Wednesday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson opened his program with a monologue criticizing the coronavirus lockdown, which has had a profound impact on many Americans’ lives.
According to the Fox News host, with little input from the public, elected officials moved to lockdown many places around the country. But given public officials’ reactions to protests and the impact of the virus on areas where lockdown restrictions were not as strict or severe, Carlson claims the public was “played” by politicians.
Partial transcript as follows:
Millions of Americans remain subjected to unprecedented restrictions on their personal lives, their daily lives, their family lives. The coronavirus lockdowns continue in many places. You may not know that because it gets no publicity but it’s true. If you’re living under it, you definitely know. As a result of this, tens of millions of people are now unemployed. A huge number of them have no prospects of working again, many thousands of small businesses are closed and will never reopen.
Many Americans have become dependent on drugs and alcohol, seen their marriage is dissolved, become clinically depressed. Some of them have delayed their wedding. Others were banned from the government by from burying their loved ones and funerals. Some Americans will die of cancer because they couldn’t get cancer screenings. Some unknown number have taken their own lives in despair. Others have flooded to the streets to riot because bottled up rage and frustration take many forms.
The cost of shutting down the United States and denying our citizens desperately needed contact with one another is hard to calculate, but the cost has been staggering. The people responsible for doing all this, they have no regrets about it — “We faced a global calamity,” they say. COVID-19 was the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu. That flu killed 50 million people.
We had no choice. We did the right thing. That’s what they’re telling us. Is it true? The answer to that question matters not just because the truth always matters, but because the credibility of our leaders is at stake here.
This is the biggest decision they made in our lifetimes, they were able to make it, they rule because we let them? Their power comes from us. So the question now and always is, are they worthy of that power? That’s not a conversation they want to have. And right now, they don’t have to have that conversation because right now, all of us are distracted and mesmerized by the woke revolution underway outside. They created a separate country in Seattle. As we said, we will bring you the latest on that in just a minute.
But we think it’s worth taking a pause to assess whether or not they were, in fact, lying to us about the coronavirus and our response to it. The short answer is this: Yes, they were definitely lying. As a matter of public health, conclusively, the lockdowns were not necessary. In fact, we can prove that and here’s the most powerful evidence — states that never locked down at all, states, where people were allowed to live like Americans and not cower in indoors alone, in the end, turned out no worse than they could states that had mandatory quarantine, the states you probably live in.
The states that did lockdown and were quick to reopen have not seen explosions of coronavirus cases. All of this is the opposite of what they said would happen with great confidence. The media predicted mass death in places of Lake of the Ozark and Ocean City, Maryland — the place where the middle class dares to vacation.
But those deaths never happened. In the end, the Wuhan coronavirus turned out to be a dangerous disease but a manageable disease like so many others. Far more dangerous were the lockdowns themselves. For example, in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts — panicked and incompetent governors forced nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients. And as a result, many thousands died and they died needlessly. This is all a remarkable story but its going almost entirely uncovered.
The media would rather tell you why you need to hate your neighbor for the color of his skin. The media definitely don’t want to revisit what they were saying just a few weeks ago, whend they were acting as press agents for power-drunk Democratic politicians. Back then, news anchors were ordering you to stop asking questions and obey.
[…]
One minute they were mass murderers for going outside. Now they are Sam Adams. They are patriots, they are American heroes. If all of this seems like a pretty abrupt pivot, fret now. Rioting is not a health risk, as long as it helps the Democratic Party’s prospects in the November election, rioting will not spread the coronavirus.
Sounds implausible, but we can be certain of that because last week hundreds of self-described public health officials signed a letter saying something. They announced that the Black Lives Matter riots are a vital contribution to public health. In effect, they’re an essential medical procedure.
But that doesn’t mean you get to go outside. You don’t. Thanks to coronavirus, you do not have the right to resume your life. And if you complain about that, it’s quote, “white nationalism,” that was a professional conclusion. Does a single American believe any of that? No, of course not. It is too stupid to even for CNN to repeat, so they mostly ignored it.
That’s an ominous side if you think about it. It means these people are done trying to convince you, even to fool you. They’re not making arguments, they are issuing decrees. They think they can. They no longer believe they need your consent to make big decisions to run the country. Once the authority stops trying to change your mind, even by deceit, it means they decided to use force, and they have.
During the lockdowns, people whose loved ones died were not allowed to have funerals for them. Think about that, it’s hard to think of anything crueler, but it happened to a lot of people. They claimed it was necessary. It was not necessary, and we know that they because now that a man has died whose death is politically useful to Democratic Party, the authorities have given him three funerals and not a word about a health risk.
Or consider King County, Washington — that’s where Seattle is. Restaurants in King County are operating at just 25% capacity. That’s the law now. Nonessential businesses are allowed 15% capacity. The effect of that is an economic disaster. Most small businesses run on very small margins. They can’t survive for long, and many have failed. What should they do? They should join Antifa, obviously, because in King County, Washington, Antifa can do whatever they want to do. They’ve taken an entire six-block section of downtown Seattle, and that’s fine with health authorities. There are no social distancing required. They are essential.
Are you getting the picture? Is this adding up to our message? Yeah, the messages you were played. We were all played, corrupt politicians scared us into giving up control over the most basic questions in our own lives. At the same time, they gave more power to their obedient followers like Antifa while keeping the rest of us trapped at home and censored online. In other words, they used a public health emergency to subvert democracy and instill themselves as monarchs. How are they able to do this? The sad truth is they did it because we let them do it. We believed them, they are therefore we obeyed them. If there’s anything good to come out of this disaster, it’s that none of us will ever make that mistake again.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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