TCS: Tucker Responds to the Death of Americans in ICE Protests (Transcript)

And at that point, crowd control, keeping riots from spinning completely out of control and burning down, say, your city, will be the job of local law enforcement.

So just to restate, these are the four points. Number one, you have to answer 911 calls from federal agents. Number two, you have to do your best to keep them from getting killed when they’re off duty. Number three, the jails have to tell us where the rapists are. And number four, if you do that, we’ll basically pull back and allow you to keep the situation from spinning out of control on your own.

And some federal law enforcement will remain to protect federal assets. The federal courthouse, for example, can’t burn that down, and that’s the job of the feds to protect it.

Minnesota’s Refusal and Its Implications

That happened, and the response from officials in Minnesota was, no, we’re not doing that. So at that point, you have to ask yourself, well, why? Why would a state refuse to protect American citizens from murder, refuse to give the names or whereabouts of murderers and child molesters, and refuse to use its own cops to keep riots under control? What could possibly be the answer?

Because they want riots. That’s why. Because they want the chaos. And this proves to you, if you’re following this at home and trying to make sense of all, where did this come from? Why did I shoot these people?

This is proof that what you’re watching is not a series of protests about immigration. What you’re watching are the beginnings of a color revolution of a kind of insurrection against federal authority.

And what you have to ask yourself, even if you disapprove of the Trump administration, even if you have, you know, some commitment to keeping illegal aliens here, is do you want that? Can you live with that? Can you live in a country of fifty states that don’t agree on what the federal law should be and that allow Americans to get murdered in their cities because they have the wrong politics or they work for a politician they disapprove of.

And if you are okay with that, have you thought through its implications? The number one implication is the country will fall apart. That’s civil war. It’s the definition of it. You have regions and internal government states that don’t recognize federal authority, the authority of a government over them all, of Washington.

And at that point, what you have is warring nations within the same borders, and then you have widespread violence. Then you have killing at scale. Then you have civil war.

And it’s sort of depressing even to say that out loud, and you certainly don’t want to encourage radical thinking by saying that. In other words, you don’t want to kind of talk civil war into existence because there’s nothing worse than civil war, nothing more brutal because the stakes are the highest possible.

Someone has to win, and the other side has to give up completely. There has to be total surrender and total victory. And on the way to that, there’s no accommodation in a civil war. One side has to completely dominate the other, and a lot of people get killed in that. Do you want that?

And, of course, no decent person wants that. Not for a second. And so how do you stop it? We’re going to discuss the options.

The Organized Nature of the Chaos

But before we do, you should know that what you’re watching is clearly, provably an organized attempt to get us there, to provoke chaos by elected officials. And it’s hard to see that at first because the video that you see, all the videos you see are of the participants, the foot soldiers in this.

This is one of those conflicts that people experience on social media. So by definition, it’s mostly limited to thirty second out of context clips. And what you see, and both sides see this, the left and the right, Trump voters and Trump haters all see their version of the conflict, and it’s almost always limited to the people who are actually in the streets participating.

So you have the ICE officers either hurting someone or getting hurt. Then you have the protesters doing what they do, which is get mad and hurt, destroy, stand in the way of things. But what you don’t see are the forces that are directing both of those sides.

And it’s important to remember from the beginning to the end that your perceptions as an American are being manipulated on purpose clearly by a whole bunch of interested parties.

Understanding the Participants

So if you’re on the right and anti chaos, it’s very easy to focus on the Antifa elements of this, and they’re there. People shooting videos of themselves in their cars saying, this is war. We have to kill the other side. And that’s designed to scare you, of course, but it’s also easy to lose sight of what you’re looking at.

If you actually look at the Antifa participants in all of this, what do you see? You see sad people, screwed up people. You ever seen mugshots of Antifa? I mean, they’re all kind of pasty and lumpy and transvestites. They look drug addicted. They’ve got tattoos on their faces. It’s not an attack on them at all.

It’s merely an acknowledgment that these are not life’s winners. These are people who a hundred years ago would probably middle class Americans engaged in the workforce and married and doing something. But for a bunch of different reasons, this is what we have now, which is a lot of extremely frustrated young people who are not physically or psychologically healthy at all, who are spiritually dead, and who have been brainwashed, hypnotized, convinced somehow to give their lives up in the service of what? Destroying things.

What you have very obviously is a spiritual problem, and these are perpetrators, but they’re also victims. And it’s so important to remember that. You should feel horror and fear. These are people to be afraid of. They’re genuine extremists. They would kill you for sure, but they’re also your fellow Americans who are themselves dying in some true sense.

It’s sad what you’re watching. It’s sad. This is all downstream from decades of cultural and political destruction. Of course, this is the sort of terminus of it or the last stop before the end.

But try, if you can, to remember the humanity of everyone involved here, including the people doing really bad things, including, by the way, the ICE officers who wound up in an impossible situation, maybe made a bad judgment. And the people on the other side too, these are all Americans.

The Forces Behind the Chaos

What you should always keep in mind is that somebody is directing all of this. There are forces directing this. There are forces, in other words, that profit from chaos, that seek chaos. And what forces would those be?

Well, there are two. One is the out of power political class that wants power. That’s why you abet chaos. That’s why you have color revolutions. That’s why people are shot in the square. They’re literally killed in order for a group of people to assume power.

Extra democratically, you create chaos because you want to tear down the current system and assume control of the new system. It’s the Bolshevik model, but it’s much older than that. And this is always true.

Every revolutionary movement spends almost no time trying to convince voters to adopt their program and instead tries to destroy the entire system to make voting itself pointless or illegitimate, to make the machinery of the old system broken to the point where it just can’t be used anymore, so then a new system can be built that they run.

The Nature of Organizations and Power

Okay? So there’s that. But there are also other forces, and one of them would be, let’s just say, federal agencies, including and especially the agencies with guns who understand that the more chaos there is, the more control they have. And this is not alleging a conspiracy. It’s merely noting human nature and the nature of organizations.

Organizations, by definition, exist for their own enlargement, to accrue power to themselves. That’s the real reason all human organizations, from the Church Bakesale Committee to the CIA, that’s the real reason they exist because that’s how people are. People get together. They have a mission, but the real mission is to bring to themselves more power and control.

So, if you’re an American law enforcement agency or intelligence gathering agency, chaos is an opportunity for you to get more power.

Who Benefits from the Chaos?

So those are the two groups fundamentally who are benefiting from the chaos. The rest of us are not only not benefiting, we are watching all the good things that we have on the brink of being eliminated.

So let’s start with the first group that benefits from this destruction, from what could be a much larger and much more destructive version of the 2020 George Floyd riots, which really helped no American whatsoever, certainly didn’t help black people, but made these same groups much more powerful.

Who are these people now? Well, first among them is the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, the man who ran for vice president a year and a half ago.

This is a guy who is in the middle of the biggest political scandal in a state’s history. It’s the Somali welfare scam that has just been exposed. And a month ago, Tim Walz was in disgrace. And now Tim Walz is the leader of the insurrection against the orange man. So, you can see already the benefit is there.

Tim Walz’s Inflammatory Rhetoric

So, it probably shouldn’t surprise you that Tim Walz is on television, social media, constantly encouraging the kind of violence that you’ve been watching on Instagram. Here’s one example, Tim Walz.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

TIM WALZ: We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

Someone’s going to write that story about Minnesota. Now he’s referring to Anne Frank, of course, the little Jewish girl who was killed in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding for more than a year with her family in the secret alcove from the Nazis. It’s a story that most American children are very familiar with.

And it’s the most terrifying possible thing you could ever say to a population that the president the United States and his armed agents are going to kill you like they did Anne Frank. So the people I’m opposed to are not simply Nazis in some theoretical sense. They’re coming here to round you and your children up and take them to a death camp.

That’s what the governor of Minnesota is saying in public in the middle of the most volatile rioting his state has seen maybe ever, maybe even more than what we saw five years ago, maybe even scarier than that. And here’s the governor saying, it’s worse this time to the death camps.

Why would you say something like that in order to calm things down? No. In order to gin up fear, which is, of course, the fastest way to control people by terrifying them, making them so afraid that they will believe anything you tell them, they will follow any command you give them.

And, you know, like the Japanese in the South Pacific, they’ll jump off the cliff into the sea because they’ve been so convinced that the invading army is going to eat them and rape their children that they will die before they submit. That is what he is telling his people in the state.

The Tragedy of American Deaths

So just to be clear, two Americans were killed by ICE officers, and we can debate whether or not that was justified. It was sad, and everybody should admit it was sad and bad. It’s always sad when Americans die, period.

But watching that, the deaths of those two people would make any normal person say, “Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah. Let’s cool this down.” And by the way, to restate, to his great credit, the Trump administration has had that response and has gone to Tim Walz and said, “Woah, let’s cool this down.”

Tim Walz’ response? No. Because he’s benefiting from it. That’s why.

Misplaced Priorities in Washington

And by the way, another point that I think should be clear to everybody at this moment, anyone in Washington still advocating for some new foreign war on behalf of a foreign power by definition, doesn’t care about this country.

If you’re still pushing the White House to launch a war on Iran and a regime change war later this month on Iran as your own country is devolving into chaos, then I don’t think we need to guess about where your priorities are. You just don’t care about the United States and what happens to it.

Of course, we knew that. This morning, Lindsey Graham is tweeting about the brave Kurds as the United States comes unraveled. And Lindsey Graham’s concern is about the Kurds?

Now at some point, we’re going to have to think about how did Lindsey Graham and people like Lindsey Graham wind up running our congress? How did they wind up with all of this authority? How did we ever put people like that in charge of us who in a moment of crisis are tweeting about the brave Kurds, whoever they are?

But there still are, as of right now, people in Washington, Mark Levin, and many others who are so indifferent to what happens to what is supposedly their country that they are still focused on some other neocon adventure in the Middle East on somebody else’s behalf. It has nothing to do with us at all.

Weakness Invites Aggression

Until this is solved, until the chaos is quelled, until there’s some broad agreement on where we go next, we not only have no time for a new neocon war. That is destruction, clearly.

And by the way, it is in a moment like this that foreign powers looking at us sense weakness, vulnerability. “Oh, you’ve got aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf planning a new strike on the Ayatollah in Iran? Oh, gold is over five thousand dollars an ounce? Oh, it looks like the dollar’s in trouble. Now is the time to move.”

Weakness invites aggression, and we are not in a strong place right now because our nation itself, the actual United States, the place that we supposedly care about most, is not in a strong place. It can be. We can fix this.

But until we do, no. Anyone who’s still talking about any of that nonsense, Gaza, Iran, should be called out immediately as someone who just doesn’t care about Americans.

Tim Walz’s Political Calculations

But someone who really does care about what happens next noted is Tim Walz because he’s benefiting from this. And the more protesters who are killed in Minnesota, the more powerful Tim Walz knows he will be. And the happier the people organizing this and paying for it will be.

Because the point is not to push back against ICE overreach. The point is to tear it all down. That is absolutely the point.

And thankfully, there is someone in Minnesota who’s who’s even less restrained and even more obvious about what’s actually going on than Tim Walz, who’s not a stealthy character. He has a lot of trouble hiding obvious facts about himself, in case you haven’t watched him.

But there is someone who’s even worse or more revealing on camera, and that would be lieutenant governor of Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan. Watch this.

Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan’s Call to Action

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

PEGGY FLANAGAN: If you are sick and tired of your government being ransacked by Donald Trump and his minions, literally taking away health care from your neighbors, stealing food off of the table from seniors and children, and, generally being uncool with the fact that our neighbors are being disappeared. PS, without due process, it is just called kidnapping, then show up and use your voice. Put your body on the line and use nonviolent direct action, which is one of the most important tools in our toolbox to say, “I am not okay. I will not go silently into the night.”

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

So that’s the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan. “Use your bodies. Put your bodies on the line.” She is encouraging citizens in her state to risk their lives on behalf of folks and their neighbors.

So who is she talking about? She’s talking about people who have no legal or moral right to be here in the first place. She’s talking about foreign national citizens of other countries who are living off the largesse of the federal and state governments here who are being supported by American taxpayers and in a lot of cases who’ve committed violent crimes, murder, sex crimes.

This is not propaganda. These are facts. The Trump administration, whatever its faults, has come out and given you a list of these people, their names, what they did. That’s who she’s talking about, these folks, these neighbors.

And she’s saying you, as a native born American, should risk your life to protect them. And the scary thing is it’s working. It’s working.

The Biden Administration’s Immigration Legacy

So what are we looking at? We’re looking at the Biden administration in four years, let in say twenty million people illegally from around the world. Twenty million people whose identities they didn’t know, whose identities they didn’t want to know, actually. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Who are these people? We still don’t know in a lot of cases.

Here’s a fact. Hasn’t been reported. So 2021, we withdraw from Afghanistan after twenty years. Biden famously screws it up, but we lose Bagram and US military personnel or suicide bomb die on the way out. Planes take off, people clinging to them. It’s a disaster.

No one’s ever punished for it. The only person who’s punished for it, of course, is Stu Sheller, the Marine Corps colonel who complained about it. No one else is punished. It’s fine. Move on.

But it produced, as these things always do, an awful lot of refugees. And some of them were legitimate, I guess, people who had helped the United States over twenty years in Afghanistan, interpreters, people who worked at the embassy, worked with US military, etcetera, etcetera. Some of them weren’t.

But where did they go? Well, they didn’t just all come to Bethesda, Maryland. A lot of them were moved to processing centers, camps in what they call the region. Some of them came to the Gulf.

The Biometrics Scandal

And all six countries in the Gulf, the Persian Gulf, the Sunni countries are allies of the United States. And so one of those countries held a bunch of these people voluntarily as a favor to the United States, to the Biden administration. They this is a fact.

And they so they call up Biden administration. “We got all these people and bring them to the United States, and we’re going take biometrics on them to find out who they are.” And there’s some record of who they are, biometrics.

And the Biden administration says, “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t want you to do that. Do not take biometrics of these people before sending them to the United States.”

Why would the Biden administration not want to know who these people were? Why no That’s a fact, by the way. But why’d they do that? Unclear. Unknown. Think about it for a second. That’s not a good sign.

That’s not a government working on behalf of the interest of its own people. It’s not a government trying to help its own country at all. That’s the opposite. That’s so reckless and crazy that you have to ask like, “Well, why did they do it?” When again, the answer is unclear. We can only guess, but we know they did it.

And they did some version of it with about twenty million people.

The Darker Questions

So those people show up here. They’re just here now. And the assumption has been, “Well, those people are, at worst, just new Democratic voters. And there’s going to be a series of laws passed in the future that will allow them to vote. Their children will be born here. Of course, they’re they’re birthright citizens. They can vote, and we’re going to change the balance of the demographic balance of the country so we will always have power.”

That’s always kind of been the darkest suspicion of what’s happening, but that’s not actually the darkest suspicion. You could think of a few more, actually. Why would you do that? Makes you a little uncomfortable if you start to think about it.

Why would you move people in? There’s no record of who they are. No way to know who they are. You got to suspect some of them are bad people, and some of them have turned out to be bad people. Like, what are your plans going forward? Twenty million? Really?

But that’s where we are. That’s where we are. Let let’s hope that those suspicions prove to be false. Like, what’s the purpose of this?

The Reality of Violence and Federal Authority

By the way, a lot of these people who grew up in war zones have different feelings about violence than, say, your average suburban American does and a different willingness to use violence than your average American does. Your average American has never seen violence, never seen chaos. In any case, that’s where we are.

And here you have Peggy Flanagan saying there’s nothing the federal government can do, which includes not just the Trump administration, but like people in every other state. There’s nothing they can do about it.

And if they try to take a single one of these people out of the country, no matter what this person is like, no matter how much you’re taking in welfare benefits at a time where the US economy is in trouble. And of course, we don’t need new low-skilled labor in the United States because AI, obviously, what are these all people going to do? There’s no reason for this. Nothing about this helps anyone else in the country.

But according to Peggy Flanagan, there’s literally nothing you can do, and anyone who tries to do anything about it is going to get stopped physically by her voters.

Minneapolis Officials Orchestrate Resistance

Lay down your bodies. This is being orchestrated not just by NGOs and donors, whoever they are, but by the elected officials of the state of Minnesota.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

JACOB FREY: I do have a message for our community, for our city, and I have a message for ICE. To ICE, get the f* out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy are being terrorized, and now somebody is dead. That’s on you. And it’s also on you to leave.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

Now that’s about a month ago. Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis, who, by the way, has nothing to do with Minnesota at all. He’s not from there. He moved there after law school. He’s basically an outside agitator who’s taking control of the political mechanisms of the forty-third biggest city in the United States.

Federal law enforcement, get out, he says. Do you have a right to say that, really, if you’re the mayor of an American city? Certainly understand feeling like you don’t want federal agents in your city. Okay. But do you have a right, an actual right, to say that? No, you don’t. Because we have all agreed that there is a federal government over all of us.

And if you’re saying that into the camera, what are you doing? You’re trying to start a war. And that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. And once again, every protester, no matter how misguided or crazed, deranged, extreme, a lot of them are really extreme, no matter how many foot soldiers die in this, Jacob Fry, as long as they keep dying, gets more powerful.

This guy’s the mayor of Minneapolis, doesn’t even have five hundred thousand people, not even a half a million people live in Minneapolis. Okay? And yet every American knows this guy’s name. Why? Because of this.

The Opportunism of Political Power

So, typically, it used to be like in a functioning system, a mayor would come in, and if he improved the city, he would become famous. And if he wrecked it, he would become infamous. But the job description was improve the place. You’re in charge of it. We elected you to make this place better. Those rules don’t apply.

Instead, people are rewarded for that kind of talk, which is why he’s doing it. The guy’s just an opportunist. He’s like from suburban DC or something. He just shows up here and starts lecturing Minnesotans and Minneapolis, you know, Twin Cities residents about what our history is or whatever. No. This guy’s an opportunist leveraging the destruction of his own city and the suffering of its own people in order to accrue power to himself. That’s just a fact.

But it tells you this is not a situation, however they may have mishandled it, the Trump administration created. Donald Trump ran on the promise that we’re going to get these people out. They have no right to be here. They’re not making the country better. That’s not racism. It’s just a fact.

That’s an overwhelmingly popular sentiment with the public or was before all of this, and the state doesn’t want to comply. You hate to search for civil rights analogies because that whole thing was so fraudulent that you don’t even appeal to it as a source of moral authority. On the other hand, it is a fact that Bull Connor is not considered a hero, at least in American textbooks. The guy George Wallace, the guy who stands in the schoolhouse door and says federal troops out. We don’t remember him as a champion of states’ rights.

In fact, the whole concept of states’ rights was made highly unpopular by that behavior because, of course, the media swung behind the feds. And sixty years later, the opposite is true. And almost none of that really, really matters long term. The only thing that really, really matters is how do we keep the country from spinning apart? And this kind of stuff is guaranteed to break it up and to cause real violence.

The Manufactured Crisis

That was Jacob FREY. He’s the one that the White House called and said, look, if you’ll just respond to nine-one-one calls when our federal officers call for help because they’re going to be killed, if you’ll just try to protect them in restaurants as you would any other American, if you’ll just give us the address of, say, a convicted murderer we’re hoping to get out of our country, then we’ll leave and you can take over. This is a guy who turned that down.

Again, you can’t make the point enough. This is happening because they want it to happen. Just like every big thing in the life of any country happens, this is just a sad fact, not because some group of people decide it should happen or because it’s ordained by history to happen, but because the people in charge want it to happen.

By the way, we have whatever the real number is, eighty million illegal aliens in the country in the first place because both parties want it, of course. So at a macro level, this is manipulation of the public. That’s true. If you really wanted a country where only citizens live or people with the permission of the government, only people who are following the law get to live there and reap the benefits of living there. If you really wanted that, you could have fixed this decades ago.

You’d make it really simple. You would just enforce two things. One, you’re not allowed to hire people who are here illegally. You go to employers and say no. And you would check their documents just like your documents get checked. You can’t get on a plane without a real ID. Why? Because they want to know who you are.

All these illegals are working for American businesses using fake documents, and everybody knows that. Fake Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, real driver’s licenses now because a lot of states just give driver’s licenses to illegals. Fake birth certificates, all fake, and that’s easily provable, but no one really wants to deal with that.

And the other thing we do is like, how about no benefits for you? You’re not a citizen. You’re not allowed to be here. You’re breaking the law. Why should I pay for your health care, your kids’ schooling, housing vouchers, whatever? We’re not doing any of that anymore. Easy fix. Talk about self-deportation. End of the month, you’d depopulate a lot of the illegal population.

But we haven’t done that. Why? Because there’s, of course, a bipartisan conspiracy to have what we have now. And that’s what you’re seeing in Minneapolis. Why is this happening? Because the Democratic establishment sees this as the path back to power. And, oh, the cost is just destroying our society. That’s why.

The Larger Plot: A Color Revolution

So just keep that in mind as you watch. What you’re seeing through this very narrow aperture on the screen of your phone is just a scene in a much larger movie that has a totally different plot. And the movie is called Color Revolution, but they’re not telling you that in the credits. You’re like, look at this atrocity. Okay. And by the way, some of them are atrocities.

And this is in no way a justification for shooting any unarmed person, particularly for shooting a woman. That’s awful. And if you don’t feel that that’s awful, then your soul is degrading. Make sure you think that’s sad because it is fundamentally. The question is, why did it happen? And it happened because of people like Jacob Fry and Governor Walz and Lieutenant Governor Peggy. That’s what happened.

So this is clearly about power, moving power from one group to another group. And the people inspiring violence want the power, and they’re willing to watch others die in order to get it. It’s a very familiar formula. People are like this. It’s the worst thing about them, but it’s just a fact. Not about civil rights. It’s not about the folks or the neighborhood. It’s about taking power from someone else.

The Underlying Ideology

But underneath it all is also an ideology, and it’s the same ideology that has ruled this country for generations. And it’s many things. It’s secular, of course. It’s instinctively pro-chaos. It’s instinctively anti-beauty. But above all, it is opposed to two things, and that is Christianity and whites.

Now, why is that? It’s a tough one. You know, as a non-theologian, I’m not going to speculate, only noting that because as someone who’s lived here for a long time, I’ve marinated in it for decades. The two things a ruling class objects to the most strenuously. They don’t always say it aloud, though often they do. Christianity, not religion, Christianity specifically, and white people.

Kind of interesting. And again, you can draw your own conclusions to why that might be, why those would be your operating hatreds in a country that for two hundred and thirty out of two hundred and fifty years was majority white and Christian. Who knows? Right? But those clearly are the things that people like Tim Walz, people like Peggy Flanagan, people like Jacob Fry hate the most. And we know that because they can’t stop themselves from telling you.

Here’s an interview she did with a local radio station several years ago in which she explained that as a Native American, she’s a Native American somehow, affluent suburb, but Native American. Peggy Flanagan feels this very deeply. Listen.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

PEGGY FLANAGAN: Unfortunately, Minnesota nice too often means that we gloss over the deep inequities that exist in our state. We’re one of the happiest states in the country. Our schools and healthcare systems are at the top of the list, on all the lists that you want to be on top of. We’ve got a really incredible state if you’re white. If you are a person of color, if you are indigenous, if you are an immigrant or refugee, the opposite is true. As a Native American woman, it is not lost on me that I work in a system that was created in many ways to eliminate and erase me and our community as a whole. So I’m not interested in just making a policy change here and there, but we also need to be in a place where we call white supremacy white supremacy.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

The Power of Self-Hatred

So you could sit and parse this, like, how Native American is Peggy Flanagan? How Ojibwa is she, really? But it’s not really even worth having that argument. What’s so much more important to understand is the hostility, and boy, can you feel it. As a Native American woman, the system was designed to erase me. Really? You’re a lieutenant governor. You seem pretty visible actually for an invisible person. Right.

It’s absurd. It’s felt rather than reasoned, but it’s no less significant because it’s irrational because it’s clear, it’s heartfelt. This is someone who really doesn’t like the whites. And a lot of them are that way, including a lot of the whites. That’s its whole separate question. Like, there’s no hatred quite so durable and profound as self-hatred. The self-haters, the one you really have to worry about, they’re the true extremists, which, by the way, does in part explain why all this violence in the whitest cities.

This isn’t happening in Miami. It’s not happening in Baltimore, actually. It’s not happening in Detroit. It’s not happening in Memphis, the most dangerous city in the country. They sent federal troops to Memphis, the Trump administration, to Washington, DC. These are all majority black cities. Didn’t respond like this.

But it’s the very few remaining majority white cities that we have in this country. They’re the hotbeds of this kind of radicalism and intensity. It’s just a fact. Certainly not an attack on white people. I’ll never add my voice to that chorus because there’s enough of it, but he’s noticing it.

So why is Minneapolis so much more radical than Baltimore? It’s way nicer than Baltimore. You’re less likely to get carjacked. But the political intensity, oh, there’s no comparison. You’re never going to get lectured about ICE brutality or no. You can’t deport the Somali child molester. You’re never going to get that lecture in Baltimore ever or Gary, Indiana or even Washington, DC, except from a professional class white.

But in cities like Portland, Oregon, Portland, Maine, Minneapolis, Minnesota, St. Paul, you’re definitely going to get that lecture because self-hatred is a stronger emotion than hatred. And of course, that fact has been leveraged by ambitious white ladies like Peggy Flanagan for a long time and Elizabeth Warren.

Why are they always telling you how American Indian they are when obviously they’re not? I’m American Indian. I’m a Ojibwa. My Ojibwa name is proud lady or whatever. They’re making up this absurd stuff. Settle down, Peggy. Why are they telling you that? Of course, because it’s so resonant. It’s so powerful to the self-hating white. Oh, you holy person.

I mean, it’s hilarious, but it’s also scary because in that self-hatred are the roots of true extremism. Just lay down in front of the train tracks. Lay your body down, as Peggy said.

That’s the short term problem. The long term problem is, oh, if you keep trafficking in race hate and then you get power, what happens to the people you hate? Well, they could be in trouble. That’s when you’ve got a Hutu Tutsi situation on your hands. But actually, I mean, this is the history of the world.

We shouldn’t think we’re exempt. So this kind of stuff is really, really dangerous and is the undercurrent of this whole debate over ICE. So we hate the whites and we hate the Christians. And that, of course, was the main reason you saw that church invaded the other day in Minneapolis in the Twin Cities. What did they do?

They were just in the middle of a church service, the world’s only really nonviolent religion, but they got threatened. Their kids got threatened and screamed at. And what happened after that? Well, the Trump administration tried to indict five people, but they couldn’t because they couldn’t find a judge to sign the order. It was basically nullification by judge.

No. It was a church. We’re not going to do anything about it. So you’d think people hassled in church have nothing to do with anything. The prisoners in that church were threatened by lunatics.

It’s on video. We’re not guessing. That’s not a crime, really?

Keith Ellison on the Church Invasion

Well, let’s go now to the chief law enforcement officer in the state of Minnesota, Mr. Keith Ellison, the longtime black separatist. Talk about anti-white activist, Keith Ellison, who leveraged white guilt to become the attorney general of the state of Minnesota.

Listen to him explain why, of course, no one’s going to get indicted for screaming at Christians in the middle of a church service for threatening Christians in prayer. Watch this.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

KEITH ELLISON: And the FACE Act, by the way, is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights to be protected. And so that people, for a religious reason, you know, cannot just use religion to break into women’s reproductive health centers. Right?

So how they are stretching either of these laws to apply to people who protested in a church over the behavior or the perceived behavior of a religious leader is beyond me.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

Oh, Keith Ellison, who’s the attorney general of the state, charged with enforcing the laws of the state can’t get his head around the concept of universally applicable standards, principles, or laws. Oh, no. That doesn’t apply to people I don’t like. They’re not protected by that law. Oh, no. Antisemitism is wrong. Racism is wrong. Anti-white hatred is not wrong. Okay.

It’s the same way of thinking. This is what tribalism leads to. The tribalist mind cannot understand the concept of universally applicable standards or principles. They don’t exist. So whatever’s good for my team is just good. And if it’s good for your team, then it’s not good. Okay? That’s the attitude.

It’s not just Keith Ellison, by the way, who has that attitude. A lot of people in Washington have that attitude.

The Foundation of Universal Rights

So just to restate, the country is built—in fact, it is explicitly built. It’s designed. Its documents articulate this on the idea that certain standards, rights, as they’re called, apply to every human being by virtue of the fact they’re human because they’re given by the creator, by God, to people. They cannot be taken away, inalienable, and they always reside with the individual no matter what.

This was the case that the civil rights protesters made at first. They didn’t mean it, turns out, but it’s still nonetheless true. We believe that all people are subject to the same standards because they’re people and protected by the same laws. But Keith Ellison can’t even comprehend that.

He says, no, the FACE Act, which is designed to protect abortion clinics as they kill kids, that was designed to keep religious people away from abortion clinics. They can’t pray on the sidewalk outside an abortion clinic. Got it. It in no way protects religious people from being threatened in church by my voters. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Okay.

And by the way, this is the mindset that has rendered useless, except for political activism, huge swaths of our judiciary. This is why no one gets punished for left wing activism, and yet people who gather outside the capital with their little pocket constitutions end up doing five years in prison on January 6th, having committed no crime at all other than wandered too close to the so-called people’s house because it’s just a totally different set of principles.

Like, whose side are you on? Your team doesn’t have the benefit of protection under the law. You don’t have the right to exist. This is their thinking.

The Stakes Are High

You should know this, by the way. And this is why what we’re looking at now will determine not just the course of political power over the next two years or between now and the midterm. They want to shut the country down before the midterm so they can take power in the midterms. Obviously got it. But the course of our lives going forward.

Because if people who don’t believe in universal principles or rights take control and you’re on the wrong side, you have no rights. None. Will they feel guilty about hurting you? Of course not. You just heard him say that.

Why do Christians have protection? They’re Christians. It’s like they’re abortionists. They’re not like Canaanite priestesses. They have protection. But like people praying in church?

So just keep in mind, no matter what happens going forward, that the instincts, the hatreds of the people on the other side can be distilled to don’t like whites, don’t like Christians, and white Christians are the worst possible combination. So those people who have been in our government’s crosshairs for an awful long time should wake up and remember the stakes are really high for you.

Institutional Interests and Chaos

Talk about a disfavored group. And that leads to the last point that is worth making in all of this, which is there is another group that benefits from chaos, and that’s entrenched institutional interests. It’s one of the reasons, you know, Apple gave so much money to the Black Lives Matter protest because, like, in some sense, it’s good for them because they’re here no matter what.

But government agencies with guns always have an interest, an inherent interest, regardless of who’s running them at the time. But as an organization, they have an interest increasing their powers. And so if you’re thinking that this is going to move toward more confrontation, it’s going to get more extreme before it pulls back.

Obviously, we’re praying, literally praying for this to calm down. But let’s say it doesn’t. You have to ask yourself, like, who are the people who are armed, who have the authority to, say, point a gun at a fellow American, take the life of a fellow American because they’re doing it on behalf of the government. It’s the law. Just trying to keep order here. It’s why we shot you.

Don’t Always Trust the Government

And there are a lot of Trump voters who have kind of suspended these thoughts because they’re rooting for Trump. But it doesn’t matter how much you love Trump, voted for him, or if, like me, you campaigned in multiple states with Trump. It’s not an attack on Trump to note that, oof, you should not trust the government. I mean, like, why would you?

I mean, in order, I think most people who voted for Trump would say, I’ll speak for myself. What do you believe in most? Well, God, my family, decency, kindness, my neighbors, my ancestors, the founding principles of our country, like maybe an order. And one of those founding principles of our country is like, don’t always trust the government. Fair. It’s fair.

And don’t forget that. You’d be a fool to forget that. And the institutions that are fighting back against people you’re worried about might be the ones oppressing you at certain point. So you’d be crazy not to ask obvious questions like, okay, is the uniformed US military or its leaders sort of on the side of the rule of law?

We never have to think about that. Most Americans never thought about that. Then you look at January 6th, which was, among other things, probably the most effective, largest false flag operation in the last ten years. There’ve been quite a few, but that was definitely one of them. And the US military, National Guard played a role in that. We’ve never been held to account for that. That should make you a little bit uncomfortable. Right?

The fact, the whole first Trump term should make you uncomfortable. So Trump voters are like, no. We have to trust the government. Really? Was that the lesson of the first Trump term we have to trust the government? Was it really?

When the government, his own federal agencies tried to send Trump and his kids to prison for the rest of their lives with the Russiagate hoax? Was that actually the lesson there? And then you have January 6th, the false flag of January 6th, and then two years later, you have armed FBI agents in his wife’s underwear drawer, and they’re there because we really believe Trump may have violated the espionage act.

No one believed Trump violated the espionage act. You have to be a moron. No sane person thought that, but they did it anyway. No one’s ever punished for that. So, the people telling you to trust the government, you probably shouldn’t trust.

Questions About Disclosure

It’s always the same people. It’s kind of funny. They don’t want any disclosure. The funniest is all the people who are telling you, you have to hate Muslims. Oh, hate the Muslims. Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin, hate Muslims.

Why aren’t those same people calling for full disclosure of the 9/11 documents? It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? If you really wanted to prove that Muslims are bad, you would want all the 9/11 documents disclosed, wouldn’t you? Just so you could sort of play out the horrifying details that led to those fabled nineteen Arabs with box cutters committing the biggest act of terror in American history.

Why would you ever want to keep any of that secret? Has Mark Levin ever called for the full disclosure of the 9/11 docs? Shut up, conspiracy theorist. Well, why wouldn’t you? That would kind of make your case the Muslims are bad, wouldn’t it? Just put a nail in the coffin of all the jihadis in America. Is Ben Shapiro on that? Well, shut up, conspiracy theorist.

So just keep in mind when people tell you, trust the government, maybe there’s another agenda there. I mean, here are two facts you should know. I’m not trying to sow paranoia or anything like that, but there are national guard units in the United States in various states that are actively recruiting right now the children of illegal aliens.

Why would you do that? The National Guard exists for a number of purposes, but one of them is to keep order in the United States. So you’re intentionally recruiting people with no ties whatsoever to the United States and giving them the power to shoot your fellow Americans as long as the government declares it an emergency? What? Is that really the group you’d be targeting? The children of illegal aliens?

Three Options for Stopping the Chaos

So here to end are the three potential options for stopping the chaos in Minnesota. And there may be others, but these are the three that come immediately to mind for the Trump administration. Clearly, state officials in Minnesota have a vested interest, as explained, to increase the chaos, to increase the casualties, to increase the destruction.

Their city burns. It’s a win for them. Their protesters die. It’s a win for them. Those are all martyrs. Their holy names will never be forgotten. They want this, obviously. So what does the administration do to end the chaos? Three things, potentially.

The first is kind of keep doing what they’re doing, but more so. So invoke the Insurrection Act. You’re hearing a lot. We just invoke the Insurrection Act. That’ll fix it. It’s been invoked a lot. It certainly has in American history. What would that mean?

Well, it’d means sending more troops there. I think over three thousand, maybe thirty-five hundred federal troops in Minneapolis in area right now. It’s a lot. Not working. You could invoke the Insurrection Act. That would sound scary. Would it change the actual conditions on the ground?

Maybe if you sent enough of them. You sent the 101st Airborne like Eisenhower did at Central High School in Little Rock, 1956. Maybe that would work. But you’d have to send a lot, and you’d have to take pretty no nonsense posture. And what are the chances people get killed very high? But you could try it, and then you would have to kind of deal with the aftermath, but maybe it’d be worth it.

Two, you could—and this makes some sense too—you could target the people in charge of this rather than their foot soldiers. Because if you think about it for a second, punishing the human waves that have been mobilized by the attorney general, the governor, the mayor, and the lieutenant governor probably isn’t the right way.

When you have war crimes tribunals, you don’t put infantrymen on trial. You put their commanding officers on trial. Who gave the order to do this? They’re the culpable party, of course.

So you could arrest the governor, the lieutenant governor, the mayor, and the attorney general, and you would have grounds to do that, ample grounds to do that. The lieutenant governor has been coordinating, according to the ICE signal chat, apparently, has been coordinating attacks on federal officers. If that is indeed her, if the alias on the signal chat is Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, it looks like it is, she’s a conspirator in this, in an insurrection.

You could arrest her, and they could arrest the governor on the same grounds. They could arrest the attorney general. They could arrest the mayor. And that’s a possibility. So go after the people who are fomenting chaos, not just their agents, not the kind of sad pasty face tattoos on the neck people, but the actual generals in this war, and it is war.

The downside would be what then? There’s no jury in the state that’s going to convict him. No one who goes after the Trump administration. Almost nobody or their agents is ever convicted. We have jury nullification.

Federal Response Options and the Minnesota Dilemma

It’s the law of the land, basically, in all blue states. And the third possibility is that you quarantine Minnesota effectively. You say, okay, you want to live with Somali fraudsters, foreign born murderers, tons of child abusers, people convicted of child rape, and you want to call them “folks” and your neighbors, and you want to pay for their lives, go ahead. But we’re not paying for it.

The US government federal tax funds are not going to be used to pay for child molesters and murderers to get food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid, whatever. We’re cutting you off. And you want to live like an autonomous zone? Be one. Pay for it yourself.

And that might be very effective because in the end, money is power and people like Frey and Walz and Lieutenant Governor Peggy and the Black separatist attorney general, they want the money. So that might bring them to heel, and it would be completely fair.

And you could tell the public, look, I’m against any kind of violence. This is clearly going to cause more violence. We’re going to pull back any federal officers there. They can police their own state, and we’ll see how long they last. We’re to have a financial siege of Minnesota. Just cut off the money. Good luck.

The problem, of course, is that you will immediately find a federal judge who says, as they always do when the Trump administration does something, you can’t do that. And so for it to work, you’d have to say, well, we’re ignoring the federal order.

So at almost any turn, and this is why it’s a pretty clever and diabolical trap that these Democratic politicians have laid at almost any turn, the Trump administration is, unless you can think of something else, likely to have to say, I’m sorry. We can’t go along with this. We know these are the preexisting rules, but no. How about no? We’re going to get to that place.

Or what is obviously their intent, this color revolution, which will hurt a lot of people, destroy a lot of property, and change the country forever, obviously, that’s going to play out. What will happen? Praying for peace as always. Praying for an end to chaos, but unknown.

So this is one of the most significant moments, also one of the most complex moments and one of the most distorted moments any of us have lived through in a long time.

Interview with Michael Shellenberger

And so to help make sense of it, we’re proud to have someone who I think of as one of the greatest journalists really of our time, certainly one of the clearest observers and most honest observers I know, and that’s Michael Shellenberger who joins us now. Mike, thanks so much for doing this. What I’m just going to stand back and let you assess what you think we’re watching right now in Minneapolis.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Sure. Well, it’s great to be with you, Tucker, and I wholeheartedly agree this is an issue of great significance. I should, you know, start by saying that the people involved in it on the left are very familiar to me. I spent many decades on the radical left. I’ve participated in nonviolent civil disobedience multiple times. I’ve led nonviolent civil disobedience most recently to save the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

I’m also somebody that takes physical security extremely seriously. I’ve been in war zones ever since I was seventeen years old. I’m very aware of the fact that your physical environment is something that you must be aware of at all times. You must know whatever situation you’re in at all times and that physical security starts with knowing the situation you’re going into and the situation around you.

So context is everything. And one of the things that I found disturbing about the media coverage of this is that they’re stripping all the context away. And so you just see a particular moment of Alex Preti on the ground. You’re missing a broader context here.

You know, I think it’s really important to understand that these are incredibly well organized efforts to interfere with law enforcement operations by a very sophisticated group of individuals, of nonprofits, of people that have the support from Democratic officials in the state of Minnesota.

We saw a manual that they have created for activists to disrupt law enforcement operations. That manual describes how people should, for example, call 911 on ICE officers and deceive the 911 dispatchers into thinking that they’re reporting a kidnapping by armed men. That is exceedingly dangerous. I can’t emphasize it enough. You’re provoking confrontations between different law enforcement officials with malicious intentions, an intention to get people hurt, to create disruption and violence.

The Victims and the Strategy

So I think the important thing to know about both Renee Goode and Alex Preti, these deaths are obviously tragic. I actually view both of them as victims of the left and this broader strategy to create violence and chaos as a way to ostensibly disrupt ICE operations. I think there’s a larger strategy here which we should talk about.

But the context is that they’re interfering in law enforcement operations. And the claim that they were simply observing is dishonest. And you can see Alex Preti waving traffic in from the middle of the street. He then intervenes when an ICE officer is engaging with a woman.

Now, I say all this with, you know, no, I’m not defending the behavior of any of these ICE officers. You know, if you pressed me, I think that this was not great behavior. I think we can all look at it and see a lot of things that we think are inappropriate. This is a force of ICE agents that was not well prepared. I don’t think it was well managed.

And other things can be true, which is that Alex Preti put himself right in front of that officer, stepped into the street, you know, got himself involved in this altercation that he didn’t need to be involved in, certainly not to film it. So they are clearly intervening.

And of course, Renee Goode, you know, drives perpendicular to blocking the street. Her partner was outside the vehicle taunting ICE agents. I think it’s just obvious that these are behaviors aimed at interfering with law enforcement operations. And again, that’s not justification for the behaviors of the ICE agents or anything else. But I think this effort to kind of strip away all that context and suggest that somehow these were, you know, observers or journalists that were keeping safe distance is just false. It’s just not the case.

Two Different Protest Strategies

I think the other point I wanted to make about this is that there’s two separate strategies that people should be aware of that left wing activists use. One is nonviolent civil disobedience. Incredible tradition from Henry David Thoreau to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King to nonviolent civil disobedience I was involved in. The first priority is to keep people safe and prevent any physical altercations or any conflict with law enforcement.

Those efforts, in fact, should and do use a lot of communication between the protest leaders and law enforcement to avoid any physical violence. The whole strategy is to be arrested. That’s the point of it. But to be arrested in a peaceful way.

What we’re seeing in Minneapolis is not that strategy. It is a strategy aimed at provoking an overreaction. It’s much more similar to the guerrilla strategy that was developed by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to overthrow the Cuban government, which is to make an attack and then get an overreaction from your opponent that hurts many people on your side deliberately in order to foment a larger, you know, revolution or reaction.

Notably that tactic, you know, it’s a neutral tactic. It can be used by anybody. It was used by Osama bin Laden in attacking the United States on 9/11 to trigger an overreaction. That’s precisely what occurred.

So I think that the tragedy here is both the deaths of these two individuals who I think are used as cannon fodder by the left wing leaders of this movement. I mentioned before there was a manual that was being used. We now know there was a Signal group that had at least a thousand people in it. We now know there’s, you know, Democrat leaders in Minnesota had been calling for people to put their bodies on the line. That was the specific language of the lieutenant governor. And we’ve now seen other evidence come out.

The Organized Militia Structure

For example, there’s a young reporter on the scene named Haley West. She documented on video how she was being followed by anti-ICE left activists in Minneapolis. And when she confronted them, they said that they had her driver’s license or sorry, they had her license plate in their database. And she said, well, we’re not ICE. And the response from one of those leaders I found so disturbing. I think he said, “Get the f* out of here.” He was just basically commanding her to leave. He has no right to do that. He’s not law enforcement.

These are people acting as though they have a private militia. That is a breakdown of order. The definition of having a functioning state is that the state is defined, at least by one of the great sociologists, as the legitimate monopoly on violence. Well, they are trying to take the right, take the policing powers away from the state, take it upon themselves as self-appointed left wing activists. That’s just straight up thuggery or gangsterism.

And what’s so disturbing about it is that you sort of say, well, we don’t see any of them using weapons or it’s not armed. Well, they’ve created an entire militia structure with a communications system, legal system, a policing effort. They’re somehow able to run license plates. They’re able to get information from rental car companies. It’s incredibly well organized.

And I think they got what they wanted in the sense that they got two people killed. They have successfully persuaded the media to focus extremely narrowly on a particular moment and eliminate the broader context of the ways in which the left is using people as cannon fodder, the way in which the left is getting people killed. I think it’s shameful. I think it’s disturbing. It’s frightening.

I think that the Trump administration needs to exercise great care, greater care, so as to not actually participate in the radical left’s agenda to sow more discord, to create more violence. Because I think so far they’ve succeeded in doing that. They’ve made the issue around ICE rather than about the fact that they’ve effectively got a militia structure organized in Minneapolis that is taking over normal policing functions and then sending out, you know, people to basically get hurt and killed and disrupt operations.

The Constitutional Question

At a legal level, you know, one might agree or disagree with President Trump, with his policies on migration, with ICE enforcement. But the constitution is very clear. There’s a supremacy clause. Whenever there’s a conflict between federal law and state law, the federal law applies. There’s no sort of debate about any of that.

And so I fear that unfortunately, we’re in a situation where the Trump administration finds itself in a bind, where it’s got a situation in Minneapolis that’s spiraled out of control. But if it now, you know, runs away or backs off, then of course, there’s the risk of sending the message that really anything goes and that state and local authorities should have supremacy over federal law, and I think that’s an extremely dangerous precedent.

TUCKER CARLSON: It feels in some ways like the bill is coming due on a tab that we’ve been running for a long time where states have been in open violation of federal law for decades as sanctuary cities, for example, sanctuary states. The state of Oregon decriminalizes fentanyl. Lots of states decriminalize marijuana. But all of this is in contradiction, contravention of federal law, and nobody does anything about it at all. So should it really shock us if there’s a city that decides to have its own militia, its own private army? Like, that’s not like a new development really, is it?

Parallels to 2020 and Autonomous Zones

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Well, no. And I think I’m sure you’ve had the experience too where you remember back to 2020. And, obviously, the killing of George Floyd is different than the killing of Alex Preti, but there’s so many different similarities to this. I mean, the first one is that they’re looking to create autonomous zones.

Recall that they created an autonomous zone in Minneapolis, but they also created one in Seattle. The political leadership in Seattle, the mayor and the city council, allowed that autonomous zone to exist. And so these autonomous zones are essentially, I mean, they’re illegal ceding of power from the state, our democratically elected and controlled state, to unelected left wing activists, militias.

And, you know, two kids got killed. You know, two black kids got killed in the Seattle autonomous zone. It took the, you know, they didn’t even shut it down after the first kid was killed. They only shut it down after the second kid was killed. And so now we’re doing it again.

I think it’s very hard for people to understand how important it is to have order. And I was slow to come to this because of course, when you focus on that specific incident, you ignore the broader context. But when you go and essentially turn over several city blocks, when you allow, you know, riots night after night as Minneapolis did after the killing of George Floyd, you are abdicating your responsibility as responsible, you know, political officials who were duly elected by the people to keep them safe.

It’s essentially undermining not just Locke, but also Hobbes, which says that we need to, the first function of the state is for physical security. And so you’re seeing a very disturbing, I think, partnership between these radical left activists who are interfering in law enforcement operations, working with elected Democrat officials to essentially, you know, end or sort of pull back from providing basic security to citizens and residents.

It’s hard not to look at this and feel like you’re headed or we’re headed towards some kind of civil conflict or civil war, you know, heaven forbid.

But I think it’s just I can’t underscore how dangerous and reckless the current situation is. You know, people, you know, the mark of a civilized society is that we protect our vulnerable and we’re obviously failing to do that. I mean, I’ve seen it in person. The first victims of chaos are defenseless or the weakest, of course. And so, yeah, everything about it is evil and certainly uncivilized.

I wonder what the goal is. So clearly, you know, acquiring power is the short term goal, but, like, what’s the vision for the country that activists like this have? Like, what are they working toward?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah. Well, that’s the right question. I think it’s pretty clear. It’s an agenda to essentially unmake Western civilization. The left has obviously not disguised it. It’s had the goal, it’s viewed western civilization as having committed the sins of indigenous genocide, slavery, you know, leading up to in this story, the holocaust, nuclear weapons. It’ll all end in, you know, climate change, apocalypse, or nuclear apocalypse.

So these are extremely radical views that come from the assumption, an a priori assumption. I mean, this goes back to Rousseau and through Marx and other radical thinkers that, you know, western civilization is evil, that all of the problems that we have from inequality to suffering are a result of a particular system that we have, that there’s some radically different system we can put in place, you know, whether it’s anarchism or communism or some other system they want to name where there won’t be these problems.

So it’s an extremely radical agenda. You know, when I was on the radical left, that was a very specific thing separate from the Democratic Party. We thought the Democrats were sellouts. We were all, you know, very far to the left of the Democrats.

The Radicalization of the Democratic Party

I think what we’ve seen that’s maybe the most understudied and under theorized issue in political science is the radicalization of the Democratic Party. And so you used to see the, you know, mainstream Democrats distancing themselves from this kind of radical behavior. Well, now they’re participating in it. They’re legitimizing it. It’s a, you know, extremely radical agenda.

It’s notable that, you know, in both the George Floyd and the Minneapolis case, the argument that’s being made by the left is that there’s too much policing, that there’s too much law and order. And, you know, as you pointed out, I mean, we see it everywhere. I mean, you know, you lower the penalties and the consequences and the enforcement of laws around all sorts of crimes, using drugs in public, camping in public, public defecation, you know, even things like, you know, reducing traffic stops, I think you were one of the first people to report on this, actually results in more death. It results in more crime.

And so, you know, I had a public safety officer from Denver actually who said to me, he said, you know, he said, “Mike, it’s pretty simple. You get what you allow.” And so as soon as you stop enforcing certain laws, you get more of those crimes. Like it happens right away.

And so this is a very, you know, it’s a very radical movement. It’s not a reformist movement. No one’s talking about reform. It’s clear that people that are doing this, you know, believe in open borders, believe in mass migration. They’re doing this to, you know, undermine, you know, controlling their own borders. They’re obviously, you know, want to get rid of Trump at a minimum.

But I think more maximally, you if you get a Democrat as president, I think we’re going to see, you know, a kind of this kind of anarchy and chaos at the physical reality level. And then at the, you know, level of the internet in terms of speech, you’re going to get increasing censorship.

So with this kind of chaos that gets created in the neighborhoods, it’s the only way you can sustain that is by controlling information and making people think it is something that it’s not. This obviously worked in terms of fueling the drug and homelessness epidemic. I think it’s also working now to make people think that somehow, you know, the underlying problem is law enforcement. I mean, it’s so absurd.

The Black Lives Matter Lie

And that was the ideology that, you know, was behind Black Lives Matter. You know, an organization that, you know, falsely that spread disinformation led people to believe that police brutality was increasing and also that there was greater use of, there were more police shootings of black Americans than white Americans. That was disproven by Harvard professor Roland Fryer. We knew that also just police killings, like all killings had been going down since the seventies. So the entire thing was based on a lie.

And so I think that’s the fundamental. You see the lie, there’s, you know, many lies stacked on top of each other. One of the big lies is that civilization somehow hurts vulnerable people. Well, civilization is what protects vulnerable people. You know, this idea that law enforcement is fascist. I mean, it’s so offensive, the comparisons between ICE and, you know, the Gestapo, the Nazis.

I mean, you’re comparing, you know, someone pointed out it’s like migrants get, you know, illegal migrants get three thousand five hundred dollars, you know, and a flight back home. They have all their rights protected. They have better due process than I think any country in the world has ever offered migrants. We allow in more migrants than any other country in the world. The United States is the most anti-racist nation that’s ever existed.

So when they compare ICE to Nazis, I don’t think it’s just hyperbole, or at least if it started as hyperbole, it’s become something much more dangerous, which is that it’s basically saying that ICE officers and other law enforcement are worthy of being killed because the only proper treatment of Nazis, as, you know, eighty years of Hollywood films and television and movies have shown, is to murder them.

You know, that’s what Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” is saying. And there’s heroism and excitement and glory in that promotion of that idea. So you put those two things together that the only proper treatment of Nazis and fascists is to murder them. And then you call law enforcement officials, your political opponents, Nazis and fascists.

Well, we shouldn’t be surprised that we see, you know, two assassination attempts on President Trump, you know, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and now, you know, essentially turning, you know, left wing naive, left wing activists into cannon fodder essentially for these very radical goals.

Unfortunately, it just keeps getting worse, and I’m afraid we haven’t hit the bottom yet. I don’t know where the bottom is. But I don’t think there’s any question about what their goals are.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, maybe I’m too pedantic, but to hear people who worship violence describe themselves as nonviolent activists grates on me since I believe in nonviolent protest as a Christian strongly. I don’t know if these same people were organizing protests against shoveling hundreds of millions to the Ukrainian war machine. I don’t remember that part.

I mean, do they have a history of opposing, there’s a lot of state violence that the United States sponsors around the world, and think it’s immoral. Think it’s a crime. But I don’t hear these people worrying about that at all. Right?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: No. I mean, it’s an amazing, it’s a great point. I mean, they’re not, they’re doing their, their focus is on attacking the basic structures of civilization. And maybe the most basic structure is security, is physical security, is law and order. Another is maintaining your borders. If you don’t have, you know, borders that are well maintained, then you don’t have a nation. It’s just that simple.

I mean, I’ll say something else, Tucker, which is that, you know, I think a year ago, shortly after the 2024 elections, I found with many people on the left, both ones that I know personally and also just, you know, reading, there was a moment of an, it seemed like we were headed towards a moment of introspection.

There was some sense among, you know, mainline Democrats that they had been misled by the media, which had claimed that Biden was fine, for example, and the border was, they were doing everything they could to close the border. You know, you kind of get into January, February, Trump closes the border. We know that Biden was not fine. And I think there were some efforts to rethink things.

Sadly, that moment has passed, and I think Democrats are more radicalized than ever. They’re more certain than ever about what they believe. They’re really a very black and white way of thinking about these things. They, there’s a real desire to, I think they get swept up in this desire to feel like heroes fighting against fascists and Nazis. It’s just their comfort zone. It’s where they just where they’re there.

I mean, they don’t, they don’t want to leave there. And so I’m afraid that all of that, that moment of potential awakening or reckoning with just how radicalized the left have gone, I think that’s all gone now. And you can see it in people like Gavin Newsom who, you know, at first, you know, had conversations with Charlie Kirk and with, you know, people on the right as a way to try to under, apparently try to understand obviously in a performative way.

But nonetheless, there was some sense in which that was good politics a year ago. That’s all gone now. And now we’re back to, I just think, a really profoundly anti-civilization, anti-American, you know, hatred and that is giving them pleasure, that makes them feel important, that makes them feel powerful, gives their lives meaning and purpose.

And, you know, that for me, it just, it’s just a huge concern because that’s part of the forces that are leading us to, I mean, I think you just have to be honest about it. That appears to be what’s leading us towards civil war.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. And I do think people who are for civilization underestimate the seriousness of the of these people. I mean, they’re serious, and they’re not stupid at all. I watched yesterday an anti-ICE protest form in a small town thousands of miles, over a thousand miles from Minneapolis, and every, and was not on social media, and every woman in the town received a text about it. Right? And that’s how it was.

And so that makes, I watched it. So that makes me think this is, this is not about those poor, sad people getting killed. And I just want to say again how sad I felt watching those videos. I really did. I mean it too. But it’s not really about that, is it?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Well, no. Except for the part of the fact that it’s that this is clearly the kind of, this is the, this is what they wanted. I mean, they were inciting this. They’re telling people to interfere with law enforcement operations knowing full well how dangerous that is. And so I think it’s a mistake to view these things as unintentional.

I’m not saying that there were, we’re going to find messages with them saying we hope somebody gets killed. But the recklessness that they were advocating, I mean, again, it’s like night and day when you look at the tactics being used by the anti-ICE left right now, and then you look at the really noble tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience, it’s day and night. They really have nothing to do with each other.

The tactics that are being used in Minneapolis now are just much more similar to what’s being used for, you know, guerrilla warfare, for example, rather than in the tradition of King, Gandhi and Thoreau.

Advice to the White House

I think the Trump administration is in a very tough spot right now. I think they know they are. I think for political and humanitarian reasons, for reasons of love of country, I’m being sincere, they want to fix this, but they, you know, but it’s very, it’s complex at every turn. So what would your advice be to the White House right now?

Well, I thought they made a good step forward in trying to put somebody with a lot more experience in charge. I thought it was just outrageous that the secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, just got up there and trashed Alex Preti. You know, clearly it was—

TUCKER CARLSON: Unbelievable. I agree.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah. It was just, obviously what she was saying was false. And I don’t understand it. I mean, I found it, you know, dehumanizing and gross.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. I think I agree. Good and Preti are victims of the left, and that should have been what they said. And, you know, look, it’s just I think there’s a lot of ways—

Can I just ask you to pause for one second? All of us should have reverence in the face of death. We didn’t create life. We can’t. We’re not capable of it. And when it ends, and I don’t care who it is, we have to bow before the mystery of death and take it seriously. You can never mock someone. You know what I mean?

There has to be, even if it’s your enemy, you have to take it seriously. And decent civilized people, Christian people do take it seriously. And that’s not trashing someone like that, especially if it’s untrue. That is not the way. I just have to say that. I feel that.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah. I totally agree. I think it’s very hard for, you know, people certainly in the heat of the moment to deal with the fact that many things can be true at the same time. It was, that’s right. Look, the ICE operations were just not, obviously, they were not well organized. And they’ve had, they’ve recruited a lot of people that don’t have the experience they need.

I mean, whenever things go terribly wrong, you know, including like, you know, in Uvalde, New Mexico, or elsewhere, I think everyone wants to blame the individual officers. And they certainly have responsibility.

But they’re part of an institution and the higher responsibility goes to the people in those institutions who had a job of training them and preparing them for that context. I think Alex Prette also has responsibility.

It’s very, there’s a lot of demagoguery on this issue where, you know, I pointed out on X, I’m like, I think that, you know, women should have the right to walk through any neighborhood in America in scantily clothed. And I’ve fought to make that happen. In California, that’s one of the problems is that it’s not safe to walk anywhere.

And increasingly in other parts of the United States, it’s not safe to walk anywhere. I’m also a father of a daughter. I’m a professor now. I actually took my students, undergraduate students, you know, nineteen year old students, to interview people on the street here in Austin. They told stories of witnessing homicide, you know, drug dealing, assault, you know, is extremely, you know, it was a, they’re living in extremely violent, dangerous circumstances.

And I take that responsibility very seriously of making sure that students are safe and understand my surroundings. And that means that Alex Prette also has responsibility. And it’s certainly not speaking ill of the dead to say that, I have I think he had no idea. I think he had a sense of entitlement that they were somehow he should be able to interfere in a law enforcement operation and have no consequences.

You know, again, it’s not a justification for what happened to him, but I think people need to understand that you are responsible ultimately for own physical security. And the first part of that physical security is where you put yourself. And that, you know, people, because of Hollywood, I think they sometimes think that your security is all about your ability to fight once you’re in a dangerous situation or how to react in those situations. No. It’s actually about not being in that situation in the first place.

And we’ve got a situation here where you’ve got leading Democratic officials in Minnesota. You have major NGOs in Minnesota. You have very skilled organizers that create manuals and have lawyers waiting who are encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations. It’s grossly irresponsible.

So, you know, many things are true at the same time. And I, you know, we just have not seen, you know, I think we have not seen the left. We have not seen Democrats. And sadly, I don’t think we saw the Trump administration at its best over the last few days. I think there is time to turn it around. And I think Tom Homan is somebody that should bring that experience.

I have my own views of how to kind of what should be the policies around migration and what to do about it, but I think the administration is pursuing a strategy to focus on the criminal element. I think sixty-four percent of all of the ICE arrests and detainees since Trump took office had been people with either a criminal prosecution or charges against them. I think that like to see that number be even higher and, you know, much more care taken in these operations, much more focused.

You know, I think you’ve got to find a way to get local police and state involved from the beginning. Otherwise, I kind of wonder whether it should be done at all. Again, you have federal supremacy, but, you know, we’re trying to be practical here too.

A Wake-Up Call for All Parties

So I hope it’s a wake-up call for everybody. I know there was some calls between the president and the governor and the mayor. You know, the president was I think I will say again, I think the president was elected on a particular agenda and it would be really a bad precedent for a president’s agenda to be undermined by people that are pursuing a strategy to essentially, you know, break the law, violate the law, you know, undermine that strategy.

Because, you know, we’re a republic and, you know, the president was democratically elected and there’s a lot of policies that a democratically elected president might have that you don’t like. But I think saying the president the precedent whereby you’re going to abandon your policy agenda because you’ve encountered violent resistance, I worry about that a lot as precedent. And I’m sure the Trump administration is as well.

But I think you should be able to do both. I think you should be able to pursue your agenda and do a better job of protecting and maintaining security in those areas.

TUCKER CARLSON: You can imagine, though, that it might soon become I mean, I don’t know how you could continue doing the same thing if you’re bumping up against local law enforcement that won’t protect federal officers, local elected officials, statewide elected officials who are promoting the conditions that inevitably produce violence. I mean, it seems like if they keep doing what they have been doing without changing it at all, we’re going to get a lot more Alex Prettes. And so should I mean, is there like a dramatic change in their approach that you think would work?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: I mean, I were advising you know, I’m not advising them, but if I were advising them, I’d say you need to keep pursuing the agenda you were elected to pursue. You just need to pursue it in a better way, in a more, you know, practical, safer way.

Historical Parallels to Federal-State Clashes

I mean, I think it’s so interesting, Tucker, also, think under remarked upon is that the last time we saw, I think, this level of federal state clash was when, you know, Kennedy and Johnson were desegregating institutions in the South and they faced significant resistance. Yes. And they did not hesitate to use, you know, force to, you know, to send out the National Guard to protect children and students as they desegregated educational institutions.

I think most people also recognize that some of those efforts did go too far. For example, the forced busing, you know, and you start to get to you start to have to kind of have a practical view of this. I mean, at the end of the day, I think public opinion is paramount, you know, and as Lincoln says, you know, with public consent, you can do anything. Without it, you can’t do anything. So I think the administration has to keep that in mind.

It is amazing. I mean, there’s a very large percentage support, I think somewhere around seventy percent support for closing the border, which the president did. But when you start to get these ICE raids, you know, I think support for those, you know, goes down to something like forty percent. I know the president’s approval rating on immigration has significantly declined.

The Need for Presidential Leadership

You know, the president probably not going to change his ways at this point, but I do think showing some genuine empathy and compassion. I mean, you felt the need to do this special on this, which I think is really important. I agree on. I felt the need to respond to it as quickly as I could. The president needs to address the country. I just think you need a Oval Office address at this point to, you know, explain to the public what he’s trying to do.

You know, that it hasn’t always been perfect, that he has, you know, feels the pain of these deaths. And the same time, you know, he’s pursuing a particular policy agenda that he was elected to pursue. And it would be dangerous to not pursue that because of, you know, both mistakes at the federal level, but also through this violent aggression by these radicalized left groups. You I think we need to hear from him in a really with a serious address from the Oval Office as soon as possible.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Michael Shellenberger, thank you for your wise assessment of all of that, and I’m grateful, especially right now. Thank you.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Thank you, Tucker.

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