Tucker Carlson: “I lie if I'm really cornered or something. I lie.”
Published
Citation
From the September 12, 2021, edition of The Rubin Report, streamed on YouTube
DAVE RUBIN (HOST): When you have to cover some idiotic thing that [CNN's Brian] Stelter said or [CNN's Chris] Cuomo — just these clown people. When you have to cover it, right? Or Don Lemon, as you call him, like, how do you think they live with themselves at this point when they just lie again and again and we have the internet to expose the lies? This isn't 20 years ago when you were on CNN.
TUCKER CARLSON (GUEST, FOX NEWS HOST): Yeah!
RUBIN: And we couldn't expose things. We can expose it now and they still do it.
CARLSON: Well it's — I guess I would ask myself, like, I mean I lie if I'm really cornered or something. I lie. I really try not to. I try never to lie on TV. I just don't — you know, I don't like lying. I certainly do it, you know, out of weakness or whatever. But to systematically lie like that without asking yourself why am I doing this? So if these people ask themselves why am I doing this? And they say, well, I want to protect the system because I really believe in the system. Ok, who's running the system? You're lying to defend [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos? Like, you're treating [Microsoft co-founder] Bill Gates like some sort of moral leader, like, are you kidding me? How dare you do that. How dare you use your power to protect and guard the powerful even as you clamped — you know, put your boot on the neck of the weakest people — some Catholic school kid from Kentucky. It's like a parody. Are you kidding? He's a child. And you're using your power to crush him, to wreck his life. That shocked me.
And I have to say. There have been many times in the 25 years I've been in TV where I think you know, are we using this, like, very substantial power that we have to put pictures on the screen to hurt weak people. And I have done that, inadvertently over the years because I got carried away. But I really try not to. And everyone who works on our show is very aware of the most basic rule, which is don't piss down. Don't attack people beneath you. If you're going to you know, take a punch, make sure it's upward – someone who is rich or stronger, more powerful, in charge of more things than you are. Punch up. Like, that's just like a life rule. And people who punch down are the worst. They should have no power whatsoever, in my opinion.
RUBIN: Right. And the irony is that they are punching down while pretending they are doing the opposite, which is the grossest part.