(LifeSiteNews) — Religious and ethical moral norms, that is “taboos,” which have allowed American society to govern itself, are being rapidly undermined and replaced by “the people who run our country,” argues Tucker Carlson in the second installment of his new show on Twitter.
This has brought about a softening of attitudes toward many established “taboos,” such as adultery, drug use, racism, and now — the former Fox News host warns — child molestation.
Ep. 2 Cling to your taboos! pic.twitter.com/45AeVdtwOu
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 8, 2023
In order to “control [even] what people think,” dictators “need to take charge of the society’s taboos,” Carlson asserted.
“A taboo is something that, by popular consensus, is not allowed. A taboo may not be illegal, but it doesn’t need to be. Over time, social prohibitions are more powerful and more enduring than laws,” he said demonstrating how religious societies, such as traditional Christians, govern themselves through their rejection of behaviors like adultery.
Other commentators will use the language of “public religion” to describe this framework of norms, stating quite frankly that for America, this framework used to be Christianity and biblical norms, and “everybody knew that.”
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However, Carlson noted, “What’s interesting is how fast our taboos are changing. This is not happening organically. What we’re allowed to dislike is being dictated to us from above, sometimes by force.”
The former Fox News host, who enjoyed the highest-rated cable news show in history before being cancelled on April 24, pointed out how formerly “it was taboo in this country to attack people on the basis of their race,” but punishing them now “based on their skin color is not only permitted in modern America, it is mandatory for business and government and higher education, as long as the victims are white.”
In addition, he provided the example of adultery having been considered a disqualifying factor for anyone seeking higher office as late as 1992, but Bill Clinton was the last presidential candidate who was required to face that standard, Carlson proposed.
“One by one, with increasing speed, our old taboos have been struck down. Those that remain have lost their moral force,” he said. “Stealing, flaunting your wealth, striking women, smoking marijuana on the street, shameless public hypocrisy, taking other people’s money for not working. All of these things used to be considered unacceptable in America. Not anymore.”
“So it probably shouldn’t surprise us that the greatest taboo of all is teetering on the edge of acceptability: child molestation,” Carlson warned. “A generation ago, talking to someone else’s children about sex was widely considered grounds for a thrashing. Touching them sexually was effectively a death penalty offense.”
The commentator then compared how the public in Wisconsin was inclined to celebrate the killing of convicted serial child molester and murderer Jeffrey Dahmer in a prison bathroom in 1994, with the changed attitudes reflected in the Kyle Rittenhouse case in 2020.
During the BLM riots, “Rittenhouse defended his life from a convicted child molester, Joseph Rosenbaum.” Carlson explained. “Rosenbaum was trying to kill Rittenhouse, so Rittenhouse shot him in self-defense.”
“But it was Joseph Rosenbaum whom the media cast as the victim of the story. Kyle Rittenhouse, meanwhile, an underage boy fending off violence from a child molester, was denounced as the villain. Ultimately, he was indicted for murder,” the host recalled.
“One of the things that this tells us is the people who run our country no longer see child molesters as the worst among us,” he said.
This became more obvious due to an extensive Wall Street Journal “exposé about kiddy porn on Instagram” earlier this week that Carlson observed. Despite the WSJ reporting how Instagram “helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage sex content,” the most shocking aspect of this story was that nothing of any significance happened in response.
“The largest circulation newspaper in the United States revealed that one of the world’s most influential companies was promoting pedophilia, and nobody in power did anything about it. The Justice Department did not announce an investigation. Congress did not schedule hearings,” he said.
Noting how 10 of 11 press releases from the FBI’s Washington field office over the last month have been regarding January 6, Carlson commented, “Now you know why the feds were ignoring kid-touchers on Instagram. They’re too busy to respond. They’ve got much more important things to do.”
While it has been broadly noted that Carlson’s former 8 p.m. time slot show on Fox News was the industry’s greatest success, averaging approximately 3.5 million viewers per night, his inaugural Twitter episode on Tuesday currently shows 111.3 million views and this latest edition shows 44.6 million after less than one day.
Accordingly, the satire-based Babylon Bee reported on Tuesday, “Unemployed Guy’s Basement Selfie Video Crushes Fox News in Primetime Ratings.”
Unemployed Guy’s Basement Selfie Video Crushes Fox News In Primetime Ratings https://t.co/ivkvxssQht pic.twitter.com/D17lrfb9sO
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 6, 2023
An unofficial transcript of Carlson’s full monologue can be found below.
Tucker on Twitter. Ep. 2: Cling to your taboos! Unofficial Transcript
Hey, it’s Tucker Carlson. Let’s say you wanted to control a country. How would you start? Well, you would want to make sure you had the complete obedience of everybody inside your borders who was authorized to use deadly force. You would start with the military and then federal law enforcement and move your way down ultimately to agencies like the IRS. Controlling the guns would be top priority for you if you ever wanted to go dictatorial, if you wanted to be Baby Doc.
But let’s say you had deeper ambitions. Let’s say you wanted the power not simply to control people’s behavior, but to control how they think, not just their bodies, but their minds as a god would. In that case, you need to take charge of the society’s taboos.
A taboo is something that, by popular consensus is not allowed. A taboo may not be illegal, but it doesn’t need to be. Over time, social prohibitions are more powerful and more enduring than laws. Societies are defined by what they will not permit, as are famously religions. Muslims don’t eat pork. Neither do Orthodox Jews. Traditional Christians oppose extramarital sex. The Amish avoid electricity and so on.
American society isn’t overtly religious, but it’s governed by taboos, and it always has been. What’s interesting is how fast our taboos are changing. This is not happening organically. What we’re allowed to dislike is being dictated to us from above, sometimes by force.
Until fairly recently, for example, it was taboo in this country to attack people on the basis of their race. That was the main lesson of the Second World War, we were told, again and again. The one thing we learned from the Nazis is that it’s dangerous to reduce human beings to their genetic code. There is no master race. That made sense, but apparently we no longer believe it.
Punishing people based on their skin color is not only permitted in modern America, it is mandatory for business and government in higher education, as long as the victims are white. At one time, that would have been unimaginable.
So the current behavior of our politicians. As recently as the 1992 presidential campaign, adultery was considered disqualifying for anyone seeking higher office. Bill Clinton was very nearly derailed in the New Hampshire primary by his affair with Gennifer Flowers. Clinton went to elaborate lengths to lie about the relationship because he had no choice. But he was the last presidential candidate who had to meet this standard.
By 2008, it was obvious to anybody who was paying attention that Barack Obama had a strange and highly creepy personal life. Yet nobody ever asked him about it. By that point, a leader’s behavior within his own marriage, the core relationship of his life, had been declared irrelevant. It was Barack Obama’s business not yours.
One by one, with increasing speed, our old taboos have been struck down. Those that remain have lost their moral force. Stealing, flaunting your wealth, striking women, smoking marijuana on the street, shameless public hypocrisy, taking other people’s money for not working. All of these things used to be considered unacceptable in America. Not anymore.
So it probably shouldn’t surprise us that the greatest taboo of all is teetering on the edge of acceptability: Child molestation. A generation ago, talking to someone else’s children about sex was widely considered grounds for a thrashing. Touching them sexually was effectively a death penalty offense.
When Jeffrey Dahmer was bludgeoned to death in the bathroom of a Wisconsin prison in 1994, the Milwaukee district attorney had to caution the public not to turn Dahmer’s killer into a folk hero. Jeffrey Dahmer had molested and murdered children. People felt justified in celebrating his death. 25 years later, that standard had changed dramatically in the state of Wisconsin, as in the rest of the country.
In the summer of 2020, during the BLM riots in Kenosha, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse defended his life from a convicted child molester called Joseph Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum was trying to kill Rittenhouse, so Rittenhouse shot him in self-defense. But it was Joseph Rosenbaum whom the media cast as the victim of the story. Kyle Rittenhouse, meanwhile, an underage boy fending off violence from a child molester, was denounced as the villain. Ultimately, he was indicted for murder.
One of the things that this tells us is the people who run our country no longer see child molesters as the worst among us. It’s never been more obvious than it was yesterday when The Wall Street Journal ran a long exposé about kiddy porn on Instagram. Instagram, the Journal found, “helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage sex content.” Instagram connects pedophiles and connects them to content sellers on child pornography. In one instance, the paper discovered that Instagram was recommending the phrase ‘incest toddlers’ to users who had expressed interest in similar material.
By the way, no one at Instagram denied that any of this has happened. Nor did Mark Zuckerberg, who controls the company. The Journal’s story was accurate, was all pretty shocking, but not as shocking as what happened next, which was effectively nothing at all.
The largest circulation newspaper in the United States revealed that one of the world’s most influential companies was promoting pedophilia, and nobody in power did anything about it. The Justice Department did not announce an investigation. Congress did not schedule hearings. The guy who runs Instagram, Adam Mosseri, still has his job. In fact, Mosseri’s last tweet, which is pinned, is a video of himself bragging about how effective Instagram’s algorithm is. Keep in mind, as you watch this, it’s real.
Adam Mosseri: People often talk about the algorithm, but there is no one algorithm for Instagram. There are many algorithms and ranking processes we use to try to personalize the experience, to make it as interesting as we can for each and every person who uses Instagram. We believe in this idea of personalization. What you’re interested in, and what I’m interested in is different. So that your Instagram for my Instagram should be different.
What you’re interested in and what I’m interested in is different, Mosseri explains patiently. So your Instagram feed will be different from mine. You’re interested in children. That’s why you’re getting all the ‘incest toddler’ posts. It’s a highly personalized experience. That tweet is still up tonight.
Of course, everybody at Instagram, in fact, everyone everywhere in authority will still claim to think that child molestation is bad. But the tone has changed unmistakably. When they say it’s ‘bad,’ they mean it in a kind of abstract way: ‘bad,’ like a civil war in central Africa is ‘bad.’ You wouldn’t prefer it, but there are reasons it happens.
That’s why we now refer to pedophiles as ‘minor attracted persons’ because honestly, ‘who can judge? These people are a sexual minority, so pause before you attack them. And in any case, it’s not like pedophiles are barging into the Capitol building to sit in Nancy Pelosi’s chair, or asking uncomfortable questions about the last election. For miscreants like that, no punishment is too harsh.’
So far this month, the FBI’s Washington field office has issued 11 press releases. Ten out of 11 have been about January 6. Keep in mind that January 6th happened more than two and a half years ago. Now you know why the feds were ignoring kid-touchers on Instagram. They’re too busy to respond. They’ve got much more important things to do, like finding white supremacists.
White supremacists are America’s new child molesters. We’ve got zero tolerance for white supremacists because no one threatens the life of this country more than they do. Here’s Joe Biden once again, making that very clear last month.
Joe Biden: To stand up against the poison of white supremacy as I did my inaugural address to single it out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. And I’m not saying this because I’m at a black HBCU. I say wherever I go.
Pardon the feedback, but you heard the point. White supremacy is the most dangerous threat to the American homeland. Joe Biden just told us that. It’s more dangerous than the threat of nuclear war with Russia. It’s more dangerous than the threat of the Mexican drug cartels who have already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and are now in control of swaths of our southwestern states.
White supremacy is that bad, Joe Biden says. In fact, it’s worse. But what is it? That’s the question. Can anyone in authority actually define white supremacy? What is it? Is white supremacy liking white people too much? If so, that’s going to put those of us with white children in a pretty tough spot. Or is white supremacy something much more obviously bad, like trying to expel all non-whites from America and creating some kind of ethno-state?
If that’s Joe Biden’s definition, what exactly is the scope of this threat? How many people are currently working on this American white ethno-state project, and what are the chances are going to pull it off? Our guess is not very many and precisely zero, but we can’t say for sure because no one has showed us the numbers.
These are not rhetorical questions. When the president of the United States describes something as the worst possible crime Americans can commit, you have a right to know what that crime is. You used to have that right. Under a pre-revolutionary legal code before George Floyd, questions like these were easy to answer. A crime was defined as something that an elected legislature had explicitly banned, usually an act that hurts somebody else. In America, crimes are described precisely with words in English and then preserved in books, which you could read yourself. If you ever wondered whether you were committing a crime, you could just look it up. You could know for sure whether you were a criminal. Now you can’t. And needless to say, that’s the point. The point of the exercise is to keep you off balance, to keep you afraid. When no one’s willing to define the offense, you can’t be sure whether or not you’re committing it. You could be accused at any time and everything you have taken from you. You live in fear. Remember this guy?
NBC News Report, June 2020: Emmanuel Cafferty was driving near a Black Lives Matter protest in Poway in his SDG&E truck when he says he noticed somebody following him and trying to get his attention. Later, that person posted a picture of him making what some believed is a white supremacy symbol on Twitter. Cafferty says he had no idea about any white power symbols and was just cracking his knuckles outside his window when the picture was taken of him. Later that day, he says he was notified by SDG&E that he would be suspended pending an investigation. And a few days later, he was fired.
What that man did was so offensive, as you just saw, that local news had to blur the photograph of his hand. He was fired from his job. His life was destroyed for cracking his knuckles. He didn’t know cracking his knuckles was racist, in his defense. But then nobody did until the day that for Emmanuel Cafferty was unwise enough to crack them. When a crime has no definition, anyone can be guilty of it.
It’s hard to relax in a country like that. The old system was better. Government operated on the basis of laws, not amorphous moral terror. Politicians couldn’t accuse you of something they couldn’t define. The legal code was straightforward. Child molestation was a crime. Having unfashionable opinions was not.
Outside of the public sphere, the population mostly governed itself as it does in every society, and used taboos to do it. You knew what was allowed and what wasn’t because the rules didn’t change very often.
The taboos were organic. They derive from collective experience and instinct, the two most reliable guides to life. They evolved for a reason. They still do. Our job at this point is to protect them, despite the hectoring, the nonstop hectoring from the people in charge. You know the outlines of right and wrong. You’re born knowing them. So don’t let them talk you out of what you can smell. Don’t let them rationalize away your intuitive moral sense. Cling to your taboos like your life depends on them because it does. Cherish and protect them like family heirlooms. That’s exactly what they are.
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