FNC’s Carlson: ‘We’re Looking at Growing Authoritarianism — That’s Not an Overstatement’

Tuesday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson warned about the creep toward “authoritarianism,” which was evident by trends within the Biden administration as it attacks to combat the alleged threat of so-called domestic terrorism.

According to Carlson, by turning the focused inward, the FBI was contributing to the trend.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: This weekend, police in Columbus, Georgia arrested the 39-year-old man called Justin Tyran Roberts. Over the course of a single day, Roberts shot five separate people in two different states. We know this happened because Roberts has admitted he did it. He also said why he did it.

In his confession, police say Roberts quote, ” … explained that throughout his life, specifically white males had taken from him, so he decided to kill them.” In one case, Roberts walked up behind a white man, a total stranger as he was getting out of his car and shot him in the back.

By any definition these were crimes of viciousness motivated by race hate. They are not unique in this country, not by a longshot. If we wanted to, and we don’t want to, we could do a whole show on crimes like these — nor are they especially surprising, really, when you think about it.

If you really believed what the Democratic Party and BLM were telling you that white males are intentionally destroying the world, you might be motivated to hurt someone. Why wouldn’t you? What’s striking is how little attention Justin Tyran Roberts’s shooting spree has received. Imagine if the colors were reversed here. Roberts will be leading every newscast tonight.

Needless to say, he is not. In fact, this may be the last time you hear his name on television. And on one level honestly, that is fine with us. Picking at the wound — America’s wound — is unwise. We’ve always thought that. We think it more now than ever.

A multiracial country can only survive if it self-consciously de-emphasizes race, if it treats every person as an individual and not a member of some larger group that’s guilty or innocent. So, that shouldn’t be the goal, that’s our history and we ought to get back to it as soon as we can.

But that is exactly the opposite of what our leaders are doing. They are working hard to divide us into warring camps and they’re using lies to do it. They’re telling us a story that is completely and very much intentionally disconnected from reality.

They are claiming that something called white supremacy — and that’s a term they never defined — is the single greatest threat we face, a greater threat than al Qaeda or ISIS.

Here’s our thoroughly craven Attorney General telling us that very lie today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MERRICK GARLAND, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: In the FBI’s view, the top domestic violent extremist threat comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate it for the superiority of the white race.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: All right, that’s the Attorney General of the United States making a statement of fact, backed up by the FBI, so, it’s fair to ask obvious questions. Who exactly are these violent white supremacists? What are their names? What crimes under the U.S. Code have they committed? We still don’t know. Merrick Garland didn’t tell us today.

Instead, he spent most of his time talking about the riot at the Capitol on January 6, an event that had nothing whatsoever to do with race. Nothing. But Merrick Garland lied about that. He, like most people you see on television, wants you to believe and wants history to record that January 6 was an attempted insurrection by white supremacists revolutionaries bent on taking over this country.

“We came this close,” Merrick Garland said and that’s why, quote, “We must adopt a broader societal response to tackle the problem’s deeper roots.” So, because of January 6 says the chief law enforcement officer in the United States of America and many other members of Joe Biden’s Cabinet, we must now use law enforcement and military force to arrest, imprison, and otherwise crush anyone who leads opposition to Joe Biden’s government. That’s their position. They say that out loud, they did today.

So, what is this exactly? Well, it’s a big change in the way the United States government assesses and then treats its own citizens. We are living through the transformation of a formerly Democratic Republic into something else. We’re looking at growing authoritarianism. That’s not an overstatement.

Vladimir Putin knows authoritarian systems very well, and he sees clearly what is happening in this country. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: Did you order Alexei Navalny’s assassination?

VLADIMIR PUTIN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): Of course not. We don’t have this kind of habit of assassinating anybody. That’s one. Number two is, I want to ask you, did you order the assassination of the woman who walked into the Congress and who was shot and killed by a policeman?

Do you know that 450 individuals were arrested after entering the Congress and they didn’t go there to steal a laptop? They came with political demands.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: OK, so yes, we just played tape of Vladimir Putin. Under normal circumstances, we would never play tape of a foreign adversary criticizing our government. But honestly, those are fair questions. Who did shoot Ashli Babbitt? And why don’t we know?

Are anonymous Federal agents now allowed to kill unarmed women who protest the regime? That’s OK now? No, it’s not OK. It’ll never be OK.

And why are all those January 6 protesters still in prison on trespassing charges as so many Biden voters who torched Federal buildings walking free? What’s the answer to that question? If all of that was going on in Russia, we would rightly call it scary. We would call Putin a dictator. In fact, we do call him a dictator.

And speaking of January 6, why are there still so many things, basic factual matters that we don’t understand about that day. Why is the Biden administration preventing us from knowing? Why is the administration still hiding more than 10,000 hours of surveillance tape from the U.S. Capitol on January 6? What could possibly be the reason for that? Even as they call for more openness, we need to get to the bottom of it. They could release those tapes today, but they’re not.

Why?

We ought to be asking those questions urgently because as the Attorney General reminded us today, a lot depends on the answers.

At least one news organization is asking that, Revolver News. It’s a new site. It turned out to be one of the last honest outlets on the internet. A new piece on revolver.news suggests an answer to some of these questions. We know that the government is hiding the identity of many law enforcement officers who were present at the Capitol on January 6, not just the one who killed Ashli Babbitt.

According to the government’s own court filings, those law enforcement officers participated in the riot, sometimes in violent ways. We know that because without fail, the government has thrown the book at most people who were present in the Capitol on January 6. There was a nationwide dragnet to find them, and many of them are still in solitary confinement tonight.

But strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged. Look at the document. The government calls those people unindicted co-conspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that in potentially every single case, they were FBI operatives. Really in the Capitol on January 6?

For example, one of those unindicted co-conspirators is someone government documents identify only as Person 2. According to those documents, Person 2 stayed in the same hotel room as a man called Thomas Caldwell, an insurrectionist. A man alleged to be a member of the group, the Oath Keepers.

Person 2 also quote, “stormed” the barricades at the Capitol on January 6 alongside Thomas Caldwell. The government’s indictments further indicate the Caldwell, who by the way is a 65-year-old man is a dangerous insurrectionist, was led to believe there would be a quote, “quick reaction force” also participating on January 6.

That quick reaction force Caldwell was told would be led by someone called Person 3 who had a hotel room and an accomplice with him. But wait, here’s the interesting thing. Person 2 and Person 3 were organizers of the riot. The government knows who they are, but the government has not charged them. Why is that?

You know why. They were almost certainly working for the FBI So, FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6 according to government documents, and those two are not alone. In all, “Revolver News” reported there are, quote, “upwards of 20 unindicted co- conspirators in the Oath Keeper indictments, all playing various roles in the conspiracy who have not been charged for virtually the exact same activities, and in some cases, much, much more severe activities as those named alongside them in the indictments.”

Huh? So it turns out that this white supremacist insurrection was, again by the government’s own admission in these documents organized, at least in part by government agents. Are you shocked? We are shocked, we shouldn’t be shocked. Because in March, the FBI Director admitted that the Bureau was infiltrating as many dissident groups that opposed the regime as it possibly can.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MN): There must be moments where you think if we would have known, if we could have infiltrated this group or found out what they were doing and that — do you have those moments?

CHRISTOPHER WRAY, FBI DIRECTOR: So anytime there’s an attack, especially one that’s this horrific that strikes right at the heart of our system of government, right at the time a transfer of power is being discussed, you can be darn tooting that we are focused very, very hard on how can we get better sources, better information, better analysis, so that we can make sure that something like what happened on January 6 never happens again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, wait a second. There’s a huge difference between using an informant to find out what a group you find threatening might do and paying people to help organize a violent action, which is what happened apparently according to government documents on January 6. That’s a line and the FBI has crossed it and it’s not the first time they crossed that line.

In Michigan, remember that plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer? We heard a lot about that. And Whitmer was able to cover some of her own incompetence, though not all, by pointing to the fact that she is now a victim.

Now, when the FBI is telling if that plot, a whole team of insurrectionists was going to drive a van up to Gretchen Whitmer’s vacation house and throw her in the back and drive away. The mastermind of this plot, according to the FBI was a man called Adam Fox. Who is Adam Fox? Adam Fox turned out to be a homeless guy who was living in the basement of a vacuum repair shop, quite a gorilla.

The whole story was a farce. It was insulting, really, once you got to the details, which outlets like the AP didn’t bother with in the first read. But if you read the government’s charging documents carefully, and you should, you will see that it gets even more ridiculous.

It turns out that one of the five people in the plan of Gretchen Whitmer kidnap van was an FBI agent in the van. Another was an FBI informant. And the Feds admitted in these documents that an informant or undercover agent was quote, “usually present in the group’s meetings.” In other words, using simple math, which we can do even on cable news, nearly half the gang of kidnappers were working for the FBI

Remember, the guy who suggested using a bomb to blow up a bridge as part of that plot? That got a lot of coverage. That guy was an undercover FBI agent. Oh, OK.

So, if you’re wondering why they are always comparing January 6 to 9/11, there’s your answer. They’re using the same tactics, and a lot of us miss this the first time around and you are due an apology and we’re proffering on television right now.

We didn’t see the obvious. If you empower the government to violate civil liberties in pursuit of a foreign terror organization, and there are foreign terror organizations, it’s just a matter of time before ambitious politicians use those same mechanisms to suppress political dissent, and that’s what we’re seeing now.

We should have seen it earlier. Trevor Aaronson wrote a book on this called “The Terror Factory,” and it analyzed every terror prosecution from 2001 to 2013. Aaronson found that at least 50 defendants were on trial because of behavior that the FBI had not only encouraged, but enabled. FBI agents were essentially the plotters in these crimes, they made the crimes, crimes.

In 2012, a writer for “The Nation” called Petra Bartosiewicz found that FBI agents had, quote, “Crossed the line for merely observing potential criminal behavior,” which, by the way, is allowed and good to — and we’re quoting, ” … encouraging people and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself,” end quote.

And we checked, we looked carefully and that’s not an exaggeration. I wish it were.

One of those plots was an Islamic terror attack in 2015 in Garland, Texas. It turns out that an FBI employee played an active role in that shooting.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): The FBI was much closer to the Garland attack than anyone realized.

COOPER (on camera): After the trial, you’ve discovered that the government knew a lot more about the Garland attack than they had led on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That’s right. Yes, after the trial, we found out that they had had an undercover agent who had been texting with Simpson less than three weeks before the attack to tear up Texas, which to me was an encouragement to Simpson.

COOPER (voice-over): The man he is talking about was a special agent of the FBI, working undercover posing as an Islamic radical.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Man, so they’re doing that to Islamic radicals. What are they doing to American citizens? That should really worry you?

In a moment of uncharacteristic honesty, a former FBI Assistant Director called Frank Figliuzzi explained the other day on MSNBC, the goal is to round up people who dissent against the regime and throw them into solitary and that’s including Members of Congress. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FRANK FIGLIUZZI, FORMER FBI ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: What have we learned from our experience with international terrorism? In order to address that problem of arresting low level operatives is merely a speed bump, not a roadblock, in order to really tackle terrorism in this time domestically, you’ve got to attack and dismantle the command and control element of a terrorist group. That may mean people sitting in Congress right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Round up sitting members, duly democratically elected Members of Congress because they oppose the regime? Even Vladimir Putin is not doing that. And there’s a former assistant director the FBI calling for it on television and no one noticed.

So, we’re rounding people up. How about rounding up the FBI operatives that rioted on January 6? Why not identify the guy who shot Ashli Babbitt to death? This is crazy, and we should resist it.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor