Transcript: Tucker Carlson on Ted Cruz, Trump, Israel & 9/11 – Piers Morgan Uncensored

It collapsed that afternoon for reasons that no one has been able to explain. You’re not a lunatic for asking – there is no plausible explanation for how that building collapsed. It’s not even mentioned.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, let’s talk about that for a moment because it’s one of the many things that have raged since. If you look into the investigation into Tower 7, the findings of the investigation were that the North Tower, when it came down, had set off a load of fires in Building 7. It was a steel structure and shouldn’t have gone down, but it did. These fires burned all afternoon and I think it was about 5 o’clock in the afternoon that the tower eventually gave way to the fires raging inside it.

It was the only time that had happened to a structure that was built in that way. However, there has been another tower very similar in structure which has since gone down in Tehran. So it’s no longer the only one. In other words, there is another example of a tower like that collapsing.

When it comes to the specific theory about that, what is the alternative explanation? If you’re examining another theory other than the one that the investigation concluded – that the North Tower came down, fires were set off in Tower 7 and then it eventually collapsed – what is the other theory which we should give more credence to?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know that the onus is on me or anyone who seeks the truth about what happened to come up with an alternative theory. The onus is on federal authorities to explain why, for example, they never investigated it. Why the rubble and the steel from that building was carted off within hours and sent out of the country to Asia. Why an analysis done not by kooks but by chemists found traces of explosive material in the dust from that day. Why structural engineers who have no skin in this game came to the conclusion that just couldn’t happen based on all available evidence, and none of that is addressed at all or even mentioned in the 9/11 report.

There are all kinds of anomalies, as I know that you’re fully aware. There are possible explanations to explain all of them. For example, the BBC report on air saying the building had fallen when it hadn’t fallen yet. There are all sorts of reasons to wonder what the hell is this? But it’s not incumbent on us to provide explanation. It’s incumbent on the people running the government and running the supposed investigation into this to tell us what was that?

Fog of War or Something More?

PIERS MORGAN: I have a very open mind. The reason I’m interested to watch your documentary series – I have a genuinely open mind and actually it’s been more open generally about this kind of thing since the COVID pandemic. I was too credulous about what the authorities were saying through the pandemic, to my detriment. You and I have had this conversation. So I actually have a very open mind about this.

On the specifics, for example, the BBC report you mentioned was based on a false Reuters report that they retracted soon afterwards and said it shouldn’t have gone out. The building, you could see the building behind the BBC reporter. So it was obviously ludicrous. CNN did the same thing. But having been in the news game as you have on big breaking news stories, fog of war stuff happens. If it was a genuine error by Reuters, these things can happen.

I remember being on air at CNN when Hurricane Sandy burst through Manhattan. You probably were at Fox then. Half the lights went out in lower Manhattan. I remember a report coming from CNN that the stock exchange was underwater and that had an immediate impact on global markets. It turned out that was a false report. So these things can happen.

In terms of your overview, from everything you’ve unearthed in the documentary, have you unearthed any evidence that there was any suggestion anywhere of an inside job? Or is the stuff that you’re talking about – relating to CIA and the fascinating details of these two people in particular they were following – is that more incompetence than conspiracy?

In other words, was it a gigantic mistake that after Bin Laden had already had one go at the World Trade Center, that there was just not a collective effort by the CIA, by FBI, by other intelligence agents around the world to stop him succeeding with the second attempt? So is it incompetence or do you think there is merit to the suggestion that some people somewhere must have known more than we’ve been told?

The 9/11 Investigation Questions

TUCKER CARLSON: Well we know that people did know more than we’ve been told. I mean somebody shorted the airlines and a bunch of the banks that were affected. Now this is not a conspiracy theory, it’s not a guess. This is publicly available information.

Now the FBI found out the identity of the person or institution that shorted these events on 9/11 and made a huge amount of money by doing that but never released that information. So why can’t we know who clearly had foreknowledge? I mean if you’re shorting American Airlines a week before 9/11 when no one knows it’s coming, I think you should have to explain why you did that. And if you’re shorting Barclays and banks that were affected by 9/11, why can’t we know who you are? These are public markets by the way. This is not private equity, this is publicly traded equities. So I wonder about that.

So clearly, yes, there was foreknowledge, by the way. There was a team. This is according to the FBI, by the way. This is the FBI saying there was a team of clearly intel connected foreigners who were arrested after 9/11, as you well know, videotaping the terror attacks. This is, I’m almost verbatim quoting from the FBI assessment of this. And the FBI determined that they apparently had foreknowledge of the attacks. So why can’t we know more about that?

Exactly. “Shut up, that’s bigoted.” No, this is my country, actually. I know people who died on 9/11. Everything was changed because of it. I promptly went off to the Middle East just like everyone else in our business. I’m sure you did as well. And then we lost our civil liberties at home. We immediately started torturing people and locking up people for years. They are still locked up in Guantanamo Bay with no charges at all.

And the rest of us, very much me included, nodded our heads and like, “Yeah, they’re bad, they’re Muslim terrorists now.” I think a lot of them were bad and they were Muslim terrorists. On the other hand, if your government is allowed to torture people and lock them up indefinitely without charging them, how long before they do that to you? We don’t do that here. I know it’s very common in the UK now, which is an authoritarian country. We don’t want that here.

And 9/11 dramatically changed our assumptions about what the government is allowed to do. So and by the way, I should say the main beneficiary in the United States of those attacks was the CIA, which allowed them to happen. So the CIA budget became more than doubled. Of course we’re not allowed to know what the CIA budget is even in government. This is a fact, by the way, if you ask a high level official at the White House currently, “What’s the CIA’s full budget?” They can’t tell you. It is a secret that is so closely guarded that even people in charge of administering the government don’t know what their budget is, but more than twice what it was before now.

