Tucker: Charlie Kirk Spent His Life Above All

Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. Charlie Kirk was assassinated two weeks ago today in an event that clearly is going to change American history, changed a lot of people inside. And there was a moment in the first week where you thought to yourself, this is going to have effects, a lot of them are going to be bad, but some of them are probably going to be good because Charlie's life was itself so good. Charlie Kirk spent his life above all trying to live the Christian gospel and trying to live the principle of free speech, which is to say he talked and he also listened. He was most famous for traveling from college campus to college campus and asking people who disagreed with him to confront him. Ask me anything, he said, and he sat there patiently as they did, and they often attacked him. They almost always expressed views he found repugnant and almost always he took those views seriously and answered the questions put to him as crisply and honestly as he could. That's what he spent his life doing. And in fact, he was assassinated while doing that. So if there's any lesson from Charlie Kirk's life, well, the first lesson would probably be sincere Christians tend to be really decent people. Maybe we should have more of them. But the more secular temporal lesson is that free speech is a virtue. It is, in fact, the foundation of this country, not only its laws, but its culture, and that we should protect it. And maybe if we seek to honor Charlie Kirk, we should emulate it. Maybe we should begin by asking our politicians to do what Charlie Kirk spent his life doing, which is to answer the question. Just calmly answer the question. We'll ask you anything and then you go ahead and answer it to the best of your ability. Like, for example, who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline? What happened? All the money we sent to Ukraine. Why haven't you released all the JFK files, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All the questions on your mind that slowly drive you crazy because no one will address them. Why don't we just ask them directly to our leaders and they get to answer? Nothing, nothing would honor Charlie Kirk's memory more than that. That is free speech in action. But nothing like that happened. Instead, the only real conversation we've had about free speech has been about Jimmy Kimmel, who is hardly a champion of free speech. In fact, just the opposite. He's a nasty little censor, talentless, a person who has many times on camera over the years chuckled and applauded as other people, his political enemies, have been silenced. A guy who has so little influence in American society and so little audience, he was on his way out anyway, has the job only as a result of some kind of weird political affirmative action where people who agree with studio heads get to have late night jobs. He is hardly the person who should be taking up the cause of free speech or become a symbol of it, because, of course, he's the symbol of censorship and has been for most of his career. And the other thing that we saw, maybe even more distressing than that, was politicians turn not only against free speech, but actively and openly announced efforts to censor the American population and use the memory of Charlie Kirk to do it as their justification. There are many examples we could pick. Here's a particularly raw one. This is from Congressman Moskowitz just in the House of Representatives eight days after Charlie Kirk died. Here it is. It's crazy what's going on on the social media platforms. There are so many conspiracy theories on what's going on with Charlie Kirk. Israel assassinated him, right? There are conspiracy theories about your personal social life all day. It is totally rampant. Big names on the right, Candace Owens, right, talking about how the what's been released as far as the dialogue between the perpetrator and his roommate is manufactured by the FBI, manufactured by the administration. It is totally rampant, allowing foreign governments to just perpetrate these platforms, all of these bots, all of the time to weaponize Americans. And so if we want to do something, then we should talk about Section 230. We should talk about how we're going to make sure that we don't let foreign governments poison our children's mind. And so I will work with you on that, director. I'll work with you on 230 any day. So there is the congressman talking to the FBI director. And there's a lot there and we'll unpack it. But the most telling line came right in the middle. And he turns to the FBI director. He says, they're criticizing your personal life. They're airing conspiracy theories about your personal life. Now, speaking for myself, I have literally no idea what the congressman was talking about. I haven't seen that. Doubtless, it exists. There are conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories about everybody and everybody's personal life. If you're in public, people are theorizing about you on the Internet, kind of the nature of the Internet and kind of the nature of having authority. But you'll notice that the congressman thinks this will be a compelling argument for the FBI director. He basically just says they're criticizing you and me and they're not allowed to do that. He's not even pretending that the purpose of censoring speech and that's what he's saying, we need to censor the speech, that the purpose of that would be protect to any vulnerable group, vulnerable groups. No, they're criticizing us. They can't do that. And then, of course, he goes on to blame unseen foreign actors. And by the way, that's something that I think most Americans who get behind, but that the congressman is not behind at all. If we want to take the influence of foreign nations out of our politics, most Americans would applaud. And that would start with not taking money from their lobbies. That would be a welcome change. But the idea that we need to censor what you say because the people who run everything don't want to be called out or have their personalized misdescribed or the subject of conspiracy theories. Well, that's not really reform as much as it's just kind of classic old fashioned tyranny, isn't it? Shut up. We have guns. You don't. And we're going to make you. And how are we going to make you? That's the question. So you may remember that last week, the attorney general came out right after Charlie Kirk's death and said there is a distinction between speech constitutionally protected, famously in the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights, and something called hate speech, a category that doesn't, strictly speaking, exist under the law, but which a lot of people seem to believe exists. And hate speech is never defined like most of the most powerful words that we use to punish people. Terrorism, for example, racism, it's never actually defined. What is that exactly? We don't know. Other than its speech, the people in charge hate and therefore it should be banned. And most people who understand the American story, who understand our government, who understand our culture, who care about continuing all of those things, reacted with outrage when the attorney general said that you can't pass a law that will strip from us our God given right to say what we think is true. She addressed it in such a ham-handed way that was obvious to everybody exactly what she was talking about. And they reacted. We did, too. But in real life, that will not happen. There will not be, I can say confidently in my lifetime, a law in the Congress that says explicitly any American who says something our leaders don't like, anybody who traffics in a conspiracy theory about our personal lives will be shut down, fined, imprisoned. An open, transparent censorship law will not pass through the House of Representatives or the United States Senate, will not be signed by the president. Why? Because it's just too obvious. So instead, because censorship is coming, if these people can help it, instead, they will invoke something called Section 230. And you're going to hear a lot more about this without question. It's never again explained very well. And the reason it's not explained is because they don't want you to know exactly what they're doing. So let me just give you the Cliff Notes version of what Section 230 is. Section 230 is a section, 230, within the 1996 Communications Decency Act. And it is the piece of legislation often credited for creating the Internet. It's the framework that Congress came up with at the dawn of the Internet to put parameters around what this is, to protect companies as they grew, to set laws around this new technology. And one of the laws that they made, Section 230, shields Internet providers, platforms from lawsuits. It gives them legal liability from lawsuits on the basis of slander, obscenity, things that are on their platforms that they didn't create. In other words, it creates a distinction between a publisher, like a newspaper, a magazine, a television network, and a platform, Google, Facebook, X. And the distinction allows the platforms to let other people post whatever they want without getting sued for it. They cannot be held liable. These big companies cannot be held liable for slander, hate speech, anything really on their platforms. And as a result of this law, those platforms have come to dominate news and information globally. In fact, when we talk about censorship, nobody's talking about censoring The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, because nobody cares. All meaningful information and all meaningful social movements are influenced by social media. So if you want to get people whipped into a frenzy, if you want to change your government, for example, you're not going to take out an ad in The New York Times. Of course not. You're going to get something going on the social media platforms. So they are huge. They are completely dominant. Information flows almost exclusively on them. And all of this is possible because of Section 230. Now, there's been a pretty vigorous debate for the last 20 years over whether this is a good idea. And there are arguments against it. One of them is, why would Google get a liability exemption when I don't have one? You run a business. You're just an American citizen. You can be sued at any time under our famously loose and destructive tort laws and you can go to business. You'd be bankrupt. You can be destroyed. They can do to you what they did. Alex Jones, for example, the FBI can join up with some activist group and take your business away. Wreck your