad popes to make us really grateful for good popes.

And the other point I'll mention on Francis, because, you know, obviously I had some questions about the Francis Pontificate.

Yeah.

I reverted during the Francis Pontificate.

This trend started during Francis.

Yes.

It might have been in reaction against many of the things that Pope Francis was said to stand for.

I don't know exactly how it worked.

That's above my pay grade.

But that's,

you think of like the progress of the church and our whole civilization, and we think of it as just like a straight line.

But I think it's a little bit more kind of like this, you know, and the papacy goes to having on for a little bit.

And there's some king is like arresting the pope.

And, you know, it's like kind of a little bit more circuitous, but it's always pointed in the same direction.

So there's not, it just reminds me of God using Pharaoh, blinding Pharaoh to the truth in order to save the Jews from slavery.

Yeah.

Which is what's described.

And

I always imagine that there's a direct line between the quality of the leadership and the quality of the people.

Of course.

This is why I came to the point.

But that's not always true.

So as America becomes more prosperous, the people become weaker and sillier.

Yes.

I mean, that's how I grew up.

I grew up in the richest country in history.

But there was a steady decline in the quality of thinking, certainly, and of behavior.

And of leadership.

And of leadership.

Yeah.

I mean,

is it H.G.

Wells who said democracy is the theory that...

Was it?

No, I don't know.

Who was it?

I forget who it was.

Who said democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard?

Is This is why I can't get into, I have

many,

I love the populist movement.

I was so into the rise of Trump.

I remain into the rise of Trump.

I think this has been the healthiest political awakening in my lifetime.

I think I'm all about it.

But

I can't throw too many stones merely at the leadership class because one, the civil authority is there for our own good.

It's in that way appointed by God in a certain sense.

And also, we kind of get the government that we deserve.

And if you don't know anything about your country and you don't care about your civic life and you're just going to be greedy, you're either going to, on the left side of things, just indulge in weird social stuff that's purely selfish.

And on the right side of things, you engage in economic selfishness and no one cares about the common good and no one cares about the body politic, then that's kind of where we are right there.

Yes, and you're going to get crappy leadership a lot of the time.

And sometimes you get a, sometimes you get a second chance.

So it's just like greed, greed and lust those your choices.

Yes.

And this, look, this is, this is classic political philosophy going all the way back, which is that greed, avarice is the beginning of evils in the city.

And it's natural and you, you have to try.

Worship of money is the root of all evil.

Yes, that's right.

So,

okay, have you noticed, I, I mean, I have a lot of young people who work for me.

I have children and all that, but like every

month or two, I'll run into like a younger person like at an airport or something and always strike up a conversation and they'll say things that, you know, super nice or whatever but like you just feel like wow the attitudes are people are getting by my middle-age standards pretty freaking radical it's crazy i was talking

you've had this experience for sure i have always been the most right-wing person in me too me too and i i've always been the radical i'm like man i better shut up because my thoughts are not welcome in public at all and all of a sudden I'm like feeling a little bit more moderate.

Yes.

Well, that's good.

Listen, now we can go on TV and say, look, I'm the moderate.

okay

i've never felt moderate in my life i i was talking to a professor uh who is very very right-wing and he said michael it's the craziest thing for the first time in my life i'm being outflanked by my students i'm being outflanked he says it's never happened before and now part of this obviously is like a pendulum was like so far over here you know trans your kids and kill the ones that you don't trans

it's going to fly back in the other direction the which is good that's a healthy impulse this is where however one must have a solid foundation with proper authority and guardrails and everything.

Because you need to make sure that you don't fall into the same error on the other side.

You want to get back to sanity and reason and be fully in command of your will and your intellect.

And you don't want to center your views on hating people.

You certainly don't want that.

You need charity.

I mean, you know, St.

Paul says, if you don't have charity, you got nothing.

Yeah.

Well, every wedding service in

1 Corinthians 13.

So, no, I think that's exactly right.

But I just wonder as like a political matter, here are a few of the things that I sense.

People feel free to say what they think in a way that is so inspiring and great and refreshing, but also a little shocking because what they think is like not what they're supposed to think at all or have been supposed to think.

I feel like there's a recognition that the whole like, let's put women in charge of everything just didn't work.

Cracker barrel didn't work out.

It didn't work.

Female leadership just didn't work.

I mean, I guess I wanted it to work.

I don't know how I felt about it, but it didn't work.

And people feel free to say that.

There's also, I have noticed from talking to younger people, a recognition that

democracy just kind of isn't working or our conception of democracy.

I don't meet really anybody who uses the term democracy non-ironically.

Yes.

Do you?

Well, when you go back to the framers of our Constitution, you'll recognize that they use the phrase democracy in a derisive way and as a warning of impending peril because even the notion that our country is a liberal democracy, that is a self-conception that came up in the 20th century.

It started a little bit in the 30s.

It really took off after the World War, and then it reaches its peak in the 80s.

That's when it gets escape velocity.

We're not a liberal democracy.

We have a democratic element, a healthy democratic element to our country.

And actually, in large part, I think it comes in because of Tocqueville's great book, Democracy in America, the best study of America Ever.

But even there, our regime is a mixed regime.

Our regime has a strong democratic element.

As it was initially instituted, it has an aristocratic element in the Senate, and it has a monarchical element in the president.

So you even think today, of all the kings around the world,

the president of the United States probably has more practical monarchical authority than, say, King Charles, right?

Adrian Vermeule made this point the other day.

I'm pretty sure the president of the United States is a more robust king than like the king of Norway or whatever.

And so our regime, this was intentional, by the way, and it's outlined as the ideal regime in the Summa Theologia, but it goes all the way back to Polybius, this notion that there's a cycle of regimes

because it's a fallen world.

And so maybe you have a monarchy, but it's going to degrade over time and it's going to become a tyranny.

What's the difference between a monarchy and a tyranny?

A monarchy is for the common good.

Tyranny is for private interest.

You can have an aristocracy, you know, government by good, lots of, you know, a small number of good people.

That will degrade into an oligarchy.

I think we've seen a lot of that in recent years.

Common good versus private interest.

And you can have a democracy, and a democracy can be quite good.

You know, the virtue of the early American Republic, that can degrade into a kind of mob rule where it's just people pulling for their own factions and their own private interests.

And so you're going to have this cycle of revolutions that's going to go on.

What the framers of the Constitution tried to do was escape that cycle by instituting a mixed regime, no matter what they called it, a republic if you can keep it, or a constitutional system or whatever.

And it has held pretty well.

It has been increasingly democratized, so it's probably like leaned a little bit too much onto that side.

Trump, I think, now is trying to restore, and this is part of a

program that had been going on for decades, restore a little bit more executive authority to balance the whole thing out.

But regimes fall.

You know, that's the norm in world history.

And so we are at a real risk of that if we don't correct some of the degradations in our own regime.

So what would that mean?

What degradations need to be corrected in order to forestall revolution?

Well, here's one.

The 17th Amendment.

I do feel like this country is much more volatile than people publicly acknowledge.

Oh, yeah.

The 17th Amendment creates direct election of senators.

Today we say, what would be wrong with that?

There's nothing wrong with more democracy.

Isn't that good?

Have you met the senators?

I've met a lot of senators.

It's the densest collection of douchebags and liars and sex freaks I've ever met in my life.

I mean it.

And just wait till you go to the house.

I work

television.

I feel like there are more normal house members, but the Senate, I mean, there are some exceptions who guys I like

a lot, but only a handful.

I like that press.

Listen, some of my best friends are senators, but a lot of them...

I was just with,

I'm friends with a couple of them, and I say, well, these guys are freaks, man.

They're all freaks.

Like John Cornyn, what's his search history?

No, I'm curious.

You know, you don't know John Cornyn.

If you had a hold of that guy's iPhone, like, what would you find?

Any of these people, Ted Cruz?

I love Ted.

Oh, my God.

I love him.

He's a good friend of mine.

He is.

Okay, but I get, but I'm just saying, I'll leave Ted out.

I'm not going to attack Ted.

I've always liked his wife, but I'm just, I don't know.

Yeah, it's not working.

It's not, it's not, and think about how these guys got elected.

These guys, it used to be they would be elected by the states, which meant that the states had a role in the government.

You know, we're supposed to have states.

Yeah.

We don't really have states.

No, we certainly are because they're kind of all vassals for this imperial blob of bureaucracy.

But

why did we lose that?

Antonin Scalia said this to me me when I was a student.

I got to meet him a couple of times undergrad.

And he said,

we asked him about states' rights.

He said, Why are you asking me about states' rights?

I'm a Fed.

I'm a Fed.

What do I care about states' rights?

You got rid of your states' rights in the progressive amendments when you had the direct election of senators.

States' rights are done.

The civil rights movement killed it.

Civil rights movement killed it, the interpret the implementation of this.

I mean, every government office has a civil rights division now.

It's like Christopher Caldwell, an excellent guest on your show, and a great writer.

Wonderful guy.

His book, Age of Entitlement, basically

proves this

thesis that there's a parallel constitution, which is in tension with the old constitution.

So you do have a crisis of regime that's coming up.

And how does that play out?

I hope peacefully.

I really hope.

I think it can play out peacefully.

You know, some people on the right, they'll say, well, I want a civil war.

You heard this a lot during BLM and COVID.

I want a civil war.

On the left and the right, they say, I say, I don't want a civil war.

If there's a civil war, I'm going to have to shoot my cousins.

Do you know what you're saying?

I want a civil war.

Do you know what a civil war is like?

You know, Dante is one of my favorite writers.

Civil war ruined his life.

He said, it's like the worst thing that can happen because the whole point of a political community is to secure peace and order for the common good so that we can flourish.

And when you crack that, I mean, the whole political community is just an extension of a family.

The Spanish Civil War ended 85 years ago.

And you go to Spain now, they're still mad about it.

It still divides that country.

Yes.

Greece, same way.

It's kind of weird.

We have to be angry that the communists were defeated.

The Bolsheviks who were killing priests and racism.

Spain is a uniquely sad country.

It's a wonderful country and wonderful people, but oh my gosh.

Yeah.

They had a, that was demonic, obviously.

Obviously.

They began by shooting a statue of Jesus, so that was kind of a sign.

But yeah, and every evil person in the United States joined.

Yes, what is the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?

Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

I remember when I was a kid, I heard that.

Some guy died.

He was in the Abraham Lincoln.

I said, oh, it's an Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

I looked into it.

He's a communist.

Was Stalinist.

Yes.

He was Stalinist, like the entire American left was.

Stalinist.

This is why, talk about the changes in the 60s into the 70s.

You know, this is why they had to get Nixon.

They never forgave Richard Nixon because

he got Alger Hiss.

Richard Nixon knew that there were actual communists in the government at the highest levels of the State Department helping to found the United Nations.

And he knew it.

And

he believed Whitaker Chambers and he got him dead to to rights.

They never forgave him for it.

That's totally true.

And they made up this whole fake scandal and took out the most popular president in American history.

Yes.

No, I know.

It's very destructive.

But anyway, I guess the point is a civil war has

our own civil war.

It's only finally kind of cooling down.

And we're relitigating it.

Well, because Reconstruction never really ended.

Right.

Let's just humiliate the South and turn its cities into slums, which we've done.

So, yeah, no, it's all,

we don't want a civil war.

We don't want a civil war.

So how do we avoid that?

Well, I think we need

strong leadership, which we are getting in Trump.

We actually do have an executive on the right who's willing to do things.

This has been a big problem for the right because of ideologies that were essentially liberal, where the right said, you need to elect us so that we do nothing.

That was their explicit pitch.

If you elect me, I won't do anything because I want to principally,

with great dignity and integrity and principles, give away all the power.

Because if I ever do anything, then the minute the Democrats come into office, they might do all the things they've been doing for 50 years.

So we can't have that.

Yeah, it was national review Republicanism.

But either Buckley for that.

I mean,

Buckley at least, I mean, Buckley defended McCarthy, for goodness sakes.

He did.

He did.

He absolutely did.

Then he turned on him, but yeah.

At a certain point, it was politically incorrect.

But you think of those early days, Brent Bozell, you know, who Ghost Row Conscience of a Conservative, an amazing book.

Well, Brent Bozell meant it.

Right.

So he was exiled.

Yeah.

Because he really meant it.

He was mentally ill.

Okay.

And he went over after the Spanish Civil War.

Oh, I know.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He raised his family in Franco-Spain.

No, I know.

He meant it.

But, but that, look, there's always been this hodgepodge on the right of disparate groups, as you well know, that don't totally make sense together.

So you have the traditional conservatives.

Well, the fusionist coalition was the traditional conservatives and the libertarians and some Warhawk Democrats who wanted to take down the Soviet Union.

And I think it made sense at the time it uh common enemy in the soviet union i was there for that of course and it's i read commentary every month growing up did you got it at home yes we did you don't have any copies around here anymore i know i don't know where i was raised on commentary i mean we're like this protestant family getting the official publication of the american jewish committee i read every issue arch puddington yeah ruth vissa or whatever i think they all hate me now but whatever i i grew up reading i had one one of my favorite lines recently was from norman padhoritz who said they said you're the founder of neoconservatism he said no no I'm so old that I'm now a paleo-neoconservative.

I'm too old for that.

And this is, you know, there's the paleos and the neos and the libertarians and the traditionalists and the this is and and

obscure political monikers are the right-wing version of gender pronouns no it's totally everyone's got his own thing and this is what i love about trump is trump is trump an ideologue no do you what what kind of ism does trump ascribe to trumpism trump trump that's what he ascribes to americanism i guess i don't know This is a man who has brought together a disparate coalition of like weirdo, crunchy hippies and bow tie-wearing traditionalists and libertarians and Silicon Valley tech futurists.

And like, it's the craziest coalition ever.

And he has brought them together and won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years as a Republican.

And it's an amazing thing to see in action because he's got a vision and he's just a force of nature.

And so the question, I think, on a lot of our minds now, I think this is what all this Trump is dead discourse is about.

There is this viral meme that Trump died because he got a bruise on his hand or something.

He went to play golf one day.

They said he was dead.

No, he's still around.

He's around.

I verified that.

Yes, he's still around.

And I think a lot of that is an anxiety of, wow, we got this reprieve from all the craziness and all the decay and all the division.

And we're actually, we won the popular vote.

You know, things are on track.

And what happens next?

When the patriarch's gone?

Well, I mean, you know,

what happens in families when the

it can be really hard.

Yes.

It can be really hard.

I have a lot of confidence in JD Vance.

Yes, I think he's quite clearly at this point set up the vice president as the successor.

I hope that's right.

It seems like in the cabinet meeting the other day, he said, look, Rubio's done a great job in the 15 jobs that he's doing in the admin.

At least.

At least 15.

But he said in the cabinet meeting the other day, and I noticed it.

And no one around me seemed to have heard this line.

He goes, everyone's talking about what a great job Rubio was doing.

And he said, wow, Marco, you've just been amazing.

I frankly, I hope you never run for another office because I want you to do this for the rest of your life.

And I said, well, that seems like a win.

If those are the two most,

not popabile, they're the most like presidential abule, you know, of the, for 2028.

So that seems like he's saying, no, the vice president is my natural successor.

Trump drops these bombs in every conversation you have with him.

I haven't interviewed him that many times because it's so difficult.

Dizzying.

You're dizzying because he does the weave famously.

But every time I've interviewed him, like three days later, I'll think, did he just say that right in the middle of the, right?

Yesterday, he was doing an interview with the Daily Caller.

Right in the middle of the interview, he was talking about Israel.

And I love Israel.

And no one's done more for Israel than I've done.

And, you know, rooting for his day.

He's very pro-Israel, of course.

And then he goes,

They used to own Congress or whatever.

He said that.

He goes, you know, the Israel lobbies totally control Congress like nobody else.

That's not true anymore.

I'm like, did you just say that?

Yeah.

It was amazing.

I remember in the

interview or the the press conference with Netanyahu, this was months ago.

And I don't think I was taken in by theatricality.

I think this was real.

When he said, and look, what we're going to do is the United States is going to take over Gaza.

And you look at Netanyahu and he sort of like, he looks at Trump.

And he kind of looks nervously at the audience.

He's kind of laughing, but kind of not laughing.

And he's like, what is it?

He goes, we're going to take over Gaza.

We're going to build a big Trump casino there or whatever.

I don't know what he's going to do.

You know, hey, we're going to build it.

It's going to be beautiful.

It's going to be the Riviera of the Middle East.

And it was, it was,

it was so apparently out of left field and i'm not even convinced he's totally sincere on that i think he's a great negotiator and he's working uh other angles it was weird i was actually in the middle east that day when that happened and i was eating with a bunch of you know local residents um who run the government in the country it was in and i'm like did what it you know and i was actually sitting at the table and they played that Everyone's staring at this.

And I thought, I don't know what the hell is that?

Yes.

What do we have to with Gaza?

Like, my instinct is always like, we got nothing to do with this.

I'm out.

I'm good.

You know, it's like when girls fight, like, I don't want to get involved.

I'll take Monica.

I'll take the French Riviera.

I don't need the Gaza Riviera.

That's exactly right.

But their reaction was, I have no idea if this is true or not, but it was so interesting.

They're sophisticated, very sophisticated.

And they're like, oh, no, no, that's an attack on Netanyahu.

Yes.

That was their gut reaction.

He's basically tweaking Netanyahu's.

It wasn't a

haymaker.

It wasn't

collaborating on that.

It was a little poke.

And I i

do you think that too yes i think it was a little poke

in what way in the sense that it's in the cabinet meeting the other day uh trump was asked i said you uh promised that this war would be over permanently in five seconds after you were inaugurated and so when are we going to get a definitive conclusion to the war and he laughs definitive a definitive conclusion he turns to steve wickoff he says hey steve How long this, this, this conflict, this has been going on

thousands of years, is it?

Yeah, there's no definitive conclusion.

We're just trying to stop the bloodshed.

We're trying to establish some kind of peace.

And it was this brilliant move because

in what other way are you going to get the Israelis and the Arab League and

the Iranian regime all united in not liking this one plan by suggesting we're going to go in and take it.

And so, you know,

it's basically an intractable situation.

There will not be any permanent resolution probably until the second coming.

So what you want to do is just establish some modicum of political order.

What I would especially like to see happen is a preservation of the holy sites and pilgrimage access and all that.

We should demand that.

I mean, that's not even, it's like, no one owns Jerusalem.

Sorry.

Yeah, of course.

But there's easier said than done in a messy neck of the woods.

Well, and you're paying for it.

You can just be like, look, our first demand is Christians need to be able to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Oh, of course.

Of course.

Well, you know, I don't know.

I don't know.

It seems to me that the holy sites still seem to be okay.

In Gaza, there was unfortunately the attack on St.

Perfurius,

which I grant was accidental.

I don't think it was.

I don't see why, from a strategic perspective, it would be beneficial to the Israelis to particularly stick a finger in the eye of the Christians when America is your last political protector.

There's been a lot of it.

I don't know.

I don't understand it.

I think it's self-destructive behavior, but what I care about is the effect on Christians, and it's just not good at all.

Well, and you have to ask yourself, too, okay, what's the conclusion?

You could either have the state of Israel take over Gaza again, had Gaza from what, 67 until 05, then just gave it away in 05.

Hamas gets elected.

Hamas runs it for a little bit.

And then there's the October 7th attack.

Israel's going to say now, okay, this is an unacceptable security risk.

We're not dealing with this anymore.

So you could have Israel take it over.

That's going to be probably an unsatisfactory resolution.

You could have the Arab League take it over, some of Egypt take it over.

I don't know that they really want to do it.

No one wants to touch that hot potato.

You could have...

And then Trump just drops out of the air and he says, yeah, we're taking it.

And we're going to develop condominiums.

And we're going to ship all of the residents to South Sudan.

That was floated, I think, in the Israeli government.

South Sudan, the one place on earth that's less pleasant than Gaza.

And I don't think that's going to work out well at all.

And what is, I think Trump is totally sincere in what he says.

He goes, my solution here is not some permanent answer that will totally make the Israelis happy and totally irritate all the Arabs and the Persians.

My answer is not going to totally make the Israelis unhappy and totally satisfy Egypt or whatever, the Arab League.

It's, I just want some semblance of peace, which is where

I feel totally vindicated on this.

I've said for years, when everyone is calling Trump the N-word, you know, they always call him the N-word?

A nationalist?

Oh, yeah.

Always.

They call him the N-word.

And I said, I don't really think he's a nationalist.

He loves the nation.

He's a great patriot.

He supports strong borders.

But I said, I don't think he's really a nationalist.

I think he's kind of an imperialist.

He wants to acquire Greenland and invade Canada.

I don't think that's not generally what like yeoman farmers do.

Oh, no.

No, that's a Teddy Roosevelt move.

Yes.

I think his vision of America first

is that America will take due care to prioritize her national interests, part of which is accepting the political reality that we're the global hegemon and we need to maintain some modicum of world order.

And this goes back to the really

ancient conception of the political political order, which is that

the purpose of empire is to just have peace and order.

This is, you know, this is in the Aeneid, in book six of the Aeneid.

Aeneas goes down to his dad in the underworld, and the dad gives him this whole view of what's going to happen to Rome.

And he says, you know, look, different peoples are given different arts.

The, I don't know, the Greeks are good at making souflaki.

The Chinese are good at making bad soup.

And the Romans.

Awful soup.

Awful.

I've never even tried.

The pangolin is good, but I've never tried the bat.

He says the Romans, their art is to govern.

