Tucker Carlson delivered a lengthy monologue on Wednesday responding to recent criticism from Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro and outlining his view of the future of the America First movement.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s interesting because people like Levin and Ben Shapiro, who at one point had this like media empire, propped up by Facebook, the Daily Wire, with some good people on it, you know, it’s fine, it was fine. But Ben Shapira spent, I don’t know, a decade posing as someone who actually cared about your concerns as an American. He did it imperfectly. There were flashes that he didn’t really care. But he’s like, no, no I’m a conservative. I’m conservative. I’m not just interested in the fortunes of one tiny country in the Middle East with a population of 9 million know I have a lot of interest, I really care about this country and I’m against the trans movement or whatever. But increasingly as everyone’s gotten more hysterical and prone to sort of blurting out the truth, that veil has dropped and you can see what Ben Shapiro really, really cares about. So this is a very revealing exchange that took place six days ago last Thursday on stage with Megyn Kelly. Ben Shapiro was just sitting there being interviewed by Megyn Kelly and said something, he said something like, well, Tucker Carlson’s, you know, for Maduro. Maduro, the communist leader of Venezuela, who I guess were on the way to killing or something, forcing out regime changing him. And he defended Maduro didn’t actually. And Megyn Kelly says, well Tucker said in his show that Maduro most people didn’t know this, whatever his many faults. I wouldn’t hire him as an economist, OK? But whatever’s many faults, it has the most socially conservative country, probably in the hemisphere. So Venezuela is just a fact. I mean, I didn’t make this up. I’m not in charge of Venezuela. Just noticing that Venezuela has banned pornography, banned abortion, banned gay marriage, banned sex changes, and banned usury. You don’t have credit cards with 40% interest in Venezuela. Ben Shapiro responded. MEGYN KELLY: [Tucker Carlson] made the point, I’m not going to be here to be Tucker’s defender, but he’s made the point that Maduro is culturally conservative. Who gives a shit? The guy’s a communist dictator. Everyone in his country is eating dog. He’s shipping fentanyl to the United States to kill Americans. Why do we give a shit whether he’s anti-LGBTQ rights? Who gives a shit? CARLSON: I’m not moving to Venezuela, not Pro Maduro. But I care about that, why wouldn’t I care about that? I’ve got kids. Like, first of all, I’m against abortion. Sorry, unpopular, I feel that way. I think it’s really sad. I would personally become poorer to end abortion, voluntarily become poorer to end the abortion in the United States. That’s not a choice. Don’t want to become poorer, but I would, because I care abut it. Maybe you don’t, maybe you’re offended that I do, but I care bout it, lots of people care about it. I don’t think pornography’s good. That really hurts people, you know? I don’t think pretending that the sexes are the same is good. And you claimed that you didn’t think it was good, but it turns out, quote, I don’t give a shit. Maduro’s against Israel. I don’t give a shit. Well, you spent like a decade pretending you did give a shit that you’re on the side of like normal Americans who have a mix of concerns. They definitely care about economics and they care about social issues too because they have children and they see where this is going. It’s not good. That your economic condition is not the only measure of health, your spiritual condition matters too. It’s just a fact, it does. If you’re totally degraded, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, it’s not worth it. It’s worth getting the whole world and losing your soul. Sorry. And most people feel the way, but not. Not Ben Shapiro, he doesn’t give a shit. So why the hostility? Well, maybe because if you keep talking about the so-called social issues, which are not limited to abortion and pornography and gay marriage, the trans issue, they get pretty quickly to economics, to usury, to lending money and interest. And most people, including me, are not against lending money and interest, conceptually. But it depends on what interest rate it’s being loaned at. So there are payday loans in this country that are 600% annually. 