Friday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson slammed Democrats for their claims that the wildfires ravaging the West were a product of anthropogenic climate change, and by extension, President Donald Trump for not being more proactive about climate change.
Carlson said such statements were a part of an argument for citizens to change their lifestyles and turn over more power to the government.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Massive wildfires, unprecedented in their scope continue to sweep across huge portions of the West tonight.
In Oregon, half a million residents have been forced to evacuate their homes. That’s one of every 10 people in the entire state. Dozens are dead, including small children. But the fires still are not close to contained. Watch this report from Fox’s Jeff Paul.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEFF PAUL, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Months of tinder-dry conditions added to days of high winds and hot temperatures creating a perfect firestorm across the West. California is one of the hardest hit with a record-breaking three million acres burned and nearly 4,000 homes and buildings lost so far. A 12-year-old boy and his grandmother are among the latest deaths.
The flames are spreading so fast, it really doesn’t give people much time to get out.
The fires also taking a toll in Washington State where more than a hundred homes are gone, and a one-year-old boy died as his family tried to flee the flames.
And in Oregon, more than 35 fires are burning with at least five small towns destroyed. Resources across the west are stretched thin.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: It is awful and it continues as we speak right now. Walls of flame consuming everything in their path, homes, thousands and thousands, untold numbers of animals, and of course, as we said human beings, too. It is tragedy on a massive scale.
When something this terrible happens, decent people pause. They put their own interests aside for a moment. They consider how they can help.
We’ve seen that kind of selflessness before in this country. This is, remember, the anniversary of 9/11. But there are others for whom altruism is an unknown concept. Self-interest is all they know. These people do not pause, they never do. They relentlessly press forward for any advantage under any circumstances.
They see human suffering as a means to increase their personal power. These are the people who turn funerals into political rallies and feel no shame for doing it.
As Americans burned to death, people like this swung into action immediately. They went on television with a partisan talking point. Climate change, they said, cause these fires. They didn’t explain how exactly that happened. How did climate change do that? They didn’t tell us but they just kept saying it.
In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky. You can’t see it, but rest assured, it’s everywhere, and it’s deadly. And like systemic racism, it is your fault. The American middle class did it. They caused climate change.
They ate too many hamburgers. They drove too many SUVs. They had too many children. A lot of them wear t-shirts to work and didn’t finish college and that causes climate change, too.
And worst of all, some of them may vote for Donald Trump in November. And if there’s anything that absolutely definitively causes climate change, and literally over a hundred percent of scientists agree with this established fact, it is voting for Donald Trump. You might as well start a tire fire in your yard.
Joe Biden has checked the science and he agrees with this. Yesterday, the people on Biden’s staff who understand the internet tweeted out an image of the wildfires along with this message, quote: “Climate change is already here and we’re witnessing its devastating effects every single day. We have to get President Trump out of the White House,” end quote.
So once again, by voting for Donald Trump, you are causing climate change which causes devastating fires. You by your vote have made hundreds of thousands of Oregonians homeless tonight. You’ve murdered people.
Joe Biden’s closest friend in the world, a prominent kite surfer on Martha’s Vineyard called Barack Obama echoed that message with his trademark restraint. Obama declared that your life depends on voting for Joe Biden.
Now, hold on a minute, you might ask, doesn’t this very same Barack Obama own a $12 million spread right on the ocean in Massachusetts? At a time when sea levels are rising so fast we are about to see killer whales in the Rockies. Well, that doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t seem like Barack Obama could be very concerned about climate change.
And by the way, didn’t Obama go to law school? When did he become a scientist? Those seem like reasonable questions.
On the other hand, lawyers pretending to be scientists are now everywhere in the Democratic Party. Here, for example, is the Governor of Washington State, Jay Inslee. Inslee is a proud graduate of Willamette University Law School. He is explaining he has already figured out the cause of the fires. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOV. JAY INSLEE (D-WA): And these are conditions that are exacerbated by the changing climate that we are suffering. And I do not believe that we should surrender these subdivisions or these houses to climate change exacerbated fires. We should fight the cause of these fires.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So I mismanaged my state, now it’s on fire. You’re required to give me more power. Right? You see how that works.
But as a factual matter, this is a crock. There is not a single scientist on Earth who knows whether or by how much these fires may have been, quote, “exacerbated” by warmer temperatures caused by climate change. All we have is conjecture from a handful of scientists and many politicians, none of whom has reached a definitive conclusion.
Daniel Swain, for example, he is a climate scientist at UCLA conceded recently that it’s, quote, “hard to determine whether climate change played a role in sparking the fires.” Okay. That’s what science is. It’s gradual. It’s incremental. Often, it’s tentative. We don’t say things we don’t know for certain.
It’s the opposite of politics. They have nothing in common.
Meanwhile, back in the material world, investigators have determined that the massive Eldorado Fire in California which has towards nearly 14,000 acres, was caused by people setting off some kind of fireworks.
And then on Wednesday, police announced that a criminal investigation is underway into the massive Alameda Fire in Ashland, Oregon, the southern part of the state. The Sheriff there said it’s too early to say what caused the fire, but he did say human remains were found at the suspected origin of it. So nothing is being ruled out tonight, including arson.
As always with these things, the more you know, the more facts the more details you know, the more complicated it becomes. So serious people — and there are still some — are just beginning to gather evidence to figure out how this started and thinking through how to prevent it going forward.
But at the same time, unfortunately, our media are giving voice too deeply unserious people, partisan people and they are on television drowning out nuance. Don’t worry about the facts, they say, just trust us.
The sky is orange over San Francisco because households making 40 grand a year made the mistake of voting Republican. Therefore, you must give us total control of the nation’s economy. The Green New Deal, it’s mandatory now. Watch amateur arson detective, Nancy Pelosi explain.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): Mother Earth is angry. She is telling us — whether she is telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is that the climate crisis is real and has an impact.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Mother Nature is angry, please. When was the last time Nancy Pelosi went outside? Could she identify a single tree? No one asked her, of course. All we know is what she said, climate change caused this, and of course, it did. Because no matter what the natural disaster is — hurricanes, tornadoes, acne, whatever — climate change did it.
In other words, you did it. And to repent for doing it, you need to give us full control of your life.
Now keep in mind, the person telling you this, Nancy Pelosi owns at least two subzero freezers. She showed them to us on television. Each one costs $10,000.00. They use a lot of energy. And like Barack Obama, like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi constantly flies around the country privately, between her multimillion-dollar estates.
So if she cared about climate change, of course, she wouldn’t be doing that. She doesn’t, and neither do her supporters. Otherwise, they’d be masked outside of her estates in anger. They wouldn’t be trying to destroy the hair salon that exposed her hypocrisy.
But it’s not about science, it’s certainly not about the Earth. Again, these are people who don’t go outside who know nothing about nature. It’s about blaming and ritually humiliating the American middle class for daring to elect someone they don’t like.
Joe Biden knows that the Pennsylvanians would be financially ruined by the fracking ban he supports are the same Pennsylvanians who flipped Pennsylvania red in 2016 for the first time in a generation. Think they’re holding a grudge? You bet they are.
One of the reasons Joe Biden doesn’t go outside because his handlers won’t allow him is because when he does, he has a tendency to show pure undisguised contempt for the middle class he supposedly care so deeply about. In 2019, you’ll remember, he openly mocked coal miners. He suggested they just get programming jobs once they’re all fired. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: I come from a family where an area where there is coal mining in Scranton. Anybody could go down 300 to 3,000 feet in the mine sure in hell can learn how to program as well.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Learn to code. Hilarious. Joe Biden should learn to code. Keep us posted on how that goes. But there isn’t time for that. The world is ending. There’s no time to pause and savor the deep layers of hypocrisy here. Stop. We’re too busy.
We’re measuring our lives in minutes now. Last summer, Sandy Cortez did the math on all of this. She is good at math, and she calculated we only have 12 years left to live.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change. Like this is the war. This is our World War II.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, that sounds bad, and we’re starting to wreck your night on a Friday, but actually, it’s worse than that. Much worse than that. Consider this.
Just four months after she gave us that warning, Sandy Cortez tweeted that we only have 10 years to cut carbon emissions in half. So think about that. We lost two years in just four months. At that rate, we could literally all be dead unless Joe Biden wins in November, which is of course, what they’re saying underneath it all.
On Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom pretty much said it out loud. Newsom has abandoned science completely. He did it long ago. Science is too stringent for Gavin Newsom, too Western, too patriarchal.
Newsom is now a man of faith. He has decided that climate change caused all of this and that’s final. He’s not listening to any other arguments. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): I have no patience, and I say this lovingly not as an ideologue, but as someone who prides himself on being open to argument, interested in evidence, but I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers. It simply follows completely inconsistent that point of view with the reality on the ground.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: I’m not an ideologue, but anyone who disagrees with me must be ignored and eliminated. I don’t want to hear any countervailing facts or evidence. None. But I’m not an ideologue.
So people like Gavin Newsom has announced they don’t want to listen to climate change deniers which raises the central question, what is a climate change denier? Well, a climate change denier is anyone who thinks a ruling class has done a very poor job running their states, running their country, protecting the people they were hired to protect and watch over.
So are we climate change deniers if we point out that the State of California has failed to implement meaningful deforestation measures that might have dramatically slowed the spread of these wildfires? Does that make us deniers? Because in 2018, the state oversight agency in California found that years of poor or non-existent forest management policies in the Sierra Nevada forest had contributed to the fires.
One of the few Republicans who still holds elected office in that state, State Assemblyman, Heath Flora, last year called on using the state’s $22 billion budget surplus, probably the last one in its history to implement vegetation management because fires don’t obviously spread as well if they’re not connected by huge forests, which function as kindling.
All of that is obvious, which means you can’t say it out loud. The natural world facts nature itself is anathema to ideologues like this, the same people telling you they are protecting nature hate nature, everything about nature.
Presumably, you’re also a climate change denier if you point out that six of the Oregon National Guard’s wild firefighting helicopters aren’t in Oregon anymore. Where are they, you might wonder? They’re in Afghanistan.
So instead of dropping water to suppress the blazes, this helicopters are busy supplying a war effort that’s been going on for nearly 20 years for no reason. So how did that happen? And what’s the effect of it? Those might be good questions to ask of, I don’t know, Gavin Newsom, Jay Inslee, and the Governor of Oregon. Does anyone even care? And the answer, of course, is no. Nobody cares about the details at all.
They don’t care about the lives of the people they govern. They don’t care about facts. They don’t care about science.
It was just last week that the mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti admitted on the record that LA has become completely third world, which it has, unfortunately. Of course, Garcetti didn’t blame himself for the degradation of one of the great American cities that he runs. No, he blamed you. You did it, quote, “It’s almost 3 p.m.” Garcetti tweeted, “Time to turn off major appliances. Set the thermostat to 78 degrees or use a fan instead. Turn off excess lights and unplug any appliances you’re not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part.”
Oh, you’ve got to wonder if you were able to go to Garcetti’s house which are not, can’t get past the bodyguards you pay for. But if you were, is he following these recommendations? No. But it’s not about him. It’s about the people he is supposed to be helping. The ones he is now blaming.
He wants them to suffer to fix a problem that he and his fellow Democrats in California created. Even now as residents are facing sweeping power outages in addition to the wildfires. In the meantime, Gavin Newsom has vowed that 50 percent of the energy in California, percent of their grid will be based on, quote, “renewable sources” within a decade. That means sources like wind and solar power.
The truth is, you can’t dial up wind or solar in moments of extreme demand. Moments like right now, during the heatwave sweeping California.
Gavin Newsom was asked last month whether he would consider revising his stance given that the blackouts have left millions of Californians without power and presumably killed people because that’s what happens when you don’t have electricity. And Newsom responded this way, quote: “We are going to radically change the way we produce and consume energy.” In other words, no, we’re not changing.
In other words, the blackouts will continue until morale improves. So will the wildfires. Get used to it.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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