Monday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson opened his show with his reaction to last week’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Carlson focused on the pushback from Democrats and corporate America to the ruling and suggested corporate America’s opposition was out of self-interest of wanting their female employees childless.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: I would like to begin with the loud and at times violent response to the end of Roe v. Wade that came down to the Supreme Court on Friday, as you know.
If you’ve been following this, you may have noticed a profound change in the way the Democratic Party talks about the issue of abortion.
Gone is the empathy or the room for compromise. So, from the very beginning of this debate 50 years ago, even the staunchest pro-lifer acknowledged the anguish of young women who are pregnant and don’t want to be, who are alone and feel trapped by the child growing inside them, and that is the reason that pro-life institutions had built crisis pregnancy centers.
And to be fair, for generations, even the most committed pro-choicers acknowledge the inherent sadness of abortion, which, at the very least, is the end of a potential life.
“I do not view abortion as a choice,” said Joe Biden as recently as 2006. “I think it’s always a tragedy.” And of course, it always is a tragedy, even if you believe it should be legal.
And Democrats once said this out loud, forthrightly. In fact, in 1997, as White House counsel, now Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan urged her boss, Bill Clinton, to sign a ban on partial-birth abortions.
Elena Kagan has always been pro-choice, but ending the life of a child a week before birth was too much, even for her. And of course, for his part, Bill Clinton never spoke about abortion as anything but as a last resort. He famously described it as something that should be, “safe, legal and rare.”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BILL CLINTON, THEN PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Our vision should be of an America where abortion is safe and legal, but rare.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: You don’t hear that on the left anymore, ever. In fact, many on the left now behave as if abortion is itself a positive good, excited by the fact that a child who would have been born wasn’t.
Think about that for a moment — celebrating the failure of a child to come into the world. What does that say about how you feel about children or about people? In fact, some behave as if having an abortion is preferable to having children.
How do we know this? Well, no one on the left encourages women to brag about having kids. Having more than a couple of children at most, in fact, it’s considered weird and embarrassing, something that Mormons and people who live in the ghetto do.
But abortion? That’s something to tell your friends about. There’s even a shout your abortion campaign, highly well-funded, complete with perky T- shirts bragging about ending your pregnancy. What does that say? Nothing good.
Over the weekend, you saw a lot of people proudly shouting about their abortions at pro-choice riots all over the country. Here is what Washington, DC and Los Angeles looked like.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANTIFA YELLING: Every city, every town. Burn the precinct to the ground.
MAN YELLS: We are not scared of you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: What is that?
The hysteria is telling. It’s not the assault on bodily autonomy of the end of Roe v. Wade. Those are the same people who demanded vaccine mandates, but this happened all over the country.
In Arizona, thousands of enraged rioters tried to storm the State Capitol. On Friday night, they tore down security fencing around the building. They pounded on the Senate’s glass doors and windows where the legislature was in session.
Police had to fire tear gas from the windows to protect the politicians inside. Here’s what the State Capitol of Arizona looked like on Friday.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: It looked like insurrection to us, but no arrests were made at the Arizona State Capitol on Friday when that footage was shot. There will be no FBI investigation.
Democrats who call January 6 the racist insurrection said nothing this weekend about the violent siege of the State Capitol of Arizona. Did you expect them to? No, of course not. And in fact, instead, they justified it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL (D-WA): Let’s be clear. We have so many problems with the Supreme Court and the legitimacy.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): This Court has lost legitimacy. They have burned whatever legitimacy they may still have had.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): This is a crisis of legitimacy.
JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: And that threatens the Court’s long-term legitimacy.
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: The Court is about to face one of the largest threats to perceived legitimacy ever in its history.
REP SARA JACOBS (D-CA): The Supreme Court has lost legitimacy with the American people.
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL, MSNBC HOST: The crisis of the very legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court fills me with sorrow.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Well, you’ve got to give them credit for all being on the same page as usual. We’d love to get the conference code to the morning call where they set that up.
But because the Court did something they don’t like, they’re now telling us the third branch of government is “illegitimate.” The Supreme Court is illegitimate because it’s allowing voters to decide what they want to do with abortion.
Some would call that democracy, a system in which citizens choose their own form of government. They’re telling us it’s illegitimate.
On Sunday, the unelected Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, explained that without nine members of the Supreme Court dictating the law for hundreds of millions of Americans, women are fundamentally oppressed.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOV. KATHY HOCHUL (D-NY): Because we’re going to get a flood of people. I have declared this as our safe harbor. This is where we have the Statue of Liberty welcoming people who are oppressed, women who cannot receive fundamental right to control their body or receive an abortion, they are oppressed. They’re welcome here in the State of New York.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, we could go on and on and play you absurd soundbite after absurd soundbite, but what are we seeing here? It’s not simply an attack, an explicit attack on the legitimacy of the third branch of government, Court. It’s not just an attack on the right of people to govern themselves. It’s something bigger than that. What you’re seeing is a coordinated attack on the family and on children.
People at these protests are angered at the idea that children are being born. Watch what’s happening there. That is hardly an overstatement.
Here is a photograph on your screen from this weekend. It was taken outside the Supreme Court. It shows a mother humiliating her children in public, implying they are a burden to her because they are still living.
We saw things like this everywhere at pro-abortion protests often in full view of children. This was the scene, for example, in Dallas this weekend. Watch.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: So, what is that exactly? What about the thought of having children makes these people so angry? Where does an attitude like that come from?
Well, as it turns out, that attitude comes from the same place the Democratic Party now gets all of its attitudes, directly from corporate America.
Corporate America wants you childless and this is a big change. A hundred years ago, big companies built housing for the families of their employees and then schools and libraries to educate them. It was the humane thing to do, but it also seemed to make good business sense at the time.
If you wanted workers you could count on, you had to take care of them and their offspring, but over time, that arrangement got expensive.
Employees with families demanded higher wages to support their children, and in many cases, they formed unions to get those raises. So, labor costs soared.
So corporate America, in response to this, developed a new model: hire single women. At many big companies, including in the traditionally male banking sector, young women now make up the majority of new employees and you can see why they do. They work hard, they’re reliable. They tend to be loyal to the companies they work for.
The one downside to hiring young women is they can get pregnant.
If you’re running the HR Department at Citibank, that is the last thing you want. Children make your healthcare plan more expensive. Worse than that, they tend to compete with an employee’s attention.
Responding to after work e-mails seems less pressing to most new moms than putting their own kids to bed. That’s a huge problem for big companies, so they have every incentive to prevent their workers from having children.
You can’t say that out loud, of course. It would it be too obvious. Give us the best years of your life and in exchange we’ll pay you what’s effectively a subsistence wage in whatever overpriced urban hellscape we’re based in and then take from you the one thing that might give your existence meaning and joy in middle age, which is having children. That’s the deal we’re offering.
That is the deal they’re offering, but they can’t say that. It would sound like what it is, which is exploitation, no better than what the cotton mills once did to 14-year-old girls.
So, instead of saying that, which is the truth, corporate America uses the language of the social movement it created, “feminism,” to spin the entire arrangement as some sort of progressive liberation movement. “Fight the patriarchy. Have an abortion. It’s got nothing to do with lowering our labor costs, we promise.”
But of course, it does have everything to do with lowering their labor costs. Across the country they are making that case: Abortion as liberation.
Many of the biggest American companies are now paying female employees to have abortions, to end their pregnancies.
That would include Microsoft and Apple, Facebook, Yelp, Netflix, Comcast, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, JP Morgan, Nike, Starbucks, etc., etc.
Dick’s Sporting Goods is offering female employees up to $4,000.00 if they get an abortion. Does the company offer the same amount to female employees who want to have children?
Well, the editors at Breitbart wondered that. They asked Dick’s Sporting Goods that question, but the company didn’t even respond and that tells you the answer.
What’s amazing is that in the face of this, so many Americans who ought to know better have fallen for it, so some accountant at a soulless, publicly traded corporation concludes that drones with no personal lives make cheaper workers. That’s what happened.
But rather than question this or resist it, your average college-educated NPR listener nods in vigorous bovine agreement and then becomes completely hysterical when someone suggests that maybe there is another way to live, that is at least theoretically possible that raising your own children might be more rewarding as a life choice than commuting into a slum on public transportation in order to claw your way up to middle management at Deutsche Bank.
But the very thought of that, of turning down Deutsche Bank to bring new life into the world drives these people into a frenzy of rage.
Choosing a family over service to global capitalism? That’s disgusting, shut up.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor