How Facebook staffer could 'reduce circulation' of Hunter Biden exposé

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How Facebook staffer could 'reduce circulation' of Hunter Biden exposé

New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari reacts to his paper's social media censorship on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight'

Oct. 15, 2020 – This is a rush transcript from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” October 15 2020. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: Good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.

There's an awful lot of noise in the news right now, as you would expect.

There's an election coming three weeks away. Everyone wants to get a blow in before it's too late. But not everything you hear is untrue and not every story is complex.

At the heart of the growing Biden-Ukraine scandal, for example, is a very straightforward question: did Joe Biden subvert American foreign policy in order to enrich his own family?

In 2015, Joe Biden was the sitting Vice President of the United States.

Included in his portfolio were U.S. relations with the nation of Ukraine.

So at that moment, Vice President Joe Biden had more influence over the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian economy than any other person on the globe outside of Eastern Europe.

Biden's younger son, Hunter knew that. He hoped to get rich from his father's influence.

E-mails published yesterday by "The New York Post" documents apparently taken directly from Hunter Biden's own laptop tell some of that story.

Tonight, we'd like to bring you some more detail.

We have another batch of e-mails, some exclusive to the show. We believe they also came from Hunter Biden's laptop. We can't prove that they did. We haven't examined that computer.

But every detail that we could check, including Hunter Biden's personal e- mail address at the time, suggests they are authentic.

As we told you last night, if these e-mails are fake, this is the most complex and sophisticated hoax in history. It almost seems beyond human capacity.

The Biden campaign clearly believes these e-mails are real, they have not said otherwise. We sent the body of them to Hunter Biden's attorney and never heard back. So with that in mind, here's what we have learned.

On November 2, 2015 at 4:30 in the afternoon, a Burisma executive called Vadym Pozharskyi e-mailed Hunter Biden and his business partner, Devon Archer. The purpose of the e-mail, Pozharskyi explains is to quote, "be on the same page about our final goals, including but not limited to a concrete course of action."

So what did Burisma want exactly? Well, good PR for starters. The executive wanted, quote, "high ranking U.S. officials" to express their quote, "positive opinion of Burisma." And then he wanted the administration to act on Burisma's behalf. Quote, "The scope of work should also include organization of a visit of a number of widely recognized and influential current and/or former U.S. policymakers to Ukraine in November, aiming to conduct meetings with and bring positive signals and message of support to Burisma."

The goal the executive explained, was to quote, "close down any cases/pursuits against the head of Burisma in Ukraine." So that couldn't be clearer what they wanted. Burisma wanted Hunter Biden's father to get their company out of legal trouble with the Ukrainian government. And that's exactly what happened.

One month later to the day, on December 2nd, 2015, Hunter Biden received a notice from a Washington PR firm called Blue Star Strategies. Blue Star Strategies apparently have been hired to lobby the administration on Ukraine.

This show has exclusively obtained that e-mail. "Hello all," it began.

"This morning, the White House hosted a conference call regarding the Vice President's upcoming trip to Ukraine. Attached is a memo from the Blue Star Strategies team with the minutes of the call, which outline the trip's agenda and addressed several questions regarding U.S. policy toward Ukraine." End quote.

So here you have a PR firm involved in an official White House Foreign Policy call. How could that happen? Good question. But it worked.

Days later, Joe Biden flew to Ukraine and did exactly what his son wanted.

The Vice President gave his speech slamming the very Ukrainian law enforcement official who was tormenting Burisma, the exact guy.

If Ukrainian government doesn't fire its top prosecutor, a man called Viktor Shokin, Biden explained, the administration withhold a billion dollars in American aid. And Ukraine is a poor country, so they had no choice but to obey.

Biden's bullying worked. He bragged about it later.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor and they didn't.

So they said they had -- they were walking out the press conference and I said, I'm not going to -- we're not going to give you the billion dollars.

They said, you have no authority. You're not the President. The President said. I said call him.

I said, I'm telling you're not getting the billion dollars. I said you're not getting the billion and I'm going to be leaving here. I think it was what -- six hours? Look, I said, I'm leaving in six hours, if the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.

Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Now, Joe Biden gave that speech before the Council on Foreign Relations. So we pretend as if what he said was normal and officially authorized. This is how things are done.

That's not true at all. This is bizarre.

And the amazing thing about the video you just saw is that no one in that audience of Harvard graduates and other assorted smart people, asked the glaringly obvious question: why was the Vice President of the United States threatening a tiny country like Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor? That doesn't seem like the Vice President's role?

Well, now we know why. Viktor Shokin has signed an affidavit affirming that he was in fact investigating Burisma at the moment Joe Biden had him removed. Shokin said that before he was fired, administration officials pressured him into dropping the case against Burisma. He would not do that, so Joe Biden canned him.

That's how things really work in Washington. Your son has got a lucrative consulting deal with a Ukrainian energy company. You tailor American foreign policy to help make him rich. Our foreign policy.

Even at the State Department, possibly the most cynical agency in government, this seemed shockingly brazen.

During the impeachment proceedings last fall, a State Department official called George Kent, said it was widely known in Washington that the Bidens were up to something sleazy in Ukraine, quote, "I was on a call with somebody on the Vice President's staff and I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma." This George Kent noted, could create a perception of a conflict of interest.

So how did the Vice President's office respond to this concern? Well, according to George Kent, quote, "The message that I recall hearing back was that the Vice President's son, Beau, was dying of cancer, and there was no further bandwidth to deal with family related issues at the time."

Family related issues. This was America's foreign policy being tailored to Joe Biden's son.

Five years later, Joe Biden still has not been forced to explain why he fired Ukraine's top prosecutor at precisely the moment his son was being paid to get him to fire Ukraine's top prosecutor nor has Joe Biden addressed whether or not he personally benefited from the Burisma contract.

But there are tantalizing hints. Last night, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani published what he said was yet another e-mail from Hunter Biden's laptop.

It's a note to one of his children. It's sad, and it's fraught and it's personal, and we're not going to quote it at length.

But at the end, there's this quote, "Don't worry, unlike your grandfather, I won't make you give me half your salary." What does that mean exactly?

Well, we don't know.

There may be more detail on the laptop, but unfortunately, we don't have access to that. But the question remains: how has Joe Biden lived in extravagance all of these years on a government salary? No one has ever answered that question and the tech monopolies are working hard to make certain no one ever does.

This morning, "The New York Post" published another story based on the e- mails. This one describes a business venture Hunter Biden was working on in China. The e-mail reads this way, quote, "At the moment, there's a provisional agreement that the equity will be distributed as follows, 10 held by Hunter for the big guy." The big guy. Is the big guy Joe Biden? If so, how much did Joe Biden get? And how much of that came from the Communist Chinese government? Those are real questions.

This man could be elected President in three weeks, but Twitter doesn't want you to wonder it won't allow you to ask those questions. Twitter restricted "The New York Post" story as quote, "unsafe," like it was a lawn dart or a defective circular saw.

And that was enough for the Biden campaign. It was enormously useful. All day today, they deflected questions about Joe Biden's subversion of our country's foreign policy by invoking Twitter's ban on "The New York Post"

story.

So the tech monopolies censor information to help their candidate, that candidate uses that censorship to dismiss the story. One hand washes the other. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMAL BROWN, NATIONAL PRESS SECRETARY, JOE BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT: Well, look, I think Twitter's response to the actual article itself makes clear that these, you know, purported allegations are false and they're not true. And glad to hear, you know, to see, you know, social media companies like Twitter taking responsibility to limit misinformation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: You want to know what corruption looks like, that's a term that we throw around a lot. You just saw what corruption looks like.

My campaign donors control the media. They're shutting down the public's access to the information that criticizes me. The fact they're doing that gives me justification not to address your question about that information.

That's what corruption looks like.

When billionaires shut down legitimate questions about a candidate three weeks before Election Day. That's corruption.