And

governing is not like fun.

It's not the most glorious necessarily thing.

In some ways, it'd be more fun to be a writer.

It'd be more fun to be a poet.

It'd be more fun to go.

But that's what the Romans are given, is to govern.

And it's just a job in the world, and someone's got to do it.

And you just need to establish.

relative peace and protect the rights of nations and just keep on keeping on.

Do you think we're suited for that?

I think Trump is quite suited for it as an individual, as a national leader.

Is America suited for it?

It's not how we started.

We weren't looking for it when the country began, but we got it.

I mean,

I totally agree.

Someone's got to be dad.

I mean, that is absolutely just the nature of man and there's no getting around it in shirking it doesn't make it go away.

So I completely agree with that.

That's where I do agree with the neocons, I guess.

Yeah, conceptually, yeah.

in a different way, like, because the neocons,

at their most extreme, would say, we have an obligation because of the demands of history with a capital H to spread liberal democracy around the world.

It's

just stupid.

It's crazy.

But like the smart, like, I remember David Brooks, who was impressive.

I know it's hard to believe, but at one point when I knew him 30 years ago, he was smart.

And he would say, look, you know, someone's got to take control because there has to be order at the center.

And that's not stupid.

Where I began to really hate the neocons, where my whole politics began to revolve around opposing them as an ideology,

not as individuals, but just the idea is bad.

Some of the individuals.

Some of them.

John Pedaris.

But

no, it's when I went to Iraq.

And the main takeaway for me is we're not good at it.

We're just like leaving aside the...

dumb spread democracy and all that nonsense, turn Baghdad into Belgium is stupid.

But what's not stupid stupid is the idea that you can't have disorder because it metastasizes.

And I'm getting there, my assessment and has not changed in 25 years is we're just not, we're not suited for this at all because we don't have the self-confidence required to do it because our society at its core is really thin.

There's nothing really there, actually, other than some distorted version of capitalism, which is kind of disgusting.

Do you think that was true, say, in the 50s and 60s, and it's changed?

I think the fight in the cold war the battle against the soviets gave a kind of clarity and purpose yeah but even then

you know the u.s um

sided with the viet minh actually yeah in 1954 at tien ben phu against the french like there was never really a kind of consistent

um that's

little known yeah but not even grand strategy but like a consistent worldview or instinct like the english for all their many faults at the height of empire the height of the victorian period like they really believed they were superior.

Now we deride that as racist, but you have to have that.

You have to believe my way is the better way, or why are we doing this in the first place?

To extract minerals?

Like that's not over time, people can't sustain that.

You really have to have an evangelical spirit, and we don't have that.

Well, and think about what Trump's been knocked for, especially in the recent Alaska summit.

He's been knocked for shaking hands with Putin and, you know, being nice to him.

Yeah.

And I think, well, hold on.

We've tried the other way.

Bush, W.

Bush, tried to talk a little tough or tried to be sweet and then talk tough.

And

Putin invaded Georgia.

And then Obama, oh, man, he talked tough.

After the reset failed and Hillary Clinton couldn't spell a simple word in Russian, then that failed.

And he talked really tough.

Oh, boy, was he tough.

And Putin invaded into Crimea.

And then you had Trump.

And everyone just kind of chilled.

And then you had Biden.

Man, no one talked tougher than Biden, huh?

Oh, didn't he have such moral clarity?

And

Putin invaded further into Ukraine.

The World Order collapsed.

The moral clarity thing is a clarity.

If you think that Joe Biden was a better leader or a better man than Vladimir Putin, like, I don't even know what to say to you.

That's insane.

There's by no measure, by no measure, did Joe Biden's country,

the people he solemnly swore to help and defend, did they thrive?

No, they withered.

Putin, who's been there for 25 years, his country's improved.

The people are happier.

They like him, actually.

The war has been a little tough on people.

The war has, of course, it's been tough.

Of course it's been tough.

I'd be curious about public opinion today, this far into the war.

Well, actually, it's measured a lot.

Yeah, look it up.

And you can say, oh, that's all a lie.

Okay, well, show me one.

Yeah.

Okay.

Go there.

And look, I'm not moving to Russia, but I mean, Putin has been the most effective leader in my lifetime.

I can't think of an effective one.

He's been a very stable leader for Russia.

But why is he more evil than Joe Biden?

Well,

I can't even conceptualize that.

You know, you could could say, look,

I don't know his religious views, but he's promoted Christianity within Russia.

Aggressively.

Yes.

To combat, you know, liberalism and all these other forces.

Joe Biden has imprisoned pro-lifers and sued nuts.

Well, exactly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Whatever.

But I guess the reason that I kind of pull away a little bit from the...

This is kind of neoconnie to me, is the sort of purely good and evil and sacred.

I totally agree with you.

And to me, I think, well, look,

I'm on the side of my country, even if Joe Biden is running it, which is a great pity if he is.

And I am because it's...

Dude, I'm with you.

Of course.

Patriotism is an extension of filial piety.

Just like, just like, you know, all liberalism comes down to saying, screw you, dad, like I hate my mom or whatever.

And I think, no, no, no, we are called to respect our parents and to love our countries.

And Russia

has...

interests that are not aligned with ours and they have missiles pointed at us.

And you think, well, okay, Putin, for all of his sins, Putin is defending the interests of Russia.

And I think there was a sense.

Look, Biden would say he was defending the interests of the United States or NATO or whatever.

He didn't do a very good job at it.

By the way, NATO, yeah, exactly.

And this is why you'll notice Trump doesn't use this good and evil language all the time.

And the way he talks about Putin, he says, look, Putin has interests.

He has hard interests.

That's so I.

And I have hard interests.

And if I can be a little diplomatic with him, I'm going to do it.

I'm reminded of, do you remember the Jeffrey Goldberg article in The Atlantic, which said

it was the Obama Doctrine.

This was back in 2016.

I'll never forget it.

This piece.

And what's so funny now is it was a fascinating piece.

Fascinating piece.

Goldberg is a liar.

I know him and one of the most dishonest people I've ever met.

Truly dishonest, but a very talented pro-stylist.

Yes.

And it's like an interesting reporter.

Oh, I read every word of that piece.

In that piece, they are lauding Obama for saying things like, Russia's always going to have a viral structure.

Oh, I know, Russia's always.

They're always going to have escalatory power.

Trump says says the exact same thing.

And all these people.

By the way, Obama, who I think kind of wrecked America,

comes off as pretty reasonable in that piece, just being honest.

Yes.

If you read that piece now and just like take Obama out and just put another name in there, it's like, I kind of agree with most of this.

And Trump is saying most of that.

Oh, I know.

And there's one big difference.

Trump can actually implement it.

And Obama couldn't really implement it.

The world order was fraying under him.

And so it is so ironic that these people who, you know, accuse Trump of being like a KGB agent or whatever, that these people

would, would knock Trump for saying the same thing that they were parroting for years.

Well, they're all just children.

Like, these are not, they're the people who told you that Russia was a gas station with nuclear weapons.

People like John McCain, like 95 IQ and his sad

idiot daughter.

I mean, these are just like not.

I've just gotten along with the daughter.

No, no, no, I never met John McCain.

She's fine.

I mean, McCain was charming in his way.

I mean, I love McCain, actually,

when I knew him

well, but a very charming guy, but like

not a serious person.

