Skip to content
Home » Transcript: Professor Dave Collum’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

Transcript: Professor Dave Collum’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

Read the full transcript of organic chemistry professor Dave Collum’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show titled “Financial Crisis, Diddy, Energy Weapons, QAnon, and the Deep State’s Digital Evolution”, premiered on August 20, 2025. 

Academic Freedom and Speaking Beyond Your Lane

TUCKER CARLSON: Very few college professors do what college professors are supposed to do, which is kind of breakthrough, outside campus into the conversation among smart people about what the world is about. In other words, they don’t kind of influence the broader culture directly. And you do, and you’re an organic chemistry professor.

Are you allowed to do this at Cornell? Are you allowed to kind of opine on economic, social policy, foreign policy? What are your administrators saying when you do this?

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t know if it’s generally true, but Cornell’s not giving me any grief. The only problem I had with Cornell, and we talked, you know, we had breakfast and we talked a little bit about. I think my colleagues wish I would shut up, but they don’t tell me to shut up. Although, you know, they’ve told me to stay on.

I have kind of an intellectual Tourette syndrome where “stay in your lane.” Well, I’ll be in the middle of class, like in March of ’07, in the middle of class. No warning. I blurted out “the banking system’s about to collapse.” I’d written about it in ’02, but I turned, I said, “I think it’s about to collapse.”

TUCKER CARLSON: This is an organic chemistry class.

DAVE COLLUM: An organic chemistry class. And they looked at me and I just said, “Look, I think the entire banking system’s going down the tubes now.” And it took another year, year and a half.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did they say that’s not a related discipline? What are you talking about?

DAVE COLLUM: No one gave me grief for that. What was entertaining about that particular Tourette’s-like outburst is that I had the same kids in an honors thesis course two years later. In the first lecture, one lecture a week, the first lecture, I said, “Didn’t I warn you?” This is February of ’09. Said, “Didn’t I warn you that the banking system was going to collapse?”

I said, they said, “Yeah, you did.” I said, “Did your econ professors tell you that?” They said, “No.” And I said, “What are those made for?”

In this thesis course, I used a lot of guest lectures. So my first guest lecture was the CEO of Morgan Stanley bank and he had cut his teeth on mortgage backed securities and he spent two hours talking about the catastrophe that we were in the middle of in February of ’09.

So yeah, I do occasionally go off the rails, but no one gives me grief.

The 2020 Cancellation Incident

I got canceled in 2020. The closest you and I – I’ve been following you for years, but the closest you meeting, but we didn’t – was in 2020. I got canceled during the height of Cancel season. Remember how it’s happening all the time? And the probability of me ending up being interviewed by you was pretty high because it was being. I got canceled. I was written up in the Federalist or someplace like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you got canceled for?

DAVE COLLUM: Oh, it was a real crime against humanity. I supported the police.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, okay.

DAVE COLLUM: It was one of those. Remember the guy got knocked over in Buffalo? A friend of mine I was doing a podcast with that Saturday, posted that late one night and said, “I think this is just appalling.” When the old guy got knocked out by the riot police and I watched the video a couple times, I said, “Well, Chris,” his name is Chris Irons. I said, “We can talk about it on Saturday. But I have no idea what he was doing there.”

So this is in a tweet. And I said he was poking riot police with something that looked kind of like a taser or something. Turns out in retrospect, it was a skimmer. And so I said, “It looks like kind of a self-inflicted problem to me.” I didn’t say he deserved it or anything like that. But it is self-inflicted if you poke a riot policeman and he knocks you over. That’s pretty much, you know, it’s a Darwin award.

TUCKER CARLSON: Bears and riot policemen shouldn’t be poked.

The Astroturfed Nature of Cancel Culture

DAVE COLLUM: Turns out what I learned that night was the cancel culture is not organic. It was incredibly astroturfed. The speed with which it happened was staggering. It was automated within 20 or 30 minutes. Email boxes all across the administration were filling with complaints. It went everywhere. I had to lock down my Twitter feed fast and things like that.

And then Cornell was on sort of a war footing, trying to figure out what to do. Now they’re trying to figure out what to do just because they wanted the fire to be put out. So they weren’t against me in that sense. It was during the lockdown, so I didn’t actually. There was the advantage of everyone was locked down, but I wasn’t sure Antifa wouldn’t show up. And we know that’s not organic either.

And so I slept with some loaded guns and I was emotionally ready to blow someone’s brains out.

TUCKER CARLSON: How many tenured professors in Ivy League schools have guns at home?

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t know. Just you. I would not. Well, there’s probably more. We have Natural Resources Department and stuff like that, and those guys probably use the resources available.

But the one mistake Cornell made, they made two mistakes. First of all, it turns out the guy was a grifter. The whole thing was faked. And there’s video footage of him telling people he’s going to go get knocked down and people yelling at him for doing that. It turns out the blood that came out of his ear, I’ve talked to physicians.