Tucker: 'Wokeism' will destroy civilization as we know it

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Tucker: 'Wokeism' will destroy civilization as we know it

'The Parasitic Mind' author Gad Saad warned that if we don't put a stop woke ideas, it will be a 'slow train ride to hell'

This is a rush transcript of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on October 8, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST: Good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.

We're going to do something a little different for the next hour, we are going to try to explain what this country is fighting itself about. What are the lines that divide us? It is pretty obviously not the old partisan divide that the rest of us grew up with, Republican versus Democrat, you've figured that out now. You look over at the Democratic side you see Rashida Tlaib, you're pretty certain she is not on your side, obviously.

But then the question is, is Mitch McConnell on your side? And the answer as you well know is no, not really.

So what divides us? What is the dividing line? And it's really simple.

The people in charge are intent on replacing our free democratic system with an authoritarian system where they don't convince you of anything, they simply make you do things and they benefit from that.

There are people in this country who are opposed to that. They are anti- authoritarian, and if you look at who we book on this show, that may explain why we do it. You may have noticed, we have a lot of former lefties on the show -- Glenn Greenwald, is the most obvious; Alex Berenson as well, and many others.

Now, we probably don't agree with these people on a lot of things. Are we on the same side on abortion? We've never asked.

But one thing we know for certain is that they are totally opposed to authoritarianism, so that really is the divide. People are for an authoritarian America and those who are for a free America, it's that simple, and once you start to understand politics through that lens, you figure out what's really going on.

By the way, looking at polls is an unusually bad way to understand what's happening in American politics. Polls are often wrong and when they are wrong, they are almost always wrong in the same direction. The last presidential election made that very clear.

The polling outfit, Quinnipiac for example, which is attached to some kind of college in Connecticut predicted that Joe Biden would win the popular vote by 11 points. It also predicted that Mitch McConnell was in tough shape in Kentucky. Pollsters even convinced a lot of Democratic Party donors that they had a real shot of winning the State of Texas.

In retrospect, it's clear all of this was partisan fantasy and it had a purpose, it was all designed to make a mentally decaying senator from Delaware look like Teddy Roosevelt riding a massive wave of popular support. Of course, that was a lie.

So once you understand that, once you recognize what these polls are actually designed to do, they are designed to put Democratic Party leaders in the best possible light.

It is worth noting when the polls move in the opposite direction, when they start to reflect badly on the Democratic Party. That's been happening over the past several weeks.

According again to Quinnipiac, a reliably left-wing pollster, Joe Biden's national approval rating is now 38 percent, 60 percent of Independents disapprove of what Joe Biden is doing as President.

A new AP poll noted that just 34 of Americans are pleased with the direction of the country, that's called the Right Track Wrong Track Poll, and for the party in power, it is very bad news.

This means that the very same people who just last year lied to you, to your face, about how popular Joe Biden was, are now admitting that he is actually the least popular President in modern political history. Why are they telling you this all of a sudden? Why are these reliably Democratic pollsters telling Democratic voters that their President is unpopular?

Maybe because they have no choice, maybe there are other reasons. We're not sure. What is absolutely clear is that according to a new poll from Pew, Democratic Party voters understand what this means, and what it means is, in a free and fair democratic system, they can't win.

If we allocate power based on who is the most popular with the public and that's the basic premise of democracy, the Democratic Party is in very tough shape, and they know that. And that may be why according to polls, Democrats know overwhelmingly want the government to make their political opponents shut up.

More than three quarters of Democratic Party voters want the tech companies to quote: "Restrict false information online even if it limits freedom of information." Think about that for a second. More than 60 percent of Democratic voters want the Federal government to quote, "Control that flow of information over the internet."

So all of that contravenes the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which is the very core of our system of government and of our culture. It is what makes America great. And now, the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters are against it.

So that's authoritarianism. There is no other word for it and it is ironic considering for four years, prominent Democrats told us we were living through a fascist system. Donald Trump is a fascist. But of course they were describing their own attitudes.

So we're going to spend the next hour looking at the rise of authoritarian impulses on the left and try to figure out where those came from and where they're going.

Now, none of this is brand new. You'll recall that Democratic Party politicians have been pushing for censorship for a long time. Certainly, since Trump won in 2016. They blamed that victory on Facebook.

Here is Ed Markey last October for example, calling for more censorship.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. ED MARKEY (D-MA): The issue is not that the companies before us today are taking too many posts down, the issue is that they are leaving too many dangerous posts up.

In fact, they are amplifying harmful content, so that it spreads like wildfire and tortures our democracy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, they're not censoring enough because these posts, according to Ed Markey -- who will literally say anything you should know -- are quote, "dangerous." But Markey never explained what was dangerous about them, but you got the message. They all did.

A few weeks after Markey said that, Big Tech effectively removed the elected President of the United States from the internet. They silenced him completely, and virtually nobody said anything about it.

So it didn't stop, it merely accelerated.

Now, Democrats and their allies in the news media have decided to drop all pretense. Jonathan Chait writes for "New York" Magazine. He is considered smart on the left, one of the weirdest people practicing journalism today. 

He just published a deeply revealing piece in "New York" Magazine. Here is the headline from it, and we're quoting: "Anybody fighting Joe Biden is helping Trump's next coup. All Republican politics is now functionally authoritarian."

All right, because Republicans are calling for censorship. So, that's how the Democratic Party is responding to the collapsing poll numbers of their President. They are accusing the other side of authoritarianism while practicing it themselves. Right.

So, you'll recall that Joe Biden voters destroyed statues and destroyed our country's biggest cities for more than a year and the police did nothing about it, and our media class applauded, and yet, because justice is no longer meted out equally, if someone dares to dishonor the legacy of Saint George Floyd, the New York Police Department's Special Hate Crimes Division springs into action.

Here is an actual quote, by the way from this week. "On October 3rd, 2021, at approximately 10:15 a.m. in Union Square Park, a person on a skateboard threw gray paint on the face and base of a statue of George Floyd." That's the NYPD bulletin. Information. Contact us." Exclamation point.

So, that is not really hypocrisy anymore, it is hierarchy. What they are telling you is that crimes against their ideas are the only crimes that matter. Well, that attitude has no popular support in this country, so you can only enforce it by force using surveillance to root out people who got the wrong ideas, and that's exactly the basis on which the Biden administration is proceeding.

That's why the administration has now given itself the authority to monitor everything that happens, for example in your private bank account.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, CNBC NEWS HOST:        An effort that I know you're a 

proponent of for the I.R.S. to collect more information and more tax dollars, but more information about taxpayers' bank accounts including annual cash flows, and I was curious whether you think the I.R.S. has the wherewithal to actually do that.

JANET YELLEN, U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY: Well, of course they do, and a simple way for the I.R.S. to get a sense of where that might be is just a few pieces of information about individual's bank accounts.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Did you see that? The most interesting part of that exchange was not the Treasury Secretary. She has embraced authoritarianism full-blown, it's the creepy little shill from CNBC and the question is not does the I.R.S. have the right to snoop into your bank account with no evidence you've done anything wrong.

His question is, do they have the wherewithal? Do they have the manpower? 

Can they actually pull it off? To which he says, of course. We're the government we can do anything.

So, after January 6, this show reported that Bank of America quote, "Proactively rooted through customer's private financial information" to find individuals who quote, "met thresholds of interest." They spied on their own customers and then like the good East Germans they are, they passed those names to the F.B.I., without telling anybody involved.

The Democratic Party approves of this and they want to make certain this kind of invasion of privacy is permanent, it is codified, and of course, they want to control your children, too, the center of your life. They'll destroy anyone who tries to stand in the way of this.

Bradley Keyes, for example -- we could give you a million, here's just one

-- Keyes was a track and field coach at Pembroke Academy. He was fired because he didn't think it was good for his athletes to have to wear masks as they were playing tennis. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRADLEY KEYES, FORMER TENNIS COACH: My goal is to get these mandates removed and it's not just track and field, it's tennis, it's baseball, it's every outdoor sport. Masks will be worn all times -- practices and competitions.

Tennis, wonderful example. Singles tennis. You go watch practices, everyone is wearing masks. Competitions they will be wearing masks even though they're 30 to 60 feet apart on the courts.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So, we're going to tell you what we've told you a thousand times before, none of this is science. There is not a single study anywhere in the world that suggests kids benefit by wearing masks as they play sports outdoors, in fact, they are hurt by it. That's both commonsense and the scientific consensus on the question.

But the fact is, it is happening anyway and that's the point. They don't feel the need to justify their decisions with science, and in fact, they will punish actual scientists who object to these unnecessary medical mandates.

Aaron Kheriaty for example, is a physician at the University of California. 

He is the Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UC Irvine, not a small job. He has just announced the university has quote, "Put me on leave." 

Why? "For challenging their vaccine mandates in court."

Oh, so it's not a question of whether vaccine mandates help or hurt or good for public health, it is about power and anyone who challenges it is crushed.

The weak are hurt the most profoundly, as always.

Here is a story we'll be telling you a lot more about in coming weeks about a woman in Colorado who is facing death. She has got stage 5 renal failure. 

She has just been denied a kidney transplant. Now, she has a donor, a willing donor, who has a kidney for her. Everything is ready to go.

But according to the health system there, the woman and her donor have not taken the COVID shot. The donor explained that her vaccination status quote, " ... does not affect any other patient on the transplant list. How can I sit here?" The donor asked, "And allow them to murder my friend when I've got a perfectly good kidney and I could save her life." That's a great question.

No one in the Biden administration has bothered to answer it or even think about it, instead, they are forcing anyone who raises these questions to be quiet. That's not a democratic system, that's an authoritarian system.

Douglas Murray is one of the smartest people we've ever met. He takes the long view on everything. He is a historian and best-selling author and he joins us tonight to assess the great divide in American life.

Douglas Murray, it's great to see you. Thanks so much.

DOUGLAS MURRAY, HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR: Great to see you, too, Tucker.

CARLSON: So it does seem like -- and I'm sure you feel this way in your own life -- all of a sudden you find yourself with sympathy toward and making common cause with people you've never agreed with on anything over the past

20 years and you realize, the one thing that you have in common is the most important thing, which is you're for a free society and so are they.

That does seem like the divide.

MURRAY: That's definitely right. I would add one other thing to that, which is that I think that there have been an increasing number of people on the left in America and around the world who are just seeing that their own political side has gone wrong. They have seen that it's gone off.

And this is to my mind unexplainable -- un-ended business from the 20th Century. It has been my profession for a long time saying this that after the 20th Century, we know where the right can go wrong.

We have left as unexplained unbothered about business the question of where the left goes wrong, and the left is very clever about this because where is the right? You know, it is very obvious when the right -- when certain people on the far right, the alt-right that some people in America like to call them, start talking racial games.

That we know is where the far right goes way wrong. But what about the far left? Well, when it is expected to go wrong and not everyone seems to agree they do, a lot of people seem to think that you know, you keep running left and the worst you get to is veganism. But if you don't take that view, what you find is all the way along to the left, you never get to the gulag.

What you get is this amazingly clever dictionary they've got so that for instance they talk about equity when they mean discrimination. They talk about fairness when they mean unfairness on an amazing scale. They talk about justice and they really mean revenge.

But it takes a long time for people to see through this and by the time people have seen through this, we're way down this track.

CARLSON: It is interesting that all of a sudden a lot of the debates that we've been having in my case and in yours since we've both been involved in public debate for a long time that we're really at the center of our professional lives, look almost meaningless compared to this -- the question of how we're going to -- can you live in a country where you can follow your own conscience and say what you really think?

MURRAY: Absolutely.

CARLSON: How is it that we didn't see this coming?

MURRAY: Well, some people did see it coming. I mean, as I say, this unfinished business has meant that the left has been able to push an incredibly long way very, very easily and very fast and relatively un- resisted.

You know, I mean, we see it now with -- I mean, in historical terms, it seemed hilarious to say it, but basically committees on the public safety, you know, Robespierre would have called it after the French Revolution. You know, these committees on the public safety that effectively exists now that we see around the world. I mean, America is not as far down the road as some.

