Monday, FNC host Tucker Carlson opened his program by sounding off on a rise in crime in America’s cities, particularly Chicago. He attributed it to bad leadership dominated by ideas that do not address those problems directly.
Carlson said such trends were akin to what one might see in some third-world countries.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: It was a year ago this month — we checked the calendar — that a University of Chicago Economics Professor called Harald Uhlig questioned in public the wisdom of defunding the police. Now, Uhlig is German by birth, he is a macroeconomist by trade, so he is a fairly rational person, it’s his job.
And it struck Harald Uhlig that maybe a functional society might want to have police around so that say old ladies don’t get beaten up on the way to the grocery store, and fewer people get shot to death, less rapes. You know, the basics. That seemed reasonable to him.
Unfortunately, for Harald Uhlig, in the weeks right after George Floyd’s death extending to the present day, rational thinking of any kind has been prohibited by law. Nothing that is true can be said out loud. The truer it is, the more forbidden it is.
So, in Uhlig’s case, the Federal Reserve of Chicago promptly fired him from his job as an advisor, then they went online to attack him and his support for the police as quote, “not compatible with our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” All of which require no police apparently.
Then the University of Chicago, his employer began an investigation into Harald Uhlig’s racial views, which went on for some time. Then Janet Yellen, then the Chairman of the Fed; now, the Secretary of the Treasury denounced Uhlig effectively as a racist.
Everybody did. “Defund the police, we’ll be safer if we do.” That’s what they were saying a year ago, everyone in charge. It was lunacy.
And precisely because it was lunacy, no one was allowed to disagree with it. Here is the formula. The more self-evidently absurd a statement is, the more clearly untrue, the more viciously they have to attack anyone who points out that it is untrue, who dissents.
Trans-women are women. January 6 was an insurrection. Defund the police. It’s childish. It’s all so ridiculous and no sane person believes a word of it. But until the fever of the moment passes, most people who have no power feel obligated to play along with whatever orthodoxy it is until reality re-emerges as inevitably it does because you can’t beat nature.
In the case of crime, that may be happening no. The White House announced today that on Wednesday of this week, Joe Biden will outline a new plan to fight rising crime rates — which are skyrocketing — and the body counts that accompany them. Now, we haven’t seen the plan. We can’t know what’s in it. The White House won’t tell us.
But we do have two fairly informed guesses for what we’re going to discover on Wednesday. First, there will be no apologies. You will not hear Joe Biden beg forgiveness from the thousands of families whose loved ones have been killed by the Democratic Party’s nihilistic embrace of crime and disorder. “Looting as reparations. You go looters.” They should apologize for that, they never will.
The left’s ideology destroyed America’s cities, but they will never under any circumstances admit that — ever. Instead, they will blame you. That’s guaranteed.
Our second guess is this. Whatever Democrats propose to fix the problems that they created, will in the end make them more powerful. See how that works? They create a problem and the solution empowers them. That’s always the way it goes.
So, with that in mind, we expect Joe Biden to remind us on Wednesday who the real criminals are, who the threat is. People who didn’t vote for Joe Biden, whereas Joe Biden himself puts it, white supremacists.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We’ve taken steps to acknowledge and address systemic racism and the scourge of white supremacy in our own country.
Yes, forced us to confront systemic racism and white supremacy. It’s just been weeks since all America witnessed a group of thugs, insurrectionists, how political extremists and white supremacist violently attacked the capital of our democracy.
I believe we’re in a battle for the soul of this nation and the simple truth is, our soul will be troubled as long as systemic racism is allowed to persist.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, white supremacy is America’s biggest problem. As we’ve noted many times before, we still don’t know despite fervent and sincere efforts to find out what a white supremacist is. The White House has not told us. They have refused.
So, as of tonight, that remains a term without definition. By the way, if you’ve got a definition, send it to us. We’ll read it on the air.
But they don’t need a definition. They keep screaming, “It’s the greatest threat we face,” so because we’re highly literal on this show, we believe in language, we went searching for the numbers. Are there numbers to prove that? Because there are numbers on everything. Well, they are busy trying to create those numbers now.
But for the moment here’s what we’ve got. Researchers at the University of Maryland run something called the Global Terrorism Database. Some of the data they produce are clearly highly political. For example, they count the Parkland School shooting as an act of white supremacist violence, it wasn’t. There is no evidence that it was. How could you say that? But they say it anyway.
So, the numbers they have are inflated and yet, the researchers at the University of Maryland could find fewer than 70 people in the entire country who died from white supremacist violence over the entire period between 2015 and 2019.
How many people is that? Well, of course, it’s too many. Any death is too many, but for some perspective, more people die in this country every year from lightning strikes — literally. Look it up.
So, no, white supremacist violence, bad as it may be is not a major threat. It is not even on the list, actually.
What’s at the top of the list? Well, let’s see. Crime.
Crime tops the list. There’s no second place on that list.
In the year 2019 alone, there were more than 10, 000 arrests for murder in this country. By the way, more murders than that, but 10,000 were arrested. Just in 2020, last year, more than 750 people were murdered just in the City of Chicago, 750, and we can say, not that anyone is asking, but in case you’re wondering, with some confidence that the overwhelming majority of those suspects in the City of Chicago were not practicing white supremacists or members of QAnons.
How do we know this? Well, an informed guessed, but in some cases, there is video.
For example, this show has obtained exclusive surveillance footage of a shooting that took place this weekend, a horrifying shooting, on the northwest side of Chicago. This one took place right after a Puerto Rican Day Parade there.
You may have seen an abbreviated version of this clip on social media today. We have the full version, it’s on your screen as we speak. It is taken directly from a closed-circuit television camera in the City of Chicago.
Now as you watch this, ask yourself: what country is that? It’s America. It’s not some third-world hellhole. It’s not Haiti. It’s a major street in your third-largest city.
So, a couple with a Puerto Rican flag waving from their car, apparently minding their own business, ambushed by a mob, dragged from the car and shot execution-style right in the middle of the road. The men who shoot them take off, and then maybe the worst part, the victims just lie there bleeding because nobody comes to help.
Again, what country is this? Who is running it? And why haven’t we brought those people up on felony neglect charges? They deserve it.
If we accept a country where things like this happen, then we are the savages. We should not accept it. Joe Biden does, though. He hasn’t said a word about that shooting and he won’t because there are no white supremacists to blame. It’s one crime he’ll never mention.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Here is a Podcam video of the horrific altercation. The brother who didn’t want to be identified says his brother had rear-ended a parked car. After that, a group of up to six men inside of that car jumped out, started attacking them, and also throwing up gang signs.
Twenty-four-year-old Gyovanni Arzuaga was shot in the head, hip, and thigh. He died at Saint Mary’s Hospital. His wife, 23-year-old Yasmin Perez was shot in the neck and remains in critical condition.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Shot in the neck and just laid there with no one helping. But that wasn’t the only shooting this weekend in Chicago, far from it. In Chicago, a city by the way that just banned its own police from chasing suspects on foot, in all, 54 people were shot in Chicago this weekend.
And it wasn’t just happening there. Chicago gets a lot of attention, but it’s not constrained to Chicago. In New York where the geniuses also defunded the police, surveillance footage shows two children were nearly shot to death on Thursday in the middle of an attempted murder, in the middle of the day. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): This disturbing surveillance video shows a gunman firing his weapon at a 24-year-old man inches away from two young children, brother and sister ages 10 and five. It happened in broad daylight, Thursday.
The kids were walking to this bodega before they were caught in the middle of this. At one point, you can see the sister trying to shield her younger brother with her own body.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, normal people watching that would say to themselves, “Whatever we’re doing, we have to change. You can’t have things like this.” Innocent people are getting killed, even guilty people are getting killed. People getting killed flat out, and we can’t have that because we’re a civilized society. This is a decent nation and the one thing you can’t allow is that, and yet that’s not the conclusion they’re reaching.
By the way, new polling — there’s a mayor’s race going on in the City of New York right now. The primary is tomorrow, which in effect is the election because it’s a democratically controlled city. Fewer than 20 percent of New Yorkers would like to see fewer cops on the street, so most people aren’t for this at all because it’s insane, but the people in charge apparently haven’t noticed.
So now, New York may change its approach even further in the wrong direction. Just days ago, officials in the city announced they were dropping charges against hundreds of rioters and looters who were arrested last year. So, you wreck the city and you’re not punished.