And at all.

He killed the repeal of Obamacare, which is very difficult to get over.

But he wasn't serious.

He was just a shallow wasp.

And he was one of the last of the true

hawkish anti-Russia, you know, coming out of the Cold War, though he was younger.

You just got a bomb.

You just got to

implement yourself.

He was this deep.

I mean, I spent a lot of time talking to the guy on the road, traveled to various countries with him, knew him, I think, as well as I've ever known a politician.

And there was so much to like about the guy.

He just was a charming,

very aristocratic bearing, hilarious, vulgar in a way that I always enjoy.

But if you pushed him on any issue, like he hadn't spent 15 minutes thinking about anything.

Yeah, you know, this is something you notice on Capitol Hill generally is there are some people who are very intelligent and decently well-read.

A lot of them, though, their skill

is not doing a lot of reading.

You know, that's not the skill that's laid out.

I went to boarding school.

I know what that is.

That's like memorize three famous quotes, throw them out like you've read the whole book.

And that was McCain, man.

He,

on any question, including the foreign policy questions he was supposedly an expert on, he knew nothing.

To say Russia's a gas station with nuclear weapons, like you're, you're an idiot.

This is the nation of, you know, like Tolstoy.

Like, I'm the winner palace.

Tolstoy.

St.

Petersburg, right?

All right.

There's no city in Europe.

There's certainly no city in the United States that approaches their two main cities.

Well, this is what was fascinating.

I mean, I'm now remembering.

It's just a fact.

And the fact that you got to interview Putin.

Yeah.

And when you listen to that interview, this is a man.

Say what you will about his yarn that he spun.

It was a very compelling yarn.

He had a view of his own country that was a very strong view.

And I wonder, look,

Trump, in his own way, tells a story about America.

He hugs the flag.

He kisses the flag.

He's got it really in his gut.

How many American statesmen today, after all these decades of just dissolution and hatred of country, how many of them can tell a compelling story about what the country is,

why we ought to love the country beyond mere filial piety, and where we're going?

How many of them are there?

It's hard.

I mean, because the, you know, who are the American people?

That's, that's the question.

And that's what.

really bothers me as someone who is not a race guy.

And I don't think your DNA should determine the course of your life or the nation you live in i just don't i'm american i'm from california i don't feel that way however all of history suggests i'm wrong because when putin talks about russia he's talking about the russian people

whose dna you can map and they're the indigenous population he's not talking about the chechnyans or he's not no no by the way he gets along with them really well yeah well that's the other thing i mean he's got 20 muslim population he's promoting christianity but the muslims all like him like how do you do that yes don't try that at home that's hard and and it's a skill that is, I mean, this is why I keep coming back to empire is because our country looks more like an empire than it does like a yeoman republic.

Russia certainly looks like an empire.

You know, it's got all spanning a continent.

It has all these peoples.

And so on this question, which is...

But we don't even know who lives here.

Yeah.

Trump said to me recently, we think there are about maybe 50 million people here illegally.

Yeah.

50 million?

I mean, but who no one knows?

The president of the United States doesn't really know.

We've got facial recognition technology, but somehow we can't know who lives here.

Yes.

And so when you talk about my country, are people who are, you can't even visualize who they are.

Yes.

And this, this gets, I mean, you just said, look, I'm not a race guy.

I'm not a race guy, of course.

But when you...

I'm a sexist, not a racist.

I always say that.

No one believes me.

I think about sex all the time, actually.

But when you think with this, what is America now, you know, in 2025?

There was this line where it's, America's just an idea, you know, or diversity is our strength or what all these kind of slogans from the 90s and 2000s.

You think, well, no, it's not.

A country is not just an idea.

There is a critical aspect, but it's not like an idea floating in outer space.

What are you talking about?

And so there has to be a real grappling with, okay, well, look, a country is also geography.

You know, like there is no America without the rivers, for instance.

Okay.

You know, it's not, the rivers aren't just an idea.

You're speaking to a fly fisherman now, Mr.

Knowles.

Yeah.

It's not a country without trout.

It's not, it's not a country without the oceans.

And it's, it's not a country without people.

And this, this also is where.

If someone can just like show up from Delhi and like start lecturing me about American values,

can't even speak American English and no one says anything like, hey, son, settle down.

You just got here.

Don't start lecturing someone whose family's been here 400 years about what America is.

Then there's kind of no America, actually, at that point.

Of course.

And so this is where even the grappling.

It's scary.

Even the grappling with ethnicity, you know, like what we, we've come out of this very liberal period where we have been told there's no such thing as ethnicity or race or anything like that.

Except it, but simultaneously, it's the most important thing.

All that matters is race, but it doesn't exist.

And the reality is, again, to this kind of via media,

it's okay.

It's okay when Joe DiMaggio hit a home run.

It's okay that the Italian Americans in New York got a special little thrill out of that.

It's okay.

They say, that guy kind of looks like me.

And he hit that home run.

That's kind of...

That's fine.

There's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong with recognizing that there are differences between peoples.

There are two simultaneous errors, which we fall into.

It seems actually at the same time, which is we say ethnicity means nothing at all whatsoever, and ethnicity is totally deterministic and means everything.

And the reality is, I mean, this is where our Christian heritage, Christianity, which animates the whole civilization comes in, is you say, no, we are in a very real way

all

children of God.

Like in a very real way, there's only one race, the human race, or whatever like the liberals like to say.

That is true.

And also, there is vibrant vibrant diversity among peoples and that's fine to acknowledge god created that god created that

as long as that is ordered toward charity as long as a proper love of that which is similar to one is is not ordered toward cruelty or any and is ordered within charity for the common good yeah that's called having a country of course when is we're not allowed to say that now

Yeah, I just feel like it's gotten,

I don't know, they've been so tough on whites for so long.

Yes, of course.

So cruel to whites that I think like

there's a crazy backlash coming.

Without question.

Yeah.

It's a well-deserved backlash.

It's already happening.

Is it?

I think so.

And, you know, as Tucker, you know, I'm part Sicilian.

A non-white people.

A racially liminal people.

We Sicilians.

I love Sicilians.

Children of the Mesojorno, yes.

And so you get a kind of look at it, which is,

I mean, even early on, I got these WASP ancestors and I got some Irish ancestors in there.

The Italians came in a little bit later.

And so there's a little mixing of all of Europe in there.

And

the reality is, in order to have

a sense of a country, you do need to have some kind of a sense of a common people.

And so to your point on the guy from Delhi, it's not even that the guy from Delhi can't be like quite American three generations from now.

But you can't, you can't just like land in a place and because you read a book about America or because you watched a YouTube video, you just totally get America.

To have a country is to have a lived experience that has passed sometimes ineffably, you know, without words from generation to generation.

I'm looking around your house here.

I mean, there's like pretty old stuff and you just kind of do it.

And there are habits that are inculcated in people.

And there are inclinations that the American people have, observed by Tocqueville back in the 19th century, that they're not even aware of, that it takes some random Frenchman to come in and notice it.

I totally agree.

So you got to be very careful.

And but i just want to be clear since i have a million indian friends and actually like india a lot as a country you hate the indians you hate

i'm like probably the most pro Indian uh right-winger you'll ever meet but um sincerely but it's not it's it's not even lecturing but showing up and lecturing me about what it is to be an American it's showing up and attacking whites yeah

And boy, did you see a lot of that?