I mean, we've all seen the footage from Australia where you see that the police are battening the public down for the public safety. You know, for the public's well-being, they have to be bashed around the head by the police wearing masks. Somebody said this week, you know the joke -- there's a there's a risk in Australia of a shortage of hospital beds and people hospitalized by the police for their own good.

I mean, we are at an extraordinary stage where everything from public health to education and everything else has been just hijacked by this leftist language and not enough people have stood up on the left or anywhere else to say no, we see through this. We know what you're saying.

CARLSON: And people who don't stand up are complicit in it. Let's just be honest about it. They're cowards and they're allowing this to happen.

MURRAY: Absolutely.

CARLSON: Douglas Murray, a great man, I appreciate your coming on tonight. 

Thank you.

MURRAY: It's a great pleasure. Thank you, Tucker.

CARLSON: So as we said, we're going to spend the entire hour tonight looking at the central question of our time. This surge of authoritarianism from the left, how it got here, where it's going and who is being hurt by it? The Americans with the wrong ideas are being crushed under the wheels of this movement, and there are so many of them.

The Biden administration, to name the most recent example is now using the I.R.S. to spy on your bank account and every single financial transaction you engage in. They have a right to see all of it, they claim. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: So these stories come in every single day and you read them, they are always written in a very straightforward manner, the AP Style. Well, this is what's happening today with the Biden administration, and you think, wait a second, that's never happened before?

This is a massive departure. This is a new precedent. This is kind of scary. In this case, very scary.

Here is the latest. The Biden administration has now directed the Internal Revenue Service to dig into, and scrutinize every bank account in this country with a balance of more than 600 bucks. That's essentially everybody, not because there is evidence you did anything wrong, but just because they're the government they can do whatever they want.

The Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who really is responsible for a lot of the economic devastation in this country, says the plan is completely routine, not a big deal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CYNTHIA LUMMIS (R-WY):  Do you distrust the American people so much 

that you need to know when they bought a couch or a cow? I am astounded by what you're supporting and proposing. I think it's invasive, I think privacy for individuals is getting ignored, and I think treating the American people like they are subjects of the government is unconscionable.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: All true, on the other hand, what are you going to do about it? 

Nothing.

Pedro Gonzalez is the Associate Editor at "Chronicles," the magazine of American Culture. He joins us now.

Pedro, thanks so much for coming on. So, the pretext for this is that Janet Yellen wants to make sure that rich people aren't getting away with tax fraud, which by the way I'm completely for that. But Janet Yellen herself is a shill for the big banks, which have made her personally rich.

Millions and millions of dollars, she has taken from the big banks. So, this isn't really about making sure that, you know the hedge funds or JPMorgan pay their fair share, is it?

PEDRO GONZALEZ, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, "CHRONICLES": No. Basically, this is Biden asking you for $80 billion to weaponize the I.R.S. against you, to raise an army of bureaucrats and have them invade your privacy to get more control over your life so that they can access the details of your bank account.

This doesn't sound like healing and unity to me. I don't know about you, Tucker. But like you said, I'm not against using the I.R.S. to punish enemies and reward friends. The oligarchs hiding their money in tax havens in Delaware and South Dakota, the people exploiting cheap illegal immigrant labor like the Kochs, we should go after them and we should crush them.

But Biden is setting the I.R.S. loose on Middle Americans specifically, which tells you whose side he is on.

Obama did the same thing. He used the I.R.S. to target conservative groups. 

Sorry, go ahead.

CARLSON: No, no, no. Please, you keep going. I'm just -- I'm just nodding in a profound agreement.

GONZALEZ:        Right. He used the I.R.S. to target conservative groups and the 

funny thing is that the I.R.S. actually apologized for that in 2017, but now Biden is turning the guns again on the little guy and allowing the most powerful and corrupt players to slide and of course, he would, they are in his administration.

But the I.R.S. is actually just one head on this monster. Attorney General Merrick Garland has recently instructed the F.B.I. to investigate threats, threats of parents protesting the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. In other words, if you don't want your tax dollars to go toward indoctrinating your children into white guilt, you might get flagged as a terrorist threat by the F.B.I.

The federal government has also secretly ordered Google and other search engines to track and provide data on anyone using certain search terms through so-called keyword warrants.

Biden has effectively declared war on privacy in Middle America.

CARLSON: That's what it is. I mean, the people who have benefited from our system for the past 20 years will feel no pain here. It's people like you.

GONZALEZ: That's right.

CARLSON: Pedro Gonzalez, I appreciate the clarity of your thinking. Thank you.

GONZALEZ: Thank you.

CARLSON: As you just heard Pedro say, the D.O.J. is now targeting parents who have any complaints at all about the lunacy their kids are learning in school, white people are bad, don't complain or else you're ISIS-K.

But some parents are not afraid, they're fighting back anyway. One of them will join us as we continue our assessment of the authoritarian surge in the United States of America, that's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATT FINN, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: Welcome to "FOX News Live," I'm Matt Finn in Los Angeles.

Texas fights back to protect its controversial abortion law. The state is asking a Federal Appeals Court to reinstate the law after a Federal Judge suspended earlier this week some of the state's abortion clinics resumed normal services today for the first time since early September.

The law bans abortions once cardiac activity is detected, that's usually around six weeks, and can occur before a woman knows she is pregnant.

Inoculations for COVID-19 are now hitting a three-month high, that averages close to one million a day, but it's still far below the number of shots last spring. The reason for the increase, more seniors are getting boosters and employer mandates are pushing workers to get first doses.

Demand is expected to spike more in a few weeks if Federal regulators give the okay to vaccine elementary school students.

I'm Matt Finn, now back to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.

CARLSON: The Biden administration has now unleashed the most powerful law enforcement apparatus in the world, the U.S. Department of Justice against American parents, middle class parents whose kids go to public school and who voice any opposition whatsoever to the racism now being pushed on their kids.

Why are they doing this? Because something called the National School Boards Association has told D.O.J. that these parents are domestic terrorists.

At a recent briefing at the White House, Joe Biden's chief flack apparently agreed with that assessment. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PETER DOOCY, FOX NEWS CHANNEL WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: So, does the administration agree that parents upset about their kids' curriculums could be considered domestic terrorists?

JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Well, let me unravel this a little bit because the National School Boards Association is not a part of the U.S. government, I'd point you to them.

What the Department of Justice said in a letter from the Attorney General is that quote: "Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation's core values." That is true. These were threats against public servants, threats against members of the school board.

Regardless of the reasoning, threats and violence against public servants is illegal. That's what he was conveying from the Department of Justice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Threats and violence are illegal, they're rarely prosecuted, if ever, when they are committed by loyal Democratic voters, but that's not the point. The Department of Justice did not give a single example of threats or violence. These are thought crimes that are being prosecuted here.

Erika Sanzi knows that well. She is a parent and founder of Parents Defending Education and she joins us tonight.

Erika, thanks so much for coming on. So, basically because you want some say in what your own children are taught by government schools, you have been likened to a domestic terrorist. Where does this leave you?

ERIKA SANZI, FOUNDER, PARENTS DEFENDING EDUCATION: So it leaves me frustrated, but not surprised. Over the summer, the teachers union signaled

-- actually, they didn't signal, they said explicitly that they were going to invest money in investigating parent groups.

So we knew that something like this might be coming and it's clear that school boards and school officials are simply not used to this level of scrutiny. They are -- I was on a school committee, so I can say that this is something new.

COVID blew, you know, the curtain wide open and now parents are expressing concerns over a variety of things and it seems that almost regardless of what it is that they are expressing frustration about, they are -- they are mocked, they are dismissed or they are told that it is going to cost them many thousands of dollars to get the information that they're asking for.

So, we're obviously very concerned particularly because it takes a lot of courage for parents to go before school boards and express their thoughts and how they are feeling about what's happening in their children's school. 

It doesn't come naturally to most people.

And so when we saw this come down from the Department of Justice, we knew that it was an attempt to intimidate parents into silence even though they are not doing anything wrong.

CARLSON: No, no. In fact, they're doing what they're required to do as parents, which is look out for the best interest of their own children and as citizens, which is to speak up with elected officials.

So when there were concerns about police brutality and the misuse of police powers, reformers pushed for bodycams and their argument was if you've got nothing to hide, why wouldn't you allow it to be on tape? And that's happened across the country. Why don't we have cameras in classrooms -- every single classroom?

SANZI: So, that's an interesting question and the truth is, I still come down on the side against cameras, though I certainly understand the impulse for people wanting that to happen, but I do take your point about the hypocrisy.

The same people that wanted to defund the police now want to seek the F.B.I. on parents, and the same people that were for cameras are now saying that parents don't even have a right to see the curricular materials being used in their children's schools.

CARLSON: Yes, so it really is like a deep question. Whose children are they? Do they belong to the teachers union -- or to you? You are a brave person to persevere in the face of this and I appreciate it. I hope you'll come back. Erika, thank you.

SANZI: Thanks for having me.

CARLSON: So authoritarianism is not new, of course, it's a feature of human nature. It has arisen in virtually every government throughout human history. We've kept it at bay for hundreds of years in this country, things are changing fast.

The Biden administration is openly authoritarian, but again, they're not the only ones. So are corporations, so is Big Tech.

Alex Berenson has spent the last two years exposing what is actually going on with coronavirus -- mass lockdowns and mandates -- and for that he has been completely banned from Twitter, which was his main means of communication. He is now on "Substack" and tearing it up, much deserved.

Alex Berenson joins us now.

Alex, thanks so much for coming on. So there are so many -- those of us who read your "Substack" faithfully and I do multiple times a day have too many questions for you but I just want to start on something you wrote about just hours ago and that is on this push to vaccinate five to 11-year-old American kids.

Bottom line question: Is there scientific data as of tonight that shows that that is a good idea and/or necessary?

ALEX BERENSON, AUTHOR: I would say no. There is scientific data that shows that the mRNA vaccine that Pfizer and BioNTech make works as advertised, it causes your body to make a lot of spike proteins, your body then makes antibodies to those spike proteins. What Pfizer and BioNTech have not demonstrated is that that's any good for children five to 11.

We know that these vaccines cause side effects, we know that those side effects can be severe and we know that in especially in younger men, there are a lot of myocarditis and pericarditis there's a lot of heart inflammation that can follow these vaccinations.

We have no evidence that suggests that the benefit of vaccinating five to 11-year-olds outweighs the risks clinically.

Here is what we know. There are a lot of scared parents out there who watch, you know, too much of your competitors. There are a lot of scared teachers out there who don't want to get COVID and think kids are going to give it to them even though almost all the evidence suggests the reverse is true.

And so those people are trying to get kids vaccinated basically for their own peace of mind, and I think that's a terrible thing.

CARLSON: Yes, it is an absolutely terrible thing, and the question of course arises, it has never been answered, what threat do unvaccinated people pose to the vaccinated? It is a longer conversation.

Really quick, and this is complex, but you were the first person I saw to point out the President of the United States came out on television a couple of weeks ago and said I demand private employers with more than a hundred people working for them impose vaccine mandates, but there was never an executive order to that effect. Has there been, as of tonight?

BERENSON: No. There has not been as of now, and this is really interesting. 

This goes right to the heart of your questions about authoritarianism. So you know, just as the Biden administration essentially compelled Twitter to you know, to push me off and is compelling social media companies to crack down on dissent around COVID, and you know you know we may -- I hope at some point very soon that I'll have some discovery to show exactly what happened in all of this.

They are back dooring a vaccine mandate and so what they're doing is they're trying to get companies that contract with the Federal government, which is a lot of companies to essentially force all their employees to be vaccinated and force their subcontractors to be vaccinated.

And so without even an executive order, just sort of by administrative orders at regulatory agencies, they are trying to do this, and what's amazing, Tucker, is that big companies are not pushing back on this. On some level, they like this because they don't want to have to lose employees who would go elsewhere to companies where they don't have to be vaccinated.

So if you're a big company, all you care about is that you don't lose employees -- who especially in a tight labor market and that's what these companies are doing. I have to say, to think about this level of sort of corporate government autocracy, you know you're thinking about modern China, you're thinking about pre-World War II Germany, it is really dangerous when all the levers of power are pointing the same way. We're not even talking about academia or the rest of the media.

CARLSON: Exactly.

BERENSON: But you know big companies you traditionally thought of them as conservative, now they're on board with this authoritarianism.

CARLSON: When every institution in American life is a raid against the middle class, I think you know the country will change fast and it is, and you've been one of the great chroniclers of that. A brave man, Alex Berenson, thank you.

BERENSON: Well, thank you. Thank you, Tucker.

CARLSON: By the way, just to be totally clear. This has almost nothing to do with the vaccine itself. You could have gotten the vaccine, good for you if you want that. You can totally support the vaccine, you can work at Pfizer.

It doesn't matter, forcing people to take medicine they don't want is a turning point from which we will not return. This is the single biggest issue in American life and it has nothing to do with COVID or the vaccine, it has to do with forcing people to violate their own consciences, violating their bodily autonomy, and basically making the point that the government and Big Business is in charge of you, every detail of your life.

There is nothing bigger than this than mandates. Of course, the Republican Congress is ignoring it almost completely.

So, it's not just the United States that the authoritarian wave is breaking over, take a look at Canada and the man who runs that country, Justin Trudeau, obviously, a lunatic and a buffoon. But in his public statements, a picture of our future, we'll have that next.

By the way, right now on tuckercarlson.com, you can get the new book. You can cut out amazon.com, which gets nothing. I like saying that. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: So, Donald Trump and Alex Jones and a whole lot of other people are no longer allowed on Twitter, but Justin Trudeau is. He is the Prime Minister of Canada. Now, that's unfair, of course but it's also interesting because Trudeau is way crazier than any of the people who've been banned from Twitter that we're aware of.

But you can see him think in real time, and that's kind of cool. It tells you a lot.

He just sent this tweet out quote: "People across the country are lighting candles to honor indigenous women girls and 2SLGBTQQIA++." Now that's a group, a so-called community, most of these communities by the way consists of people who've got nothing in common with each other and don't even know each other. There are no meetings or anything, they're not real communities, they're constructs of politicians. But whatever.

What the hell is he talking about? What are the chances Justin Trudeau has no idea what he's talking about? He's not even sure how you're supposed to say that acronym. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JUSTIN TRUDEAU, CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER: I will never apologize for standing up for an LGDP -- LGT -- LBG -- LGBTQ2+, kids' rights.

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CARLSON: It's all pretty great, also a little terrifying.

Gad Saad is a very interesting professor, author of the new book, "The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense," And boy, is that true.

Professor, thanks so much for coming on. We appreciate your being here. So, what do you make of the Prime Minister of Canada coming out with a vehement defense of, an endorsement of a group whose name he can't even pronounce or define?

GAD SAAD, PROFESSOR AND AUTHOR "THE PARASITIC MIND": Well, it's part and parcel of his moral confusion and moral hypocrisy when he was a parliamentarian, when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau got very upset because Stephen Harper referred to honor killings and child bride and female genital mutilation as barbaric, Justin Trudeau wasn't angry at those acts, he was angry that Stephen Harper would call them barbaric, so that gives you a sense of this moral compass.

CARLSON: So this -- it's not about protecting human rights, which I think all of us would be strongly for. I certainly would. It's about elevating some groups and hurting others.

SAAD: Indeed and I mean, I see this all through my scientific career. It is no longer about judging -- when you apply for a scientific grant, it's no longer about the worth of the scientific application, it's about whether you adhere to certain diversity inclusion and equity edicts.

So, these dreadful ideas, these parasitic ideas have real world consequences. They start off in the esoteric world of the ivory tower, but eventually they break out and now they infect every nook and cranny of our societies.

CARLSON: I hope that our audience will take a look at your book in which you lay this out in some great detail, but I just have to sum up by asking the obvious question: Is this slowing down or is it picking up steam? Do you see an end to this?

SAAD: I mean, it is picking up regrettably, but I am optimistic and that I truly believe that the silent majority despises this stuff. If we can activate our inner honey badger and speak in unison, we'll get rid of these parasitic ideas by next Tuesday. If we don't, it'll be a slow train ride to hell.

