Tucker on Macklemore’s Cancellation and the So-Called “Conservatives” Championing Censorship

The Tucker Carlson Show

Tucker Carlson reflects on the murder of Charlie Kirk and uses his legacy to defend free speech, arguing that censorship is always a tool of

Key takeaways

• Free speech is an inherent human right rooted in individual dignity and belief in God.
• Censorship is never about protecting the vulnerable—it's always a tool to shield those in power from criticism.

Main topics

• Free speech and its philosophical foundations
• Censorship as a tool of power

Notable quotes

"Any society that doesn't protect the right to tell the truth collapses and is also morally stained."

"Censorship is used to protect the powerful from criticism, to gird and protect their power."

Conclusion

True free speech requires protecting even unpopular or offensive views

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore. Because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began. Turning dreams into direction. Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. So, where will your journey take you? Etihad. Beyond Borders. Speaker 8 (0:30) Last Friday was the year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's murder, and the internet was flooded Speaker 2 (0:35) with remembrances of Charlie, and unfortunately, even more so, all kinds of predatory people trying to use the memory of a fallen man for their own political or financial purposes. That's kind of always the case. We sat it out because that was depressing to see. But you did see people who knew him. Speaker 4 (0:54) genuinely well and liked him and weren't trying to profit from his death, raised the question, how do we honor his memory? And that is a completely fair question. But it begins with a more fundamental question, which was, what was his life about? If you were to remember Charlie Kirk, what are the first Speaker 2 (1:09) qualities of his that come to mind? Of course, are the personal qualities, enthusiasm and decency and energy and intelligence. But his beliefs? Well, as someone who knew Charlie well, I would sum them up this way. He Speaker 4 (1:24) believed all kinds of things, but the main thing he believed was Christianity. He was a sincerely religious man. He was a follower of Jesus. And politically, he believed a lot of things as well. Of course, he spent a life talking about them. But above all, he believed in free speech, the right of human beings to say what they think, to share their deepest beliefs. And those two are directly related. Charlie Kirk believed in free speech because he believed in God, and because he believed in God, he believed Speaker 2 (1:57) that each person was created by God with a distinct soul. God does not create communities. God creates individuals. And because they are individuals, sovereign individuals created in the likeness of the creator, each one has an inherent right to say what he thinks to his own conscience, to make up his own mind and to express his conclusions. So that's where the belief in free speech comes from. That's reflected, by the way, in the founding documents of the United States. These are inherent rights. They're not given to us by the state. We are born with them. And the purpose of the state is to protect them. And Charlie Kirk was an eloquent defender of this idea and a great explainer of this idea, not just eloquent and good at it, but really one of the very few left. There are not a Speaker 4 (2:47) lot of people explaining why free speech is important and what it is. But Charlie Kirk spent really... the entirety of his public life doing that up until the day he was murdered. We could have picked up a lot of clips to show you on the question of Charlie Kirk and free speech, but we just grabbed one and it's as good as any. Here's Charlie Kirk, I Speaker 2 (3:08) think last year, but it could have been any year, explaining what free speech is and why he defends it. Watch. I Speaker 7 (3:15) was wondering if you could talk about where you draw the line with free speech, hate speech, and slander. It's Speaker 1 (3:21) a terrific question. Speaker 1 (3:24) My position is that even hate speech should be completely and totally allowed in our country. The most disgusting speech should absolutely be protected. And it's not a viewpoint that is held by the left. The ACLU used to hold this viewpoint. The American Civil Liberties Union, they sued so that legitimate Nazis could march through downtown Skokie. You remember this? Back in the 80s and 90s? Now, why would the ACLU do this? Because they said, as soon as you use the word hate, That is a very subjective term because then all of a sudden it is in the eyes or the it is in the implementation of whomever has the power. So here's my belief. The more speech, the better. Well, exactly. Speaker 4 (4:10) So not only is it answer good, the question Speaker 2 (4:12) actually reveals a lot, too. So the question was, what's your view of free speech, hate speech and slander? And Charlie didn't explain the difference between those three categories, but it's worth just pausing for a moment. So there's free speech, which, as described, is inherent to every person. You Speaker 4 (4:30) have an inherent right. You were born with this right. You will die with this right, whether or not it's abridged, it still exists, to say what you think, to express Speaker 2 (4:37) your conscience out loud. There is a category called hate speech, which, as Charlie just said, effectively means speech that people in charge hate. And there's a Speaker 