Tucker Carlson dropped his second episode on Twitter yesterday, and this one is a doozy.

I had mixed feelings about his first episode, not so much because I thought the content wasn’t good–it was–but because he scattered insults into it unnecessarily. His opposition to the US’s zealous support for Ukraine is fine–I disagree with his vehemence, but don’t think that support for the war is a litmus test of decency–but he dipped into the personal insult well too often for my taste.

Still, it definitely caused a stir, and I was happy to see that Tucker’s voice was again being broadcast.

This second episode is, in my view, dramatically better. Or at least speaks more directly to my interests.

Tremendous monologue. Also a million times more interesting and insightful than anything you’ll hear on Fox. https://t.co/hVFetPhu1G

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 8, 2023

The theme is what makes a culture a culture, and why American culture is declining so quickly and so dramatically.

His answer: taboos.

It’s an interesting and compelling argument, and one with which I am very sympathetic. It is not a comprehensive answer, of course, but as a hypothesis, it explains a lot.

Taboos are not laws: they are pre-law. What is legal and illegal is, largely, determined by what is considered taboo. If something is completely socially unacceptable, it will rarely occur and likely be illegal, although the illegality itself is hardly the point. People avoid violating taboos because the social consequences are enormous, and the laws only exist to catch the odd case of people who are willing to violate the taboo.

Taboos do what laws cannot: make people want to comply with a stricture regardless of whether they are likely to be caught and prosecuted. They enforce voluntary compliance with social norms–police, after all, are never there when you need them. Shame is, for most people, a far more powerful deterrent than a 1% chance of getting caught doing a crime.

Tucker gets to the nub of the matter when it comes to America’s social decline: there is a large-scale, organized effort to eliminate, or rather change, the taboos that regulate society. Things that were once taboo are now considered acceptable, or at least tolerable. Look at any Pride parade or what goes on in Kindergarten classrooms today, and much of it would have been taboo 20-30 years ago. Now such things are essentially mandatory.

The most compelling example he uses, at least to me, is the case of the Wall Street Journal’s investigation into kiddie porn on Instagram. I noticed this myself–I wrote about the case two days ago, and the post landed with a thud. I expect tremendous readership, but the post simply didn’t take off outside the confines of the regular readers of Hot Air.

The Journal’s investigation showed that Instagram not only hosted kiddie porn–something inevitable when billions of photos are posted all the time–but actually facilitated the practice of selling such content through creative uses of hashtags and customization of search algorithms and content curating to ensure that people who enjoy the disgusting content are fed nothing but kiddie porn.

The Journal’s exposé should have been a bombshell, but it, too, landed with a thud. Nobody seemed to care. Instagram didn’t fire anybody. They made an anodyne comment and the issue went away. No Congressional investigation. No nothing. Instead, the powers that be in Washington talked about January 6th, Donald Trump, and the size of Ron DeSantis’ penis.

Instagram essentially participates in the distribution of child pornography AND the arrangement for producing custom content for connoisseurs, and nobody made much ado.

This is the dropping of a taboo. In prior years there would have been a firestorm, and rightly so, but the taboo against pedophilia is crumbling. The laws are still there, but the enforcement? Not so much. And few people care much anymore.

It’s just sex, and we are sexual beings. Oh well. Tut tut. Move along.

We didn’t get here through the natural changing of social norms over time. It was planned, and the plan was implemented through our academic and entertainment complexes.

I and others have been warning about this for years, and again the general response is a shrug. Lots of woke moms are facilitating the breakdown of these norms in order to get social credit points, and the distribution of those credit points comes from the cultural elite.

These are Megan Fox’s sons. We used to live in the same gated community and our kids played at the park. I saw 2 of them have a full on breakdown saying they were forced by their mom to wear girls clothes as their nanny tried to console them. It’s pure child abuse. Pray for them. pic.twitter.com/k3ULKG7fFm

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 8, 2023

Ironically, while there are organizations like Moms for Liberty fighting back, the people who show up at protests are largely dads. And it is dads who are often the resistant parents regarding transition. And, as you can see, the Moms for Liberty crowd have been labeled a hate and terrorist group by the elite and the MSM. It’s not that moms care less, but rather that women are more responsive to social pressure than men, and taboos are enforced through social pressure.

It’s great to see Tucker back in the fight again. Agree or disagree, he creates controversy and debate and is simply one of the most incisive voices in the public realm these days.

I will likely watch every episode on Twitter, and almost never watched him on Fox News. This formate is perfect for him.