600% interest annually? And who’s taking payday loan in this world? Well, poor people are. And they’re never getting out of it. There are car loans. There are credit card loans. There’s private credit. Used to call it loan sharking. At exorbitant rates, rates so high that people will never get out from under them. They’re enslaved by it. It’s called debt slavery. It’s 100% real. That’s not an ideological point. It’s just an obvious observation. And it was one of the observations that Charlie Kirk was making on a daily basis before he was assassinated, which is interesting. And it’s that kids are buying food on credit. Buy now, pay later. That’s credit. You’re paying interest on that, whether they call it that or not. Late fees. People are loaning you money at a much higher interest rate than, say, rich people are borrowing money. And that’s bad because it’s really hard to get out of it. And if you’re wondering why the average American homebuyer, American-born homebuyers, almost 40 years old, when the year I graduated from college, it was 28, how did that happen? People are in too much debt. This is the, probably if it isolated in a world with a lot of issues, a lot pressing issues, debt for young people is probably the number one issue, which is to say, it’s the number thing that is destroying them. And making it impossible for them to get married and have children, which Ben Shapiro told us he cared about. And that’s the conversation that they absolutely don’t want to have. So if you say, well, Maduro, whatever his many faults, probably stole the election, looks that way to me. I don’t know, but it looks that. People say he’s bad. Okay, I believe you. He’s bad, but he doesn’t have that, and that’s a good thing. And Ben Shapiros is like, I don’t give a shit. Shut up. He’s a communist. It makes you wonder how we’re defining communist here because of course in the united states communist no longer means someone who believes Marx and Engels it has nothing to do with academic theory that’s all gone communist in the United States is a synonym for someone who seeks to rot a society from within and destroy it and I guess I would argue that if you don’t give a shit about pornography or 63 million abortions in the United States and the since Roe v. Wade or whatever, and if you don’t care about 600% annual interest rates on payday loans being given to the poor, who’s the communist exactly? Who’s trying to rot this country from the inside? Who doesn’t care about the destruction of human beings in our country? That’s not me. You’re a communist! So I thought a lot about this. I didn’t want, you know, you never want to extrapolate too much from a single clip. You don’t wanna be cruel to people. You don’t wanna be unfair. Having been unfair many times, it weighs on me. Don’t wanna do that. So kind of looked around, is this consistent with Ben Shapiro’s worldview? Does he think GDP, the aggregate economic activity in a country, the bottom line number, it really doesn’t tell you that much. But for simple people like Ben, who aren’t sophisticated in their understanding of economics. That’s important. GDP, GDP, GDP, never hinting at the things that it doesn’t measure. Never hinting it what a distorted number that is, just like the inflation rate or the employment rate. I mean, these are not really real numbers. But is he really a guy who cares about GDP or economic activity or some people getting rich more than he cares about the lives of his fellow Americans? Boy, that’s a pretty heavy charge. You’d hate to level that against anyone. You’d to claim that about anyone. Could this be a guy? Who really only cares about a foreign country. So we went looking. So first and famously, don’t even put it on the screen because I’m sure you’ve seen this, there was Ben Shapiro saying, you know, I’d be willing to vote for Bibi Netanyahu for President of the United States if only it were constitutionally allowed. You want some foreigner to run our country? Who even thinks like that? He said that. Maybe it was just he was getting carried away. He just loves Bibi so much. Loves the guy who is killing tens of thousands of children in Gaza so much that he wants him to run our country. But then we found a couple of other clips, which are recent, that give a window, not just in, I hate to be mean to poor Ben Shapiro, who’s clearly going away as a media force. I hate be mean do him. But this does reflect the worldview of an awful lot of people in Washington and a lot of the people in Ben Shapiros’ world. And that worldview is, the people of this country don’t really matter. They can be replaced. By the way, if you complain about the fact they’re being replaced, which they are, at high speed, it’s measurable. Then you’re a Nazi and you must shut up and be punished. But those people don’t really matter. They should do what they’re told, and ultimately they should just serve the people who are for-profit-ing from all of this. Does he really think that? Well, here are a couple of clips that you can watch carefully and answer the question for yourself. BEN SHAPIRO: We have trained an entire generation of people to believe that if their lives are not what they want them to be, it’s the fault of systems, as opposed to decisions that are in their own control. And politicians absolutely have a stake in selling that. A lot of people in our industry have a stick in selling that makes people feel good about themselves and bad about the world. And the reality is if you want a better life, you should feel better about the world and worse about yourself. If you’re a young person and you can’t afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here. I mean, that is a real thing. I know that we’ve now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up. But the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that. CARLSON: It’s hard to know where to start with that clip. I think that’s been on the internet and people are experiencing gut level revulsion when they see it and they really should. And there’s so many ways to approach it. There’s so may things wrong with those statements. So childish those statements, so lacking an understanding of people or any connection really to the country at all. But really what you see underneath all of that is contempt for the people who live here. You have no right to live in the town where you were born just because your parents are buried there. Your ancestors built the town? Who do you think you are? Imagine feeling that way about someone in your own country. Imagine having that level of contempt for a fellow American. You don’t even know anything about the person. These young people, they’re not entitled to live where they want. They’ll live where BlackRock tells them they can live. It’s like, whoa, if you had a thought like that, I’ve had some ugly thoughts. I just admitted having some ugly thought. Boy, I would try and push it back and not express it. Ben says it without any embarrassment because he means it. That’s exactly right, because he MEANS it. I don’t think that you can win a popular debate with that attitude, because irrespective of the content of your sentence, people can feel the loathing that the speaker has for them. Ben Shapiro does not care about you at all. He’s not even pretending to care about. So again, it really doesn’t matter what he’s selling. That guy is not gonna make the sale if people are free to buy whatever they want. It’s like, I don’t know what that guy’s selling, but he doesn’t like me, I can feel it right away. He doesn’t care at all about me at all. And he thinks so little of me, he’s not even gonna put on the dog. He’s not gonna try to pretend to care about me. And a guy like that? He really needs censorship and bullying to succeed because the free market does not reward a man like that at all, ever, because people don’t like it. Why would they like it? Here’s another clip that makes basically the same point that is in some ways even more disgusting, maybe less well known. Here’s Ben Shapiro telling you that if you ever wanna retire, stop working to pay off your 50 freaking year mortgage. You own the house, really, for 50 years. Okay, no, I’m renting it. I’ll be 90 by the time I pay it off, which of course I won’t because I got all kinds of other loans too. So if you complain about that, if you had these dreams of working really hard and retiring, how dare you? SHAPIRO: No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem. It’s totally insane that you believe that you should be able to work from the time that you are essentially 20 to the time that you’re 65, which is a 45 year period. Pay in and then you will receive Social Security benefits sufficient to support you and your family, you and your wife forever for like another 20 years. That’s crazy talk. CARLSON: How dare you? Now the conventional response to this, I’ve heard people say it is, well Ben Shapiro can say that because he’s a podcaster, he’s not climbing ladders for a living. And if you climb ladders from a living, you know, or do any kind of physical labor, even light physical labor your body breaks down. It’s just a fact. And if around people who’ve done it, you know by the time they get to 50, they’re limping and they’re in pain. That’s why they’re, you go to these little towns around the country and most businesses are gone. There are no furniture stores or no toy stores. Like they’re all gone. They’re all at Walmart, they’re a husk, but what you do find next to the drug rehab places are chiropractors, or a lot of chiropractors throughout the country. It’s because poor people, working class people, blue collar people are aching. They have trouble walking, their backs hurt. So retirement for a man who climbs ladders is a little bit different from a man who hosts a podcast. But that’s not even the point that I would make. That’s true, of course. He’s pure contempt for people who work with their bodies and he should be judged for that. But I think it’s deeper than that. It’s like, how dare you tell me when I should retire? Who are you exactly? Who gave you the moral authority to judge when I retire? That’s insane! You’re like a child who’s got some deal with Facebook. I mean, or whatever, whoever you are. You are not God. You have no right to talk to me like that. But you do because you have no respect for me. You have not love for me at all. And it does kind of point to the core problem, not with Ben Shapiro who will not be a factor in America in five years, I can promise you that. Or Mark Levin, let’s hope he gets better.

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