Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution is an extraordinary book that builds upon the work of Pat Buchanan in Death of the West, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 and the wars between the Tea Party and the establishment in the Republican Party. It is an unabashedly populist book, but this mainstream conservative agrees with nearly everything in it. Carlson’s criticisms of America’s elite are consistently on point and there are large sections of the book demonstrating the ways that liberals have changed for the worse that even thoughtful Leftists might nod along with. It’s an artfully constructed, well-thought-out, extraordinary book and I would highly recommend it to you. As you read the 20 best quotes from the book out of the 100+ that I highlighted, you will get an idea of why you need to read the whole thing.
20) “One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.”
19) “Elites feel like good people when they read Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s exactly the kind of book you’d like to be seen bringing to the beach. What they don’t want is to change their lives in any meaningful way. Coates doesn’t ask them to. Admit you’re bad, Coates says. Gladly, they reply. Nothing changes except how elites feel about themselves. Coates is their confessor. His books are their penance.”
18) “When motherhood is less valuable to society, so are women.”
17) “It raises the most basic civic question of all: what kind of society do we want to live in? Among intellectuals, the answer used to be obvious and widely agreed upon: the goal is a free society. You knew what that meant because all free societies share the same features: They tolerate dissent. They prize reason and encourage civility. They discourage witch hunts and groupthink. They try to ensure that people aren’t punished for saying what they think. They recognize that truth is always a defense. Every nation tries to influence how its citizens behave, but a free society never presumes to control what people believe. That’s for the individual alone to decide.”
16) “In speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is. Liberals reminded America of that. Yes, they were hysterical, inconsistent, and simplistic, and often motivated by a dislike of their own country. But on a basic level, they were right: war is not the answer; it’s a means to an end, and a very costly one.”
15) “The river has changed over the years I’ve been fishing on it. It’s still pretty but no longer tidy. There’s now trash everywhere along the banks, beer bottles and takeout chicken boxes and soiled diapers. The homeless have left their rusting shopping carts and moldering sleeping bags. This section of the Potomac is on federal land, so the National Park Service has jurisdiction over it. You see park rangers driving by in their green trucks. I often wonder why they don’t clean up the mess. Then I remember: our environmental leaders don’t care about litter anymore, or even about the state of the natural world, the birds or the riverbanks. They’ve got bigger concerns now—global concerns, moral concerns—that ordinary fishermen stepping over dirty diapers and Tecate bottles couldn’t possibly understand or appreciate. But they feel good about themselves, and that’s what matters.”
14) “Did feminism make women happy? We don’t have to speculate. Since 1972, researchers at the University of Chicago have collected data for a project called the General Social Survey. The purpose is to measure the changing attitudes of Americans. They’ve discovered a lot of interesting things, but maybe the most striking is this: women have become dramatically less happy over the past forty years. In the early years of the study, women reported greater happiness than men. They’ve become progressively less content ever since. Men are now considerably more satisfied with their lives than women are. That’s true across demographic groups, regardless of income. It’s not about money.”
13) “According to the Democratic Party, the goal of immigration policy was to ensure the well-being of immigrants. ‘The current quota system,’ the platform explained, ‘discriminates against certain immigrants, including immigrants of color.’ It’s hard to think of a claim more at odds with numerical reality. In 2016, only about 18 percent of immigrants to the United States were white. Thanks almost entirely to immigration, the population of the country had gone from 84 percent white in 1965, when Congress stopped favoring European immigrants, to 62 percent white in 2015, and the number was dropping every year. There are a lot of things you could call American immigration law, but the product of white racism isn’t one of them.”
12) “One of the most influential books in recent years is Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, a guide to empowerment for women in the workplace. Published in 2013, Lean In sold more than two million copies and spawned a nonprofit foundation that organizes support groups for professional women around the world. Sandberg lays out her thesis in the book’s introduction: ‘A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes,’ she writes. ‘I believe that this would be a better world.’ Sandberg’s words are invariably characterized as a vision of equality, but that’s not quite what they are. What Sandberg is describing is sameness, a world where men and women are interchangeable parts, like widgets in a bin awaiting assembly.”
11) “Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime. Our elites relentlessly celebrate those changes, but their very scale destabilizes our society.”
10) “But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question.”
9) “When the U.S. government failed to secure the border, (Cesar) Chavez’s unionized fruit pickers acted unilaterally. In the winter of 1979, UFW members, almost all of them Hispanic, began intercepting Mexican nationals as they crossed the border and assaulted them in the desert. Their tactics were brutal: Chavez’s men beat immigrants with chains, clubs, and whips made of barbed wire. Illegal aliens who dared to work as scabs had their houses bombed and cars burned. The union paid Mexican officials to keep quiet.”
8) “Lost in the mindless celebration of change is an obvious question: why should a country with no shared language, ethnicity, religion, culture, or history remain a country? Countries don’t hang together simply because. They need a reason. What’s ours?”
7) “A 2013 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that two-thirds of children who say they believe they were born the wrong gender change their minds and come to accept their biological sex. Another study, by clinical psychologist Devita Singh, found that without adult intervention, 88 percent of kids ultimately evolve out of gender confusion.”
6) “Increasingly, having a father at home is a sign of affluence. But it is also a cause of affluence, especially for boys. Boys who grow up with a father at home earn much more as adults. Boys who grow up alone with their mothers tend to earn less. They also have more disciplinary problems in school. They read less, and less well. They’re less likely to graduate from high school or go to college. They are more likely to be unemployed and to live in poverty. They get married less often, and when they do, they divorce more. They’re more likely to be obese and have asthma. They’re far more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, exhibit antisocial behavior, and commit acts of violence. As adults, they’re twice as likely to go to prison.”
5) “If you want to know what people really care about, take a look at where they live, especially if they could live anywhere. Hillary and Bill Clinton are worth tens of millions of dollars and have free Secret Service protection for life. They could live safely in Harlem or East New York. Instead they bought a place in Chappaqua, which is less than 2 percent black…. Barack and Michelle Obama are also rich and surrounded by bodyguards. Their kids went to Sidwell Friends, so school zoning is irrelevant to them. Yet when they left the White House they still moved to the whitest neighborhood in Washington. Fewer than 4 percent of their neighbors are black, in a town that was known for generations as Chocolate City… Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York is a tireless advocate for diversity, but not in his own neighborhood. Although he lives in Brooklyn, where one in three residents is African American, his own zip code is one of the whitest in New York. It’s less than 5 percent black.”
4) “Today, opioids are killing Americans at a much faster rate than AIDS or crack, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing. It’s not a crisis that has interested Washington much. There’s been no effort to rein in the pharmaceutical companies that flooded communities with opioids. Nobody seems to be rethinking our current rehabilitation and treatment models for addicts, which clearly aren’t working. Both the Congress and the White House seem to have run out of ideas, or even the desire to think of new ones.”
3) “Companies can openly mistreat their employees (or ‘contractors’), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose.”
2) “One of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight Islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for Islamic extremism.”
1) “You no longer hear much from our leaders about the importance of racial harmony. Almost nobody claims we’re really all the same beneath the skin. The emphasis is on our differences. That’s the essence of the diversity agenda. Not surprisingly, that has led to an explosion of racial hostility in American life. It was once considered the gravest possible sin to criticize someone for his skin color. It is now regarded as a sign of enlightenment. It’s everywhere, especially on campuses.”
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