Free Speech Activists

"What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong."

"Millions of Americans sincerely love Donald Trump. They love him in spite of everything they've heard. They love him, often, in spite of himself. They're not deluded. They know exactly who Trump is. They love him anyway. They love Donald Trump because no one else loves them. The country they built, the country their ancestors fought for over hundreds of years, has left them to die in unfashionable little towns, mocked and despised by the sneering halfwits with finance degrees -- but no actual skills -- who seem to run everything all of a sudden. Whatever Donald Trump's faults, he is better than the rest of the people in charge. At least he doesn't hate them for their weakness. Donald Trump, in other words, is and has always been a living indictment of the people who run this country. That was true four years ago when he came out of nowhere to win the presidency. And it's every bit as true right now, maybe even more true than it's ever been. It will remain true regardless of whether Donald Trump wins reelection."

"Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the voice of the street, actually grew up in an idyllic town 45 miles north of New York City. It’s called Yorktown Heights. You never know it from listening to her recent race-baiting but the population of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez' home is over 90 percent white."

"This may be a lot of things, this moment we're living through, but it is definitely not about black lives, and remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will."

"For a lot of middle class people, wages are not keeping pace with expenses. Child care, housing, education, health care -- they're all getting more expensive by the year. The student loan bubble is still inflating. It's burdening young people with debts so large, they can't start families. Now, these are economic problems, but they require a political solution. The candidate who makes it easier for 30-year-olds to get married and have kids will win the election and will deserve to win. Remember that. It's truer than any economic theory conceived on any college campus in the last hundred years."

"How exactly is diversity our strength?"

"If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns, problems this country has, where would white supremacy be on the list? Right up there with Russia probably. It’s actually not a real problem in America. "White supremacy, that's the problem." This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It's a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power."

"We noted at the beginning of this show that Ilhan Omar is trying to take this show off the air. Shut us up. Silence us. We want to reassure you that’s not going to happen. Why? Because we work at Fox News, and they’ve got our back, and we’re thankful for that."

"Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn't grateful, not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever . . . Omar isn't disappointed in America, she's enraged by it. Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism. This is an immoral country, she says. She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people. That should worry you, and not just because Omar is now a sitting member of Congress. Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately. Maybe that's our fault for asking too little of our immigrants. We aren't self-confident enough to make them assimilate, so they never feel fully American. Or maybe the problem is deeper than that, maybe we are importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours. Who knows what the problem is, but there is a problem, and whatever the cause, this cannot continue. It's not sustainable. No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results. So, be grateful for Ilhan Omar, annoying as she is. She's a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately, or else."

"You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country, it means killing people."

"These are the people who write our movies and our sitcoms, They are not shocked by naughty words. They just pretend to be when it’s useful. It’s been very useful lately."

"Why are the people who consider Bill Clinton a hero lecturing me about sexism? How can the party that demands racial quotas denounce other people as racist? After awhile you begin to think that maybe their criticisms aren’t sincere. Maybe their moral puffery is a costume."

"I want to say to you — why don’t you go fuck yourself, you tiny brain — and I hope this gets picked up because you’re a moron, I tried to give you a hearing but you were too fucking annoying."

"Even Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. Waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. She lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in Hancock Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. How did Waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? I asked once. She didn’t answer, but did call me a racist."

"The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America."

"The few sincere liberals left, the ones actually fighting corporate power, seem like bewildered relics from an earlier age. For generations, there was no more famous activist on the left than Ralph Nader . . . If life were fair, Nader would be living out his days in a socialist retirement home in Florida, greeting a parade of awestruck liberal pilgrims. Instead, he's mostly reviled by his former admirers. His crime was daring to run for president in 2000. Democrats blamed him for Al Gore's narrow loss to George W. Bush. They never stopped blaming him. "Ralph Nader Still Refuses to Admit He Elected Bush," read a headline in New York magazine sixteen years after the election."

"But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question."

"Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime . . . If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that . . . [W]e are told these changes are entirely good . . . We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language."

"Voters knew from the very beginning exactly who Bill Clinton was. They knew because voters always know. In politics as in life, nothing is really hidden, only ignored. A candidate’s character is transparent . . . Voters understood Clinton's weaknesses. They just didn't care . . . Once he got elected, Clinton seemed to forget he'd won . . . Clinton's new priorities seemed to mirror those of the New York Times editorial page: gun control, global warming, gays in the military. His approval rating tanked. New Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress in the first midterm election. Clinton quickly learned his lesson. He scurried back to the middle and stayed there for the next six years, through scandal and impeachment. Clinton understood that as long as he stayed connected to the board center of American public opinion, voters would overlook his personal shortcomings . . . That's how democracy works . . . Somehow, Bill Clinton's heirs learned nothing from the experience."

"Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created. Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. He didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. You couldn’t really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that."

"It’s obvious we need more scientists and skilled engineers. What we’re getting instead are waves of poor people with a high school education or less. They’re nice people; nobody doubts that. But as an economic matter, this is insane. It’s indefensible, so nobody tries to defend it. It’s indefensible, so no one even tries to defend it.Instead, our leaders demand you shut up and accept it. We’ve got a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, dirtier and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement. Previous leaders of our country committed sins. So, we must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans."

"You know, the funny thing about that, and one of the reasons I’ve never talked about it, is there’s no winning. Either you lie and say, “I’m so wounded by that.” Or you tell the truth and sound like a sociopath. In my case, the truth is my childhood wasn’t that bad. It was actually pretty fun. I love my dad. Losing my mom was sad, I guess. My parents got divorced because my mom was a nutcase. Boo-hoo, poor me. But my dad got remarried to a wonderful woman, my stepmom, whom I love. I always worried I was suppressing all this rage. I used to say to my girlfriend, now wife, “What am I going to do if she ever reappears?” Then I actually did get the call, and it turned out she was living in remote France, in the Pyrénées mountains, working as a sculptor . . . [My aunt] called me and said, “Your mother’s dying.” That didn’t even make sense to me. “My mother? Who’s my mother?” And she said, “Your mother. You know, my sister.” . . . “She’s dying and she’s going to be gone soon. You’ve got to go visit her.” I thought about it, and I said, “No, I don’t think I do.”"

"This was mid-October 2001. I’d gone to Pakistan for New York magazine to cover the Taliban. I was flying from Islamabad to Peshawar, on the Afghan border, to Dubai. It was right after 9/11, so everyone was paranoid about air travel. I was sitting in first class on a big Airbus, and everyone was chain-smoking Marlboros. There were clouds of cigarette smoke, but no alcohol was allowed. We stop in Peshawar, and all these randoms file in and sit on the floor of the cockpit and smoke cigarettes. It made me nervous. This was not a First World thing to do. So we took off again, and because of the bombings in Afghanistan, we had to fly the long way around, over Iran. It ended up being a four-hour flight. Around two in the morning, we’re starting to descend. All of a sudden, bam, the plane just stops . . . And then the plane starts to drop. The engines rev and the plane turns sideways. It’s clear we’re crashing, no doubt about it. People are screaming. We finally touch down and bounce right off the runway. The right wing snaps off and all these sparks are coming up. Everyone knows we’re going to die . . . You’d think in the face of imminent death you’d be like, This is happening, it’s inevitable, and I’m peaceful about it. I was not peaceful at all. So the plane goes into a sand dune and ends up on its side. I was the first person off. I kicked open the door, the slide came down, I ran into the darkness and immediately got picked up by guards. I was brought to a room, locked in there and then put on a British Airways flight eight hours later."

"Hazleton's population was 2 percent Hispanic. Just 16 years later, Hazleton is majority Hispanic. This is more change than human beings are designed to digest. This pace of change makes societies volatile, really volatile, just as ours has become volatile. That's happening all over the country. No nation, no society has ever changed this much, this fast. Now before you start calling anyone bigoted, consider and be honest: how would you feel if that happened in your neighborhood?"

"That is not actually what is illegal as far as I understand. What I understand is the removal of an entire portion of the female sex organ without the consent of the child. Now you underwent this as an adult, there is a quantum difference between making a decision to do something like that and having that decision made for you, that cannot be reversed, as a child. That seems to me, probably the worst thing you could do to a child. Would you concede, because there are a lot of women who feel mutilated by this .. this is not, y'know .. this is being lead by women .. that maybe we should let adults make this decision and not impose it on six year olds .. is that fair?"

"It’s going to confuse the living shit out of our viewers . . . When’s the last time you saw someone defend Iran on Fox News? Right around never?"

"Totally bizarre situation—which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all."

"Let me just stipulate. I am for getting along. I am for colorblindness, I’m for tolerance, 100%. But I also think that if things radically change in your country, it’s okay for you to say, what is this, and maybe I don’t want to live in a country that looks nothing like the country I grew up in. Is that bigoted?"

"A temporary ban on Muslim immigration? That sounds a little extreme (meaning nobody else has said it recently in public). But is it? Millions of Muslims have moved to Western Europe over the past 50 years, and a sizable number of them still haven’t assimilated. Instead, they remain hostile and sometimes dangerous to the cultures that welcomed them. By any measure, that experiment has failed."

"When was the last time you stopped yourself from saying something you believed to be true for fear of being punished or criticized for saying it? If you live in America, it probably hasn’t been long."

"Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal."

"Carlson: — child rape. I'm not for child rape. I'm just saying, if you mistreat dogs like that, we're going to have to execute you."

"Bubba: Yeah, dog killing, really bad."

"Co-Host: Dog killing, bad. Child rape, eh, not so much."

"Bubba: The governor of Arizona, right now. That's the problem. We'd all be --"

"Carlson: All of a sudden, like we're very skeptical about everything until like some prosecutor comes out and says, "This guy's bad" and the rest of us nod in agreement like a church choir, "Yeah, he's bad." How do we know he’s bad? What do we know exactly? Nothing… I should make the laws round here, and Michael Vick would have been executed, and Warren Jeffs would be out on the street."

"Carlson: He's not accused of touching anybody; he is accused of facilitating a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a 27-year-old man. That's the accusation. That's what they're calling felony rape. [crosstalk] That's bullshit. I'm sorry. Now this guy may be… a child rapist. I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her. That’s bullshit"

"Carlson: What do you mean an accessory? He's like got some weird religious cult where he thinks it's OK to, you know, marry underaged girls, but he didn't do it. Why wouldn't the guy who actually did it, who had sex with an underaged girl, he should be the one who's doing life."

"Co-Host:: No, he is an accessory to the rape of children. That is a felony and a serious one at that."

"Carlson: He's in prison because he's weird and unpopular and he has a different lifestyle that other people find creepy."

"Co-Host: That means that —"

"Carlson: Whatever the hell that means."

"Co-Host: No, he's in prison for facilitation of child rape."

"Carlson: Well, actually, he's not in prison for that. He didn’t — Warren Jeffs didn't marry underaged girls, actually."

"Carlson: But Canada's a solid place with good-looking women and good fishing. We should invade."

"Bubba: Keep burying yourself."

"Carlson: I totally disagree. If I didn't like Canada, I wouldn’t consider it worth invading. I mean, Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys — that’s why it wasn't worth invading."

"Bubba: Fine people of Canada, please understand that Tucker is a very good friend of mine, but I in no way, shape, or form share his views of how he feels about people from Canada. I love Canada. They're great people up there. Tucker feels that you guys are a bunch of assholes."

"Carlson: A lot of people would rather see the world in those terms and a lot of people in politics do, and now the Republicans do even more and I just disapprove."

"Bubba: How many pieces of Nicorette has he had today?"