Fox News host and author Tucker Carlson bemoaned what he described as the increasingly Soviet-style conformity he sees in the United States, especially among young people.
Speaking about his new book “The Long Slide: Thirty Years In American Journalism” with Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow on Tuesday, Carlson blamed such creeping totalitarianism on the precipitous decline of American masculinity and courage.
“I do think, marginally, people can be more brave and more honest just in their personal lives,” Carlson said. “There’s no reason to sit at a dinner party and be browbeaten by somebody and not pipe up. You don’t have to argue, but you can quietly speak your conscience in public.”
“The society has become so incredibly conformist,” Carlson continued. “I see it in my kids and their friends. My kids don’t agree with a lot of this crap, but the spirit of the age is, ‘Well, I don’t really want to step outside the herd.’ We don’t celebrate mavericks at all. … It’s such a Soviet society now. What we celebrate is team joiners. ‘Oh, look, this guy got the vaccine. He’s a hero. He took his medicine.’ It’s insane!”
Carlson later pivoted to claim that American men are largely failing to step up. “Where are the men?” he asked. “There’s been a massive decline in testosterone levels. I think that’s a huge part of what we’re seeing right now. That accounts for a lot of the cowardice. I’m just being as honest as I can be.”
In April, Carlson pinpointed a decline of religion as a major source of the country’s problems. As The Daily Wire reported:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson soberly observed Friday that politics is replacing religion as Americans increasingly fall away from faith, which is a trend he claimed is enslaving people into lives of despair.
Speaking with Fox News hosts Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino about the recent Gallup poll noting that U.S. church membership has declined below 50 percent, Carlson noted such a trend has “never happened, so far as I know.”
“This is the result of a long-term trend,” he said. “This is the result of a liberation movement, a liberation movement that sought to liberate Americans from the constraints of traditional religion. And like all liberation movements in this country, at a certain point it becomes the opposite of what it purports to be.”
“Are people really more liberated than they were when they believed in God?” Carlson asked. “Are they less anxious? Look, everyone dies in the end. And if you don’t acknowledge that or provide an explanation for what happens after you die, then people are filled with existential dread, with anxiety. And maybe drug abuse skyrockets, and so do suicides and hopelessness, and all the conventional signs of despair like the ones we’re seeing now.”
“And so, actually, people aren’t liberated by fleeing from meaning, from God, from religion,” Carlson concluded. “They’re enslaved. Look at the country!”