to be. we honor him tonight. charles krauthammer,. >> faith is something that one has doesn't have. one doesn't construct it. for me, it's a difficult concept. the one thing i do believe is that of all the possible views of god, atheism is the least plausible. the idea that there is no meaning or purpose or origin, that the universe is as it always was. i mean, that cannot be. i sometimes joke by saying i don't believe in god but i fear him greatly. ♪ ♪ >> i have been american since the day i was born in

new york city. and my father was quite conscious of how he came to america and brought me to a world which is this open and in many ways secular, the risk of me not following his way of life. and he had tremendous equimity. >> charles reall not like to talk about himself. one of the most rewarding experiences i had at fox is finally convincing him to open up in a series of interviews around the release of his new book, a few years ago, "things that matter." we spoke for hours. it was his life in his words. and i asked him what do you think about this project? and he said i don't like it. >> i need to write my father's story before i pass on because there is nobody who will remember the story except me now. it's the story of a 20th century. he was born in 1903. he died in 1987.

by the end of his life he spoke nine languages not because he was a great scholar but because he lived in a lot of places. and not always moving willingly. and whenever he needed a word he didn't have french or english, he picked it out of russian or polish or german it didn't matter. so no one understood what he was saying. but he had a sort of charming amal gam he lived. in starts in eastern europe and ends up in america with france, cuba, brazil, belgium, everywhere in between. he would have preferred that i follow in his way to be a religious orthodox jew. he was completely open he saw i went a different way. he insisted when i was young that i study the scriptures and men tears and that i not be ignorant. he said if you are ignorant you won't be able to choose wisely. if you know you choose and i will be happy and respect

whatever you take. that sense of openness reinforced my attachment to judaism even when i gave up the practice of the religion. i had this revelation about the broad-mindedness and universitiality of jewish culture and it brought me back at a different place. not the kind of practicing jew that my father was but as somebody who deeply respects and wants to perpetuate to his culture. so that's where i ended up as a result of the broad-minded upbringing and rather than abandon it as many orthodox jews do when they are raised orthodox and then rebel against it, that never happened to me. >> well, i knew he wasn't a believer. i am a believer. the god i worship he would want charles in his presence. who wouldn't? >> when i became sort of politically conscious in my late teens, when i was in

college and began to get involved in political thought. when i was studying political theory, i had been impressed by just the history around me in those days. >> just look at, for example, in my 20's was a cultural revolution in china. and they set about to deliberately destroy 5,000 years of chinese high culture. the arts, the sciences, everything leveled by the politics. and then of course the worst example of all is the holocaust. there was 1,000-year-old civilization of european jews flourishing, producing in the arts, in the sciences and culture. and all of it is utterly wiped out in six years. now, that tells you that you better get the politics right or all the lovely wonderful things in life are extinguished and that's sort of the reason i changed what i was doing starting out as a doctor and decided i wanted to be involved in what ultimately is the most

important of all endeavors. i had applied to medical school really to please my family. i'm from a family of doctors. so i applied. i had been accepted and i deferred indefinitely. after that i went to oxford and studied political theory. i began to feel that i was sort of spinning out into a universe that didn't have anything to do with the real world. one night a roommate sat on top of one of my armoires in a yoga position, maybe 2:00 in a morning. he was a rather strange bird. he said krauthammer, can pigs think? this is an important element in the thesis he was writing. i had an enjoyable conversation that lasted until the morning. i thought that may not be the most useful way to spend your life. i thought, you know, why don't i go to medical school and have a very straightforward life where everything is clear and plain. that afternoon i went down to the public phone in the dorm, this was a long time

ago. we didn't have cell phones. i called a registrar at harvard medical school and said i would like to come in the coming class. and i remember her saying well, one guy dropped out. we have got a spot if you are here on monday, it's yours. i grabbed a toothbrush. i didn't pack. i got on a plane and i left. now, when i woke up in boston the next day i thought to myself oh my god what i have done? >> there's an internet story out there that i dove into an empty pool and i traced the source of it to ar arthur schlessinger he wrote that in his diaries. never spoke to me. doesn't know anything about me. if that's a reflection of the accuracy of the histories he wrote, then he is a master of fiction. i see it likes a if it happened in a film. it was the end of my first year medical school. we are doing neurology. we are studying the spinal cord of all things. my classmate and i decide to

skip the morning session. beautiful july day. we're going to -- we play tennis instead. we're now headed over to class for the second session. we're very sweaty. it's very hot, very beautiful day. so we drop in next door to the medical school to the children's inn. you know, those are the hotels nearby for the parents of children. when my friend and i arrived at the pool, there were lots of people in it. swimming in it. we go for a swim. we take a few dives and i hit my head on the bottom of the pool. the amazing thing is there was no cut on my head it just hit at precisely the angle where all the force was transmitted to one spot. and that is the cervical vertebra which severed the spinal cord. i had been studying neurology. i knew exactly what happened. i knew why i wasn't able to move and i knew what that meant. and i knew i was at the bottom of the pool. and i knew i wouldn't be able to swim. i was sure that was the end.

and interestingly enough, people talk about near death experiences. there was no panic. there was no great emotion. i didn't see a light. my life did not flash before me. you sort of get to a place where you are ready and then you are suddenly brought back to the world. my friend, thinking i was fooling around, left me down there for a while because he thought i was playing. then he pulls me out and there were two books on the side of the pool when they picked up my effects. one was the anatomy of the spinal cord and the other one was is man fate by monroe. quite a choice. i didn't know what was coming. but it fit very well.

>> fdr is a champion of denial. i like to think i am but he was. fdr had 40,000 pictures of him taken. do you know how many showing in a wheelchairshownin a wheelc. it was considered a private matter and for him, ignoring it or denying it or

transcending it was the essence of how he treated it and there is a great dignity in that. he never discussed it with his mother, who was the closest person to him. he lived a life of kind of fierce denial. i don't mean you deny the facts of it but you denying its effect on you. you simply say i'm going to live the way i would live otherwise and he did. for the first three months or so, i was so sick that it was hard to visit me because i had pneumonia. i ran at the edge for quite a long time, respirator, masks, heavy doses of antibiotics and at that point i didn't have anybody to come to see me, i think. when i started to come out of that, i resumed my classes. the professors would come in. repeat their lectures and project slides on the

ceiling. i had asked the medical school to let me stay in my class. i knew once i got off the course i would never ride it again. one of the cardiac plexiglass plate that he hung above the posters of the bed and the nurses would put a book on it face down. now, you don't want to call them every three minute and a half to turn the page so i put two books up at once. so they would only have to come half the time. but that's how i was able to study. towards the end of the recovery, this is now 10 months in. i'm inpatient in a teaching hospital. so, one of the residents would come by at 6:00 at night. i would put on a white coat and stethoscope. get in the wheelchair and i gold around and do rounds. serves able to do the clinical course at night between 6:00 and about midnight. and then i would turn into a pumpkin, go back to my bed and become a patient again for the rest of the night, until 6:00 p.m. the next day

when i would be a doctor. this is a guy who was robust and healthy. not a guy that was born with this problem. it happened to him when he was in med school. somehow he summoned himself to finish med school and enter that profession. >> i knew what the deal was from the first day, so i never had any allusions. i would get infuriated give my cell mates, the guys i shared hospital rooms with false hope. there was one guy in my room of four who i'm going to give you seven years and then i'm going to kill myself. now, i don't know what happened to him. that sent a chill for my life hearing that. >> in those interviews, i was just by. this as a young man, charles is really conflicted about which way his life is going to go. he goes to oxford to study philosophy. but determines it's too he is sheisesoteric.

he goes to harvard middle medicl school. he really was straddling those two disciplines. look what he chooses in his medical specialty. >> i studied politics and philosophy before. and i had this feeling this is too abstract. i should be doing something serious with my life, you know, a kind of real job in the real world with real facts. not ohio state ohio hoyty toyot. not of this airy fairy stuff. get real with life. i decided to go to medical school. but i wanted to do something that i thought would be sophisticated and intellectual and in some ways abstract. i was looking for something halfway between the reality of medicine and the elegance, if you like, of philosophy. so psychiatry was the obvious thing. i was lucky because it was probably the easiest branch of medicine for me to do once i was hurt. but it worked out that i

didn't have to change any plans. i'm pretty much anti-freud freud an. the reason i chose the program it's very biological. they do drug therapy. they do hypnosis. they did behavioral therapy. they did shock therapy. they did incredible stuff. but, they made some concessions to soak co-therapy. psychotherapy. there was group therapy once a week. i didn't go but i was actually called in into the chief's office after about seven weeks of nonappearance. he said to me why aren't you going to therapy? and i said, sir, i came here to give therapy, not to receive it and he said to me, you're in denial. and i said of course i'm in denial. denial is the greatest of all defense mechanisms. i could be a professor of denial. i mean i'm an expert. i was going on and on. he wasn't very amused. and he said look, you are

either going to do this or i can't have you in the program. so, having no real prospects i actually did and went to the 21 weeks of sessions or whatever it was. i really didn't say a word. so whatever people would notice that they would say why aren't you talking i said because i'm in denial. i'm not a big therapy guy. we live in confession. people talk about their feelings. they have to. that's what we worship. we're in the age of oprah. there is this whole idea car thars cyst that has to do with the psychiatry part. i'm not high on that. i'm not high on feelings you ask yourself well, maybe i chose -- i did. that's why i left. now back

to charles krauthammer, his words. >> arthur, a doctor himself before becoming a writer, talked about the lessons that you learn as a doctor. discipline, confidence, and being able to be decisive and all of that is indispensable. the last thing i got from it is a very deep understanding of science. and also an appreciation of empirical evidence. you spend seven years most

of it in hospitals in a satisfactory human suffering, and if you are some hot shot kid from harvard, it beats the callousness out of you in the sense that you are the master of the world and it humbles you in many ways. it makes you appreciate human life. it makes everything you write about and talk about less abstract. here i was approaching the last year of my residency. and i thought i don't really want to continue to do this. i liked what i did. i was okay at what i did. i did research. but my heart wasn't in it and i felt there was a world happening out there, outside the hospital walls but there was no way to get from here to there. and pure, shear blind certain diserendipitous luck. one of the professors at harvard i had written a paper on bipolar disease. out of the blue i got appointed by jimmy carter national institutes of health. the second i heard about it i went right to his office,

i said jerry, i hear you are going to washington. he said yes. i said i also hear that if you go to washington without a right-hand man they are going to eat you alive. he said where did you hear that? i said i made it up but i really think you need somebody. he said okay. you got the job. i came to washington and jerry, my boss, and my professor was the only person i knew in d.c. for a radius of 200 miles. but i thought once i'm in washington, isn't that where they do politics? one thing will lead to another. i had been a reader of the new republic, a liberal magazine, very well-written, interesting. i thought maybe i could do this. and then one day they ran a classified ad. the new republic seeks a managing editor apply here. we were overwhelmed with the response and most of them were lawyers. and wanting to get out of

law. there was this one psychiatrist who was charles. and we arranged for him to come to lunch. >> so i went down to see mike. he interviewed me and he said can you show me a writing sample i said unfortunately i can't. i have never written anything. when i was a psychiatrist, and you discharged a patient you write a discharge summary. the first time did i a discharge summary it came out looking like it was written in chinese. i had to rewrite the whole thing. after one or two or three or four. i would dictate, this is 3,000 words in one go. as long as i had it in my head where i was going with this, so i learned to dictate long just from the practice i got at mass general as a psychiatrist. so then when i began to write articles, another stuff i was in that habit. so i wrote something. they liked it. they published it. and i got lucky again. it was republished on the op-ed page of "the washington post." it was the first time any article of the new republic had been picked up by the

post. solve hit a double the first time out. >> how many people have you heard of who become giants of journalism just by sending a piece to a magazine like the new republic. that's what charles did. >> then i went through another stage. i became a speech writer for the vice president of the united states, walter mondale. i joined him sometime in the spring of 1980. talk about luck. i had met, again, shear blind luck once at a dinner the chief speech writer. and we met a second time. talking about the job. he said, you know, he mentioned the third speech writer had quit. i thought well, i might be interested. i said well, maybe i could apply. he said okay. so he gave me the to jim johnson. jim johnson was the chief of staff to mondale. interviewed me and of course the first question is can you show me a writing

sample? so i had to go through the same thing, sorry, i don't have any. have you ever written a speech no. i will tell you what, mondale is giving a speech next week. write me a speech. i looked up political speech and began reading them. so i get an idea of what political speeches look like. it struck me when i first came to washington is the fact that all the monuments here, unlike the monuments in europe, are monuments with words on them. i decided i would make that the theme. i wrote that they liked it. they used it. they hired me. >> 1980 he worked for walter mondale, democratic candidate for vice president. but, this was long before the triballization of american politics and the polarization that have the two parties facing one another across the barricades of mutual incomprehension. a much more gentle kind of partisanship then. >> and when we got totally crushed in the general election got a call from the

we public do you think you are like to work for us. >> rope down in the bottom of the well i say yes right away. on the day reagan was sworn, in that's the first day i started the new republic as a writer. i wrote one editorial that caused largest number of cancelled subscriptions in cancelled subscriptions in the history of the magazine. you won't see these folks at the post office

they have businesses to run they have passions to pursue how do they avoid trips to the post office? stamps.com mail letters ship packages all the amazing services of the post office right on your computer get a 4 week trial plus $100 in extras including postage and a digital scale go to stamps.com/tv and never go to the post office again

>> i had always been a cold war liberal. now that the cold war is won everybody says he was a cold warrior. the word code warrior was an epitaph in liberal discourse in the 1970s and 1980s, one that i wore with pride. so i ended up supporting about every element of the reagan foreign policy, the build up, support for the contrast, strategic defense, all the stuff that liberals

opposed. and i wanted the magazine to support that. so i wrote the unsigned editorials and boy did we get reaction from liberal rearedship. we would get letters you wouldn't believe. what are you doing? you are a traitor. i suggested why should do something with all the letters coming in that every week the editors should choose the worst letter and then cancel the writer's subscription. we would announce that they are unworthy of reading our magazine and no, you are not getting a refund. apparently on the business side it was not accepted as a very good idea. so it never passed. ♪ >> there were two people conservatism had enormous influence on politics over the last half century. one was ronald reagan. the other was charles krauthammer. >> i was a great society liberal. help the poor and give them all the money you can. then you have the documenting how the great society had hurt the people

it was trying to help as a doctor i had been trained in empirical evidence, if the treatment is killing your patients, you stop the treatment. i think the most important element of it was what big government was doing to civil society. because the essence of a free society is the independence and strength of the institutions that lie between the government and the individual. the church, the school, the family, the community. i wanted to see a strengthening of civil society. all the evidence was that these well-intentioned programs were destroying the institutions or weakening them. that undermines the entire american experiment. >> gosh, i started reading charles when i was in high school in the "the washington post." probably when i was 15, i'm now 49. so a long time. i was a new republic reared. i was conservative. then the republic had this eclectic mix of brighters and a lot of intellectual

foment and vibrant magazine. i didn't always agree with charles but i appreciated his intellectual honesty and the clarity of his thinking. and he was willing to take an argument to its logical conclusion and had the horsepower to do that. >> i discovered you write anything in a column, if you get the structure wrong, you will never get it right. you will spend hours whacking your way through the weeds with a machete many and won't be able to escape the marsh, i take 10 minutes to write out outline and then i use a 1972 cassette tape recorder that i talk into. and i'm done. and then my assistant transcribes it. and then i spend the next four or five hours editing the text. i go through the it 15 times from beginning to end. cleaning, sanding, polishing, just like a clay ornament. and i get it right and then i sleep on it that's the best part. and i wake up in the

morning, spend another hour because by then overnight i discovered 15 egregious errors or mis -- not misstatements but wrong way to put things and i fix those. that's just my -- i mean other people write easily. i find it very hard. i have a wh horror of the black page. once i'm editing it's like a puzzle and i like doing puzzles. >> charles won the pulitzer prize for commentary in 1987. this was a huge moment for him but also for his father who never really truly understood why charles left a career in medicine for a job in journalism. >> the last time i saw my father, he had a cancer and he was very sick, about six years after i left medicine. and i had just received the pulitzer nut afternoon in the ceremony. and then i went to the hospital where he was when i came in i said dad, i have something i want to give you.

i gave him the medal. and he beamed and he showed it to all the nurses and said the last time i saw him was a time when this whole circle was closed and he could feel that the choice had been redeemed in some way. but it was a very comforting thing to remember about the last time you see your parent. >> charles talked to me a lot about his dad. a lot of different conversations. but getting him to talk about his wife robin and his son daniel, that was more of a struggle. his relationship with robin, i mean, it is a true love story. they meet in oxford. she is from australia, a brilliant lawyer. he then goes to the states, to harvard medical school and she comes after his accident. their son daniel is a terrific young man. just amazing person. getting charles to talk about either of them was tough. >> i'm not going to talk about that. >> okay. >> when dan was born, i

wrote a column about his birth. and it was a good column. and it was nice. and then when he was 1, i wrote one on his first birthday. and then i realized i'm never going to do this again. this is using him. this is going to be his vision of himself through my eyes. and i simply won't do it. i never wanted to use personal relationships as material. >> when i first met him and i said i didn't know. and i said charles, this is embarrassing.

>> people ask me how did you go to walter mondale to fox news? answer is simple i was young once a long time ago. >> maybe not today maybe not tomorrow but for the rest of your life. [laughter] >> a great place. it is without a doubt the best hour of news on television any television. >> let's bring in our special expanded panel again. >> my mother would watch it even if i wasn't on it. that's high praise. the beautiful thing is because news is breaking all the time, we get to be up there early. and you want to be out there early to give an opinion because it can have an extra nudge if it's early. why, it's brit hume.

as i live and breathe. >> i don't remember the exact details but he was coming on the arrow occasionally. and then we began to have him on occasionally on "special report." which i was then anchoring. and he was terrific. just nobody like him. >> those euphemisms are false this is a not a forest fire. this was a deliberate campaign. war in fact. >> charles became a regular. i so cher remember issued the time bring him in early because of the set we had then. it was awkward to get his wheelchair in place. for a couple segments before the rest of the panel come in. he was there with me as i read the news or did whatever did i and then we would chat during the commercials. i loved chatting with charles during the commercials. he is one of a kind. and i just liked being around him. >> i always imagined and i'm speaking to my son, she was a terrible case, shes would the worst imaginable shy had all the advantages.

you don't want to talk in high falutin ridiculous. i tried to make things plain, clear. i always imagined to talking to an audience that wants to learn and will listen. the one thing i try to do when i want to persuade someone is i never start with my assumption because if i do, not going to get anywhere. you have to figure out what the other person believes in at root and then you try to draw a line from what they believe in to what i believe in by showing them a logical sequence. but you have got to lead them along and have it in your head from the beginning or you will never get there it's not a question of sparing people offense. it's a question of when you have a public monument, you are making a public statement. >> i actually smile when i think about the last time i was with charles because it was one of our iconic kind of dustups on "special report." >> what trump did today was a moral disgrace.

>> got pretty testy. i resent that you just said it was a copout what i said on this set. >> frustrating to me and i'm sure i was frustrating to him but we understood at the end it was a really good segment. >> i can -- doesn't bother me brit brit on paper, looking at him you say this is not a man designed for television. this is not a potential tv star. in fact, he became a huge star even i would say a mega star on this channel. it was the shear force of his intellect and power of his thinking. >> he gets up and cause for a pause something the country doesn't want to do he will be a laughing stock. i would say half the people i mean are an absolutely surprised to see me in a wheelchair and one of the more amusing of those incidents happened about 8 or 9 years ago. i was sitting in madison square garden fox box convention. sean hannity stands up and walks up the stairs and he looks at me and he goes what happened?

now, what i really should have done, i should have done this oh my god, you are right. i have no idea. >> i interviewed him so many times. for me, charles, it's very simple, i never noticed. when i first met him and i -- i said i didn't know. and i said, charles, this is embarrassing. what are you talking about? he goes you're not the only one. a lot of people feel -- have not noticed it either. >> just told me that even somebody i had been on the air with wouldn't know and a lot of people come up to me at restaurants and have the same question like what happened? i'm tempted to say you know i sprained my ankle last week. it was a real bad sprain so i got this elaborate wheelchair. i'm not aversed of the spotlight. i'm not going to pretend somebody is not on doesn't enjoy it i never wanted to make myself the focus of my career. one of the things i aspired to in all of my columns is i try never to use the word i.

a lot of columnists write the word i all the time to me every time you use it it's a failure. the point of what i do is i left medicine to do this to put ideas in the right order and hopefully to convince people of certain things that i believe in very passionately. but, when it comes to interior life and, of course, it has to do with the fact that i'm in a wheelchair. finance the first thing people see and they are curious about. i know it's inevitable that people are going to want to talk about my unusual history. but i would rather let the words speak for themselves. that's why i wrote the book. those are the words i have written. and that's why i wrote the auto bauto biographical. my career and my thoughts and my writings. >> charles is in new york promoting his new book "things that matter." there you take a look at it. the book is on the shelves now. >> the book was astonishing

to charles and his publisher, because collections of columns i can speak from experience don't usually sell like that. but, it was a testimony to the hold that charles had on a large public that had gotten to him him frankly on fox news. >> bret: charles, why did you write this book? >> gambling debts. i put my money on the cubs, obamacare and the edge show. >> i guess the oddest book review actually came from president trump who actually tweeted, quote: on sale today "things that matter" in paperback with a new section on the obama years. book sucks. charles loved that he said he wanted to put that quote on the cover. wow. krauthammer and trump. that really was something. >> i must say, of course, the high point was when he

mentioned me. i thought i was going to be the surprise new national security advisor so i was somewhat disappointed. >> i think it's so open. >> well, i wil miss you, bret.

>> would tend in our sophisticated historical analyses attribute everything to large underlying current. you know, it's a certain political ideologies or social changes. you are missing the obvious. there is always a person. everyone sees it in their own personal lives. yes, there are the forces that influence your personal life. but, there is usually a person who influenced you in a way that all the underlying forces cannot account for. american history is populated by the figures without whom at arc of history would be completely different. washington, lincoln, fdr, reagan, they all stand out.

i think that's overlooked. >> here's where i get close to almost religiosity. there is a kind of providential nature to american history. when we needed a lincoln, we got a lincoln. that saved the republic. in the 20th century we needed an fdr and we got an fdr and in the second half we needed a reagan we got a reagan. >> we have missed him so much over these past months here at fox. there is no one that really replaces him. there is -- there has been a void because of his knowledge of history. his knowledge of science. his knowledge of washington, obviously. but the intersection of science, culture, politics, history, that's a pretty big sweep. not a lot of people have that. >> it's my job to say what i think is true. it's my job to say what i think will work. it's my job to call a folly a folly. whether it straightens him

out, i don't know. i don't know whether it's going to have an effect on them but there is no other way for an honest critic to be other than to be honest and to be critical. whether it's going to have the effect, i don't know. there is a great line by tom stop hart who once said about his own life as a writer and what he tried to do. he said, you know, you spend your life writing and every once in a while you put words together all your life and everywhere once in a while you get them in the write order and you give the world a nudge. so i just hope i get the words in the right order every once in a while and give the world a nudge. that's the most i can hope for. but it's what i exist to do really. >> charles and i used to talk about whether there is a lasting impact of journalism. we occasionally wondered how long it would take after we left the scene before we were forgotten and our

consensus was that it ranged anywhere from a nano second to six months. i think with regard to charles, that's way too pessimistic. henry adams once said. a steveer has a kind of immoral tattle because he or she never knows when his or her influence stops radiating i think it's far to say that charles has that kind of immoral tattle. >> somebody that had to face the challenges that charles krauthammer had faced his whole life and how he overcame adversity and how every single day he had to wake up and face challenges and. he did it with humor and grace and fought hard and he followed his passions and he made a difference. >> whatever i do is a little bit harder and probably a little bit slower and with a

little more effort and that's basically it i mean, look, everybody has their cross to bear. everybody. and i made a vow when i was injured that would never be what we characterize my life. so, i don't want it to be the first line of myopitch area. >> some sad news to share with you from our own fox news family our long time fox news contributor charles krauthammer, who has graced your homes and this channel for years, revealing today in a letter that he is in a losing battle with cancer. >> i don't know what the first line of charles' obituary is going to be, but i do know that he left this world as eloquently as anyone ever has. when the end was near, he sent me an email with the bad news. and it took my breath away. it moved me more than -- more than anything those words.

he wrote i am forever grateful for your unwavering support and dedication to returning me to my life. i'm only sorry i couldn't make it back to the desk by your side. but i leave this life with no regrets. it was a wonderful life, full and complete, with the great loves and great works that make it worth living. i am sad to leave -- but i leave with the knowledge that i lived the life that i intended. best wishes, charles. >> if i didn't write, if i didn't do what i do, if i didn't do commentary. if i didn't play whatever minor role i play in the history of this time, i would feel that i had failed in life. i hadn't done what i could do. i'm very lucky to have stumbled upon what i was

meant to do. i love it and i think it's important. ♪ next. ♪ >> tucker: good evening. welcome to "tucker carlson tonight." we want to take the next hour and go inside the issues looking beyond for a moment just the day's breaking news. there is a lot of it. but assess some of the bigger issues that are coming to define our life in this country. we are going to open with another look at what has been this year's biggest story. immigration. without much real public debate or even discussion, the elite left has reached a conclusion on the question. it is that america needs more immigration. much more. immigration without limit. we shouldn't worry about whether the people coming here have skills that we need. whether they are educated. whether they can speak english even or even whe