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

I was thinking about you this morning, and I haven't seen you since 2019. I think that's correct.

I think so.

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

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

That's so obviously true. If you said that now, the The only reason I'm bringing this up is just to celebrate how much this country has changed and how much fear 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. 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. I just want to say I'm glad to see you in this this better world.

Well, thank you, Tucker. It's good to be in this better world. You heroically uncanceled me, actually. No. 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 Saint Helena for making what I felt was a benign observation. In exile. Yes. You said, That's ridiculous. You forced me back through into TV.

Well, I mean, It certainly didn't require heroism. It was just like that was so stupid. I couldn't believe. 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 I should. 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. The perpetrators were never punished for that. They never even apologized. They never even acknowledged. They were never forced to acknowledge their wrongdoing. The people who called you disgusting for saying something was actually compassionate.

That was my view. It was charitable. For real? I strive for that.

Why are we exploiting this A child who's clearly unwell? She clearly is unwell.

Wielding children in politics generally is unseemly, I think. When you're exploiting a truant in order to score some cheap point on the sun monster or something, I I think is... I think that's disgraceful as a matter of fact.

But you're the criminal for pointing it out. The fact that my former employer played along with that and called you disgust... I think that's the word they used, disgust.

Yes. I think, look, I'm not saying I'm Fabio, but I wouldn't call myself I don't know. But you mentioned this cultural revolution, and obviously you had all these ideological aspects. It seemed downright Maoist. 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.

Then the fog just lifted. It just something broke. Now it seems like all of that from the most ideological cultural cultural level, all the way down to just being free to go out and see granny at Christmas. Exactly. It's over.

We should celebrate that.

We should. How should we celebrate, Tom?

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 not exactly the way I think they ought to be. 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.

I very practically want to celebrate. I came prepared I don't know if you're familiar with this product. 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 the-You are always welcome to use an ALP here.

It's been a year this month, I used the other product, Zinn. I didn't even know that it was wrong. It was one of those weird moments where You're shocked into reality. Somebody told me, I think it's true that the majority, like 70% of Zyn users use the product rectally.

That can't be. Somebody told me that.

I was like, Are you serious? He's like, Yes, you should try it. I was like, I don't know what this is, but I'm out. We started this, which I think is a really good alternative. That's good.

No, I agree because it's got to be at least less than 10% of users. No, I think it's zero % of users. 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 a pouch, you couldn't have anything. Now it's just like...

Because it raises testosterone, whereas weed lowers it. It makes you less obedient, more free thinking, happier stronger. Those are all the last qualities authoritarians want the population to have.

I was looking back because I was trying to figure out the morality of... I've smoked cigars since I was 15, and I was trying to figure out the morality. Is this a vice? 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 have enough vices. Then there was the case of Saint Philip Niery, who, 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, it wasn't corrupted after he died. It was corrupted while he was alive from all the nasal snuff that he did. Yes. Pope Leo XIII, the most prolific Pope ever, wrote the most encyclicals, apparently drank cocaine wine, Vam Mariani. Is that true? It is. I've never tried it.

Along with Sherlock Holmes, Coco wine.

Coco wine, yes. Yeah, I'd probably have written more I said, I tried it, but I haven't.

It's funny. Somebody told me a really interesting story recently about the number of current Catholic Cardinals who smoke cigarettes. I just love that. I'm not Catholic, but I have always loved cigarettes smoking. I know you're not supposed to say that. I know it's bad. Killed a close relative of mine. I'm aware of the health effects. But I just thought, I don't know. There's something about that.

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, Benedict, the one we just had. Yeah, the German Pope. Yes.

He would smoke a couple cigarettes a day. I thought, this is something beautiful. This is another thing that's come back since our cultural revolution.

Is that widely known?

I don't know. I'm sure they've tried to suppress that. They probably want to make him into a kombucha drinking, hemp smoking. But no, he liked Marlborough Reds. Good for him. He would smoke them. This is the chief political virtue. He would smoke them in moderation and prudence. This is the thing. We live in this crazy, schizophrenia 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 Marlborough Red every once in a while.

Well, if I could do that, I would still be doing it. I have a friend who's over 80 who smoked two Marlborough lights, which men should not be smoking those, but whatever, the white ones, every day his whole life.

I think it was after a burger fell, they let men smoke Marlborough lights. I think it was a little red part of that decision.

I was out by then. So speaking of gender bending, what do you make of the shooting in Minneapolis? How should we think of... There's so many different threads there. I don't really understand.

Did you read the manifestos? I did not. I took a look.

I saw they were in Cyrillic script.

Yes, Cyrillic. My Cyrillic is not great, but we had some translations done and you could read the writing on the magazines. The first thing that struck me, I mean, after the horror of it. 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 innocent little kids in a Catholic church. 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 It's anti-gay. The guy was a tranny. Then 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. That's scary enough.

Like a goat-headed demon.

Like a goat-headed, Baphomet-looking demon. When you read, when you translate the Cyrilic, the first thing that's written top left of the page is, Who am I? This is really jarring because you recognize that Moses at the burning Bush, he asks God, who are you? Who will I tell them that you are? And God says, I am who I am. I am. 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 Ruddler once observed that 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. When you don't identify yourself with I am, then you're left with this pathetic question, who am I? You see this obvious demonic influence there. 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 anti-gay.

It's anti-Trump, kill Trump right now, but it also has all these far right wing slogans. It reminded me, which is very important to remember, especially in our line of work, because you're constantly reading all this radical stuff. You're on Twitter.

You're looking for the easy explanation. 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 imposed to the training thing passionately, but...

You realize the demons, which are real, they're not under every rock, but they're real. They're such a thing as spirits. 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 up or down. All they want to do is devour you. It's like Lewis and the screwtape letters. Just any tactic that will let them get a hold of you. It's so clear with this guy because you realize this guy was being obsessed from every angle.

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That's masachips. Com/tucker. Use the code Tucker for 25% off your first order. For to shop in person. In October, Moss is going to be available at your local Sprouts Supermarkets. Stop by and pick up a bag before we eat them all. We eat a lot. 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 with 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, God's a spaghetti monster. Come on, there's nothing but flesh and We're just synapses firing. It's a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. That was one error. I think that's fallen away.

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 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 realized 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. 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.

It is a portal to hell. All day long, I'm sitting- That's 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 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 ignoring of the physical reality around us. Yeah.

This is why, by the way, everyone's becoming Catholic now. Have you've noticed this strange phenomenon? I think this is a big reason why. 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. 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.

I think this is why. I mean, the words at the sacrifice of the Mass are, this is my body, which will be given up for you. Which is mocked. The phrase hocus-pocus, like in magic, is a mockery of hauchis danum corpus meum. This is my body. It's a hauchis corpus, hauchis-pocus. At least that's a popular etymology, I'm persuaded by it. There's always this mockery in all of the false religions. There's always this mockery of the real sacrifice. But in a lot of religious traditions, and I don't cast dispersions, I had a Baptist grandpa. The Knowles has come from Maine, actually. This is the ancestral homeland of the Knowleses. Amazing. Yes. I haven't made it up very often, but a lot of Puritan in the line.

A lot of us had ancestors in Maine, and they left.

It's cold. Cold and barren. It is cold, yes. But I think the reason why the sacramental theology is kicking up again is because we say, 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. Actually, maybe this whole religion is about God becoming man and taking on flesh and dwelling among us and broiling fish. The first thing you see our Lord doing when he comes back, his resurrection- Standing on the shores of the Lake. He's cooking fish for his friends and eating fish. For breakfast. For breakfast, which is a hard core. Do they do that in Maine?

It's hard core. It's only in Japan do they do that.

In Maine, it's lobster.

But there is-brooktrout. Actually, people eat them with baked beans.

I think that's why. I think there's just... 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. Human beings are We're like the angels in one way because we have reason, we have intellect and will, and spirits 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 their bodies. We're in the middle of those two things. You can only ignore the body for so long before people say, No, I'm a man, actually. Believe it or not, even in modernity, I'm a man. 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 religion that says that... Well, the 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. Oh, no, you're free. We're going to sue nuns. We're going to sue nuns. We're going to persec Catholics. Biden is 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. 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. You do it in your whole life. 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 present. This is confounding to modern man who says, Well, get me an electron microscope. Let me see. I don't see. Actually, there have been Eucharistic miracles where the appearance of the bread is not maintained and actually gives way to 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 or were 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 abstract. You can just forgive sins by 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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I'm sure you hate Martin Luther, but I really love Martin Luther.

He had some very funny prose. He was a spicy character. Yes.

The real Martin Luther, not Michael Luther, who changed his name, and Michael King, who changed his name. But anyway, the actual, the German monk. But one of the things he didn't got rid of indulgence is, 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.

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. I've never had that. I've never heard of it.

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

Yes. Zero. Do 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, Vice President. You remember that?

Do I remember that? That's the head of my church. Yeah. Do I remember it? Every Episcopalian, I know we're all texting each other, former Episcopalian. But yeah, no. I love that because then the world could see what it's really become. It's repulsive. It's not Christianity. And she was just so obviously in torment. This is not someone who's 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 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, Mr. Knowles?

That is a similarly Lutheran or Helaerbelec-like vituperation. I totally get it.

I'm not being very Christian, but no, no. I mean, That'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, the Episcopalians ran the country and did a great job, I would say, much a better job than the current people around 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 a Episcopalian, you know red door. There's a lot that was good about them. 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 of one of my kids. But in a lot of Episcopal churches, it's hateful menopausal ladies like that and they're gay sidekicks. It's just the saddest, ugliest, cruelest thing ever. Now everyone saw it.

Everyone saw it. The other thing about it is, if you go to church and your church is some lady spouting off about, I don't know, the latest migration policy and whining about Trump. Exactly. Then put aside the political issue, you just ask yourself, Well, why am I going here?

Well, that's exactly the question we asked.

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. You just ask me to get out of bed and take a shower at seven in the morning, which I hate doing, to go to church Which 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 filled with hate.

No. But this is why. In the answer to your question, how did these things decline? I think part of it is 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 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 Harrison Bergeron handicapping of everything. You've got to make the church like the world. 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. The Catholic 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 party. The priest then faces the people instead of facing God as leading us all in worship. Whatever, the age of Aquarius, I guess, demanded that in the '60s or something. But I think people have had enough of that. I think people hate the disenchantment and the degradation of the world and just the physical ugliness of it.

That's exactly right. We want to look up again.

When was the last time someone built a... I mean, you go to downtown London, which has got to be the saddest place on the planet. 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 the prettiest buildings in the city were built before electricity or machines of any kind, actually.

It's also tough to get around London now because my Arabic isn't very good. So there's that. My.

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

Yes.

I'm like, what? Which obviously, I understand why he feels that way. But to say something like that, I would just casually dropped that yesterday, I think. It's like, we're living in a different time.

Of course we are.

It's not 2020 anymore.

I just hope that the return to sanity happens while Angela Merkel is still alive. 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, this was the part I mentioned to Halaire Belloc, who has a similarly delightfully acerbic style to what you're Are you allowed to mention him? Yes. Are you allowed to? Belloq is... Listen, he was buddies with Chesterton. Chesterton is slightly more clubbable, so maybe you're allowed to mention Belloq. But Belloq 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, this both bloodthirsty and totally charitable way of writing. But he says, Look, the crusades were lost. We lost the battle of Hattin. That was 1187. That was it. It was done. We flatter ourselves. We think that Islam is done. He's writing this in the '20s or '30s. He says, We think Islam is done and Christianity is strong. He goes, no. Islam remains intact. The The only reason it seems like christened him 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. 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. I'm not against wealth. I mean, I haven't accrued much, but I'm not for poverty, for sure. But it's also true that generational wealth makes you into a horrible person. Fall is here, and so is fall fashion. So let's talk about Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth pants and joggers are perfect when it starts to get chilly out. You can wear them at home, running, indoors, outdoors, even to work around flights. And best of all, they are comfortable, really comfortable. We didn't know joggers could feel so we didn't know what joggers were. But Cozy Earth taught us and redefines how you will lounge and live. The feel stays consistent no matter where you go. They're lightweight, breathable, flexible, yet still polished enough to wear out. Take our word as a fashion icon for it. The everywhere pants move with you and keep you looking good. It's the perfect balance between comfort and function. Everyone on our staff who wears them agrees they like it.

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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 health.

I'm going to ask you about the cigars because I don't know, how did you wind up the cigars business? But hold on. But I take it too seriously to address it parenthetically.

I feel as though I've got a really nice life. I got a nice house. I got this beautiful family. I have nice little doodads and things like that. You have three sons. Three sons. I cannot produce- That's true wealth. It is true wealth. 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.

That is the truest thing. I'm sad for you that you already know that at 35, that your final hour will be spent alone, and your boys will be somewhere with some hacker. I'll be like, You know, he was a good guy. Whatever happened to him?

What was his name? Was it Matt or Mark or something? Anyway, he- Whereas if you had daughters, bedside vigil.

Yes. Dad needs a catheter chain, whatever it takes.

They will That's actually why I need generational wealth. It's just to pay for my long term care.

You're going to have some Haitian lady who's out for a cigarette when you croke. You need some daughters, man.

But I carry around a prayer card of Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible. It was also a great, a rhetorical pugilist. 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 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 a Episcopal church. But we go in the afternoon to say our prayers for the year. Every year, I always feel like I get a message or something resonant, 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, this is all passing away. And to the extent that you love material things and take great undue pride in your own stupid accomplishments like you're a fool. You're a fool.

I think you can 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. 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. You walk around and you think, it's great, and I'm glad to be here. Even this, it's a government building, first of all. Exactly. It's drab, which is why Trump's trying to fix it up a little bit. Even this, even this will pass away. Four years. Well, even Trump's been President for 12 years. He's been the dominant figure in public life for 12. His President will have been for eight. I 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. Oh, it's totally true. What is this about?

She's going to be 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. I see. There's 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. 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.

Obama would joke about it. I got drones. I'm coming for you, Jonas Brothers. They love it.

They all love it. I've talked to a lot of them about it. They love it. The clever ones try to hide the fact they love it. Well, it's the burden of the office. But that's 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 most transitory power.

Yeah, of course. The three- Hilling people. The three material things that people want, Fame, money, and power. 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. It does. I was talking to a friend the other day.

The prize is not worth winning.

Yes, right. Because you get there and you say, Okay, well, now what do I want? 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.

I got into it so young that 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. What could possibly be worth having?

I'll tell you the upside. Sometimes you'll get a free appetizer at dinner. If someone likes your show or something, that's great. I like free appetizers.

I always feel so obligated. What does that mean? Do I have to name my next kid after you? I don't like presents. You know what I mean?

My next child, Truffle French fry notes. Yes. After, yes.

It's so true. But just to go back to what's happening in the Catholic Church, I don't know, is it happening in the church or is it happening under the wings of the church, auspices of the church? Is it happening around the church or is the church itself experiencing a revival?

Well, we're all the mystical body of Christ. It's at the level of the Episcopate, 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. There is just something happening. I think even, I have this doc series called The Pope and the Führer, which is really about Pius XII, who was the during World War II until 1958. He's this image of the old-school Pope, the papal tiara, arms extended.

You're supposed to feel bad about that Pope.

You're supposed to.

To cause the war or something, right? Yeah.

It turns out none of that is true.

There was a famous play attacking him.

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 the- 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.

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 all of humanity.

It was just an amazing- Because 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- Was the point to influence the council? I think, really, my deep thesis on the pious battles, which really exploded even in the '90s, much, much later. I see it as a intracatholic battle. In that way, 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. One thing about the church, you can't change anything. Doctrine develops, but you don't change. I think it was a battle for the identity of the church. 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 the Roch Halkhuth 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 then 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 in this time Americans learned what actually happened. We're going to tell you, we're releasing one episode per week. You're not going to want to wait. If you remember, you don't have to. You get all five episodes the day it drops 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. Interesting, but even now, loathe these many years later that the stench hangs in the air.

Yes, it's absurd. It will dissipate with time. The church measures her years not in weeks and months, but in centuries.

No, no, no. That's right. That's just interesting. I know so little about it, but my instinct tells me strongly that that was a pivot point in the history of the modern history of the church. What was Vatican II, as we non-catholics call it?

Well, 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 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. The funny thing is, people who talk about Vatican II prone against have never read the documents.

I certainly haven't. What was it? Can you just summarize it for us?

Well, yes. It was an ecumenical council. There have been many of these.

What does that mean, ecumenical council?

The bishops all get together. This is like the real deal. This goes all the way back to antiquity. The fact that we talk about this one council as the biggest one in the whole church is silly. You don't talk about the spirit of the fourth laddering council. You don't talk about the...

Well, I think the reason that I'm fixated on it is because as someone who's pro-catholic, I guess.

Catholic curious?

I'm not Catholic curious. I'm not going there. I'm a Luther I understand. But the idea that in 1950, the majority of immigrant kids in our biggest cities were schooled in Catholic schools and that went to church every week and it provided order and, well, Christianity, which I believe in, and I'm very in favor of that. Then post-Vatican II, this is just my ignorant overview, that all collapsed. I don't know how Catholic schools there were in 1965. They're probably less than half now. All those churches closed. There are lots of factors. Then you have the molestation scandal, which was to some extent real and horrifying. 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- He was the Pope before Francis.

The Pope before Francis. The cigarette smoking German. Yes, the cigarette smoking German.

He observed. He said, 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... And then there was this big reform that totally changed the mass and totally changed the smells and bells and the ornementations, which matters because the way we worship dictates how we believe. There's a phrase lex orandi lex credendi. If you worship a certain way, obviously, that's going to change how you to think about things. Of course. It's going to change how you live your life. He said, 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, I don't know, like a a madness took over all of these reforms. And then what happened is the fever started to break. And so after Vatican II, you John Paul I, who was Pope for 30 days, and then you get John Paul II. John Paul II, in my mind, is 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 anticommunist, helped end the Cold War, really important man, now canonized as Saint.

After him, you get Benedict. And Benedict said something really brilliant, which has been an... He said many brilliant things, but This is a real antidote to the spirit of the age. He said, There were 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. What he said is, No, no, no.

We do it We do it generationally.

We do it generationally.

You can't imagine your parents having sex.

Yes. You wouldn't be here if they didn't mind it. I don't know about yours, but mind it.

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. If we think there's been some radical break, we're probably wrong. Who's more likely to be wrong? The smartest, most serious men for 1950 years or you? It's me. I'm more likely to be right.

I agree.

That was the fog-breaking, I think.

But can I ask, were there meaningful changes made during that council?

Yes. Changes in the sense that there were certain pastoral elements that that were discussed and written into dogmatic constitutions. An understanding of religious liberty. This one is sometimes... Now, 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, not, but 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. 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 right to that. But of course, the rejoinder is error has no rights.

Well, that is pretty anti-modern.

It's quite antimodern.

Yes, it's about as antimodern as you can get.

You can say people who err have rights. So don't say error has rights. People who err... The Catholic church has a long history of toleration, contrary to what polemicists in the Enlight 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. Again, these are the stories that no one's taught in school anymore. However, that could be misinterpreted as to saying that, I don't know, we have the right to some Satanist display in the in the courthouse or something, as activists argue today. Totally ridiculous. What else does Vatican II contain?

Well, so here's Here's my actual question. 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. It doesn't matter. 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 Part of the confusion is there's the claim in Latin, extraecclesium nullus allus. There's no salvation outside of the church. The church does not change her view on that. However, people always ask this question, what about my Protestant My grandpa, or my, I don't know, my atheist dad, or my Jewish, or my Hindu, or my Muslim, or my whatever?

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, you say, No, sorry, you're all totally without any hope. I guess what the council clarifies is that 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 dialog in this modern world. Wait, 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 Catholic, 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 clarified at the second Vatican Council, or maybe not clarified, maybe it just leads to more ecumenical dialog or something like this. But that one could say, when you're baptized, you're a Christian. You might never receive any of the sacruments, you might never go to church. When you're baptized, that's what delineates you as a Christian. 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. The council states clearly that The Jews are our elder brothers in faith, which is another line that's used polemically in all sorts of ways. God doesn't revoke his promises to his people. This can be taken into all different kinds of ideologies.

That was the conclusion of the Council?

Well, that's a statement of the Council. But this comes from Saint Paul. Saint Paul says that for the sake of the gospel, the Jews aren't with it, but for the sake of their forebears, God loves the Jews because the call of God and the gifts of God are irrevocable. What does that mean? This means- But Paul was a Jew, obviously.

Paul was a Jew. He was a pharacy. Yes.

What this means, and this gets back to what we were talking about at the top with Aristotelian virtue as the mean between two extremes. There are two views on this. One is a view that says that you don't need Christ to be saved, and specifically the Jews don't need Christ to be saved. Another view is that God's done with the Jews and forget about the Jews now, and it's just only the church. What Saint Paul is saying and what the council is clarifying is there's a little bit of room for both. Christ is the savior. He's the one savior. He's the way, and the road narrow, and he's the way in the truth and the life. Also, God doesn't hate the Jews, and God still has a plan for the Jews. This is something that the Catholic Church does that other denominations and ideologies don't always they fall to one side or the other, is she brings in, well, what I would call the fullness of truth.

What is that? That means that there are people who can go to heaven without believing in Jesus?

No. Though, one could unwittingly be following Christ, and one could have a, I don't know. The firmness-Unwittingly. Well, really, you can. 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 thing. But that's not really true because natural religion does have something to recommend it. 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 nature. 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's more to it. You got to keep going. That God also reveals himself.

But that you can be certain God exists just Are you looking at his creation? Yes. Using your reason. That's the truest thing ever. Yes. Right. But in modern- 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 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. Newman's entire life was spent invading against liberalism in religion. You know, this wishy-washy sense.

Who is Newman?

Newman is great. He was a Protestant and very anti-catholic. Then Then he became a Catholic, and then he became a cardinal, and then he became a saint.

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 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. One 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. This modern idea that religion is just a matter of private judgment. You're a shinto and I'm a Methodist, and it's like, whatever, man, who knows? You just do you and it's all good. He says, no, religion is a public thing. It's a scientific thing. We can know something about it. He wrote a great book. You look at the crises of the universities today. There's a remedy to which is a book that he wrote called The Idea of a University. In this book, he says, 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 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 chemistry problems. That's so silly.

We're talking about data. We're talking about data. Just an accumulation of numbers.

And what they say is, No, because we live in this world after the crackup of chrishendom, where everyone has their own private ideas, 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. That's obviously impossible. Do you remember 20 years ago, there was this phrase?

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?

I 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. When you come to that conclusion about practical morality, which 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 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.

Well, exactly. And sad, and she's worthy of compassion. But what happened to you as a result of this epidemic of shallow but highly aggressive moralizing that took the place of something that we had before.

Yes. That's why I think, okay, now we're going to get on our puritanical high horses about pronouns or whatever, 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 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. With that, we can't know about that. But we can know about some ridiculous Nostic 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. 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. Bob Dylan was right about that.

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. Before my confirmation, I told my mother, I said, I don't believe it. Christopher Hitchens, he's so smart, and Richard Dawkins, and I'm really taken. I'm such a- You thought Richard Dawkins was smart? Listen, I was 13. Okay, come on. 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. I told her, I said, I don't want to be confirmed. My mother, she's, You're going through a phase. You, kid, you're going through a phase.

Wise woman.

Wise woman. She goes, Receive the sacrum. She wasn't even super-duper religious, but she said, Receive the sacrum. 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. 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, it was- Pretty clever. Yeah, a lot of good things about Hitchens, but his life was so sad that he was not really an advertisement for atheism. I didn't think. Yes. But what did you think was cool about that whole- Well, I thought religion was for stupid people.

I thought religion was for stupid people. I, of course, didn't know anything and hadn't read anything. My brain hadn't lived. I was quite wrong, but I was never in doubt. And so I... In there? Yes. I said, Look, I just don't see God. Bad things happen to good people. And science has microscopes. Anyway, and actually getting back to the point on the reforms of the church and everything changing, it was weak liturgically. There were all these sappy effeminate hymns that were about eagles wings and stuff that was not really appealing to a young boy and all this nonsense.

The eagles wings got you.

God, it was such It wasn't even cool in the '70s when those people were coming in.

No, I know. Oh, I was there.

Yeah. I said, Well, look, it's just so obvious. Social proof. All the smart people are atheists. Then I get to college, and everyone's an atheist. Many people are much smarter than me in college. But I did notice the smartest people believed in God. Really? Yes. With that question. A Yale. Yes. There weren't a ton of Muslims, though there were a couple, but across the board, the Muslims, the Jews, the protestants, the Catholic. 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. I said, huh? Then I was presented with an argument for the existence That's what an interesting observation. There weren't even that many of them there, but you say, oh, well, it's a little bit the wheat from the chaff.

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 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 with that question, and I'm not the only one. 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? 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 corrupt 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. 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. I said, Well, darn, I can't refute that. Then I read Lewis. C. S. Lewis.

Who is this person who said that to you?

This is my roommate, actually. A freshman here.

What ever happened to him?

He's my best friend. Still To this day. Very close.

And he's a Christian?

Yeah. He was a great old Catholic, raised mega church, Protestant, and then he reverted to the church. He was confirmed in the church later on. But he and I, and some other people, were going through this together. I would say 18 to 23. I was really dragging my feet. I said, I'll see as 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. I'm going through. I finally seriously read the Bible at 23. I said, Oh, this is true. This is right. First, you have to accept that God exists. Then you say, Okay, well, 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 church did he establish? That's going to lead... There were plenty of protestants along the way who were really helpful in my return and thinking. 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 Twitter DMs 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. I was a huge fan of his, so I didn't even want to message him. One time, he sent out a tweet, and it sounded despairing. Now we know he was dying of cancer. He was 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, a huge fan of yours. If I can be of any help, I don't know that I can, but I'd be happy to. We started writing each other these letters. Really? Yeah, for weeks, every night, just for weeks. It's long essays, really.

To Norm McDonald on Twitter DM.

It's weird. This is one of the strangers. Great. Every night. He would do this thing where he'd say, Michael, I can't do a great norm. 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 really an undergraduate degree. I'm not an educated man. I didn't really go to college. Then he would do this thing where he'd make it seem like he's just some old chunk of coal. 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. We were talking about religion, basically, the whole time. He said to me, I still don't know the particulars of all of his religious views, but he said, For me, I told him I converted, reverted. He said, Oh, yeah, for me, I've just always known the Bible's true. I just always knew. I'd read it. I just knew. Anyway, that's it. I thought, Well, that's the better way. It's like Christ to Thomas the Apostle. He says, blessed are you, you've seen and believed, but blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.

That was Norm. That's another example, too, of you think, the whole culture and all these smart people are atheists. Norm is one of the smartest pop culture figures that's been around decades. But he knew. It's just like, everyone knows deep down.

Everyone knows. That's totally right. That's why they're mad.

Yeah.

People feel judged.

They feel judged.

I never feel judged by the Earth is flat people. I don't think the Earth is flat, but it doesn't bother me that you do.

You know what I mean? I get a kick out of it. I'll go down the-Yeah, whatever.

It's not a threat. I don't... Because I know in my heart, it's probably not flat. You know what I mean? Yeah.

But the ancient Greeks thought this was scary.

No, I remember thinking that even in early high school with the question of abortion, and 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 clearly, you're judging yourself because you know that you took a life. There are all kinds of extenuating circumstances. I get it, in the end, you killed the kid. You know that you did.

The devil gets you this way because he says, before you commit the sin, he says, It's no big deal. It's no big deal. It's nothing. It's a clump of cells. It's nothing. It's your freedom. It's your body. It's your choice. It's, come on, it's no big deal. You're not going to feel bad. She's got to do it. Then you do it. Then one second later, he's in your ear, he says, You'll never be forgiven. You can never admit this is wrong. The second you do, you are damned walking the Earth. You are done. You're done. I think that explains a lot of modern behavior.

It's totally right. It's totally right. If you ever watch to shout your abortion event, which always like, fascinating, weirdly fascinating to me, and I always feel so bad for the girls, but they never really can muster enthusiasm for the abortions they had because you can see it right in their faces. It's like, oh, I feel so sorry for them. Can you imagine?

Well, to make it fully religious, Peter Kraft 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.

But everybody know. I guess I'm just tying to the North McDonald 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, I don't like that. But I still thought that's true.

Yes. A hundred % true. 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 dumb classes.

Mine was shiny like stainless steel. But yes, I can imagine there are others who had darkened their conscience.

Yes, but you all know. Then the other impulse, which is 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, no kings, only men, and we decide.

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 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. 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?

It's like salmon farming. Salmon farming is my favorite idea because it was something I just thought... Because obviously, I love to catch saying I'm a fisherman. I love Atlantic salmon fishing. It's hard to catch them. There aren't that many of them. The idea was people love to eat salmon. Let's just have a salmon farm. Out there, just make a giant net, just breed them right there in the ocean. There's no downside. It cures the problem. Salmon farms basically destroyed wild salmon, both through the pollution for crossbreeding with the salmon, and they don't spawn. We're in danger of losing-We don't spawn either, by the way. No, but we're in danger of losing Atlantic salmon as a species because of salmon farming, people are just starting to figure this out. But it's a species of the same lie. I'm in control of nature. Oh, shit. We'll just salmon farm. Duh. You know what I mean? We'll just... Whatever it is.

We have done that. We have now exercised increasing control over how we spawn through contraception. That's exactly right. 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.

If you ended up extending human life to 150 years, the last 80 years of the life would just be like a living hell. Do you know what I mean? I mean, for one thing, I've always thought this is like what instead I did have when I was young, which is the problem with getting old is not bladder control, and it's not even dementia. 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, I can't believe how fast it went, and they're crushed by that. Imagine living to 150.

And think about when they're all promising this. There are people on the right who are really into this, too. Radical life extensionals. And 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. Pills are bad. Pills are just... Let's just start there. Pills are bad. Anyone that wants to take a pill, fuck off. That's how I feel. I strongly feel that way. But why would you want to live to 150?

And this is the understanding. The curse 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 murder, rape. I don't think it's actually a great mercy.

It depends what you think happens next, I guess.

Yes, that's true. People are, I think, also increasingly aware that something might happen next. They're clinging on to this hope that, well, I hope this is all there is, and I just turn to worm food and take a dirt nap. I don't think that makes sense at all. 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. That is what killed him.

I am the destroyer of worlds. That's exactly right. I'm become death.

Exactly. Okay, so if All these young people are becoming Catholic of all unfashionable things, that's where the most unfashionable. But by the standards of 30 years ago, becoming a Catholic.

It's 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. People, his political enemies, were always saying, Oh, he's cynical. He's just changing his views with the times, whatever. I think, Hold on. You're telling me a guy who had a tough upbringing, who graduates Yale law school, wants to 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. You think that's going to help you? No, that's the craziest thing to do if you were thinking cynically or opportunistically.

Well, it's a radical move, I guess. Again, I'm not promoting it and I'm not doing it. But I just as an observer, I'm like, wow, that's pretty wild. I guess here's my question. It's a political question. If young people are converting the Catholicism, what else about their views is changing?

Everything.

Okay. Everything.

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 something that's much bigger and much broader and much more beautiful. Even just in our political order, we used to call it Christendom. Now we call it the West. 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 sieve has got to go. People are beginning to realize, it's not that I just want to preserve my town or my '90s liberalism or my... I want to preserve this great cultural patrimony that I've been given. That cultural patrimony has to go deeper than not just esthetics. It has to go deeper than just abstract ideology. 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 People, even beyond questions of conviction of the Holy spirit and rational arguments and all that, they're just saying, Well, this thing's pretty sturdy.

It's been around a long time. Belak, again, Belloc keeps coming to mind. He had this line. He says, I am he said more eloquently, he said, I'm required as a matter of faith to hold that the church is diviny 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 Fortnite. No, no. That's obviously true.

Yeah, the best thing I ever heard from a practicing Catholic in the last five years, there was no one around who was a very close friend of mine, 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, yeah- Are you sure you're not Catholic?

Yeah. It was the greatest thing ever. He goes, yeah, I totally agree. But he's not the worst Pope we've had.

Yes.

Was it completely nondefensive? 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, totally. Don't tell me that there's no, that what I'm seeing isn't real.

Yeah, yeah.

Be honest.

Of course.

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. We have to remember that the Pope is fallible except when he's infallible. Sometimes God gives us bad popes to make us really grateful for good popes. The other point I'll mention on Francis, because obviously I had some questions about the Francis Pontificate. I reverted during the Francis Pontificate. This trend started during Francis. 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 you think of the progress of the church and our whole civilization, and we think of it as just a straight line. But I think it's a little bit more like this. The papacy goes to Avignon for a little bit, and there's some king is arresting the Pope. It's 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, which is what's described. 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 can't get- But that's not always true. So as America becomes more prosperous, the people become weaker and sillier. I mean, that's how I grew up. I grew 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... Who 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 why I can't get into... I have many... I love the populist movement. I 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. Also, we get the government that we deserve. 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. On the right side of things, you can engage in economic selfishness, and no one cares about the common good, and no one cares about the body politic.

That's where we are right there. Yes, and you're going to get crappy leadership a lot of the time. Sometimes you get a second chance.

It's just like greed and lust, those are your choices.

Yes. Look, this is classic political philosophy going all the way back, which is that greed, avarice, is the beginning of evils in the city. It's natural and you have to-Worship of money is the root of all evil. Yes, that's right.

Okay. Have you noticed... I have a lot of young people work for me. I have children and all that, but Every month or two, I'll run into a younger person, in an airport or something, and always check up a conversation, and they'll say things that... Super nice or whatever, but you just feel like, wow, the attitudes people are getting, by my middle-age standards, pretty freaking radical.

It's crazy. I was talking- Hey, you've had this experience. For sure. I have always been the most right-wing person in any room.

Me, too. I've always been the radical. I'm like, Man, I better shut up because my thoughts are not welcome in public at all. All of a sudden, I'm feeling a little bit more moderate. Yes.

That's good. Listen, now we can go on TV and say, Look, I'm the moderate. Okay?

Come on, guys.

I never felt moderate in my life. I was talking to a professor who who is very, very right wing. 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 said, It's never happened before. Now, part of this, obviously, is like a pendulum was so far over here, trans your kids and kill the ones that you don't trans. It's going to fly back in the other direction, which is good. That's a healthy impulse. This is where, however, one must have a solid foundation with proper authority and guard rails 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.

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

You certainly don't want that. You need Jared. I mean, Saint Paul says, If you don't have charity. You got nothing.

Yeah, well, every wedding service in the country- That's right. Yes, of course. One Corinthians 13. No, I think that's exactly right. But I just wonder, as a political matter, here's 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 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, 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 guess I wanted it to work. I don't know how I felt about it, but it didn't work. People feel free to I would say that. There's also, I have noticed from talking to younger people, a recognition that the democracy just 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. Actually, in large part, I think it comes in because of Tocqueville's great book, Democracy in America, Best Study of America Ever. But even there, our regime is a mixed regime. Our regime 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. 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. Adrian Vermuil made this point the other day. I'm pretty sure the President of the United States is a more robust king than the king of Norway or whatever.

Our regime, this was intentional, by the way, and it's outlined as the ideal regime in the suma 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. 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 in a tyranny. A monarchy is for the common good. Tyranny is for private interest. You can have an aristocracy, 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. You can have a democracy, and a democracy can be quite good. The virtue of the early American Republic, that can degrade into a mob rule where it's just people pulling for their own factions and their own private interests. 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.

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. That's the norm in world history. We are at a real risk of that if we don't correct some of the degradations in our own regime.

What would that mean? What degradations seem 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 in television. I feel like there are more normal House members, but the Senate... I mean, there are some exceptions who guys I like and A lot, but only a handful.

I like that person. 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. I say, these guys are freaks, man. They're all freaks. Like, John Cornan, what's his search history?

No, I'm serious. I actually don't know John Cornan.

If you had a hold of that guy's iPhone, what would you find? Any of these people, Ted Cruz?

I love Ted. Oh, my gosh. I love him. He's a good friend of mine.

He is. Okay, 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. And think about how these guys got elected. It used to be they would be elected by the states, which meant that the states had a role in the government. We're supposed to have states. We don't really have states. No, we certainly don't. They're all vassals for this imperial blob of bureaucracy. But why did we lose that? Antonin Scalier said this to me when I was a student. I got to meet him a couple of times, undergrad. He said, We asked him about 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. That's 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. Of course. It's like a Christopher Coldwell, 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.

How does that play out?

I hope, peacefully. I really hope. I think it can play out peacefully. Some people on the right, they'll say, 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 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? So, 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, the whole political community is just an extension of a family.

It's like- The Spanish Civil War ended 85 years ago. And then you go to Spain now, they're still mad about it. It still divides that country.

Yes.

Greece, the same way.

We have to be angry that the communists were defeated. The Bolsheviks who were killing priests.

Spain is a uniquely said 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 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 if some guy died, he was in the Abraham Lincoln. I said, oh, it's the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. I looked into it. I said, there's nothing. He was a Communist.

He 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. This is why they had to get Nixon. They never forgave Richard Nixon. Where? He got Alger His. 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. He knew it, and he got him dead. He believed Whittaker Chambers, and he got him dead to rights. They never forgave him for it.

That's totally true. They made up this whole fake scandal and took out the most popular president American history. Yes. No, I know. It's very... But anyway, I guess the point is a civil war has our own civil war. It's only finally cooling down.

And we're relitigating it.

Well, because reconstruction never really ended. Right. Let's just humiliate the south and turn it 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 a strong leadership, which we are getting in Trump. We actually We 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, and 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. I was there for that.

Buckley, at least. Buckley defended McCarthy, for goodness sakes. He did.

No, 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 Pozel, who goes through a conscience of a conservative. An amazing book.

Well, Brent Pozel meant it. Right. So he was exiled because he really meant it. He was mentally ill. Okay.

And he went over after the Spanish Civil War. Oh, I know.

Yeah, of course. He raised his family in Franco, Spain. Yeah. No, I know. He meant it.

But 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 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. I think it made sense at the time. It was a common enemy in the Soviet Union. I was there for that. Of course.

I read commentary every month. Growing up. We got it at home. Yes, we did.

You don't have any copies around here anymore. I don't know where.

I was raised on commentary. We're like this Protestant family getting the official publication of the American Jewish Committee. I read every issue, Arch Puddington, Ruth, Vissa, or whatever. I think they hate me now, but whatever. I grew up reading that.

One of my favorite lines recently was from Norman Podhoretz, who said, You're the founder of neoconservatism. He said, No, I'm so old that I'm now a paleo-neoconservative. I'm too old for that. There's the paleos and the Neos and the libertarians and the traditionalists and the this is in it. And obscure political monikers are the right wing version of gender pronouns.

No, it's totally right.

Everyone's got his own thing. And this is what I love about Trump. Is Trump an ideologue? I know. What ism does Trump ascribe to?

Trumpism.

That's what he ascribes to it. Americanism, I guess. I don't know. This is a man who has brought together a disparate coalition of weirdo, crunchy hippies and bow-tie-wearing traditionalists and libertarians and Silicon Valley tech futurists. It's the craziest coalition ever. He has brought them together and won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years as a Republican. It's an amazing thing to see in action because he's got a vision and he's just a force of nature. 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's 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 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 won the popular vote. Things are on track. What happens next?

When the patriarch's gone? Well, I mean, what happens in the families? 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 has 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 is talking about what a great job Rubio was doing. And he said, Wow, Marco, you've just been amazing. 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 that seems like a win. If those are the two not popabile, the most presidential ovule 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.

Dizying.

Dizying because he does the weave famously. But every time I've interviewed him, 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, rooting for his ace, very pro-Israel, of course. And then he goes...

They used to own Congress or whatever. He said that.

He goes, the Israel lobby's totally control Congress. Nobody else. That's not true anymore. I'm like, Did you just say that? Yeah.

It was amazing. I remember in the- What? The interview or the press conference with Netanyahu, this was months ago. I don't think I was taken in by theatricality. I think this was real, when he said, Look, what we're going to do is the United States is going to take over Gaza. You look at Netanyahu, and he looks at Trump, and he looks nervously at the audience. He's laughing, but not laughing. 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. We're going to build it. It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be the Riviera of the Middle East. It was so apparently out of left field. I'm not even convinced he's totally sincere on that. I think he's a great and he's working 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 local residents who run the government in the country it was in. I'm like, What? 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? What do we have to with Gaza? My instinct is always like, we got nothing to do with this. I'm out. I'm good. It's like when girls fight, I don't want to get involved.

I'll take Monica. I'll take the French Rivière. 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. They're like, Oh, no, no, no, that's an attack on Netanyahu.

Yes.

That was their gut reaction He's basically tweaking Netanyahu.

It wasn't a haymaker. No, no, no. He wasn't clobbering on that. It was a little poke. Do you think that, too? Yes, I think it was a little poke. In what way? In the sense that In the cabinet meeting the other day, Trump was asked, he said, You promised that this war would be over permanently in five seconds after you were inaugurated. When are we going to get a definitive conclusion to the war? He laughs. Definitive conclusion. He turns to Steve Wykoff. He says, Hey, Steve, how long 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 peace. It's 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? This is by suggesting, We're going to go in and take it. It's basically an intractable situation. There will not be any permanent resolution, probably until the second coming. 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, you know, pilgrimage access.

And all that.

But you just want- 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.

When you're paying for it, you can just be like, look, our first demand is Christians need to be able to visit the church, the Holy Sepulcher. Oh, of course. Well, 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. Porphyrias, which I 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 protection.

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.

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. Then there's the October seventh attack. Israel is going to say, now, okay, this is an unacceptable security risk. We're not dealing with this anymore. 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. I don't think that's going to work out well at all. I think Trump is totally sincere in what he says. He goes, My My conclusion 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 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 socialist? Oh, yeah. Always. They call him the N-word. I said, I don't really think he's a socialist. He loves the nation. He's a great patriot. He supports strong borders. But I said, I don't think he's really a socialist. I think he's an imperialist. He wants to acquire Greenland and invade Canada. That's not That's not generally what Yeomen farmers do. 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. This goes back to a really ancient conception of the political order, which is that the purpose of empire is to just have peace and order. This is in the Aneid, in Book 6 of the Aneid.

Aneis goes down to his dad in the underworld, and the dad gives him this whole view of what's going to happen to Rome. He says, Look, different peoples are given different arts. I don't know, the Greeks are good at making sufflaki, the Chinese are good at making bad soup, and the Romans- Awful soup. Awful. I've never even tried. The pangolin is good. I've never tried the bet. He says the Romans, their art is to govern. Governing is not fun. It's not the most glorious necessarily. In some ways, it'd be more fun to be a writer, be more fun to be a poet, be more fun to go. But that's what the Romans are given is to govern. It's just a job in the world and someone's got to do it. 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? That'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, but in a different way. Because the neocons, at their most extreme, would say, We We have an obligation because of the demands of history with a capital H to spread liberal democracy around the world. It's the final form. That's just stupid. It's crazy.

But like this smart... 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. He would say, look, someone's got to take control because there has to be order at the center. 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 Poddaris. But no, it's when I went to Iraq. The main takeaway for me is we're not good at it. We're just leaving aside the dumb spread democracy and all that nonsense, turned Baghdad into Belgium. It's just stupid. But what's not stupid is the idea that you can't have disorder because it metastases. I'm getting there. My assessment and has not changed in 25 years is 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 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 clarity in purpose. But even then, the US sided with the Vietnamese, actually, in 1954 at Dian Ben Phu against the French. There was never really a consistent... Grand strategy? That's a little known. Yeah, but not even grand strategy, but a consistent worldview or instinct. The English, for all their many faults, at the height of empire, the height of the Victorian period, they really believe they were superior. Now, we derived 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? 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 has been knocked for, especially in the recent Alaska summit. He's been knocked for shaking hands with Putin and being nice to him. 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. Then Obama, 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? Putin invaded into Crimea. Then you had Trump, and everyone just chilled. And then you had Biden, man, no one talked tougher than Biden, huh? Oh, didn't he have such moral clarity? 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, I don't 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 solamente swore to help and defend, did they thrive? No, they withered. Putin, who's been there for 25 years. His country has improved. The people are happier. They like him, actually.

The war has been a little tough on Putin. The wars, 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. You can say, Oh, that's all a lie. Okay, well, show me one. Okay, go there. I'm not moving to Russia, but I mean, Putin has been the most effective leader in my lifetime. I can't think of a more 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 could say, look, I don't know his religious views, but he's promoted Christianity within Russia. Aggressively. Yes. To combat liberalism and all these other forces. Joe Biden has imprisoned pro-lifers and sued none.

Well, exactly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But whatever.

The reason that I pull away a little bit from the This is Neo-conny to me. It's the purely good and evil-I totally agree with that. 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. I am because it's- Dude, I'm with you. Of course. Patriotism is an extension of filial piety. Just like all liberalism comes down to saying, screw you, dad, I hate my mom or whatever. I think, no, we are called to respect our parents and to love our countries. Russia has interests that are not aligned with ours, and they have miscellan pointed at us. You think, well, okay, Putin, for all of his sins, Putin is defending the interests of Russia. 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. At the very least.

By the way, NATO, yeah, exactly.

This is why you'll notice Trump doesn't use this good and evil language all the time. The way he talks about Putin, he says, Look, Putin has interests. He has hard interests. That's how I feel. I have hard interests. 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.

Never forget it.

What's so funny now is-It was a It's 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.

It's like an interesting-50 page.

An interesting reporter. 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 stream of infrastructure. Oh, I remember. They're always going to have escalatory power. Trump says the exact same thing, and all these people were lauding.

By the way, Obama, who I think wrecked America, can't comes off as pretty reasonable in that piece, just being honest. If you read that piece now and just take Obama out and just put another name in there, it's like, I agree with most of this.

And Trump is saying most of those things. Oh, I know. There's one big difference. Trump can actually implement it. Obama couldn't really implement it. The world order was fraying under him. It is so ironic that these people who accused Trump of being a KGB agent or whatever, that these people would knock Trump for saying the same thing that they were parroting for years. They're all just children.

They're the people who told you that Russia was a gas station with nuclear weapons. People like John McCain, 95 IQ, and his sad idiot daughter. I mean, these are just not- I've just gotten along with the drama.

I never met John McCain.

No, no, I know. She's fine. I mean, McCain was charming in his way. I love McCain, actually, when I knew him well, but a very charming guy, but not a serious person at all.

He did kill the- He killed the repeal of Obamacare, which is very difficult to over.

But he wasn't serious. He was just a shallow wasp.

He was one of the last of the true, hawkish, anti-Russia, coming out of the Cold War, though he was younger. You just got a bomb. You just got to implement your will.

It 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. 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, he hadn't spent 15 minutes thinking about anything.

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. That's not the skill that's like- Dude, 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. 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, you're an idiot.

This is the nation of Tolstoy.

Oh my God, the winner of policy. Okay. St. Petersburg? Great. All right. There's no city in Europe, there's certainly no city in the United States that approaches their two main cities.

This is what was fascinating. I'm now remembering. It's just a fact. The fact that you got to interview Putin. 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. There was a very strong view. I wonder, look, Trump, in his own way, tells a story about America. He hugs the flag, he kiss 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 who are the American people? 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'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, right? He's not.

No. No, by the way, he gets along with them really well. That's the other thing. He's got 20% Muslim population. He's promoting Christianity, but the Muslims don't like him. How do you do that? Don't try that at home. That's hard.

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 Yeomen Republic. Russia certainly looks like an empire. It's spanning a continent. It has all these peoples. On this question, which is- We don't even know who lives here.

Tom said to me recently, we think there are about maybe 50 million people here legally. 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 you can't even visualize who they are.

Yes. And this gets... I mean, you just said, look, I'm I'm not a race guy.

I'm not a race guy, actually. But when you think- I'm a sexist, not a racist. I always say that no one believes me.

I think about sex all the time, actually. I do, too. But when you think, what is America now in 2025? There was this line where it's America is just an idea, or diversity is our strength, or all these slogans from the '90s and 2000s. You think, well, no, 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? So There has to be a real grappling with, okay, well, look, a country is also geography. There is no America without the rivers, for instance. The rivers aren't just an idea.

You're speaking to a fly fisherman now, Mr. Knowles.

It's not a country without drought. It's not a country without the oceans. It's not a country without people. This also is where- Someone can just show up from Delhi and start lecturing me about American values. Yes.

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 who's family has been here 400 years about what America is. Then there's no America, actually, at that point. Of course.

This is where even the grappling- It's scary. Even the grappling with ethnicity. 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. Except it's convenient. We All that matters is race, but it doesn't exist. Yes.

The reality is, again, to this via media, it's okay. It's okay when Joe DiMagio 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 looks like me, and he hit that home run. 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. The reality is, I mean, this is where our Christian heritage, Christianity, which animates the whole civilization, comes in. You say, no, we are in a very real way. All children of God. In a very real way, there's only one race, the human race or whatever the liberals like to say. That is true. Also, there is vibrant diversity among peoples, and that's fine to acknowledge.

God created that. God created that. He created different peoples.

As long as that ordered toward charity, as long as a proper love of that which is similar to one is not ordered toward cruelty and is ordered within charity for the common good, yeah, that's called having a country, of course. 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 there's a crazy backlash coming. Without question. Well-deserved backlash.

It's already happening.

Is it?

I think so. And as Tucker, you know I'm part Sicilian.

A non-white people.

A racially liminal people. We Siciliens.

I love Siciliens.

Children of the Messages. Giorno, yes. You get a 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. There's a little mixing of all of Europe in there. The The reality is, in order to have a sense of a country, you do need to have some sense of a common people. To your point on the guy from Delhi, it's not even that the guy from Delhi can't be quite American three generations from now. But you can't just 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 lived experience that has passed, sometimes ineffably, without words, from generation to generation. I'm looking around your house here. I mean, there's pretty old stuff, and you just do it. 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 Frenchmen to come in and notice it.

I totally agree.

You got to be very careful before you mess all that.

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. I'm probably the most pro-indian right winger we'll ever meet, but, sincerely. But it's not even 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 it wasn't just Indians, but like people would... Immigrants would show up, taking all these benefits from the country and the permanent population here, and then start immediately attacking Whites. Now, they attacked Whites because they were encouraged to do that by a ruling class. They got into Stanford. The schools and-100 %. And then they get to Stanford and it's like, oh, you want to succeed, you have to attack the Whites. And they just, they're status oriented. All immigrants just want to fit in and want to 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.

I have a solution to this, though. My solution to this, we're always told it's all just got to be organic from the culture and the people. That's politics. It's purely downstream of culture and whatever. I have a little more of a classical political view of that. I think people respond to incentives. That's exactly right. When you mention these institutions, I think, and Trump is very good at this, 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 Buttijich. I don't know Pete Buttijich.

The fake gay guy?

I have a friend who thinks he's a fake gay.

Or is My gay producer is always like, he's not gay. He was with a girl like 20 minutes ago. He wants to be the Democratic nominee. It's like, time for a gay guy.

It's playing the long game. I mean, that's going down.

Look. Well, it's suffering for your art. I'll say that.

Look, just because I don't know him, I know 100 people to judges. I know this character. Oh, I do, too. He went to the elite school, and then he goes to McKinsey, and then he does the checks.

Then find some benighted midwestern town that he can just become mayor of.

I'm a mayor now. I was talking to a big Democrat figure, and he said, 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.

But of course. But the town 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 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.

You're not gay, dude. Stop.

Think about Pete Buttijage. 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.

Oh, totally.

Pete Buttigich, I am convinced. Look, this is purely my gut telling me this. He would be like, waving the stars and bars, doing dip. A hundred %. It would Whatever incentive were there, he would go to it. I think this is where the Trump, a little more muscular view of politics comes in. He says, no, forget about this stupid, like 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 20th, sitting there, and it was indoors for a second. I can't remember why, but I'm sitting there chatting away, of course, that next Laura Ingrum, gossiping about Fox. And all of a sudden, I look up and there's Jeff Bezos sitting right in front of me. Yes. What's Jeff Bezos doing here? And then all these people fired Jim Cooke, Sundar Pichai. 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. All of a sudden, some of the big corporations that we work with, with my show, they're more interested in helping us. They want to make sure our experience... I said, Oh, this is what power is. It is incumbent upon statesmen on the happy occasions that they get power from the people, that they actually use it in a good way and make hay while the sun shines.

We have a couple of viewer questions. We've never done this before, but it's the internet.

I'm in.

Okay. Lots of people asked this one, my producer said, Michael Knowles, do you miss working with Candice Owens?

Well, I still see Candice all the time. I'm the godfather to Candice's daughter. Actually? Yeah, I'm the godfather to Candice's daughter. I'm very good friends with her husband. It's weird for me to hang out with her. We have many Mayflower cigars over the time. I don't see Candice at work, anymore. But I do see her at church. She actually goes to the earlier Mass than I do because she converted. She came into the church like a year or something ago. In fact, I was the godfather to her daughter before she came into the church. Then all those smells and bells just kept holding her in. There was one time I was invited to the baptism of their next kid, and I just couldn't make it. I was visiting my grandma or something. People kept telling me like, No, you should really come. I was like, No, look, I love the former family, but I got to go see my granny, whatever. They kept, I said, What's this about? I don't know. They have a kid every six months, so they'll have another one soon. But then I thought it was because she was being baptized, and she wasn't telling anybody.

Anyway, she came in, and now at least I get to see her at Mass.

People love her. It is wild.

She has actual star quality. She has this thing. She could tell me something. She could tell something not only that I don't agree with, she could tell me something about myself. She could tell me I have blonde hair, and I would just the whole time, I just be like, go on, tell me everything.

It's wild. I mean, I was telling this off there, but I just going 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 goes, Tucker Carlson? Yes. You know Candice Owens? I was like, yes. He goes, Tell her that I love her. I was like, how famous do you have be where people will come up to you in 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. Another very... You say, Hey, hi, I'm Tucker, by the way.

Do you know who- No, no, no. It didn't... No, I was so impressed by it that it didn't hurt my feelings at all.

That is unbelievable.

But yes, the main thing that he liked about me was that I knew Candice Owens. I was like, wow, that, that's devotion. So I was impressed. I called her. I said, wow, man, you're really at another level.

Got to start that at restaurants. Hey, can I get a free dessert or something?

I know Candice Owens. I know Candice 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.

Okay, 23 and 25. Yeah, you should get serious. 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 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 start spitting out kids right away. The way to maybe present this to your sons is, we screw up everything in modern life. We just get everything perverted or in the wrong. We now marriage is 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 chlamedia.

Now that I have drug resistant chlamedia and my brain is half melted, now I'm going to get married. 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. 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. I've seen many, many good marriages where people married their high school sweetheart because it's like our bones. When you grow, your bones are agile and malleable, and they grow, and then they harden. Then it's really hard when two people harden into their own ways to mash together. But if you're still young and a little more malleable, even in your 20s, you're starting to really harden your views. You need to do that in such a way that you're fused together.

To me-No, that's right.

The notion of divorce.

They get really rigid, too, as they get older living alone.

Yes, get weird. Oh, so weird. They get weird. 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 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 enmeshed. All the way. It's unthinkable.

I also think young men, especially, are really concerned about the economy, which has basically been designed to exclude them. 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, of course. I was talking to a buddy of mine, even with the kids, it took us a couple of years, and then we had our first kid. I said, I hope I have enough money.

Oh, you will?

Yes. My friend said that babies are like little money bags. You 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...

He was a teacher of mine. We have that in common.

Bill Kristol was a teacher of yours?

I did one of these fellowships, like a summer fellowship. He taught me, I don't know, Machiaveli or something. To think now, I mean, now his publications have taken shots at me over the years. Oh, of course. I just think, Man, where did you lose the plot, buddy?

I don't know what happened. I don't know. It's distressing. But I think he collapsed inside as a person. Depressing. It can happen, by the way. It can happen. We have to be on guard against it. But anyway, I remember I had this editor called Richard Starr. He was such a nice man. I had this child at 25, and he goes, Your life's going to change. I was like, Everyone says that. What do you mean? He goes, When you have a child, especially when you're young, you realize you will do whatever it takes to for that child. You need to rob a fucking liquor store? Yes. No problem.

Yes.

I was like, Wow, that's so true.

It even made me-Not that I ever robbed any liquor store, but-But you might. I might still. When we got married, I was a little older. I was maybe 27 when we got engaged, 28 when we got married. I wish we'd gotten married younger. We were moving, we were long distance, all this stuff. It's all works out in providence, but it's one regret I have. We should have got, my wife says it, we should have got married younger and start having kids younger. I remember, though, I started my show after I got married or right around the time I got married. I thought, Man, thank goodness I'm not single in this career in particular because you're public. Can you imagine? All you do is just stay up late and go drink and screw around. When you're married and you have kids, you have a sense of purpose that you're doing things for something.

Of course. If you're under real stress, if you're performing in public or whatever, any job where you're under pressure and you feel like you're on a tight rope all the time. But if you didn't have a wife, I don't know how you would do that.

Yeah, I almost-They all melt down.

You need a wife.

Yes. My wife, she'll sometimes say, I'll do my show. She'll listen to my show. She'll go, Mike, you were a little bit… Mmm, lip over there. You went a little squishy. I'll be like, Man, you're the… She's like the rock solid one. She's the only person I'll ever let write some of my show. Because she gets it. Really? Yeah, it's not. She was no political nerd or anything like that. But she has a very conservative disposition. She just has this gut instinct.

When moms go right wing, boy, they're not dicken around at all. I've seen that a lot. Members of Congress, who I respect, 100% have wives who are like, What? No. You know what I mean? Yes. No, I can think of a couple. Okay, last question. It's 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, yeah. This is a boomer. This is a boomer. Baby boom, 1946, 1964, I think.

The boomer Boomers have attracted a lot of ire, rightly so. My defense of the boomers is, they came from somewhere. They came from somewhere. So even 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. I think what it has come down to is an ideological selfishness. I'm not even saying... A lot of boomers, they have all this stress and anxiety for their kids and the future. It's not even a personal selfishness. It's an ideological selfishness that says, Hey, I'm going to do what you want. Hey, follow your bliss. Do what makes you happy. I would say that came from a good place for a lot of the boomers were 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. 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 something horrible. Ideological selfishness. Boy, 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 the end of World War II and just before Woodstock. There are a lot of nice people who really care about their kids and grandkids. But it's ideological. Yes.

They can't even... What are you talking about? If I were to say that right is right and wrong is wrong, well, that would be, I don't know, authoritarian or judgmental. Yes. You think, well, you have to make judgments in life. 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.

I'm going shooting after this. I'm going to burn one of these. Okay, great. All right. I can't wait.

I have loved cigars since I was 15, which is a little old to start in New York as an Italian American. 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.

It's charity.

I couldn't agree more.

I was 15, and I never liked cigarettes. I never liked, but I loved cigars. A family friend gave me one when I was 15. I really liked it. I would go grocery shopping in the Bronx, in the Italian neighborhood. They had these guys rolling the cigars. I was too young to buy them, so they would just give them to me. They'd give me four a week. I got into it. I smoked them. I 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 I'm not going to mention about cigars.

They let you into Yale, one of the cigars, say?

I probably wouldn't have worked out today. Yeah. Better than writing about my political use.

Were your parents big donors? They were not.

Safe to say they were not. The story of this company, I wanted to start that for a long time because despite my swarmy appearance, I do have this wasp Mayflower ancestry. I said, I want it to be Mayflower. I want it to be patriotic, but I don't want it to just be like, I don't know, guns fried chicken cigars. I want it to be a little more elevated. But yeah, and this is paradox with the Mayflower, which is like the founding stock. On the one hand, they're blueblood elites. On the other, these are salt of the earth people. Yeah, they're rugged. Rugged. Rugged. Rugged. Rugged. Wiredos. Oh, big time. Booted out of England. Yeah. I said, I like that paradox because cigars are a luxury, but they're also very accessible. You can have an amazing cigar for $12. 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.

I said, Well, these are special. I need to save them for special occasions. Graduate high school, get married, first kid, that thing. Maybe I'll give some to my kids if I have any leftover. This is providential. I'm I was trying to start the cigar company. It was tough. Daily Wire was allowing me to 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, he says, Hey, Knowles, you're a cigar guy, right? I said, Yeah, yeah. He's like, Oh, I got this cigar. You got to come buy 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, yeah. I said, I can't get in touch with them. He goes, Oh, I'll put you in touch. I said, Well, that's fortuitous. Fifteen 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. We finally launch it.

Now, how hard is it to get to the right blend?

If you're 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 wanted to do it for 15 years. I landed on a blend, a Connecticut blend, which is the Mayflower Dawn. That's the more mainstream one. The Mayflower Dusk, which is an Ecuador Habana rapper. That was really blended just for my tastes. And a double Maduro, the Mayflower Dream. It comes from a painting by William Halsall of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, and it's an orange sky. You can't tell if the sun is rising or setting on America, which I love this ambiguous painting. Is it, We're getting it tomorrow or is the light going? I said, That's what I wanted it 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. Do you smoke them? All the time. You smoke your own brand? Oh, yes.

They were actually made for my taste. They are, I say, with no false modesty and true humility, they're exquisite. We've got three lines now. I even made the... I was so brutal about it. I made these little mini ones. I call them Mayflower Compacts. They're a little Petite Coronas.

That's pretty funny. Thank you.

But they're a premium hand-roll long filler, so it's not a cigarea or something. I I just love them. And they sold out immediately, which is a good problem to have because I sold four months supply in one day and was out of stock for Black Friday, out of stock for Christmas. We're picking up production. 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, 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. I want them to do that, not be in the rooms, not be just on Zoom. I want them to be in this and to recognize, thus passeth the glories of the world, Sigtranci Gloria Mundi. 45 minutes, you have your conversation, then it's over. You can light another one, maybe tomorrow. But I think it's instructive. It's whatever people say about the health effects of cigars. I have always found, I think this quote was George Burns or someone, that I've taken more out of cigars than cigars have taken out of me.

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?

It's so hard. 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. Why? 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 different. Certain states I just can't do business in. I wish I could. I have stores begging me for them. I just can't.

Why?

The regulations are so brutal. I mean, certain places are trying to ban smoking just like forever. Massachusetts, tried to set a date after which you could just never buy tobacco. It kept aging with you. Crazy, crazy stuff like that. California is awful on the regs. We're trying to sneak them out as best we can.

It does seem like tobacco should be part of the backlash.

Is it? Of course. Is it? Well, it's the American crop. First, help build the country. Washington grew it.

Where did it come from?

The American South.

The American Indians.

And originally, that's right.

Yeah, it's not native to Europe. It's native to North America.

You know who really discovered it was Christopher Columbus. I know. I've read the Taeno 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.

I don't sell syphilis. No.

Or have it. Michael Knowles, that was great.

Tucker, thank you for that.

I really I really appreciate it. It's great to see you after six years. Totally vindicated. You're not the disgusting one, Michael Knowles.

Thank you, Tucker. Thank you for your help. Oh, my gosh.

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