Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson decried the mainstream media for its handling of presidential politics on two fronts — the varying treatments of President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in debates and forums, and the handling of the bombshell allegations first reported by The New York Post regarding Biden son Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Carlson speculated that once the November 3 election had come and gone, the media’s status quo would be unsustainable.
Transcript as follows:
If you flipped the during our show last night, you may have seen the President and his challenger making their respective cases to voters.
But Trump and Biden weren’t debating each other as we’ve long been promised they would, they were not on the same stage, and they were not even on the same network. That would have been too risky.
There’s a massive public health crisis underway you may have heard, so to avoid what Doomsday hobbyists on Twitter like to call a super spreader event, Trump and Biden held separate indoor Town Halls surrounded by people. They talked to partisan moderators instead of each other.
That might seem like a loss to the country three weeks before a presidential election, but unfortunately, the science on this question is clear. Nothing could be more dangerous to America than a televised in- person debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
So the so-called Debate Commission made certain a debate couldn’t happen. Who benefited from that decision? Well, not voters. America has held regularly scheduled presidential debates for decades and we have them for a reason. The more information voters can get directly from the candidates rather than the media, the better our democracy functions. Not that anyone is interested in democracy anymore.
Joe Biden doesn’t care either way, he just didn’t want to talk about Burisma. That’s the scandal that vividly illustrates how as Vice President, Biden subverted this country’s foreign policy in order to enrich his own family.
The good news for Biden last night was that he didn’t have to talk about it. No one from ABC News asked him, not one word about that scandal for the entire 90 minutes.
As we’ve been telling you this week, The New York Post and few other news outlets including this show have published emails taken from Hunter Biden’s personal laptop. They show that Hunter Biden was paid by foreign actors to change American foreign policy using access to his father, then the Vice President.
This is a big story. It is also a real story.
This afternoon, we received nonpublic information that proves conclusively, this was indeed Hunter Biden’s laptop. Period. There are materials on the hard drive of that computer that no one but Hunter Biden could have known about or have replicated. This is not a Russian hoax.
Again, we’re saying this definitively. We’re not speculating. The laptop in question is real. It belonged to Hunter Biden.
So there’s no excuse for not asking you about it. None. But they didn’t ask about it. It was a cover up in real time.
No matter what happens in the election next month, the American media will never be the same after this. It cannot continue this way. It is too dishonest.
Nevertheless, we did learn a few things last night, anyway. It’s hard not to learn when you watch Joe Biden try and speak for an hour and a half.
At one point, an activist told Joe Biden that she has got an eight-year-old transgender daughter, eight years old, and a second grader. She asked Joe Biden what he thought about that. Here is how he responded.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: The idea that an eight-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, you know, I decide I want to be transgender. That’s what I think I’d like to be. It would make my life a lot easier.
There should be zero discrimination. And what’s happening is, too many transgender women of color are being murdered. They’re being murdered. I mean, I think it’s up to now 17, don’t hold me to that number.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: OK, so if an eight-year-old biological boy decides one day that he is really a girl, that’s final, and you’d have to be a bigot, to pause and say, wait a minute, you’re eight years old. You’re a small child. Maybe let’s think about this for a minute. That’s what a normal person who has kids would say. People with kids know that children grow and change. They change their minds about a lot of things, including themselves. That’s the reality of it.
But if you’re a crazed ideologue, you don’t care about reality. So you would tell the rest of us that an eight-year-old is entitled to hormone therapy on demand and permanent life altering surgery if he/she demands it. That’s what Biden is telling us.
It doesn’t matter how fashionable talk like this is right now and it is very fashionable. It is crazy and it’s destructive, and it is having a profound effect. No one wants to say it, but it’s true.
We know that between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for biological females in this country quadrupled in one year. We also know that many people who get those surgeries regret them later, deeply regret them.
We have a lot more data on that, but universities are actively punishing researchers who follow that line of inquiry, so much for science.
In the end, mania like this will end. The left is at war with nature. Inevitably, they will lose that war because nature always prevails. But in the meantime, so much damage, so many children are being hurt irreparably.
Biden doesn’t care, it’s the new thing. And so he is for it, whatever it takes.
Biden is now busy rewriting his entire life story to pretend that he has been woke for 60 years. Last night, he told us he became a gay rights supporter in the Kennedy administration, sometime around 1962 when he and his father saw two gay men kissing. That was the same year by the way, he met Corn Pop. Here is how Biden described the scene.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: We were getting out to get an application to be a lifeguard in the African-American community because there was a big swimming pool complex. And these two men well-dressed, leaned up and hug one and kissed one another.
I’m getting out of the car at the light, and I turned to my dad. My dad looked at me, he said, Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Do you want to hear the freaky thing? One of those, quote, “well- dressed men” was Corn Pop. That’s right. Taking a walk on the wild side generations before it was cool. Seriously? What are the odds of that?
The whole Corn Pop saga coming together in a neat little morality tale live in an ABC Town Hall. Amazing.
Actually, odds are higher than you would think. When you’re writing narrative fiction, you’ve got the luxury of tying up all the loose ends in the final scene of your story. In fact, you can also rewrite other people’s stories.
Asked last night about police brutality, the former Vice President speculated that maybe people like George Floyd would be alive today if the police had just shot him in the leg a few times.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: There’s a lot of things we’ve learned, and it takes time, but we can do this. You can ban chokeholds, you can — but beyond that, you have to teach people how to deescalate circumstances — deescalate.
So instead of anybody coming at you, and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, just shoot him in the leg.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: They did that to Corn Pop after they chased him and his boyfriend down the road. More on that later. But as to the question of shooting people in the leg, replacing chokeholds with leg shooting. Wow.
How much would you have to know about firearms or human biology to wonder if maybe there could be some unintended consequences there? People do have arteries in their legs after all. In fact, sometimes bullets do miss their targets. So why did no one last night point out that’s demented?
Well, today we got some clarity on the question of why no one pointed it out. It turns out the moderator at last night’s ABC Town Hall was not the only political operative in the room. One supposedly uncommitted voter was in fact a former Obama administration speechwriter called Nathan Osborn.
Osborn repeated Biden campaign talking points to the letter faithfully, of course. At one point, he referred to court packing as a quote, “safeguard” that will ensure a long-term balance on the Supreme Court. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NATHAN OSBORN, FORMER OBAMA SPEECHWRITER: Merrick Garland didn’t get a hearing for all of 2016 and Amy Coney Barrett is being pushed through at the last minute, even though millions have already voted.
So what do you think about ideas from people like Pete Buttigieg and others to put in place safeguards that will help ensure more long term balance and stability?
And what do you say to LGBTQ Americans and others who are very worried right now about erosion of their rights and our democracy as a whole?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: How do you handle a question that tough? If you’re Joe Biden and someone who used to work for you takes the microphone and just savages you like you just saw? How do you deal with it?
Well, if you’re a man who has faced down Corn Pop, and maybe his boyfriend, too, with a chain, you’re not even fazed.
Joe Biden kept his composure under the grueling cross examination, and here is how he responded.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: I have not been a fan of court packing because I think it just generates what will happen — I mean, whoever wins, it just keeps moving in a way that is inconsistent with what is going to be manageable.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC NEWS HOST: So you’re still not a fan?
BIDEN: Well, I’m not a fan. I didn’t say — it depends on how this turns out, now how he wins, but how it is handled — how it is handled. But there’s a number of things that are going to be coming up, and there’s going to be a lot of discussion about other alternatives as well.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So we did learn something new last night despite their efforts to keep us from learning anything, Joe Biden isn’t a fan of court packing. You see court packing has had a few off years and Joe Biden started to lose his faith and had even sold his court packing jersey, but at the end of the day, Joe Biden is still open to court packing. He can get back on the court packing bandwagon depending on how things are handled. Got it?
Biden was allowed to answer non-questions like this because he was surrounded by sycophants and former employees of his party.
Over at NBC by contrast, the sitting President didn’t have that luxury to put it mildly. And by the way, it’s not good for you to be sucked up to too much. It’s good to get smacked around a little bit. It makes you sharper.
At the NBC Town Hall, the President’s biggest fan was a nodding woman seen right behind him and the media made certain to dox her immediately. How dare she nod? We’ve got to find out who she is, and they did.
During the President’s one-hour event, the moderator asked him dozens more questions than the voters in the room got to ask, and when Trump began speaking, the moderator interrupted him over and over again.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: But as the President, I have to be out there. I also know —
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE, NBC NEWS ANCHOR: But there is no one that says you can’t be out there, but it’s just about wearing masks and having, for example, your rallies.
TRUMP: Well, I know this.
GUTHRIE: Your rallies don’t require masks.
TRUMP: I wouldn’t be able to get the word out.
GUTHRIE: The word is false.
TRUMP: And the word is? Military balance from our great military. And they are dumped in garbage cans.
GUTHRIE: That is a handful. We could go all night, which we won’t. We could go all night.
TRUMP: No, it is happening every day.
GUTHRIE: One by one.
TRUMP: I want the money go to directly to people.
GUTHRIE: The Senate Republicans with you, they are going to go big.
TRUMP: They’ll go — yes.
GUTHRIE: A big whole number.
TRUMP: They’ll go. Yes, they’ll go. They are going to be very happy.
GUTHRIE: So far, they have not said they would.
TRUMP: That’s because I haven’t asked them to.
We will always protect people with preexisting conditions.
GUTHRIE: If you’re successful in court —
TRUMP: And here is the thing —
GUTHRIE: In November, those preexisting conditions — that promise is gone.
TRUMP: If we don’t succeed —
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So Joe Biden wasn’t there so the moderator played stand in for Joe Biden. The good news about all of this is it’s so bad and so transparent that it can’t continue, all of their stupid little morning shows and their dumb Sunday shows and their even dumber cable shows. All of that is going away.
When the smoke clears from this election, there will be a massive realignment in the media, no matter who wins because they’ve showed who they are and it is so unappealing. It’s so far from journalism that it can’t continue.
Meanwhile, back on ABC, Joe Biden skated by without answering any questions of substance about his son or Antifa, or BLM. The moderator over on NBC pushed Donald Trump to condemn QAnon and white supremacy, the most important issues in this nation, and he did it, dutifully, but it wasn’t enough.
The point of demanding performative disavowals isn’t to get the disavowal, it’s to smear the person you’re asking to disavow the group by association with the group. And that’s exactly what happened last night.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GUTHRIE: You were asked point blank to denounce white supremacy. In the moment, you didn’t. You ask then follow up questions, who specifically? A couple of days later on a different show, you denounced white supremacists?
TRUMP: Oh, you always do this. No, you always do this.
GUTHRIE: My question to you is —
TRUMP: You’ve done this to me and everybody —
GUTHRIE: Why does it seem like —
TRUMP: I denounce white supremacy, OK.
GUTHRIE: You did two days later.
TRUMP: I denounced white supremacy for years. But you always do it. You always start off with a question. You didn’t ask Joe Biden whether or not he denounces Antifa. I watched him on the same basic show with Lester Holt, and he was asking questions like Biden was a child.
GUTHRIE: Well, so this is a little bit of a dodge.
TRUMP: So are you ready — are you listening? I denounce white supremacy.
GUTHRIE: OK.
TRUMP: What’s your next question?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Why doesn’t anyone ever define white supremacy? What is white supremacy? It’s America’s biggest problem. The F.B.I. has said that’s the biggest problem we face. Not China. White supremacy, but what is it exactly?
White supremacy is not voting for Joe Biden. That’s the functional definition. But the President denounced it anyway. I denounce white supremacy. OK. Well, it sounds like a dodge, says the moderator.
In her defense, NBC was under a lot of pressure from Democrats to make last night’s Town Hall look like this with 19 days to go until the election, just like Facebook and Twitter delivered earlier this week, NBC delivered, too.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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