PIERS MORGAN: Okay, but what you’re suggesting with your phraseology about that is that the CIA were part of a kind of inside track knowledge about what may happen, which is obviously an incredibly serious job.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not suggesting that. I’m not suggesting that. I’m stating the facts, which are that the CIA was fully aware that many of these hijackers were here, that those visas were issued in a country with which we have very close security service cooperation at a time when John Brennan was running a station there.

PIERS MORGAN: But that’s different to saying that they knew what was going on, whereabouts.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they actually did know that these people were planning a terror attack because they surveilled a meeting planning it in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a year before, and then followed the guy as he came to the United States and arrived in San Diego for flight training. So again, I’m not guessing about any of this. These are established facts. There’s no person, including then CIA Director George Tenet, who would deny this. They’ll say, “Oh, you’re a conspiracy theorist.” Okay, fine, whatever, attack my character as you will, but tell me how I’m wrong. And of course I’m not wrong. So.

The Question of Intent vs. Negligence

PIERS MORGAN: I’m not saying you’re right or wrong or anything. All I’m saying is that from everything you’re saying, it is a leap. It is a leap. There is a demonstrable difference. I would argue, and by all means push back on this, but I would argue that there’s a demonstrable leap between knowledge of bad people moving around and maybe monitoring them and aware they may be up to bad things, but actually having coherent, clear knowledge in advance that they were planning the attack using planes on the World Trade Center.

TUCKER CARLSON: I understand, I understand. You’re saying that intent matters, and I would not, of course, I would not dispute that intent does matter. It matters under the law and it matters morally. Did you mean to do it? Yes, that matters. However, it doesn’t matter as much as we pretend that it does.

If I pull up to a casino and leave my toddler in the back of the car with the windows up and just kind of forget and the kid dies, do you say, “Oh, you didn’t mean to kill your own child?” No. You’d say through your negligence your child died. Yes, it’s a murder. Now, it’s not a first degree murder, but it’s certainly at least a manslaughter.

PIERS MORGAN: It’s certainly severe negligence. I agree with that. We know I do. And I agree.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree with that is a kind of murder.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, listen, I don’t think there’s any doubt that there was massive negligence when it came to 9/11 happening on the watch of whoever was running the US government at the time. The CIA, the FBI, all of them. No one can credibly say that what happened was not a catastrophic failure of intelligence because I’ve always assumed there must be some guys at the Pentagon in a room whose only job it is is to think the unthinkable.

And it’s not that difficult to think that one day somebody may hijack a plane and use it as a weapon. Right. It’s not that when you’ve got fundamentalists prepared to kill themselves as they kill people doing it, using a plane did not seem to me to be that unthinkable. And yet nobody seemed to have thought that through.

CIA Compartmentalization and Cover-Up

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the US Government had war gamed that of course, look, I mean that was of course a possibility in the minds of the people whose job it is to protect the United States from it happening. They war gamed that they took bin Laden very seriously. We interviewed members of the Bin Laden Station, CIA Bin Laden Station, who I think are patriotic, decent people who really want to prevent a terror attack.

But there are also elements of the CIA which does not act as, you know, a coherent body. It’s a vast sprawling organization. There’s not a single person at CIA who understands everything that’s happening at CIA at any given time because it’s compartmentalized. That’s the nature of it.

And so there were people at CIA, and I would say John Brennan, clearly one of them, who understood that these terrorists, these hijackers, planned to commit violence against Americans in the United States and they did nothing about it. Now, you can draw your own conclusions about that. In fact, they abetted it. They helped the hijackers get here. Fact.

And so you can argue about why, but the truth is it’s incumbent on them to tell us why. We had a fake investigation. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Philip Zelikow participated in hiding the truth from the public. Again, I voted for them. I’m not. It’s not a partisan point. Know it now.

And why isn’t there a 9/11, an actual 9/11 commission dedicated to finding out what happened? And the truth is, not only is there not, but even right now, as we speak, the CIA is effectively refusing to release information they have from 24 years ago. And why? What is the answer? I don’t know. But they should be forced at gunpoint to divulge this.

Pattern of Government Secrecy

PIERS MORGAN: Because it reminds me, you know, it reminds me of the JFK files of The RFK files of the Martin Luther King files, of the Epstein files. Time and again we are led to believe we’re all going to find out exactly what went on and then we don’t. So there is clearly behind the scenes, at high levels of the government machinery, a concerted effort, and there has been for many, many decades, to prevent the American people and the wider world, but the American people, I think, from knowing the full story about any of those things.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, especially in the case of the Kennedy files, which have been the subject of a bunch of federal laws passed by Congress that demand disclosure. The President, current president on January 23rd issued an executive order saying release it all. And they haven’t. So why is that? Is it to protect the CIA? Actually, who was the CIA director in 1963? John McCone. How many people know that? How many people care? Nobody. So is it to really protect an agency, you know, 60 odd years later? I don’t think it is. Or maybe it is, I don’t know.

All I know, and this is a statement of fact that they are not releasing relevant information that pertains to that event that the murderer is sitting you as president. Yeah, and by the way, a whole lot of other things, I mean the UAP, I mean you could just go on forever.

And the cumulative effect bears on what you said in your smart intro, I think, is that at a certain point people understand it’s not a democracy that people do not rule. They actually have no relevant input into how the government operates. It’s not operating for their benefit. And they either become one of two things. Cynical and resigned, non participatory. “I give up. Give me some Fentanyl,” or they become revolutionary. And both are really bad. Both make a stable future impossible. And so the only remedy is disclosure.

The CIA’s Unchecked Power

And I have to say, at this point, because they’ve been so resistant to it, I don’t know why. We have a CIA. It’s the most important single significant player in global affairs. It’s not controlled by anybody. It’s not democratically controlled. Again, we don’t know the budget. And that fact alone prevents this country from being a real place. So why do we have it?

