Revolution & The Call To Bravery

Tucker Carlson On The Urgency To Refuse The 'Everything Is Fine' Lie

Tucker Carlson delivers his Bravery speech at ISI

Here’s the text of a knockout recent speech by Tucker Carlson, one that deserves to go viral. Here TC is talking about the fact that America has changed radically, almost overnight, right under the noses of its people:

It happened because only one side of the revolution recognized that it was a revolution. The other side had no idea.

One side saw these changes for what they were: Let’s completely change American society, from the bottom to the top. Let’s eliminate any sense of shared culture or history. Let’s atomize the country to the point where there’s no viable opposition to what we’re doing. And once we’ve done that, let’s addle everyone with prescription drugs. Let’s encourage them to be unhealthy, unmarried, and childless, and then we can do whatever we want.

And no one’s aware on the other side—which is not just the right, but the vast bulk of everyone else, which would include a lot of Democrats and just normal people who aren’t at all interested in the revolution. They had no idea what was happening.

It’s important to understand the moment that you’re in. It cuts against the very core of human nature to understand that, because denial is the most powerful of all human instincts.

TC tells a story about how twenty years ago, he was in a plane crash in the Dubai desert. Even as they were all in maximum distress, the flight attendant kept yelling, “Everything is fine!” It was plainly a lie, and TC said he rejected the lie, and got himself out of the fuselage. He goes on:

I’ve brooded on this for over 20 years—why did the flight attendant claim everything was fine? I think he just couldn’t metabolize the change. It was so awful he just could not admit what was happening right there in front of everybody. This really bothered me all these years, despite the fact it wound up fine for me.

Man, is that ever true! It is so very, very, very difficult to wake up people to what is happening, what has been happening, and what is probably going to happen. I have experienced in my personal life how the Everything’s Fine™ mentality can destroy everything, and I see it everywhere in our culture and society.

Just last night, I was texting with a female friend back in the US (she reads this newsletter — hey girl!), who is single. She was telling me that given that I have been off the dating scene since 1996, I will likely be absolutely shocked by what pornography has done to men and women and romantic pursuits. She gave me some examples, and I swear, I wanted to put on a monastic robe and take a one-way flight to Mount Athos. My friend was just telling me that I had better prepare myself to navigate these realities. Even if I don’t accept them, these are the new norms, she said.

If you had been an emissary from 2024, and traveled back in time to 1996 to tell me that this is how it was going to be between men and women in the West, I would have thought that we had well and truly morally collapsed. And yet … here we are. I told my friend that I had a sense the other day of what things were like when, googling to find out more information about that story I posted here the other day — the one about the Brooklyn sex commune where people complain that consent was violated — I came across this 2021 Men’s Health story about a sex party at the commune.

Silly me — back in the 1990s, I wrote a story for that magazine, and thought it was a normal, mainstream men’s health magazine. That piece, though, written by its bisexual sex columnist, author of a book called BoySlut, reads like one of those lurid Penthouse Letters that teenage guys in my generation used to read clandestinely in dirty magazines. But this is a completely mainstream health magazine today! What was considered pornography a generation ago is normal discourse today.

But hey … Everything’s Fine™.

Last night I was having drinks with a Catholic friend visiting the city from western Europe. He is pretty demoralized about politics and everything else. He told me how pathetic the institutional church is in his country, as well as the political parties his side usually votes for. He complained that it is so difficult to rouse the conservatives in his country to recognize how insane the situation is. They want desperately to pretend that everything’s fine, that if they just keep voting for the mainstream conservative party, it’s all going to work out in the end.

He told me that one of the most difficult things for him to come to terms with is how his view on America has changed. He said he has no love for Russia or China, but it was a bitter red pill for him to swallow to realize that as bad as those countries’ governments are, they aren’t the biggest threat to him. No, he said, the forces that are destroying the things I cherish most in the world — faith, family, nation, tradition — all originate in the United States.

My friend is not an old man, either. He grew up loving America. And now this.

Anyway, back to Carlson, who tells an amazing story — one I think I’ve mentioned here in the past — about the memoirs of a Tsarist general who returns to St. Petersburg, which is at the beginning of the Revolution, and is utterly shocked to see so many people, in the imperial family as well as in the streets, utterly oblivious to what’s going on around them. We can’t let ourselves be that way, says Carlson.

So what do we do? He begins:

Are we actually living lives that prepare us for whatever is coming next?

I do think this is a spiritual battle. When you’re honest, you are proud of yourself. When you’re honest, you are strong. When you lie, you become weak. Why do you lie? Because you’re hiding something—because you believe that if the people around you knew what you really thought or said or did, they would think less of you. That diminishes you. Your power ebbs when you lie. Tell the truth. Live like a decent person.

It sounds so radical, but it’s not.

Gather your family to you in a real way. If you’ve got a dispute with a sibling, a parent, a child, or the person who shares your bed, do your best to make it better. Spend less time on Twitter. Spend more time talking to your wife. Strengthen the core, and the core is your family. It’s the orbit right around you.

There’s other strong advice in there, including: believe in God, and be brave. Read the whole thing, and share it widely.

About the bravery thing: in recent days, I’ve had various conversations, both in person and online, about what the moment requires of us. People now who work in my world know that the kinds of stands our principles require us to take could easily get us fired, cancelled, or worse. This is not getting better, but rather much worse, especially as governments throughout the West begin to define dissidents as “domestic extremists” and suchlike.

But what do we do? I say: follow God and be brave. In Live Not By Lies, I tell the stories of men and women who are still alive today, and who faced a far more terrifying force than we do. Yet all were brave, and many found their courage through belief in God. If they did it, we can too. If they did it, we must too.

Everything is not fine. Resistance begins by refusing the big lie.

You can watch the entire speech here — the piece I linked to above is a distilled version of it.

Scotland Used To Be Free

From The Herald (Glasgow):

Police officers in Scotland are being given training to target social media posts, including re-tweets, of material deemed "threatening and abusive."

Under the county's new hate crime law, actors and comedians are not given a free pass to make jokes about sensitive subjects that offend people, either.

The new training provided to officers, which was leaked to The Herald, requires police officers to go after anyone who produces material deemed "threatening and abusive," which can also be communicated through "public performance of a play."

Under the new hate crime law, people who make fun of or misgender trans people, make racial jokes or criticisms of certain religions, or criticize migrants can be prosecuted.

They gonna go arrest J.K. Rowling now, for believing in biological reality?

That is not a free country, Scotland. What happened to its people? What would you do if you were a young Scot? Fight, or flee? If fight, then how? If flee, then to where? All of the West is trending this way. But not Hungary. Thank God for Hungary.