And not just, it wasn't just Indians, but like people would, immigrants would show up, you know, taking all these benefits from the country and the permanent population here and then start immediately attacking whites now they attack whites because they were encouraged to do that by a ruling class like they got into stanford schools 100 and then they get to stanford and it's like oh you want to succeed you have to attack the whites yeah and they just they're status oriented all immigrants just like want to fit in and want to do the get the merit badges that this society demands they get and one of those merit badges required them to denounce whites And I felt like that is the most destructive thing

that you could ever do.

You know, I have a solution to this, though.

My solution to this, we're always told, you know, it's all just got to be kind of organic from the culture and the people.

And that's politics is purely downstream of culture and whatever.

I have a little more of a classical political view of that.

I think people respond to incentives.

Well, that's exactly right.

When you mention these institutions, I think, and Trump is very good at this, taking...

beating up Harvard, I think was a brilliant political attack.

You see some of that in Florida, taking in some of the universities.

It's happening around the country.

I'll give you a Pete Buticic.

I don't know Pete Buttigiec.

The fake gay guy?

I have a friend who thinks he's a fake gay.

Dude, my gay producer is always like, he's not gay.

He was with a girl like 20 minutes ago.

And like, he wants to be the Democratic nominee.

It's like, time for a gay guy.

He's playing the long game.

I mean, that is, that's going down.

Look.

Well, it's suffering for your art.

We'll say that.

He, look, just because I don't know him.

I know 100 Pete Buttigieg's.

I know this character.

Oh, wow.

And he went to the elite school, and then he goes to McKinsey, and then he does the checks.

And I think...

Then finds some benighted Midwestern town that he can just like become mayor of.

I'm a mayor now.

Talk about the great, I was talking to a big Democrat

figure, and he said, you know, say what you will about Pete.

He's the greatest careerist we've ever seen.

You're mayor of this tiny town.

You become the Secretary of Transportation.

No, but of course, but the town kind of sucks.

Actually, he didn't do a good job.

He didn't have the college there.

But I've always wanted to interview him.

He's never agreed to interview, but I'm going to ask him like some very specific questions about gay sex and see if he can even answer.

I doubt he even knows.

Where does.

Yeah, no, totally.

Yeah, I don't.

I'm gay, dude.

Stop.

Think about Pete Buttigieg.

If we controlled the universities, if we controlled the culture, and if the incentives in the corporations and all of the DEI offices, we can rename them, if all the incentives were not to be like America-hating,

gay, liberal, elderly.

Pete Buttigieg, I am convinced, look, this is purely my gut telling me this.

He would be like waving the stars and bars, doing dip, like whatever incentive were there, he would go to it.

And so I think this is where the Trump, a little more muscular view of politics comes in.

He says, no, forget about this stupid, like, oh, everything's just going to be organic.

That's never how culture has changed.

We're going to go in.

I'm going to.

pummel Harvard into the dirt.

I'm going to go in.

I'm going to pummel these bureaucracy, the Kennedy Center, whatever, and I'm going to create new incentives such that the best and the brightest and the most ambitious are incentivized to like our country and do good stuff.

It's totally right.

I'm at the inauguration January 20, sitting there and it was indoors for a so-called I can't remember why, but I'm sitting there chatting away, of course, sat next to Laura Ingram,

gossiping about Fox.

And all of a sudden, I look up and there's Jeff Bezos sitting like right in front of me.

Yes.

What's Jeff Bezos doing here?

And then all these people fire and see

our pot.

Wow.

Yeah, that's right.

I noticed all of a sudden after the inauguration, after the election, really,

my phone starts ringing from news networks that have never been interested in talking to me before.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden, some of the big corporations that we work with with my show,

they're more interested in helping us.

And, you know, they want to make sure our experience.

I say, oh, this is what.

power is.

Yeah.

And it is incumbent upon statesmen on the happy occasions that they get power through from the people that they actually use it in a good way and make hay while the sun shines.

So we have a couple of viewer questions.

We've never done this before, but,

you know, it's the internet.

I'm in.

Okay.

Lots of people asked this one, my producer said.

Michael Knowles, do you miss working with Candace Owens?

Well, you know, I still see Candace all the time because, you know, I'm the godfather to Candace's daughter.

Did you?

Actually?

Yeah, yeah.

I'm the godfather to Candace's daughter.

I'm

very good friends with her husband.

And, you know, it's kind of weird for a moment to hang out with.

Yeah.

We're have many Mayflower cigars

over the time.

And I still, I don't see Candace at work, obviously, anymore, but I do see her at church.

She actually goes to the earlier Mass than I do because she converted.

You know, she came into the church like a year or something ago.

And in fact, I was the godfather to her daughter before she came into the church.

And then all those smells and bells just kept pulling her in.

And there was, there was one time I was invited to the baptism of their next kid and I just couldn't make it.

It was, I was visiting my grandma or something.

And people kept telling me, like, no, you should really come.

I was like, no, look, I mean, I love the farmer family, but I'm

got to go see my granny, whatever, you know.

And they kept, I said, what's this about?

I don't know.

They have like a kid every six months.

So, like, they'll have another one soon.

And, uh, but, but then I found it was because she was being baptized and she wasn't telling anybody.

So, anyway, she came in, and now at least, uh, now at least I get to see her at uh at Mass.

So, people love her.

It is wild.

She has actual star quality.

She has this thing.

She could tell me something.

She could tell me something not only that I don't agree with.

She could tell me something about myself.

That you tell me I had blonde hair.

And I would just, the whole time, I'd just be like, go on, tell me everything.

It's wild.

I mean, I was telling this off there, but I was supposed to say it.

I was in Oslo, Norway last week, salmon fishing with my kids.

I'm coming, walking back from dinner with one of my kids in downtown Oslo.

And this guy comes up, goes, Tucker Carlson, yes.

You know, Candace Owens.

I was like, yes.

He goes, tell her that I love her.

And I was like, how famous do you have to be where people will come up to you on the street just because you know somebody else?

Where people will come up to another very famous guy.

No, it had nothing to do with me at all.

You say, you know, hi, I'm Tucker, by the way.

No, no, it didn't.

No, I was so impressed by it that I, it didn't hurt my feelings at all.

I, you know, that is unbelievable.

But yes, the main thing that he liked about me was that I knew Candace Owens.

I was like, wow, that,

devotion.

So I was impressed.

I called her.

I said, wow, man, you're really at another level.

I've got to start trying that at restaurants.

Hey, can I get a free dessert or something?

I know.

I know Candace Owens.

Not my birthday, but

okay, this is an interesting one.

This is a question.

I think I've inadvertently led my two sons, ages 25 and 23, to have a mindset to put off having a family.

I think I've made a mistake.

How do I convince them to hurry up, get married, and have kids?

The question, the answer that I would, or the evidence that I would need here is how old the kids are.

23 and 25.

You got, okay, 23 and 25.

Yeah, you should get serious.

You should, I mean, these days, you'd be like a child groom at that age, but you need to start getting serious.

I guess the reason is this.

I had a kid at 25.

Yeah.

I mean, people, people used to get married.

I have a good friend, very successful guy, though.

He struggled for a long time, six kids, got married at 20 or 19 or something and started spitting out kids right away.

And

the way to maybe present this to your sons is

we screw up everything in modern life.

We just get everything perverted or inverted or wrong.

And we now view marriage as the capstone to our lives.

Exactly.

We say, I've lived now that I've lived, now that I've had sex with 100,000 people and I've made a million dollars and now that I've done everything, traveled all over the world.

Now I'm going to get married.

Now that I have drug-resistant chlamydia.

Now that I have drug-resistant chlamydia and my brain is half melted, now I'm going to get married.

And you think, okay, that's not what marriage is.

Marriage is when two people leave their families, come together and become one flesh and do something together.

And so it's really supposed to be more like the beginning of your life.

But here's a real practical reason why you shouldn't do it that way.

I married my high school sweetheart.

You married your high school sweetheart.

Yes, I did.

And highly recommend it.

And I've seen many, many good marriages where people married their high school sweetheart because

it's like our bones.

You know, when you grow, your bones are kind of agile and malleable and they grow.

Yeah.

And then they harden.

Yes.

And then it's, it's, it's really really hard when two people harden into their own ways to mash that together but if you're still kind of young and a little more malleable even you know in your 20s you're starting to really harden your views uh you need you need to do that in such a way that you're fused together so i mean to me no it's that's right the notion of of divorce men get really rigid too as they get older living alone yes get weird

get weird and you i i'm entirely opposed to divorce.

I would not divorce under any circumstances.

I know people do it.

I know it happens.

It's a fallen world.

But

it seems to me that

if you're a whole set person and you marry someone and you sign a prenup and you keep separate bank accounts and you just, you're kind of setting yourself up to prepare for when you're just going to crack apart.

But if you do it.

a little bit younger and you're just totally in mesh all the way it's unthinkable yeah i also think you know young men especially are really concerned about the economy which has like basically been designed to exclude them.

And they feel like they're not going to be able to succeed and provide for their children the lives that they had from their parents.

Just as a math question, getting married is like, it's just, there's a lot of research on this, is the single most effective thing you can do to be more successful.

Yes.

Yes, of course.

I was talking to a buddy of mine, even with the kids, you know, when I had my, it took us a couple of years and then we had our first kid.

I said, oh, I hope I hope I have enough money.

I hope I, you know.

Oh, you will.

Yes.

My friend said that, that babies are like little money bags.

You just,

you just make more, you just make it work.

You were, yes.

When I had my first, I was working at the Weekly Standard, hard to believe I ever worked there, but for Bill Crystal, I know it's so shocking, but you know, he was a teacher of mine.

We have that, we have that in common.

Bill Crystal was a teacher of yours?

I did one of these fellowships, like a summer fellowship.

He taught me, I don't know, like Machiavelli or something.

And to think now,

I mean, now his publications have taken shots at me over the years.

And I just think, man,

where did you lose the plot, buddy?

I know what happened what happened.

I don't know.

It's distressing, but

I think he kind of collapsed inside as a person.

Depressing.

It can happen, but you can have to be on guard against it.

But anyway, I remember I had this editor called Richard Starr, who was such a nice man.

And I had this child at 25.

And he goes, your life's going to change.

And I was like, everyone says that.

What do you mean?

And he goes, when you have a child, especially when you're young, you realize you will do whatever it takes to provide for that child.

You need to rob a fucking liquor store.

Yes.

No problem.

Yes.

And I was like, wow, that's so true.

It even made me.

Not that I ever robbed any liquor stores, but like I said.

But you might have.

I might still.

When we got married, I was a little older.

I was

27 when we got engaged, 28 when we got married.

That's my one, I kind of wish we'd gotten married younger.

We were kind of moving.

We're long distance, all this stuff.

And it's, it's all works out in Providence, but it's, it's one regret I had.

We should have got my wife says it too.

We should have got married younger and started having kids younger.

And I remember, though, I started my show after I got married or right around the time I got married.

And I thought, man, thank goodness I'm not single in this career in particular because you're public.

Can you imagine?

You just, all you do is just like stay up late and go drink and screw around.

And that's, and when you're married and you have kids, you have a sense of purpose that you're doing things

for something.

Of course.

of course.

And if you're under like real stress, if you have, you know, the kind of performing in public or whatever, any job where you're like under pressure and you're feeling like you're on a tightrope all the time, but if you didn't have a wife, I don't know how you would do that.

Yeah, I almost all melt down.

I mean,

you know, you need a wife.

Yes.

You do.

I mean, even my wife will, she'll sometimes say, I'll do my show.

She'll listen to my show.

She'll go, you know, Mac, you were a little bit kind of lib over there.

You kind of went a little squishy.

I'll be like, man, you're the, you know, she's like the rock solid one.

She's the only person I'll ever let write some of my show.

She gets it.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not, she was no political nerd or anything like that, but she has a very conservative disposition.

Yeah.

And she just has this gut instinct.

When, when moms go right-wing, boy, they're not dicking around at all.

You know, I've seen that a lot.

Yeah.

Members of Congress who I respect 100% have wives who are like, what?

No.

Yes.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

No, I can think of a couple of them.

Okay.

Last question.

This is kind of a weird one.

Michael, do you detest boomers as much as Tucker seems to?

I was born in 1951.

What's the main thing I ought to do or stop doing to help improve life here in the United States?

So this is a boomer, I take it.

This is a boomer.

This is a boomerang.

Baby boomer, 1946, 1964.

Yeah.

I think.

The boomers have attracted a lot of ire.

Quite rightly so.

My defense of the boomers is they came from somewhere.

Yeah.

They came from somewhere.

So even, even, I mean, you know, the, our grandparents generation.

And they're human beings.

I don't mean to talk about them like they're animals.

No, but things went really screwy during the boomer generation.

You think?

You might have noticed.

And I think what it has come down to is an ideological selfishness.

I'm not even saying a lot of boomers, like they have all this stress and anxiety for their kids and the future.

And, you know, so it's not, it's not like even a personal selfishness.

It's an ideological selfishness that says, hey, I'm going to, you know, do what you want.

Hey, follow your bliss.

Do what makes you happy.

And I would say that came from a good place for a lot of the boomers who are a little hippy-dippy, whatever.

I don't think that's helpful to kids.

I actually think a little bit more clarity is better.

Clarity is charity.

And I think a little bit more on the guardrails, a little bit more of saying, hey, son,

don't just follow your bliss.

You're doing.

It's just ideological selfishness.

Boy, that is, I've never thought of that.

That is really smart.

Because it is, of course, it's true that boomers, which again is everybody born between, you know, know the end of world war ii and yeah just before woodstock um there are a lot of nice people who really care about their kids and grandkids but they but it's ideological yes they they can't even say what are you talking about if i were to say that right is right and wrong is wrong well i'd be that would be i don't know authoritarian or judgmental yes yeah and you think well

You have to make judgments in life.

And sometimes parents actually do know what's best for their kids.

And you just need to, I think,

have the confidence to state that.

Have the confidence to help your kid, even if it might make him angry in the short run.

Let me, that's a really smart point.

Let me just end by asking you, because I'm legit interested.

How did you get into the tobacco business?

Can I offer you one?

I don't want to make you smoke at 10 o'clock in the morning, but I'm going shooting after this.

I'm going to burn one of these.

Okay, great.

I can't wait.

have loved cigars since I was 15, which is a little old to start in New York as an Italian American.

But But I was, you know.

Totally.

If I ever get rich, I'm going to start a Nicotine for the Children Foundation just to make sure that they have enough.

I'm serious.

There's a charity.

I mean, there's a degree more.

I was 15, and I never liked cigarettes.

I never liked, but I loved cigars.

And

a family friend gave me one when I was 15.

I really liked it.

And I would go grocery shopping in the Bronx, in the Italian neighborhood.

And they had these guys rolling the cigars.

And I was too young to buy them.

So they would just give them to me.

They gave me four a week.

And I got into it.

I smoked them.

I really

wrote my college admission essay about how much I love cigars.

I called it the Count of Monte Cristo.

Because I said, write about something you're passionate about.

I'm very passionate about cigars.

They let you into Yale, one of the cigars they

probably wouldn't have worked out today.

Yeah.

Better than writing about my.

Were your parents big donors?

They weren't.

Safe to say they were not.

And I, so the story of this company, I wanted to start that for a long time because despite my swarthy appearance, I do have this kind of wasp Mayflower ancestry.

And I,

I said, I want it to be Mayflower.

I want it to be patriotic, but I don't want it to just be like, you know,

I don't know, guns and fried chicken cigars.

I want it to be a little more elevated, but there's this paradox with the Mayflower, which is kind of like the founding stock.

On the one hand, they're blue-blood elites.

On the other, these are salt of the earth people.

They're rugged, rugged, weirdos getting booted out of England.

Yeah.

And I said, I like that paradox because cigars are a luxury, but they're also very accessible.

You can have an amazing cigar for like $12, you know.

Yes.

And so I said, I want it to be that.

And I wanted to work with a particular company.

When I was a kid, my mother, shortly before she died, gave me a box of Oliva cigars, Oliva Series O Robusto for Christmas.

We did not have a lot of money, and this was a really nice present.

When she died unexpectedly, I still had half the box.

And I said, all right, well, this is, these are special.

I need to save them for special occasions.

Graduate high school, get married, first kid, that kind of thing.

Maybe I'll give some to my kids if I have any left over.

This is providential.

I was trying to start the cigar company.

It was kind of tough.

Daily Wire was allowing me to kind of explore this and use the platform to start a cigar company.

I said, oh, great.

But what do I know?

I don't know anything about starting that.

I'm backstage at a TV show and a guy calls out to me and says, hey, Knowles, you're a cigar guy, right?

I said, yeah, yeah.

He's like, oh, yeah, I got this cigar.

You got to come by this cigar club that I'm a member of.

I said, oh, that's a great idea.

I don't know him.

He goes, yeah, I'll give you one of mine.

It's an Oliva, rebanded Oliva.

I said, do you know Oliva cigars?

He said, yeah.

I said, I can't get in touch with him.

He goes, I'll put you in touch.

Well, that's fortuitous.

15 minutes, we have the deal for production and distribution for a test cigar.

Only because of a happenstance of business.

It basically couldn't have worked with any other company.

We go through it, we blend.

I'm blending meticulously.

I wanted to go to Nicaragua.

I had a little trouble getting into the country of Nicaragua.

I'm blending it for long distance, all this.

We finally launch it.

Now, how hard is it to get to the right blend?

If you're obsessive,

if you're horrifically obsessive, I was such a terrible person to work with.

That's the way to be.

But you have to be.

Because I said with those, I said, look, this is something I care about.

I'm not really doing this primarily to make money.

I'll make money other ways.

I'm doing this because this is a thrill.

I've wanted to do it for 15 years.

And I landed on a blend, a Connecticut blend, which is the Mayflower Dawn.

It's kind of the more mainstream one.

The Mayflower Dusk, which is an Ecuador Habano wrapper.

That was really blended just for my tastes.

And a double Maduro, The Mayflower Dream.

Comes from a painting by William Holsall of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor.

And it's an orange sky.

And you can't tell if the sun is rising or setting on America.

Which I love this ambiguous painting.

Is it, are we getting in tomorrow or is the light going out?

And I said, that's what I wanted to be: dawn, dusk, and dream.

We get the cigars.

The cigars are made at the same factory that made the box that my mother gave me.

No way.

Yeah.

How do you plan that?

Talk about Providence.

How do you plan that?

That's wild.

Yeah.

And so.

Do you smoke them?

All the time.

You smoke your own brand.

Oh, yes.

They were actually made for my taste.

And they are,

I say with no false modesty and true humility, they're exquisite.

And so we've got three lines now.

I even made the, I was, I was so brutal about it.

I made these little mini ones.

I call them Mayflower Compacts.

They're little petite coronas.

Yeah, that's pretty funny.

Thank you.

And they're, but they're a premium hand rolled long filler, so it's not a cigarillo or something.

I just love them.

And they, they sold out immediately, which good problem to have because I sold like four months supply in one day and was out of stock for Black Friday, out of stock for Christmas.

Fine.

We're picking up production.

We're now we're in retail stores.

This brings us all the way back to the top of our conversation because

One of the reasons I started this company is I want people, especially guys, guys, to get out in the physical world and spend time together and speak.

The best conversations I've had in my life are over cigars.

I agree.

And I want them to do that, not be in their rooms, not be just on Zoom.

I want them to be in this and to recognize, you know, thus passeth the glories of the world, sitransi, gloria mundi.

45 minutes, you have your conversation, and it's over, and you can light another one, maybe tomorrow.

But

I think it's instructive.

And it's whatever people say about the health effects of cigars, I have always found, and I think this quotes, was it George Burns or someone, that I've taken more out of cigars than cigars have taken out of my cigars.

I feel that way very, very strongly about tobacco.

Can you just start a cigar company and start selling them?

Do you have to go through FDA hoops or?

It's so hard.

And through sheer providential blessing, I was able to leapfrog over a lot of that.

It still took me over a year basically to go from beginning the deal to launching.

To get them into stores is almost impossible.

If I started because of all these stupid regulations, if I started a pot company, I'd probably be in 57 states in the country.

For sure.

Yes.

It's very difficult.

Certain states I just can't do business in.

I wish I could.

I have stores begging me for them.

I just can't.

I can't.

Why?

The regulations are so brutal.

I mean, certain places are trying to ban smoking just like forever.

Massachusetts, you know, tried to set a date after which you could just never buy tobacco.

So it kept aging with you.

So crazy, crazy stuff like that.

California is awful on the regs.

And so we're trying to sneak them out as best we can.

Yeah.

It does seem like tobacco should be part of the backlash.

Of course.

Is it?

Well, it's the American crop.

First.

Helped build the country.

Washington grew it.

Where did it come from?

The American South.

The American Indians.

And, oh, originally, that's right.

Yeah, it's not native to Europe.

It's native to North America.

And you know who really discovered it was Christopher Columbus.

I know.

I grew up the Taino Indians.

They would smoke them up their nose, which I don't think I've ever tried.

But yes.

The two things he took away in addition to corn,

tobacco and syphilis.

Yeah.

And I don't sell syphilis.

Or have it.

Michael Knowles, that was great.

Tucker, thank you for that.

And I really, really appreciate it.

And it's great to see you after six years totally vindicated.

You're not the disgusting one, Michael Knowles.

Thank you, Tucker, and thank you for your help.

Oh my gosh,

it was nothing.

Thank you.

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