Tucker: Modern progressivism destroys the things its designed to help
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host examines why the left thinks democracy is in peril.
Here's something we've noticed you may have noticed it too. All of a sudden, pretty much every powerful person in the country is talking about something called democracy. Democracy, our sacred democracy. You hear that word everywhere, from the Atlantic to NPR to the New Yorker magazine and NBC News in between. Democracy defines the year 2022 the way that groovy defined 1968. All the cool kids are saying it.
Liz Cheney has decided her life's mission is now to defend democracy. Jim Acosta has a new CNN show in which he uses the word democracy the way some people use prepositions - in every sentence. Tomorrow, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, there's a Zoom webinar on Democracy, which you're welcome to attend, in case you haven't heard enough about it already. Every left-of-center midwit on Twitter will be there. All of them will be fretting about the future of democracy. Pretty amusing.
It's easy to make fun of an event like that. And of course, you have a moral obligation to. David Frum bloviating about democracy. Insert joke here. But actually, if we're being honest about it, you should be a little worried about the state of our democracy, how is our democracy doing?
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Well, let's see: Another way to describe democracy is popular representation. It's a synonym. When the government does what citizens want it to do, you have a democracy. And when it doesn't, you don't. You no longer have a free country that is ruled by its people.
So what kind of system do we have? It's easy to know. You find out what citizens care about and then you compare those concerns to what the people who run the government say they care about. If you've got a functioning democracy, there should be a fairly precise overlap. In a democratic system, leaders try very hard to speak for their voters. That's the whole point of the government.
So let's apply that test to the United States of America. What do our leaders care about? We know the answer because they tell us constantly. Our leaders care about equity and climate change. They care about trans rights, police brutality, the deadly insurrection on January 6th, mandatory vaccinations, more H1B visas for Indian tech workers and above all, at the moment, defending our closest ally, Ukraine, from Russian aggression. And of course, they care about third-wave academic feminism. That's deeply important to them.
The most famous Democrat in Congress gave us an impromptu tutorial in Instagram about the connection between cosmetics and the patriarchy.
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: There are studies that show that women who wear makeup regularly wear like a, a decent amount of makeup kind of show up to the office and glam also make more money. And so at that point, it stops being these calculations and decisions stop being about choice and they start being about patriarchy. … We live in systems that were largely built for the convenience of men and oftentimes were designed with the subjugation of women and queer people in mind.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Give that lady an MSNBC show. Sorry, Mika. I wear makeup because I'm oppressed. Me, me, me, me, me. Now the shorthand description of that is narcissism, which in the end is the defining concern of our leaders. Above all, they're interested in themselves.
If you work in the media or have multiple college degrees, chances are you're pretty good at making it all about you. You is what you care about most. What does the rest of America care about? Once again, we don't have to guess about that. We've got a huge amount of public opinion polling on that subject.
At the top of the list, you'll see government incompetence, the economy, the cost of living and immigration. Well, that's weird. It is completely different from the list Joe Biden might have made. Equity, climate change, transgenderism mandatory vaccination, Jan. 6, Ukraine. Those trends be pretty unimportant to most Americans. Some of those issues or at the very bottom of the list.
But how can that be? If global climate change is the most imminent existential crisis of our time, then why don't voters seem concerned about it? We don't know, but they're definitely not concerned about it. Instead, Americans are very worried about inflation and crime. As it happens, and this tells you everything, those are the two topics the White House has dismissed recently as irrelevant and dumb. The White House isn't at all worried about inflation and crime.
Hmm, that doesn't sound like democracy. Here's the White House press secretary taking some time off from her junior year in Oberlin to speak to her fellow undergrads at something called Pod Save America about how rising crime rates are actually an invention of those racists at Fox News.
JEN PSAKI: Right now, just to give you a sense of CNN Pentagon, as many as eighty-five hundred U.S. troops on heightened alert. OK, true statement MSNBC CNBC is doing their own thing about the market. And then on Fox, is Jeanine Pirro talking about soft on crime consequences? I mean, what? What does that even mean? Right? So there's an alternate universe on some coverage. What's scary about it is a lot of people watch that and they they think that the president isn't doing anything to address people's safety.
So what do your kids getting shot have to do with Ukraine? Nothing, Dumbo. You're living in an alternate universe. That's Jen Psaki position. You have to be delusional to think crime was a problem in this country, unless you happen to be in Georgetown last night, around 6:45 p.m.
If you were there, you may have seen a man shot to death outside Georgetown cupcakes. That's just off M Street. And the funny thing is, that's not too far from where Jen Psaki lives. But did Jen Psaki acknowledge that happened? Of course, she didn't. Noticing the collapse of our civilization is racist, even when it's happening just down the street. Look away, Jen Psaki. Look away.
And whatever you do, don't go to Baltimore. Baltimore is a major American city. It's only about 40 miles from where Jen Psaki lives. It's one of the worst places in the western hemisphere. It's a little bit of Haiti in the mid-Atlantic. Baltimore is exactly what happens when you appliy Jen Psaki's ideas to governing. Baltimore is a city run by people who fervently believe in the equity agenda and consider gender studies a legitimate academic discipline. In Baltimore, pretty much everyone in charge is Black, yet it's a matter of religious faith that the main thing holding the city back is White racism.
In other words, everybody with power in Baltimore agrees with Jen Psaki. So it's an entirely fair question to ask Hey, Jen Psaki, what do you think of Baltimore? How did the city get that way? You claim to care so deeply about African-Americans. You never stop talking about that. And yet here is one of the biggest Black majority cities in the United States. Tens of thousands of black people who live in Baltimore are in misery because their kids keep getting murdered. Last year, Baltimore's murder rate was higher than it is in El Salvador and Honduras. Now those are countries the State Department tells us to "avoid due to crime."
So it's fair to say things are incredibly violent in Baltimore. They have been for a long time. And yet under Joe Biden, somehow they've gotten even worse in Baltimore. Here's a local news report from today.
NEWSCASTER: The hugging and crying sounds of sorrow, outpouring of emotions over the killing of a loved one. Thirty-six homicides in the first month this year in Baltimore City with only two arrests, one for a deadly shooting, the other a stabbing death.
Thirty-six murders in thirty-one days, that's the deadliest January in Baltimore in nearly 50 years and remember, fifty years ago, Baltimore was almost twice as big as it is now. Half the city is left. So Baltimore is far worse off than it has ever been in its history. And it's not just murders. Drug crimes are up dramatically. You might not know that because they're not being prosecuted anymore. Last spring, the local city attorney and George Soros puppet called Marilyn Mosby announced she would no longer prosecute low level drug crimes. So arrests plummeted, but drug trafficking exploded. Here's what it looks like:
REPORTER: Cameras caught what appears to be one of those open-air drug deals happening in broad daylight near the Edmondson Village shopping center. It's an issue we've been hearing about in neighborhoods citywide throughout this summer. It comes after a city state's attorney, Marilyn Mosby, stopped prosecuting certain drug crimes in the city, including drug possession, a major policy shift that some believe have left the issue to only flourish because.
Jen Psaki's for that, Black people don't want laws to be enforced. That's her view, that's the view of everyone she knows. But what did policies like that do the Baltimore? Well, they turned a once beautiful city into a slum. According to a report by Fox 45 in Baltimore, public school administrators have instructed the police to stop arresting students for committing crimes. And that would include serious offenses from burglary to assault. So the cops did stop arresting kids. The number of students arrested in Baltimore schools has dropped by 98% in the last decade. That's good on paper.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki speaks at a press briefing at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
But it turns out ignoring crime is not the same as stopping crime. Schools in Baltimore got so bad that kids stopped learning anything. Watch this report and ask yourself: What is Baltimore going to look like in 20 years?
REPORTER: In reading 628, Paterson High School students took the test 484 of them, or 77%, tested at an elementary school reading level that includes 71 high school students who are reading at a kindergarten level and 88 students reading at a first grade level. Another 45 are reading at a second grade level. Just 12 students tested at Paterson High School were reading at grade level. That comes out to less than two percent.
So, the kids can't read, they're illiterate, what is their future look like? What does Baltimore's future look like? What does the country's future look like? How are they going to participate in our society?
You wouldn't know any of this was happening by looking at the official graduation numbers, because last year Baltimore announced that students will graduate from high school even if they failed their courses.
Baltimore’s so-called chief academic officer - that would be Harvard educated bureaucrat called Joan Dabrowski - announced that this policy was designed to quote Avoid the punitive approach of failing students. OK. But somebody is failing students in Baltimore. Somebody, in fact, is failing the entire city, and you have to ask yourself, who would that be?
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You'd like to ask Jen Psaki, Who do you blame for Baltimore? Did White men do this to Baltimore? Was it the patriarchy? Was it structural racism that caused all those murders? Do you agree with Pete Buttigieg that Klansman urban planners put the highways in the wrong place? And that's the real problem. Racist roads?
Or, could it be that the real problem with Baltimore is something much more obvious? Could it be that progressive policies designed to "lift up marginalized communities" in the end destroyed those communities? What's the answer, Jen Psaki?
In a functioning democracy, people like Jen Psaki would have to tell us the answer, they would be required to live in Baltimore until they learn something, just as the people who wrecked Afghanistan probably ought to explain what they've learned before they move on to Ukraine and Russia, that ought to be a requirement.
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And in fact, honestly, you'd think that people like this would welcome a chance to reflect on what they've done. They have screwed up very badly. They've hurt the weakest among us. For Christians, that's the greatest sin. But these people aren't Christians. They worship only themselves, so they turn away.
You can bet money that Jen Psaki rarely goes to Baltimore, it's just too depressing. And it raises too many questions. Instead, Jen Psaki and her friends are planning their fun little summer trips to Bozeman or Martha's Vineyard or East Hampton, or some of the remote and blindingly White outpost of privilege.
Funny how that works. You wreck stuff and then you ignore it. This allows you to wreck more stuff without feeling guilty. That's modern progressivism distilled to 18 words.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the February 1, 2022, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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