During Monday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson remarked on how Democrats continue to lose the coronavirus pandemic a tool in their pursuit to gain political power.
Carlson pointed out the inconsistencies from policymakers in defining the virus and its remedies, which he said were being leveraged in an election season.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Unfortunately, this is not a normal Labor Day. It hasn’t been a normal summer. In many places tonight, politicians still monitor and control the most intimate details of your life: where you eat, who you spend time with and where, how many relatives you can invite to your wedding. Whether or not you can hold your parents hands on their deathbeds. The pretext for these social controls is the coronavirus epidemic. We never thought it will go on this long.
This spring, you’ll remember, we were told we had 15 days to slow the spread. We thought that meant 15 days. We are very little literal, but 15 days became 170 days and it’s still going. People like Tony Fauci showed up. Fauci seemed reasonable enough at first.
In January, he said that lockdowns of the kind that China imposed would never happen in this country. He also said you don’t need to wear a mask. He also insisted the virus wasn’t a major threat here. He said all of that. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
QUESTION: Bottom line, we don’t have to worry about this one, right?
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: Well, you know, obviously, we need to take it seriously and do the kinds of things that the C.D.C. and the Department of Homeland Security are doing.
But this is not a major threat for the people in the United States and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, don’t worry about it. It’s totally fine. That’s what Tony Fauci told us in January. By the way, we didn’t take that out of context. It’s not an isolated quote. We’re not proof texting here.
As the latest — as March — this March, standing at a White House coronavirus briefing, Tony Fauci did not oppose the idea of gathering indoors for an indoor campaign rally.
But then more people started dying, Federal officials panicked and they elevated Tony Fauci from an adviser, a physician, to a policymaker. And that was a pivot point in American history.
The Hippocratic Oath says, “Do no harm” and it works in the context of a doctor-patient relationship. But it does not work when you’re trying to run a government, particularly in a country as big as this one. Every speed limit on every road has a tradeoff. Everything in life has a tradeoff between efficiency and the value of human life.
If we cut all speed limits to 10 miles per hour, thousands of lives would be saved. But we don’t do that. Sad as it is, we keep speed limits higher because we understand that some risks, even real risk, potentially fatal risks are necessary if you’re going to have a functioning society. That’s just the truth.
But Tony Fauci couldn’t see that. He insisted otherwise.
So by April, he was warning that even shaking hands could be too dangerous to continue.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
FAUCI: I don’t think we ever should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you. Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease, it probably would decrease the incidence of influenza dramatically in this country.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
CARLSON: OK, so that’s extremism. It’s not balancing the cost and the benefit of a recommendation or a mandate. But Fauci was clearly figuring this out as he went along, just like the rest of us were and that’s not a sin, by the way. Everybody does it. This was new.
But Tony Fauci was a useful foil for the Democratic Party and the media to attack the President. So you weren’t allowed to point out that some of his recommendations were inconsistent. Some were just silly. Not all, but some.
The so-called progressives who often confuse science for religious dogma had finally found their leading man and they wanted to protect him at all costs.
Jeff Bezos’s personal newspaper proclaimed that Trump and his minions are trying to destroy Fauci. Destroy Fauci — asking questions about the mandates from the policymakers is now destroying him. It’s absurd, but dozens of media outlets repeated that talking point.
By the time Tony Fauci described his lockdowns, the one that hobbled the U.S. economy as quote, “inconvenient,” nobody seemed to notice. The Washington press corps just nodded along. They weren’t unemployed.
In fact, politicians began engaging in an arms race to implement their own inconvenient regulations.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot promised that people who went to parties would suffer sterner consequences than people who looted Target. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR LORI LIGHTFOOT (D), CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: And this is how it’s going to be. We will shut you down. We will cite you, and if we need to, we will arrest you, and we will take you to jail.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, if only she was that angry at people shooting each other on the South Side or people mugging pedestrians in the Loop, but she’s not.
In Los Angeles, the Mayor Eric Garcetti went even farther than that. He took his cues from the Chinese government. Hosting a gathering in Los Angeles will cost you your water and your power service, the mayor decreed.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI (D), LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: These large parties are unsafe and can cost Angelinos their lives.
That is why tonight, I’m authorizing the city to shut off Los Angeles Department of Water and Power service in the egregious cases in which houses, businesses and other venues are hosting unpermitted large gatherings.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: No science behind. Hard to believe this is happening in America, but of course it is. Once you give politicians power, they don’t relinquish it. Why would they?
For mediocre people like Eric Garcetti and Lori Lightfoot, people could never find a job outside of say, a corporate HR department where the standards are very low. This was profoundly empowering. They loved it.
The problem was, it crushed the country. It crushed people, Americans measurably. Divorce rates, for example, soared by 34 percent.
At one point, newlywed separations doubled. Domestic violence and fatal overdoses increased dramatically. It may be a long time before we know how dramatically, but it is clear, many people died as a result of this and many more thought about killing themselves.
According to CDC numbers, a quarter of all young adults contemplated suicide during the pandemic.
Ultimately, the only group that found the coronavirus to be empowering were people who are trying to win a presidential campaign and trying to regain control of the Senate and the White House.
They haven’t tried to hide the political benefits to the lockdown. No, they’ve leveraged the fear most people have of this virus to gain political power.
Back in May, House Democrats passed what they call the HEROES Act. There are parts of the bill that were good. The parts that were transparently political. One part would send out approximately 160 million ballots to any jurisdiction in the state of emergency. That’s the vast majority of United States.
The bill would also legalize the practice of allowing paid political operatives to collect an unlimited number of ballots and return them en masse to polling stations. That’s called ballot harvesting. It’s illegal in many places because it’s obviously, obviously an invitation to voter fraud.
It provides opportunities to criminals to intercept and manipulate ballots. It’s happened. The L.A. Times concluded that California’s ballot harvesting law, quote: “Does open the door to coercion and fraud.” Understatement of the week. That happened in North Carolina.
The state invalidated a congressional election last year in a ballot harvesting fraud scandal. So, for the people pushing it, that’s not a cautionary tale. It’s a blueprint. It’s why they’re doing another coronavirus emergency bill, by the way, known as the Dismantle Mass Incarceration for Public Health Act.
It would allow for the release of more than 100,000 prisoners including violent offenders. Of course, the usual group rushed to support Sandy Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, the Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson, they all support this.
The prisoners are released on home confinement, but their status would not be revoked unless they’re literally caught hurting someone. That’s in the bill. We’re not making this up.
It allows incarcerated felons to leave prison and stay free unless they quote, ” … cause bodily injury or use violent force against another individual.” So murderers get to go free, but you have to stay inside indefinitely.
No one has told the rioters that they are on mandatory home confinement. They have to destroy their own stuff. No, they’re out in the street.
These commands have been in place since April. We’ve known that this was basically a political power grab since then, since the day a member of Joe Biden’s Coronavirus Taskforce, Dr. Zeke Emanuel told us so on television. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. EZEKIEL EMANUEL, AMERICAN ONCOLOGIST, BIOETHICIST AND SENIOR FELLOW AT THE CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS: Realistically, COVID-19 will be here for the next 18 months or more. We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine or effective medications.
Is all of that economic pain worth trying to stop COVID-19? The truth is, we have no choice.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: The truth is we have no choice. Meaning, the truth is you have no choice. We’re doing this whether you like it or not, no one asked the public what they think, nobody cares.
Last month Joe Biden said that he will lock down the country if the experts tell him to. What experts is he referring to? Well, hardened partisan operators like Zeke Emanuel.
This isn’t science. It’s dystopia. How long can it continue?
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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