CLAY: We are going to be joined now by Tucker Carlson. He is on Fox News every single evening. He has the most watched television program many nights in the entirety of the country. Tucker, I appreciate you joining us. Thanks for having us on as you have many times over the past several years. I gotta start with this. I think tomorrow, Tucker, I’m gonna have to go to a school board meeting.

I’ve got two kids, the youngest two, kindergartener, I guess a first grader and a fifth grader and they’re talking about instituting a new mask mandate for my kids. It’s now been 18 months since we had 15 days to slow the spread in March of 2020. How does this ever end? I feel like there’s a lot of people out there listening to us right now that feel the exact same way. How does this end? How do we end the perpetual covid madness? And thanks for coming on with us.

TUCKER: Well, thanks for having me, by the way. I can’t believe you get to do three hours.

CLAY: (laughing)

TUCKER: In this news environment, that is a blessing.

CLAY: No kidding.

TUCKER: I envy you.

BUCK: Lots of deep dives.

TUCKER: Yeah! (laughs) And it’s wonderful and needed. I would say most of us Americans — people over 30, anyway — gave the presumption of goodwill to our medical establishment for sure and really to our political leaders at the beginning of covid. It’s a serious thing. It’s a pandemic. “They’re not gonna use it for their own aggrandizement. They’re not gonna use it to control us and become more powerful, win the next election. That’s too low.

“This is America. We don’t behave that way.” Over time, what we’ve learned is, they did. So you kind of have to ask yourself, “If something keeps happening and it’s bad and there’s no justification for it and you allow it, to what extent are you implicated in it?” In other words, we get what we put up with. If I let my kids smoke weed at the breakfast table, I guess they would. They’re kids, right?

So you have to draw limits at a certain point. You can’t participate in your own oppression or in injury to your own children. Look, if children were dying of covid in large numbers or there was some real evidence that masks protected them, then we could have a remarkable conversation. But neither one of those things is true. We do know that kids need to see the human face in order to develop.

We all need human connection in order to live. There’s so much research on this, but we don’t need any research to know what’s obvious, which is you need to see other people’s faces. It’s dehumanizing and wrong to prevent people from seeing your face or preventing you from seeing theirs. We were against the burqa about 20 minutes ago, remember?

So, to allow the authorities, the teachers unions, the school boards, the governors, the president… It doesn’t matter who’s doing it. We shouldn’t allow it. Now, this country has a long and noble tradition of civil disobedience, and I think it’s important to remember that and it’s time to resurrect it. We should not participate in injury to our own children. Why would we? How weak are you to let your our kids get hurt?

BUCK: Mask noncompliance, Tucker, is what I’ve been calling for. That’s the only way. And, by the way, that doesn’t mean everyone has to go out and get arrested for refusing to mask on a plane. But it does mean go into places without a mask. Make them tell you, “You gotta put it on.” Just start to push back in ways that you can because that’s what they have done to us essentially is the incrementalism of authoritarianism.

But it also feels, Tucker, like there’s a lot of just straight-up lying going on in the media right now. We just had Dr. Makary on. You might have seen his Wall Street Journal op-ed. We asked him questions about things like the risk to kids from the Delta variant. We asked him about naturally acquired immunity. The media right now is running scare pieces on how hospitals are gonna be overflowing with children. This is just madness. This is not rooted in any reality whatsoever.

TUCKER: Right. Right.

BUCK: But somehow, they get away with this? How is that possible?

TUCKER: Because we allow them to. I certainly went through this; I know that you both did too when this first started. You hear something and you say, “Okay, is there evidence for that?” Maybe there is; maybe there isn’t. We can debate it. And then as it became clearer over the last year and a half that on some of the big questions there’s literally no scientific evidence justifying their regulations….

You keep saying, “Wait a second. This study shows you’re wrong.” Actually, the biggest study on masks, on paper masks — the kind that American citizens use as distinct from the kinds surgeons use. The biggest study in Vietnam showed they actually abetted the transmission of viruses ’cause the viruses got stuck in the mask. They’re dirty. Look, people need oxygen, et cetera, et cetera.

You keep making the case, and they’re saying, “No, no, no. We need masks just because.” At that point you realize — again, they’re only doing this because we’re allowing them. My personal view as the father of four is you draw the line at the kids. We all have… How much indignity can you handle?

I don’t know that’s an individual decision. Should you allow lunatics for political reasons to hurt your children? That’s not a tough call. No. How about this? “No!” So I don’t know what form that takes, but I hope that nationwide people of all backgrounds, all political persuasions decide we’re not gonna do this again because it’s hurting our kids, period.

CLAY: You got a new book out, Tucker, The Long Slide: 30 Years in American Journalism. Tell us about it and what made you want to write this book at this point in time.

TUCKER: Well, it’s a collection of journalism over the last 30 years, okay. So I was a magazine writer for a long, long time, long before I went into television. That’s where I started. So I had this thing due to Schuster, just a collection assignment to put together and whatever. As I was doing that, Simon & Schuster canceled the book contract of Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri because he voted in a way they didn’t like. And I was shocked by this.

I couldn’t believe that a publisher would act as a partisan instrument on behalf of the Democratic Party and squelch speech. So I called the president of Simon & Schuster and the editor of Simon & Schuster, and I got ’em on a Zoom call and I asked them point blank, “Why did you do this?” and they basically conceited they came under political pressure from the Democratic Party to do it and so they did it.

I just thought that really was a pivot point in American history. Publishing has always stood up for the First Amendment above all, Dana Canedy and Jonathan Karp who run Simon & Schuster basically just doing the bidding of the Democratic Party.

So I wrote a chapter on that because it’s a massive contrast to the world that I grew up in, a world of free expression and free conscience that publishers upheld. So really the book is — I wouldn’t say an attack, but it’s — reporting on Simon & Schuster’s behavior and on their basically unwillingness to uphold freedom of speech in a business that exists because of freedom of speech.

BUCK: And Tucker just to be clear so then you wrote a chapter in the book The Long Slide — which is out now, Tucker’s new book; I’m sure it’s gonna be a big best-seller. You heard a chapter about how Simon & Schuster bent the knee to the DNC, and now is published by Simon & Schuster, right?

TUCKER: Well, it is. I feel like they don’t think they have a choice. Obviously, they want to cancel it but I mean they think they think that would bring them worse publicity. Yeah, and in fact I dedicated the book to Jon Karp.

BUCK: (laughing)

TUCKER: Watching Jon Karp go from an open-minded book editor to a Stalinist crusher of speech has been one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. Jon Karp’s a smart guy and now he’s just purely an instrument of political forces making people be quiet because they’re inconvenient to the Biden administration.

CLAY: Why do you think, by the way…? For him and other people, this is a big question that I’ve had for a long time, Tucker. If you get to a position in prominence in business, it probably means that over time you’ve worked hard and made pretty good decisions, and maybe yourself have decent instincts. Why are so many people so quick to give up their own agency because people are mad about a choice they might be making? I really don’t get that. That, to me, is the essence of these choices.

TUCKER: It’s such a deep question and I’m so glad you said that. I think of that all the time. If you’re Jeff Bezos and you’re the richest man in the world, maybe you can a whatever you feel like saying.

CLAY: Exactly.

TUCKER: Like the rest of us say, “Oh, I got kids in school. I got a mortgage. I better shut up and pretend that trans women are women. Okay. It’s false, but I’ll just say it because I don’t want to be punished.” But why would Jeff Bezos go along with that? A guy who’s clearly science minded, why would he go along with the lie? ‘Cause he’s a coward. That’s the truth. People crave, above all, acceptance by the group.

It’s a rare person who’s willing to deviate from the mandatory position that the group has taken. But thank God for American history. Nothing good happens in the world except for the bravery of individuals. So you look around and the people who aren’t going along with it. You guys, Glenn Greenwald, anybody else saying unpopular things right now deserves our heartfelt thanks. I really think that.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Tucker Carlson. His new book is The Long Slide, which is just out, and you should check out a copy of it. Tucker, we’re wondering here. There was this piece in Axios that I brought up earlier before you came on, “The Midterm Gusher,” and it’s essentially saying between an economy with inflation in it that looks not so hot, a border that I’ve been down to numerous times and is a complete and utter…

It’s not even… It’s just a joke now. It’s wide open within anybody can come in. No one really gets turned away if they know the basic rules and the dance they have to go through to get in. And you also have the crime issue, defund the police. No intelligent person is still walking around saying defund the police is anything but lunacy. Is there a way that the Democrats avoid paying a price for this, you think? I know it’s a ways out, but it feels like everything that the critics of the Biden administration in advance of his taking office said would happen is happening.

TUCKER: Yeah, and they know that. They’re not like us. They’re playing the long game, and they know they’re gonna get hurt in the midterms. But what will that mean? It means like Lindsey Graham — who’s like an utter fraud, he’s just a tool of the left — can jump up and down and say, “Oh, great Republicans have more power! We’re safe now,” and whatever’s going on now will continue in a quieter way.

But long-term when you change the population of the country in a way that benefits you — and that’s the point of your immigration policy — then you know like 10 years from now, it’s not even a conversation. The things that we think are controversial now we’ll take for granted them, because they’ll have an absolute one-party state, you know, an unlosable majority because they’ve changed the demographics of the country.

And, by the way, that’s not a conspiracy theory; they say this out loud. Dick Durbin said it on the floor of the Senate a couple of weeks ago. They are doing this on purpose because they know over time, they win. Again, why would you put up with that? It’s our country. I was born here. So were you! Why would you let someone wreck your country and change the population? If you believe in democracy, then my vote is diluted by the introduction of millions of new people from foreign countries. That’s an attack on democracy. Why are we letting that happen? I really don’t know.

CLAY: Tucker, did your invitation to Obama’s 60th birthday party get lost?

TUCKER: (laughing)

CLAY: I was expecting to see you on the list of celebrities there.

TUCKER: Oh, it’s so funny, the lack of self-awareness. You look at the Romanovs and wonder, “Didn’t they know that acting this way was likely to provoke some kind of radical revolutionary movement?” Nah, they didn’t. They were so up their own butts, they had no idea how out of touch they were.

And imposing mask mandates on other people’s kindergarteners and then having the party with Jay-Z or whoever on Martha’s Vineyard with 200 servants in your oceanfront property that you know for a fact isn’t gonna be destroyed by global warming. It’s such a middle finger to the country that it only tells you that they don’t even know how bad they look, and they don’t care ’cause they think they have enough power that your opinion is irrelevant. They don’t think it’s a democracy. If they did, they wouldn’t do it.

BUCK: The book is The Long Slide, Tucker Carlson the author. Also you’re all checking out Tucker Carlson Tonight, I’m sure, at 8 clock eastern on Fox. Mr. Tucker, we always appreciate it, man. Thanks for joining us.

TUCKER: You guys are the best. I’m honored. Thank you.