Monday, during the opening of FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson commented on the heavy U.S. troop presence in Washington, D.C., which he said had less to do with safety and more to do with making a statement.
The use of military has reportedly been a response to the unrest that plagued the U.S. Capitol early this month. However, as inauguration approaches, Carlson said it was to send a message of control to the public.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Our capital city, Washington is under military occupation tonight. By Inauguration Day, there are expected to be more than 26,000 armed Federal troops in Washington.
No living American has seen a moment like the one we’re watching now; 26,000 soldiers, that’s more than five times the number of American military personnel currently stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. That is more than twice the number of troops that President Lyndon Johnson ordered to Washington in April of 1968.
In April of 1968, Washington, D.C. was literally on fire. Race riots had broken out after the assassination of Martin Luther King, whose memory we celebrate today. More than a thousand people were injured in those riots and at least 13 of them died. Much of the capital was leveled, and it stayed that way. Blocks of charred rubble for decades. If you visited Washington in the 1990s, you’ll remember what it looked like.
But according to our current leaders, the so-called insurrection of January 6th was much worse than any of that. So far, here’s the death toll from that day. A police officer was hit in the head by rioters then later had a stroke and died at a local hospital. An unarmed protester was shot to death by authorities as she tried to climb through a window, a woman may have been trampled to death by the crowd.
As of tonight, those are the three casualties we can confirm from the riot at the Capitol Building on January 6th. In response to that, our leaders have assembled the largest military presence in Washington in all of American history during peacetime.
In 1864, as the Civil War raged on the other side of the Potomac and Americans died every day in large numbers in battle, there were fewer Federal troops protecting Washington, D.C. than there are tonight.
And it’s truly a national force. The Guardsmen you see in Washington have come from every state in the Union, as well as from Puerto Rico. And the question is, why is that? There’s no practical or operational justification for it. For decades, Washington, D.C. has the highest per capita law enforcement presence in the country and one of the highest in the world. So there was no need to fly in troops from Alaska to keep the city safe.
But keeping the city safe was hardly the point of the exercise. The murder rate in the District of Columbia has risen with terrifying speed over the last six months: men, women and children shot to death in the streets. But no one in charge seems to care about that or even notice their deaths.
So no matter what they are telling you, those 26,000 Federal troops are not there for your safety. Instead, unmistakably, the Democratic Party is using those troops to send the rest of us a message about power: “We’re in charge now.” We run this nation from Honolulu to our colony in the Caribbean, and everything in between very much, including where you and your family live. Do not question us. Men with guns enforce our decrees, we control the Pentagon.
And indeed, they do control The Pentagon. Republicans have spent years ignoring the leftward drift of our officer corps, but we can’t ignore it now. The mask is off.
Our military leadership, the very same generals who howled at the idea of deploying American troops to stop an invasion of our southern border, those same generals sent tens of thousands of soldiers with rifles to Washington purely as a show of force on behalf of the political party they support.
And once they did that, they then allowed Democratic politicians to degrade and politicize the military itself. Democrats in Congress demanded that the troops sent to Washington this week, submit to a political purity test, ideological vetting, as they put it, to make certain that every soldier professed loyalty to the new regime. Not loyalty to our country, not loyalty to our Constitution, but loyalty to the aims of a specific political party.
Nothing like that has ever happened in America. And just a few months ago, it would have been unimaginable. Suddenly, it’s compulsory.
Here’s Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis, explaining why it is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. STEVE COHEN (D-TN): The Guard is 90 some odd percent, I believe, male. Only about 20 percent of white males voted for Biden. You’ve got to figure that in the Guard, which is predominately more conservative and I see that on my social media, we know it. There are probably not more than 25 percent of the people that are there protecting us who voted for Biden, the other 75 percent are in the class that would be the large class of folks who might want to do something.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: We should pause that tape and we should consider for a moment and think deeply about what Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee just told us on television.
He said that every white man in this country is a potential murderer. Every white man in America should be under suspicion purely on the basis of being white and male of planning a presidential assassination.
He told us the National Guard is overwhelmingly white and male. Therefore, Congressman Cohen says, white male National Guardsmen must undergo government background checks to prove they are not planning murder. Steve Cohen didn’t couch any of that. He just said it, and the CNN anchor nodded as he did.
The rules on generalizations like this have changed quite a bit in a very short time. It wasn’t that long ago, it was November 5, 2009, that an Army major called Nidal Hasan opened fire on innocent people at a military base in Texas. Nidal Hasan shot 45 people at Fort Hood, 13 of them died.
When it emerged later that Hasan was an Islamic extremist, and then it emerged that the Army had failed to notice his extremism or in any way protect the public from his extremism. No one at The Pentagon was Court Martialed.
Instead, the rest of us sat through months of lectures about how we had no right to come to broader conclusions about what had happened at Fort Hood. Yes, the shootings were bad, though not Barack Obama made clear at the time an act of terrorism.
But far worse than mass murder, we were told would be the sin of drawing any connection between the Nidal Hasan’s beliefs and the beliefs of anyone else in our country. Nidal Hasan was a single person, literally a lone gunman. He was not a stand-in for all Muslims. So stop with your prejudice, rednecks. That’s what they told us.
And by the way, it is okay that they told us that. Most Americans are decent people, they don’t blame entire groups for the crimes of a few. Bigotry is immoral, and so is collective punishment. There is nothing more un-American than that, but not anymore.
Collective punishment is now the official policy of the Federal government and it is enforced by The Pentagon. You’d love at some point to ask Congressman Cohen about the implications of this.
Since we’ve established this new standard, this new requirement of collective punishment, what other groups of Americans, Congressman Cohen should be denounced and hurt simply because of the way they look? Simply because of the DNA they were born with? Or does this new standard apply only to white men?
And if it does apply exclusively to white men, which is definitely the impression we’re getting from you, how does targeting white men contribute to your stated goal of reducing white male extremism? Because doesn’t attacking people on the basis of qualities they can’t control make them more extreme, not less extreme?
Aren’t you persecuting them into behaving in precisely the ways you claim you don’t want them to behave? And since you’re not a moron, wouldn’t all of that be obvious to you? So why are you doing it?
Why in the name of fighting extremism, are you Congressman Cohen creating extremism? By the way dead certain, no question about it. That’s exactly what you’re doing.
What, Steve Cohen, is your motive for doing that? That’s a sincere question by the way? Congressman Cohen is invited on this show anytime to give us his answer. In the meantime, you’ve got to wonder about what the Guardsmen themselves think of all of this — this new policy?
Serving in the National Guard is not easy work. Guardsmen aren’t paid much. Some you’ve got to imagine are doing it for love of country. Now, they’ve been deployed to their country’s own capital city, and they’ve been given orders to shoot their fellow Americans if necessary. That’s a lot to ask.
Now, suddenly, on top of all of that, they’ve been told that if they were born a certain way, if they are white and male, and therefore evil and dangerous, they themselves are under suspicion of being the enemy, they are potential killers, assassins, betrayers of a nation.
We’re not overstating this for effect. Here’s a National Guard Commander in Puerto Rico describing to his troops the enemy they will face in Washington. They are white nationalists, he tells them, they are Proud Boys.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Speaking in foreign language.)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: If you wanted to stoke in irreparable civil conflict, you would talk this way and you would keep talking that way. You tell armed men under your command that they might have to shoot people who voted for the wrong candidate in the last election. You can see where this could all go. It’s really scary.
So where’s the pushback from our defenders? Well, we didn’t get any calls today from Republican senators begging to come on this show to talk about any of this or to push back against it. The Democratic Party is using the military of the United States, which they do not own as a political weapon. But Republicans in Congress just can’t be bothered to notice that.
You think officers of The Pentagon would be outraged by this. It’s such a total betrayal of everything our country and the military are supposed to stand for. Yet, as far as we know tonight, not a single officer has resigned in protest. Background checks on people because of their race and sex? Because of their political views? Why aren’t they protesting? Why aren’t they resigning?
We can’t say. We know some clearly agree with all of this and they’d like to see it accelerate, quote, “I was chief prosecutor of Guantanamo for over two years,” a former Air Force Colonel called Moe Davis announced on Twitter today, ” … and there’s far more evidence of Congressman Madison Cawthorn’s guilt than the guilt of more than 95 percent of the detainees. It is time we start a domestic war on sedition by American terrorists.” That’s a verbatim quote.
And we’ll repeat that sentence in case you thought you heard it incorrectly or we’re making it up, we are not. A career American military officer has now called for, quote, “A domestic war on sedition by American terrorists,” a war.
Among those terrorists, the ones he says are literally more dangerous than al Qaeda and therefore must be imprisoned and killed is a 25-year-old wheelchair-bound Madison Cawthorn, who was just elected by American voters to the United States Congress.
But according to Colonel Moe Davis, Congressman Cawthorn and the millions of Americans who agree with him, the ones who voted Republican in November must be subdued by force. They are the enemy our military exists to fight.
Now keep in mind that Colonel Davis — Colonel Moe Davis, spent his life under arms, so you can be certain he isn’t using the term enemy in some metaphorical sense as in Oreos are the enemy of an effective diet. No. He means enemy in the way Osama bin Laden and his coconspirators at Gitmo were our enemies, and you remember what we did to Osama bin Laden.
Has Twitter seen Moe Davis’s tweet? Has the Secret Service? Do they care? Does anyone? Well, you know the answer. Will a single one of Colonel Moe Davis’s many allies in the Democratic Party denounce what he said, or even tell him to cool it a little bit?
And what about the news media? Reporters are perpetually on the hunt for what they describe as dangerous extremism. Have they noticed Colonel Moe Davis on Twitter? Probably they have, but of course they agree with them.
Just today, “The Daily Beast,” the homepage of our highly credentialed, but not super bright ruling class ran a piece with this title: “Can U.S. Spy Agency Stop White Terror?”
“Other countries,” the story pointed out, ” … have domestic spy agencies to fight extremists at home.” So of course we need one right away.
What the piece does not mention that those other countries would include China, North Korea and Kazakhstan. Domestic spy agency is a not very subtle euphemism for secret police. That is what they’re calling for.
Now you’d think talk like that would constitute a big red line for the many professional freedom defenders in Washington, the ones you send money to, the think tank libertarians for example. They’re everywhere. But not tonight. Where are they tonight?
A former U.S. military officer declares war on American citizens. Members of the media call for a secret police agency. This is the stuff of libertarian nightmares. It’s what they claim to hate. So where are they now?
Why isn’t billionaire libertarian man of principle Charles Koch spending billions of dollars to stop this — these abridgement of liberty, these unprecedented attacks on liberty? He is definitely not spending billions to stop it. He doesn’t seem doing anything. No one is. And so it continues unabated.
Democrats in Congress support a new secret police agency, but why wouldn’t they support it? What better way to protect your own power than funding a quote, “domestic spy agency” to fight extremists at home? Those extremists needless to say, will be their political opponents, so you don’t have to worry about them anymore because they’ll be in jail.
Just last year, Congressman Brad Schneider of Illinois sponsored legislation to begin the process of creating just such an agency, empowering current agencies to spy on Americans based on their political beliefs. And guess what? Schneider’s bill sailed out of the House Judiciary Committee, all but two Republicans voted for it.
Nor did Republicans say a word when Congresswoman Grace Meng of New York sponsored a bill to criminalize the quote, “purchase, ownership or possession of body armor.” Body Armor? Not the ownership of guns or bombs or even knives. That’s where you thought we were.
Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas just introduced legislation to require a license from the government in order to own ammunition. Well, that seems nonsensical and extreme, especially from a party that released thousands of violent criminals from prison in just the last year.
But no, it’s much crazier than that, it’s banning body armor. Devices that cannot under any circumstances be used to hurt another person. Body armor is purely defensive. Body armor exists only to protect the person who is wearing the body armor. It is already a crime to use body armor in most places while committing a violent felony. This is different. This would make it a crime to possess body armor at all.
Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you make it a crime to possess something designed to save your life? That’d be like banning seatbelts or banning helmets. And actually now that we mentioned it, Grace Meng’s bill would ban helmets, any helmet that might protect you from gunfire — for real.
And honestly, you should pause when you hear that. What could possibly be the motive for it? We can’t think of a non-sinister explanation for banning body armor. It should make you nervous to hear it’s even being considered.
But again Republicans never said a word about this. They were too busy agreeing with Democrats that what happened at the Capitol was a white supremacist insurrection. Senator Jim Lankford of Oklahoma who tells his voters he is conservative just apologized to African-American voters for ever mentioning the possibility of voter fraud since somehow that is now racist. How is that racist exactly?
We’ll tell you exactly the truth. What happened on January 6 was awful. We don’t like mobs. We don’t like vandalism. We don’t like violence. We said it at the time. We’ll say it again now, we’ll never stop saying it.
But what happened on January 6 was not an insurrection and there was nothing racial about it. That is a total lie. It is told and repeated purely for political advantage.
Here is what it actually looked like inside the Capitol when the first demonstrators burst in.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey. Hey, man. Glad to see you guys. You guys are [bleep] patriots. Look at this guy. He has got — he is covered in blood. God bless you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You good, sir? Do you need medical attention?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I’m good. Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right. I got shot in the face.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where are they?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I got shot in the face with some kind of plastic bullet.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We will. I’ve been making sure they ain’t disrespecting the place.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Okay, I just want to let you guys know this is like the sacredest place.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I know.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I know.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Just chatting with the cop on the House floor. The guy in the Viking hat, Chewbacca man, you’ve seen him before is a real-life person. His name is Jacob Chansley. Chansley is sitting in jail tonight. He’s being held without bail. Bail was denied on Friday.
The judge who ordered him to rot in jail presented no evidence that Chansley was violent or a threat to anyone. Nevertheless, the judge concluded, quote, “This is an insurrection” and Jacob Chansley was, quote, “a symbol of what occurred.” He now faces 25 years or more in prison if convicted. You just saw the crime. The real crime though, was being a symbol of insurrection.
No matter what happens, Jacob Chansley will almost certainly do more time in prison than countless murderers, rapists and armed robbers. Actual criminals aren’t a problem for the Democratic Party. In fact, they’re an important constituency and it shows.
Since Memorial Day, about 90 percent of the people arrested for gun crime in New York City, for example, have been released back onto the streets free to do it again. Gun crime? Really? From the party that is against gun crime, right?
Gun crime, gun violence. Yes, 90 percent released. Because unlike Jacob Chansley, they are not symbols of insurrection. Anyone else who is not a symbol of insurrection? These people.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: That was your country for months and months on end. Now, they are pretending none of that ever happened, but it did happen. Mobs of politicized thugs, virtually every one of whom supported the violent overthrow of the elected President and said so loudly at every opportunity and spray-painted on buildings, went on to torch and loot and vandalized major American cities.
In the City of Minneapolis, Minnesota alone, BLM and Antifa rioters burned or destroyed more than 700 buildings. How many innocent people did they kill? We’ve counted more than two dozen nationwide, not including the many hundreds murdered by criminals who are sprung from lockup in the name of George Floyd.
We don’t know the full death toll. We probably will never know. Nobody is keeping track. There’s no political advantage in tallying the people that your side kills. But it’s not a problem, they tell us, because none of that was an insurrection, not even symbolically.
So how long will this cycle go on? If you’re hoping America will revert to normal on Wednesday afternoon after Joe Biden is sworn in as President, you are an optimist. You probably assume the quarantines and mandatory face coverings were temporary, too. Probably not.
Something awful has been unleashed on our country; unchecked, it will inevitably lead to more awful things. Every action provokes a reaction — that is Physics, it is also human nature.
Abraham Lincoln understood this well. In January of 1838, Lincoln spoke to an audience in Springfield, Illinois about what happens when a society refuses to punish thugs and vandals. It’s not a small thing.
“Citizens,” Lincoln said, ” … see their property destroyed, their families insulted and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better, they become tired of and disgusted with a government that offers them no protection.”
At that point, Lincoln noted, they become radical. They do things they never would have considered if the authorities had bothered to enforce the laws they made in the first place. In other words, they become liable to show up at the Capitol Building in Viking hats and face paint.
You could have scripted what was going to happen on January 6. What we can’t know is what happens next. And let’s pray that the people planning a war on American citizens find their reason and their decency and stop talking like that immediately, much less planning to act on it.
Let’s hope the Biden Campaign didn’t really mean it when they promised to make, quote, “The same commitment to root out domestic terrorism as we have to stopping international terrorism.” Think about that. How would that project end? You know.
The truth is, we don’t deserve that. Very few Americans deserve to be treated like Osama bin Laden, because they’re not terrorists. They shouldn’t be treated like ISIS. Most Americans are good people, even if you hate how they voted.
We don’t need a war within our borders. Stop calling for one, people in charge. Only the worst people will win that war.
Huey Long understood this. Huey Long was maybe the only true economic populist ever elected to the United States Senate. He was a Democrat back at a time when you could be an economic populist and still a Democrat.
And for that, he was more hated than Donald Trump ever imagined he could be hated by everyone, not just Republicans, but by the sitting Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt.
Huey Long was a very flawed guy, they always are but he wasn’t stupid. In fact, he had flashes of wisdom. In 1935, Huey Long had a flash of wisdom. Here’s what he said: “If the United States ever winds up with a fascist government, quote, “We will have it under the guise of antifascism.” That’s right.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.