life. So why should these big tech companies be exempt? Now, that's a real argument. It's similar to the argument about the pharma companies. Why should vaccine makers get a shield from lawsuits? If I make playground equipment, I'm vulnerable. If I make the COVID vaccine, I'm not. That's a principled argument. But what's interesting about the 230 debate is that both parties have been on both sides of it at various times. The Republicans for years were mad at the big platforms because they were censoring conservatives, which they were. And so they often muttered about revoking 230 shield protection unless they opened their platforms to all points of view. In other words, they wanted to use Section 230 to end censorship. There's no reason you should get a special carve out from the US government, from the Congress, if you don't treat people equally, if there's not fairness and neutrality in the way you allow opinions to be broadcast on your platform. That seemed like a fairly reasonable position. But things have changed. Now you're seeing Republicans invoke Section 230, pick up the cudgel that they hold over these huge tech companies and say, unless you censor, we will revoke Section 230. And by the way, they are following in the footsteps of the leftward edge of the Democratic Party in doing this. In 2020, Beto O'Rourke of Texas ran one of his many doomed campaigns for office, this one, I think, for president. And he said, unless they get hate speech off the platforms, we're going to revoke Section 230 and put these people out of business. By the way, the threat is enough. That was the hope. If we threaten them, then we don't have to do the censoring. We'll make Google, Facebook, Meta and X do the censoring for us. That was the idea that no one can accuse us of violating the First Amendment or being for speech codes. We'll make someone else do it. He lost. But then Joe Biden that same year, 2020, said, actually, yes, we should use this threat to force the big tech platforms to censor in ways that we like. And by the way, they did. They did throughout the Biden presidency, Facebook, Twitter, Google, all censored opinions the Biden administration didn't like. And they did this ultimately because they feared having their legal protection revoked. That's why they did that. That's what got them to act. And Republicans, the sensible ones, looked at this and said, this is completely wrong. It's totally immoral. It's illegal for the U.S. government to be imposing censorship on its citizens. It's against the Constitution of the United States and against, more important, natural law. These are not rights we were given by the Biden administration. These are rights we were born with. And when you take them away from us, you are the criminal. And they made that point. All of a sudden, you are seeing Republicans take the position that Beto O'Rourke and Joe Biden took just five years ago. Here, for example, and this will come as no surprise to you at all, you will not be shocked to hear this. Here is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina running for reelection, making exactly the same case that Beto O'Rourke made. Watch. Section 230 needs to be repealed. If you're mad at social media companies that radicalize our nation, you should be mad. Have a bill that will allow you to sue these people. They're immune from lawsuits. Oh, it should be repealed. Now, it's not clear from that clip exactly why Lindsey Graham is calling for the repeal of Section 230. Why is he threatening the tech platforms? And by the way, the pretext always changes. They'll tell you, well, we're against child sex trafficking as if anyone is for it. We're against terrorism, a term once again they never defined and don't have to. We're against drugs. We're against foreign influence. We're against bigotry, whatever. They will always give you an excuse and that excuse will make them sound like the virtuous party, like the good guys. We're here to save the vulnerable. But that's never the real reason. Censorship always and everywhere is imposed with the intent and always has the effect of shielding the powerful. They're the ones who don't want to be exposed. Free speech, by contrast, and this is the reason it's in our Bill of Rights, is the one great power that the powerless have, especially in a world where your vote may or may not matter. All you have is your voice. All you have is your opinion. And that's infuriating to Lindsey Graham's donors. And make no mistake, when he's calling for invoking Section 230 and taking it away, threatening the big platforms, he's doing that on behalf of his donors who feel criticized by random accounts on the Internet. And they hate it because the people in charge always hate to be called out. Censorship has one goal, and that's to preserve secrecy and secrecy has one purpose, and that's to abet wrongdoing. So people who are doing nothing wrong are transparent. People who are committing evil hide and censorship allows them to hide. It's literally that simple. And those people are the most powerful people in the country. So who's encouraging this? The donors, whoever they are, but there are lots of lobby groups, all of them on the left, pushing the Republican-led Congress to get behind censorship initiatives, using the cover of the Section 230 debate to get it done, to pressure the tech companies into making you shut up, into taking your opinions off the Internet, using algorithms designed to censor you without even a human being entering into the equation. No person will decide that your opinion is offensive and pull it off. The computer will decide that, and it will be aided by the massive exponential growth in computing power that is at the very center of tech right now, AI. That is the goal, to make certain that opinions that are disruptive to the people in charge never see the light of day. What's amazing, and what's especially infuriating, is that many in the Republican Party, the party that controls all branches of government right now, are completely for this, strongly for it. Where did they get this idea? Is this a betrayal? Oh, it's a betrayal. How profound a betrayal? Listen to Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska, a former Air Force general, describe who he's been talking to about censorship. And I appreciate John DeGriba, what HIT'EM and his ADL stands for. I know you've made us better with your feedback and ideas and recommendations, and it's been a treat to get to know you. We want to be in a country that makes clear that anti-censorship or any kind of racism is repugnant, unacceptable, not allowed in my space, and with zero tolerance for it, so we need to hold these companies accountable and work with them to take it off the airwave. It's hard to believe that's a real clip we actually checked. Is that real? Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska, a great and sensible state with tons of normal people, a former Air Force general, is he really colluding with Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL to take away your right to say what you think? Oh, you bet. That's exactly what he's doing. And make no mistake, the ADL is not an anti-defamation organization. The ADL practices defamation and slander and bullying and not in service of protecting a marginalized group, but in accruing power and by forwarding its goals, which are ideological. And if you don't believe that, go on the ADL's website and take a look at what the ADL considers hate speech. Hate speech, another one of those terms never quite defined, but the ADL has actually taken the time to define it. What do they consider hate speech? Well, among other things, complaining about drag queen story hour is hate speech, according to the ADL. Huh. Not being enthusiastic about the COVID vax. That's hate speech and it's dangerous. Noticing that the American population has changed completely in the past 30 years, thanks to immigration. That's dangerous hate speech. You should be punished for that, for noticing in your country that you were born in, no noticing. You can't notice that it looks completely different because of decisions that someone who never consulted you made without your knowledge, shut up, says the ADL. You don't only don't have the right to speak. We're going to scream at you and call you a Nazi and imply that you are the dangerous one. The people who opened up the borders to 50 million foreigners, but you're the dangerous one. Sure. You know what else is hate speech, by the way, reading the gospels of Matthew or Mark or Luke or John, the gospel itself, Christianity itself is hate speech. I know that because three nights ago, I recounted the Christian story in its essence over like five minutes and was immediately denounced by the ADL as someone who was dangerous and inspiring murder. But I'm not the only one. The ADL has actively attacked the Christian gospel for years, has gotten behind a definition of hate speech that includes the Christian story. That's not an exaggeration. That's not a fervid conspiracy theory. That's a fact. And you can look it up. So this is the guy. That's the guy, Jonathan Greenblatt of the most aggressively left wing democratic aligned, but much more important than that lunatic, anti-human, anti-American group, the ADL, completely corrupt. He's consulting that guy to decide how much speech you should have because there are ugly opinions on the Internet. Yeah, that's your Republican Party. Was he denounced by his fellow Republicans in the House? Was he denounced by the Speaker of the House, Speaker Johnson? No, he wasn't. They barely even noticed because they have the same views, not all of them, but an awful lot of them. It's unbelievable and it's counterproductive because once again, censorship is never enacted to help the powerless. It is always and everywhere an effort to shield the powerful, always. And in fact, as a counterproductive effect on the people, it is supposedly designed to help. How would you feel about any person you're not allowed to criticize? Would that make you like the person more? No, it would make you resentful and suspicious and would give you the well deserved opinion that this is not an egalitarian society in which we're all citizens. It's a hierarchical society in which the government has decided some people have more rights than others. So if you find out you're not allowed to criticize someone else, maybe the first question you might ask is, well, then why are people allowed to criticize me? And the answer is because some people have more power in our society or being used to pit different groups against each other or who knows what's going on. But none of it is consistent with the core promise of this country, which is we're all citizens under our government and we're all equal before our God who made us. It says that, but increasingly that's not the country we live in. We live in a country where some people have more rights than others. And that's exactly the kind of message you would send if you wanted to foment a revolution against your government, because it enrages people and it divides them from each other. Oh, we have to protect this group. What does everyone else think of that? They secretly don't like the group. You're not ending bigotry by enacting censorship. You're creating it, Dumbo. And this is specifically aimed at Congressman Bacon, who was somehow an Air Force general. He can't be dumb, but he's obviously not very thoughtful because this is very obvious. People don't like other people who get special treatment. Were you never a child? You never learned that? Who knows what the purpose here? It doesn't even matter. It is happening right before us. The people who are elected to protect us, who say they're our friends, are selling us out. And you can theorize as to why. And by the way, all of that theorizing is itself unhealthy. Where do conspiracy theories come from? Where do you think they come from? They come from living in a country where the government will never explain anything and lies constantly. So the next time you see someone in power complain about malicious conspiracy theories, stop him in mid-sentence and say they exist because of you. If you would just tell the truth, if you would live like Charlie Kirk and answer the question politely, reasonably, fully, there wouldn't be a vacuum into which lunatics would rush. We would have a plausible answer to basic questions like, what the hell is going on? But because you haven't provided that, what do you think is going to happen? People are going to have some pretty far out explanations. And maybe some of them are true, by the way. We don't know. Your behavior is so suspicious because you can't answer any question straight. Any. And you're spending your time talking to Jonathan Greenblatt, one of the darkest, most corrupt people in our society. Truly a divisive figure. Speaking of divisive, how many Americans have made fellow Americans hate each other more consistently over the years than Jonathan Greenblatt? Very, very few. Very few. And you're talking to him? So if this sounds like a paranoid rant, like, oh, that could never happen. Well, you should know that it is happening right now in the state of California. The state of California, like two weeks ago, 10 days ago, eight days ago, something like that has passed a law in the state legislature, both chambers, the state legislature. It awaits a signature from Gavin Newsom that would ban hate speech on the internet in California. Hate speech. Now, how do they define hate speech? Actually have the definition. I actually wrote it down because I was so shocked by it. This is happening. The state of California, if Gavin Newsom signs this law, and he has until October 13th to do it, people will be fined if the censors determine that speech constitutes, and we're quoting now, violence, intimidation, or coercion. What's intimidation or coercion, right? Or coercion based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other protected characteristics. Obviously, white Christian men are not covered under that. And so the society becomes ever more hierarchical with a Brahmin class and untouchables at the bottom, the opposite of the country all of us over 50 grew up in that had an egalitarian spirit where some were rich, some were poor, some were smart, some were dumb, some had good jobs, others were unemployed, but all of us were considered equal under the law and equal in the eyes of God. And that concept is the basis of a stable society, any stable society, and it was the basis of stability in this country. And laws like this and the attitudes that give birth to them to laws like this have made it wildly unstable, wobbly. It's so unstable. So as of October 13th, that could become law. Now that's a censorship law. Now they'll say, no, no, no, we're just, we're actually getting the platforms to censor. Well, right. You're getting someone else to do the job for you, but if you hire a hit man and he carries out the hit, you're the murderer. He participated in it, but you hired him and that's exactly what's going on here. The state of California under Gavin Newsom is about to, we think, censor the opinions of Americans, not to protect anybody, but to shield themselves from criticism so they can continue to do what they want to do in secret. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, applauds this. And in case you're not familiar with Jonathan Greenblatt, in case you want a sense of what he's like and what he considers hate speech, let's just go right to the tape so you know that we're not exaggerating. This is Jonathan Greenblatt of ADL. When you look at the prevalence of anti-vaxxer accounts that have been amplified and spread across Facebook, they don't show up on your network, but they show up every day to billions of people because Facebook profits from amplifying these voices, which are literally killing people. And freedom to express your opinion isn't the freedom to incite violence. But, but for Facebook, it is. And that needs to change. That's all. It's simple. There's nothing wrong with keeping all of us safe from violent white supremacists or hateful people. So criticizing the COVID vax is tantamount to murder. There's never been, I mean, obviously that's prima facie insane. It's untrue. It's a deranged perspective. But more than anything, you're seeing who Jonathan Greenblatt really is. He is a faithful Praetorian guard for the people in charge. This is not someone who's ever challenged actual power, not once in his life. That's who he works for. That's who he takes money from. That's what hate speech looks like. Anybody in charge can make you shut up when you criticize them or stand in the way of their aims. So in case you don't think this can come to the United States, one final clip, and it's a sad one, and it comes from the UK. Now the UK, obviously the country that gave birth to ours, a cousin, a country so similar to ours and so close, six hours by plane overnight, that we don't really think of it as fully foreign. It's not like going to Malaysia or Burundi or even France. It's an English speaking country whose customs are recognizable, whose government and common law form the basis of our government and our law. Everything about England seems like home, but three degrees off. And yet the UK has become a police state. And if you don't believe that, if you think that's just hyperbole designed to whip you into a frenzy, here's a stat that we checked and it's hard even to believe this is true, but this is true. 2023, so like a year and a half ago, how many people do you think were arrested in the United Kingdom for speech violations, arrested by the police, handcuffed and brought to jail in 2023? A couple dozen, you know, the ones you see on X, the ones Fox News talks about. How many people in that year were arrested for saying things the government didn't want them to say? What's your guess? Is it more than 12,000? Cause that's the answer. More than 12,000. Wow. That seems like a lot. Is that a lot? It's kind of hard to know, right? Okay, well, let's compare it to the number, the widely agreed upon number from the most totalitarian country in the world, a country so lacking in basic freedom, a country run by a madman, a country that's so evil. We're literally at war with that country right now, just on principle, because we so disapprove of how they treat their people. And that country, of course, is Russia under Vladimir Putin. So if the UK handcuffed 12,000, more than 12,000 people in one year for saying things the government didn't like, how many were arrested in Russia? A country with twice the population of the UK. Oh, we happen to have the number 3,319. So to restate more than 12,000 people arrested in the United Kingdom, England in one year for speech code violations, 3,300 arrested in Russia, a country with twice the population. So that tells you, you don't think totalitarianism can come to the Anglosphere, oh, it already has. We haven't even touched on Australia, New Zealand, Canada, in some ways, even worse. But what does it look like? What is the face of hate crime prosecution? What does it actually look like when a citizen is arrested for saying something the government doesn't like? This video is not from China. It's from the United Kingdom. This is a British veteran being arrested for offending the government. Watch. I just wish police would realize how ridiculous this is. What did it need to come to? Because I don't understand. I posted something that he posted. You come to arrest me. You don't arrest him. Why has it come to this? Why am I in cuffs? Because there's something he shared, then I shared. Because someone has been caused, obviously, anxiety based upon your social media sites. That's why you've been arrested. Oh, yes. The velvet wrap jackboot of British fascism. You're being arrested because someone has been caused anxiety by your views. Notice that someone has never identified. And of course the answer is someone in power. Someone in the government or someone who funds the government, someone close to the government. Someone who has a lot more power than you, didn't like what you were saying, felt anxious about what you were saying. And so, unfortunately, we're going to have to handcuff you and bring you to jail. That happened this year. That happened in that's from January. And it happens every single day. More than 12,000 people arrested every single year for criticizing their government in the UK. Our closest ally with whom we share intelligence on every level. British intelligence. I know everyone's spun up about Mossad. Very close to Mossad. We're closer to British intelligence. That's the country we're partnering with to spy on our respective populations. Yeah. So it's really, really simple. If a government, if your government is willing to arrest you for saying things that they don't like, if your government is arresting you for criticizing them one way or another, you need a new government. If there is any justification for revolution, it's that that's unacceptable. That's tyranny. A government that does that is not a legitimate government. It has absolutely no right to do that. And it should be stopped from doing that immediately. That's the red line right there.