It's also almost perfectly circular reasoning and to illustrate that, Twitter and Facebook censored "The New York Post" story before they had any reason whatsoever to suspect it was wasn't true. Even now, they're not really claiming it's a hoax because it's not a hoax.

In minutes, they simply shut down this country centuries' long tradition of a free press and they did it for purely partisan reasons. They didn't pretend otherwise.

Now, it doesn't matter who you plan to vote for the first Tuesday in November, you should be terrified.

Democracies cannot exist and never will be able to exist without the free flow of information. That is a prerequisite. And without it, we're done.

But companies like Facebook, and Google and Twitter do not care because they don't believe in democracy. They worship power. And they don't need to be consistent.

Melania Trump's private phone conversations, the President's stolen tax returns. They were happy to publish all of that. They didn't have a problem with hacking.

But if you criticize the Democratic candidate, their candidate, you are banned. That's the standard they have set. How do we come back from this?

Today you had elected Democrats, members of a party that in just the recent past claimed to revere free speech, cheering on censorship. Here's the supposedly moderate Senator Chris Coons of Delaware doing just that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CHRIS COONS, (D-DE): Facebook and Twitter have policies to not spread things that are utterly unreliable, that have been debunked, and where their origin is untrustworthy.

They are practicing their own internal controls, as I wish they had over the past four years. If they had been more selective about what they posted in 2016, don't take my word for it, listen to the head of the F.B.I., an active Russian disinformation campaign in 2016 had an influence on that election. They are trying even harder in this election.

I'm glad that they are managing the content on their own websites.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: That man is a liar. Not one word of this story has been debunked.

Not one word in those e-mails has been quote "debunked." And if it is debunked, we'll be the first to report it because we're not liars.

But did you catch the phrase he wanted you to hear? Russian disinformation.

That's what they are claiming these e-mails are and it's all over the internet. In fact, free conspiracy laden conjecture crazier than anything the Q people ever thought of. But none of their garbage, their lunatic lies about Russia is ever censored by the tech monopolies. It's not unsafe, because it helps Joe Biden, therefore you can read it.

Where are the real journalists now? We need them more than ever. They're gone. They're cowering. They're afraid. They don't want to upset power.

Jake Sherman of POLITICO, who claims to be a news reporter, actually apologized on Twitter for asking the Biden campaign about Hunter Biden's e- mails.

These people are craven. They have no standards. They have no self-respect.

Like their masters in Silicon Valley, they worship power alone. Adam Schiff of California knows that feeling well. When he sees censorship, it excites him. And he calls for more.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): The online ecosystem and unwitting audiences that the Kremlin so ably exploited, remain vulnerable to unscrupulous homegrown actors who seed and spread falsehoods of their own.

If left unchecked, there could be reversible damage, not only to our nation's discourse, but to how we as a society discern fact from fiction.

The leading social media platforms have all made significant changes in their policies and capabilities since 2016, but they have not changed the foundational features of their platforms that expose users and even recommend to them often extreme, sensational or emotionally charged content.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: That guy is the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and there he is affirming the censorship of his own campaign donors in Silicon Valley, the most powerful people in the world. If this doesn't rattle your cage, then nothing will.

Ten years ago, no Member of Congress would have said what Adam Schiff just said in public. Never. It would be considered an obvious threat to our Constitution, to the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. The ACLU would have screamed. Professional journalists associations would have joined them.

But today they are all silent. Some are applauding, and so it accelerates.

Watch this Member of Congress suggest that the government ought to decide what news organizations are allowed to publish, just like they do in China.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do we need a new agency that essentially would be on behalf of the public making the rules, subject to -- obviously, with legislative authority, as opposed to have that delegated to the tech giants?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, a new agency with legislative authority to decide what you're allowed to read. Sound familiar? We've even got a name for it actually, ready to go. The Ministry of Truth, and it's coming.

Miranda Devine writes for "The New York Post." She joins us again tonight and we are happy to have her.

Miranda thanks so much for coming back. Tell us since some of our viewers who have been relying on social media for their news may not know what "The New York Post" revealed today from this cache of e-mails.

MIRANDA DEVINE, COLUMNIST, "THE NEW YORK POST": Well, this is day two of Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop and the e-mails and documents and photographs that are on it, which all point to a cache for influence grift of the Biden family.

And today, we published the China e-mails, documents that showed tens of millions of dollars, even hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to the Biden family, from Chinese companies, Chinese state-owned companies that are linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

For instance, in one deal, Hunter Biden is getting $10 million a year for, quote, "introductions" alone. This is from a Chinese energy company. In another case, he is on a $1 million retainer for supposedly legal services.

In another case, I think you mentioned, there is a company, a lucrative new Chinese company that split up six ways and allocated 20 percent here, 10 percent there. Hunter Biden gets 20 percent, but he also gets another 10 percent that he is holding for, quote, "the big guy," whoever that might be. You can use your imagination.

So what's significant about this is that these deals are happening after Joe Biden has stopped being Vice President. This is around 2017. But what is the Chinese Communist Party doing? What are they paying for exactly when they're giving tens hundreds of millions of dollars to the family of the former Vice President, future presidential candidate who may be President of the United States as of November -- January?

So what exactly are they paying for? And you have to remember also that Joe Biden introduced his son, Hunter in 2013 to the top officials of the Chinese Communist Party when he flew him there on Air Force Two for an eight-day visit in which Joe Biden met President Xi and failed miserably to do any of the things that he was sent there to do in America's national interest, including stopping China from militarizing islands in the South China Sea.

So while America missed out, Hunter Biden got a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of a Chinese bank.

CARLSON: These are very serious charges, and there are so many threads to what you said, we can't possibly at this date know exactly where they all lead. But we do know that this is a story. This is news and it requires an explanation from the Joe Biden for President Campaign. Have you received one?

DEVINE: No, you know, yesterday, Joe Biden, called a lid, went into hiding before 10:00 a.m. Today, he has just done virtual fundraisers. He hasn't made himself available to journalists. He hasn't answered questions. He hasn't done press conferences.

The interesting thing is that his campaign is actually now hedging a bit.

Yesterday, they said, oh, no, you know, we searched Joe Biden's official campaign calendar -- sorry, official calendar from when he was Vice President and found no evidence of a meeting with the number three in the Ukrainian company, Burisma that was paying his son so much money.

Yet today, what they're saying is, well, look, there might have been a meeting, but it would have been informal on the sidelines, very cursory. So hedging their bets.

That's a pretty bad sign. They have not pushed back and for all those Democrats and other apologists today who are saying that these are purported allegations that they've been debunked, discredited, et cetera.

None of that is true.

This is brand new evidence, never been seen before. E-mails that point to a link between Joe Biden and his family's grift in these shady foreign countries, these shady foreign companies, and he hasn't answered it. Two days, not an answer.

Maybe he will answer it tonight, when he does a Town Hall. I doubt whether he will be asked any really tough questions though.

CARLSON: No. And some people aren't even aware of it because of the censorship, and so we're proud to highlight "The New York Post" reporting on this show and to repeat that we will never submit -- period -- to censorship on this ever.

Miranda, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it.

DEVINE: Thanks, Tucker.

Well, one editor at "The New York Post" said yesterday that a digital civil war is underway. Big Tech isn't even hiding its standards anymore. It is openly partisan, openly repressive, totalitarian in its instincts.

We'll talk to the editor who wrote that about where this is going, because it is going somewhere. That's after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: There have been hints for years now that the Big Tech companies -- Twitter, Facebook, Google -- had a sinister agenda, a political agenda, also a social agenda, also an international agenda.

There have been hints of that for a long time for years, and for years, we've been telling you about it. But within 24 hours, the last 24 hours, they've bared their teeth simultaneously and made it obvious.

The Big Tech companies, those monopolies shut down a legitimate news story in the middle of a presidential campaign and made it impossible for many Americans to read the facts about the news. That's never happened before in this country. It is a moment that historians will look back on as a turning point.

Sohrab Ahmari is the op-ed editor at "The New York Post," the newspaper that broke the story originally, and he has a particularly insightful view of what this means and where it might be going. We wanted to talk to him about it tonight. Thanks so much for coming on.

So we're right in the middle of this, but I think you agree that this is different from what's come before. We've never seen anything like this happen before in this country. What does it tell us? And what does it portend?

SOHRAB AHMARI, OP-ED EDITOR, "THE NEW YORK POST": Tucker, I think it just should suggest a level of blatant-ness that we haven't seen before.

It began actually with Facebook, we've talked a lot about Twitter. But it began with Facebook, and specifically a Facebook communication staffer named Andy Stone, saying that this story deserves to be fact checked, and in the meanwhile, Facebook is going to reduce its circulation online.

And what was fascinating, disturbing, and alarming about is that Andy Stone before he joined Facebook was a staffer for Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, and for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

And so the fact that they allowed him to go forward and say that we're reducing circulation on a story before there were any disputes about it, and there are still, as you showed earlier, there isn't really any disputes about the underlying facts.

But he felt courageous enough or bold enough to just say, as a former Democratic staffer, who now has his hand over the levers of the internet, essentially, of where free speech lives or dies, is on these platforms, I'm going to reduce circulation in this story.

This is different than before, and it's truly chilling and sinister.

CARLSON: Where are journalists in this? Where are the guardians of the First Amendment, the people who make their living by the first point in the Bill of Rights, the freedom of the press? They're not saying anything.

I mean, just to be clear, the Big Tech companies control the overwhelming majority of American media, directly or indirectly, and yet journalists are not speaking up against censorship. Why?

AHMARI: I mean, I think there's this culture of groupthink, where it really feels like all the elements of the establishment have lined up. You have Big Tech. You have Hollywood. You have media, and they are all so bought into a kind of narrative where if a story is put forward, including a story, which you know, you've seen some of the e-mails, we've published the e-mails, it's so much more solidly sourced than so many of the mountain of stories of anti-Trump stories that appeared in left of center media, that were all based on hearsay.

You would think journalists would say, let's dig into this. But immediately, it becomes an effort to either shut it down or to attack the source, and not to investigate the underlying fact of massive potential, graft and corruption.

So the most chilling aspect we are seeing, a journalist like Jake Sherman, again, you mentioned him earlier, sort of, you know, he had won the victory over himself to quote George Orwell, he posted this long apology for having posted our story and raised some questions about it.

That's the chilling effect in this, it is that if you are going forward, if you publish stories that go against the narrative, you will have to kind of publicly confess and apologize. And you're talking about a story in the oldest continuously published newspaper in this country, founded by Alexander Hamilton is not some shady website and you saw the story, it was deeply reported. This is shameful in terms of my fellow reporters and editors.

CARLSON: It's one of the biggest circulation newspapers in this country.

It's not a small thing. How can someone like Jake Sherman apologizing for asking a question for forwarding a news story? How can someone like that continue to work in journalism? How can this go on?

AHMARI: Well, I think look, what we can do is continue to just present our reporting. We've been extremely transparent about our sourcing, about the provenance from the beginning of the story, much more so than say, I don't know that story about suborning perjury.

The President suborning perjury that appeared in BuzzFeed. That was immediately debunked by the Mueller team itself and said that that's not true. Has that story been censored? Was it banned by Facebook? Was it reduced in circulation by Twitter?

No, you can still post it and it was then, so the hypocrisy is glaring. All we can do is continue to get the word out and hopefully more Americans can hear it.

CARLSON: Look, I get that a lot of these people don't like Trump, fine.

We've got an election three weeks, but don't destroy our country. Don't destroy centuries' old traditions that underpin everything good that we have. And freedom of speech and of thought, expression, conscience. That's what we have. That's what makes this country different and better and they are wrecking it because they don't like Trump.

I can't even --

AHMARI: Yes, I worry about the international ramifications. What if there is an election in, say, Spain or Poland where the Populist Party is unpopular with the establishment? How will our malign internet forces affect elections in democracies elsewhere in the developed world?

CARLSON: We're going to have to live with the consequences of this poison long after Trump is gone. It's very upsetting Sohrab Ahmari, thank you so much. Great to see you.

AHMARI: Thanks for having me.

CARLSON: So a leading Democrat was caught on a hot mic today. It could happen to anyone, but it always happens to most interesting people. It was during Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings. It told you a lot.

We'll show you the tape when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: We are a people of faith Joe Biden and I, Kamala Harris said the other night at the debate. That's not true. The Democratic Party is a secular party. I am not attacking them. It's just obvious.

A lot of Democrats are highly, highly hostile to organized religion and a lot of them deeply resent Amy Coney Barrett for her orthodox Catholicism.

But they've decided not to say anything about it because it's an election year, so they are trying to keep it under wraps. It's a political calculation, obviously.

But what do they really think? Well, privately, Democrats are fixated on Amy Coney Barrett's religious beliefs. We know that, in part because today, Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from California, didn't realize her mic was on and let the mask slip. Here she is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA): She's been pro-life for a long time. So, I suspect with her, it is deeply personal and comes with her religion.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: It's deeply personal and it comes with her religion, like it's a disease. We shouldn't be surprised Dianne Feinstein said this. And by the way, Catholicism is one of the few religions you're allowed to say this about.

In 2017, Feinstein told Amy Coney Barrett that her religious faith was, quote, "a concern."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FEINSTEIN: I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in in your case, Professor, when we read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that's of concern.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: The dogma lives loudly within you, not the dog, the dogma lives loudly within you. In terms of sheer incoherence and stupidity, it's almost like a Mazie Hirono impression. Honestly.

The big secret in Washington is that a lot of these people dripping with credentials, like third world generals and their medals are actually not very bright.

So what does Amy Coney Barrett really like? Anne Falgoust has known for a long time. She has been close friends with Amy Coney Barrett since college, and we're happy to have her on tonight.

Anne, thanks so much for coming on. So it seems worse since we -- you know, we've gone through day after day of hearing talking about Amy Barrett's legal philosophy, getting a sense of what she is like, as a person since you've known her for decades, we thought we'd ask you.

Anne Falgoust, AMY CONEY BARRETT'S BEST FRIEND IN COLLEGE: Well, I thought, first of all, thanks for having me on. I thought she was absolutely superb, the past few days in the hearings. She demonstrated her high intellect. She was humble. It comes across very, very well, to everyone.

I saw some polling today saying that across party lines, support for her has grown in the country. And she is -- you know, she is a faithful Catholic, but she shouldn't be attacked for that. There's no religious test in this country for public office and it shouldn't be an issue.

CARLSON: So when religious people live, in general, much happier, more productive lives add rather than detract, in what world is that a bad thing?

FALGOUST: I mean, most of the people in this country are religious and live religious lives. I think that there are a lot of people in this country on both sides of the coast, for example, who have gotten away from that, but they miss what's happening in most of the country, even at our own college, at Rhodes College we had a group of alum come out and say and call her a theocratic bigot. They wanted the college to disavow her as an alum. One of our most prestigious alums of all time, if not the most.

So a few of us who know Amy very well started ‘Alumni for Amy’  to get some signatures and send them today to the Senate Judiciary Committee on her behalf, including Justice Scalia's grandson, who is a 2018 graduate of Rhodes College. And, you know, we're still taking signatures through her confirmation, but we just wanted to show the Senate Judiciary, we want to show Rhodes College, we want to show Amy that we're behind her.

It's a bipartisan letter, it goes back and talks about how wonderful she is as a person, the achievements that she has attained in her life. You know, at Rhodes she was on the Honor Council, which is a big deal. We voted her on junior year and senior year from our class, and then our senior year, she was voted school campus wide to be the Vice President.

CARLSON: Interesting. Well, she has continued on that trajectory. Anne, thank you for that.

FALGOUST: Yes.

CARLSON: Great to see you tonight. That was hurtful about college alums.

FALGOUST: Thank you.

CARLSON: Thank you. Well, when you vote, if you vote in person the first Tuesday in November, you'll see a lot of names on the ballot. A lot of people running for President and actually one of them, not one of the two big ones, Kanye West, and he has just released a new campaign ad.

Unlike most campaign ads, it's actually worth watching. We wouldn't show it to you if it wasn't, so suspend disbelief for a second. Stick with us.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Well, Kanye West is still running for President. He is actually qualified for the ballot in more than a dozen states. He is not going to win, most likely. But he has made a brand new campaign ad that we want to show you.

As you watch it, ask yourself why other politicians don't sound more like this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KANYE WEST, RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We as a people will revive our nation's commitment to faith. Faith can be restored.

We as a people are called to a greater purpose than ourselves. We are not only a beacon to the world, but we should be servants to each other, to encourage each other, to help each other, to lift up each other.

Our fellow Americans, we will build a stronger country by building stronger families. Families are the building blocks of society, of a nation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Families are the foundation, the building blocks of a society of a nation. Yes, he is crazy.

By the way, his campaign is also selling shirts that say God save America.

He has tweeted repeatedly on topics that most politicians won't get anywhere near, like abortion and how it affects the black community.

Why is he the only one talking like this? And why is everyone ignoring him?

Candace Owens is a senior writer at Townhall, author of "Blackout: How Black America Can Make its Second Escape from the Democratic Plantation."

We're happy to have her on tonight.

So Candace Owens, without even getting into you know, the political facts or, you know, who he draws from or whatever, just the message of the Kanye West campaign. It seems like most people would agree with that. Why is nobody paying attention this and why is nobody copying it?

CANDACE OWENS, AUTHOR, "BLACKOUT": Well, I will say full disclosure, I am personal friends with Kanye West and I will say that when he first came out as a Trump supporter a couple of years ago, I was so disappointed in the reaction that we got from both the left and the right.

You know, the left dismissed him as a race traitor, which is very typical, and the righteous called him crazy. And Kanye West is actually neither.

This is a man that is using his billion dollar platform to talk about issues that are actually impacting all Americans, but especially black Americans, things that I say, right?

What is it about these progressive platforms that always lead to progressive results for the black community? Progressive stance on abortion, right? The slaughtering of millions of black babies that disproportionately impacts black America, progressive stance on the Black Lives Matter platform.

When Black Lives Matter arrives in the city, it destroys black communities.

That's another progressive platform. Defund the police. That's a progressive movement, right? What has it led to? An increase of something like 200 percent in inner cities in shootings that have happened since this time last year?

So Kanye West, you know, I understand that for a lot of people, they are uncomfortable with him because stylistically, he is different. It's not what we're used to in politics.

Trump is not what we're used to in politics, but I will say this, what has what we are used to actually bought us? If Kanye West is crazy, what is the correct adjective, Tucker, for Cory Booker, for Kamala Harris, for Joe Biden?

CARLSON: I totally agree. For all these people. That is totally right. I mean, Kanye West is the only one who said the obvious, which is, they can say they love you, but if they are putting abortion clinics in your neighborhood, maybe they're not sincere. If they don't want you to have more children, maybe they don't really love you.

OWENS: Right.

CARLSON: Like, that's not crazy. It's the opposite of crazy. It's true.

OWENS: Right and, you know, I'm seven months pregnant right now, Tucker, with my first child. It's unconscionable to me that the Democratic platform stands on believing that at seven months pregnant, I have the right, right now to choose. You know, it's not a life, it's not a life.

I can get -- I can I have two more months to decide whether or not I want this child and then beyond that, and these are really important topics.

We're talking about things that are scary, something that you never thought we'd ever be discussing before in America.

You know what? They've pushed this now to nine months being able to abort a child out of its womb and not only are they -- they're not shy about this.

Remember, Andrew Cuomo lit up the city pink when they passed this policy in New York City.

So these are -- I think Kanye West, the only word is brave. I think he is incredibly brave because he has risked his entire professional platform and professional life to come out and to say these things.

CARLSON: I totally agree. He is saying things we should all be saying without apology or embarrassment, but we're too afraid and we need people like that, more of him.

Candice Owens, congratulations on your baby and thanks for coming on.

OWENS: Thank you.

CARLSON: Well, you may have heard word of something called The Great Barrington Declaration. It proposes an alternative to the coronavirus lockdowns that our public health experts have imposed on us. They are ignoring the statement. It's made Tony Fauci pretty upset, too. We'll talk to one of the authors of that Declaration, next.

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CARLSON: So the science shows that the overwhelming majority of people who contact the Wuhan coronavirus survive it and when we say overwhelming majority, we mean overwhelming for people under 50. It's 99.9 percent.

Lockdowns on the other hand affect everyone regardless of age, and it shows. Rates of suicide and depression have soared in this country. Drug abuse, too.

Earlier this month, several scientists authored a document called The Great Barrington Declaration, you should read it. It's sensible. It's smart. It's moderate.

The document advocates for allowing healthy young people to live their lives normally. Let's not kill them.

The theory is that people who contract an infection then build up an immunity, which actually reduces the overall spread of the virus. Our public health experts have mocked that idea. Tony Fauci, who they say is a genius, has called this idea quote, "total nonsense."

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is one of the authors of the Declaration, and he joins us tonight. Doctor, thanks so much for coming on.

So if you would just summarize your position. I think The Great Barrington Declaration has been characterized in a bunch of different ways by partisans. So I'd like to hear you describe what it is.

DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA, PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY: Yes, I think, so the key idea of The Great Barrington Declaration" is that there's a thousand-fold difference in the risk of mortality for people who are older for whom COVID-19 is actually a deadly disease, you know, 95 percent survive, but there is still five percent who die, let's say you're 70.

Whereas for younger people, it's much less deadly. So for instance, for children, there have been many more flu deaths this year than COVID-19 deaths. So people under as you say, have very, very high survival rate for people who are who are who are younger.

And then you combine that with the fact that the lockdowns have been absolutely deadly, deadly in the United States, as you say. So, for instance, the C.D.C. found in June that one in four young adults had seriously considered suicide, which is an astronomically high number.

Putting kids out of school is bad for kids' health. Of course, for their education as well. The people have skipped cancer appointments because they're more afraid of COVID than cancer. Just -- it's bad for people's health all the way across domestically.

Internationally, it is devastating. A hundred and thirty million additional people the U.N. estimates will starve this year as a consequence of the economic collapse caused by the lockdowns. An additional 400,000 tuberculosis patients will die worldwide. It just -- it's mind boggling, the cost of the lockdowns and it hits the poor, the hardest -- the poor, the working class.

We designate certain class of workers as vulnerable or as essential, and yet if you are a 63-year-old-bus driver, we ask you to go expose yourself to COVID to earn a living.

The argument for The Great Barrington Declaration is we should take the money we're spending to address COVID and protect the vulnerable whoever you are, whether you're older, protect nursing homes, I think we started to do a better job at that, but we can keep continuing to do that.

We use tests and all the standard mechanisms to do that there, provide accommodation laws so that you don't -- if you're 63, you don't have to teach in -- you can you can teach on Zoom, but if you're younger, you can teach it in person.

If you're a bus driver you have some other sort of disability accommodation, so you don't have to be exposed with community spread.

CARLSON: What you just said is that sparklingly sensible. I wish she'd been in charge and I wish we had more time. It is The Great Barrington Declaration, and I encourage all of our viewers to look it up.

Dr. Bhattacharya, thank you so much for coming on tonight.

BHATTACHARYA: Please do sign.

CARLSON: And sign as well.

BHATTACHARYA: Thank you.

CARLSON: I think it's worth it. Great to see you.

Thanks for watching tonight. We're out of time.

We will be back tomorrow night, 8:00 p.m., the show that's a sworn enemy of lying pomposity, smugness and groupthink.

The Great Sean Hannity right now.

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