Last Updated on September 26, 2022
Fox News host Tucker Carlson spoke at the Stockton, California funeral of Hells Angels founder Sonny Barger on Saturday, where he delivered a speech to the crowd assembled in Barger’s honor and called on Americans to heed the biker’s words to “remain free” and “value honor.”
Fox News host and longtime conservative pundit Tucker Carlson told the crowd of Hells Angels and other mourners of Barger’s death that he’d traveled from Maine to his native California to attend the memorial service for Barger, who helped found the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club in the 1950s. Himself a motorcycle enthusiast, Carlson told the crowd that he was moved by a letter Barger wrote prior to his June death, in which the nationally-renowned tough guy and motorcyclist laid out his worldview.
“I never met Sonny Barger, but when he died, his letter to his wife and friends was released, and my college roommate, who was also a Harley Davidson fan sent it to me. We’d always been fans of Sonny Barger, but I didn’t know what his personal views were apart from representing the club,” Carlson explained from the podium.
“And the letter, if I can just summarize it from memory, was; ‘stand tall, stay loyal, remain free, and always value honor.’ And I thought to myself if there is a phrase that sums up more perfectly what I want to be, what I aspire to be, and the kind of man I respect, I can’t think of a phrase that sums it up more perfectly than that,” said Carlson.
“That came from Sonny Barger, the famous outlaw biker,” Carlson added, before posing the question of why Americans aren’t hearing the same advice from their elected officials, who are supposedly tasked with leading the nation.
“That’s Sonny Barger’s worldview. Why aren’t we hearing that from the people who run the country? Why is it left to Sonny Barger to say ‘stand tall, stay loyal, remain free, and always value honor’? The President of the United States should be saying that every single morning as he salutes the flag, but only Sonny Barger is saying it,” Carlson went on to say, amidst cheers from the audience.
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Ralph Hubert “Sonny” Barger, Jr. was born in Modesto, California on October 8th, 1938, and passed away on June 29th, at the age of 83. At the memorial service held in Stockton, California in his honor this past weekend, more than 7,000 people are estimated to have turned out.
In 1957, Barger was one of the founding members of the famous Oakland, California chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. Just one year later, in 1958, he was declared the de facto president of the national Hells Angels organization and Oakland became the base of the club’s operations.
In the 1960s, with Barger serving as president, the club received much press coverage for smashing up left-wing, pro-communist demonstrations against the Vietnam War. In a public statement, Barger referred to the left-wing demonstrators as “a mob of traitors.”
A true American Patriot, Barger once sent a letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson, offering up he and his men within the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club for use as special soldiers in the Vietnam War.
“I volunteer a group of loyal Americans for behind-the-line duty in Vietnam,” Barger wrote to LBJ. “We feel that a crack group of trained guerillas could demoralize the Viet Cong and advance the cause of freedom.”
Johnson never responded to Barger’s offer and was later credited with losing the war for America by way of his gross mismanagement of combat operations from afar in Washington.
Through his time in the club, Barger served stints in prison and survived numerous attempts on his life.
A key component of American open-road culture, motorcycles and motorcycle clubs have long been objects of fascination for everyday Americans. In his later years, Barger made a guest appearance on the popular show Sons of Anarchy, which followed a fictional biker club loosely based on the real-life Hells Angels.
