I have something of a love/not-love relationship with Tucker Carlson.

Well, that is an exaggeration. I actually have no relationship with Tucker Carlson, or rather it is one-sided. But you get the idea. I appreciate that he says what he thinks without equivocation, and I think he is often very right; I also think he can be very wrong at times. Go figure.

In the clips I saw from his interviews with the candidates, I thought he did something that almost never happens: get candidates to be candid and answer real questions. Hence the Hindenburg moments, where candidates blew their chances over big issues, not over minor stumbles or personal foibles. That is how it should be. If you are going to self-immolate, it shouldn’t be because you drink too much water during a debate.

Tucker gave a speech at the Turning Point USA conference that was pure Tucker Carlson. Saying exactly what he thinks, and showing why people pay attention to him.

𝗧𝗨𝗖𝗞𝗘𝗥: “No One Is Punished for Lying; People Are Only Punished for Telling the Truth”

“When something is clearly or very likely untrue, it poses no threat to anyone. What’s scary and what will elicit a response are true things,” remarked @TuckerCarlson. “No one is… pic.twitter.com/qnLd0XwK3f

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) July 16, 2023

What Tucker is saying here is obviously true, or at least so close to true that it doesn’t make much of a difference. It is clear that some people pay a price for lying, but for the most part, the powers that be are just fine with lies and deploy them strategically all the time. In fact, Joe Biden has tweeted out two obvious lies today–that he created the 888 suicide hotline (Trump did) and that real wages have increased since he became president. Neither is true, and nobody is censoring him. There will be no consequences, and the social media companies who censor true things all the time will do nothing. Only on Twitter, with community notes, is there going to be any consequence, and that consequence is simply that people are allowed to demonstrate that he is wrong.

The MSM lies all the time. I am not talking about mistakes, but rather outright lies. Jennifer Rubin printed an obvious lie and it took days to make a correction, and with a history of printing lies she is still employed as a “conservative” columnist. James Comey is feted, as is Adam Schiff, and they lie as a matter of routine. Even Administration officials who have committed perjury before Congress kept their jobs, and now are respected commentators on TV as if they are credible.

Lying has been good business for them. The media knows they are liars and promotes them as truth-tellers. Happens all the time. Fauci is by now a proven liar–we have his emails proving he lied. He is a hero.

The Lincoln Project created a hoax against Glenn Youngkin and is still rolling in the dough and promoted by the Left. The SPLC lies constantly, but since they smear Republicans it is promoted and used by Facebook as a fact-checker and to censor people.

But people who tell inconvenient truths? They are conspiracy theorists, fascists, White supremacists, you name it.

It is the truth-tellers who are reviled and punished. In Great Britain, the banks are refusing to do business with vocal conservatives now. Nigel Farage and a host of others are being de-banked based upon an informal social credit system, making it impossible to live in the modern world. Soon enough Central Bank Digital Currencies will become a new method to kick you out of the economy if you are in disfavor.

The Elite is at war with the truth. By this I don’t mean that conservatives are always right or always tell the truth–that is an impossibility–but rather the Elite is self-consciously aware that what they are selling is not what people want to buy, so they simply lie and punish people who tell the truth. They silence them, they doxx them, protest outside their homes, get them fired, and try to ruin their lives. Look at what they did to Kavanaugh in order to keep him off the Court.

Can you recall a time when a prominent liberal has put out completely false information and then been censored by social media? I can’t. Happens all the time. Google apparently demonetizes and deboosts posts about certain topics–a form of punishment for saying unapproved things.

The Left used to be outraged about such tactics–the “Red Scare” is one example–but it either turns out that they have changed their minds on speech or only care if Left-wing speech is suppressed. Even the formerly free-speech absolutist American Civil Liberties Union is foursquare behind punishing the wrong kind of speech.

This happened to Tucker Carlson himself. Many people think he was let go because of the Dominion lawsuit; that is untrue, given that others at Fox did far more to platform people who defamed Dominion. He just wasn’t easily controlled and was going off-script.

The remedy for speech that is wrong or offensive is not less speech, but more and better speech. It certainly isn’t punishment. Yet punishment it is these days.

My latest Substack revisits something that happened to me in the hospital in 2016

I didn't realize at the time, but it was the start of naked politics among doctorshttps://t.co/KydHP1kjxY pic.twitter.com/JWsqBVJ9yd

— Vinay Prasad MD MPH (@VPrasadMDMPH) July 15, 2023

This is poisonous, but now so common that many people have grown used to it. A great example is what has happened in medicine. In two days I have seen two pieces of evidence about how doctors are now punishing patients for saying or believing the wrong thing. The first was an essay by Vinay Prasad about how a medical resident started arguing with a patient about Trump–a man who was dying of cancer and considering discontinuing treatment.

Another was this:

A @wakeforestmed 4th year medical student says she abused a patient because he laughed at her pronoun pin. She has since deleted her account. pic.twitter.com/2m3DsjTFZx

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 29, 2022

Should doctors be in the business of punishing patients for having the “wrong” opinions? Of course not. But apparently, it is becoming more common. Look at what is happening to Jordan Peterson in Canada, where they are trying to take his license away. Here in Minnesota Scott Jensen, a doctor and former Republican candidate for governor, has had his license to practice threatened for deviating mildly from the COVID consensus.

Tucker is absolutely right: it is much more dangerous to be a dissenter from the Narrative who is telling the truth than to be somebody who asserts or believes obvious falsehoods.

Bonus: an amusing skit about Tucker Carlson’s facial expressions: