Tucker sounds off on the Fed for 'partying' with Americans' money

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Tucker sounds off on the Fed for 'partying' with Americans' money

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' weighs in on the Federal Reserve's currency tapering plans

This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" October 12, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

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

There's probably no institution in American life that has more effect on how you live but that we talk about less than the Federal Reserve. People don't care to talk about the Federal Reserve because it seems very complex, and a lot of what it does is in fact complex, unless you have a grounding in monetary policy, it is hard to know exactly what's going on.

But the basics aren't that complicated, actually, and here are a few of them.

The Federal Reserve was created way back in 1913 by an act of Congress, and it had really two main goals: Maximize employment and keep prices stable. Keep inflation under control. Those are virtuous goals, but it may be a measure of the way that bureaucracies work that over time, the Federal Reserve has actively undermined both of those objectives. It's the classic story of the fireman turned arsonist, or for that matter the COVID czar who helped create COVID -- irony of ironies, it seems like we read a lot of those lately.

In the case of the Federal Reserve, consider something called quantitative easing. That's the main thing the Fed has been doing since the financial crisis of 2008. Every month, Federal Reserve officials print more than $100 billion new in American currency, and then they inject those dollars into our financial system by buying assets like bonds and securities.

This is not a normal thing to do, it's a radical thing to do, and it was supposed to be temporary. It was in response to a crisis. In medical terms, quantitative easing is like chemotherapy. There are times when it can save your life, but fundamentally it's poison. If you keep taking it, it will kill you. Pretty much everyone agrees on that. And pretty much everyone understands that ultimately quantitative easing causes horrible inflation, and it's easy to understand why. You don't need to be an expert.

The more money you print, the less that money is worth. It is supply and demand. You buy diamonds by the karat, but you buy dirt by the yard. Overabundance decreases value.

So every new dollar you print buys less. If you keep printing them, you wind up devaluing your own currency. That's one thing a responsible government should never do. It may enrich banks and a tiny number of big investors who give to the Democratic Party, but devaluing your currency screws everyone who works and who saves, and that's immoral.

Those are exactly the people that a legitimate government ought to be trying to help as its core mission, and yet they're not. All these years later, quantitative easing continues. They are still doing it.

On Wall Street, they joke about how it is going to go on forever. They call it QE-infinity. It's an incredibly reckless policy and everybody knows it, very much including the people who are getting rich from it.

So, for the better part of a year, Fed officials have been promising they are going to stop doing this. They have sworn they will get sober. They have vowed to begin a process called tapering, that means they'll start to gradually slow the money they print.

At a Fed meeting in April, officials said they would start to do this very soon, they would taper, but they never did. They made the same promise throughout this summer, but again they didn't. The binge continued.

This morning, the Vice Chairman of the Fed, Richard Clarida once again insisted that tapering is almost here, we're about to do it. The conditions to begin detox, he said, have all but been met. And yet as of tonight, the Fed is still partying with your currency like this is the richest country in the world and always will be.

So what are the effects on our country of this? Well, in the short term as with vodka, it makes everybody feel pretty good. It's 3:00 a.m., your lips are numb, and you can barely see and yet somehow, the breakfast meeting downtown you've got in five hours, the one you're going to have to give a detailed presentation to your boss seems like no problem at all. You've got this.

Except you don't have it at all. Morning always comes. It is always worse than you think.

America's quantitative easing hangover is going to be ugly. Beneath the manufactured euphoria of our top line economic numbers -- Google is killing it, record profits for Amazon, says CNBC -- beneath all of that garbage, the actual American economy is in trouble and there are many signs of it.

Labor markets are tight right now because a lot of Americans have simply dropped out of the labor force, 4.3 million people walked off the job last month, some of them were forced out by Joe Biden's vaccine mandates.

Projections for GDP growth just dropped from six percent to one and a half percent. Small businesses across the country are dying. And maybe most ominous of all, inflation is here. It's not just a temporary problem caused by COVID disrupted supply chains, it is absolutely real.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice over): The American economy is starting to sizzle once again as it emerges from the pandemic and workers' paychecks are, too with businesses practically begging for help.

But there's a flip side to all the raises and that's inflation. Prices rising at the fastest rate since 2008, everything from washing machines, up almost 30 percent, to furniture, up 11 percent and television sets up eight percent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So it's happening throughout the economy, it's not just washing machines and television sets, consumer electronics. It is everything including the big things. Try to buy a house, it's now more expensive to buy a home than it has ever been at any time in American history.

The median existing home price last year was $310,000.00. It is now over $356,000.00 and a lot more in the zip codes you might want to live in. Part of the reason is the cost of building materials. They are completely out of control.

Last October, lumber went for about $580.00 per thousand board feet. As of last week, it was $712.00.

Last August, used cars which you might need were selling for an average price of $21,000.00. This August, a year later they were almost $28,000.00. Same car, seven grand more.

Over the same period by the way, as you well know, the price of gas jumped a full dollar a gallon and a lot more than that in some places.

Been to the grocery lately? The cost of a pound of steak is up by two bucks, a pound of bacon costs over seven dollars right now. And suddenly, everything costs more. Eggs, milk, coffee, mustard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These are not luxury items. This is not a trip to St. Bart's. These are things you buy every week and you have to buy.

The question is, are your wages rising as fast as your costs? Well let's see. Vegetable oil is up 60 percent, so probably not, and that means you're getting poorer whether you realize it or not. But that's what inflation does, it causes poverty.

So because we can prove that the population of the United States is getting poorer by the day, you'd think the Biden administration would be actively concerned about this and working to make it better, but they're doing the opposite. They are actively making it much worse.

And here's how they're doing it: By spending.

No government in the history of the world has ever spent more money than Joe Biden is spending right now. That is a fact.

In fiscal year 2019, just the other day, the entire Federal government spent $6.6 trillion, then COVID hit the following year and those numbers went up, they went up by 40 percent. Federal spending in 2020 jumped to $9.1 trillion. Was that too much? Of course, it was. What do we get for it? Not enough.

But here's the shocking thing. Under Joe Biden as COVID recedes, it's going up even higher, because they're no longer using COVID as a pretext.

Through the end of this August, which is to say a month and a half ago, the Federal government has already spent more in 2021 than it did over the entire calendar years of 2019 and 2018.

So all of this drives inflation to scary levels, but they're not scary to everyone.

If you're a massively leveraged financial institution that owes a lot of money to a lot of people and that's how you're making your money, this is not necessarily bad news. If money is worth less, that means that your debt service costs less. You don't fear inflation, inflation helps you. The problem, is it crushes the American middle class.

Now in a normal country this would be a huge concern, but because the people who make our policy don't care about the middle class, this is a bargain well worth making.

Bloomberg News just published a piece with this headline which we're not making up. They're celebrating the disaster, quote: "America needs higher longer lasting inflation." If you can even imagine writing something like this. Does America need more emphysema, too? It's grotesque.

Now most people may not know this is happening, normal people don't read Bloomberg News, they may be unaware that these attitudes even exist in what they assumed was their country and the Biden administration would like to keep it that way. They'd like to keep the population from finding out what's happening.

So here is the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. She is the reptile who once ran the Federal Reserve and is therefore more responsible than any single living person for your growing poverty. Here she is assuring you that seven-dollar bacon isn't actually a problem. That's not really inflation, it's something called transitory inflation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JANET YELLEN, U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY: I don't believe that we're at risk of hyperinflation. We've had several months of high inflation that most economists including me believe will be transitory as our economy gets back in full swing after the pandemic.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: It's just transitory, it's the price of progress, seven-dollar bacon. Yes, but look what you're getting in return. Aren't things great?

Until just a few hours ago, that was the official line in Washington, along with those Southwest delays were caused by weather, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan was actually a huge success. What are you talking about? That's what they were telling us.

And then the President of the Atlanta Fed, a man called Raphael Bostic admitted what was very obvious to anyone who goes to the grocery store. This actually is inflation, it is real inflation. It is not transitory inflation and it's going to be here for a long time.

What he didn't say was that this is not an Act of God. This isn't a hurricane, it's not an earthquake, it's not something we can't control. This is the result of decades of policy that have enriched a few and impoverished the many.

When will the reckoning be for them? And what are the effects for you going forward?

