President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election may have signaled the end of a dark era in world history.
Indeed, as America’s Golden Age begins, we must never forget that those who told the truth made this moment possible.
With that in mind — and for those who missed it the first time around — let us revisit a simultaneously hilarious, maddening, and revealing exchange between conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and a female reporter in Australia last June, when Carlson, having explained his actual views in great detail, responded to the reporter’s misrepresentation of those views by rightly questioning her intelligence.
“How do they get people this stupid in the media?” an exasperated Carlson asked. “I guess it doesn’t pay well.”
A sympathetic-sounding audience laughed at the barb, as they should have.
The reporter began by describing Carlson’s views on immigration as racist. She did not use the word “racist,” but she insisted that he had espoused the so-called “great replacement theory,” for instance, by repeatedly expressing fears that mass immigration from across the globe would displace the Western world’s native-born white population.
Carlson, however, did not allow her to get away with that slanderous assertion. He explained, in fact, that he had never referred to the displacement of “whites.” Instead, he worried that the people who made policy in the United States did so without regard for its native-born population, including black Americans and people of all backgrounds.
Incredibly, the obnoxious reporter refuted Carlson’s assertion.
“I believe that’s untrue,” she said.
Was Tucker’s takedown so brutal that you almost felt sorry for the liberal reporter?
“We just met,” Carlson replied, “but when our relationship starts with a lie it makes it tough to be friends. So let’s pull that back. I’m happy to explain what I do think.”
All the while, the reporter talked over Carlson, insisting without evidence upon the truth of her initial premise.
Carlson then spent the next minute laying out his views on declining birth rates and Western economies that make it difficult for people who want to have children.
But he also recognized the reporter’s ulterior motive, for he had seen it many times.
“If you think that’s racist, that’s your problem,” Carlson said.
“I never called you a racist,” she disingenuously replied.
“But of course you are suggesting — and I must say one of the reasons people don’t like people like you in the media is that you never say exactly what you mean; your slurs are all by implication,” Carlson said before again asking for “no more lying.”
At that point, with a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, the reporter mentioned the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York. That shooting, carried out by an actual white supremacist, took the lives of ten black Americans. The reporter tried linking that horrific crime to views that Carlson had just spent more than two minutes disavowing.
At that point, he had enough.
“Come on,” Carlson said, slamming his glass of water on the podium in disgust.
Moments later, he made his comment about stupid people in the media.
“Look, I’m sorry, I’ve lived among people like you for too long, and I don’t mean to call you stupid. Maybe you’re just pretending to be,” Carlson joked, again drawing laughs from the audience.
He then spent more than a minute explaining why, as a Christian, he opposed violence. That included the war in Ukraine, which, he suggested, the reporter undoubtedly supported like all “dutiful liberals.”
Incredibly, the reporter then asked if Carlson’s opposition to violence meant that he supported gun control.
“What?!?” Carlson replied. “I thought it couldn’t get dumber, but it did. No. I don’t support disarming law-abiding people so they can’t defend themselves, so the government has a monopoly on violence? I don’t think so.”
Finally, after Carlson spent another minute explaining his actual views, the stubborn or mentally-addled reporter returned to her original premise.
“So you don’t think you harbor any kind of responsibility for these hate crimes?” she asked.
Carlson simply chuckled along with the audience.
“I’m sorry, I’ve tried to be charitable, I’ve tried to be charitable,” he said as the laughter continued. “I was like, ‘maybe you’re just pretending to be dumb.’ Now I don’t think it’s an act.”
The reporter’s initial question came at the beginning of the video, and the exchange continued for five or six minutes.
End Wokeness, a prominent conservative account on X, used a sanitized version of a vulgar word before describing Carlson as having “just committed a homicide on live television.”
Holy shlit Tucker Carlson just committed a homicide on live television pic.twitter.com/9CJEGhGdes
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 26, 2024
Carlson, of course, modeled the precise behavior that helped Trump win the election.
For too long, agents of cancel culture in the woke establishment media succeeded in browbeating sensible conservatives into submission.
They used epithets like “racist” to mischaracterize conservative views and silence dissent. And they used censorship to suppress those views.
However, after Elon Musk purchased Twitter in late 2022 — later rebranding the site as “X” — conservatives finally had an established platform on which they could speak freely. From there, they only needed to tell the truth at every turn. The more they told that truth, the more the “racist” epithet and other tools of the authoritarian left lost their power.
By now, many readers know this general narrative. But it is easy to forget that telling the truth in the face of authoritarian wokeness once took a great deal of courage.
Thus, as the cloud of state-sponsored propaganda from the establishment media begins to lift across the West, we should thank Carlson and others for going the lengths they did to tell the truth at all costs.
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