CARLSON: What a great -- I'm glad I asked that question -- what a great -- if we can activate our inner honey badgers, we can end this by next Tuesday, but if we don't, it's a train to hell. Well, that's -- I'll put that on the fridge.

Gad Saad, appreciate your coming on. Congrats on the book.

SAAD: Thank you so much. Cheers.

CARLSON: Thank you. So Corporate America is now completely committed to woke activism, so how did that happen exactly? It didn't happen by accident, it happened all at once. What was the mechanism that allowed you to wake up one morning and Coca-Cola all of a sudden hates your family. 

How'd that happen?

Our next guest knows, he studies this stuff for a living as a Wall Street analyst and he has the answer. We'll be right back.

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CARLSON: All of a sudden, Delta Air Lines sounds like the Sociology Department in Oberlin and not just Delta, all the big companies. How'd that happen? It happened super-fast, really quickly.

For a brand new episode of "Tucker Carlson Today," we spoke to a man who actually knows the answer, Stephen Soukup has spent decades analyzing Wall Street and he knows how Corporate America went left. Here is part of it.

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STEPHEN SOUKUP, AUTHOR AND FORMER RESEARCHER: I want people to understand what's going on in business and what's going on behind the scenes financing business and to understand how radically political that has become and how dangerous that is to what we understand as America, what we understand as a free enterprise system, the engine that brought America to where it is.

This is a tremendous risk and eventually it will have unpleasant and uncomfortable ramifications.

CARLSON: How free are -- I mean, a lot of conservatives I should say have been very slow to criticize Corporate America because they believe in free markets as they often say, free minds and free markets.

SOUKUP: Right.

CARLSON: That was somebody's slogan in Washington at some point and I think most conservatives agree with that. I mean, they don't want heavily regulated markets, they really believe in capitalism in its purest expression.

SOUKUP: Right.

CARLSON: Does that system, the free market system still exist at scale in this country?

SOUKUP: It does, but it doesn't really exist in Big Business. I think that we have gotten to the point where our Federal government supports business when they should be supporting markets, which would involve supporting smaller businesses.

You know the overwhelming majority of Americans work at small businesses, the overwhelming majority of Americans buy products from small businesses, and yet small business has almost no political Clout, Big Business has all the political clout and business basically dragging the government along by its nose.

CARLSON: One of the main victims of the coronavirus hysteria for the past couple of years has been small business.

SOUKUP: Absolutely.

CARLSON: So now that the smoke is beginning to clear, what does the picture look like? So, January 2020, what percentage of the economy was represented by small businesses and what do you think that will look like going forward?

SOUKUP: I'm afraid that it is going to be an even lesser percentage every year henceforth, in large part because what we've gotten ourselves into is a system that -- and there is some debate among those of us who study this, whether it is a corporatist state or a corporatocratic state. I can think -

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CARLSON: What is the difference?

SOUKUP: A corporatist state would be collusion between corporate businesses and government in which the government is pulling the strings. A corporatocracy would be the same collusion but business is pulling the strings. I tend to think that we are in what we would a corporatocracy.

CARLSON: Yes, I would agree with that, on the basis of no evidence, just watching as a daily news consumer. That is what it looks like to you.

SOUKUP: I definitely believe that government is doing what business demands as opposed the other way around.

CARLSON: That seems even less healthy than government helping business -- with government controlling business because at least, government is theoretically accountable to voters, businesses are not.

SOUKUP: Right. Well, and that's one of the things. When I talk about woke capital, as in the dictatorship of woke capital, I use that term to mean the top-down antidemocratic means by which some of the biggest names in business are trying to change the relationship between the citizen and the state.

And so, the antidemocratic nature of it is one of the key components to what is going on and why it matters so much.

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CARLSON: Stephen Soukup, that guy knows a lot, little shocked by it, actually. Absolutely fascinating hour. It is a brand new episode of "Tucker Carlson Today." It is on FOX Nation.

We are out of time tonight. We are grateful that you tuned in.

We will see you Monday and every weeknight at 8:00 p.m., the show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.

See you then.

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