This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," May 24, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: Good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.

Actually, it looks like this virus did come from a lab in China. Nearly a year and a half into the pandemic that is the new consensus in the American media, boy, these things change fast. Excuse me. Whoa.

There are holdouts, of course. Just today over at "The Washington Post" a China shill called Michael Gerson wrote a hilariously overwrought column with this title, quote: "The right is dwelling on slanderous myths about the origins of COVID-19." Slanderous myths Russian QAnon sleeper cells, slandering the Chinese government.

Pretty funny.

The good news is, it's almost over. You're probably not going to see a lot more columns like that going for. The nonsense is finally dying down.

At other parts of Michael Gerson's own newspaper we have learned they are working on news stories about how the virus did in fact escape from a lab in Wuhan. So the debate among serious people over the origins of COVID appears to be pretty much winding up. Pretty much every sane person at this point acknowledges that the government of China likely caused the single worst manmade disaster in human history.

As if we need more evidence of that, over the weekend, "The Wall Street Journal" reported the very first people infected with COVID-19 were probably researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In November of 2019, three of them were taken to the hospital with symptoms. Now, "The Wall Street Journal" did solid reporting on that, but it wasn't entirely new. Back in January of this year, the State Department issued the factsheet telling the whole country the same thing. They said the first COVID patients were not in fact hungry patients of the local wet market, reckless diners who gorged on pangolin and bats. No, they weren't. The first patients were researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Clearly, obviously, they have been infected at work while working on the virus. So if you're trying to understand where COVID came from, and you should be if you want to prevent future pandemics, that State Department memo this January told you a lot, and yet it was ignored.

In fact, just a few hours ago, Tony Fauci himself, the man in charge of our whole response to COVID-19 explained to CBS News that he'd never even heard about the State Department's findings on the Wuhan lab. He had no idea.

In other words, Fauci's own employer, the U.S. government publicly released compelling evidence that the virus he devotes his life to fighting escaped from the very bio lab that Tony Fauci had sent American tax dollars to fund. And yet somehow, Tony Fauci was totally unaware of this.

He didn't know it until he read this weekend's "Wall Street Journal." It was news to him, bolt from the sky. Totally new information. Can we believe him when he says that? No, of course we can't.

In fact, this show has heard that on or about November 19, 2019, right around those time those Chinese researchers became the first COVID patients on planet Earth, the government of Thailand contacted the C.D.C. and Tony Fauci's office to say that it's Intel Service had picked up biological anomalies around the lab in Wuhan where there had been a leak.

Now, we can't confirm the Thai government sent this message, but we believe the Thai government did. We do know that several other allied foreign governments, including the governments of France, and Australia have gathered evidence showing the virus escaped from a Chinese lab.

Yet Tony Fauci, who runs the whole thing didn't know any of this. Come on. Of course, he knew. Fauci, in fact, has known from the beginning that the virus may well have come from that lab. Many people have known that. But Fauci lied about it for more than a year.

Here he is, in May of 2020 in an interview with the willing dupes at "National Geographic," telling you that as one of the world's most eminent scientists, there is really no chance that COVID-19 was engineered by human hands.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, is very, very strongly leaning towards this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated the way the mutations had naturally evolved.

A number of very qualified evolutionary biologists have said that everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that it evolved in nature and then jumped species.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: A number of very qualified evolutionary biologists betting you won't even know what that is. Really? A number of them? So where are those scientists today?

Is there for example, a single working virologist in the world who would come on this show right now and dismiss the Wuhan lab leak idea, out of hand as ridiculous, or, quote, "outrageous," as Francis Collins who runs the N.I.H. once did, that is his eternal shame.

We doubt there's a single working virologist who would dare to do that.

But not so long ago, the entire scientific and public health establishment did that very thing. So what's changed? Not the science, the science remains precisely the same. Only the politics have changed.

And that gets you thinking, now that we know what we now know about the Wuhan lab and we're fully aware that of course, Tony Fauci has known it as well for a very long time, how could he not? It is pretty remarkable to go back and look at Tony Fauci's public statements about COVID and the government of China.

Keep in mind, he knew that it was at least possible that this virus came from that Wuhan lab, and yet he did this interview with our David Asman, from FOX Business in January of 2020, right at the very beginning of the whole thing.