Oren Cass has thought a lot about this. He understands monetary policy. He is the Executive Director of American Compass and we're happy to be joined by him tonight. Oren Cass, thanks so much for coming on.

OREN CASS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AMERICAN COMPASS: Thanks for having me.

CARLSON: So as you see these spending bills, the so-called infrastructure bill, numbers that no one who follows Federal spending has ever seen before or even imagined you would see, you almost never hear anybody suggest that these may be inflationary. Spending this much money might devalue the U.S. dollar. Why does nobody say that?

CASS: Well because it gives away the game. I think, we've been separating this sort of fake economy from the real economy for so long and the real economy has huge problems and rather than address them, we just keep doing things that make the fake economy look better and better.

And these kinds of spending bills that you see being proposed are exactly more of the same. They -- you know, politicians can say look at this, look at all the money we're sending you and hope that that the music doesn't stop playing, at least until they're gone.

CARLSON: What's so interesting is that their expectations of the public seem to have changed. I mean, I remember for decades in Washington, no one wanted to talk about raising gas prices with increasing the gas taxes because gas prices were the one thing people would react to and you didn't want to make the public mad.

Now, you're hearing people openly say -- elected officials say, yes, it's going to be too expensive for you to drive. What are you going to do about it? It almost seems like they don't care what the public thinks as much anymore.

CASS: Well, I think you know there's a very clear agenda in all of these spending bills from the Biden administration. I mean, why would you do this many? They already did $2 trillion at the start of the year, then they have, you know a trillion more of infrastructure plus another three and a half trillion they want.

There is no real reason to be trying to do that all at once except that they know they're not actually going to have the power to do it for that long, and so the priority is really just how quickly can we rush all this stuff through? Not actually asking, what would be good for the American people? What would actually help them build strong families? Make sure there's good jobs available for them?

You know, those are the things that drive prosperity in the real economy and it's almost like we don't have time to -- we don't have time to think about that, so we will just kind of play around with imaginary dollar figures.

CARLSON: At what point do you think it becomes really obvious that they've mismanaged monetary policy? That they don't care about inflation and then inflation really begins to bite people and people wake up to this?

CASS: Well, you know the dangerous thing about inflation is that it builds on itself. What the expectations that we have for inflation then lead to more inflation. So, I think there is a real danger that if you say, we'll just kind of let it run a little bit and it won't get too bad, that's exactly when things can really start to get out of control.

And I think if we were to see you know all of this proposed spending go through, you know, if you look at already, the supply chain issues we have, the shortages out there, as you mentioned, it's really important. People think wages are going up, but they're not going up as fast as inflation. So in fact, wages are going down. That's what people will notice.

CARLSON: Right.

CASS: And that's just not sustainable. That's when the car hits the wall.

CARLSON: Right, and that's when you have real political volatility. Inflation makes systems teeter. I think these people are really reckless. I know you agree with that.

Oren Cass, thank you so much for unpacking that for us.

CASS: Thanks for having me.

CARLSON: So last night we told you that the cancellation of a huge percentage of flights by Southwest Airlines was not the result of weather, that's a lie. It was a reaction to Joe Biden's vaccine mandates. They are wrecking our travel infrastructure.

Well, there's been a major update on this story, including a response from the White House and Southwest Airlines. We'll bring that to you straight ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: We spend a lot of time on the show talking about ideology, what people believe, but in the end, the measure of a government is not its ideas, it's the effects of its policies on you.

Can you walk around the mall without getting mugged? Can you send your kids to school with the hope that they will be educated? Can you run your air conditioning in the summer without worrying there's going to be a brown out because the electrical grid has been so degraded by bad policies? Those are the things.

Can you take a Southwest Airlines flight to go see your family? When those things start to become impossible, you know you've got bad government.

Well, over the weekend, a lot of American air travelers found out things are falling apart. Southwest Airlines canceled probably half their flights this weekend. Now why did that happen? Well, we told you last night the truth about why it happened. We know the truth because we've spoken to people who are directly involved in it.

Pilots at Southwest Airlines are facing a vaccine mandate. They will be fired right before Christmas if they don't submit to medicine they don't want to take. A lot of them have already recovered from COVID, they don't need the vaccines. But the Biden administration is forcing them anyway.

And so this weekend, a lot of them didn't show up for work. That used to be called civil disobedience, but that's what's actually happening -- that happened this weekend. There is no doubt about it. And the fact that virtually everyone in charge is lying about it tells you a lot. It tells you, on the one hand, they don't want to own up to the results of their policies, their reckless crazy policies which are in effect, a power grab, and not public health.

But it also tells you they're very worried because when ordinary people realize they have power, too especially people with skills, people who do things most people can't do like fly airplanes or run air traffic control centers, when they realize simply by not doing those things, they can be heard, maybe the government has less power than they think they do.

So for the past 24 hours, you've seen the usual liars stand up and shout us down. Oh no, that's not what happened. It was weather that somehow only affected Southwest Airlines.

You heard the CEO of Southwest Airlines go on television and tell that lie. His name is Gary Kelly. He is under an awful lot of pressure, so maybe he had to lie, but he definitely lied.

He went on TV today and said oh no, it had nothing to do with Biden's vaccine mandates. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC NEWS ANCHOR: We are a lot of people invested in this idea that this is somehow related to vaccine mandates.

GARY KELLY, CEO, SOUTHWEST AIRLINES: There is just no evidence of that. You know, as I said and as Captain Murray said, our people are working very hard. They are doing a great job, I'm very proud of them and especially when we get into a difficult situation like this. They are also delayed, they're also ending up in places that they didn't expect.

So now, our people are doing a phenomenal job.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Well, your people are doing a phenomenal job, standing up for what they believe in the face of tyranny. But to say there is no evidence this was the result, a direct reaction to Joe Biden vaccine mandates is a lie and you know it's a lie if you know anything about the company you run and doubtless he does.

Later in the same interview, Gary Kelly of Southwest made it clear that Biden's mandate is the only reason he is forcing his employees to get the shot or be fired.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KELLY: And the vaccine mandate obviously is controversial and it's not anything that I wish for our company. This is a government mandate. It is a presidential order and we're doing our best to comply with that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, it's a government mandate. That would be the same government that is ignoring its own laws, that is ignoring Federal immigration law and allowing the rest of the world into our country unchecked. That's a violation of the law. The Biden administration is abetting illegal behavior.

So, for the CEO of a company to say we must follow the law as directed by an administration that is violating the law on a mass scale is a little much, and everyone knows it.

Lying, lying, lying.

Well, the Governor of Texas, to his great credit, Greg Abbott just banned vaccine mandates in the state. Southwest is headquartered in Texas and yet, Southwest and now American Airlines and IBM have announced they will defy Greg Abbott's ban. Oh, they're more afraid of Joe Biden than they are of Greg Abbott. Let's hope that changes.

Over at the White House, by the way, Joe Biden's top flack was doing what she does every day -- lying, lying, lying. Here are more lies about what happened at Southwest.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I know there was a little hubbub over the course of the last few days about Southwest Airlines. We now know that some of those claims were absolutely false and actually the issues were completely unrelated to vaccine mandates.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh you lied. They were not completely unrelated to vaccine mandates, talk to the people who called in sick. They were a direct result of the vaccine mandates. You did this, Joe Biden White House. You are wrecking our interstate travel system, and over Christmas, you're going to make it impossible for people to travel. You did that.

And at some point, it's going to be very obvious to the whole country.

So of course, Southwest is not the only institution that's been burdened with these mandates, so has the LA County Sheriff's Department. The Sheriff in LA County, Alex Villanueva says he will not enforce the mandate in his department. He is a Democrat, we should tell you. He joins us tonight to explain why.

Sheriff, thanks so much for coming on. I'll just throw it to you. Why are you taking this very public step to defy this order?

SHERIFF ALEX VILLANUEVA, LA COUNTY: Well, it's very simple. I have -- I know my employees very well and I cannot afford to lose five to ten percent of my employees overnight who will react to someone trying to impose something and remember, I believe in the vaccine. I believe in the science.

But if someone else who was an employee does not believe in that, who am I to impose on them my belief system? And they're going to vote with their feet. I have people near retirement, who can just simply just walk away, no harm no foul. I have other people who can claim Workers Comp injuries, call in sick, and then all of a sudden we're dealing with a homelessness and a homicide surge that is of gargantuan proportions.

And I have a board of supervisors who are embracing this woke alternate universe where somehow they just you know send off edicts like Moses coming down from the mountains and everybody is going to snap to attention and make them happen. I have to deal in reality and that is a very dangerous and a nonsensical mandate.

CARLSON: Well, yes, I mean, you run -- I think LA County, it is certainly one of the biggest counties in the country, maybe the biggest, I can't remember but it's huge. Did you tell them if you force 10 percent of my workforce to quit, people will die? I mean you must have made that case. What did they say?

VILLANUEVA: Well, remember, this is the same county that's sitting on a $2 billion surplus while they are defunding only one department, law enforcement, as we have a 54 percent surge in homicides, we have a quarter of the nation's homeless in our county and more are coming and they have no plan for that except, the only thing they can seem to agree on is, let's keep defunding law enforcement and see how it works out.

Well, that is -- that's just woke privilege speaking really because the people who are going to be harmed by that are the people expecting someone to show up when there's a 9-1-1 call and there's no one there to either answer the call, go to the call, investigate the crime, and actually hold people in jail when we're being defunded.

Heck, they want to close the nation's largest jail with no alternative and everybody, I guess, walk away.

CARLSON: I hope you run for office. I think a lot of people would vote for you no matter what party you're representing because we're so desperate for people to speak as you just did. Sheriff, thanks so much for coming on tonight. I appreciate it.

VILLANUEVA: You've got it, Tucker.

CARLSON: So a pretty interesting story in Washington the other day, a Pentagon official quit because he says the United States is not winning the global tech war with China and he would know. He joins us next to explain.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Until recently, Nicolas Chaillan was the Chief Software Officer at The Pentagon. He was the first person to hold that position. He just quit his job and he says he quit because it is useless. China has already won the tech war and that American government systems are quote "kindergarten level" in comparison to China's.

We thought that was interesting. We don't have a lot of background on the story, but it'll be probably worth hearing more about it, so we're happy to have Nicolas Chaillan join us tonight.

Nicolas, thanks so much for coming on.

NICOLAS CHAILLAN, FORMER AIR FORCE SOFTWARE OFFICER: Thanks for having me.

CARLSON: So, just summarize for non-experts watching including me what you meant when you said they've already won.

CHAILLAN: So, I didn't exactly say they already won, what I meant to say was that effectively, as it is, if we don't change the way we plan on attacking this issue of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, we have no chance of winning in the next 50 to 20 years from now, so that's effectively what I meant to say.

And so, we have to wake up right now before it is too late for our kids and grandkids to compete 15 to 20 years from now against China.

CARLSON: To what extent are the Chinese monitoring U.S. government activities in this country?

CHAILLAN: So obviously, that's part of the normal Intelligence of China, and of course Russia as well, and that's evidently things that they do through different means including applications like TikTok, right? TikTok is effectively a weapon that is used by China to collect intelligence particularly around citizens in the United States.

CARLSON: Yes, they know a lot about 13-year-old girls. I'd hate to be the guy in charge of watching it all.

I have to ask just because it's an obvious question, why not stay and help The Pentagon win this fight?

CHAILLAN: So, I joined about three years ago and you know, I like to of course thank the men and women that are serving our great nation and quite honestly, it was the greatest honor of my life to have the chance to serve them.

And I think we demonstrated that we were able to achieve great outcomes in a very short amount of time. At the same time I was hearing The Pentagon leaders say the right things, but no action, not walking the walk. And quite honestly, we're running out of time.

And so it was important for me to point out that all these issues, when it comes to the lack of adoption of agility and being able to move at a pace of relevance and looking at the tremendous waste of taxpayer money whether it is driven by bureaucracy or silos or egos, and the lack of collaboration with the commercial side in the U.S. where companies refuse to collaborate with the DoD effectively ensuring that we just get behind when you compare that with the Chinese Communist Party that effectively is able to take their commercial companies and mandate them to collaborate together so they can move faster, they can have access to more data, and be more successful.

CARLSON: Sounds right based on what we're watching all around us. I appreciate your coming on tonight for that. Thank you, Nicolas.

CHAILLAN: Thank you.

CARLSON: So, the Department of Justice rather than protecting you is now planning to investigate you if you dare to criticize your school board. Meanwhile, a new report -- this is a genuinely shocking story -- suggests that one of the biggest and most left-wing school boards in this country covered up sexual assault on a female student. That's the allegation. We'll bring you more in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Anarcho-tyranny is the name of a system that exists to protect and enrich the managerial class while punishing everybody else. It's the kind of a system that might welcome unvaccinated illegal aliens and then fire American Airline pilots who don't want the shot, that might be anarcho- tyranny. Does it exist? People debate it.

Well, consider this story.

According to new reporting in "The Daily Wire," a 9th grade girl was sexually assaulted at Stonebridge High School in Loudoun County, Virginia in May. A boy allegedly wearing a skirt apparently went into the girl's bathroom and sexually assaulted this girl. The boy was arrested for forcible sodomy and the accounts are horrifying.

This month, the boy was arrested again for allegedly assaulting a different girl at a different school.

At a school board meeting in June, the Superintendent of Loudoun County Schools, a man called Scott Ziegler said the school board had no records of this assault. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do we have assaults in our bathrooms or our locker rooms regularly? I would hope not, but I would like clarification.

SCOTT ZIEGLER, SUPERINTENDENT OF LOUDOUN COUNTY SCHOOLS: To my knowledge, we don't have any records of assaults occurring in our restrooms.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Scott Smith is the father of the girl who was allegedly assaulted in the bathroom at the school. He came to a school board meeting to explain what happened to his daughter and demand accountability, but before he could finish talking, he was tackled and arrested. Here is how our local FOX station reported it at the time.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CROWD: (Chanting "Shame on you.")

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice over): A Loudoun County School Board meeting devolved into chaos, Tuesday, after the board ended public comment where nearly 250 people signed up. Deputies even tackled one man who was later arrested for disorderly behavior.

Another man got a ticket for trespassing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, disorderly behavior. He was talking at a public hearing, so they beat him.

You should know that at the same moment all of this was happening, the man who wanted to report the sexual assault of his daughter in a bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt, at that same moment, the same school district was pushing a policy for students identifying as quote, "transgender" and would allow students to use any bathroom they want.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice over): On the agenda for the contentious meeting, a proposed policy that's been just as controversial, Policy 8040, which would require transgender and gender non-conforming students to be called by their preferred pronouns. It would also align with state law allowing those students to use restrooms and be on sports teams that align with their gender identity.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Luke Rosiak is a reporter for "The Daily Wire." He broke this story and we're happy to have him on tonight to explain it. Luke, thanks so much for coming on.

Essentially, did we characterize the story correctly? Is that what you think happened?

LUKE ROSIAK, REPORTER, "THE DAILY WIRE": Yes, this story is one of the most disturbing I've ever worked on. It raises the possibility that the Loudoun County Public Schools covered up the rape of a 14-year-old girl at the hands of a boy wearing a skirt in order to pass a school policy that Democrats were adamant about passing, and as a result of concealing that, a second girl was raped last week.

And to prevent all of this from coming out potentially, they arrested the father of the victim, tried to put him in jail, and he is now the face of domestic terrorism listed by -- listed individually by the National School Boards Association, all for coming to that meeting.

He didn't come to that meeting because he's a bigot. A lot of people thought they knew that guy, they trotted out his picture, his embarrassing picture with his belly hanging out and his bloody face. They all thought they knew him. They knew nothing about him.

This was a caring father who was involved because of something very personal that happened to his daughter, and if they would have shut up and listened to him for 30 seconds, they would have been heartbroken.

Instead, they demeaned him, they arrested him, and they tried to put him in jail.

CARLSON: A working-class white guy, he deserved it. I wonder though, if they would have cared if they'd listened to him? I mean, if these allegations are true and the school board covered up the rape of a child in a bathroom, then maybe they wouldn't have cared had they heard from her father?

ROSIAK: Yes, I think that's right. I mean, after he was arrested at that school board meeting, the elected prosecutor of Loudoun County, who is a Soros-funded far-left progressive who ran on a campaign about you know ending mass incarceration, not charging people for minor crimes, she personally charged this guy for misdemeanor, disorderly conduct. It is unheard of.

The actual DA showed up and personally asked for jail time for disorderly conduct. This is a woman who is very close with the school board. You know, and after that, they gave him a no trespassing letter just a few days before the August 11th meeting where they finalized this transgender policy.

It's hard to imagine they would have been able to pass that policy if this guy would have showed up and told his story, but none of the things that liberals say they believe in, believe all women, objecting to police kneeling on a man who is screaming "I can't breathe," which is what he is saying, ending mass incarceration -- none of that applies when you cross their agenda that they are trying to enact on our children.

CARLSON: Right. So she is not against mass incarceration, it is not actually the suspension of law, it's just using the force of law against disfavored groups. That's what this really is, and we should just say it out loud because that's exactly what it is.

This is an amazing story. Thank you, Luke Rosiak for reporting this out. I hope you'll come back and tell us how it goes.

ROSIAK: Thank you for having me.

CARLSON: Of course.

Well, Mark Zuckerberg is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to interfere in our elections. Just today, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touted the fact that his state has banned tech billionaires from influencing Florida's elections.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. RON DESANTIS (R-FL): We ban Zuckerbucks and so Zuckerberg, he spent over $400 million through these quote, "non-profits" to quote "help with election administration," but what they would do is they would require certain things to be done like mass mail balloting, ballot harvesting, and they would focus on partisan voter turnout basically.

Elections should be administered by these offices, not by private tech moguls.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Well exactly. So we knew that Zuckerberg spent close to half a billion dollars on the last election, but until now we didn't have many details on where that money went to.

Mollie Hemingway did the leg work on that. She has written a new book called "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections," she joins us tonight to explain exactly what Mark Zuckerberg did in 2020.

Mollie, congrats on the book. Thanks for coming on. And please tell us what Mark Zuckerberg did.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CONTRIBUTOR: Thank you. Yes, in my new book, "Rigged," I tell the story of how Mark Zuckerberg, who is one of the world's most powerful and wealthy men funded the takeover of government election offices that are in charge of voter registration, voting, and vote counting.

He spent nearly half a billion dollars giving it to two left-wing groups that gave the money to governmental election offices, predominantly in Democrat cities in key swing states and with those funds, they targeted Democrat voter outreach, designing ballots, translating ballots, and staffing the operations that handled ballot harvesting, the curing of ballots, and the counting of ballots.

And to be clear, this is not campaign spending. This was a concierge level, get out the vote operation, on behalf of Joe Biden and other Democrats in key Democrat areas in swing states. This is something that had never happened before and this was done inside the election administration, not outside where billionaires normally spend their money.

CARLSON: Well, how are billionaires allowed to run our elections? I mean, as if they don't have enough power over our society.

HEMINGWAY: Well, what's so amazing is as Governor DeSantis noted, they had to make it illegal this year. It wasn't illegal when it was done because nobody ever imagined that tech oligarchs could control democracy by embedding left-wing activists into the election system, even in states where people pay a lot of attention to this like Wisconsin, they didn't even know really what was going on.

And because they claimed these were nonpartisan, they didn't realize until it was too late that Democrat counties were getting the vast outside portion of the votes and that it really made a difference in the final vote totals.

CARLSON: Well, I wish the campaign that was running against Biden would have said more about this at the time. I mean this seems like a massive scandal to me.

HEMINGWAY: It's a massive scandal, but it actually took a while to realize just how targeted this was. This was very smart, it actually -- there are people who researched in Texas, they say it gave Joe Biden a net of 200,000 votes. Now that didn't mean that it made the difference in Texas, but that figure would make the difference in Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

CARLSON: Yes, virtually every swing state, and I've got to be honest, I didn't get it either until your book came out, so probably give them a pass on that.

HEMINGWAY: Lots of details in there.

CARLSON: Exactly. Mollie Hemingway, thanks so much.

HEMINGWAY: Thank you.

CARLSON: So Joe Biden's presidency isn't going well unless the goal is to wreck our institutions. Now, we're learning that Biden could be directly implicated in an F.B.I. probe into his son. Pretty amazing. That's straight ahead with Brit Hume.

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CARLSON: We don't tell you a lot about poll numbers because they're unreliable and they really are just a snapshot, but holy smokes, Joe Biden's poll numbers are bad just across the board. All Americans disapprove of his border policies, his handling of inflation, the debacle in Afghanistan, and if all of that was not enough, "The Daily Mail" reporting today that Joe Biden could be implicated in an F.B.I. investigation into his son, Hunter.

To assess all of this is Brit Hume. He is our senior political analyst here at FOX News and for good reason. Brit, thanks so much for coming on, and I do this -- it's not an age question, it's a wisdom question.

So at this moment, according to "The Daily Mail."

BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS CHANNEL SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Hi, Tucker. It's an age question.

CARLSON: Just a slim percentage -- so "The Daily Mail" says that Biden may have funded some of Hunter's extracurricular activities and that they shared bank accounts. If that's true, that sounds like a big deal, is it?

HUME: Well, it would be a big deal, Tucker, it was shown that that, you know that Hunter's business activities, some of which are very questionable redounded to his father's financial benefit because, you know clearly, Hunter Biden crossed ethical lines in the activities he engaged in and it was always this howling conflict of interest that he is serving, you know doing business in Ukraine when his father was responsible for policy related to Ukraine. That's been on the books for a long time, we've all known that.

If it were to come out that Joe Biden himself or his campaign or whatever profited from that that would move the matter up quite another notch and would add one more thing to the reasons why Joe Biden's popularity rating has been plummeting as you pointed out.

CARLSON: I hate even to say this, but given the behavior of the Attorney General over the past couple of weeks, likening parents to domestic terrorists, can we be certain that the Department of Justice will conduct a free and fair investigation into the President's son and maybe the President?

HUME: No. In a word, no. The one thing that Merrick Garland has turned out to be for all of his reputation as being a fine jurist and a man who deserved a seat on the Supreme Court, he appears to be weak as water when it comes to upholding the independence of the Department of Justice and keeping the Justice Department out of politically motivated investigations.

This business of having the F.B.I. looking into parents' behaviors as if was some kind of terrorism it seems to me it's something that no sensible Attorney General would ever allow himself to be involved in order or give the greenlight to, and yet he did it.

So, no, I don't think we can depend on that at all. It might depend on investigative journalism to try to uncover this or a congressional investigations if the Republicans ever get control of one or both Houses of Congress.

CARLSON: Maybe "The New York Post" will report on the contents of this -- oh, wait.

So, I mean given that this story which we first learned about in October of last year, a year ago, was squelched completely by the media titans. I wonder if we can be certain we'll get the details this year.

HUME: Well, I would think if "The New York Post" comes forward again with another story about Hunter Biden, I trust and hope at least that the mainstream media outlets who behaved so disgracefully last year when "The New York Post" broke the earlier story would see the error of their ways and be willing to pick up the story.

I would not expect however that they would sic their investigative teams on it. They might just follow the story as it appears, you know day-to-day, that would be about the most we could hope for. But that's a lot better than nothing, which is what we got last year from these I think politically corrupt news organizations.

CARLSON: They'd have to pull a lot of guys off the QAnon Army beat to do that though. Do you think they'd be willing?

HUME: Well, I think they'd be hesitant. It's a sad state of affairs, but I think there'd be enough noise made about this that the whole country would be able to hear it. No question about it.

The border situation which was ignored for many months by mainstream media outlets finally broke through, so you know these things can't be suppressed forever, at least one hope's not.

CARLSON: So in 20 seconds, what effect does this have on the midterms which are a year from now?

HUME: Well, anything that redounds to the disapproval of Joe Biden hurts his party in the midterms and the President's approval ratings and standing with the public is always a major factor in the midterms, especially a President's first midterm after he takes office in which the President's party historically does badly.

So the outlook in the House at least for the Democrats is very poor and it might spill over to the Senate as well although the map there favors the Democrats, but a big wave election would sweep the Democrats out in both Houses in my view.

CARLSON: Well-deserved. Brit Hume, thank you for that analysis great to see you.

HUME: You bet.

CARLSON: We're out of time. We've got a brand new episode of "Tucker Carlson Today" on FOX Nation tomorrow.

We will see you tomorrow as well. Have a great evening with the ones you love.

Sean Hannity takes over now.

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