Transcript: The End of Free Speech w/ Michael Shellenberger – Tucker Carlson LIVE

Maybe we should begin by asking our politicians to do what Charlie Kirk spent his life doing, which is to answer the question. Just calmly answer the question. “We’ll ask you anything,” and then you go ahead and answer it to the best of your ability.

Like, for example, who blew up the Nordstream pipeline? What happened? All the money we sent to Ukraine. Why haven’t you released all the JFK files? All the questions on your mind that slowly drive you crazy because no one will address them. Why don’t we just ask them directly to our leaders and they get to answer? Nothing would honor Charlie Kirk’s memory more than that. That is free speech in action.

The Misguided Response: Censorship in the Name of Free Speech

But nothing like that happened. Instead, the only real conversation we’ve had about free speech has been about Jimmy Kimmel, who is hardly a champion of free speech. In fact, just the opposite. He’s a nasty little censor. Talentless. A person who has, many times on camera over the years, chuckled and applauded as other people, his political enemies, have been silenced.

A guy who has so little influence in American society and so little audience he was on his way out anyway, has the job only as a result of some kind of weird political affirmative action where people who agree with studio heads get to have late night jobs. He is hardly the person who should be taking up the cause of free speech or become a symbol of it, because of course, he’s the symbol of censorship and has been for most of his career.

Politicians Weaponizing Tragedy for Censorship

And the other thing that we saw, maybe even more distressing than that, was politicians turn not only against free speech, but actively and openly announced efforts to censor the American population and use the memory of Charlie Kirk to do it as their justification.

There are many examples we could pick. Here’s a particularly raw one. This is from Congressman Moskowitz just in the House of Representatives, eight days after Charlie Kirk died. Here it is:

Congressman Moskowitz: “It’s crazy what’s going on on the social media platforms. There are so many conspiracy theories on what’s going on with Charlie Kirk. Israel assassinated him, right? There are conspiracy theories about your personal social life all day. It is totally rampant. Big names on the right. Candace Owens, right, talking about how the what’s been released as far as the dialogue between the perpetrator and his roommate is manufactured by the FBI, manufactured by the administration. It is totally rampant allowing foreign governments to just perpetrate these platforms, all of these bots, all of the time to weaponize Americans. And so if we want to do something, then we should talk about section 230. We should talk about how we’re going to make sure that we don’t let foreign governments poison our children’s mind. And so I will work with you on that, Director. I’ll work with you on 230 any day.”

The Real Motivation Behind Censorship

TUCKER CARLSON: So there is the Congressman talking to the FBI director, and there’s a lot there, and we’ll unpack it. But the most telling line came right in the middle. And he turns to the FBI director, he says, “They’re criticizing your personal life. They’re airing conspiracy theories about your personal life.”

Now, speaking for myself, I have literally no idea what the Congressman was talking about. I haven’t seen that. Doubtless it exists. There are conspiracy theories about everybody and everybody’s personal life. If you’re in public, people are theorizing about you on the Internet. Kind of the nature of the Internet and kind of the nature of having authority.

But you’ll notice that the congressman thinks this will be a compelling argument for the FBI director. He basically says, “They’re criticizing you and me and they’re not allowed to do that.” He’s not even pretending that the purpose of censoring speech, and that’s what he’s saying, we need to censor the speech. That the purpose of that would be protect any vulnerable group. Vulnerable groups? No, they’re criticizing us. They can’t do that.

And then of course he goes on to blame unseen foreign actors. And by the way, that’s something that I think most Americans get behind, but that the congressman is not behind at all. If they want to take the influence of foreign nations out of our politics, most Americans would applaud and that would start with not taking money from their lobbies. That would be a welcome change.

But the idea that we need to censor what you say because the people who run everything don’t want to be called out or have their personal lives misdescribed or the subject of conspiracy theories, well, that’s not really reform as much as it’s just kind of classic old fashioned tyranny, isn’t it? “Shut up. We have guns, you don’t. And we’re going to make you.” And how are we going to make you? That’s the question.

The Attorney General’s “Hate Speech” Distinction

So you may remember that last week the Attorney General came out right after Charlie Kirk’s death and said there is a distinction between speech constitutionally protected, famously in the First Amendment, in the Bill of Rights, and something called “hate speech,” a category that strictly speaking exist under the law, but which a lot of people seem to believe exists.

And hate speech is never defined. Like most of the most powerful words that we use to punish people, terrorism, for example, racism, it’s never actually defined. What is that exactly? We don’t know, other than it’s speech the people in charge hate and therefore it should be banned.

And most people who understand the American story, who understand our government, who understand our culture, who care about continuing all of those things, reacted with outrage when the Attorney General said that you can’t pass a law that will strip from us our God given right to say what we think is true. She addressed it in such a ham handed way that it was obvious to everybody exactly what she was talking about. And they reacted. We did too.

The Section 230 Weapon

But in real life that will not happen. There will not be, I can say confidently in my lifetime, a law in the Congress that says explicitly any American who says something our leaders don’t like. Anybody who trafficks in a conspiracy theory about our personal lives will be shut down, fined, imprisoned. An open, transparent censorship law will not pass through the House of Representatives or the United States Senate, will not be signed by the President. Why? Because it’s just too obvious.

So instead, because censorship is coming if these people can help it, instead, they will invoke something called Section 230. And you’re going to hear a lot more about this without question, it’s never again explained very well. And the reason it’s not explained is because they don’t want you to know exactly what they’re doing.

So let me just give you the Cliff Notes version of what Section 230 is. Section 230 is a section within the 1996 Communications Decency Act. And it is the piece of legislation often credited for creating the Internet. It’s the framework that Congress came up with at the dawn of the Internet to put parameters around what this is to protect companies as they grew, to set laws around this new technology.

Understanding Section 230’s Power

And one of the laws that they made, Section 230, shields Internet providers platforms from lawsuits. It gives them legal liability from lawsuits on the basis of slander, obscenity, things that are on their platforms that they didn’t create. In other words, it creates a distinction between a publisher like a newspaper, a magazine, a television network, and a platform, Google, Facebook and X.

And the distinction allows the platforms to let other people post whatever they want without getting sued for it. They cannot be held liable. These big companies cannot be held liable for slander, hate speech, anything really on their platforms. And as a result of this law, those platforms have come to dominate news and information globally.

In fact, when we talk about censorship, nobody’s talking about censoring the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, because nobody cares. All meaningful information and all meaningful social movements are influenced by social media. So if you want to get people whipped into a frenzy, if you want to change your government, for example, you’re not going to take out an ad in the New York Times. Of course not. You’re going to get something going on the social media platforms.

So they are huge. They are completely dominant. Information flows almost exclusively on them. And all of this is possible because of Section 230.

The Debate Over Section 230

Now, there’s been a pretty vigorous debate for the last 20 years over whether this is a good idea. And there are arguments against it. One of them is why would Google get a liability exemption when I don’t have one? You run a business. You’re just an American citizen. You can be sued at any time under our famously loose and destructive tort laws. And you can go to business, you can be bankrupt, you can be destroyed. They can do you what they did to Alex Jones.

For example, the FBI can join up with some activist group and take your business away, wreck your life. So why should these big tech companies be exempt? Now that’s a real argument, similar to the argument about the pharma companies. Why should vaccine makers get a shield from lawsuits? If I make playground equipment, I’m vulnerable. If I make the COVID vaccine, I’m not. That’s a principled argument.

The Political Flip-Flop on Section 230

But what’s interesting about the 230 debate is that both parties had been on both sides of it at various times. The Republicans for years were mad at the big platforms because they were censoring conservatives, which they were. And so they often muttered about revoking 230 shield protection unless they opened their platforms to all points of view.

In other words, they wanted to use Section 230 to end censorship. “There’s no reason you should get a special carve out from the US government, from the Congress, if you don’t treat people equally. If there’s not fairness and neutrality in the way you allow opinions to be broadcast on your platform.” That seemed like a fairly reasonable position.

But things have changed. Now you’re seeing Republicans invoke Section 230, pick up the cudgel that they hold over these huge tech companies and say, “Unless you censor, we will revoke Section 230.” And by the way, they are following in the footsteps of the leftward edge of the Democratic party in doing this.

The Biden Administration’s Censorship Campaign

In 2020, Beto O’Rourke of Texas ran one of his many doomed campaigns for office, this one, I think, for president. And he said, “Unless they get hate speech off the platforms, we’re going to revoke section 230 and put these people out of business.” By the way, the threat is enough. That was the hope. If we threaten them, then we don’t have to do the censoring. We’ll make Google, Facebook meta and X do the censoring for us. That was the idea. Then no one can accuse us of violating the First Amendment or being for speech codes. We’ll make someone else do it.

He lost. But then Joe Biden that same year 2020, said, “Actually yes, we should use this threat to force the big tech platforms to censor in ways that we like.” And by the way, they did. They did throughout the Biden presidency. Facebook, then Twitter, Google, all censored opinions the Biden administration didn’t like. And they did this ultimately because they feared having their legal protection revoked. That’s why they did that. That’s what got them to act.

And Republicans, the sensible ones, looked at this and said, “This is completely wrong. It’s totally immoral. It’s illegal for the US Government to be imposing censorship on its citizens. It’s against the Constitution of the United States, and it’s against, more important, natural law. These are not rights we were given by the Biden administration. These are rights we were born with. And when you take them away from us, you are the criminal.” And they made that point.

Republicans Adopting the Censorship Playbook

All of a sudden, you are seeing Republicans take the position that Beto O’Rourke and Joe Biden took just five years ago here, for example. And this will come as no surprise to you at all. You will not be shocked to hear this. Here is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina running for reelection, making exactly the same case that Beto O’Rourke made. Watch:

“Section 230 needs to be repealed. If you’re mad at social media companies that radicalize our nation, you should be mad. Senator Bill. That will allow you to sue these people.”

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: They’re immune from lawsuit.

The Real Purpose of Censorship

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, it should be repealed. Now. It’s not clear from that clip exactly why Lindsey Graham is calling for the repeal of section 230. Why is he threatening the tech platforms? And by the way, the pretext always changes.

They’ll tell you, “Well, we’re against child sex trafficking,” as if anyone is for it. “We’re against terrorism,” a term, once again, they never define and don’t have to. “We’re against drugs. We’re against foreign influence. We’re against bigotry,” whatever. They will always give you an excuse, and that excuse will make them sound like the virtuous party, like the good guys. “We’re here to save the vulnerable.” But that’s never the real reason.

Censorship, always and everywhere, is imposed with the intent and always has the effect of shielding the powerful. They’re the ones who don’t want to be exposed. Free speech, by contrast, and this is the reason it’s in our Bill of Rights, is the one great power that the powerless have, especially in a world where your vote may or may not matter. All you have is your voice. All you have is your opinion.

And that’s infuriating to Lindsey Graham’s donors. And make no mistake, when he’s calling for invoking section 230 and taking it away, threatening the big platforms. He’s doing that on behalf of his donors who feel criticized by random accounts on the Internet. And they hate it, because the people in charge always hate to be called out.

Censorship has one goal, and that’s to preserve secrecy. And secrecy has one purpose, and that’s to abet wrongdoing. So people who are doing nothing wrong are transparent. People who are committing evil hide. And censorship allows them to hide. It’s literally that simple. And those people are the most powerful people in the country.

The Push for AI-Powered Censorship

So who’s encouraging this? The donors? Whoever they are. But there are lots of lobby groups, all of them on the left, pushing the Republican led Congress to get behind censorship initiatives, using the cover of the Section 230 debate to get it done. To pressure the tech companies into making you shut up, into taking your opinions off the Internet using algorithms designed to censor you.

Without even a human being entering into the equation. No person will decide that your opinion is offensive and pull it off. The computer will decide that. And it will be aided by the massive exponential growth in computing power that is at the very center of tech right now. AI that is the goal. To make certain that opinions that are disruptive to the people in charge never see the light of day.

What’s amazing and what’s especially infuriating is that many in the Republican Party, the party that controls all branches of government right now, are completely for this, strongly for it. Where did they get this idea? Is this a betrayal? Oh, it’s a betrayal. How profound a betrayal. Listen to Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska, a former Air Force general, describe who he’s been talking to about censorship.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: And I appreciate Jonathan Greenblatt, what ADL and his ADL stands for. I know you’ve made us better with your feedback and ideas and recommendations and it’s been a treat to get to know you. We want to be in a country that makes clear that anti Semitism or any kind of racism is repugnant, unacceptable, not allowed in our space and we just with zero tolerance for it. So we need to hold these companies accountable. I work with them to take it up the airwave.

The ADL’s Definition of “Hate Speech”

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s hard to believe that’s a real clip we actually checked. Is that real? Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska, a great and sensible state with tons of normal people, a former Air Force general. Is he really colluding with Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL to take away your right to say what you think? Oh, you bet. That’s exactly what he’s doing.

And make no mistake, the ADL is not an anti defamation organization. The ADL practices defamation and slander and bullying and not in service of protecting a marginalized group, but in accruing power and by forwarding its goals, which are ideological.

And if you don’t believe that, go on the ADL’s website and take a look at what the ADL considers hate speech. “Hate speech.” Another one of those terms never quite defined, but the ADL has actually taken the time to define it. What do they consider hate speech? Well, among other things, complaining about drag queen story hour is hate speech according to the ADL.

Huh? Not being enthusiastic about the COVID vax, that’s hate speech. And it’s dangerous. Noticing that the American population has changed completely in the past 30 years thanks to immigration, that’s dangerous hate speech. You should be punished for that. For noticing in your country that you were born in. No noticing. You can’t notice that it looks completely different because of decisions that someone who never consulted you made without your knowledge.

“Shut up,” says the ADL. “You not only don’t have the right to speak, we’re going to scream at you and call you a Nazi and imply that you are the dangerous one.” The people who opened up the borders to 50 million foreigners, but you’re the dangerous one. Sure.

You know what else is hate speech, by the way? Reading the gospels of Matthew or Mark or Luke or John. The Gospel itself, Christianity itself is hate speech. I know that because three nights ago I recounted the Christian story in its essence over like five minutes and was immediately denounced by the ADL as someone who was dangerous and inspiring murder.

But I’m not the only one. The ADL has actively attacked the Christian gospel for years, has gotten behind a definition of hate speech that includes the Christian story. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s not a fervid conspiracy theory. That’s a fact. And you can look it up.

Republican Complicity

So this is the guy? That’s the guy. Jonathan Greenblatt, the most aggressively left wing Democratic aligned, but much more important than that lunatic anti human, anti American group, the ADL. Completely corrupt. He’s consulting that guy to decide how much speech you should have because there are ugly opinions on the Internet. Yeah, that’s your Republican Party.

Was he denounced by his fellow Republicans in the House? Was he denounced by the speaker of the House, Speaker Johnson? No, he wasn’t. They barely even notice because they have the same views. Not all of them, but an awful lot of them. It’s unbelievable and it’s counterproductive because once again, censorship is never enacted to help the powerless. It is always and everywhere an effort to shield the powerful. Always.

And in fact has a counterproductive effect on the people it is supposedly designed to help. How would you feel about any person you’re not allowed to criticize? Would that make you like the person more? No. It would make you resentful and suspicious and would give you the well deserved opinion that this is not an egalitarian society in which we’re all citizens. It’s a hierarchical society in which the government has decided some people have more rights than others.

So if you find out you’re not allowed to criticize someone else, maybe the first question you might ask is, “Well then why are people allowed to criticize me?” And the answer is because some people have more power in our society or being used to pit different groups against each other, or who knows what’s going on. But none of it is consistent with the core promise of this country, which is we’re all citizens under our government and we’re all equal before our God who made us.

It says that, but increasingly that’s not the country we live in. We live in a country where some people have more rights than others. And that’s exactly the kind of message you would send if you wanted to foment a revolution against your government, because it enrages people and it divides them from each other.

The Counterproductive Nature of Censorship

“Oh, we have to protect this group.” What does everyone else think of that? They secretly don’t like the group. You’re not ending bigotry by enacting censorship. You’re creating it, Dumbo. And this is specifically aimed at Congressman Bacon, who was somehow an Air Force general. He can’t be dumb, but he’s obviously not very thoughtful because this is very obvious. People don’t like other people who get special treatment. Were you never a child? You never learned that?

Who knows what the purpose here? It doesn’t even matter. It is happening right before us. The people who are elected to protect us, who say they’re our friends, are selling us out. And you can theorize as to why. And by the way, all of that theorizing is itself unhealthy.

Where do conspiracy theories come from? Where do you think they come from? They come from living in a country where the government will never explain anything and lies constantly. So the next time you see someone in power complain about malicious conspiracy theories, stop them in mid sentence and say they exist because of you.

If you just tell the truth, if you would live like Charlie Kirk and answer the question politely, reasonably, fully, there wouldn’t be a vacuum into which lunatics would rush. We would have a plausible answer to basic questions like what the hell is going on? But because you haven’t provided that, what do you think’s going to happen? People are going to have some pretty far out explanations and maybe some of them are true.

By the way, we don’t know your behavior is so suspicious because you can’t answer any question straight, any. And you’re spending your time talking to Jonathan Greenblatt, one of the darkest, most corrupt people in our society. Truly a divisive figure. Speaking of divisive, how many Americans have made fellow Americans hate each other more consistently over the years than Jonathan Greenblatt? Very, very few. Very few. And you’re talking to him.

California’s Censorship Law

So if this sounds like a paranoid rant like, “Oh, that could never happen.” We used to know that. It is happening right now in the state of California. The state of California, like two weeks ago, 10 days ago, eight days ago, something like that, has passed a law in the state legislature, both chambers of the state legislature. It awaits a signature from Gavin Newsom that would ban hate speech on the Internet in California.

“Hate speech.” Now, how do they define hate speech? I actually have the definition. I actually wrote it down because I was so shocked by it that this is happening. The state of California. If Gavin Newsom signs this law, and he has until October 13th to do it.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: It.

TUCKER CARLSON: People will be fined if the censors determine that speech constitutes, and we’re quoting now, “violence, intimidation, or coercion.” What’s intimidation or coercion? Right, right. “Or coercion based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other protected characteristics.”

Obviously, white Christian men are not covered under that. And so the society becomes ever more hierarchical with a Brahmin class and untouchables at the bottom. The opposite of the country all of us over 50 grew up in that had an egalitarian spirit, where some were rich, some were poor, some were smart, some were dumb, some had good jobs, others were unemployed. But all of us were considered equal under the law and equal in the eyes of God.

And that concept is the basis of a stable society, any stable society. And it was the basis of stability in this country. And laws like this and the attitudes that give birth to them to laws like this have made it wildly unstable, wobbly. It’s so unstable. So as of October 13, that could become law.

Now, that’s a censorship law. Now they’ll say, “No, no, no, we’re just. We’re actually getting the platforms to censor, right?” You’re getting someone else to do the job for you. But if you hire a hitman and he carries out the hit, you’re the murderer. He participated in it, but you hired him. And that’s exactly what’s going on here.

The state of California under Gavin Newsom is about to, we think, censor the opinions of Americans not to protect anybody, but to shield themselves from criticism so they can continue to do what they want to do. Secret Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, applauds this.

Jonathan Greenblatt in His Own Words

And in case you’re not familiar with Jonathan Greenblatt, and in case you want a sense of what he’s like and what he considers hate speech, let’s just go right to the tape so you know that we’re not exaggerating. This is Jonathan Greenblatt. A video.

Jonathan Greenblatt: When you look at the prevalence of anti vaxxer accounts that have been amplified and spread across Facebook, they don’t show up on your network, but they show up every day to billions of people because Facebook profits from amplifying these voices, which are literally killing people.

And freedom to express your opinion isn’t. The freedom to incite violence. But for Facebook it is. And that needs to change. That’s all. It’s simple. There’s nothing wrong with keeping all of us safe from violent white supremacists or hateful people.

The UK’s Descent into a Police State

TUCKER CARLSON: So criticizing the COVID vaccine is tantamount to murder. There’s never been—I mean, obviously that’s prima facie insane. It’s untrue. It’s a deranged perspective. But more than anything, you’re seeing who Jonathan Greenblatt really is. He is a faithful praetorian guard for the people in charge. This is not someone who’s ever challenged actual power, not once in his life. That’s who he works for. That’s who he takes money from.

That’s what hate speech looks like. Anybody in charge can make you shut up when you criticize them or stand in the way of their aims. So in case you don’t think this can come to the United States, one final clip, and it’s a sad one. And it comes from the UK now.

The UK, obviously, the country that gave birth to ours, a cousin. A country so similar to ours and so close—six hours by plane overnight—that we don’t really think of it as fully foreign. It’s not like going to Malaysia or Burundi or even France. It’s an English speaking country whose customs are recognizable, whose government and common law form the basis of our government and our law. Everything about England seems like home, but three degrees off.

And yet the UK has become a police state. And if you don’t believe that, if you think that’s just hyperbole designed to whip you into a frenzy, here’s a stat that we checked and it’s hard even to believe this is true. But this is true.

2023. So about a year and a half ago, how many people do you think were arrested in the United Kingdom for speech violations? Arrested by the police, handcuffed and brought to jail in 2023? A couple dozen? You know, the ones you see on X, the ones Fox News talks about. How many people in that year were arrested for saying things the government didn’t want them to say? What’s your guess? Is it more than 12,000? Because that’s the answer. More than 12,000.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Wow.

TUCKER CARLSON: That seems like a lot. Is that a lot? I mean, it’s kind of hard to know, right? Okay, well, let’s compare it to the number—the widely agreed upon number—from the most totalitarian country in the world. A country so lacking in basic freedom, a country run by a madman, a country that’s so evil, we’re literally at war with that country right now, just on principle because we so disapprove of how they treat their people. And that country, of course, is Russia under Vladimir Putin.

So if the UK handcuffed more than 12,000 people in one year for saying things the government didn’t like, how many were arrested in Russia, a country with twice the population of the UK? Oh, we happen to have the number: 3,319.

So to restate: more than 12,000 people arrested in the United Kingdom, England, in one year for speech code violations. 3,300 arrested in Russia, a country with twice the population. So that tells you—you don’t think totalitarianism can come to the Anglosphere? Oh, it already has. We haven’t even touched on Australia, New Zealand, Canada. In some ways even worse.

The Face of British Authoritarianism

But what does it look like? What is the face of hate crime prosecution? What does it actually look like when a citizen is arrested for saying something the government doesn’t like? This video is not from China. It’s from the United Kingdom. This is a British veteran being arrested for offending the government. Watch.

[VIDEO CLIP: Hampshire police would realize how ridiculous this is. We need to come to this. What did it need to come to this level? Because I don’t understand. I posted something that he posted. You come to arrest me, you don’t arrest him. Why has it come to this? Why am I in cuffs? Because of something he shared then? I shared because someone has caused, obviously anxiety based upon your social media post.]

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yes, the velvet wrapped jackboot of British fascism. “You’re being arrested because someone has been caused anxiety by your views.” Notice that someone is never identified. And of course the answer is someone in power, someone in the government or someone who funds the government, someone close to the government, someone who has a lot more power than you, didn’t like what you were saying, felt anxious about what you were saying. And so, unfortunately, we’re going to have to handcuff you and bring you to jail.

That happened this year. That happened in January, and it happens every single day. More than 12,000 people arrested every single year for criticizing their government in the UK. Our closest ally, with whom we share intelligence on every level, British intelligence. I know everyone’s spun up about Mossad. Very close to Mossad. We’re closer to British intelligence. That’s the country we’re partnering with to spy on our respective populations.

The Red Line of Tyranny

So it’s really, really simple. If a government—if your government is willing to arrest you for saying things that they don’t like, if your government is arresting you for criticizing them one way or another, you need a new government. If there is any justification for revolution, it’s that. That’s unacceptable. That’s tyranny. A government that does that is not a legitimate government. It has absolutely no right to do that, and it should be stopped from doing that immediately. That’s the red line right there.

Michael Shellenberger is one of the great reporters in the United States, a friend of ours, and someone who, as a former liberal, has probably thought about speech for more years and with more clarity than probably anyone I know. And so we’re so grateful to have him on to assess the state of free speech in the United States two weeks after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Mike, thanks very much for coming on. Are you worried?

The Censorship Industrial Complex

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: I’m very worried. I mean, I think what’s maybe under said recently is that assassination is the ultimate form of censorship, and it comes from the same place. I think that’s what everybody senses about it, is that there had been efforts to censor, and they had censored Charlie Kirk, obviously. I mean, the Twitter files—we discovered that he was on a blacklist. There was obviously huge attempts to keep him out of universities. He had already had many death threats, which is not a direct form of government censorship, but these are societal demands that he be silenced.

And then at a global institutional level, yeah, it’s a very disturbing trend that we’re seeing. I mean, I think there’s two things happening. There’s both an organic kind of demand from powerful people, the kind that you were describing, where a politician just really can’t stand something, and they just want to see something taken down. And you see that from groups and politicians.

And then there’s more of an inorganic demand for censorship, which we’ve labeled the censorship industrial complex. You can call it the censorship industry. And that is in place in the European Union, in Britain, in Brazil. California would like to have that. Basically, all the Five Eyes countries are pursuing that.

And their strategy, I think, is pretty clear at this point, is to encircle the United States and to make our tech platforms censor along the lines that they would like to so they can achieve censorship through the back door. And this has always been their strategy because they know that the First Amendment is a major obstacle for them since it requires that the people have really radical levels of free speech that no country has ever come close to.

The Radical Nature of the First Amendment

And as you said, based on this idea of natural rights that we are granted by our creator, not given to us by the government, that speech comes before the government. The speech is how we constitute our government. Whereas in Europe and everywhere else, the government had gradually let people say certain things. You have to petition the king. “Oh, King, can we criticize you for sleeping with Anne Boleyn?” And the king would decide whether that would be okay or not. And that’s how it would occur.

And the creators of this amazing country—and as you work on free speech, I’ve only worked on it now for really two and a half years. I’m a newbie to the issue. But one of the things you just really appreciate is really how radical and powerful and strong that commitment to the First Amendment was. It’s not just hype. You might just think, is that just patriotic hype from Americans? It’s not.

When you read the history of free speech over 2,500 years, going back to Socrates, who was put to death for things that he said—also an act of censorship—then you realize just how radical the First Amendment is, how beautiful the First Amendment is, because the Americans that created our country said, “We don’t want to have a country, we don’t want to have a government if we can’t have full free speech with some very narrow exceptions.”

And so the exceptions now, they sort of say, “Well, the Internet changed everything.” That’s what you hear from—that’s what I hear from my progressive friends. Heard it on Martha’s Vineyard, of all places. “It’s all changed with the Internet. It’s too dangerous to allow this high level of free speech. We have to change things.”

Well, Tucker, to put into context how crazy that is, our Supreme Court has ruled not once, but twice that Nazis can march through neighborhoods not only of Jewish Americans, but of Holocaust survivors. And that the line where you—the line that gets crossed between speech and actual violence is when I say, “Go kill that person there” or “Go light that house on fire.” It’s when the speech becomes part of the action or coordinating an assassination or something. Of course, language in that context has to be illegal because it’s part of breaking the law.

But marching through a neighborhood with the most vile ideology is something that the Supreme Court has twice upheld. Well, now we’re supposed to believe that some racist comments on a Facebook post, or as you said, it’s really political. It’s really about stifling the conversation around migration, gender, climate. I mean, it’s actually been less on race, a huge amount on trans issues.

I mean, we just saw a British gentleman, Graham Linehan, a famous television comedy writer, get arrested when he landed in Britain for having urged biological women to defend themselves from biological males that come into their bathrooms. So it is a very serious threat, Tucker.

The Trump Administration’s Response

I think that the thing to keep our eye on is they’ve been trying to basically get governments to empower a mostly secret group of so-called NGOs that would be financed by the government and who would be telling the social media companies what to take down. In some places, they’re more subtle with it than in others. That’s the big threat.

The Trump administration has done some great things to defund that. It was all going to work through NSF and then Congress would have to bless it and that was the way that they were going to do it. So the Trump administration has done a great job defunding that and also holding a strong line on both Europe and Brazil, demanding that free speech protections be there.

But obviously, we see some backsliding and some behaviors over the last couple of weeks that were lamentable. Certainly the Attorney General’s comments, which she then later kind of went back on and said she didn’t mean what she had said. And then obviously, or maybe not obviously, but a dust up over the FCC chair and his comments around Jimmy Kimmel, which I got to say, as the days go by, and you look in retrospect, it just seems absurd.

I mean, you had Democrats trying to create this elaborate censorship system and then you had some badmouthing of Jimmy Kimmel. It wasn’t really—it wasn’t great. I think it was inappropriate, but I think there was a lot of other complicating factors too. And there was economic concerns around Jimmy Kimmel and just sort of this demand that he have to be carried on every television station. I think in retrospect, we won’t look back on as not a great moment. I don’t think the Trump administration covered itself in glory over the last couple of weeks on that.

But on the European side of holding strong on free speech and also in standing up to Brazil, I do give the Trump administration credit.

The TikTok Controversy

TUCKER CARLSON: All it did was save Jimmy Kimmel. I mean, Jimmy Kimmel’s on his way out. Nobody watches that. It’s crap. I mean, it has no effect on American society. It’s just masturbatory. It’s really—he’s playing for an audience of one: himself. And this kind of allowed him to pose as a free speech defender.

I got to say, I’m—the TikTok thing. I think I sort of missed that. I don’t know why I wasn’t paying attention. I should have been. But TikTok was banned by the Congress, forced to sell—it’s Chinese owned company by ByteDance owned TikTok. And the argument in the Congress was, “Well, we can’t have foreign ownership of a critical service like social media in this country. And so it has to be owned at least 51% by Americans.”

Okay. I don’t know why I missed the significance of this. Then it turns out, and they said this openly, it had nothing to do with China. And members of Congress said this. A lot of Republicans. “I’m voting to shut down TikTok because people are starting to like Hamas when they watch it.”

Now, I’m not endorsing Hamas, obviously I’m not pro-Hamas at all. But Americans have a right to like anything they want and to come to their own conclusions about some foreign conflict or even domestic conflict, any conclusion they want, because they’re not slaves.

So is it okay for the Congress to decide, “I don’t like the effects, the radicalization of this one social media platform. So I’m going to shut it down”? I mean, is that allowed? Can they do that?

The Platform Monopoly Problem

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Well, this gets to. Let me only come to it by addressing one of the things that you, I thought rightly discussed in your monologue, which is this very wonky but important issue of this law called Section 230 and the nature of these platforms that we have. And I think it’s helpful to think of these platforms at this point as utilities. They’re monopoly utilities.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: You could say there’s some competition between Instagram and TikTok and X and there’s truth to that. But there’s often situations in monopoly environments where there’s some competition, but they really do operate, I think functionally as monopolies. And they’re already regulated monopolies by Section 230. They’re already saying to them, you’re a different category of business. You’re not liable if you take down illegal content. You can’t be sued for having had that content on your website. It still requires them to take it down.

I think my view, and I’ve published a couple of white papers on it, I’ve testified on it, hasn’t exactly caught fire. My proposal, I’ve got a lot of views like that too. Yeah. But I think like, I think that, you know, I mean, look, one thing you have to understand about these big tech companies, they’re so powerful. There’s. I was shocked when I learned that like Facebook has a different lobbyist for House Republicans then for House Democrats and a separate lobbyist for Senate Republicans, Senate Democrats. I mean, these guys really put a lot of money into having that control over Congress. So that’s a little bit like the utilities power at the state level, the electric utilities power at the state level. So it’s a regulated environment.

A User-Controlled Content Filtering Solution

But I do think public interest voices like yourself and Joe Rogan and others out there carrying this message is really important because I think what’s in the public interest is that we actually do keep 230 but make it contingent on allowing all adult users to filter our own content, our own legal content. So in other words, all the child exploitation stuff obviously still being policed as we do now. All of the copyright violation, all that stuff still being policed as is now. But when you would go into social media platform, you’d have a chance to basically decide what you wanted to see and what you didn’t want to see.

And there was even some talk among Republicans who I respect, but I disagree on this issue that were upset that the video of Charlie Kirk being assassinated was on X. I mean, it was quite shocking. I have to agree with that. But I don’t think the solution is to necessarily take it down. But you could certainly create your own filter that I want to filter out any scenes of people being physically harmed. You could have a lot of different filters. You could have the Tucker Carlson filter, you could have the Greta Thunberg filter, but the users would be able to do that. And then of course the platforms like X already does can feed you their own platform, a separate stream.

I think Elon has gotten pretty close to that at X. Not as close as I would love to see it, but we’re so grateful because, I mean, the impact that he’s had has been so enormous in terms of ending this censorship. Fact checking Mafia, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta earlier this year decided he was going to copy the Elon Musk model of crowdsourcing, which is what the spirit of the First Amendment is. We crowdsource truth with the First Amendment. And then we just saw Google yesterday in a letter to Chairman Jim Jordan in the House so that they would move to something more like that. So those are good directions.

The Deep State’s Censorship Vision

But for me, that should be the only issue of Section 230 reform, is to actually expand the speech. That’s allowed, not restricted. What they want to do is they want to basically give the deep state, you know, for lack of a better word, DHS, NSF, DOD, the power to kind of choose the people that will decide what the truth is, as these NGOs, who would then get NSF money, which is, you know, public money, National Science Foundation money, and that they would then get special access to the data. I mean, this was their whole vision, and they were close to achieving it. We only really discovered it with the Twitter files.

That’s their holy grail, is to be able to control it that way. They’re set back in the United States, but they are moving for sure in that direction in Europe, Britain, Brazil, and certainly California would like to do the same. I hope that if Gavin does sign that atrocious legislation that you were describing, Tucker, I hope that the Supreme Court or that the courts strike it down. They struck down the last California censorship initiative, which was aiming at banning AI parodies, and that got struck down by a judge in a very eloquent decision.

The Cultural Shift Toward Censorship

But that’s kind of where we’re at. And why I think you’re special on this is so important because we’re on a knife’s edge. On the one hand, I think we’re making some good progress here in the United States in exposing the censorship and shutting and defunding it. But I think worldwide, the trends are in the wrong direction. And on college campuses with young people, unfortunately, we’ve seen an increase of support among censorship, really, every generation, from baby boomers to Gen Xers to Millennials to Zoomers, that we see support for censorship going up.

And it’s exactly like what you were saying. It’s about protecting feelings. It’s this, you know, to use a bit of jargon, it’s this expressive individualism, which is that my feelings are like the most important thing in the world. And if my feelings are hurt, then somebody has to pay a price. That, sadly, is the ideology. And that’s why I think the of sense censorship is in this broader cultural decline, where it’s like the intolerance and the entitlement that people feel are these big forces that have been, I think, driving those demands for censorship.

Hijacking Good Intentions for Totalitarian Ends

TUCKER CARLSON: I think everything you’ve said is absolutely true. I think it may even be more insidious than that. However, I think that there are decent people who’ve had their best impulses hijacked by totalitarians and used against them. In other words, I think there are good people, Americans, mostly women, to be totally blunt about it, who are like, “Oh, we can’t be mean to this or that group.” Well, I think that’s a good impulse, by the way. We shouldn’t be mean to any group. And the weaker they are, the more careful we should be about being mean to them. Because you don’t be a bully. Right. That’s a good impulse.

But that impulse is hijacked by the censors who are acting on their own behalf, not on behalf of whatever marginalized group they claim they’re acting on behalf of. They don’t care about those groups. Obviously, the lives of black people in inner cities did not improve after the George Floyd riots, obviously. But they. They hijack that, and they say, “If you care about the weakest among us, you will get on board with censorship.” I think that’s really clever and insidious and evil, but effective.

The Slippery Slope of Hate Speech Laws

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think it’s. It’s a manipulation. You know, it just shows how emotional the culture has gotten, you know, that you can appeal to those feelings. I mean, Tucker, it’s so easy to show how much of an abuse of power you can get with these hate speech laws. I mean, it’s worth considering. For example, you’ll get people that will be like, “Oh, well, are you defending the right of people to, like, call for genocide?” And you kind of go, “Oh, my God. Well, no, I mean, that’s horrible. I don’t want people to call for genocide.” And so you kind of go, so we’ll carve that out.

But then you kind of go, well, wait a second. So the same people that are saying that to you are the ones that point out as soon as you talk about the American experiment of the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries, that the European settlers committed a genocide to create the United States of America. So how hard would it be to criticize somebody that, say, praised America, praised the Western expansion Praised the. The west opening up and the European settlers, frankly, taking over this land from indigenous people. Someone could say that’s defending genocide. So you see how easy and quickly it comes.

I’ll give you another example, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which is one of these deeply sinister. I mean, they would not return any phone calls or whatever. And they personally smeared me and a lot of others.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, we stop to. The center for Strategic Dialogue didn’t want any dialogue.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue refused to have dialogue.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not surprised.

British Intelligence and Censorship Operations

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Creepy, creepy group close to British intelligence. I mean, it’s just like. I mean, close to. I’m being generous, you know, like, clearly an intermediary with deep state British organizations that is very interested in censoring Americans. And we see this dynamic a lot where they, you know, the Brits, you know, pick on Americans, the British groups pick on Americans because, you know, the US Intelligence community can’t directly go after Americans. So they get their British allies to do it.

And this is a group that labeled, along with the center for Countering Digital Hate, which is equally sinister organization, very connected to the Labour Party of Britain. They label criticism of George Soros as anti Semitic. And Tucker, I’m not saying criticism of George Soros and even noticing that he’s Jewish. It wasn’t even that. It wasn’t like they said the Jewish philanthropist George Soros, they’d be like, just criticizing George Soros was anti Semitic. That’s how crazy it is.

And got that. And, you know, you look at the number of institutions that have been putting this. It’s the European Union, it’s NATO, it’s the United Nations, it’s Germany, France, Britain. The United States is really powerful. And I think that the president did a good job pushing back against those types of people around the world. But it is important to remember that the European economy is bigger than the United States economy.

Global Economic Pressure and Censorship

And certainly when you go and kind of look at a world with this incredible economic power of China and the gravity it exercises and all these other countries in the world, including Europe, including Brazil, I mean, it was notable that when Trump punished Brazil with tariffs for its censorship and banning their opposition party leader and the leading presidential candidate, Bolsonaro, that China made up the difference in the loss of trade. So you sort of start to see the world and particularly get this kind of organic decline of real belief and support in free speech with a kind of global move towards this censorship, industrial complex system of censorship by proxy.

It is disturbing because they can exercise economic power over our platforms and, you know, I mean, I think Elon has shown good reason that we can, you know, basically trust what he’s done. I think he’s made great decisions for the most part since he’s taken over the platform. But, you know, if anything were to happen to Elon, I mean, these companies, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, Sundar Pichai, they’ve shown themselves to be quite cowardly.

Facebook was worried about the lack of help from the Biden administration. It was enough to get Facebook to censor because they were worried about not having enough help from the Biden administration to retrieve their very valuable user data from Europe, which their laws require. And that’s why they agreed to do censorship that even their own social scientists within Facebook said would backfire. Because they were like, “Look, if you go censor mothers sharing information about the COVID vaccine side effects, it will make mothers more nervous.” That’s what the internal people at Facebook said. And the Facebook execs were like, “We better just give the Biden administration what they want, otherwise they’re not going to help us with our data in Europe.”

So it doesn’t. I mean, it’s not hard to imagine, you know, the power that these states can exercise on these platforms. And I don’t think that that threat has gone away.

The Fragility of Our Free Speech Defense

TUCKER CARLSON: It doesn’t seem like a good system if one South African born, naturalized American is the only thing standing between us and tyranny. I mean, I really think that the media wouldn’t be. I mean, I work in the media. My whole life I’ve worked in the media. Elon Musk did this. Elon Musk did all this. And he did it because, I think he says, because he believes in it. Whatever the cause, he did it. He opened up everything. Yeah, so. But which I will never stop being grateful for, obviously. However, that’s a pretty thin thread kind of holding your civilization aloft. No.

Alarming Trends Among Young People

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah. I mean, the things I really worry about are those numbers, you know, I mean, you’ve had, you know, just those numbers of young people that. I mean, the number of young people, the number of college students, the share of college students that said that violence may sometimes be necessary to stop. A campus speaker was under 20% in the year 2020. It’s 34% right now. That means one third of college students think that violence might be necessary to stop a campus speaker. That is. I mean, that’s pathological. I don’t know if there’s another word for that. That’s bonkers, crazy, scary behavior.

And so, you know, remember George Orwell? He was, you know, a leftist wrote 1984 because he had read James Burnham, who’s this very famous former Trotsky who becomes a conservative and writes this book about the managerial state, which is basically about how this totalitarianism would kind of emerge out of the society and out of the state in these very specific safeties. Harm reduction demands that you would sort of get a whole kind of state of busy body, you know, nanny state, people that wanted to police the speech. I mean, that was his prediction in 19. Whatever that was 1947, I think, or, you know, when 1984 came out.

The Threat to Free Speech and Democratic Values

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: That was so brilliant. I mean, it’s terrifying. Brilliantly prescient, because that’s what I worry about. And I think, you know, I saw the… Obviously very moved by all the Charlie Kirk. What’s the response to the Charlie Kirk assassination and the desire to go into universities. I think we need to figure out how to move that number down so that people really do. The young people become. And everybody becomes more comfortable with…

Yeah, I mean, look. I mean, Charlie really was inspiring in the way that he would go into places. And of course, the sign said “prove me wrong.” He was saying, look, I’m open to debate. Exactly. He… I mean, it’s so… I don’t know. Ironic is not the right word. It’s so powerful that the person that was assassinated was the person doing what we need the most of that.

The person that was killed was the person who was doing what we need to see much, much more of at the high schools and the colleges, which is getting people very comfortable with having difficult conversations and with having conversations with people whose values you don’t share and who believe things that you find reprehensible. And that is at the heart of it.

I don’t know. I mean, it’s sort of… What’s terrifying is that, you know, those numbers of intolerance kept increasing over the last 10 years. I hope that we’ve hit an inflection point. I will say, Tucker, one number that did change that gave that heart that I felt some heart in, was that Pew had found that the share of Democrats that thought the government should be involved in censoring misinformation online had risen from 40% in 2018 to 70% in 2023.

They did the study, the same question earlier this year, and it’s now declined to 58%. So I do feel like there is a chance at which the… I mean, it’s still terrible, but like, the sense in which that trance has broken, you know, that hypnotic “We have to fight misinformation.” That just bonkers, anti-American, un-American impulse. It feels like it was broken.

But I still think there’s a lot of that cultural work that we need to do to really educating kids. Because I just don’t think free speech is intuitive. I mean, you go to a playground and you see little kids playing and they just are yelling, “shut up, shut up” at each other all the time. It’s our natural instinct. You hear something you don’t like, you want to shut them up.

And the alternative, to listen to somebody and actively disagree with them and maybe think about how to respond or just figure out if you agree or disagree. It’s like a muscle. It just takes practice. And I think we have to teach the kids, both the K-12 and the college students, how to do that and that doing that is a core value that will be rewarded in life and we should be celebrating rather than the opposite, which is this desire to silence and shut down.

AI and the Future of Censorship

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you concerned that technological advances that we’re in the middle of really will be harnessed to affect censorship without people even knowing it? I mean, you did the Twitter files with Taibbi and found what? I don’t think anyone knew there was this vast censorship program at Twitter, but most users had the sense that, you know, it’s a liberal website, whatever, they’re taking the conservatives off, but had no idea about the specifics until you brought them to light. Does AI increase the power of the platforms to take information off the site without anyone even knowing it’s been taken off?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah. I mean, just to answer that question, I’ll preface it by saying, of course, I watched very closely your interview with Sam Altman where you asked, I think, some very important questions, which is, what is the moral framework with which his AI will follow? That is the right question. And of course, it remains an ever present question. It’s not like it will never go away.

Ultimately, these decisions about what gets censored and what the AI censors for us are made by people. And so you look at the worst episodes of censorship over the last, you know, five to 10 years, you can find the people that were demanding the censorship. You can find the groups they created to demand it, you know, that it was… It was human decisions.

And that in fact, at the company level, in the Twitter files, there was a huge amount of debate around… I mean, not enough. A huge amount of debate around deplatforming the President of the United States, like removing the account of the President of the United States, which is so insane, it was a big deal. Obviously, it was talked about.

And then, of course, you could see it. Same thing with the Hunter Biden laptop, where the FBI ran a deception operation against the social media platforms illegally in an illegal conspiracy that included spreading disinformation about the laptop. That was obviously a very elaborate thing that a lot of people could see and were getting kind of glimpses into.

There was also just the humdrum or the ordinary kind of dark de-amplification. So you remember Twitter famously said, “oh, we don’t shadow ban.” That was the language that people had used. Well, of course they did. They called it something different. It was called, like, you know, “do not amplify lists,” for example. It’s like a kind of blacklist that they ran or a trends blacklist. Don’t let them show up on the trends thing. So there’s just all a million dials.

Of course, as you know, Tucker, to, like, kind of turn these things up and down. Yeah, the AI can help. But sometimes they wanted to go after a QAnon conspiracy. At one point, I reported this in my Twitter files on the decision to deplatform Trump. And there was something around the Kraken, which I guess is like a giant squid in the ocean. I think they were like, the Kraken was somehow tied into QAnon conspiracy theories, and they wanted to censor that, which is also insane.

They wanted to literally stop people from talking about Kraken, like, on Twitter. And then somebody figured out that the Seattle, I think, hockey team is the Kraken, and that all these tweets around hockey were getting, like, swept up in it. So it’s like, you know, it’s like, I worry about it, but ultimately, it’s not a bunch of censors in, like, the Philippines or even, I think, Palo Alto.

These, like, the worst forms of censorship are being decided at the executive level. But as I said, my view is that if you have Section 230, which is what gives you the power to be a monopoly, it’s like, literally like the patent, like, the permit to operate as a functional natural monopoly. I think that you should have to give the user, the adult user, complete control over all legal content, and you can censor the illegal content.

And I do think we should… There’s a whole separate thing on kids, you know, which I think is complicated, because they’re using the kids right now in Australia. They’re literally using the kids in Australia to create digital identification as a way to censorship, which I think we should be alarmed about. But nonetheless, as a father who’s seeing the impact of social media on adolescents. I do worry about it, but I do think if you’re going to have Section 230, that should be the agreement.

Fighting Back Against Censorship

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And thank you for describing as using the kids because it is the most obviously transparently cynical attempt to censor political speech by using the suffering of children about whom they care. Nothing, obviously. There’s no demonstrated care for kids. Like, how are the schools? You know, they don’t care. Right. Any pretext will do.

I mean, the terrorism thing was huge, as you know, under the Bush administration. Terrorism, what is that exactly? Can you define it for me? No, they can’t. I’m wondering, though, what’s the recourse? So these are decisions you just described that are being made at like the highest level of recognition. Well, global society, I mean, the richest man in the world decided to restore free speech to the United States. The president of the United States helped him. Federal judges rule on these things.

But let’s say we have a different president and there’s no Elon or his commitment changes and there’s a different Supreme Court. Like, where’s the power to fight back against this? Can you imagine a kind of civil disobedience that people could use to regain their speech? I’m trying to think through what that would look like.

NATO and the Defense of Free Democracies

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Well, look, at the top of my list is that we are in something called the NATO organization and it has a treaty that requires that we only have as members free democracies. We only are going to defend countries that allow free speech and that allow candidates, people to choose the candidates of their choice.

Currently that is absolutely under attack in Europe. Romania has already prevented, as you interviewed, the Romania has prevented their presidential frontrunner. Now France is about to ban their presidential frontrunner, Marine Le Pen, in a completely trumped up charge that the prime minister, the last prime minister was already guilty of and still came into office.

Germany, there’s… I just interviewed a mayoral candidate who was banned for like, made up reasons because he liked Lord of the Rings. I’m not even kidding. And he went to a book fair where there are some people that the intelligence services didn’t like people. And that was like the basis of the election council preventing him from running. And then they have these elaborate censorship industrial complexes.

We’re part of NATO. Everybody knows that we’re the main event. We subsidize it to the tune of, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Like you, Tucker, I’m willing to die for free speech and democracy like I was Seneca, like the Spartan slave boy in the great Seneca passage. I would rather die, you know, a free man than live as a slave.

And so we are willing to die for freedom. And I think we all care a lot about western civilization in Europe, but not if they’re going to… I don’t want to defend, I’m not going to. I don’t want to put my life on the line to defend authoritarian censorial autocracies like France, Germany and Romania and potentially Britain.

So I think the president has been pretty strong on it. They’re still negotiating this right now. But I just think that the public certainly MAGA. But whatever leftists are still in favor of free speech out there, including as you mentioned, I think a lot of the pro-Palestinian folks that felt censored on TikTok and elsewhere and have been censored in other ways that we should all make very clear that we don’t want to be a part of a military treaty that has us risking our lives for illiberal autocracies.

Like that’s got to be at the top of the list. Same thing with Brazil. It’s like, okay, I think people, Americans need to know we should pay more for orange juice. If it means protecting our freedom of speech, that our freedom of speech, it’s not like a small thing, it’s like the main event.

It’s like the reason why America is the greatest country that’s ever existed and certainly the greatest country in the world still, despite all of our problems and the country that everybody wants to live in is because of the First Amendment of free speech. So it just has to be an absolute non-negotiable.

So I said this is the number one issue. If you don’t have free speech, you don’t have anything. You don’t have democracy, you don’t have your dignity, you don’t have prosperity. Infrastructure can’t work. It’s just everything depends on free speech. And so it’s just got to be an absolute issue for the administration in these, in these negotiations.

And yeah, I mean, I think civil disobedience, if we see, you know, when things get to that level, should always be an option, particularly for defending something as essential and sacred as the First Amendment.

The Collapse of Free Speech in Britain

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you have any guesses or theories as to what happened to Great Britain, which of all countries is the closest to ours, has the deepest historical ties and is now arresting more than 12,000 people a year for saying things the government doesn’t like that really, it’s hard for me even to digest that. But I’m also confused by it. How did that happen?

The End of an 80-Year Cycle

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah, I mean, look, you had Christopher Caldwell on the other week, and I thought he did an incredible job explaining what’s happened to Europe. But I mean, I think we’re at the end of an 80-year cycle that began in 1945 with the end of World War II.

The United States had the role of being really the country that was at the center of this new empire. You can call it the American empire, whatever you want to call it. And we were trying to prevent another war in Europe and we pushed out an ideology that you might call—R.R. Reno calls the “open society ideology.”

And at first it made sense when you’re de-Nazifying Germany and moderating Japan and you’re trying to kind of usher in a liberal democratic Western order. Made sense for a few decades, probably didn’t make sense after 1990. And it went too far.

And it obviously, we decimated our industries by exporting them to China and created, with the help of George Soros, this elaborate NGO sector that basically pushed two things at the same time.

The Connection Between Censorship and Physical Disorder

Because I think the only way you can understand the censorship and the demand for totalitarian censorship in the mental space is to also understand the total disorder that they’re creating in the physical world. From the unchecked mass migration, the collapse of borders, people in boats, people with 14 criminal prosecutions and still let out on the street despite their schizophrenia, to commit murder against refugees.

I mean, that disorder is—I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those two things are unleashed by the same people at the same time. I mean, Soros foundation wants censorship. They also want disorder and anarchy and lawlessness at the street level, at the city level.

So I think that the contradictions of their own ideology of just the guilt around the past and the construction of these singularities of evil that were the Holocaust, slavery, indigenous genocide—those became new religious, the new original sins for this new woke religion.

The Replacement of Western Civilization’s Story

And it’s funny because it was interesting. Everyone looks at—I mean, everyone’s seen the data that really the border, the migration and the illegal migration of the United States really wasn’t nearly as out of control before Trump campaigned on in 2016. But it really gets out of control as a kind of reaction by Biden and the blob elites after 2020. Europe’s a slightly different story.

But I think it’s just what it looks like. There’s just this woke religion has just absolutely displaced the older story that we had of Western civilization, which is that Christianity gave way to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment secularized a whole bunch of Christian values, including the idea that we’re all born with dignity and rights.

And that old story just got replaced by this really ugly story, which is that humans are a cancer on the earth, that Western civilization is just genocidal. And it’s just the opposite of really what it’s been historically, which is a massively liberating phenomenon.

The Bipartisan Nature of Censorship

We got stuck in this awful story, got taught in the schools, it got taught in the universities. And it’s just that beautiful open society vision from 1946 just became its complete totalitarian opposite. And I think Britain really exemplifies that.

And it’s worth noting by the way too, because I think you’ve done such a good job here, Tucker, pointing out the left and right origins of this. Certainly what we call the foreign policy establishment, the Blob—they were behind the Online Safety Act in Britain that passed in 2023. It was the Conservative government that got it done. But it was the same foreign policy blob that was behind our censorship industrial complex.

The Trans Madness and Medical Experiments

And that clearly emerged out of this effort to govern the American empire and then was reacting to this just massive populist unrest to out of control migration policies, energy policies that were aimed at creating scarcity and high prices. The trans madness were literally—I mean, that is just one where, if you really want to, like, it’s like a David Cronenberg movie.

It’s these atrocities, physical atrocities that you’re then not allowed to talk about. If you actually deny—I mean, they wanted censorship on all of it. We had Twitter censor Megan Murphy for saying “a man is not a woman.” Like that’s what she said. And they de-platformed her.

So I mean, you talk about a terrifying scenario. We’re in a scenario where these hideous medical experiments are being conducted on the bodies of adolescents and mentally ill people. And they were then trying to censor people talking about it and demanding that you believe that it’s possible to change your sex.

I mean, that’s just how far gone we got as a civilization—that we convinced ourselves that you could perform biological alchemy, and then we wanted to silence and suppress anybody who told the truth about it.

Hope for the Future

So there’s a black pill moment where one could say that we’re pretty far gone if you’re already at this place. But I do think, thanks to what you were saying, to the opening of the platform, to the success of people like you and Joe Rogan and the creation of this alternative media universe, I do think we have a chance to remake that case, not just for free speech, but really for this amazing, tiny moment in history where actually everybody that’s a citizen of a country got to be free.

And that’s a beautiful, wonderful thing. Anybody that’s ever traveled outside the United States, I think, can see that and appreciate it.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the greatest thing that we have. And the reason we have it is because we’ve reminded ourselves generationally, because we told the story of it. This is the greatest thing that we have. And I can’t think of a greater tragedy, a more perverse tragedy, than the assassination of Charlie Kirk being leveraged by people in order to construct a world that he hated and fought against for his entire short life, to use Charlie’s assassination as a pretext for censorship.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Terrible.

TUCKER CARLSON: The mind struggles even to understand that, but that’s how brazen people are. So I hate to ask you this, but you’ve thought so deeply about it. Maybe you have an answer. I don’t. What’s the motive for all this? Like, why would you want to conduct hideous medical experiments on children? Doesn’t benefit you? It doesn’t benefit them? Like, what is this, actually?

The Psychology of Power and Control

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah, I mean, as you probably remember, in one of my last books on the homeless crisis, I put a lot of emphasis on this desire from the left to be compassionate and to think of ourselves as good people. And that really the idea—and it’s really this immediate emotive response.

With addiction, people that are crying out there saying, “I’m fine and I’m fine living in my waste and being sexually assaulted every night. I’m just fine. Let me just smoke some more fentanyl.” Everybody should know that that person needs an intervention so that they stop harming themselves in public. But the emotionalism and the sentimentality, that immediate appeal to, “oh, no, it’s somehow cruel to enforce laws and mandate care for people.”

So on one hand, it does seem like this empathy of “oh, we have to protect people.” But I also think there is something darker and more selfish and frankly more hedonistic than that. Which is, as you were saying, I mean, the ability to censor somebody is an incredible act of power and domination.

It’s not something that the weak can do—weak people can’t censor people. I mean, you look at any movement for human liberation—the weak don’t have the power to censor. The censorship comes from these really arrogant, overly empowered, overly powerful, entitled elites displaying traits of frankly antisocial disorder with no empathy for the people that they’re censoring.

The Incompetence of Totalitarians

And so I think that my view is that there’s certainly plenty of people that feel that they’re being empathic, but I think a lot of other people, it’s will to power and nothing besides, to paraphrase Nietzsche, where it’s actually the pleasure of just controlling what people can say online.

I mean the people—these censors—we’ve profiled them and we’ve written about them. We haven’t published all of it, but we try to understand the people that are doing this very deeply at a psychological level and they’re just absolutely power hungry and they’re completely arrogant and closed minded and frankly not very smart.

I mean, that’s the thing you forget about the totalitarians. It’s depressing because I think there’s a story that’s getting told—I won’t say everybody knows by who—but there’s somebody on the right that’s sort of telling a story about how terrible democracy is and how if we had an autocracy it would be run by somebody competent like Elon Musk and everything would work great.

Actually, the history of totalitarianism is that it’s the incompetent, awful, idiotic bureaucrats that are running things. It’s not Mozart and Goethe and Nietzsche that are running things. It’s these very crude, dumb people.

The Pathology of Control

And so you see someone like Nina Jankowicz or Renee Diresta—these are really power hungry, very petty, small people. There’s so much kind of just a neediness there. You see it in some of them, a neediness for people to tell them how good they are and how much they care.

A lot of—if you remember the movie “Misery,” the Kathy Bates character—I always get a lot of that Kathy Bates energy of “I’m going to take care of you.” But it’s actually, “I’m going to dominate.”

So I think that when people sometimes sort of say it’s suicidal empathy or it’s pathological altruism, and I know what they mean, I think that what’s underneath it is something darker, more nihilistic that is just feeding hedonistically off the power of dominating and censoring and persecuting others.

That really isn’t in service—as the foundational spiritualities and philosophies of the west have aimed at that power be used in service of beautiful values. It’s not in service of that. It’s just in service of their own individual expression of power.

And like you said, if it’s to censor you on Covid or anti-Semitism or trans or migration or the Ukraine war, they don’t care. They’re always wanting to find new ways to censor because it’s coming from something so deep. Something so deep and frankly pathological inside of them.

The War Impulse and Ultimate Power

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the war impulse is so similar. Killing people being the ultimate expression of power. You know, you can’t create life, but you can end it. And there are people, and I would say Lindsey Graham is one of them. But there are many who just derive pleasure from the idea of killing people. Not just because they’re cruel, though obviously they are, but because it makes them feel alive. And I think there’s something you see in school administrators.

So I have—I really feel like we’re on the cusp of something great. Charlie Kirk’s memorial on Sunday made me feel that way. I feel like it’s not all darkness and don’t take the black pill. There is light there. And so I feel that way.

But then you see—I have to say—video of Don Bacon, the Republican congressman from Nebraska, the most normal state out of 50, saying, “Oh yeah, yeah, I’m talking to Jonathan Greenblatt,” who’s like a gargoyle from ADL, which is like the most anti-human organization I’ve ever dealt with in my life. And you feel like, wow, if Don Bacon is taking orders from the ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt, then the fix is in. Like it’s a bipartisan conspiracy to strip people of their most basic freedom.

The Secrecy and Totalitarianism Problem

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah, I mean, I think that for me also what comes up, Tucker, and I know that this is something that you are concerned about too, is that I think you were saying it before, like there’s censorship and then there’s actually so many sides to the totalitarianism. There’s the censorship, there’s the disinformation and dehumanization that the state or these parastatal censorship proxy entities play. And then there’s the secrecy.

So I think what we now know, and again, I’ve said very clearly and praised the Trump administration. They’ve actually been helpful in my own case in Brazil, where I’m under criminal investigation for the Twitter files. And so I’m very grateful the Trump administration. I hope that’s clear.

But nonetheless, I think we can see that there are clearly some things that we’re not that they really don’t want us to know about. And the Epstein one, the Jeffrey Epstein situation, is easily, I think, the most explosive and most famous one, where everybody knows there’s these files, and everybody knows that they’re the FBI and DOJ, and everybody knows that there’s no legal barriers to releasing them, and that there’s all these excuses, or everybody knows that it’s not just Jeffrey Epstein’s own personal pornography collection and that the story has kept shifting.

But, you know, it looks like there may now be enough votes in the House pretty soon to force a vote on it. I think Speaker Johnson could still try to stop that, but I think I’m heartened that the MAGA movement actually remained true to following that issue through to the end.

The Secret Government and Sex Blackmail Operations

But I think we’ve seen that there’s, frankly, a secret government that, I mean, we can. People will say that sounds conspiratorial, but I think if you realize what the Epstein files are and that it was covering up, almost certainly very likely a sex blackmail operation. And by the way, we didn’t even have proof of the hidden cameras until a couple of weeks ago when the New York Times published two photos of the hidden cameras, one of them pointing right at a bed in Epstein’s New York apartment.

I think we know that. And, you know, we had. And Massie was in, you know, Congressman Massie was in Congress last week, and he said there was 20 names that he knows who they are that are in the files. He gave us one of them, CEO of Barclays bank. And then he kind of listed who the other ones were. One of them was like a, you know, Hollywood producer, rock star, magician. So we know all these things.

I think it’s a really important test. I think it’s really important that all of us that are sympathetic to things the Trump administration has done, that we continue to not let the Epstein issue go.

The UAP Issue and Government Secrecy

And then I think the other issue, Tucker, that I know you care a lot about is the UAP issue. The President said after the drones over, the drones over New Jersey, the unidentified, mostly unidentified drones over New Jersey, that we were going to be able to find what that is. I have a list of all of the key documents provided me by John Greenwald of the UAP documents that exist that have many of which have been released and have just been so heavily redacted. They need to release these things. They need to stop hiding this.

And I’ll just end by saying on this, to culminate it all, look, the elephant in the room here is the CIA. You know, you’ve got this wonderful reform leader in Tulsi Gabbard, who is a unifying leader. She has so much trust from people that were on the left, so much trust from the MAGA community. She’s obviously a good person like anybody that has ever met her.

TUCKER CARLSON: She is.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Seen her.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s correct.

The CIA Problem

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: And she, by law, Congress after 9/11 made this law that she is the boss of the intelligence community. That is what the law requires. But we have this recalcitrant CIA where, I mean, come on, guys, like we have not seen significant change to personnel. Apparently only 2 of the people that worked on the bogus intelligence community session about Russia interference in the 2016 elections, only two of those people are gone.

It’s the response from CIA to us. I frankly found their. What they told us to be just patronizing to the point of offensive in insisting, you know, it’s basically “trust us, bro. It’s all good now. The CIA is fine.” The CIA is not fine. The CIA is hiding information that the American people paid for and have a right to know on a lot of issues, a lot. UAP Epstein. Congressman Massie revealed that there is a CIA file on Epstein that needs to come out.

And look, maybe CIA shouldn’t exist. I mean, Senator Moynihan before he died and Kennedy’s historian. Why am I blanking?

TUCKER CARLSON: Arthur Schlesinger.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Schlesinger. Schlesinger. There’s been various proposals to break up the CIA. You know, frankly, it’s a paramilitary organization. Ever since 9/11. It was supposed to be. Truman wanted an intel organization. We need good intel. By the way, congratulations on your brilliant documentary. I saw the first part of it last night.

So now it appears, if I’m understanding correctly, that the CIA was probably behind the 9/11 attacks. It was a botched CIA operation. It sounds like I haven’t finished your series but here you have this. So, I mean, you kind of go, so here you have an organization that’s responsible for just the worst, like regime change, coups followed by dictators who tortured people, CIA that, you know, infiltrated American student groups that used labor unions to engage in regime change, that spawn off people that were involved in the censorship, industrial complex and lawfare may have been. Sounds like what you’re saying, that was behind or at least didn’t stop or contributed to the 9/11 attacks, and then they did the torture after 9/11, which not only doesn’t work, creates bad information, and is a stain on the moral character of the United States.

At a certain point, you’re like, what is this dog of an organization doing? Being just unreformed and trampling on all of our basic, you know, freedoms. So, I mean, I, you know, I kind of go, I think we just need to tell people that we don’t really govern ourselves. As long as you have this, you know, mess of an institution called the CIA, where a bunch of analysts kind of appear to run the world, as long as that organization remains unreformed and we don’t really get true disclosure about all the things that we know are going on, then I think we should be pretty unhappy and pretty demanding of much more significant reforms than it appears the Trump administration is going to pursue.

The Need for Real Oversight

TUCKER CARLSON: I’d settle for real oversight rather than, you know, Tom Cotton, who runs the Senate Intelligence Committee’s basically an apologist for the CIA, has no oversight at all. He carries water for the agency in ways that hurt this country. And it’s. I’m not exactly sure why. Like, what is that? And I don’t know the answer. People can speculate all they want. I do want to just go back and thank you for what you said. It’s all true. It’s true. Okay, good.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: I haven’t seen the end of it, but I saw the first part. It’s amazing, by the way.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, no, I’m not talking about our documentary series. I was just saying your analysis of CIA. I mean, how many people do you think in the White House right now know what the actual CIA budget is? You know, I’d be surprised if you’d find someone. I don’t. I’ve never met anyone who can actually. Who can’t tell you because it’s classified, but. And I assume supposedly the House and Senate Intel Committee chairman know what the full budget is, but I would be shocked if they actually did.

I mean, it’s its own country, it’s autonomous, it doesn’t have oversight, it doesn’t have command and control structures. It just kind of does what it wants. It lies about what it does. There’s no way to know for a fact. I mean, it’s a separate government within our borders, just like they had in Portland, Oregon at the, you know, at the height of George Floyd. Right.

The New Jersey Drone Mystery

But I just want to ask you about something that you said about the, the drone sighting or the lights in the sky over New Jersey last year and, you know, so many sightings that it’s really no dispute that it happened. The question is, what is it? And the president said that he would tell us. We’ve never heard. What was that, do you think?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: I don’t know. And, you know, they’re having also very similar drone sightings now over in Denmark that actually shut down both Danish airports on Sunday. I mean, it’s. Yeah. I mean. And why can’t we know about it? You know, and, but what’s your sense?

TUCKER CARLSON: You’ve done a lot on this. I’ve talked to you off, you know, off camera, just because you’re one of the few people whose judgment on this. I trust there’s so much deception on this question. I think parts of it. What’s the term they use? It’s an op. I think part of it is, part of the explanation is. But at its core are physical phenomena that have been recorded in such volume at such scale that like, something real is happening. And I know you don’t really have the final answer on that, but what is your sense?

Government Disinformation on UAPs

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah, I mean, I think, look, first of all, the government is engaged in extensive disinformation on this topic. And that’s not, that’s not, that’s just all confirmed. Like, it’s been well documented what they’ve done. I mean, there’s a, you know, there’s an alien Crash Retrieval manual that is, you know, that is officially, according to the official story, a total fake, a total fabrication. But I mean, when you look at it, it is extraordinary in its quality of like, if it is a fake, I mean, complete with, like the names of the people who checked it out and those people having been checked out.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who would do that?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Like, why would you do that? Well, one story is that it was used as passage material to identify cases counter intelligence spies in the US Intelligence community. But nonetheless, there has been so much government misinformation. There’s also been, you know, efforts to. There’s also secret, you know, technology projects. I mean, one of the guys that testified at the UAP hearing last week just said that he has seen successful reverse engineering of technologies.

You know, there’s a whole kind of Pentagon technological side of this that many other people have done so much better work on and reporting on than me. Jesse Michaels, being one of the leaders of kind of unearthing it, I will say I don’t think any of it could all be reduced to hard military hardware, either ours or somebody else’s. I’m very confident that there’s just way too many cases that don’t fit that.

The Spiritual Element of UAP Phenomena

I also think that Jacques Vallee has done really some of the most important scholarship on this. I find myself. And he just gave a presentation on it. He’s like, he’s the French character played by Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg, a French researcher who’s just sort of an international treasure of UFO cases. And, you know, he’s actually gone a very similar direction that you’ve gone. And I find myself going there a little bit too, which is that there is a spiritual element to this that I don’t think is just purely attributable to technology.

Because the issue is such a gestalt issue. Because, you know, if you look at like in a classic gestalt, is it an old woman, is it a young woman? Is this a spiritual issue sort of manifesting as sort of some high tech hardware, or is it some high tech civilization manifesting as something spiritual?

I find myself really gravitating towards these cases, which is also where a valet encouraged a lot of new research. One of which is my favorite is this English woman in the countryside who had a UFO sighting in the 50s. And I would dare anyone to watch that. And she describes seeing, you know, she’s like a very working class English woman. It’s a beautiful interview with her. It’s like BBC or somebody. And they just said, describe what you saw.

You know, she said she hears this noise. Her two boys are in the front yard. She sees a huge UFO over her house. He asked her to describe it and she said, “What can I say? It was like a Mexican hat,” you know, like a typical, you know, fine saucer with a dome. Her kids were there seeing it. She swears she saw it. She says there was two people inside and they were beautiful people with long blonde hair and sort of slightly bigger foreheads and sort of looking at her.

And it ends so interesting because she says, you know, “We told people about this and then we were ridiculed.” And then she said, “But it’s okay because I know it happened.”

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s true.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: And I think I dare people to watch that and come away thinking that she was lying. I don’t think she was lying. Yes, I also, as you know, I have interviewed a fair number of psychotic people living tragically on the street and people in psychotic states. That’s not the kind of story they tell. In fact, I have, I even have, I have homeless people I’ve been interviewing that are meth induced psychotic, you know, and meth induced psychosis. Talking about aliens and it’s just a lot of word salad and garbled. It’s like talking to somebody trying to explain a dream they had. It doesn’t make sense.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

The Reality of Unexplained Phenomena

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: So I don’t think she lied. I don’t think she’s capable. I think that most actors are bad actors. I don’t think she’s capable of having invented that and then persuading her children lie with her. I think that she had that experience. I don’t think she’s psychotic.

I don’t really know if anybody knows if those beings come from a different planet or they’re interdimensional or they’re spiritual or if they have some other form and they’re just manifesting and hologramming like that. I don’t know. But I think that the conversation, thanks to people like you and Joe and others, has just widened so that we can see just what a big lie it’s been that science has really properly accounted for reality.

Science magazine did a survey of scientists, including natural scientists, and I think it was somewhere around 60 to 80% of natural scientists – I’m talking physics and biology and chemistry – were not able to replicate famous studies in their field. They admitted this in a survey. And then they would ask them, “Do you still trust your field of science?” And they all said yes. But they can’t replicate basic scientific experiments. They keep changing their mind on the creation stories at the big bang. I think there’s sufficient doubts about human origins.

The Spiritual Movement and Government Cover-Up

But that became so taboo. That was so you couldn’t talk about that in polite society. But I do think now we are able to have those conversations. And I do think it’s really notable that at this political shift there is, I think, a spiritual movement. I mean, I’m obviously really into it. Other people in my life are not as excited about it. But for me, I think these experiences, the evidence, the spiritual side of it, the government cover up, are just huge areas that we should be doing so much more research and investigations and journalism on.

I get a little frustrated because I think sometimes, I think the conversation right now in the podcast world and the conversation is just a lot of people are repeating and speculating about stories that we’ve kind of heard before or sort of know about. But we haven’t put nearly enough pressure on the government to release or unredact the documents that we know exist to come clean about what they appear to know and are unwilling to tell.

There should be a real movement around this and there should be consequences for members of Congress because that’s information that belongs to all of us. And if there’s some evidence of non human intelligence or a lot of evidence, my understanding, I’m very confident that there are thousands of high quality videos, photos, sensor data, radar data – a lot that the military is keeping from us and the CIA is keeping from us. And we should be really upset about that.

The Need for More Disclosure

I think that for me, I think that we can – there’s just been a lot of conversations where people go round and round about with the data that we know. But what we’re missing is the fact that the government is sitting on so much more of it. And I find myself wanting to do more to force it out. And I’m getting frustrated, but I’m a little bit – as you’ve seen, I’m on the one hand very grateful to this administration and the strong things it’s done on free speech and the disclosure it’s done certainly disclosing so much more than the last administration, but we still need a lot more.

There’s still so much that needs to be released on Epstein, on Covid origins, the whole COVID pandemic response, on the weaponization of FBI, the continuing rot of – I mean someone at the CIA told us, pathological rot at the CIA. And we need to know what’s going on with the UAPs. It’s just the speculate, like you were saying before, it would be irresponsible not to engage in conspiracy theorizing and speculation given how little information they give to us. And if they were really so concerned about conspiracy theories and speculation and misinformation, then they should be releasing those documents.

Government Deception and Distraction

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, of course they foment conspiracy theories and race hatred because it’s a distraction from what they’re doing. When I was younger living in Washington and I began to understand that the government was systematically lying across agencies about a couple of things, probably a lot of things, but UAPS were definitely one of them. That became obvious a while ago and I remember asking like, “What is this?” And never getting a straight answer.

Except people would say, “Look, it’s not – it’s destabilizing. It would be destabilizing if the public knew. And like, who wants an unstable country? There’s some things that people just aren’t ready for,” whatever the euphemism they use. But that was the explanation. As I got older, I began to talk to other people and have other thoughts. And one of them was totally possible that the government has something, really does have something to hide, is participating in things that people would not approve of or be shocked to learn.

And all of that gets to a question that’s never occurred to me until right now, but like, who named America’s military headquarters after a pentagram? Like, who thought that was a good idea? And I know you’ve done a lot of research on that period, the war period. Like, what was that?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Well, yeah, I mean, this is – I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t evaluate it yet. I don’t know a lot about it, but yeah, I mean there’s some – there’s a real darkness to the area.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, let’s call it. Let’s call the building that controls nuclear weapons the Pentagon. Huh. I mean, it’s sort of like right in your face, right? Or no.

The Occult Connection and Suppressed Information

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Yeah, I mean, I just haven’t looked that much on it. I do know that like a lot of the UFO stuff is very tied in with the occult. And apparently, Jesse Michaels again did a – apparently did a new documentary on occult – I mean, I’m not vouching for, I don’t know about it, but I like Jesse – occult behaviors within NASA. So very concerning. I don’t know what it means.

I’m shocked by how little curiosity there is at a society wide level. I think that the intellectual life of this country, by which I mean not just the universities, but also the newspapers and the big media companies, that is how censorship was done over the last 80 years. The Internet is almost a return to a pre radio, pre broadcast period when people were really free to just print whatever they wanted. The Internet is not there, but it’s a lot closer to it.

We finally get to kind of learn that actually there’s all these anomalies around human evolution, around human history, around archaeological sites where things don’t seem to add up. Right. And you start to get people that were called pseudoarchaeologists starting to kind of win some arguments publicly. I mean, there’s one happening right now around Gobekli Tepe with this guy Jimmy Corsetti, where he’s just shown that the people that are supposed to be excavating the site are destroying it, planting trees whose roots will destroy these ancient sites, and also building these really grotesque roofing structures in ways that destroy the site. They’re very weird and suspicious.

There’s just a lot of – we know that a lot of the Tesla information was missing that should have shown some very interesting things.

Nuclear Sites and UAP Activity

And then, yeah, I mean, I think that the relationship with nuclear is one of the most interesting parts of this because these UAPs, they show up around nuclear sites. I used to work on nuclear a lot, and there would be nuclear – there would be these drones, these unidentified – they seem like objects, but unidentified phenomenon around nuclear power sites. The people working at them were often very concerned around public perception of danger. And so they often didn’t talk about them. But they’ve certainly been over Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California.

But when the drones happened in New Jersey, well, we caught them in an open lie. I mean, they just said, John Kirby at one point said something like they had evaluated like 3,000 cases of drone sightings in like 48 hours, which is absurd. There’s no possibility they did it. And then we started looking, a set of people started looking, and you discover that in fact, there’s been these drone swarms around US Military bases. I mean, not a couple either. I mean, I think it was somewhere around two or three dozen military bases. And there’s a lot of evidence that those drones are circling around those moments when there’s nuclear weapons in the area.

So if it’s – I’m skeptical that it’s Chinese and Russian because the drones are engaged in behaviors that I think are very difficult for anybody to do. But I mean, if these objects are behaving in ways that do appear to be using a different kind of propulsion or anti gravity, I mean, I’m very skeptical that that’s ours in the sense that it takes a lot. It took a huge effort to create the Manhattan Project and to create nuclear weapons. It was a massive, massive endeavor. And so to somehow easily get, or to be able to easily hide, reverse engineering, I don’t know how you do that. I’m really skeptical that we have it, but it’s absurd that we have to just sit around, speculate about it.

Government Deception Operations

There is basically no transparency. Instead we have a DOD organization called Arrow, which as far as I can tell, is part of a deception operation consistent with the CIA’s recommendations to the Robertson panel in the 1950s, that the main thing the US government should do is supposedly debunk the UFOs and to ridicule the people that see them and research them and worse. There’s a lot of threats made to people in this field.

I personally find it one of the scariest issues. Trans and UAPs are the two, paradoxically, the scariest issues, because it just seems like a lot of people really don’t want us to know what’s going on with it. And President Trump’s hat made noises like he was going to reveal something. And Tulsi Gabbard just made some noises that she wanted to get to the bottom of it. But otherwise, Tucker, they’re just – they just seem like they really – it seems like they wanted – they wanted Jeffrey Epstein v. UAP Files.

The Spiritual Component

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any – and if you’re wondering if there’s a spiritual component to the whole thing, if it’s about technology and Martians.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Probably not going to be this kind of response to it. I mean, this just glows with intensity. Again, it’s the Pentagon. So, yeah, there’s no spiritual component to it, I would say. I’ve been scared off, too. It’s like I don’t even want to deal with it. But I’m grateful for you, Mike Shellenberger. Really, I’m so grateful you went into journalism. There are a few people with – you could be doing a lot of other things or not that many super smart people in journalism with true principles, and you’re definitely one of the very few.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: And back at you. And congratulations on coming back to your famous monologues. And I was really delighted that you did it on Free Speech. And I hope you keep doing a weekly monologue.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think it’s getting all spun up. Yeah, I enjoy it. Thank you. We can have dinner soon. Great to see you. The great Mike Shellenberger. We’ll be back next week. Good night.

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