On Monday night's show, we interviewed a U.S. Senator called Mike Braun. Braun is a Republican who represents the very Republican State of Indiana.
Braun ran for office two years ago as a conservative, but he has not governed like one. As the mob burned cities and shot police officers, Mike Braun used his power in the U.S. Senate to punish local police -- cops were the real problem, Braun decided. So he sponsored legislation to make it easier for leftwing activist groups to sue and bankrupt individual police officers.
And then Mike Braun endorsed Black Lives Matter.
QUESTION: Do you support the Black Lives Matter movement?
SEN. MIKE BRAUN, R-Ind.: I support that movement, because it's addressing an inequity that has not been solved, you know, from a grassroots level.
It's hard to imagine that many of Mike Braun's voters agree with any of that. Black Lives Matter has said it wants to eliminate police departments, dismantle the nuclear family and install socialism in the United States.
Even in the highly revolutionary year of 2020, those don't seem like winning positions in the State of Indiana. So we asked Mike Braun to explain how that works exactly, and it didn't go well. We're not going to play you the tape. It feels like piling on to do that.
We will just sum it up this way. At one point in the interview, Mike Braun explained that he was pushing leftwing legislation because he was afraid of being criticized by Chuck Schumer, if he didn't.
The whole thing went like that. It was remarkable. Almost beyond belief really. Again, we're not trying to be mean here. Cruelty is easy, too easy, especially with politicians. The closer you get to them, the easier you realize it is.
And by the way, Mike Braun doesn't seem like a bad person. If you live next door to him, you'd probably like him. Braun is just weak and he doesn't really believe in anything. He is definitely not alone in that, an awful lot of Republican officeholders look very much like Mike Braun right now, probably most of them. That's a problem.
In a moment like this, it is a severe and dangerous problem. Here's why. Republicans at all levels could lose this fall. If they do, there will be profound consequences for you.
People who supported Donald Trump will be punished. There's absolutely no question about that. There's never been an American political party as radical and as angry as the Democrats are now. Imagine them with unlimited power, and that's what they plan to get.
In their first year, Democrats will give voting rights to every illegal alien in this country, and then encourage many others to join them from abroad.
At a minimum, that means more than 20 million new Democratic voters overnight. No Republican will win nationally. Again, we will have one-party rule.
But Democrats don't plan to stop there. In Congress, they will abolish the filibuster. That means they'll be able to do whatever they want to do with just a simple majority, which they will have. They plan to pack the Senate by making the District of Columbia a state.
Giving statehood to D.C. is unconstitutional, clearly, but they're not worried about that. They plan to pack the Supreme Court, too. They have said so.
So what will Democrats do with all of this untrammeled power? It's pretty easy to imagine. We won't go into details right now. We don't want to wreck your night. But look around, you've got a pretty good idea of what's coming.
The point is, and it could not be clearer, non-Democrats in America are in peril. We're going to need someone with power willing to come to our defense. And that's where people like Mike Braun come in. That was the point of last night's interview.
Not to humiliate a specific senator, but to remind the Republican Party that it is our only shield. Yes, the Republican Party, flawed and infuriating, though it often is. The fact remains, the G.O.P. is the only institution still open to the rest of us, to Americans who want to live as they did just 15 years ago. Quietly, productively, without being harassed and harangued by self-righteous lunatics who mean them harm and they do.
If you want to be left alone to do your job and raise your family in this country, you will need a protector. That protector must be the Republican Party. There are no other options, but it must be a very different kind of Republican Party.
Keep in mind, we're getting a new Republican Party no matter what happens. Even now, vultures wait just off stage to swoop in and claim the G.O.P. for themselves once Donald Trump is gone. Former Governor Nikki Haley tops that list, but there are many others on it.
The moment Trump leaves, they will attack him. They'll tell you that Republicans lost power because they were mean and intolerant just like Donald Trump. And if you listen carefully, you can hear them say that even now. It's a lie.
Republicans are failing for a much more obvious reason, a more fundamental reason. They're failing because they haven't done much that is worth doing. They haven't tried very hard to improve your life. When the crisis came, they fled. They did nothing to defend you. They did nothing to defend the country.
They were paralyzed. Their so-called principles turned out to be bumper stickers they wrote 40 years ago. They had no clue what to do.
So from this day forward, it's very simple. We're going to have to tell them what to do, and that will work. No matter what they may believe privately, politicians respond to organized groups of voters. They want to win, above all, so they head to where the votes are.
Going forward, Republican voters should demand three things from their candidates, and if they don't provide them, don't vote for them. Here they are.
First is vigorous defense of total equality under the law. We are equal because we are citizens. Every American has precisely the same rights as every other American. Period. That is the promise of America. It's why millions of people move here.
For a long time, we knew that; no one questioned it. It was obvious, but it no longer is obvious and there are many who are working in the opposite direction.
Republicans must counterbalance this. They must work as hard as they can to make America fair again. Wealth, appearance, ancestry can play no role whatsoever in the eyes of the law.
That means that criminals like Jeffrey Epstein must go to jail the first time they're caught molesting children. It means your children must have precisely the same chances of getting into college or getting a job as anyone else's children.
It means fighting to make this a colorblind meritocracy. A colorblind meritocracy. Say it again. The alternative to that is disaster.
Slavery and Jim Crow were immoral precisely because they punished people for how they were born. Any system that punishes people for how they were born is immoral, always. Republicans must say that loudly.
Don't get caught in pointless debates about whether or not this is a racist country. Clearly it isn't. Prove it by making it less racist, by making it a colorblind meritocracy. That's our promise.
Second, Republicans must defend our freedom of speech. We are not a free society without that. This is not simply a debate about the First Amendment and its limits. It's bigger than that and more important.
If you can't articulate something, if you're not allowed, you can't think it. And that's precisely why authoritarians try to control language. They're trying to control your mind. Republicans should lead the fight against this without shame.
Americans have the absolute right to tell the truth. This is not negotiable, nor by the way is it a theoretical concern, of interest only to intellectuals. Everything depends on it.
If you can't think freely, you can't solve problems. Try to build a hydro plant or fly a commercial airplane? If certain categories of thought are off limits to you, it doesn't work. The power grid collapses, planes crash. Society degrades.
No speech means no science, no art, no civilization. Most of us were taught that this debate was settled conclusively during the Enlightenment hundreds of years ago and reason vanquished dogma. But it wasn't settled.
More from Opinion
The forces of superstition remain. They are stronger than ever. In fact, they are growing in strength. The Republican Party must fight them or it's not a party worth having.
And finally, we must never forget that in the end, the Republican Party exists to serve the interests of normal people, ordinary people. Middle class families are the core of this country. They are our hope for the future -- our only hope -- and yet both parties have shamelessly abandoned them.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER
Middle-class families have no national spokesman. They have no lobby in Washington. Republicans pretend to be their champion, you know by now that they are not. Instead of improving the lives of their voters, the party feeds them a steady diet of mindless symbolic victories, partisan junk food designed to make them feel full even as they waste away.
Who cares how many Benghazi hearings we have? We're supposed to care. Why should we?
How did Peter Strzok's text messages become more important than saving American jobs from foreign nationals who are taking them? It is lunacy. We fall for it every time and to the extent this show has participated in it, we apologize with deepest sincerity.
Because meanwhile, as we're talking about things that don't matter, life for the dwindling American middle class has become steadily worse. Suddenly, there are junkies living in your park. Your nephew just died of a fentanyl overdose. And saddest of all, and who hasn't thought this, you've realized that your children will never be as successful as you are. The American Dream died with your generation.
As all of this happened, Democrats laughed because it served their interests. Republicans basically ignored it and that cannot continue. The only political movements that endure are the ones that make their voters stronger.
So how does this change? Can republican officeholders change their party? Yes, they can. We just have to make them. These are not by and large, evil people. Mike Braun is not an evil person.
Despite the way they talk, they're not secretly working for the other side. Most of them are just empty, sad people, and politics is the way they fill the yawning void inside where a personal life should be -- they are pleasers. They're searching for the approval of strangers.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Our job is to give them clear instructions about what we want. We do that by voting and by making noise. They will not lead us, we know that now. They've refused to.
We have to lead and when we do, they will follow.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on June 30, 2020.