4 (4:47) third category called slander, and that's a legal category. What's the difference between hate speech or ugly speech, speech I don't want to hear, and slander? Well, it's worth saying the difference is slander is by definition untrue. That is the legal definition of Speaker 2 (5:02) slander, is factually incorrect. You are lying. You are lying about somebody or something. Free speech, and even this category called hate speech, Speaker 4 (5:13) Those are true things, and therefore they cannot be abridged ever. Why? Because you have to have the right to tell the truth. And any society that doesn't protect that right collapses and is also, of course, morally stained. On what grounds are you suppressing something that's true? So slander is by definition a lie, but Speaker 2 (5:38) protected speech is true or it's believed by the person who utters it to be true. And that's a meaningful distinction as well. I'm not lying. Of course, I've been wrong about a ton of things and will be again. But this is my sincere belief. I mean it. And that includes opinions, but also claims. I believe this is true. And so if Speaker 4 (5:57) you are ruling over people, which is to say human beings, if you consider the people you have care over or power over to be human beings, then by definition, you can never prevent their right to say what they think is true. Speaker 2 (6:14) Of course, because by definition, if you do that, you are not treating them as human beings because you don't consider them human beings. That's how you treat a slave. You don't have to listen to what a slave says because he's not a human being. So in the very same way you can tell your dogs to stop barking, you can tell a Speaker 4 (6:30) slave to shut up. Speaker 2 (6:32) Because he doesn't have that right because he's not fully human. So anybody in charge who tells you you're not allowed to say something that you believe is true is not treating you as a human being. He's treating you as a slave. That's how he sees you. And you should know that because Speaker 4 (6:47) underneath the impulse to censor other people, and it's always dressed up as something else, concern, protection. But what really underlies it, of course, is malice and contempt. I hate you. I don't consider you fully human. Therefore, I'm not going to allow you to speak. That is unmistakably the message of every attempt to censor speech. And as Charlie Kirk said pretty well in the clip we just showed you, it is always employed by the people in charge on their own behalf. In other words, Censorship is the process of the people in charge telling you you're not allowed to criticize them. And of course, they're clever enough almost never to say that, though. Increasingly, they are saying that. But in general, they don't. And so they dress it up and they say, well, there's some group that's somehow powerless and you can't criticize them because they don't have power and your criticism of them is cruelty and there's a Speaker 6 (7:47) power imbalance and you're punching down and we're not going to allow that on their behalf. Speaker 6 (7:53) Well, whether or not that's actually true, and Speaker 4 (7:55) we could debate it, the one thing you can be certain of is the group they claim to be protecting is just a proxy for them. It's just a proxy for them. Always, attempts at censorship are an attempt to protect the people in charge from criticism. And as famously been noted, if you want to know who is in charge, ask yourself who you're not allowed to criticize. That's just a fact. That's not a slur or a slander. That is a fact. Because of course, you would never affect censorship except in defense of your own interests. And that is 100 % of the time what happens. Censorship is used to protect the powerful from criticism, to gird and protect their power. Of course, there's no other reason for it. And because the people in charge are usually in every age, no matter who they are, fairly clever and ruthless, that's how they got there. They will almost always find some fairly sophisticated way to hide that fact. And once again, they will tell you that your criticism of their behavior is somehow cruelty or out of bounds. But no, what it really is, is a threat to their power, of course. And so Charlie Kirk's prescription is the only prescription. And he said this repeatedly. If you don't like speech you hear, there is only one way. There are not a myriad ways. There's one way. to combat that, and it's with more speech. Tell me how I'm wrong. And in fact, he spent the last years of his life touring the country, effectively asking crowds that. Tell me how I'm wrong. Ask me anything. I'll defend any of my positions, and I'll do so openly, at length, in public. And if he died for anything, it's that. In fact, he died doing that. And so if you wanted to honor Speaker 2 (9:45) his memory, of course, you would try to keep that dying tradition alive. No one seems to be doing that. But what you wouldn't do under any circumstances is Speaker 4 (9:55) do the thing that he devoted his life to fighting, which is shutting down speech you don't like with threats or censorship or even with back of the hand dismissals and name calling. No, you would pause and take seriously the criticism, even if you think it's illegitimate, aimed at you or your beliefs, and explain why it's wrong and offer a counter vision of what you think is right. This was what the right used to refer to famously as the marketplace of ideas, because the idea was that the market itself was self-correcting. That was the beauty. It was an invisible hand in charge of the market. And it would find natural equilibrium if you just backed off and allowed that to happen. So if two people had opposing views, they would debate those views in public. And then the people watching could decide which was valid on the basis of the strength of the arguments and the facts marshaled. That was the tradition of debate. In fact, that was the core of the Western tradition of discourse going all the way back to Athens. And that's what Charlie Kirk was upholding when he was murdered. And what's interesting is that the last presidential election, the 2024 election, though very few people said this out loud. really was a referendum in part on this because it was a reaction against what we now refer to as wokeism or cancel culture. Well, what are those things? Well, they're really two things. They're identity politics, Speaker 2 (11:20) the idea that on the basis of your bloodline, how you look, qualities you were born with, your genes, Speaker 4 (11:27) you are subject to different rules than other people. Certain groups get treated differently because of the nature of those groups. We are no longer equal. in our citizenship, some groups are treated differently, usually better, but sometimes worse. And because that is true, because certain groups get special rights, certain groups are the only people who can use certain words, for example, literally, because of that, we have to constrain the speech of everybody else. We need censorship in order to protect those groups. Speaker 4 (12:03) So to sort of move beyond the details of this or that specific controversy, that's a pretty accurate description of what wokeism and cancel culture were and are. And the truth is, most people find it tiresome, if not infuriating and immoral, to live in a country governed by rules like that, which are constantly changing, never fully explained to anybody, backed with by no principles whatsoever other than the interest of the people in charge. And kind of no one likes that. Who likes that? In fact, it is so universally disliked, that standard or shifting standard, whatever suits the people in charge. That even Alexandria Ocasio Speaker 2 (12:47) -Cortez, congresswoman from Brooklyn who hopes to run for president in this upcoming cycle, who is, of course, a great and famous practitioner of identity politics and wokeism, got Speaker 6 (12:57) elected to Congress on it. In fact, she was out there the other day kind of mildly denouncing it, saying that was kind of silly in the same way that people who screamed at you for not taking the COVID vax are Speaker 4 (13:09) now willing to say, yeah, we kind of went a little overboard, a little overboard, got a little crazy, caught up in the moment. And that's their way of acknowledging that their past behavior was reprehensible to some extent, but also their way of avoiding any penalty for what they did by half admitting that what they did is wrong. And they do this because they don't really have an option. I mean, nobody would defend the federal government's response to COVID at this point. And nobody, no sane person would defend wokeism circa 2022 at this point, because it's just so obviously awful and absurd and childish and cruel. And it hurt a lot of people. So the point is, if we're at a place where even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is admitting that wokeism is pretty stupid at best. I think we can say conclusively that everybody's against it. The problem, however, is that not everybody is against it. And this gets to the question of why it exists in the first place. It doesn't exist because it's a remedy Speaker 6 (14:15) to some obvious injustice, because there was just so much racism in America, so much anti-Semitism in America that someone had to act before people got hurt. That's just not true. Speaker 4 (14:24) There, of course, is racism and anti-Semitism and all kinds of bad attitudes. hatreds and all of that. But that's not what these movements are about. Every single one of them is an effort by the people in charge to protect their own power, obviously. And that's just always true, no matter who's in charge. And so every group that's in charge faces the temptation to dive headfirst into identity politics, which, by the way, has the ancillary effect of dividing the country to the point where you can dominate the country. Fight amongst yourselves. We sell you meme coins. or invade Iran or whatever. So there's that, but it's also just kind of a classic move employed by the powerful against everybody else. And so Charlie Cook understood this. He understood that when he criticized wokeism or attacks on speech or identity politics, Speaker 2 (15:15) he wasn't simply speaking to the people who were then in charge. And we checked that clip you saw was from 2021. Speaker 2 (15:24) During the early Biden administration, Democrats were in charge. He wasn't just criticizing them because he knew Speaker 4 (15:30) that in his own party, which was the Republican Party, there were people who, if they ever got power, would immediately embrace exactly the same worldview and employ Speaker 2 (15:40) exactly the same tactics against the entire country. He knew those people existed because even then they existed. And now, of course, they dominate completely the Republican Party. Speaker 4 (15:52) And we could spend hours going through the irony and pulling the clips of Republicans denouncing cancel culture. And then a year later, appearing on Fox News to champion cancel Speaker 2 (16:02) culture, literally the cancellation of people whose opinions they don't like. But we're not going to do that because it's just too easy and too depressing. Speaker 4 (16:10) But instead, we just want to show you an example of what Charlie Kirk feared. And we're not guessing about this. Lots of people jump up and down about the legacy Speaker 2 (16:17) of Charlie Kirk and try and grab it for their own. But we are totally confident. when we say that Charlie Kirk then, and were he still with Speaker 4 (16:25) us now, would oppose what you're about to see. Speaker 2 (16:30) So this is a Republican congressman from New York called Mike Lawler, and he's explaining his views on free speech. Watch. Speaker 1 (16:38) We have seen a rapid rise in anti-Semitism on these college campuses. And we need to crack down on it. This is not a free speech issue. This is hate speech. Chanting from the river to the sea was not aspirational. It was absolutely vile and intended to undermine Israel and frankly, call for its extermination. And that cannot be tolerated anywhere in this country. Speaker 2 (17:06) Oh, it cannot be tolerated. It's not free speech to have that opinion. It's hate speech. It absolutely can't be tolerated. Now, that man, Mike Lawler, who, again, is a Republican member of Congress, not one of the brighter ones, but still apparently a member in good standing of the Republican Party serving in the House of Representatives. A little over a year after that sponsored legislation. with his Democratic colleague, Josh Gottheimer, to ban criticisms of the government of Israel, to encode in federal law the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which is, well, seven out of 11 criteria are criticisms of the state of Israel, the government of Israel and its behavior, would be classified under federal law anti-Semitism, and therefore a hate crime. It would be illegal, for example, under the definition that he tried to encode in federal law. to describe what the Israelis are doing in Gaza as a genocide. But what if it is a genocide? What if it meets every definition of genocide? What if murdering 20,000 children could be proven, which it already has been? Would it be okay to say that? No. Not under that law, which thankfully did not pass, but it Speaker 4 (18:20) will someday if this trajectory continues. So here you have a Republican who no doubt would describe himself as a conservative, a constitutional conservative, trying to ban criticism of a foreign country, Speaker 2 (18:32) said it cannot be tolerated. And what's interesting is why. So this is not a blanket ban that Mike Lawler is trying to get into federal law where you can't criticize foreign countries. There are plenty of foreign countries Mike Lawler would like you to criticize. In fact, there are countries Speaker 4 (18:47) Mike Lawler's destruction has called for himself. Russia, for example, or Iran. countries that his donors don't like. So what you're watching here, Speaker 2 (18:57) once again, is the most powerful people in the society, Mike Lawler's donors, of course he'll repeat whatever they ask him to repeat, trying to encode their Speaker 4 (19:07) preferences and their advantages in our legal code. In other words, you take this 250-year-old country and you take the machinery of the country and you use it to your own benefit, to protect you and Speaker 2 (19:22) to make you richer. That's exactly what you're seeing here. There's no principle at all involved in this. Mike Lawler is saying it should not be allowed to criticize Israel, but you can criticize Russia. Again, why? Speaker 4 (19:35) Well, because Mike Lawler's donors love Israel and they hate Russia. Therefore, you can criticize the country they hate, but you're not allowed to criticize the country they love. Okay. So that's just like a total collapse of... Speaker 6 (19:49) the Speaker 4 (19:50) rule of law, of decency, and of the thing that you really have to have in order to have a real country, which is a love of the truth. What's true, what's objectively true, provably true, has to be, has to remain at the center of the project, has to remain at the center of your legal code. You can't convict people of a crime unless you can prove that they did it. You have to know the truth before you can punish someone. Speaker 4 (20:18) Therefore, if somebody Speaker 2 (20:20) says something true, you have to allow them to say it, period, whether you like it or not. If someone walks up to you and says you've gained 30 pounds and you Speaker 4 (20:29) have, that might be a rude thing to say. You might hate to hear it, but you cannot punish someone for telling the truth, even if it Speaker 2 (20:37) stings. But they're trying. They trying. And by they, we mean everybody in charge. And at this point, that means Republicans. But of course, it's hard to get censorship. Through the Congress. Because we do have this thing called the Bill of Rights and the first right enumerated in it, the very first, is the right to say what you think is true. The First Amendment protects your right to say what you think is true and prevents the government from constraining that right in any way. And this has been debated for 200 years. And so we know what the parameters are and they're very, very wide. So it's going to be pretty Speaker 4 (21:17) hard for any sitting member of Congress to vote for a Mike Lawler bill. So they have to find another way to prevent Speaker 2 (21:24) you from telling obvious truths that they find inconvenient or that their donors don't care for. So how are they going to do that? Well, through threats