You could certainly. We need intel gathering. Of course. You need some sort of probably paramilitary force, I guess, but you could have that. We have a DOD. Why is it run out of CIA? Why does that still exist? And no one is willing to answer that question because they’re afraid.

And the truth is, if the President of the United States is murdered and everyone believes that the CIA played a role in it, probably lots of players there, but CIA was clearly one of them. The counterintel division clearly played a role and lied about it, then every subsequent US President lives with that hanging over his head.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, also, we’ve had rails.

TUCKER CARLSON: You cross over them and you could get killed.

Recent Assassination Attempts

PIERS MORGAN: Right. I mean, we’ve had. With Donald Trump, there were two attempts on his life in the run up to the last election.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s correct.

PIERS MORGAN: One was this young kid who appeared to have absolutely nothing on his files whatsoever. We seem to know nothing about this person. He just somehow existed in a total vacuum of any information. And the second guy, a few weeks later, was able to sit in a bush for 12 hours preparing to assassinate Donald Trump. If he’d walked up about 500 yards up a golf course to where he was waiting by one of the greens.

And I found that deeply unsettling because you would have thought that Trump by then would be the most protected human being in history, having just survived an assassination attempt. Both of those cases raised all sorts of questions which we just don’t know the answers to. And that’s happened in the last year?

Government Transparency and Democratic Control

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know, and I can’t say this definitively, but my strong impression is that people at the top levels of government don’t know the answers. Including Donald Trump paints a pretty clear picture. I think that’s right, but I don’t know.

But the picture that emerges is very clear and everyone can see it. Which is a government that is not controlled by the voters or even the people the voters elect to control the government. It’s controlled independently by the people who staff it and other aligned interests. Not all of them American.

So that is not a picture of democracy or even of oligarchy. It’s a picture of something much darker than that. And people who point that out are roundly attacked and criticized and their children are attacked. I mean, anyone who’s done this knows the consequences of doing it, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

Actually, you can attack me all you want, don’t really care. Why don’t you answer the question: how does this work? And why can’t I know? And if I can’t know, who has greater authority than I do as a taxpayer and a citizen? What you’re really revealing is that the system itself is utterly fake.

I guess everyone knows that now, but what are the consequences of knowing that? The consequences of knowing that are dire and scary. And so I think at this very late date, we should try to fix it. And the only way to fix it is by telling people the truth and reading them in, as they say in Washington, read me in to what my government is doing with my money and my name.

And if you won’t do that, then at a certain point, how is it not justified to try to replace the government? That actually is tyranny. What’s the other definition of tyranny? So they’re really playing with fire. I don’t want revolution. I can’t stand violence. Civil war is the worst thing that could ever happen. I’m not calling for any of that.

I’m merely saying that’s going to happen at some point if they don’t make good on the core promise, which is it’s your country, it exists for your benefit. You have a right to know relevant things. You can’t just be dismissed with the back of the hand and called names. Keep that up and it will get really ugly. That’s my point.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories and Investigation

PIERS MORGAN: In your series, do you dispel some of the madder conspiracy theories, and I’ll give an example which you may or may not agree with me is mad. But there’s been a raging conspiracy theory ignited again by what’s happened in Gaza that Israel was somehow implicated in 9/11. It was in their interests for that to happen because then it would lead rage against all their enemies in the Middle East and so on.

And yet, of course, if you look at the people who died, at least I think 110 or more people who died that day were known to be Jewish. And it is estimated maybe another 80 were Jewish, which meant that about 10% of all the victims that day were likely to have been Jewish, which would seem to dispel the suggestion this was some Jewish thing that they had been involved with.

But do you tackle that kind of conspiracy theory in the series? In other words, as well as exploring stuff that you think needs to be highlighted and exposed, we need to know more about. You also dispel stuff which has been allowed to rage around for maybe 25 years now and kill that off.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it hasn’t so much been allowed. It’s actually been greatly discouraged. I don’t repeat every theory about it. They’re endless. And don’t really see the point in elevating things that we can’t know are true.

I would say the effect on me was to make me more suspicious, actually. And again, we didn’t interview people who gathered their information about 9/11 from the Internet. We interviewed only people who are directly involved in the events and the subsequent events. So government officials. It was almost exclusively government officials. And during the course experience, I became more prone to believe that this is really, really bad. This is super bad.

And I answer the question that you asked specifically about Israel. No, of course I didn’t allege that the Jews did it. I don’t even know what that means. I think, in fact, saying things like that is a way to discredit real questions.

We know Benjamin Netanyahu on camera right after said, “This is a good thing because it brings the United States into a conflict that we’ve been involved in on an existential level for decades.” I mean, he said that out loud. I’m not guessing. You can pull the tape.

We know that a group of Israeli art students who clearly were not art students, clearly some of them were aligned with Israeli intelligence, were arrested and held for quite some time in the United States before being released without charges. And we know that a group of them, again, I’m quoting an FBI document here, not the Internet, filmed the attacks on 9/11, and I’m quoting, “seemed to have foreknowledge of those attacks.”

Now, you were not allowed to follow up in any of this. Fox News did a series with Brit Hume and Carl Cameron, which many people have seen in a bootleg version on the Internet. But they did it within weeks, saying, what is this? There was an Israeli spy ring in the United States and they clearly knew 9/11 was coming. This is Fox News. They pulled that under pressure. They pulled that off the Internet. It’s not searchable in any Fox News archive, but they aired it.

I know the people who did it, of course, I worked with them for years. They’re real people. They’re not crazy. In fact, they’re pro-Israel. But they had a fact set before them and they reported it, which is called journalism. And subsequent generations have been forbidden from noting what is now factually true. Those are factually true statements.

Now, we tried to interview some of those people. One lives in the United States and California and made no headway whatsoever. And we knew as we did it, by the way, that we’re going to be attacked as anti-Semites or something.

I’m not an anti-Semite, obviously. I’m not even anti-Israel on some principled level. I’m an American and I think it’s not only fair, but my moral obligation to find out what the hell was this. And you’re calling me names is not going to stop me because I’ve been here my whole life and my family’s been here a long time. I don’t have to take orders from you about what I’m allowed to know or not know, because it’s my country.

That’s the kind of democratic spirit that informed this country my entire life until 9/11, after which it became a thought crime to ask obvious questions. I’m just not going to play along, period.

Trump’s Iran Strategy

PIERS MORGAN: Where do you think we are, Tucker, with the various things that have happened since you and I last spoke in Riyadh, actually, for a really interesting double header chat, but in particular, what happened with Iran, where Donald Trump decided to attack Iran. What did you feel about that, given that it ended so apparently quickly? Do you think Trump was vindicated in his short, sharp strategy there by bombing Iran, or do you think that this will come back and haunt him down the line?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, of course I can’t say. I mean, my life is a kind of unbroken chain of bad predictions and embarrassing analysis. And I’ve been wrong so many times, and I will be in the future, without question.

However, it’s just a fact that events have consequences that we can’t foresee, often for years or generations. And I think it’s very unwise to use military force without a clear, achievable objective that serves the American national interest. In fact, it’s not allowed to use it under any other circumstances.

And in that case, I was concerned and remain concerned that this focus on Iran is not actually connected to our national security. How many Shiite terror attacks have there been in the United States in my lifetime? Let me do the math. Zero. So don’t tell me that the greatest threat we face is Iran. That’s a lie. You’re telling it on behalf of a foreign power. Maybe they feel the greatest threat they face is Iran. It’s not the greatest threat we face.

It’s not an endorsement of Iran. Doesn’t make me a simp for the Shiites. It just makes me an American who’s trying to think clearly about what our problems are. And our problems would include tens of millions of foreign nationals living illegally in my country. Nobody knows their identities. They would include a collapsing economy that makes it very hard for my children to have children and live the life that they grew up with and their friends and all American kids. It would include a drug crisis that’s killed millions of Americans over the past 20 years. Iran is not even in the top 10 list.

So you can scream at me all you want and call me names and call me a bigot or whatever, but there’s no evidence to support that. And so if the energy of the US Government is focused on a threat that’s not the primary threat to us, it is, by definition, ignoring threats that are. And that’s a kind of negligence.

And so I pointed that out. I was roundly attacked. My family was attacked. Whatever. I don’t care. It’s true, and everyone kind of knows it’s true. And being bullied by Ben Shapiro into pretending that it’s not true, it’s just not on the program for me at 56, I’m just not doing that anymore.

The Apology Question

PIERS MORGAN: President Trump told reporters at the time that you had called him and apologized after you disagreed with the Israeli strikes on Iran. Is that true?

TUCKER CARLSON: I am a champion apologizer. I really believe in apologies. I have a lot to apologize for. I always have. We all do. I certainly do. But I also think that you shouldn’t proffer a false apology. You should apologize for things that you did wrong.

And I wasn’t attacking anybody. I wasn’t attacking Israel. I was merely saying, in my capacity as someone with strong opinions, I think this is an unwise course. And I still think that it’s not an attack on Trump, who I voted for and campaigned for and really like. It’s my view. And so that’s not something I would apologize for because it wasn’t wrong. It was my duty, and I still believe it. So.

PIERS MORGAN: So that seems to be a clear repudiation of what he said that you did not call him to apologize.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s not that. It’s just that, look, I said what I said, which wasn’t very complex or sophisticated. It certainly wasn’t hate filled. I don’t think this is a wise course. I would never apologize for that because I believe it.

I will just be totally honest with you and say I’m kind of an unpleasant person when I get mad. And if I’m ever rude, which I often have been to people, that is worth apologizing for, and I’m sorry. I want to preemptively apologize for being a jerk, because I often am. So I would apologize that. To answer your question, I don’t really remember the conversation, but whatever.

PIERS MORGAN: Could it have been, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but could it have been you apologized, perhaps, for the tone of the way you had criticized what Trump had done, rather than apologize for your view of what he did?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I mean, I have no idea if I actually did that, but if I haven’t done that, let me do it now. I apologize to him and everyone else I’ve snapped at or been mean to, even poor Ted Cruz, who I don’t think is the most evil, and he’s just controlled by a foreign power. I feel sorry for him. He’s kind of desperate and wants money or whatever his motive is, but I was rude to him, and I’m sorry.

And just that way, people in my family have pointed that out. When I get mad, I get snappy and cutting. I went to boarding school as a kid. They inculcate that in you. The cruelty of the dorm. And I’ve been fighting against it my whole life. So I’m just sorry for being that way.

Hamas and Terrorism: Defining Terms

PIERS MORGAN: You know, when we had our little, highly entertaining ding dong in the desert in Saudi Arabia, I enjoyed it. I like people who give it full throttle. I like people who challenge me. I like people who take me on. I like people who can be a bit snappy.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s why I love people mad at you in my life.

PIERS MORGAN: Yes, I know you do.

TUCKER CARLSON: We have exactly the same personality that way. So I would never be snappy with you because you always, while your views are sincere, you always retain some distance from yourself and from your views and a sense of humor. I would never… And you do this for a living and you debate for a living, and so I’m not triggered by it.

But it’s the self seriousness, it’s the self righteousness of a toad like Ted Cruz that just sets me off. “Oh, well, I was elected to the Senate to fight for Israel.” And it’s like, what? “And shut up, anti Semite.” It’s like, okay, if you respond to a totally obvious legitimate question by attacking a man’s character, you earn my contempt. You don’t behave like that at all. You’re like, “okay, we have different views. That’s all right.” You don’t trigger me.

PIERS MORGAN: You mentioned Ted Cruz. You did raise some eyebrows this week when you said that Hamas is more like a political organization than a terror group. That was on the new episode of your show when you were talking.

TUCKER CARLSON: I didn’t actually say that. I said, is Hamas a jihadi group?

PIERS MORGAN: Well, we have… We’ll play the clip and I’ll tell you what Ted Cruz said. I’d like your response.

TUCKER CARLSON: Please do.

PIERS MORGAN: Here’s the clip.

TUCKER CARLSON: No one can plausibly claim that a Christian family are in Hamas. Okay, so, like, what? Tell me. You can’t claim that they’re in Hamas while simultaneously claiming that Hamas is a group of jihadis. They’re Islamic extremists, which they also claim constantly, which I don’t know if that’s true, by the way. Seems more like a political organization. But whatever it is, they’re telling us constantly they’re Al Qaeda, so it can’t also be true that Christians are a member of Al Qaeda. Sorry.

So then we know they’re not in Hamas. So why did they get killed? Why was their church blown up? Why were they killed in that hospital? Like, what is this?

PIERS MORGAN: So when you said there, Tucker, that you said in passing there, you were making a different point, but you did say in passing there, they seem more like a political organization. What did you mean by that?

The Question of Christian Deaths

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I said, you can’t claim… First of all, the core of it is, why is Israel killing Christians?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who fund it? Americans fund Israel, fund the IDF. None of this would be possible without the United States and Christians in the United States. So they don’t get to kill Christians. They don’t get to block access to Christian holy sites. They don’t get to allow people to spit on Christian clergy. And they definitely don’t get permission from the country that funds them to blow up churches or Christian hospitals. And yet they have a lot. So what the hell is that? And that’s my point.

And in response, and I’ve asked that not as a hater of Israel, but as a Christian. So I’ve asked that pretty persistently for the last few years. I’ve really been attacked for it. But so what? And the response is, “well, they’re not actually in Hamas.” And so my question is, well, you’re telling me simultaneously that Hamas is a religious group. They’re Islamic extremists, but they also have Christian members. Like, how does that work? It doesn’t make any sense at all. That was my point.

I’m not endorsing Hamas. I didn’t say they’re not a terror group. That’s a freaking lie. I said, if you’re telling me they’re a jihadi group, they’re political extremist groups. By the way, Fatah, there were tons of Arab political terror groups that were secular that did have Christians in them, by the way, a lot of Christians who were displaced in 1948, and they were radical or whatever, but they’re… Do you see what I’m saying? There’s like a childish internal contradiction there that… And now they don’t want to deal with it. So it’s like, “shut up, Hamas.”

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, I think what got people going.

TUCKER CARLSON: You stop killing Christians, you stop killing Christians.

PIERS MORGAN: I understood the bigger point.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is that? What’s the justification for that?

PIERS MORGAN: I understood the bigger point you were making.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like I said, I’m a Christian. I don’t have to put up anymore. I don’t have to sit back and be like, all these Christian ministers in the United States are like, “oh, shut up. We can’t complain about a government that we fund killing Christians.” I don’t know who’s writing the rules here, but I’m not obeying them.

I’m not attacking Israel. I’m not an anti Semite. You don’t get to kill Christians who have nothing to do with this. It’s the world’s only religion that is not only non violent but considers retaliation a sin. Turn the other cheek, that’s the religion. So why are you killing these people? Why don’t you give me a straight answer? Calling me names is not going to deter me.

PIERS MORGAN: I understand the bigger point you made, but like I said, you definitely said in passing that they seem more like a political organization. So do you want to clarify what you meant by that bit?

Political vs Religious Motivations

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m saying funded by Israel political association. By the way, Hamas was funded by Israel to some extent. It’s not a controversial statement. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s an established fact by the current prime minister. Took money, gave it to Hamas.

I meant what I said, which is they are either… I’m not questioning whether they’ve committed violence. They have. I’m opposed to that. I’m opposed to all violence, period. And I’m opposed to Hamas violence. I’m opposed to killing people.

The question is, if you are telling me that they are inspired to kill because of their religious ideology, that is a different thing from people who are inspired to kill by their political ideology. Because if it’s political, you can imagine an alliance with Christians. If it is a religious motivation, it is impossible to imagine, as I said in that clip, Christian accomplices.

There weren’t a lot of Christians supporting Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda was explicitly anti Christian. So was ISIS. Fatah, which was again radical or violence prone Palestinian political organization had Christian support. So which is it? That’s my point. I was calling into question their lack of a coherent explanation for why Christians are being killed in a conflict that from my perspective doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that. So why are you desecrating churches?

PIERS MORGAN: Do you view Hamas as a terrorist organization as they’ve been prescribed in many countries, including the U.S.?

Defining Terrorism

TUCKER CARLSON: I view Hamas killing people, especially civilians, as horrifying, immoral and wrong. And if you think you’re going to get me into some semantic game about who’s a terrorist and who’s not a terrorist, killing people who committed no crime is wrong, period. That’s the basis of Christian belief. It’s the basis of Western civilization.

Dropping bombs on people who did nothing wrong is a crime. Period. That is why we say we are better than the terrorists, because we don’t kill people who did nothing wrong. And by definition, children haven’t done anything wrong, so you are not allowed to kill them.

And now there is an entire network of not a television network, but a loosely aligned network arguing that it’s somehow wrong to say it’s immoral to kill children. And I think it’s immoral to kill children no matter who kills the children, whether it’s the government of the United States, the government of Sri Lanka, the government of Belgium, the government of Israel, Hamas, it doesn’t matter. It is immoral to kill people who haven’t done anything wrong.

That’s why Hiroshima is a problem. That’s why I’ve complained about Hiroshima. That’s why the Nazis were bad. That’s why everybody who murders innocents is wrong. And when did that become controversial? Like I said, I articulated that and was immediately attacked by all these people on the so called right. I was like, then what is the whole point? What is the point of living here or having this country if we endorse murdering people who committed no crime, how are we better than the people we supposedly hate?

You can’t get an answer. “Oh, you’re a radical jihadi?” No, actually I’m a Protestant Christian who hates radical jihadis. Like, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Anyway, that’s it. That’s the distinction.

And by the way, the designation of terrorism grows from that understanding, which was a common understanding before 9/11. If you kill people intentionally who’ve committed no crime, you are the criminal. And who does that? Terrorists. That’s why we call them terrorists. So I’m happy to call anyone who does that a terrorist. That’s my definition. That was our working definition before 9/11. And then it just became the people our political class doesn’t like.

And I’ve been called, I was called a terrorist yesterday. “You’re a terrorist.” Okay, because I espouse nonviolence, which is the basis, it’s the basis of Western civilization that you punish only the guilty.

PIERS MORGAN: But I’m trying to work out, do you actually think then that Hamas are terrorists or not?

TUCKER CARLSON: I think any organization that kills the innocent, including Hamas, is a terror organization. What I object to, and I just want to be as clear as I possibly can, what I object to is the proceeding with the conversation without the defining of terms. The purpose of language is to convey specific ideas. And so in order to have a conversation, you have to define what you’re talking about. If I were to throw a couple Korean terms in and refuse to tell you what they mean, we couldn’t have a conversation because you don’t speak Korean.

And so I want to define terrorism, and I’m going to do it very precisely. Terrorism is the act of murdering the innocent. If you murder the innocent, you are engaged in terrorism. And that would include, in specific cases, I can think of Hamas, which has murdered the innocent people at a music festival. I mean, what that is terrorism. Anybody who murders people who committed no crime is committing terrorism.

PIERS MORGAN: Does that include…

TUCKER CARLSON: And if someone else can think, does that include…

PIERS MORGAN: Okay, so does that include…

TUCKER CARLSON: It includes anybody.

PIERS MORGAN: Does that include Israel?

Universal Standards for Terrorism

TUCKER CARLSON: It includes anybody. Anybody. By the way, let me just say, it’s so funny. “Does that include Israel?” It includes people I know personally in the United States. I know a lot of people who have okayed the order. I know in some cases, people who participated in carrying out the order to murder people who committed no crime. Does that mean they’re terrorists? I mean, I don’t know. I’ll let God figure out what that means. It means they’re committing acts of terror. That is terrorism.

Because the point of it is not to punish the guilty. The point of it is to inspire fear. The point of it is to depopulate a place, move a population, whatever the point of it is, the effect of it is to punish people who’ve committed no crime.

And in our system, the Western system, which is very distinct from the Eastern system, very distinct, and it’s distinct on this one precise point, we believe, and have always believed, since this country was founded, since your country became not a pure monarchy. But even when it was a pure monarchy, the belief in the west, because of Christianity, was the worst thing you can do is punish the innocent. That’s the worst thing you can do. That’s worse than not punishing the guilty. And we often said that to each other.

We no longer say that because there is a pretty concerted effort to blur the meaning of these terms. But I’m not going to be deterred from defining words precisely. Terror is murdering people, killing people, punishing people who committed no crime. Period.

PIERS MORGAN: So when the Israeli government says it has repeatedly, that even though over 20,000 completely innocent children are believed to have died in their response to what Hamas did on October 7 at the hands of the IDF, there are many on the pro Palestinian side who say that Israel is behaving like terrorists too, in the way that they have gone about conducting this war. Would you go as far as to say that?

The Israel Debate and Foreign Policy Focus

TUCKER CARLSON: One of the things that I really object to now is this relentless focus on Israel, which, by the way, is a foreign country that I have nothing to do with, other than having been a visitor there and really enjoyed it. And it’s now at the center of the conversation in my country, when my country is degrading at high speed. We have a lot of concerns here.

I just resent the kind of solipsism that pulls everything back to the concerns of a foreign country. And that’s the litmus test. Israel. Is Israel bad? How dare you say that? Are you going to go out on a limb and criticize Israel? What about my country?

Every country commits terror because leaders drunk on hubris imagine that they can do things that no human being is permitted to do. And first on that list is killing people who didn’t do anything wrong. That is the ultimate sin. And it happens in every country, in every period. Of course, Israel meets that definition. I mean, obviously.

But so does my government, and not always. And I think we try harder. Certainly we try harder than Israel is trying, but we have definitely done that. And it’s not controversial to say that. It’s not controversial to say that things the US Government has done have intentionally murdered people who didn’t do anything wrong. People were like, “yeah, that’s right.”

But you say that about Benjamin Netanyahu, who has nothing to do with me at all. I don’t live there. I don’t want to live there. I’ve got nothing to do with that. Then you’re somehow a criminal. That whole frame to me is insane, and I’m not participating with it. Israel is not the litmus test. How you feel about your own country, what you do to improve or degrade your own country, that’s the litmus test for me, not how you feel about some foreign country, period.

Free Speech Crisis in the UK

PIERS MORGAN: Let me talk about my country for a moment, because, again, when we had our doubleheader in Riyadh, you talked pretty scathingly about the UK. And I put up, I think, a pretty good fist of a defense. But something happened last week that made me think, “My God, Tucker was probably right.”

And I’ll tell you what, it was the tipping point for me. And there’s been a lot of this going on. But when a comedian called Graham Linehan returns to the UK and is arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport over three joke tweets that he posted in April. I literally thought my country had gone berserk and was now when it came to free speech, bordering on North Korea.

So, Tucker Carlson, I would like to say you were onto something when we spoke in Riyadh because it was so shocking to me that in a democratic society like the United Kingdom, built on free speech like the United States, that this could happen. And it just, it did happen. And this guy was taken off to cells and arrested. I mean, quite extraordinary to me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you notice when they were arresting people for praying outside of abortion clinics? I mean, I do think the UK and I say this as someone who is half English, I think it’s reached or it is quickly reaching a point where democratic reforms are going to be pretty tough because of the demographic change.

And that of course, the point of importing all these people is to overwhelm the people who live there who disapprove of the program. So you don’t have to care what they think because you just bring in new people and their will becomes all that matters. And so I don’t think you’re going to fix these things through elections at some point, probably pretty soon.

And I just worry, a place like the UK, Canada is another, a bunch of different countries in the west are at the point where they’re literally revolutionary. They are poised for revolution. And as someone who really doesn’t support revolution and hates violence and hates civil war above all, I’m worried about that. I mean, I don’t see how this is fixed.

Starmer, who’s just an instrument of larger forces, but he’s a poisonous character. Obviously he’s really hurt your country. He’s in there for what, four more years. And so you wonder people are going to start to get really radical in a scary way. I think this is going to happen and the people in charge don’t seem to care.

Immigration and Public Anger

PIERS MORGAN: Well, you’re already seeing, you are seeing the anger beginning to manifest itself. And I completely understand the anger. I don’t like you. I abhor any form of violence. But I do understand the anger when you have Keir Starmer campaign, “I’m going to smash the gangs that allow these little boats to come over the Channel,” delivering tens of thousands of people illegally into the country.

And they then get put into these so called asylum hotels where they’re given a pretty good lifestyle, certainly a far better lifestyle than many people really struggling at the moment in the UK and of course, far from smashing the gangs. It turned out yesterday that he’s smashing new records for the number of people coming in illegally on the boat. It’s out of control.

And the British public are reaching a point of saying, “we are done with people coming in illegally and being treated better in a more comfortable and more luxurious manner than we treat our own people.”

Demographic Change and Cultural Identity

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the whole point is to humiliate and degrade the indigenous population of the British Isles, the white population. I mean, that’s the whole point. And are they really going to do something about it? What would that be exactly? You’d really have to force a lot of people to go back to their countries of origin, millions of people, and you need to do it really soon. And are they actually willing to do that? I really don’t know.

But these are existential questions that we have been browbeat into ignoring for decades. But the question is, is Ireland, Ireland if it’s majority non Irish? “Oh, shut up. They’re Irish.” No, they’re actually not Irish. Same with the UK. Same with England, Scotland, Wales. It’s all changing so fast.

Nothing like this has ever happened in all of history, except when, say, the Mongols swept across the steppe and raped everybody. That was true demographic change on this scale. But even that wasn’t as profound as what we’re seeing in every white country around the world. I would say the west, but Australia and New Zealand also.

So what is that now? My brain is not big enough to understand what that is. I think I mean, I have a lot of theories about it, but I don’t know if they’re true. All I know is what the numbers are, and that’s real. And no one feels that he can say it. Everyone’s like, “oh, well, if that were happening in China or India or Malaysia or Senegal, it doesn’t matter.” You’d be like, “what the hell is that? The population’s totally different.”

Look at graduation, pick King’s College, Law School, and look at the graduation picture for the last 30 years. Who’s in it? Just let your eyes tell you the truth for once. This is a total change in population. Is it better? Is it worse? Can’t have that conversation. Who’s pushing this? Does the population want it? Population clearly doesn’t want it. There’s no polling that’s meaningful on the subject. I mean, there’s no referendum on it. You don’t get to decide. You’ve got no voice in it other than you get to go to jail if you complain loudly enough about it.

What is this? I think it’s the biggest and darkest thing that has happened in the last thousand years for sure. And I think it’s leading somewhere really, really bad. It’s not happening by accident. That’s obvious, because it’s only happening in white countries.

PIERS MORGAN: I mean, I think that.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Oh, shut up, white supremacist.” In fact, I’m not a white supremacist. I’m just noticing what the hell’s going on.

The Multiculturalism Debate

PIERS MORGAN: I think most people I’ve spoken to about this in the UK, most people have always viewed the UK to be a very tolerant, multicultural, cosmopolitan place to live. That’s why so many people want to come here. And people have no problem with that. And it’s been very successful for a long period of time.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s multicultural. What does that mean?

PIERS MORGAN: We have a lot of different people from different countries, different cultures, and it’s always worked historically.

TUCKER CARLSON: So is Sharia law. In a multicultural country. Is Sharia law as valid as English common?

PIERS MORGAN: No, no, people don’t want Sharia law.

TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of people do. Wait, hold on. I don’t know what you mean. Multiculturalism itself is a lie designed to subvert a society. No. A society has a culture. You can argue about what it is or ought to be. It’s not necessarily the same as race. It’s connected to race, but it’s not the same. People from different races can buy into your culture. That was kind of the beauty of the West. But a multicultural society is not sustainable. There’s not.

PIERS MORGAN: A society is a multi culture.

TUCKER CARLSON: One culture will dominate.

PIERS MORGAN: Hang on, Tucker. Surely the United States of America, given the very way it was created, is the epitome of a multicultural society. And my point I was going to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Make to you, it’s absolutely not. No, no, no, no, no. It’s a multiracial. It’s a multiracial society.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Though it was not actually a multiracial society up until pre re. It’s just 90% white for most of its existence, but whatever. But you did have different peoples. You had different religions. That was all totally fine. But there was one culture is American culture. There’s no such thing as a multicultural society. It’s not sustainable. One culture will overwhelm the other.

Again, it’s not the same as race. It’s not identical to race. It’s connected, but it’s not the same. But multiculturalism is by definition insane. No, it’s never happened. It never will happen. One culture will predominate it will impose its values on everybody else.

I mean, the gay thing, which was not a thing 40 years ago, gay was a slur. All of a sudden becomes mandatory to worship at the altar of gayness or whatever. Trans stuff, sodomy, pride, all this stuff that was not a thing 40 years ago. We’re the same age, you know that it was reviled, now it’s beloved. That’s a culture change. It’s not multicultural.

Cultural Evolution and Enforcement

PIERS MORGAN: I don’t think you have dissent.

TUCKER CARLSON: Hold on. You can’t dissent from it. Yeah, but you’re not allowed to dissent from it. That’s why I think taxonomy’s wrong. How does it work for you? You go to jail in your country.

PIERS MORGAN: What’s happened with the gay thing, as you put it, is that actually we were an extremely homophobic society. We actually. It was only legal to be gay from the mid-60s in the United Kingdom. And I’m very glad I now live in a country where it’s perfectly legal to do so.

TUCKER CARLSON: You buy the culture? You buy. Okay.

PIERS MORGAN: I buy people’s right to have their own sexuality. That. My argument with the culture, that’s. Well, my argument with the trans, that’s never happened.

TUCKER CARLSON: That has never happened in the history of your country.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, the trans debate’s different to the gay people.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not different. It’s not.

PIERS MORGAN: It is.

TUCKER CARLSON: But people talking gays. I’m not attacking trans. I’m making a larger point that I know that you are capable of grasping, which is that these are cultural determinations. We decide what our culture is, what are our values, and that definition changes.

So your country, let’s just say its inception. Modern England, 1066. The Normans come in. The French, who are actually Norse, but whatever, they come in, they invade your country, they impregnate your women, they put themselves in charge, they take all the castles. That’s a thousand years. Okay?

During that entire period, it was not okay to be gay until, as you said, 1966 or whatever, Oscar Wilde went to jail for it. So you have a thousand years versus sixty years. Your culture changed, but there’s only one culture. It went from being totally unacceptable to be gay to being mandatory to love gays.

PIERS MORGAN: It wasn’t mandatory to love gay.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s no multi in that.

PIERS MORGAN: It’s not mandatory to love gays out.

TUCKER CARLSON: Mandatory to love gay. Really? What would happen if you stood up in Parliament or on a television show in Great Britain and said, basically, just describe what the average Victorian or even Edwardian thought of homosexuality, or just read Oscar Wilde’s indictment, but agreed with it. You’d lose your job. You might go to jail. There’s not a multiculture there. There’s one culture. One culture, and it’s required.

And that’s true in every society, because a culture is a commonly agreed upon set of values, which in their firmest form are called laws.

PIERS MORGAN: And those values can evolve.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is true everywhere.

PIERS MORGAN: But those values can evolve.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they evolve, but there’s only one set of them. There’s one set, one die.

Constitutional Values and Cultural Evolution

PIERS MORGAN: In every society, your country’s values were established by the United States Constitution, and that’s had, what is it, 26, 27 amendments, right. So your own values, as determined by the Founding Fathers, they have evolved and been changed to accommodate changing time.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s no doubt. Look, I’m not even arguing against change. That’s natural. It’s natural that people’s views evolve so the culture changes. If you’re rejecting the laws of nature, then you’re doomed. But let me just say, no, of course societies change. I get it.

All I’m saying, I’m making a very discrete, specific point, which is multiculturalism as an idea is laughably stupid. It has never worked. We never had it anywhere, and it never will exist because it’s contrary to human nature. One culture, one way of looking at things, one worldview will predominate, and it will punish all who deviate from it. That is the nature of societies.

So if you’re telling me it’s multicultural, we can all live and have radically different values, that’s just not true. It’s never been true. It never will be true. So one worldview will predominate over another and dominate and suppress all dissent. That’s just what it is.

PIERS MORGAN: I totally agree.

Multicultural Success Stories

PIERS MORGAN: Let’s be honest. I would point to the United States of America and the United Kingdom as two shining examples, albeit not completely without their flaws. The shining examples of places that are deemed by the rest of the world to be not only multicultural, but very tolerant of other people’s cultures in a way that has enriched their society. I certainly feel that about my country.

Christianity and Western Tolerance

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I certainly think that inherent in Christianity is the notion of tolerance. And that draws from a core Christian concept, which is free will. You cannot force someone to convert. There’s never been conversion by the sword in Christianity. People decide to believe in it. And so that is central to the religion. Therefore it’s been central to the society. Western civilization is Christian civilization.

And so we call that tolerance. It’s a respect for your inherent, God given right to make a choice about what you believe. Of course that’s always been a feature. My only point is a society has a commonly agreed upon set of beliefs, rules and laws that are the definition of the society itself. That’s what society is.

So you can’t have competing, you can’t have gay world and Sharia world living co-equally in a society. That does not happen. It will never happen. You have to pick one. Are we the Sharia society? Are we the party time gay rights society? Which one?

And you can’t face that reality so you’re just sort of snoozing along until the inevitable point where you’re going to wake up and be like, “My values have no bearing on what our society is anymore because we’ve been invaded by other people with a totally different worldview and they’re now in charge.”

And that day is coming very soon for your country. Maybe it’ll improve it. I don’t think the UK could be a lot worse than it already is. It’s this kind of disgusting, sad, self-hating, suicidal island that was once great. It kills me to see it as a half English person. But that day is coming. It will change. You will either decide to be western or eastern. That’s a choice that we’re all going to face. I don’t want to face that choice. But it’s being foisted upon us by the architects of mass migration.

Defending Britain

PIERS MORGAN: Sorry, I would question your characterization of my country as a sad, disgusting, what was the rest of it? Suicidal nation. I feel none of those things. I feel very happy to be in the United Kingdom and I feel there are lots of very happy people like me who are neither disgusting or sad or suicidal. But Tucker Carlson, it is always great to talk to you.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree with that.

PIERS MORGAN: I would like to remind my viewers that your 9/11 documentary series, the first episode is posted September 11th.

TUCKER CARLSON: Aptly so. Yeah.

PIERS MORGAN: Tucker, thank you very much indeed for coming on and best of luck with the series.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thanks, Piers.

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