Tucker Carlson: ‘This Is the Most Sweeping and Audacious Assault on Civil Liberties in American History’
Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson warned about the tactics employed by Democrats and their allies to suppress dissent and so-called divisive rhetoric of their political opponents.
Carlson said such treatment with the intention of accumulating power could ultimately result in more radicalism.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Happy Friday. What a week. A lot going on in this country right now, but maybe the single biggest mystery when you take three steps back is why Democrats became so vicious after they won.
So, Joe Biden got the White House, his party took the Congress, you’d think they’d be thrilled. That’s what they wanted. You think they’d be celebrating? But no. Instead they started a purge.
Within hours, Democrats began crushing even the mildest dissent. They shut down an entire social media company called Parler, not because Parler had done anything wrong, but simply because they couldn’t control it. They couldn’t take the chance that somebody on Parler might criticize them, so they eliminated it.
Then two days ago, they arrested a man and threw him in handcuffs brought him up on federal charges because he made fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter, that man is now facing 10 years in prison.
Democrats then declared war on their rival political party, not by the way, a metaphorical war, but an actual one: soldiers and paramilitary law enforcement and the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies. They denounced Republicans even the fairly moderate establishment figures who pose really no conceivable threat to anyone.
They denounce them as dangerous terrorists, they linked them to ISIS and al Qaeda, and anyone who complained about this or fought back in any way, was threatened with expulsion from Congress.
In other words, it doesn’t matter what voters decided in November, in the name of democracy, you can no longer serve in the Congress. That’s what they said. Nor are dissidents permitted in the Federal bureaucracy. No one who disagrees with our beliefs, Democrats have announced can work in the U.S. government.
We’re not overstating it; that all actually happened, and you saw it. Nothing like that has ever taken place in this country before. This is the most sweeping and audacious assault on civil liberties in American history.
So, the question is, what accounts for this? Why are they doing it? It’s worth figuring that out.
On the most basic level, of course, it’s a power grab. We said that from the first day and it remains true. The Democratic Party doesn’t exist to serve some abstract principle, liberty and justice or the Bill of Rights. No. Nor is its primary goal improving the lives of its voters. If you’ve been to Detroit, you know that’s true.
No, the Democratic Party exists to accumulate power, all of it. Some is never enough. The impulse is to control everything. So that’s what they’re trying to do now amidst the chaos and tumult.
But that’s not all that’s going on right now. There’s more. Look around: watch as Democrats erect a permanent steel prison fence around the United States Capitol. Why is that fence there? Well, to protect the people inside, to keep the public out of what we used to call the People’s House. That’s happening tonight as we speak.
Then notice the thousands of armed soldiers and law enforcement agents stationed outside that fence. What’s their purpose? Again, protecting the people inside.
Then ask yourself why are House Democrats planning to use federal committee funds to pay for more personal security for themselves? Why the renewed push to seize firearms from law-abiding Americans who have committed no crime? Why does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seem on the verge of tears as she describes as she was almost murdered on January 6 at the Capitol.
She is not entirely putting it on, she seems to mean it.
If you’re sensing a theme here, there is in fact a theme and the theme is panic, fear and it’s real. You are looking at leaders who are genuinely afraid of the people they are supposed to be leading.
Here’s the really interesting thing: they seem much more afraid now that Donald Trump has left office. With Donald Trump gone, they sense that a period of actual populism has begun, real populism, and they may be right.
Look at what happened this week on Wall Street. A group of guys on Reddit trading stocks in their boxer shorts exposed the entire American finance establishment as the corrupt and fraudulent scam that it often is. That’s a pivotal moment in this country.
Once you see something like that, you can’t un-see it. Once someone pulls the mask from your face, he still remembers your face. People’s attitudes about our economy will change forever because of what happened this week. It’s a big deal.
The Biden administration’s response to what happened this week. Their first impulse was to brag about having the first female Treasury Secretary. That’s what they said. That’s not an adequate response to what happened, and even the Biden people know that it’s not, but that’s all they had.
The truth is our leaders don’t have answers. They don’t even have explanations for what’s going on. Worse than that, they themselves are deeply implicated in the systemic problems. In some cases, the crimes that are dragging the country down. They know all this. They know their guilt. Here’s the thing: they know that you know it, too, and that’s why they’re afraid. They know why populism is rising, and it is.
So, this really is the time to make a decision about how to respond to it. What our leaders do next will define what America looks like going forward. It wouldn’t even be hard to begin the process of fixing things or bringing actual unity to a country that badly needs unity.
In a democracy, the first step to unifying the country is always the same. Leaders enter into a power-sharing agreement with the people they lead. They do the obvious thing, they stop lying to their own citizens, they stop attacking them, and they respect their culture. They don’t try to control people’s beliefs. That’s not their role.
They treat their own citizens like adults, meaning they treat them fairly. And above all, they cut the public in on some of the fruits of the country’s success. If all the benefits of our economy seem to be accruing to a small number of people, that’s a problem and they try hard to fix it.
Wise leaders know that unequal countries are volatile countries. They know that caste systems are not compatible with democracies. But our leaders don’t seem to know any of that. Instead, they tell us that solar cars and mandatory diversity training are the real solutions to our problems. But no one buys that, those are not real solutions, they are a smokescreen. They’re a diversion tactic.
Populism starts when people start to figure that out, and they have. And that’s why everything suddenly feels so unstable right now, because once again, real populism is brewing.
In the face of all of that, the people in charge are doing the single stupidest, most counterproductive thing that any leader could do in the face of a populist movement. They’re refusing to admit their role in the decline. They’re refusing to admit their failures, and instead, they are blaming the people they have failed. They’re literally declaring war on their own population. How’s that going to end?
And if you think we’re overstating it, we’re not. Here’s the former CIA Director describing what the enemy looks like.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN BRENNAN, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: And this threat from domestic violence extremists is much more challenging, I believe, than it was in terms of going after foreign terrorists. The domestic violent extremists are much more pervasive, their numbers are much larger.
When we’re going after al Qaeda or other types of terrorist group cells in the United States, their numbers were in the single digits of dozens and was finding needles in a haystack.
Here, there are a lot of haystacks with a lot of needles in them. They have the wherewithal, they already have the weapons that if they so choose to use them, they can in fact, carry out these deadly attacks.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So many problems in this country, evident to anyone who is paying attention, but John Brennan, the former CIA Director has isolated the real problem. The real problem is you.
According to Brennan, anyone who disagrees with say, Susan Rice is worse than Osama bin Laden and more dangerous. These people meaning you, quote, “Have the weapons,” these terrorists. By terrorists, Brennan means tens of millions of American citizens who might have a firearm at home and didn’t vote for Joe Biden. They’re the threat and we need to hunt them as we hunted al Qaeda.
You just saw the clip. That’s what he said. It is hard to imagine a leader saying something more destructive and more reckless than that on television in a moment as fraught as the one we’re in. It’s terrifying in its stupidity, and in its certain effect.
This isn’t crying fire in a crowded theater, this is using a flame thrower in a crowded theater. What are the implications of a former CIA Director talking like this? It’s not going to make anyone more moderate. That’s for certain, just the opposite.
John Brennan is creating more extremists than a Pakistani madrasa. And it’s not just him, all the news other than this one right now are repeating this now-official line that the American government is now at war with its own population. Here is CNN’s version.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: My colleague, Jim Sciutto, he has covered international terrorism for 20 years and says that the parallels to the domestic terror threat are frightening. And he points to and I quote here, “radicalization online, demonization of the enemy to justify violence, draw to a cause greater than themselves devotion to a cultish leader.”
That said, are we doing enough to combat this threat?
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: This is the way law enforcement looks at the domestic terror threat now is equal or greater than international terrorism. If we compared that to a U.S. politician propagating Islamist terrorist thought, materials, lies, et cetera, imagine the reaction. And yet sadly, there’s still a partisan reaction to this, some denying that the threat is real and that the lie behind the threat is dangerous.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: American citizens are more dangerous than foreign terrorists. You often hear people say, “Oh FOX is so extreme. The FOX News is so extreme.” No show on this would ever put that on the air — ever. And if anyone did, people would resign in protest because that is completely untrue and completely reckless.
For once we’re not even going to mock Don Lemon for being a mouth-breather, though he demonstrably is. The problem is much bigger than that, it’s not funny. He and that former Obama official you just saw told their viewers that millions of American citizens are terrorists.
Now, that’s a lie. For one thing, it is just not true. Press a little and you’ll find the Department of Homeland Security which has been upping up the domestic threat for the past week, at great cost to people’s sanity. DHS has no actual evidence that Trump voters are planning to hurt anyone, there is no evidence of a plot of any kind, they can see that. Trust us, they would tell you if they found a plot.
But the question you have to ask yourself is what kind of effect do lies like that, the ones you just heard are calculated to terrify you? What kind of effect do they have on the country? Especially over time? This is not new.
When you tell people they’re evil because of how they vote or how they look, and our leaders are definitely telling them that every single day, when you train a population to tally every group of Americans by race and ethnicity, first and foremost, keep track of people’s genetic background every time you see a picture. Really? What effect does that have when you promote group identity, even as you intentionally destroy national identity?
If you do all of those things, what kind of country do you get at the end? Well, you get a scary divided country, the kind of country where you need steel fencing outside the national legislature.
It’s very obvious where all of this is going. And it’s very, very bad. Part of the solution is to stop talking like this immediately. No more aging spies on cable news declaring war on American citizens, ” … domestic political enemies more dangerous than al Qaeda.” What?
No more power-mad members of Congress dividing people by race so they can conquer. White fragility, white supremacy, white sounds, those are racial attacks, let’s stop lying about it. We shouldn’t talk that way in public.
Those attacks are making people crazy. And by the way, over time, possibly making people dangerous. For real, too threatened, too nuts.
Watch this clip and ask yourself what kind of effect this woman is having on the United States right now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): There are legitimate white supremacist sympathizers that sit at the heart and at the core of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives.
There’s no consequences for racism, no consequences for massaging, no consequences for insurrection, and no consequences means that they condone it.
We are now away from acting out of fealty to their President that they had in the Oval Office, and now we are talking about fealty to white supremacist organizations as a political tool.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Wait. Let’s just be honest, for a second, that woman is a tool of corporate power posing as a truth-teller. Look at her campaign contributions. Who is supporting her campaigns? People who want to change the subject away from economics to identity politics. That whole pose is fraudulent in her case.
But listen specifically to what she says and think about the effect on the people listening, people standing in airports will hear her say that, quote, “Fealty to white supremacist organizations as a political tool.” What does that even mean? We’re not even sure who she is talking about, apparently, the Republican Party and its Grand Kleagle, Kevin McCarthy of California.
That’s not true. But it’s worse than that. This is a fantasy. It’s a very dark fantasy, designed to terrify people and make them easier to command.
Over time, probably not long now. It will have other more insidious effects. Talk like that, from our leaders, from our elected officials is going to turn some of our citizens very, very radical. You don’t want to live in a country with very, very radical people.
So to be clear, whatever you hear about Fox News being radical, we want to live in a country that looks like — I don’t know, 2005, where your race is not the most important thing about you, where you have a chance to get ahead by playing by the rules. That’s called moderate. That’s called democracy. That’s the republic that we want, and talk like this, which is everywhere, all of a sudden, is the enemy of the country we once lived in.
