Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, author of The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism, warned that America is becoming a “soviet society” prioritizing conformity and obedience to government over freedom of behavior and thought.
“I do think, marginally, people can be more brave and more honest just in their personal lives,” Carlson remarked on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. “There’s no reason to sit at a dinner party and be browbeaten by somebody and not pipe up. You don’t have to argue, but you can quietly speak your conscience in public.”
He continued, “The society has become so incredibly conformist. I see it in my kids and their friends. My kids don’t agree with a lot of this crap, but the spirit of the age is, ‘Well, I don’t really want to step outside the herd.’ We don’t celebrate mavericks at all. … It’s such a soviet society, now. What we celebrate is team joiners. ‘Oh, look, this guy got the vaccine. He’s a hero. He took his medicine.’ It’s insane.”
A culture of conformity praises compliance while condemning dissidence, Carlson stated. He said dissidents rejecting corporate and government immorality in the vein of Rosa Parks are persecuted in the modern era.
“When I was a kid, even the left was always telling us about … Rosa Parks,” Carlson recalled. “There was a political agenda in telling us about Rosa Parks, but on the other hand, Rosa Parks was pretty great. Good for Rosa Parks. She didn’t want to sit in the back, and one day, she decided not to, and she was a hero.”
He stated, “The saddest realization that I’ve made in the last couple years is that propaganda works. Look at the polling. You can tell people almost anything, and some percentage of them will be like, ‘Yeah, I saw it on NBC News,’ and of course that’s why they do it, but if you thought this was a really independent-minded country with a bunch of flinty mavericks in it, it’s kind of distressing to see that.”
Marlow linked corporate and government coercion regarding vaccines for COVID-19 in the context of conformity.
“It is amazing how the same people who were frontline heroes last summer, if they don’t want the vaccine now, they literally get fired,” he said. “We’re now talking about basic constitutional rights that we’re going to get denied because we don’t take a product and inject ourselves with it — that’s not been FDA approved — by a big pharmaceutical company. We should just change all our coins to, ‘In Pfizer We Trust,’ or ‘In Moderna We Trust,’ so then we can get our privileges back.”
Public compliance with corporate, governmental, and media coercion fuels increasing abuses from an increasingly centralized oligarchy, Carlson noted.
“It’s so crazy. It can only continue if we allow it to,” he held. “One of the phrases one never hears anymore that was a feature of my childhood was ‘civil disobedience,’ which was the act of following your conscience in a non-violent, respectful, but firm way. I’m not doing that. I’m not playing along. I’m not going to abet my own destruction.”
He continued, “I feel like a lot more people could do that, and if they did, this shit would end today, because it takes our complicity to continue. Let’s just be honest, we’re implicated in this.”
Carlson linked left-wing undermining of masculinity and men to the broader phenomenon of growing totalitarianism.
“Where are the men?” Carlson asked. “There’s been a massive decline in testosterone levels. I think that’s a huge part of what we’re seeing right now. That accounts for a lot of the cowardice. I’m just being as honest as I can be.”
Carlson said courage is needed to reject orthodoxies imposed by abusive governments and corporations while praising the Murdoch family — owners of News Corp, the parent company of Fox News — for affording him editorial freedom on his primetime show.
“An awful lot of people just feel like they can’t,” he lamented. “There’s too much at stake for them, and that increases the moral obligation I feel as someone — who just purely by good luck, had nothing to do with any decisions I made — just wound up getting the show on this channel, where the owners are going to stand by us.”
He added, “Even if all of our advertisers quit, even if the Washington Post or the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Daily Beast every single day [say], ‘Fire him. He’s a white supremacist,’ [the Murdochs] don’t care. So I just have this incredible good fortune to be at a place where I can live like it’s 1985, like the country was still free, and say what I think.”