Again, as you watch it, keep in mind that Tony Fauci was perfectly aware that China may have created this virus, and he knew for a fact that the government of China was lying, covering its tracks and pushing the World Health Organization to do the same, and imperiling the entire planet, as they did that. Fauci knew all of that, yet, he said this anyway.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID ASMAN, FOX BUSINESS NETWORK HOST: China has been known to fiddle with their stats before. Do you trust what they are telling us about this illness?

FAUCI: From what I can see right now, they really are being much, much more transparent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So you watch that, you look back over the last year, in light of what we now know and you ask yourself, how does Tony Fauci still have a job? Seriously. What kind of country gives this much power to someone who has proven himself to be serially dishonest and incompetent. It's scary that we would allow that, especially in public health.

Meanwhile -- and this is the most galling part -- those few journalists and scientists who told the truth about what happened in Wuhan were punished for telling the truth. They were attacked by CNN, they were censored by Facebook. They were denounced by their colleagues. They were destroyed in some cases.

So where's their apology? Who is paying into their reparations fund? Well, no one is, of course.

Here is someone who deserves to be rehabilitated immediately. His name is Professor Steven Mosher. He's an expert on Chinese, a very brave person. You'd need to be to say what he said in February of 2020 when he came on the show. That was back when mass lockdown seemed like something they only did in China.

But Mosher came on this show and told the truth. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEVEN MOSHER PRESIDENT, POPULATION RESEARCH INSTITUTE: I think it escaped from the lab because we have the Chinese government basically telling us that it did.

Wuhan is the only Level 4 laboratory in all of China, so that's where you would put a dangerous pathogen, whether you were genetically engineering it to be a weapon or not, that's where you would be experimenting on it. So it makes sense that the epicenter of the epidemic that the lab there would be the source of that virus.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: See, you look back at that tape and you think, that guy was on to something. He was smart. He was honest. He connected the dots.

For his trouble for telling the truth, Steven Mosher was immediately denounced as a conspiracy nut. Meanwhile, the liars and the China shills got richer and more powerful and the World Health Organization, which followed China's instructions and told the world that COVID was not really transmissible by air now has the full support of the current administration. In fact, United States has rejoined the World Health Organization with no conditions.

This is despite the fact that American Intelligence can prove that the World Health Organization lied and that people died, of course, as a result of those lies. Even now, tonight, the U.S. government has not launched a broad and serious investigation into where the coronavirus came from, if you can imagine as in fact, they have not done that.

At the same time, they are telling us we need a 9/11-style commission to understand every facet of the January 6 events at the Capitol. But the pandemic that's killed three million people and destroyed the West, which it has -- never mind. We will let someone else figure it out.

Speaking of people who are right from the very beginning and roundly denounced, Jamie Metzl may be the original whistleblower on this. He's not a conservative, by the way, he's a liberal. He is a former N.S.C. official from the Clinton administration, and as we said he's been sounding the alarm on where this virus came from since the very beginning and we thought it would be nice to speak to him tonight on the eve of his vindication.

Jamie, thanks so much for coming on.

JAMIE METZL, AUTHOR: My pleasure.

CARLSON: So, you're -- and I am embarrassed this is the first time that we've had you on the show. Congratulations on being right. I know it is cold comfort in light of everything that's happened. But tell us the response. You came out very early and said, this seems like what happened. What kind of response did you get?

METZL: So you're right, I am a progressive person. I'm not -- I wasn't a big supporter of President Trump and I don't watch a lot of television. But I am not even fully aligned with FOX News.

But early last year, when I was looking at the evidence that was being presented, I saw a couple of things. As someone who understood the science, I knew it was complete baloney to say that the pandemic started in the Wuhan wet market, when 40 percent of the earliest cases had no contact with the market.

And as somebody who understood China, it really raised a lot of alarm bells when China was so aggressively peddling that fake story that the pandemic started -- the outbreak started in the market.

And then what really upset me was in February of last year, there were a group of eminent scientists, including Nobel laureates who had a letter in "The Lancet," the eminent scientific journal, where they said that it is certain or almost certain that the pandemic has a natural origin and anybody who suggests otherwise is a quote-unquote, "conspiracy theorist."

I was coming from a very, I felt, honest place asking the tough questions that I felt needed to be asked. And I spent the entire year last year like a small number of others, fighting this uphill battle, because there was a fake and forced consensus among scientific journals, among mainstream media not even allowing us, not even creating the space for this essential question to be asked, and I'm glad that that's opening up, but we still have a lot of work to do.

CARLSON: You've got to think the response had everything to do with the country it came from. I spoke to a trustworthy national security person, there aren't many. But I did speak to one today who said, Wall Street and Washington are desperate that China is not the enemy because that's where the money comes from. They've gotten rich from China.

Now, I'm not a conspiracy nut. But I've got to think that if it had been Russia or Malawi or Belgium or any place but China, we will be looking more closely into its origins.

METZL: That's partly true. I mean, another way of saying it is let's have the same fact pattern, but it had been Chad or Congo or some other place that didn't have this kind of political clout. We would be going in on day one.

China has a lot of influence. Yes, it has influence economically, politically, and that's why there was a lot of fear. There was a lot of caution.

The Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is another hero of this story, because early last year, he was asking really tough questions. What happened? China's slapped sanctions on Australian copper, on beef, on wine exports to China, and then the Australian resolution at the World Health Assembly, which was calling for a tough investigation got so watered down that China which had vehemently oppose that resolution actually supported this watered down resolution, which passed and that laid a foundation for a deeply compromised process. There was not even an investigation.'

And you mentioned, Tucker, that there's no U.S. investigation into the origins of COVID. It will shock your viewers to know, there is no international investigation into the origins of COVID right now and that's why the government representatives meeting now at the World Health Assembly, they must authorize a full and unrestricted investigation into the origins of the pandemic with full access to all of the relevant record samples and personnel in China and beyond.

CARLSON: That's for sure. That is shocking. And if there was any topic on which we need a 9/11-style investigation, I think it would be this one. Jamie Metzl, a brave man, of course punished for it. We appreciate your coming on tonight. Thank you.

So in the State of Georgia, if you get vaccinated, you can do more than just take your mask off. Vaccinated people in Georgia could get a reduced sentence in court.

FOX chief breaking news correspondent, Trace Gallagher joins us with more on this story. Hey, Trace.

TRACE GALLAGHER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CHIEF BREAKING NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Hey Tucker, for now, this only involves two counties in Georgia, Hall and Dawson, both of which have very low vaccination rates, 29 percent of residents in Hall County have gotten at least one shot, only 25 percent in Dawson County. The Georgia State average is 37 percent, the national average 47 percent.

So to bump up these counties' vaccination rates, anyone who is convicted of a crime and will have to perform community service as part of their sentence could have their service hours cut in half. Meaning, if you're sentenced to 80 hours, you get the shot and you do only 40 hours.

The court says there's no pressure to comply, no consequences if you don't comply, except for that little part where then you would have to do all of your community service hours. Court officials said they don't track how many offenders have been offered the deal, but one public defender says, it is quote, "pretty much every plea."

In Massachusetts, a few months back, the state was planning to actually cut jail sentences for those inmates who got the vaccine, then Governor Charlie Baker got pushback and he rescinded the plan.

But right now all Georgia counties are watching this program very closely to see if it helps raise vaccination rates before they also decide to compel or rather offer the deal to their own offenders -- Tucker.

CARLSON: Amazing. Trace Gallagher, thanks as always.

GALLAGHER: Sure.

CARLSON: So there's a new bill in Congress that is supposed to help the United States compete with China. No one is against that just like no one is against infrastructure, but at least one senator says it's not what it looks like at all. He joins us next to tell us what's in it.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: So there's a new bill in the Congress called the Endless Frontier Act, and the idea behind it is kind of hard to criticize. You don't imagine anyone could be against a piece of legislation that aims to help the United States beat China in manufacturing and technology.

But we thought it'd be interesting to hear from one of its critics. What's in it exactly?

Senator John Kennedy serves the State of Louisiana in the United States Senate. He joins us now to explain his view of this bill. Senator, thanks so much for coming on.

So I know you agree that the idea behind the bill sounds great. You're saying that the reality of the bill falls far short of great. Tell us how.

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): Well, let me apologize in advance for any mean, ugly, accurate things I'm about to cite.

Senator Schumer has a bill, as you said, the Endless Frontiers Act. It is right now before the Senate. It is an orgy of spending and very little bit of the money goes to the military.

Here is a copy of the bill. It started out at $40 billion. The Budget Office tells me, it's up to $200 billion and growing like kudzu. It's probably going to pass because I say this gently, but some of my Republican colleagues have swapped brains with the Democrats that are going to vote for it.

Senator Schumer is ecstatic. He is running around like a five-year-old in a Batman costume. Here's what the bill will do, $120 billion in foreign aid. I don't know why we can't use that money for infrastructure. I don't know why we have to give money to countries that hate us. They should be able to hate us for free.

$50 billion to the Big Tech semiconductor companies. We all know how broke Big Tech is. I guess they can use the money to develop more efficient algorithms to censor us.

$80 billion to the infamous National Science Foundation. This is the same National Science Foundation that spent $500,000.00 in taxpayer money studying how long it takes pandas to poop. The answer is 12 minutes by the way, they need more fiber.

It spent $3 million, the N.S.F. did to see if students can tell the difference between toilet water and bottled water. They spent another $500,000.00 to study whether shrimp can run on treadmills underwater, and I could keep going for an hour.

Here's my point, and this is my opinion, others disagree with me. My mother did not raise a fool and if she did, it was one of my brothers. This is not a fight communism bill. If you look at this bill, and study it, you will see this is an all four feet and your snout in the trough spending bill with virtually no money going for military defense.

CARLSON: May I ask just a stupid question, and I'm sorry about your brothers, by the way. Why would a bill designed to help American manufacturing contain foreign aid?

KENNEDY: I have no idea. Well, yes, I do, Tucker.

Here's what happened. This started out as a fairly small bill, if you can call $40 billion small and then everybody piled on. And Senator Schumer desperately wants to pass the bill, so he cut everybody in on the spending, and that's why I say, it is an orgy of spending porn.

I'm not saying that every penny in here is wasteful. I'm saying an enormous amount is wasteful and here we are talking about President Biden is raising taxes to pay for infrastructure. Why can't we use some of this money to pay for infrastructure? That's all I'm saying.

CARLSON: Yes.

CARLSON: Everybody -- everybody in Washington is for fiscal responsibility. They want to cut spending. But everybody in Washington is -- it's not going to heaven. They want to go to heaven, but they don't want to take the trip.

CARLSON: Amazing. Senator, thanks so much for joining us tonight and giving us a window into how things actually work. Appreciate it.

KENNEDY: Thanks, Tucker.

CARLSON: Well, you know the border is completely out of control because you're not hearing anything about it from the media or from the White House that confirms that there is in fact a crisis underway and tonight we have new video that proves it. We'll show it to you after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: You're not hearing anything about it most of the time, but our border is still completely out of control. Thousands of migrants coming over unimpeded, FOX's Bill Melugin has been covering this under a covered story. He joins us now with the very latest on it. Hey, Bill.

BILL MELUGIN, FOX NEWS CHANNEL NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Tucker, good evening to you. So we are here in Texas's Rio Grande Valley. This is by far the busiest sector along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Border agents down here will talk to you themselves and tell you they're frustrated. They're overwhelmed. They're stretched thin. They need a lot of help.

And we got some brand new video to show you. It's pretty remarkable and it really highlights just what they have to deal with day in and day out down here.

Take a look at this drone video our FOX drone team shot yesterday morning right here in La Joya. It shows dozens of migrants just making an open run into the U.S. border, crossing illegally and trying to get away from Border Patrol.

These are not people turning themselves in like we've seen often. These are people trying to get away, mostly adults, mostly men. You'll see two of the men are actually already handcuffed together suggesting they had already been in Border Patrol custody and got away.

You'll see one lone Border agent in a pickup truck desperately trying to chase this crowd down, but they're running through open fields in all different directions. He is badly outnumbered. That crowd continues running away. Some of them run through what appears to be a stream or a culvert.

They keep going. One Border agent is continuing trying to chase after them. One migrant kind of gets stuck in the water or loses his shoe. The main group keeps running, the Border Patrol keeps going after them. You see some of them end up trying to scale a fence, scale a wall to get away.

Ultimately, we did see Border Patrol catch up with about 15 of that group. But from what we saw it appeared that at least half of that group did end up getting away and was able to escape in the brush.

We'll mention, this happens like clockwork almost every morning every day down here. Take a look at this video we shot this morning also here in La Joya. We witnessed another group of migrants once again running away from Border Patrol, escaping into the brush where they disappeared.

This time they were spotted more quickly by Border Patrol they were able to get a helicopter over the area pretty quickly, able to pin some of those migrants down. Eventually they were able to arrest two of those migrants, brought them out to the trucks, and took them away. Just the ongoing security concerns, Tucker.

Right here, last week, they arrested an active MS-13 gang member who had a warrant for his arrest in Houston for sexual assault of a child. We'll send it back to you.

CARLSON: Bill Melugin, thanks for that report. I appreciate it.

So if you're a middle-aged American, you can sincerely say that the country of your birth has never been more volatile than it is now. It's never been more on the edge. And what the country needs more than anything is what the new President promised to give the country on the day he was inaugurated in January, which is a respite, calm. Let's rediscover what we have in common, what makes us all Americans and bridge the gap.

You don't want to live in a divided country where people have nothing in common and hate each other. And if you really wanted to do that, the first thing you would do is pause immigration, which has upsides for sure, but it also has downsides. And the main downside of unrestrained immigration or any immigration is that it makes the country more volatile.

And if the administration is amping up the in-migration of foreign nationals into the United States, the latest, the Biden administration just announced that over 100,000 Haitians, for reasons that are not clear to anyone will get amnesty under a program called Temporary Protected Status.

That means, if you're here illegally from Haiti, you can get a Social Security number and work and you can't be deported. What's the purpose of this? That's worth asking.

Mark Krikorian is the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He joins us now.

Mark, thanks so much for coming on. So let's just begin at the literal level. What's the justification for doing this now?

MARK KRIKORIAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES: Temporary Protected Status is something that is in the law, but it is supposed to be to allow people, illegal immigrants, or maybe visitors even, but most of them are illegal, who are here, when some unique, exceptional tragic thing happens in their homeland that's temporary, and tide them over until they can go back like an earthquake, a hurricane, a Civil War.

Haiti in 2010, had a very devastating earthquake, and we granted Temporary Protected Status, which, like you said, mainly means work permits and Social Security numbers to the illegal immigrants who were here then. That's about 50,000 people, it ends up being.

What President Biden did over the weekend is give all the Haitian illegal immigrants who came since the earthquake, 10 to 11 years ago, work permits, this amnesty light, if you will, and the justification doesn't -- has no relation to the law. They said, well, there's economic problems there and there is political instability.

I mean, these that -- how does -- that describes half the world quite frankly. There is no rationale for this. There's no legal basis for it. And yet, you know, they're going to get away with it, because nobody has any standing to bring a lawsuit to stop it.

CARLSON: I mean, Haiti, you know, whatever its merits has been poor and volatile for 200 years. So this is not a new development. That's insane.

I mean, they're trying to change the population of the United States, and they hate it when you say that because it's true, but that's exactly what they're doing. Is anyone pushing back at all, at any level?

KRIKORIAN: Well, not really. I mean, some at the state level, the Texas State Attorney General, Arizona Attorney General are filing some lawsuits. There's a limit to what Republicans in Congress can do because they're in the minority in both Houses.

They can -- if the filibuster is still in place, they can at least try to stop some bad things. But you know, there's a limit to what can be done until there's another election, assuming people are in fact, dissatisfied with this.

And the public opinion polling does suggest that while most voters are basically okay with President Biden, you know, he's got the sort of affable grandfatherly image, the one place where he is underwater on public opinion, his big vulnerability is immigration. And I'm not sure he has the flexibility to do something about it and respond to that.

CARLSON: Yes, I don't think they care. I mean, you change the population and change the country. You make your party stronger, you turn into a one- party state and at that point, it doesn't matter what people think. And that is, of course, exactly -- exactly -- what they're trying to do.

Mark Krikorian, I appreciate you coming on tonight.

KRIKORIAN: Thank you.

CARLSON: So a new memo just out of the State Department. It's been leaked, it shows how American embassies around the world are being told to support Black Lives Matter. This is real. We'll tell you what's in the memo, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: So the publication, "Human Events" reported today on a new State Department memo. It was issued to all embassies around the world and encourages American quote, "diplomatic and consular posts to display shows of support for Black Lives Matter" tomorrow that would be the one year anniversary of the death of George Floyd.

The memo says that U.S. embassies can fly a BLM flag and the diplomat should reference Black Lives Matter in their speeches. Should American ambassadors come out against the nuclear family as BLM has? For socialism as BLM has? For race hatred as BLM does every day?

What the State Department doesn't appear to understand or maybe this is the whole point is that the existence of BLM is a national humiliation to the United States. The rest of world is watching. Of course, we're America, they pay close attention to what we do.

Listen to these Chinese officials from recently explain that BLM is a sign that the United States is a terrible place.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There are many problems within the United States regarding human rights and the challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter, it did not come up only recently.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Right, so if we ever had a State Department whose message to the world is yes, the United States is terrible, that's exactly the message that they are sending. That's what they believe. Should they be representing us to the world? Should people who don't like the country be running the country? They are.

The State Department did not respond to our request today for clarification. They didn't comment at all.

So instead be called Deroy Murdock. He is a contributing editor at "National Review" online. We're happy to have him with us. Deroy, thanks a lot for joining us. What do you think this -- the message here is exactly?

DEROY MURDOCK, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CONTRIBUTOR: Actually, what the message is not -- the message is not the areas in which the State Department ought to be focused right now. I mean, just in the last few weeks, we've seen about a huge increase of 944 percent month on month in April of illegal alien encounters on the southern border. We've seen rockets being fired from Hamas, Iranian rockets our beloved allies in Israel.

You had the Colonial Pipeline shut down by cyber hackers who are still alive and well and on the run in Russia. And we're still, as you saw, as you mentioned and discussed the top of the hour trying to figure out how a virus got out of Wuhan, China, came here to this country and kill almost 600,000 of us.

I think the State Department ought to spend some time on any one of those priorities before turning themselves into basically the public relations arm of Black Lives Matter.

CARLSON: I mean, BLM is a political organization, among many other things, but it's in effect a political party. I mean, should the State Department be promoting a political party at U.S. embassies in foreign countries? I can't think of a precedent for that.

MURDOCK: I don't think they should. And imagine if 2025, if Donald J. Trump is re-elected President or if we have President Ron DeSantis, imagine if U.S. embassies overseas were flying flags of the National Rifle Association or the or the National Right to Life Committee. I don't equate those peaceful groups with Black Lives Matter, which has an incredible recent violent history. But imagine what people on the left would respond if you had NRA flags flying over the U.S. Embassy in Paris, the U.S. Embassy in London? I don't think they'd be very happy.

And I think that to have that kind of political organization represented by U.S. diplomats are supposed to be neutral and focused on advancing America's national interests and American diplomacy. Those things just seem completely out of place and totally inappropriate.

CARLSON: Yes. Or how about the flag of the QAnon Army? I mean, maybe we should fly the QAnon Army flag, whatever that is.

MURDOCK: Over the -- over the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Imagine such a thing. Amazing.

CARLSON: Yes, it tells you a lot. Deroy Murdock, great to see you. Thank you.

So a lot of people in the past 18 months have re-assessed as American society has gone through all these convulsions, reassessed what they believe and have sought answers from traditional forms of society. Sohrab Ahmari is really leading the way on this question. He's an author and editor at "The New York Post." He is editor of the op-ed page.

He spent the last year thinking about why traditional societies, traditional belief systems actually give us comfort and stability and wisdom. He is an immigrant from Iran. He grew up a Muslim, he is now a conservative Catholic convert, genuinely interesting guy.

He's got a brand new book about the solace that traditional society offers to the individual. He spoke to us for about an hour, a new episode of "Tucker Carlson Today" just out, here's part of it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SOHRAB AHMARI, OP-ED EDITOR, "THE NEW YORK POST": We're living in an age that makes it very difficult for people like me, who is a father and a man of faith, and my children to be formed to live ordinary decent, virtuous lives.

We are actually severely disciplined in other ways, like the COVID regime or on questions of sex and gender. We're allowed to say, critical race. And so, it is not that we're not disciplined, but the discipline orders us in some ways toward disorder. So it's very perverse.

CARLSON: So, suppose we replace one set of disciplines with another?

AHMARI: Yes, I mean, and that's in many ways, the argument of the book that there is no -- there is no neutrality, a society has to stand for something. Some god, some authority will always be enshrined in the public square. The only question is which.

So you can't have a society in which you say, well, I believe there are two sexes, which is what Genesis and genetics tell us, but someone else might believe, you know, there's 135 genders, those two, one or the other will predominate, and what we're seeing now is a lot of the movement that you and I share, the Conservative Movement relinquished being willing to not only say what orthodoxy is, but also enforcing it in the public square.

And now a different orthodoxy is being core.

CARLSON: So you're saying the libertarian ideal is not workable, it's a lie. You can actually kind of said that you're getting an orthodoxy, whether you like it or not. So it's not enough to say, you know, you believe what you believe, I believe what I believe. You know, one of our beliefs is going to be forced on the other guy.

AHMARI: I mean, the past two years have utterly demolished the idea of a neutral public square. There's no way.

Look at -- I mean, past few decades, really, but especially the past few years. It's just become so stark that one orthodoxy is now seeking to lord it over the rest of us. And it happens to be very -- have a very distorted anthropology account of who human beings are, what makes them happy.

The difference between men and women -- in all these areas, it's extremely perverse, but it's winning.

And in some cases, we see how the loss of barriers against individual autonomy actually makes us less free.

So an obvious example is the gender stuff. Right?

CARLSON: Right.

AHMARI: The idea that society regulated what the sex is -- the difference between the sexes and told people what the difference between men and women were, they were complimentary, equal in dignity, but different et cetera et cetera -- it has been lost. And we lost it in the name of liberation, right?

Like, now we get to define who we are even if my body disagrees with me, I can will myself into defining my own gender. In practice that requires you to enforce me to enforce on you, you have to recognize me as something that you interiorly know that's not true.

So you know, we have these kind of pronoun dictatorship and so on so forth. So what came, what looked like a promise of liberation define yourself, actually, in practice worked out as a kind of oppression.

CARLSON: So as you as you said of your parents, you could support the revolution, but instantly come to regret it once --

AHMARI: Right, when it is gone, when it's gone. Or, you know, I mean, it's a theme that you talk a lot about on your shows, overweening corporate power, again sold as market liberty, market individualism, in practice ends up squeezing out other things.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: When you grow up in Iran, and you see the liberation become what it so often is, bondage, you have a very different perspective. And Sohrab Ahmari does. That conversation went on for quite some time, and the whole thing is edifying and interesting and well worth watching.

You can watch the newest episode of "Tucker Carlson Today" anytime on foxnation.com.

So on Friday, we met someone who called herself a chicken enthusiast. We were a little confused about what that meant. We learned -- and it changed our view forever on loving chicken. We'll tell you more in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: So last week, the C.D.C. whose instructions we follow to the letter on all things, issued a statement that wasn't about COVID, it was about chickens and they warned Americans don't get too close to your chickens. Stop chicken touching.

We never even heard of chicken touching, so this being a news program, we immediately sought a chicken enthusiast to explain, and we found her. Her name is Tiara Soleim. She came on Friday night.

Here's part of the interview.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Are these house birds? I mean, I'm trying not to ask, do they sleep on the bed, but I will just ask, do they sleep on the bed?

TIARA SOLEIM, CHICKEN ENTHUSIAST: So, when I have like chicks when I've hatched chicks, I have been known to bring them inside. I will like roll them up in a towel and they'll sleep next to me and it will be like a chicken burrito.

And sometimes they'll come inside like if I need them give them a bath or clean them or stuff, but they're pretty comfortable inside.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So we'll be honest, we went into this interview with low expectations. We interview a lot of people on the show like this and a chicken enthusiast, it's probably kind of a freaky person, right? She sleeps with her chicken.

By the end of that interview, we were a hundred percent on her side and the side of any chicken enthusiast who loves her chickens. And we heard from a lot of them, including the lady who paints her chicken's nails. I think we have video of that we can put on the screen.

We're not putting this on TV to mock. That may have been our intention Friday, but no longer. In a time of sadness and alienation, animals are a blessing from God. They give us comfort, they give us joy.

Being with them, even if they're chickens is worthwhile. Not maybe as great as a spaniel, but still, we're totally in favor.

So thank you, chicken lady, for changing our mind completely.

That's about it for us tonight. Don't forget our new episode of "Tucker Carlson Today," it is on FOX Nation. We hope you like it.

We'll be back tomorrow night and every week night. The show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.

Our new documentary series, "Tucker Carlson Originals" also on FOX Nation.

Have a great evening. Sean Hannity right now.

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