Tucker Carlson: Biden's choice of advisers reveals his plans for US
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host takes a closer look at the agenda of the people behind the president-elect
Here's a question for you: What does Joe Biden believe? What are his plans for our country?
The truth is, we still don't know the answers to those basic questions. Joe Biden somehow made it through an entire presidential campaign -- most of a year -- without telling us because a partisan press corps let him get away with it. As a result, tens of millions of people voted for a candidate who wasn't real. They voted for a ghost with a whitened smile. They had no idea who Joe Biden was. They had no idea who they were voting for or what he might do if he got elected. But at the urging of the media, they voted for him anyway. Now the rest of us get to find out what they voted for.
Joe Biden has started to assemble his Cabinet, and what is emerging so far looks a lot like the HR department at a large, left-wing multinational. Heaps of woke authoritarian social policy mixed with a corporatist economic agenda. A small group of highly connected people will get even richer, while the rest of us will get stern lectures about our moral failings. Sound familiar? If Jeff Bezos and the Google guys took over the entire U.S. government, and effectively they have, this is what it would look like.
Take Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden's closest advisers. Ricchetti has spent years as a lobbyist, representing companies like General Motors, AT&T, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Nextel, Novartis, Pfizer, all the big pharma companies. Ricchetti is one of the people who helped align big business squarely behind Biden's campaign. He was the perfect man to do it because he shares their goals and their worldview, particularly on the central question of China.
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Twenty years ago, Steve Ricchetti was the deputy chief of staff for operations in the Clinton administration. In that role, he helped lead the effort to allow China into the World Trade Organization (WTO). It was one of the greatest disasters ever to befall this country in peacetime. One study by the Economic Policy Institute found that thanks to that decision to let China into the WTO, the United States lost nearly 3.5 million good-paying jobs.
The effects of that have rippled through the generations. If you're wondering why there's a fentanyl epidemic in middle America, if you're wondering why the life expectancy for American-born middle class Americans is in decline, that's a big part of the reason. Millions of men lost their jobs and an entire society collapsed. If you live inland from the coasts, you've seen it firsthand. Steve Ricchetti was one of the key people behind that, though not the only one. He wasn't punished for it. In fact, he's been promoted. Joe Biden wants more of it.
Biden also wants less dissent from the population. The president-elect knows what we all know, which is that an armed society is an independent society. That's why he's hired Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., as a senior adviser. Richmond plans to disarm law-abiding Americans, not criminals. People who commit gun crimes are now being let out of jail, but people who have done nothing wrong and tried in good faith to protect themselves and their family will be punished. That's not speculation, by the way. Here's what Richmond told CNN last year:
RICHMOND, AUGUST 2019: If it is a buyback, then I'm all for it. If it's a mandatory buyback, I think then you may run into some complications, but the thought of it does not offend me, and it sounds like something I could support.
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Gun control didn't play a large role in the 2020 campaign. There was almost no discussion about it for six months. But it's becoming clear that preventing Americans from defending themselves and their families is a big part of the Biden agenda, and that's part of the reason that campaign manager Jennifer O'Malley Dillon is the next White House deputy chief of staff. At a time when a record number of Americans have purchased legal firearms to protect themselves from skyrocketing crime, Dillon has called for the confiscation of more than 10 million legally owned firearms. We're not making that up. That's not propaganda. Dillon said it herself:
DILLON: A plan that supports mandatory buybacks of weapons of war. The assault weapons ban is very, very important and we need to have it. But that only takes weapons of war off the streets in the future. It does nothing for weapons of war that are currently out there, and I think there's 15 or 16 million.
"I think there's 15 or 16 million." She doesn't know the number. She doesn't know anything. Imagine what she knows about firearms: "What end does the bullet come out of?" She doesn't know, but it doesn't matter. She plans to seize them anyway. Mandatory buybacks are seizure, the taking of private property by force. Not because the people who own those firearms have done anything wrong, they haven't. Jennifer O'Malley Dillon just doesn't think you should be allowed to have them.
So what's that going to look like? What's it going to look like when the Biden administration tries to disarm law-abiding Americans? We'll find out.
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We do know the entire country could look very different very soon. Alejandro Mayorkas will make certain of that. Biden has chosen him to run the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security was created almost 20 years ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and it had just one purpose: Protect the country. Mayorkas has a different plan for DHS, though. He plans to use the agency to radically increase the amount of immigration from the Third World into America, because America doesn't have enough going on right now.
In a 2017 interview with PBS, Mayorkas called for amnesty, legal amnesty, for anyone who arrived in the United States illegally when they were under age 31, regardless of how old they are now. Think about that. How many people would that include? Probably tens of millions.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So what else would you look for?
MAYORKAS: Perhaps a greater population of individuals who would qualify in terms of their age. So one of the limitations on DACA was one had to be under the age of 31 at the time of application, even though one might have been brought to the United States as a two-year-old decades ago. And so really, the determinative factor should be, how old was one when one came to the United States as opposed to how old one is now.
WOODRUFF: But you could see it being -- you'd like to see it expanded.
MAYORKAS: I would.
If Myorkas gets his way, this will be a different country overnight, with very different politics. And, of course, different politics are the entire point.
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What about foreign policy? Well, Joe Biden is nominating a man called Antony Blinken to be secretary of state. Blinken is the co-founder of a so-called "strategic consulting group" known as WestExec Advisors. We know that WestExec has represented Silicon Valley firms and pharma companies, but because it's technically not a lobbying operation, we don't know that much more.
Blinken himself has been a global affairs analyst at CNN, and that tells you a lot. Like everyone else on that channel, Blinken fell hard for the ludicrous Russia collusion line.
BLINKEN, IN 2017: Every time the president tears down the FBI or [Robert] Mueller or any of our institutions, he's actually doing Mr. [Vladimir] Putin's bidding. It's exactly what Putin was trying to do in our elections, that is, sow doubt about the credibility and legitimacy of our institutions. The president's ongoing collusion with Russia's plans is really striking, intentional or not.
So when you criticize the FBI, that's not your First Amendment right as an American, you're actually "doing Mr Putin's bidding." It's all part of "the president's ongoing collusion with Russia."
Now, Tony Blinken is the best we produce. There's not a credential that he doesn't have. He went to Harvard, unlike you. But as with so many people with those credentials, he's not a genius, and you can tell that by his position on the invasion of Iraq. Here's Blinken during the Obama administration, celebrating our occupation of that country like it had been a roaring success.
BLINKEN, IN 2012: The wisdom of going to war in Iraq is something that is going to be debated for years, and I'll leave that debate to the historians. But what's beyond debate -- and what news coverage of Iraq, in my judgment, too often fails to acknowledge -- is that Iraq today is less violent, more democratic, and more prosperous, and the United States [is] more deeply engaged there than at any time in recent history.
Yeah, Iraq's in great shape, Tony Blinken. You seem like a pretty smart guy. You should be secretary of state. And so under Joe Biden, he will be.
What does all this add up to? It's starting to look like the mirror image of what Donald Trump ran on in 2016. More giveaways to our chief global rival, the government of China; more pointless wars in the Middle East that no one outside Washington supports; massive increases in illegal immigration, along with the huge drop in American wages that always is the inevitable result of that.
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And then, of course, the attendant chaos and instability at home (which they have stoked for months now), and fewer Americans able to defend themselves and their families in the face of that chaos (which they caused). Above all, and this is the defining characteristic so far, more corporate control over our lives. We hope we're wrong, but right now it looks like this is what we're staring down.
If you believe the federal government is powerful now, in some cases too powerful, wait until it fully aligns with big business. That appears to be happening. The question is, how many people knew they were voting for that when they voted for Joe Biden? Probably not too many.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening monologue on the Nov. 24, 2020 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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