FNC’s Carlson: Democrats Are Accusing GOP of Authoritarianism While Practicing It Themselves

FNC’s Tucker Carlson opened his Friday broadcast by questioning the Democratic Party’s self-proclaimed quest to crack down on so-called authoritarianism by using tactics that one might see from an authoritarian regime.

Among those qualities that Carlson cited were censorship, a proposal to monitor bank transactions and measures instituted in the name of COVID-19 mitigation that lack scientific justification.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: We’re going to do something a little different for the next hour, we are going to try to explain what this country is fighting itself about. What are the lines that divide us? It is pretty obviously not the old partisan divide that the rest of us grew up with, Republican versus Democrat, you’ve figured that out now. You look over at the Democratic side you see Rashida Tlaib, you’re pretty certain she is not on your side, obviously.

But then the question is, is Mitch McConnell on your side? And the answer as you well know is no, not really.

So what divides us? What is the dividing line? And it’s really simple.

The people in charge are intent on replacing our free democratic system with an authoritarian system where they don’t convince you of anything, they simply make you do things and they benefit from that.

There are people in this country who are opposed to that. They are anti- authoritarian, and if you look at who we book on this show, that may explain why we do it. You may have noticed, we have a lot of former lefties on the show — Glenn Greenwald, is the most obvious; Alex Berenson as well, and many others.

Now, we probably don’t agree with these people on a lot of things. Are we on the same side on abortion? We’ve never asked.

But one thing we know for certain is that they are totally opposed to authoritarianism, so that really is the divide. People are for an authoritarian America and those who are for a free America, it’s that simple, and once you start to understand politics through that lens, you figure out what’s really going on.

By the way, looking at polls is an unusually bad way to understand what’s happening in American politics. Polls are often wrong and when they are wrong, they are almost always wrong in the same direction. The last presidential election made that very clear.

The polling outfit, Quinnipiac for example, which is attached to some kind of college in Connecticut predicted that Joe Biden would win the popular vote by 11 points. It also predicted that Mitch McConnell was in tough shape in Kentucky. Pollsters even convinced a lot of Democratic Party donors that they had a real shot of winning the State of Texas.

In retrospect, it’s clear all of this was partisan fantasy and it had a purpose, it was all designed to make a mentally decaying senator from Delaware look like Teddy Roosevelt riding a massive wave of popular support. Of course, that was a lie.

So once you understand that, once you recognize what these polls are actually designed to do, they are designed to put Democratic Party leaders in the best possible light.

It is worth noting when the polls move in the opposite direction, when they start to reflect badly on the Democratic Party. That’s been happening over the past several weeks.

According again to Quinnipiac, a reliably left-wing pollster, Joe Biden’s national approval rating is now 38 percent, 60 percent of Independents disapprove of what Joe Biden is doing as President.

A new AP poll noted that just 34 of Americans are pleased with the direction of the country, that’s called the Right Track Wrong Track Poll, and for the party in power, it is very bad news.

This means that the very same people who just last year lied to you, to your face, about how popular Joe Biden was, are now admitting that he is actually the least popular President in modern political history. Why are they telling you this all of a sudden? Why are these reliably Democratic pollsters telling Democratic voters that their President is unpopular?

Maybe because they have no choice, maybe there are other reasons. We’re not sure. What is absolutely clear is that according to a new poll from Pew, Democratic Party voters understand what this means, and what it means is, in a free and fair democratic system, they can’t win.

If we allocate power based on who is the most popular with the public and that’s the basic premise of democracy, the Democratic Party is in very tough shape, and they know that. And that may be why according to polls, Democrats know overwhelmingly want the government to make their political opponents shut up.

More than three quarters of Democratic Party voters want the tech companies to quote: “Restrict false information online even if it limits freedom of information.” Think about that for a second. More than 60 percent of Democratic voters want the Federal government to quote, “Control that flow of information over the internet.”

So all of that contravenes the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which is the very core of our system of government and of our culture. It is what makes America great. And now, the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters are against it.

So that’s authoritarianism. There is no other word for it and it is ironic considering for four years, prominent Democrats told us we were living through a fascist system. Donald Trump is a fascist. But of course they were describing their own attitudes.

So we’re going to spend the next hour looking at the rise of authoritarian impulses on the left and try to figure out where those came from and where they’re going.

Now, none of this is brand new. You’ll recall that Democratic Party politicians have been pushing for censorship for a long time. Certainly, since Trump won in 2016. They blamed that victory on Facebook.

Here is Ed Markey last October for example, calling for more censorship.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. ED MARKEY (D-MA): The issue is not that the companies before us today are taking too many posts down, the issue is that they are leaving too many dangerous posts up.

In fact, they are amplifying harmful content, so that it spreads like wildfire and tortures our democracy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, they’re not censoring enough because these posts, according to Ed Markey — who will literally say anything you should know — are quote, “dangerous.” But Markey never explained what was dangerous about them, but you got the message. They all did.

A few weeks after Markey said that, Big Tech effectively removed the elected President of the United States from the internet. They silenced him completely, and virtually nobody said anything about it.

So it didn’t stop, it merely accelerated.

Now, Democrats and their allies in the news media have decided to drop all pretense. Jonathan Chait writes for New York Magazine. He is considered smart on the left, one of the weirdest people practicing journalism today. He just published a deeply revealing piece in New York Magazine. Here is the headline from it, and we’re quoting: “Anybody fighting Joe Biden is helping Trump’s next coup. All Republican politics is now functionally authoritarian.”

All right, because Republicans are calling for censorship. So, that’s how the Democratic Party is responding to the collapsing poll numbers of their President. They are accusing the other side of authoritarianism while practicing it themselves. Right.

So, you’ll recall that Joe Biden voters destroyed statues and destroyed our country’s biggest cities for more than a year and the police did nothing about it, and our media class applauded, and yet, because justice is no longer meted out equally, if someone dares to dishonor the legacy of Saint George Floyd, the New York Police Department’s Special Hate Crimes Division springs into action.

Here is an actual quote, by the way from this week. “On October 3, 2021, at approximately 10:15 a.m. in Union Square Park, a person on a skateboard threw gray paint on the face and base of a statue of George Floyd.” That’s the NYPD bulletin. Information. Contact us.” Exclamation point.

So, that is not really hypocrisy anymore, it is hierarchy. What they are telling you is that crimes against their ideas are the only crimes that matter. Well, that attitude has no popular support in this country, so you can only enforce it by force using surveillance to root out people who got the wrong ideas, and that’s exactly the basis on which the Biden administration is proceeding.

That’s why the administration has now given itself the authority to monitor everything that happens, for example in your private bank account.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, CNBC NEWS HOST: An effort that I know you’re a proponent of for the IRS to collect more information and more tax dollars, but more information about taxpayers’ bank accounts including annual cash flows, and I was curious whether you think the IRS has the wherewithal to actually do that.

JANET YELLEN, U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY: Well, of course they do, and a simple way for the IRS to get a sense of where that might be is just a few pieces of information about individual’s bank accounts.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Did you see that? The most interesting part of that exchange was not the Treasury Secretary. She has embraced authoritarianism full-blown, it’s the creepy little shill from CNBC and the question is not does the IRS have the right to snoop into your bank account with no evidence you’ve done anything wrong.

His question is, do they have the wherewithal? Do they have the manpower? Can they actually pull it off? To which he says, of course. We’re the government we can do anything.

So, after January 6, this show reported that Bank of America quote, “Proactively rooted through customer’s private financial information” to find individuals who quote, “met thresholds of interest.” They spied on their own customers and then like the good East Germans they are, they passed those names to the FBI, without telling anybody involved.

The Democratic Party approves of this and they want to make certain this kind of invasion of privacy is permanent, it is codified, and of course, they want to control your children, too, the center of your life. They’ll destroy anyone who tries to stand in the way of this.

Bradley Keyes, for example — we could give you a million, here’s just one — Keyes was a track and field coach at Pembroke Academy. He was fired because he didn’t think it was good for his athletes to have to wear masks as they were playing tennis. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRADLEY KEYES, FORMER TENNIS COACH: My goal is to get these mandates removed and it’s not just track and field, it’s tennis, it’s baseball, it’s every outdoor sport. Masks will be worn all times — practices and competitions.

Tennis, wonderful example. Singles tennis. You go watch practices, everyone is wearing masks. Competitions they will be wearing masks even though they’re 30 to 60 feet apart on the courts.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So, we’re going to tell you what we’ve told you a thousand times before, none of this is science. There is not a single study anywhere in the world that suggests kids benefit by wearing masks as they play sports outdoors, in fact, they are hurt by it. That’s both commonsense and the scientific consensus on the question.

But the fact is, it is happening anyway and that’s the point. They don’t feel the need to justify their decisions with science, and in fact, they will punish actual scientists who object to these unnecessary medical mandates.

Aaron Kheriaty for example, is a physician at the University of California. He is the Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UC Irvine, not a small job. He has just announced the university has quote, “Put me on leave.” Why? “For challenging their vaccine mandates in court.”

Oh, so it’s not a question of whether vaccine mandates help or hurt or good for public health, it is about power and anyone who challenges it is crushed.

The weak are hurt the most profoundly, as always.

Here is a story we’ll be telling you a lot more about in coming weeks about a woman in Colorado who is facing death. She has got stage 5 renal failure. She has just been denied a kidney transplant. Now, she has a donor, a willing donor, who has a kidney for her. Everything is ready to go.

But according to the health system there, the woman and her donor have not taken the COVID shot. The donor explained that her vaccination status quote, ” … does not affect any other patient on the transplant list. How can I sit here?” The donor asked, “And allow them to murder my friend when I’ve got a perfectly good kidney and I could save her life.” That’s a great question.

No one in the Biden administration has bothered to answer it or even think about it, instead, they are forcing anyone who raises these questions to be quiet. That’s not a democratic system, that’s an authoritarian system.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor