Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson explained how big tech was working to help former Vice President Joe Biden’s election prospects through the censorship of doctors offering information counter to the prevailing wisdom dominating the mainstream media regarding COVID-19.
Carlson cited a live-streamed press conference carried by Breitbart News on Monday as an example and compared the actions by those tech companies to the Communist Chinese.
Transcript as follows:
In an election year, everything significant that happens is about the election. So all these developments are, in fact, related. And here is the core question in every election: Who is up and who is down. As of tonight, the president is down double digits in the polls. There’s not much question about why that is. Americans are miserable. They’re stuck at home. They’re fearful. Millions of them don’t have jobs.
The percentage of Americans who believe our country is headed in the right direction has dropped off a cliff since this spring. Not coincidentally, that’s when a strange new virus from China began to spread among our population. The rise of COVID-19 tracks almost precisely the decline of Donald Trump’s approval number. The political lesson from this is clear: The more damage the Wuhan Coronavirus does to America, the harder it is for the president to get reelected.
That’s not speculation. It’s the most certain fact in politics. Every Democratic officeholder understands it. If the population remains terrified, Democrats will have more power in January. The Democratic party has every incentive to keep Americans afraid and off-balance. For the next 97 days, they plan to do that. That’s their entire campaign strategy, the only thing they’re running on.
Yesterday, the news site Breitbart posted a video of a group of physicians giving a press conference about medical advances in the fight against COVID. Some of the news the doctors delivered was hopeful because there is hopeful news to report. Seventeen million people saw that video. The president retweeted it. This enraged Democrats. Any scientific advancement that reduces the suffering of Americans in an election year is a threat to Joe Biden’s campaign.
They decided to pull the video off the internet. Fifteen years ago, that would have been absurd. You couldn’t have done it. This was America. You weren’t allowed to ban a news story just because it might hurt your candidate’s poll numbers. And in any case, there was no way to do it. There were too many news outlets then. No one could control them all. That has changed.
While the rest of us were sleeping — or in the case of so many of our senators, taking payoffs from Google — a tiny number of left-wing corporations took virtually complete control of all news and information in this country. Now, if Democrats want to erase a politically-inconvenient news story fewer than 100 days before an election, they can do it.
And they did do it. Big Tech censored science. They pulled the video of doctors in lab coats talking about coronavirus research, and they hid that video from the public. That’s exactly what the Chinese government so often does. Except when Silicon Valley erases your freedoms, they lecture you as they do it. They got all the ruthlessness of Chinese authoritarians but with double the self-righteousness — the American version.
Thankfully, this doesn’t apply to us at Fox News. We happen to work for one of the few mass media companies left in America that is not controlled by Facebook or Google. We can report the news honestly. Big tech can’t censor us, at least not right now. You’re not allowed to watch these physicians on YouTube tonight, but we can show them to you here, and we’re going to.
Here’s Doctor Bob Hamilton:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HAMILTON: I think it is important that all of us who are here today realize that our kids are not really the ones who are driving the infection. It is being driven by older individuals. And yes, we can send the kids back to school, I think, without fear.
We need to not act out of fear. We need to act out of science. We need to do it. We need to get it done.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: What you just heard isn’t some crackpot theory. It’s mainstream science. Increasingly, it represents the consensus among doctors and researchers around the world. Children are not meaningful vectors for the coronavirus. Worldwide, there is not a single recorded case of a student infecting a teacher with the virus. Not one case. And that’s why so many nations around the world are reopening their schools this fall. But not us. We’ve got a presidential election in November. Children must suffer so that Joe Biden can win that election. That’s the imperative driving our so-called “health” policy. But you can’t know that. So they pulled the video telling you that. Here’s another physician from the press conference called Doctor Stella Immanuel:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
IMMANUEL: There is a cure for COVID. There is a cure for COVID is called hydroxychloroquine. It’s called zinc. It’s called Zithromax. And it is time for the grassroots to wake up and say, “No, we’re not going to take this any longer. We’re not going to die.”
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Doctor Immanuel’s claim is harder to endorse. Is hydroxychloroquine a “cure” for the coronavirus? We don’t know the answer. We do that that many frontline physicians around the world have prescribed it, and continue to. We’ve interviewed some of them. The drug appears to show promise in treating some early-stage patients. That’s good news. The science on hydroxycholoroquine isn’t settled either way. Science rarely is settled. That’s why it’s science — and not, for example, radical feminist theory. Science is constantly evolving, as we test and retest our assumptions against observed reality. That’s the whole point of science.
Unfortunately, reality is not the point of politics. Winning is the point of politics. So they scrubbed the video.
Here’s more of it:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
IMMANUEL: My message to Dr. Anthony Fauci is when is the last time you put a stethoscope on a patient? That when you start seeing patients like we see on a daily basis, you will understand the frustration that we feel. You need to start feeling for American people like we, the frontline doctors, feel. I need to start realizing that. They are listening to you. And if they are going to you, you got to give them a message of hope.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: That last clip enraged them. Above all, you must never mock the sainted Anthony Fauci. Under no circumstances can you note that Fauci is very often a hypocritical buffoon, who refuses to admit what he clearly doesn’t know. If you say that out loud, they will cancel you. Fauci is too useful to the Biden campaign. His word must be law, even when it doesn’t make sense. Criticize Fauci, and you will disappear from the internet. And so, Dr. Immanuel disappeared from the internet.
Then Google’s countless toadies did the cleanup work, the ugly stuff. The Daily Beast attacked Immanuel for getting her medical degree in Africa and then suggested she believed in witchcraft. Because, you know, Africans do that. Political correctness is fine with The Daily Beast most of the year. But this is election season. Dr. Immanuel had to be destroyed. The Daily Beast was happy to help.
So were the think tank libertarians, including some still positing as conservatives. You saw them on Twitter, helpfully reminding you that this kind of censorship wasn’t really censorship because the government wasn’t doing it.
They didn’t explain why that distinction matters to anyone. In fact, censorship is always bad, whether it’s imposed by Congress, or by monopolies that only exist because they receive special carve-outs granted to them by Congress. It doesn’t matter. It’s always wrong. Censorship doesn’t improve public health. In fact, it threatens public health. The authorities responsible for containing this pandemic have failed. We know that. Some are trying their best, but they’ve frequently been wrong. We know that because it’s on tape. What we desperately in a crisis, especially in a crisis like right now, is we need are more voices in this conversation, not fewer. Remember when the Surgeon General told us this?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEROME ADAMS: What the WHO and CDC have reaffirmed that they do not recommend the general public wear masks (edit) Wearing a mask improperly can actually increase your risk of getting the disease.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Masks are dangerous! That wasn’t very long ago. Now masks are mandatory. In other words, scientific consensus changes. That’s the point — as we learn more, our conclusions change. Legitimate scientists understand that. That’s called the scientific method. Big tech companies don’t care one way or another because their goal is to control the outcome of an election, not to protect public health. This isn’t about public health, and it’s not about science. It never was. It’s about power. And no one in the history of the word has had more power than Google and Facebook have right now.
We should have seen this coming. People who have power abuse that power and people who have absolute power abuse it absolutely, as we’ve learned.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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