It is scary, but it’s not as scary as the attitudes on display in this clip. This really gets you asking deep questions about the future of the country. This is from Oakland, California
Now, several people were shot, one died during Juneteenth celebrations this weekend. That’s bad, but the worst part is how people in the neighborhood reacted. They didn’t seem bothered at all. Here’s how they responded to the ambulance when it arrived.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: Last week, we showed you footage of people in Chicago dancing on a police cruiser and now we have this, sociopaths and that is the word for them, celebrating a shooting by twerking. What kind of society produces people like that? Who would behave like that? Do you know anyone who would behave like that?
When you see people behave like that, you have to ask yourself, what are we, as a society, doing wrong? Is it no fathers? Is it the schools? Who knows what the answer is, but if we’re not trying to find the answer, then we are going to be guaranteed more of it.
Anyone who’d celebrate a shooting is not someone you want to share a country with, so we should fix that. Is there a more important task? Probably not. But it’s completely ignored.
Instead, our irresponsible, low IQ political leaders patronize us with the same mindless talking points, the same talk about gun control, and assault weapons like AR-15s are the problem, and not our political class, which is clearly the problem.
Here for example, we can show you many examples, but here is just one. This is the Mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot featured in a local news report.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): Tuesday, little Kayden Swann was shot on Lake Shore Drive, 18 others were shot, five of them died.
Wednesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said part of the crime issue is gun control.
MAYOR LORI LIGHTFOOT (D), CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: If you can go over the border in Indiana and literally buy military-grade weapons with any — at any quantity.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): CPD numbers show that crime is up. Around this time last year, there were 521 people shot. Now, that number is 743.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: It’s tiresome even to repeat it, but again because we are literal and connected to physical reality, we feel honor-bound to tell you once more something that Lori Lightfoot, of course, knows herself — virtually every gun crime in the City of Chicago is committed with a handgun, not with an AR-15. Virtually no crimes nationwide are committed with assault weapons.
So, why is she focused on assault weapons? Well, because the people who own assault weapons don’t live in Chicago and didn’t vote for her. So, she’d be happy to disarm them and the Biden administration of course feels the same way. That’s why in March, the White House’s lawyers argued before the Supreme Court of the United States in a development that did not get the attention it deserved that police should be able to enter the homes of law-abiding American citizens and seize their firearms without a warrant. No judge involved, neither any finding of mental impairment or threat of violence, nor any of that.
In other words, your means of self-defense belong to the Biden administration. Right?
This will not solve crime, it will only disarm you. The real problems here have nothing to do with the weapons used and nothing to do with the race of the people committing the crimes. It’s not a black person problem, it’s not a white person problem. It’s not white supremacy, it’s not black supremacy. It is bad leadership by the people in charge and it’s on display all around us.
Prosecutors, many of them funded by one man, George Soros refusing to enforce the law, and the results are immediate. In the City of Philadelphia, for example, where George Soros helped elect Larry Krasner as the DA, arrests are hitting record levels, but convictions are dropping. In other words, the cops are doing their part and the prosecutors are refusing to do theirs. Result: the city is now on pace to far exceed its murder rate from 30 years ago, 1990 was the previous high, they’re about to beat it.
So, what happens when prosecutors do enforce the law and use it to target the people committing crimes? Well, that’s the way the country used to work, and by the way it works, and we have new academic research tonight to show that.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton found that gang takedowns by cops explain nearly a quarter of all reduction in so-called gun violence in housing projects in New York City after 2011. In other words, you go after the people you know are committing the crimes and then you’ve got a lot less crime.
The gangs are committing the crimes in these cities, particularly in Chicago, so if Joe Biden was serious about protecting children from being murdered on the street or people at the Puerto Rican Day Parade from getting killed next to their car, he would go after the gangs. Oh, but he is probably not going to do that on Wednesday.
He is also not going to say a word about prosecutors like Larry Krasner funded by his friend, George Soros, call on them to enforce the law, no. We also don’t think he is going to call on criminals to stop twerking on ambulances in Oakland or police cars in Chicago. Those are Biden voters.
The people Joe Biden is going to target on Wednesday are the ones who don’t support him and live far from the collapsing cities. In other words, it’s your fault. He will tell you that. You watch.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor