In a portion of Tucker Carlson’s Turning Points speech — a portion that you won’t see covered by the likes of the Washington Post or MSNBC because these institutions represent the establishment, benefit from the status quo, and have no interest in challenging it — he struck, in my opinion, analytical gold.
The veritas (emphasis added):
At some point, the basic economics really matter, and they matter because not that it's bad that rich people are getting richer. It's bad that everyone else is getting poorer. And it's especially bad that young people can't afford homes. Let me just put a very precise point on this. If you want a measure of how your economy is doing… I personally favor eliminating GDP as a measure. I don't even know what that is; it's clearly not relevant. They tell me Japan has a stagnant GDP. Have you been to Tokyo? It's the single most radicalizing experience you'll ever have because it's just so nice.
"You lost the war, really? Can we lose a war and wind up like this?" GDP, no. I don't know what even that is. The total economic activity. Oh, no, no, no. My measure's really simple. I got a bunch of kids, can they afford houses with full-time jobs at like 27, 28? And the answer is no way. And the answer is that 35-year-olds with really good jobs can't afford a house unless they stretch and go deep into debt, and I just think that's a total disaster. That's a complete disaster. Why? Two reasons. One, if people don't own things, they don't feel ownership of the country they're in, and the country gets super volatile because people feel like they've got nothing to lose. When you have a lawn, trust me, you're thinking long-term…
Nobody wants to raise their kids in an apartment. People do it because they have to; nobody wants to. People want a little house, not some mcmansion, just a little normal house. That is the actual American dream, and that is what is totally unattainable for young people…
That is a national emergency. And I know that there are certain cable channels who are spending all this time talking about, "Oh, they're about to elect a socialist in New York City," which obviously, I'm opposed to it. He's not even a real socialist. He's like a trainee vax rich kid, liberal guy. Mamdani, he's a fake leftist, but whatever.
Why do you think that's happening? One of the reasons it's happening is because normal people with normal jobs no longer believe they can win in this system.
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As I have written about extensively before for PJ Media, the overriding reason why Mamdani won the New York mayoral primary is because there is an affordability crisis in the city, which is admittedly worse than the national average but still a microcosm for the whole of America — a crisis that the establishment, as embodied by Andrew Cuomo, is conspicuously uninterested in solving.
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Tucker’s political diagnosis that the inability of an entire generation of Americans to ever have a realistic shot at the American dream constitutes a “national emergency” is correct.
And, further on, Carlson gets to the ominous prognosis, which is that true, revolutionary, French Revolution-style radicalism is definitely on the way if the current trajectory isn’t altered (emphasis added):
If you're getting rich by loaning money to people at incredibly high interest rates, that's something you're going to have to talk to God about. That is not good. That is not virtuous. That's disgusting. And the fact that nobody feels free to say that, nobody feels like you can just say, "30% on a credit card. Why is anybody paying a credit card bill?" I said to somebody recently, I feel like I'm very moderate and sensible…
I said to someone recently, "We really need a political party where it's the 'Hey, I'm not paying my credit card bill' party." And let's just bring down Citibank. Not permanently. Maybe permanently. But credit card debt is the single biggest cause of human suffering that I'm aware of in the United States…
I'm not radical. What I am is very worried that if we don't do something really soon, we're going to wind up like New York City, that there's going to be actual radicalism.
Things cannot go on as they have without serious social upheaval.
I would love to see the Republican Party come up with a rational strategy to deal with the out-of-control financial situation before things get as ugly as Tucker predicts.
But that would require bucking the edicts of the donor class that has an interest in maintaining the status quo while they bleed whatever is left of the once-great middle class dry.
