Since his separation from Fox News, political commentator Tucker Carlson hasn’t spoken much publicly—until this weekend.
In a rare spurt of appearances, he enjoyed the adulation of thousands of enthusiastic conservatives at political gatherings in two states.
On July 14, he publicly grilled most of the top-tier Republican presidential candidates—with the exception of former President Donald Trump—at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa. As the nation’s first state to caucus, it’s been the midwestern mecca of political activity in recent weeks.
Then, Mr. Carlson caught a flight to Florida, where he lives in cooler times of the year, to speak the next day at the Turning Point Action Conference in West Palm Beach.
Speaker line-ups at Turning Point events often read like a who’s who of conservative politics, sometimes even drawing leading figures from other countries.
This time, the two-day conference attracted about 6,000 people—mostly college-age conservatives—from around the country to hear from GOP firebrands. Attendees also mingled, attended Republican strategy workshops on winning elections, and shopped for patriotic merchandise and Trump gear.
Mr. Carlson was one of the crowd favorites.
Tight Security for Trump Speech
On Day 1, conference-goers crammed into the Palm Beach Convention Center’s main hall after spending hours in line. They inched forward in the blazing sun, waiting to be inspected in screenings overseen by the U.S. Secret Service.
Once inside, attendees heard from a string of outspoken supporters of Mr. Trump, the reason for the tight security. His champions included congressmen Byron Donalds and Matt Gaetz, both Republicans representing Florida.
“We ride or die with Donald John Trump,” Mr. Gaetz said, above the roaring crowd, when it was his turn to speak. He also proclaimed he’d be introducing “in the coming days a national prayer-in-school law,” an announcement that brought more raucous cheers.
Also riling up the crowd was Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who spoke in the standing-room-only space. He said he’s been criticized for not attacking his chief opponent, apparently alluding to Mr. Trump.
“I’m not running against anyone in this race,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “I’m running for our country.”
The 37-year-old political newcomer received an enthusiastic standing ovation as he left the stage.
‘All the Cool People are Here’
As Mr. Carlson stepped out to plumes of yellow pyrotechnics shooting up from the front of the stage, attendees were on their feet again, cheering and holding up phones to capture video of the moment.
“Thank you,” he repeated over and over, shaking his head and chuckling. “I don’t think most unemployed people get a reception like that.”
As the cheering and clapping continued, he scanned the audience, clearly recognizing some, and exclaiming, “Roger Stone! All the cool people are here. It’s, like, unbelievable.”
As if surprised by the unrelenting chorus of whooping, he said with incredulity, “Wow. I haven’t been around a ton of people in a while. But I never miss this event. Ever. And I meet the nicest people, really, that I ever meet at these.”
In contrast, Mr. Carlson expressed disdain for the work he’d done the day before discussing presidential candidates’ campaign platforms. He usually despises politicians, Mr. Carlson said, because “they tend to be soulless,” with sad personal lives, seeking to “win affirmation” from strangers, which he finds “pathetic.”
In person, though, they’re “charming,” he said. “I like almost all of them when I meet them.”
He didn’t want “to attack anyone on personal grounds” but “it’s tempting,” he laughed, as the crowd chanted, “Do it! Do it!”
Instead, he said, as if he couldn’t resist, he wanted to offer “general observations, which I think are more edifying than just, like, savaging Mike Pence.”
The crowd cheered more, egging him on. But Mr. Carlson insisted it “would be wrong because it’s too easy.”
Mr. Pence, the former vice president under Mr. Trump, stunned many conservatives when he argued in his Iowa forum appearance the day before that the United States has been too slow to provide tanks and pilot training to Ukraine.
Looking incredulous, Mr. Carlson stopped him and began describing the faltering economy of the United States and the country’s escalating crime, public filth, and suicide rates.
“Where’s the concern for the United States in that?” Mr. Carlson demanded during the interview.
“That’s not my concern,” Mr. Pence replied. “Tucker, I’ve heard that routine from you before but that’s not my concern.”
“I’m running for President in the United States because I think this country is in a lot of trouble. I think Joe Biden has weakened America at home and abroad. And as President of the United States, we’re going to restore law and order in our cities. We’re going to secure our border. We’re going to get this economy moving again. And we’re going to make sure that we have men and women on our courts at every level that will stand for the right to life and defend all the God given liberties enshrined in our Constitution,” he said.
“Anybody that says we can’t be the leader of the free world and solve our problems at home has a pretty small view of the greatest Nation on Earth. We can do both.”
Lesson Learned
He learned much from his day of interviews in Iowa, Mr. Carlson told the Turning Point crowd. One was that what Republicans in Washington “actually care about” are “very different from the things that matter to the people who vote for them.”
He had believed that would change back in 2016, when the politicians saw that “Republicans elected a guy basically on the promise to blow up the Republican Party,” he said.
But even the election of Mr. Trump hasn’t turned many elected politicians to align with the people they represent, he has since observed.
He also realized that “almost everybody in elected office in the Republican Party has internalized the other side’s rules for debate.”
There’s “no more self-defeating way to go into politics or life than to accept the terms that your enemies offer before the conversation’s even begun,” Mr. Carlson said. “Because there’s really no way of winning.”
He used the example of the government’s responses to COVID-19, such as mandating masking, lockdowns, and vaccines. Most people went along with leaders’ demands, he said.
Those who resisted or questioned the policies were deemed “moral criminals—they’re outlaws,” he said. So they were censored, silenced.
The War in Ukraine
The same is happening when anyone questions the war in Ukraine, Mr. Carlson said. It’s assumed all will see “one side is bad and one side is virtuous,” he said. And it’s “completely fair” to see Russia as bad and Ukraine as good, he admitted. But that’s not the point, he argued.
The point is that Americans have a “fundamental right to choose who they hate. No one is allowed to force you to be mad at somebody else.”
Yet, despite the fact that Russia hasn’t killed any Americans in the war, he said, many conservatives are desperate to send more expensive weapons, as well as deadly “cluster bombs,” to Ukraine.
It’s all to preserve democracy there, proponents of that view say. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he’ll have to suspend elections because of the war.
And “there are clergy in Ukraine who are being thrown in prison, convents raided, nuns kicked out, priests handcuffed, thrown in jail!” Mr. Carlson said.
He said he asked a “self-appointed Christian leader,” who has spent his life fighting for religious freedom, about that.
“And he said with a straight face, ‘Well they had the wrong views.’”
“Is that freedom?” Mr. Carlson challenged. “No, that’s insane!”
The same Christian leader argued that Ukraine needs weapons donated by the Unites States and that we “need to do this because that’s what leadership looks like,” Mr. Carlson recalled.
That’s a “disgusting” view, Mr. Carlson said, contrasting it to a father’s leadership in breaking up fights between siblings.
“If you’re the leader, the last thing you do is sow more chaos,” he said. “You stop the chaos. Leadership is bringing order and regularity and predictability to a chaotic scene.”
And yet, in providing unending support to Ukraine, that’s what, “in the name of American leadership, this administration [of President Joe Biden], with the full participation of the Republican Party, is foisting on the world.”
Mr. Trump, on the other hand, “is clear on this,” that he wants to stop the war, he added. “And they hate him for it.”
Washington elites want to keep others from participating in foreign-policy decisions, he said. But citizens should have a right to question war, saying, “You’re doing this in my name, with my money, and potentially my children.”
It’s reasonable to want to help Ukraine, he said. But the problem is that people in this country are shut down when they disagree. Russia has been painted as the enemy and Americans are “not allowed” to think otherwise, he said.
And “once you are prevented from thinking something, you are completely controlled by the person who’s convinced you of that.”
Problems at Home
More maddening is that politicians seem to ignore real problems here at home, according to Mr. Carlson. They don’t seem to notice the 100,000 Americans who die each year after being poisoned by fentanyl made in Mexico. It floods into this country with illegal immigrants who stream across the unsecured southern border, he said.
They don’t seem to see that the quality of life in America is getting worse, he added. There’s more homelessness, filth, and graffiti, suggesting “we’ve given up, we don’t care.”
“We’re allowing people who create nothing to destroy what we’ve built and we’re not fighting back,” he railed. “Grafitti is one step from total society collapse. Period.”
Allowing graffiti, Mr. Carlson said, means “we have no self-respect, at all. We don’t care enough about our civilization to keep it clean, to keep it pretty.”
Still, many will argue graffiti is art, he said, and “you’re not allowed to think” otherwise.
So “staying unaffected by the propaganda—that’s like the main goal of my life,” he said. “You can’t allow the propagandists to set the terms.”
“Consider the things you’re not allowed to say” now in this country, he said, pointing to the controversy over the Jan. 6 unrest at the U.S. Capitol.
People participating felt the 2020 election had been stolen “and they were really mad,” he said.
But it quickly was deemed a “racist insurrection,” and people became furious if others didn’t agree. That was troubling to Mr. Carlson.
Anyone who tried to talk about their concerns was “de-platformed, de-banked, basically hounded out of public life in America, bankrupted, in a lot of cases put in jail,” he said.
“Fired!” someone in the crowd shouted.
“Yea, or fired,” Mr. Carlson said, laughing along with the crowd.
“Sorry,” he said, putting his hands to his temples and grinning. “I was so into it that I lost all self-awareness for a minute.”
‘Thought Crimes’
On a June 7 podcast with English comedian Russell Brand, Mr. Carlson said he doesn’t know why he was fired suddenly by Fox News.
But his questioning of whether the federal government has been honest about Jan. 6 widely is one of the speculated likely cause for his termination.
For anyone wanting to explore alternative views on Jan. 6, “that conversation was literally banned,” he said at the Turning Point event. “It’s the guidelines of most social media companies that you can’t have that conversation.”
But a country that doesn’t allow discussions about “the process of electing its leaders is not a democracy, by definition,” he said. “You can’t have a democracy without free speech. Period.”
Meanwhile, serious crimes go unpunished, he said, such as defrauding investors of billions of dollars, or “burning down buildings, impoverishing people, starting totally counterproductive wars we can’t win that kill a lot of our citizens, leaving the border open so seven million people can walk across—those are not small things.”
And “what are the crimes that are punished?” he asked. “Thought crimes. Thinking the wrong things. Having the wrong beliefs. Saying unapproved words.”
And when words are deemed “wrong,” he’s realized, “those words are always true.”
He warned against “the people who censor your words and thoughts.”
He also warned against getting overwhelmed by reports that seem to be “the Mt. Everest of lunacy,” such as that men can give birth or breastfeed infants.
Where is Tucker Now?
Since being fired by Fox, Mr. Carlson has released nine episodes of what’s known as Tucker on Twitter. Most have been between five to 18 minutes long.
The latest, released on July 11, is a two-and-a-half-hour interview with the controversial social media mega-influencer Andrew Tate.
Mr. Tate is on house arrest at his estate in Romania after spending 92 days in what he describes as a cockroach-infested jail. He and his brother were arrested in December for what he says are fake human trafficking and rape charges. The Tate brothers now are suing their accusers, asking a Palm Beach County judge for $5 million in damages.
In the interview, Mr. Tate suggests that his arrest was an attempt to silence him because of his message to followers, urging men to be physically strong and independent minded.
It’s a theme Mr. Carlson repeated to young conservatives in his 45-minute address at the Turning Point event. Diversions, he warned, are concocted by those in power “so we don’t notice they’re looting the country.”
Seeking to cover up their actions, they defend absurd positions with ferocity, he said. That’s so those with objections won’t push back on topics, such as the war in Ukraine, COVID-19 policies, and the Jan. 6 unrest.
“It’s not by accident,” he said, as he yielded the stage to Mr. Trump. “Trust me.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
I was fortunate enough to see the Blaze Summit in it’s entirety and it was a joy to behold. Tucker was absolutely surgical in his questioning, going straight to each individual candidate’s particular “cancer”. An intelligent educator could workshop it into an instructional on how to properly Q&A.
In the interest of fairness however, and while I’ve come to loathe Mike Pence (more each time I hear him speak), Tucker’s “gotcha” moment with the former Vice President really wasn’t one other than the linear soundbite aspects of it. While it’s certainly not Tucker’s fault the way in which Pence chose to respond, “That’s not my concern.” was meant as a retort to Tucker’s insinuation that Pence’s priority was getting tanks to the Ukraine. The “gotcha” could have been easily avoided by Pence if he’d chose his words carefully…and if a “gotcha” was truly had, that was it.
The attributes that make a good professional golfer would’ve helped Pence in his Q&A. Patience, calm and a good read on the green. Pence obviously doesn’t golf or is bad at it. Sometimes things work out a certain way for a reason. He’s only raised $1.2 Million in campaign contributions so far and I’m betting he’s peaked…as well as his career. I’m sensing a new MSNBC contributor on the horizon.
Every word he said is True and we must get rid of every single RIno running in 2024, no more of them to destroy our country. They are liars, follow the money with every one of them, now rich and wanting more power. It is time we stop pulling the same damn lever we did at 18. Do your own research. I am 90 and I do just that. I go to my senior center and try to have a conversation with others there to no avail. The old white men and women do not care, they do not know anything nor do they want to. I just asked a woman the other day, who took me shopping about a news article and she point blank told me I do not care about politics.I then said do you know what is going on in our country, she said NO and I do not want to even talk about it.I said you better our country is in Big Trouble, she turned around and walked away.She is one of millions who vote. We need to start doing our job and get real conservatives elected. They need to be vetted way, way back to their high school years so nothing pops up that the liberals can use to slander them. Wake up voters. We are the ones who have let our country down.