A remarkable segment of Tucker Carlson’s speech at the Heritage Foundation 50th anniversary gala dinner in Washington, D.C. on Friday, which closed out two days of a summit on the political realities of our era:

 Carlson: I would just say two things about the present moment… 

The first is, you look around and you see so many people break under the strain, the downward pressure of whatever it is that we’re going through. The disdain and sadness as you see people you know become Quislings, you see them revealed as cowards, going along with the New New Thing, and it is always a silly thing, saying things you know they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs… and you’re so disappointed in people. 

You realize the herd instinct is the strongest instinct, it may be stronger than the hunger and sex instincts. The instinct, which is inherent, to be like everybody else, not to be cast out of the group and shunned. It takes over in moments like this, it is harnessed by bad people in times like this to produce uniformity. You see people go along with this and you lose respect for them. 

That has happened to me at scale over the past three years. I’m not mad at people, I’m just sad and disappointed. How could you go along with this, you know it is not true but you’re saying it anyway. Really, you’re putting your pronouns on your email? It’s ridiculous. what does that even mean? You’re saying things you can’t define. 

“LGBTQIA+” Who’s the plus? The plus is invited on my show any time. Find a plus and I’ll interview him. What’s it like to be a plus? Am I a plus? I can do addition, does that make me a plus? No one even knows what it is, and the whole society… So you reach that place and you feel… I am so upset by some people I love and the country I revere… You see the sadness happening. 

But, there is a countervailing force at work always. There is a counterforce to the badness, it is called goodness! And you see it in people. So for every ten people who are putting he/him in their electronic J.P Morgan email signatures, there’s one person who says, “No, I’m not doing that, sorry. It’s a betrayal of what I think is true… of my autonomy. I am a free citizen and I’m not doing that, and there’s nothing you can do to me to make me do it. And I hope it won’t come to that, but if it does come to that, here I am.” It’s Paul on trial. Here I am. 

And you see that in people and it is a completely unexpected assortment of people… But because I’m sort of paid to predict things I think about what connects certain outcomes before they occurred. In this case, there is no thread I can find that connects all of the people who’ve popped up in my life to be that lone, brave person in the crowd who says, No thank you.”

You could not have known who these people are. They don’t fit a common profile… Some of them are people I despised on political grounds just a few years ago. You might know their names but I don’t want to wreck your dinner by telling you who they are. But there is in one case someone who I made fun of on television, and certainly in my private life in vulgar ways, who is really the embodiment of everything I found repulsive, who in the middle of Covid decided they’re not going along with it. And once you say one true thing and stick with it, other true things occur to you. 

The truth is contagious. Lying is, but the truth is as well. And the second you decide to tell the truth about something you are filled with this power from somewhere else. Try it! Tell the truth about something. You’ll feel it every day. The more you tell the truth, the stronger you become. That’s completely real. It is measurable in the way that you feel. 

And of course, the opposite is also true. The more you lie, the weaker and more terrified you become. We all know that feeling. You lie about something and all of a sudden you are a prisoner of that lie. You are diminished by it… Drug and alcohol use is the same way. It makes you weak and afraid. 

But you look around and you see some of the people who have really paid a heavy price for telling the truth. They are passed out of their groups, but they do it anyway. I look at those people with the deepest possible admiration…

But how about if you’re a senior vice president at Citibank and you’re making four million a year… you need this job, and your whole sector is kind of collapsing. There is no incentive for you to tell the truth about anything. You just go into reeducation meetings and go, “Oh, yeah, diversity is our strength. Equity in the capital markets. All right!”

So if you are the one guy who refuses to say that, you are a hero, in my opinion. And I know some of them, in fact, my job is to interview them. And I sit back and look at these people, and I give them more credit than people who display physical courage, which is often impulsive… Every man fantasizes about what he would do when the building catches fire and you hear a baby crying. You rush inside. No one is trained to stand up in the middle of a DEI meeting at Citibank and say it is nonsense. And the people who do that — they have my deepest admiration. Their example gives me hope. 

That’s the first thing… In this profound moment of widespread destruction of the institutions that people who share our views built… we can also see rising in the distance new institutions built by new people who are every bit as brave as the people who came before us. Amen!

Here’s the second thing, which is that it might be time to start to reassess the terms we use to describe what we’re watching. When I started at Heritage, the presumption was a very Anglo-American assumption, that the debates we’re having are rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed upon outcomes. So, like, we all want the country to be more prosperous and free and people to be less oppressed or whatever. So we’re going to argue about tax rates… but the objective is the same. so we write our papers and they right their papers and may the best paper win. 

I don’t think that’s what we’re watching now at all. I don’t think we’re watching a debate over how to get to the best outcome. That’s completely wrong… There is no way to assess the transgender-ist movement with that mindset. Policy papers don’t cover it at all. If you have people who say, “I have an idea, let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate the children.” 

I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. What? It has nothing to do with politics. What’s the outcome we’re desiring here? an androgynous population? Are we arguing for that? I don’t think anyone could defend that as a positive outcome. 

But the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that. Well, what is that? It’s not rational. If you say you think abortion is always bad, or sometimes it is necessary. That’s a debate I’m familiar with. But if you’re telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying? Well, you’re arguing for child sacrifice… I have compassion for everyone involved, but when the Treasury Secretary comes up and says you can help the economy by getting an abortion — well, that’s like an Aztec principle, actually. There’s not a society in history that didn’t practice human sacrifice. not one, I checked… It wasn’t just the Mesoamericans, it was everybody. So that’s what that is. 

So what’s the point of child sacrifice? There’s no policy goal entwined with that. That’s a theological phenomenon. That’s kind of the point I’m making. none of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people, the federal government, the largest organization in human history, decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, let’s tear it down — what you’re watching is not a political movement, it is evil.