Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson opened his program by condemning Apple, Google and Amazon’s effort to shutdown Parler.
Carlson maintained such a coordinated effort violated U.S. antitrust law.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Within hours of the riot at the U.S. Capitol last week, in case you weren’t watching, we denounced the violence we saw in the clearest possible terms. We did it for one reason. We are totally opposed to political violence. We said that virtually every night for the past six months since the riots began on Memorial Day. We meant it then, we mean it now.
Every person who broke the law last Wednesday should be prosecuted. Vandalize a building, hurt a cop — go to jail. That’s our position. That has always been our position. This show is for law and order. Period.
Many of those currently in power or not, they believe instead in selective enforcement. Selective enforcement is not law and order. It is the opposite.
Laws must be applied equally to every citizen or else they are not laws, they are the whims of a tyrant. Punish the guilty, spare the innocent. That is the most basic definition of justice. But that is not what’s happening now. The crackdown on civil liberties we’ve watched over the past five days amounts instead to collective punishment.
People who had nothing to do with the violence in the U.S. Capitol are being punished for that violence, and that is repugnant and immoral and anti-American. It should shock our sensibilities.
It shocks Alexey Navalny. Navalny is the Russian dissident who was poisoned last year apparently by the Putin government. He has watched the recent crackdown in this country by Joe Biden and his allies in Big Business and Big Tech with growing concern and then horror. Here’s his conclusion, quote, “We have seen many examples in Russia and in China of such private companies becoming the state’s best friends and enablers when it comes to censorship. This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world,” end quote.
So even in Russia, they know what’s happening here is dangerous and it’s wrong, because it is.
In the past five days, PayPal, keep in mind, is supposed to be a payment processor, not a political party or a law enforcement agency. PayPal suspended the account of a group that paid for Trump supporters to travel to Washington last week.
Now, it’s not clear that any of these people participated in illegal acts. We do not know. But they were shut down anyway for their political views.
It’s not an isolated case, it’s happening all over. It happened to performer Ariel Pink. Pink made the mistake of listening to the President’s address on Wednesday. Pink says he didn’t get anywhere near the Capitol, he went to his hotel and fell asleep and no one has suggested otherwise.
But for the crime of attending a political rally, Pink was punished. He was promptly dropped from his record label. He is done.
Now it’s possible he might not be able to fly on airplanes. A flight attendants union has demanded banning all quote “insurrectionists” from flying commercially anywhere in the United States.
So the question is, and everything hangs on this definition: what’s an insurrectionist? Well, according to a letter from Democrats in Congress, it is anyone who sympathizes with what happened on Wednesday. Think about that.
Now you can oppose what happened at the Capitol and for the 15th time, we do oppose it loudly have and will. And you can still see this development for what it is. It’s terrifying lunacy.
But no one is pushing back against it. Instead, the biggest corporations in this country, the ones that control your checking account, the ones that control your healthcare, whether you live or die, have decided to radically expand the definition of what is now illegal.
Insurrection, according to this new definition means questioning any part of last November’s election. So you thought that your birthright as an American was the right to ask questions, but not anymore. That’s now a crime.
Consider this among many examples. A total of 139 Republicans in the House of Representatives objected to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, they were joined by several Republicans in the Senate. They called instead for an audit of the election results. Here’s what they didn’t do. They did not urge anyone to commit violence. They did not support the people who stormed the Capitol Building.
For our part, we did not promote their cause on this show. We had mixed feelings about it. On the other hand, we didn’t denounce them as insurrectionist because they weren’t and they aren’t. Except now they are. And that definition has huge consequences, not just for them, but for the country.
You’ll notice the definition of insurrection has changed quite a bit in just four years. Here’s what insurrection look like right after the 2016 election.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL (D-WA): Mr. President, I object to the certificate from the State of Georgia on the grounds that the electoral votes were not —
JOE BIDEN (D), THEN VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No debate. There is no debate. Section 15 and 17 of Title III of the United States Code requires that any objection be presented in writing and signed by both a member of the House of Representatives and a senator.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, even as people waited hours in Georgia —
BIDEN: There is no debate. There is no debate if it is not signed by a senator, the objection cannot be entertained.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Now, you may not remember that because not much happened in its aftermath. No major corporation threatened to destroy anyone for that insurrection. They’ve changed.
In the past few days, BlueCross BlueShield, JPMorgan Chase, Marriott, Citigroup, Commerzbank, not small companies have all cut off donations to Republicans who objected in any way to this year’s election results.
Companies like Dow, AT&T, and Morgan Stanley announced today they will do the same.
Here’s how Citibank’s Head of Global Affairs explained this move, quote, “We want you to be assured that we will not support candidates who do not respect the rule of law.” Now that sounds like a brand new standard, of course, it is. And by the way, it does not apply to any Democrat, and that’s all of them who support flagrantly illegal sanctuary cities all over the country. Talk about an attack on the rule of law, but that doesn’t count.
“Forbes” Magazine, meanwhile, wants to make certain that no one who worked in the Trump administration will ever have a job again, quote, “Let it be known to the business world,” announced the magazine’s editor, ” … hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”
In other words, dare to hire someone from the presidential administration, that’s many thousands of people and we will destroy your business. That’s healthy and normal?
You want your country to fall apart completely? Keep up fascist insanity like that, because it definitely will. The irony, of course, is that the Biden era which you probably didn’t welcome was, at the very least supposed to be a return to normal. That was the upside. But it turns out this is the new normal: silencing, blacklists, social credit scores, threats.
It’s almost boring at this point to point out the steaming hypocrisy in all of this and we’ll stop after tonight. But just for the record, we can’t resist.
Six months after Donald Trump’s election, Nancy Pelosi wrote this on Twitter quote, “Our election was hijacked. There was no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy and #FollowTheFacts.”
Insurrection? No.
A month later, a Bernie Sanders voter tried to murder congressional Republicans, officeholders with a rifle at a baseball practice in Arlington, Virginia. He almost succeeded he shot Steve Scalise and almost killed him. Yet none of these same corporations, these morally aware corporations suspended donations to Bernie Sanders or to Nancy Pelosi and by the way, shouldn’t have because Pelosi and Sanders didn’t pull the trigger.
But they didn’t even consider it, nor did they issue statements about respecting the rule of law are threatened Nancy Pelosi’s fabulists with never working again in America. These same companies indeed remained quiet all last summer after BLM set fire to the ancient Episcopal Church in front of the White House and then drove the President of the United States into an underground bunker with violence. They said nothing.
They said nothing when rioters destroyed a police precinct in Minneapolis. In fact, the whole downtown of that city when they besieged a Federal Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, or established their own country, a breakaway republican downtown Seattle and shot a guy in the middle of it.
That’s not entirely true. They didn’t comment on it, in some ways they approved it.
Citibank three months later gave the rioters money. Citi created a $1 billion fund for racial equity. Go ahead and define that term.
Some enterprising progressives established something called the Minnesota Freedom Fund that raised tens of millions of dollars to bail out the violent rioters, the insurrectionists. Big Tech and Democratic Party politicians including Kamala Harris supported that fund of the insurrectionists, they supported them.
We were against that kind of crap then, we’re completely against it now.
But from their perspective, violence and insurrection are not necessarily bad. It’s a situational, a kind of situational ethics — you remember that from the 60s. So when our side does it, it’s a good thing because the arc of justice is long. But when the other side does it, we unleash the F.B.I. to conduct one of the biggest manhunts in recent history. So we’re all Roger Stone now, everyone on the wrong side of that equation.
But actually, it’s worse than that if we’re going to be honest, and we don’t want to be alarmists, but the hair on your arms is already standing up, because you can feel that this is bad, because it is. Something bigger is happening here, something we’ve never seen in the full course of American history.
Corporations, which are now more powerful than they have ever been, ever, are colluding with one another and with the political class to silence any opposition, not to some ideal. They don’t have those, but to their rule.
This is not what we were promised. The election is over. You thought things would calm down. Again, even if you voted against Joe Biden. You thought they would calm down. No chance. That’s one campaign promise they didn’t intend to keep.
Why? Because calm doesn’t serve their purposes. Most people — most normal people in this country would like a placid political environment, but they don’t benefit from them because their coalition has nothing in common with one another. They need an enemy to unite them. Period. And so they’re going to keep torqueing up the pressure.
How much pressure can our society take before it breaks? They may find out.
Here’s the President-elect, Mr. Unity, comparing his opponents in the Senate to Nazis.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: They are part of the big lie — the big lie. I was being reminded by a friend of mine, maybe you were with me, I can’t recall when we were told that you know Goebbels and the great lie, you keep repeating the line repeating the lie.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Not even pronouncing the name correctly, of course, but the broader point is, how dare you talk like that? You’re the President-elect and you’re comparing people who disagree with you or have questions about the campaign or oppose your agenda to Nazis? What’s your message? They’re not human. They’re Nazis.
You play with fire when you talk like that. People are going to get hurt if we keep this up.
Nancy Pelosi plans to keep it up. Nancy Pelosi is not calling for unity. She doesn’t want unity.
Instead, she is leveling the most divisive attack you can make, and that’s a racial attack. The real problem with Trump voters she explained the other day is the color of their skin. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): There are people in our country led by this President, for the moment who have you chosen their whiteness of a democracy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: That tape should live forever. When Donald Trump said yes, people should go to the Capitol, we thought that was reckless, and we said so. Because we want to be Americans, and responsible before anything else. So we were honest about that.
Nancy Pelosi just attacked people who oppose her agenda for the color of their skin, their whiteness. What the hell does that mean? What does talk like that do to our country?
What it does is send a very clear message: anyone who disagrees with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is a Nazi or a white supremacist or just white, which is the same thing. They’re not Americans. They don’t have human rights. They have no right to speak or to fly or to use banks or to hold jobs.
Where is this going thinking like that? It’s poison. We will tell you where it’s going. It’s going wherever Corporate America wants it to go because they’re in charge effectively.
Corporations are fully aligned. This has never happened in our country. They are fully aligned with a political party. How much distance between the Biden campaign and Google, the most powerful company in the world? Right around none.
So publicly held multinationals like Facebook and Twitter and Google can do whatever they want and what they want to do is become partisan actors. They’ve silenced Donald Trump, okay. They will silence you if you dare dissent. Make no mistake.
Republicans should have seen this coming. It’s not like it was a mystery. Democrats never hid their intent. Here’s Kamala Harris saying it out loud from a debate stage.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAMALA HARRIS (D), VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Senator Warren, I just want to say that I was surprised to hear that you did not agree with me that on this subject of what should be the rules around corporate responsibility for these Big Tech companies when I called on Twitter to suspend Donald Trump’s account that you did not agree. And I would, I would urge you to join me.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): So look, I don’t just want to push Donald Trump off Twitter, I want to push him out of the White House. That’s our job.
HARRIS: Join me and join me in saying that his Twitter account should be shut down.
WARREN: Let’s —
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Anyone who says the other side must be forced to stop talking is a threat to our freedoms. Period. If you don’t like what someone says, explain why and win people over voluntarily. That’s what the democratic system is at its core. Anyone who says I will use the power of the state of Google to make the other side shut up again is a threat to your freedom.
By the way, this is also illegal, baldly illegal. The coordination between these companies violates the most basic tenet of antitrust law. When monopolies conspire to suppress competition and hurt consumers, it is not even a close call, they are breaking the law. Period. And it doesn’t matter if no one in Washington is brave enough to say that out loud, it doesn’t make it less true, and that’s exactly what they’re doing and the evidence mounts.
This weekend, Amazon Facebook, Google and Apple, openly coordinated set their sights on the social media app, Parler and booted it off the internet, and not just them. According to CEO of Parler, John Matze, quote, “Every vendor from text message services to e-mail providers to our lawyers ditched us on the same day.” Whoa, imagine that.
You wake up and you’re suddenly unpopular with the wrong person and you can’t communicate and you have no legal representation and you can’t fly in an airplane and you can’t put your money in a bank. On what grounds did they do this to Parler? What did Parler do wrong?
Well, we still don’t know. No one has bothered to explain that. Not one person in law enforcement or the media has shown any connection between any of the criminals caught on camera at the Capitol Building — you’ve seen them — and Parler.
Parler committed no crimes. So why are they gone? Well, conservatives speak to each other on Parler and that’s dangerous. So they were banned. Yesterday, the left shut Parler down. They did it in a lot of different ways. But here’s the way that you should think about most deeply.
Amazon, the biggest retailer in the world also controls the largest collection of servers in the world. It is called Amazon Web Services. Now a huge percentage of the internet flows through Amazon servers, and that means everything both good and bad.
Digital Mozart recordings, and hardcore pornography, Bible verses and invoices for illegal shipments of fentanyl, all of that, and much more. In fact, almost everything is hosted on Amazon servers.
So until yesterday, no one imagined that Jeff Bezos could decide who gets to speak on the internet. That’s too much power for one man. No, can we agree? We thought the left would agree, they don’t. No one thought that Jeff Bezos could silence an entire political movement in an instant, simply because he thought they were expressing inconvenient views.
But last night, that’s exactly what Jeff Bezos did, and Parler went dark.
Whoa, what’s next? You will likely find out soon.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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