Thursday, FNC’s Tucker Carlson panned the glowing media reaction to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress a night earlier.
On the left side of the political spectrum, pundits sounded off on Biden’s delivery in very favorable terms, which Carlson mocked.
Carlson also criticized the substance of the speech, which Biden repeated his claim that no constitutional amendment was absolute in reference to the Second Amendment.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Joe Biden spoke to a Joint Session of the Congress last night. If you saw it, and relatively few people did judge by the numbers, then you know that the confusing part started even before the speech began.
It was the masks again. Everyone was wearing a mask, very much including the two stern ladies sitting right behind Joe Biden. That would be the Speaker of the House and the real President. They were masked up, all of them were, like outlaws.
But here’s the weird part: all of them have been vaccinated. They’ve told us that.
So, there was literally no reason for any of them to be wearing masks, but they wore them anyway. It was like everyone in the room had Munchausen syndrome, or some other fantasy-related psychological disorder. Bizarre.
We never did get to the bottom of that because Joe Biden started talking.
Language is designed to communicate ideas, but not when Joe Biden uses it. Last night’s speech was a cluster bomb of cliches meant to knock you senseless and make you surrender. “Americans choose hope over fear,” Biden droned, “Truth over lies, light over darkness.” We lost track after that. Our brains shut down.
Mission accomplished.
The news media didn’t care. They didn’t even notice. They weren’t listening to him. They have no interest in what Joe Biden says. They got him elected. He’s their guy and that’s that.
Technically, Joe Biden is now the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world. So maybe someone somewhere could keep track of what he is doing. But no, reporters covered Joe Biden like he’s an actor on press tour for the hot new summer blockbuster, he and his dazzling co-star, Kamala.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BRIAN WILLIAMS, MSNBC: His use of voice modulation was rather extraordinary given the television era, and it served as cover at times for unspooling and ambition in this speech that was Rooseveltian in size and scope.
VAN JONES, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: It’s really beautiful, I mean, it’s beautiful. He is developing a kind of positive populism.
ANDREA MITCHELL, NBC NEWS ANCHOR: He also talked about the soul of America and that was so passionate when he talked about the injustice — the knee of injustice is on the neck of Black America.
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC ANCHOR: His connections to the people in this room – – I’m not even sure if all of them are deserving of them, but he does not care. He gives to them the benefit of the doubt.
JONES: And his voice, that kind of grandfatherly whispery voice and the fact that it actually wasn’t a big raucous crowd, let that intimacy really land.
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL, MSNBC ANCHOR: Every single sentence had a very clear point to it and every line had that Biden humility in it.
MARTHA RADDATZ, ABC NEWS ANCHOR: He is really trying to bring the country together. It was a Make America Feel Good night.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Wait a second. Was that the President of the United States talking? No, that’s what you thought. In fact, it was Jesus in aviator glasses. What Joe Biden said last night was beautiful. Beautiful. It was intimate. Grandfatherly. Indeed, Rooseveltian.
Joe Biden spoke to the soul of America. He connected with people who didn’t even deserve to be connected with. Hopeless sinners, redeemed by his voice alone — a voice that is not, and we want to be clear about this, the fading monotone of a 78-year-old man who is losing his grip. No, it’s not.
Joe Biden’s voice modulates. It has the capacity to change pitch in a way that is — and we’re quoting now — “rather extraordinary.”
And so on, we could keep going with this, if we wanted — cable news is a rich vein — but we’ll stop now and return to reality.
A powerful politician gave a speech about how he plans to change your life. So, we feel obligated to tell you what he said and not simply commit a series of symbolic sex acts upon him.
So what did Biden actually say? Well, he said that people who disagree with him are terrorists, they are more dangerous than the jihadists who destroyed the World Trade Center. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: A hundred days since I took the oath of office and lifted my hand off our family Bible and inherited a nation — we all did — that was in crisis. The worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Really? The worst attack on our democracy in 160 years? How about the Immigration Act of 1965? That law completely changed the composition of America’s voter rolls, purely to benefit the Democratic Party. That seems like kind of an assault on democracy, a permanent one.
But no. That was a good thing, because, in the end, it helped Joe Biden.
What’s bad is when anyone other than Joe Biden has power. That’s an attack on democracy, and the people who commit that attack deserve to be in solitary confinement in the D.C. jail, even if they only, technically speaking, committed misdemeanor trespassing.
So abandon those silly racist assumptions about how you have “rights” derived from some ancient piece of parchment decorated with a quill pen. The Bill of Rights? Come on.
As Joe Biden reminded us last night, no constitutional amendment is absolute. All of them are subject to his approval.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: We need a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Don’t tell me it can’t be done.
I’ll tell you that there are too many people today who are able to buy a gun, but shouldn’t be able to buy a gun.
And no amendment to the Constitution is absolute. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Don’t tell me it can’t be done. “No amendment to the Constitution is absolute.” Wow. Glad to know that. Stupidly, we assumed the document was real. Now, we’ve learned that the 19th Amendment isn’t absolute, so it’ll be interesting to discover under what circumstances women can be prohibited from voting in elections.
Nancy Pelosi will be interested, too. Good thing the suffragettes are gone. They’d be upset to hear that.
And how about the 13th Amendment? That’s a big one. Now, that Joe Biden has declared that that amendment and all of them are up for negotiation, maybe he will tell us when it’s legal to enslave people.
It turns out that abolition wasn’t really “absolute.” The only thing that is absolute at this point is the power of the Democratic Party, and don’t you dare resist it.
“You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater,” Biden pointedly told us last night. But of course, that depends entirely on the condition of the theater. If it actually is on fire, you should say so, loudly. If you think the presidential election was stolen, by God, speak up, and that is the right that’s at stake here — the right to speak your conscience, to say the obvious, to tell the truth.
That was very much the right at stake in the summer of 1917, when an earlier Democratic administration arrested a man called Charles Schenck. Schenck was a socialist who opposed America’s entry into the First World War, the Iraq War of its day.
Schenck had 15,000 pamphlets printed. They didn’t advocate violence, they argued against the military draft, which Schenck believed was unconstitutional. In fact, the headline of the essay was, “Long live the Constitution of the United States.”
Woodrow Wilson, the President, promptly had him arrested. Federal agents raided Schenck’s office, they seized his pamphlets, they carted him off to jail. He was charged and then convicted under the Espionage Act. You hear the word “espionage” a lot. He was convicted of that, and he was sent to Federal prison, and not just him.
The Woodrow Wilson administration prosecuted thousands of other Americans for daring to oppose its policies. The phrase “shouting fire in a crowded theater” comes from the Supreme Court case, Schenck vs. United States that resulted from those arrests.
According to a reading of the case the Wilson administration preferred at the time, Charles Schenck was not exercising his First Amendment rights by disagreeing with the White House. He was “shouting fire in a crowded theater,” he was endangering the public. He was a criminal who deserved jail.
Joe Biden knows all this, of course. He was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That’s one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history. Biden is squarely on Woodrow Wilson’s side of the argument, the side that crushes civil liberties in order to achieve political imperatives.
Just recently, Biden once again obliquely referred to the Schenck case while speaking at the White House.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: But no amendment, no amendment to the Constitution is absolute. You can’t yell “Fire” in a crowded movie theater and call it freedom of speech.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, you can’t yell “Fire” in a crowded theater even if the theater is burning. You must read the script. That’s the message. You thought you could say what you wanted in a free country. That was your birthright. But it’s not anymore. Your opinion is not legitimate if it deviates from Joe Biden’s opinion. You yourself are not legitimate.
In fact, if you disagree with Joe Biden or the afternoon panel on MSNBC that represents him, you are a white supremacist. So by definition, you have lost your rights. The national security state has determined that you’re a terrorist.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: And we won’t ignore what our Intelligence Agencies have determined to be the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today. White supremacy is terrorism. We’re not going to ignore that either.
My fellow Americans, look, we have to come together to heal the soul of this nation.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: We have to come together to heal the soul of the nation by attacking our fellow Americans using a phrase no one will define.
What does coming together mean? Well, it means that because of a concept called “white supremacy,” again, a phrase the left endlessly invokes, but never defines, your civil liberties have now been suspended.
By the way, the whole point of the Derek Chauvin murder trial was to inform you of that.
Traditionally in this country, we force ourselves to assume criminal defendants are innocent until proven otherwise, even if we have video. That’s our system; innocent until proven guilty. Not anymore.
Once you’ve been identified as a White supremacist, you don’t get a fair trial because you’re not entitled to a fair trial. A sitting Member of Congress can threaten to burn down a city if you’re not convicted, and the people in charge will applaud her as she does, and they did.
And even if a jury does somehow acquit you, you will still be found guilty. That was the plan. In Derek Chauvin’s case, the Justice Department made plans to arrest Derek Chauvin in court if the jury found him innocent. So if he was acquitted, he was going to be arrested anyway. He had to be guilty. Period.
Now, there was a time, like twenty minutes ago, where charging someone twice for the same crime was called double jeopardy. It’s unconstitutional, it always has been. But not anymore. Now that white supremacists roam the land, no right is absolute.
That was the message of last night’s speech: beautiful. The only remaining principle in this country is that you can’t oppose the people in charge.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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