Tucker Carlson: If You Want to Live Like a Human Being Under Coronavirus, You’ve Got to Get Elected to Something

Fox News host Tucker Carlson opened his Wednesday program with a monologue about the hypocrisy of California elected officials, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who have held the public to account when it comes to obeying measures put in place under COVID-19.

However, as Carlson pointed out, Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have not obeyed those rules.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: Sometimes a single picture so perfectly crystallizes a moment that you want to hang it in a museum as a testament to history. Dorothea Lange’s photographs of migrant farmworkers in the 1930s are like that. They captured the suffering of the Great Depression more powerfully than any government report ever could.

The image of the second flag-raising over Iwo Jima was so powerful that we cast it in bronze to commemorate the grit and courage of our Marines in the Second World War.

Those images summed up entire periods of American life.

So, what sums up ours? What picture tells our story? Well, today, we’ve got it for you.

Decades from now, our descendants will look at this one image and know what it was like to live in America in the year 2020. We’ll show it to you in just a second. But first some context.

Gavin Newsom is the Governor of California, our largest, and for a long time, our most prosperous state. About 40 million people live in California. So far, two of them under the age of 18 have died of the COVID- 19 virus, so naturally, Gavin Newsom has shut down the entire state.

Businesses are shuttered. People wear masks even as they eat. Large groups are forbidden to congregate. Thanksgiving itself is on its way to being canceled.

It’s a tough way to live, but Californians have no choice. This is science, people.

Gavin Newsom is California’s epidemiologist-in-chief. He commands obedience and the serfs obey.

With that in mind, The San Francisco Chronicle broke a pretty amazing story this week. Governor Newsom recently attended a birthday dinner up in wine country at the French Laundry. That’s one of the best and most expensive restaurants in the world. There were 12 people at Newsom’s dinner, and to civilians, that number seemed to be a clear violation of Newsom’s own rules.

But as we were told, it really wasn’t. It turns out that Newsom was simply celebrating the birthday of a longtime friend of his, a lobbyist actually called Jason Kinney. A spokesperson for Kinney described the night this way, quote, “This was a small, intimate, 12-person dinner held outdoors with family and a few close friends to celebrate a 50th birthday.”

In other words, no big deal.

For his part, Governor Newsom assured his suffering subjects that quote, “Our family followed the restaurant’s health protocols and took safety precautions.” So really, ladies and gentlemen, it was nothing. Just a small intimate dinner held in nature, under God’s blue skies, just a few close friends staying safe and following the protocols to the letter as mandated by the state that in fact they run. So relax, people. No one is getting ‘rona here.

That was the story.

Now the photograph. We have the picture thanks to Fox 11 in Los Angeles, one of the rare local stations that still does reporting. It’s a picture of the birthday dinner up in Napa.

It turns out it was not held outside. It was held in a private room and not a spacious private room either. All 12 people were packed in tight, shoulder to shoulder, breathing on each other. No social distancing here. Not one of them is wearing a mask.

A steam room in central Wuhan could not be more contagious than this dinner. Gavin Newsom’s birthday party was a germ factory and his guests were human Petri dishes.

But what a guest list it was. Next to Governor Newsom sat the CEO of the California Medical Association and the one over from him, one of the state’s top health lobbyists. Together, the two of them represent tens of thousands of physicians, credentialed men of science and women of science in the State of California.

So if you’re wondering why, if you live in California, you can’t have Thanksgiving this year or visit your mother as she dies alone in the hospital, it is because of them and people like them. And yet there they were, eating $300.00 truffle pasta and living like this pandemic thing never even happened.

The picture of them doing it known henceforth the history is the French Laundry photograph is the year 2020 condensed to its essence. Here you have plutocrats dining with lobbyists, ignoring the very orders they are so self-righteously imposing on others gorging themselves in seclusion, as the people they’re supposed to be helping wither and die.

And then when they’re caught, they lie about it. How perfect is that? It’s all there. Every element: hypocrisy, greed, selfishness, stupidity. This is our national moment in a single picture. Move over Dorothea Lange.

So what’s Gavin Newsom’s explanation for this picture? Well, for the interest of equal time and fairness we’re going to show it to you now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): I made a bad mistake, instead of sitting down, I should have stood up and walked back on my car and drove back to my house. Instead, I chose to sit there with my wife, and a number of other couples that were outside the household.

You can quibble about the guidelines, etc., etc. But the spirit of what I’m preaching all the time was contradicted. And I’ve got to own that and so I won’t apologize to you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, yes, when I saw it, I should have just walked out, got in the car and driven home. OK, Gavin. So you had no idea there are going to be a dozen people at your own party. You’re the Governor, but you never saw the guest list. You were totally shocked. That’s ridiculous.

It’s too stupid to be an explanation, and we are stupider for pretending to believe it. Why not just tell the truth, which is, I don’t really totally believe everything I say, at least not enough to let it interfere with dinner.

That’s the truth. You know it, he knows it. But he is forcing us to play along with an absurd lie.

On the other hand, at least Gavin Newsom didn’t follow the lead of Nancy Pelosi and blamed the restaurant. He didn’t accuse the maitre d’ of setting him up as part of a conspiracy among the famously right-wing restaurant community in Napa.

The French Laundry probably won’t suffer the same fate as Pelosi’s hairstylist, at least as long as they stay quiet about it.

And to his credit, Gavin Newsom didn’t follow the example of Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein has refused to answer any questions as she parades around the Halls of the United States Senate and private airport terminals, FBOs, maskless and exposed — breathing on people, infecting them. No explanation for that.

And to be fair, once again, Gavin Newsom’s explanation though, obviously untrue is still better than what his buddy, the lobbyist, the guy they’re having a dinner for has come up with. Through a spokesman, he said, whoa, “The guests specifically requested outdoor seating and that was provided by the restaurant.” Indoor, seats rather. Indoor. That’s what they really were doing.

He is saying they were outdoors, but now we have a picture showing that and he is still claiming it. No, it was outdoors. In other words, ignore the walls and the roof. What looks like inside was actually outside. Got that? Up is down. Black is white. War is peace. Trust me not you’re lying senses.

If only the criminal paddle boarder had thought of that.

This spring, police in California hunted down a lone man paddleboarding in the Pacific Ocean. He was off the coast of Malibu, probably infecting the seals. They saw this. They got on boats. They alerted the Coast Guard. And then Sheriff Deputies put this criminal in handcuffs. They arrested him and threatened him with six months in prison for breaking Corona Law.

And the media in California treated it like it was totally normal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Across the coast in California, fines and handcuffs for bad behavior. One man arrested in Malibu for paddleboarding in the Pacific, while 22 sunset seekers in SoCal were cited for trespassing on closed beaches.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: They literally put him in handcuffs for paddleboarding alone. They didn’t even claim it was a threat to marine life. They didn’t even make up a pretext. They just did it. And like seals, everyone applauded.

So the paddle boarder gets arrested, Gavin Newsom gets to dine in peace. What’s the lesson here? You know the lesson.

If you want to live like a human being, you’ve got to get elected to something, and then you can break your own rules. Otherwise, don’t even think about it.

Here is L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti explaining how he will handle people who don’t obey.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI (D), LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: This is really been marvelously embraced by 99.9% of people. We see it in the traffic data. We see it in the cell phone data, but we’re going to hunt down that last 0.1% and say, you’ve got to get inside. You’ve got to cut it out and you’ve got to distance.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Yes, you’ve got to cut it out. You’ve got to get inside. You’ve got to distance and if you don’t cut it out, Eric Garcetti will cut your power just like they do in China. No utilities for you corona felon.

If you want to break the law, if you have an unscratchable itch, go ahead and loot Target or torch a fast-food franchise or beat up an old lady. That’s federally protected political speech, but authentic human contact, no, only the ruling class gets that.

So what is this exactly? It’s hypocrisy, of course. That was not big enough. This is not conventional hypocrisy. This is — let’s stop lying — an act of hostility against the population of the country. They despise you. They’re flaunting it.

This is how people who don’t like you behave. They force you to do one thing, they do another, and they get caught. They’re not embarrassed and they keep forcing you to do the thing they’re not doing. That’s an act of hostility. They don’t like you.

Last month, for example, he learned that Gavin Newsom was sending his own children to private school. He made sure they could get in-person classroom education. And of course he did. They are his kids. He loves them.

And Newsom knows what we all now know that children don’t learn anything by remote, sitting at home on a computer screen. It hurts them. At best, it makes them weird. They don’t learn a thing.

At the same time, he was sending his own children to class in a real school, public school districts, which he is in charge of, all over the State of California remain closed because he ordered them closed. Why did he do that? We never learned. There was no science. He didn’t bother explain it.

School children don’t face a meaningful risk from this virus. When children contract the virus, CDC data show that their survival rate is over 99.99%. That’s not a TV term. In this case, it’s a scientific term, literally 99.99%.

Teachers and other adults under the age of 70 have between a 99.5 and a 99.9% chance of surviving. Again, not estimates, real numbers from the Federal government. That’s science, but nobody cares about science anymore.

A few hours ago, the mayor of New York announced he was shutting down the nation’s largest school district, not because children are in peril or suddenly becoming ill in huge numbers, they are not. De Blasio did this because a rolling seven-day average of positive coronavirus test in New York City went over 3%. Not deaths, not hospitalizations, positive tests, which in the overwhelming majority of cases, mean nothing.

So that’s insane, obviously, but it is accelerating.

Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee says, we’re going to have to cancel Christmas, but we’re going to do it in the name of love.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. JAY INSLEE (D-WA): It’s just too dangerous to gather together indoors where the virus can spread so easily. So this year, when you join us in changing your Thanksgiving and December Holiday plans, please know that you are doing it as an act of love.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: An act of love, says Jay Inslee, the politician-lawyer. What do politician-lawyers know about love? Not much. Normal people know that love isn’t possible if you’re forced to live alone in isolation and fear.

Now, in an ideal world, we’d all be at the French Laundry, laughing and eating with our friends. It sounds wonderful, especially now. Sadly, we can’t do that. We are not the governor of anything.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor