Tucker: Political class using COVID crisis to gain power

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Tucker: Political class using COVID crisis to gain power

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host calls out lawmakers for deliberately using the pandemic for political gain

This is a rush transcript from “Tucker Carlson Tonight" November 26, 2020. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: Good evening and welcome to a special -- a
genuinely special edition of TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT. It is Thanksgiving. We
hope you're having a wonderful time with your family. Nothing is more
important or happier than spending time with the people you love.

We haven't had a lot of chances to do that this year, we've been pulled
apart. Many Americans are alone tonight, more than any time in our history.
A lot has changed in this country. But a lot remains the same and we should
be thankful for that.

In a year when cultural vandals and tragically unhappy graduate students
set out to destroy virtually everything in sight from statues of the saints
to the very idea of Columbus Day, they haven't gotten Thanksgiving yet. It
remains and there's a reason for that.

Americans care about Thanksgiving and they have for a very long time. Back
in 1939, Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday a week earlier. He said it
was an effort to boost the economy during the Great Depression, but it
seemed to many Americans weird and undignified, and they mocked him for it.

They called Thanksgiving, Frank's giving. Congress heard what they were
saying and eventually moved Thanksgiving back where it belonged, and where
it is now. We've been celebrating Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of
November ever since then.

In a time of political upheaval, and this certainly is one, you'll notice
that no politician tried to move Thanksgiving or call it Juneteenth. We
should be grateful for that. It's an enduring American tradition.

At the same time, though, we have to tell you the obvious, we are
witnessing fundamental changes in the way this country works; changes that
Congress won't be able to undo simply by voting and it's not just because
the coronavirus came here from Wuhan, China and upended everything, though
it did, it is because our political class has deliberately decided to use
this pandemic as a way to gain political power for themselves.

We're not speculating about that. It's not a conspiracy theory. They've
said so out loud, over and over again.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. JAY INSLEE (D-WA): We should not be intimidated when people say, oh,
you can't use this COVID crisis in order to peddle a solution to climate
change. No, we have to recognize the necessity of this moment.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT): If there is any silver lining in the midst of
this terrible, terrible and unprecedented moment in American history in
terms of the economy, in terms of the pandemic, it is that maybe we start
rethinking some fundamental tenets about the way our government and society
works.

HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: This would be a terrible
crisis to waste as the old saying goes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: "This would be a terrible crisis to waste," says Hillary Clinton.
Well, if you wondered why Biden kept Hillary Clinton off the campaign trail
this fall, that's why. She doesn't care anymore, so she can say what
everyone else in the Democratic Party knows but isn't dumb enough to say
out loud.

As long as public health bureaucrats are throwing around oxymoronic,
doublespeak, like social distancing and flatten the curve, politicians have
the cover they need to empower themselves and their friends and that's
exactly what they've been doing.

It's wound up in the form of tyranny. Some of the tyranny has been petty.
It's hard to forget, for example, that back in May, a Nassau County
Executive told residents, don't even think about touching another person's
tennis balls on the court.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Singles only no doubles. Only every other court, you
have to have a court between players, between people, sets of people
playing. Every player unless they're from the same household has to bring
their own tennis balls, so that you don't touch other people's tennis
balls.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So you don't touch other people's tennis balls. The famous tennis
ball press conference, your grandkids will watch that and laugh. This kind
of thing happened all over the country for months. It became a kind of arms
race of the neurotic and the officious.

In one surreal moment, and there were many, the Illinois governor explained
to a reporter that henceforth, only two people would be allowed on a boat
in his state and no exceptions.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. J.B. PRITZKER (D-IL): It is restricted to two people per boat. It's
not -- you can't have five people or 10 people in a boat.

QUESTION: So, if it is a family of four or five, like husband, wife and
kids, they're going to have to pick two of them at a time.

PRITZKER: They will, yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Only two people on a boat, and no tennis balls. Kind of hilarious.
Obviously, it's authoritarian, but it's a lot less threatening than some
forms of authoritarianism, because it's out in the open, we can laugh at
it. Much has been happening quietly. You're not supposed to notice as it
does.

When Joe Biden for example, named Ron Klain to be his Chief of Staff, the
media played it totally straight. CNN dutifully reported that Klain was
picked because he is quote, "One of Biden's most trusted campaign
advisers." Who writes this crap? But that's what they wrote.

They went through this whole resume, Klain's whole resume from birth until
present. But they left something out and they did it on purpose. It turns
out Ron Klain was appointed in 2016 to the Executive Council, something
called Tech Net, know what that is? Oh, you don't, then you don't work in
Silicon Valley.

If you did, you know that Tech Net is the trade group that represents Big
Tech in Washington, they are lobbyists. And now, they've got their man in
the White House. That seems like a story. But the corporate media didn't
report it. They didn't want you to know, so they didn't say anything.

They also didn't mention that according to e-mails uncovered by WikiLeaks
in 2015, Ron Klain wrote this, quote, "It's been a little hard for me to
play such a role in the Biden demise and I'm definitely dead to them. But
I'm glad to be on Team Hillary, and I'm glad she had a great debate last
night." End quote.

Wait a minute, weren't we just told by CNN and the other reporters that Joe
Biden picked this guy because they are very close, they are old friends? So
why is his old friend writing that he played a role in Biden's quote,
"demise" and he is now quote "dead to them"?

Why did Joe Biden really pick Ron Klain? That's a real question. If we had
a functioning media in this country, we might know the answer. But if
there's one bright spot to Joe Biden's candidacy is that he sometimes can't
help himself.

He says the quiet part out loud and you can hear it. That happened back in
May when he issued a request to Silicon Valley, censor the President of the
United States and people who agree with him and do it now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: The President spends a lot of
time especially this past weekend tweeting some pretty outlandish comments,
retweeting others.

Can Twitter do something? Can they take action?

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Yes, I think they
should. I think they should say when things are patently not true, they
should say so.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: We know what happened after that. Twitter started slapping warning
labels on the President's tweets almost immediately after Joe Biden called
for it. Huh? Weird. Almost like it was coordinated.

Just a month later in June, the President dared to warn rioters and
anarchists that they can't set up a lawless commune on the streets of the
Nation's Capital. He tweeted this, quote, "There will never be an
autonomous zone in Washington, D.C. as long as I'm your President. If they
try it, they will be met with serious force." Twitter then did what Joe
Biden ordered. They hid that post from view. They said it was quote,
"abusive."

To defend the capital city of the United States from occupation by people
claiming they are another country, that's abusive.

So, Silicon Valley did everything it could to help Joe Biden become
President and making sure that voters saw what he wanted them to see and
nothing else. In return, Joe Biden is looking out for Silicon Valley. It's
an arrangement four years in the making, and it's about to pay dividends
for some of the richest people in the world.

In the near term, the implications for our democracy are very clear,
Section 230 Reform is not going to happen. The multibillion dollar
companies that enjoy legal immunity, as quote, "content platforms" can
continue to pretend they aren't publishing anything. If only we have that
freedom here at FOX News.

It doesn't matter if they continue to write bogus fact checks and censor
posts, censor even entire newspapers as they did this year.

Donald Trump was standing in their way, Joe Biden will not stand in their
way, just the opposite. So, that's a problem that can't be solved easily.
You can move to Parler, we have by the way, and we're happy about it. But
it doesn't solve the whole problem. It can't be solved by deleting Facebook
and Twitter from your phone.

Those sites aren't simply hostile to anyone outside the academic left. They
are also meeting places for the thugs who plan punishment for their
political enemies. That's happening now. It could get worse.

Earlier this month, for example, a former Pete Buttigieg judge staffer set
up something called the Trump Accountability Project. That's an effort to
make Trump administration officials unemployable in this country.

We've never seen anything like that before. Of course, the CNN anchors
celebrated it. Sandy Cortez celebrated it, too. She is a sitting Member of
Congress. Here's what she wrote, "Is anyone archiving these Trump
sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the
future?" Well, that's not scary or anything.

This isn't anything new. It's been happening for a while but since Election
Day, it has accelerated.

Last year, "The Washington Post's" conservative blogger Jen Rubin announced
that Trump supporters should never again be welcomed in polite company.
Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JENNIFER RUBIN, "THE WASHINGTON POST": What we shouldn't be doing is
shunning these people. Shunning, shaming these people is a statement of
moral indignation, that these people are not fit for a polite society. I
think it's absolutely abhorrent that any institution of higher learning,
any news organization or any or entertainment organization that has a news
outlet would hire these people.

It's not only that Trump has to lose, but that all his enablers have to
lose. They have to -- we have to collectively in essence, burn down the
Republican Party.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Burn it down, says Jen Rubin. Shouldn't we do a study -- has
anyone ever been won over by that person? Has anyone ever watched that
person television and said whatever she's into, I want to be into it, too.
Probably not.

But when she says we need to burn down the party, of course, what she is
saying is we need to burn down the country, and anyone else who disagrees
with her. That hasn't happened yet. And despite what's happened this year,
and it's been a very long year for a lot of people, we can be grateful for
that. It's still America.

Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute. We're happy
to have him on tonight. Happy Thanksgiving, Professor. Good to see you.
What should we be thankful for this Thanksgiving?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, SENIOR FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION: Well, we've got a
great country, and we have a great Constitution. So far, the left hasn't
been able to alter that track. But I think what you're referring to is that
sometime in the 21st Century, we had these perfect storms of globalized
capital pouring into our two coasts.

Fifty million people that were not born in the United States residing here,
many of them under illegal auspices, many of them under the idea that
melting pot is through and the salad bowl identity politics are arrived.

And then in addition, this electronic octopus with its tentacles of social
media, Facebook, Twitter, you put all that together, we created this
bicoastal elite, Tucker, and they have this agenda. You know, the New Green
Deal, Medicare for everybody, open borders, transnationalism,
transgenderism, and nobody likes it.

And we know that nobody likes it, because when they're running in Georgia,
they don't run on it. They run as, I am a good old boy from Georgia, if
you're a left winger and in 2018, when they won the House, they did by
saying we're Chamber of Commerce candidates, we are moderate veterans.

Joe Biden stayed in his basement, not just because he was non compos
mentis, but because he was afraid that they would catch him on, you know,
fracking or something.

So the people still are in the majority, and they don't like this. And the
problem we're seeing is that, so far, they've retreated to a monastery of
the mind. And by that, I mean, Academy Awards, turn it off. Emmys haven't
watched it in years. NFL, NBA, I'm through. Pollsters never talked to them.

They're sort of retreating into their own isolated atolls, but they are
still a majority. And when they come out of that, and they get angry
enough, as we saw in the House races, they start to be heard. And what I'm
kind of worried about is that usually when we have these cultural political
differences, they transcend geography.

The Roosevelt Coalition of New England and the Old South or the Dewey
Republicans of the 50s with Eisenhower, or the Mid-Atlantic States and the
Farm States, but what we're doing now is, we've got a geographical
difference.

We've got two coasts and we've got a red interior, and people are self-
selecting, and they're not -- they are not having any commonality and when
you played Jennifer Rubin, she has no idea of what people think of what she
just said. And what that people think of that she just said are 51 to 55
percent of the people.

And so we're creating two different nations, not just ideologically and
culturally, but geographically. We know how that went in 1860. So it's
something to watch out for.

The people haven't spoken out yet. We get little tremors, but the
earthquake hasn't come and if they keep pushing it, I'm really afraid that
things are not going to be good.

CARLSON: I fear that, too. But in the meantime, it's Thanksgiving. And we
do have much to be grateful for as you just said.

Victor Davis Hanson, thank you so much.

HANSON: Thank you.

CARLSON: Amen.

HANSON: Thank you.

CARLSON: So a year ago, it was hard to tell what was going to happen in the
election. It looks like Donald Trump was going to have a pretty easy path.
That changed. So what happened and what can Republicans learn from what
happened? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: By now you've probably seen all the exit polls and voter analysis
you want to see really for the rest of your life. But it's still worth
knowing what happened on November 3rd. And if you want to know, it's
important to take a step back and remember what was happening in America a
few months ago.

At the time, many of us didn't want to think about it. But back in June,
Donald Trump began facing a very real and to some extent, unexpected
possibility: he could lose.

So how did that happen? It's worth knowing. At the time, we explained why
we thought the Republican Party's chances were diminishing and what all of
us could learn from it going forward.

Here's what we said at the time.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: Not many people are saying it out loud on the right, but the fact
is that President Trump could well lose this election. In fact, unless
fundamental facts change soon, it could be tough for him to be re-elected.

If the President does lose, that would mean that just a few months from
now, Joe Biden would become the President. The United States government
would fall under the control of the radicals who control Joe Biden, and
they will remake the country.

Now, we're fully aware that virtually nobody watching this show tonight
wants to hear that, but it's true and key people around the President know
that it's true. They've seen the numbers. They're concerned.

At some point in the future, historians will marvel at the fact that the
President lost ground during a pandemic and then during mass riots. Both
crises should have highlighted his strengths. They were naturals for him.
Alone among national leaders, Donald Trump warned Americans for decades
about China and the perils of globalization.

Everything about the Wuhan coronavirus proved Donald Trump right? China
really is our main global adversary. The Chinese government really does
want to take over the world.

Meanwhile, the fact that we sent our manufacturing base abroad really has
weakened us badly. The most powerful nation on Earth no longer makes
antibiotics. Maybe we're not as powerful as we think.

All of that is very obvious now after the pandemic, but Donald Trump called
it. You'd think voters would reward him for that. You'd think the riots
would have increased their support for him.

An awful lot of people voted for Donald Trump precisely to avoid a moment
like the one we're now in. None of this arrived suddenly, we saw it coming.

Social cohesion in America has been eroding for decades. People sensed
that, it made them nervous. It should make them nervous.

Donald Trump seemed like insurance against the consequences of that. The
core appeal of Trump was, if things ever started to fall apart, he would
defend you. Yes, he was loud and crude. Most bodyguards are. Only a man
like Donald Trump was tough enough to fight the creeping authoritarianism
of the education cartel in Corporate America.

If Trump got elected, you could say what you really believe. The basic
promise of America could be restored, you could live with dignity. Under
Donald Trump, you wouldn't be forced to mouth the lyrics to some repulsive
little orthodoxy you hate. You could declare out loud that all lives matter
because all lives do matter. God made us all. And if you can't say that,
what's the point of living here?

Donald Trump never quite articulated any of this in a precise way. He's not
an intellectual or an ideologue. But it was obvious, he felt it strongly.
Trump's gut level instincts were on the side of order and tradition and
stability, and they still are.

And yet when widespread looting and disorder arrived, the President did not
act as decisively as many had hoped. He said little, he did less. Some
voters felt undefended, some turned against him. Why did this happen? Well,
there are many reasons.

Trump was exhausted for one thing after three years of defending himself
against Russiagate, the most elaborate and effective hoax in American
history, and his staff did not very much to help. Some of them were
actively disloyal. Most were just confused. They definitely were not
prepared for Chinese viruses or burning cities.

But the administration's main problems were conceptual. Few seemed to
understand what was really happening. Their first mistake was forgetting
the primary rule of Washington. In an election year, everything that
happens is about the election. There are no exceptions to that rule.

Washington is a political city, it's run by politicians. If the Chinese
Navy sailed up the Potomac in the fall of an election year, the first thing
most people in D.C. would wonder is, how is that going to affect turnout?
That's who they are. It's how they think.

So only the naive were surprised when Democratic governors immediately used
the coronavirus quarantines to punish people who didn't vote for them.
Christian churches and small businesses were locked down. Weed shops and
abortion clinics stayed open.

Most Trump voters seemed not to notice. They accepted the restrictions
without question. This was a health crisis and they wanted to do the right
thing. So they obeyed. They cowered in their homes, and that's exactly
where Democratic leaders wanted them -- cut off from one another, atomized
and alone.

The few conservatives who tried to organize resistance to the lockdowns
were indicted or threatened with arrest. None of this had anything to do
with public health, of course. It was electoral politics, and especially, a
brutal form of it.

Republican leaders meanwhile, were remarkably slow to catch on to what was
happening. Some of them aren't very bright, but most just couldn't imagine
anyone acting with that level of cynicism and ruthlessness. Their good
faith made them vulnerable to their opponent's lies. They were used.

In the days after George Floyd died, these same trends accelerated
dramatically. It all happened so fast that it seemed like chaos at the
time. But it wasn't chaos. There was design just beneath the surface.

Consider the targets that the mob chose, law enforcement, obviously, but
not all law enforcement. Local police departments must be eliminated, they
said, but the F.B.I. is just fine and that was telling.

Then they claimed that capitalism was the enemy, but only certain kinds of
capitalism. The mob burned independent businesses to the ground by the
score. They didn't say a word about those businesses' digital competitors,
Google and Apple and Amazon. All of those companies were funding the
destruction.

Then the mob told us that traditional Christianity was racist. They
desecrated churches in the name of avenging slavery. And yet Antifa did not
touch a single mosque, despite the fact that historians say Mohammed owned
slaves.

As all of this progressed, Democrats continued their lectures about gun
control, as they always do, but they ignored the rifles in the hands of
their own supporters in downtown Seattle. The real threat they told us was
rural Americans with their AR-15s. We better get the F.B.I. on that, arrest
more farmers.

In other words, what looked like protests were in fact highly effective
attacks on Donald Trump's voters, his power base. Few in Washington clearly
appreciated this, at least on the right. If they had, they would have told
the country what was really happening. No, this is not about George Floyd.
It's not about police brutality. It's a power grab by violent extremists,
but they didn't understand that.

So weeks into the rioting, the social media accounts of the White House
were still producing ham handed posts about Juneteenth. No one was
convinced by them, no one was reassured. Instead, many voters were becoming
increasingly agitated by the lawlessness they saw all around them. Who is
going to protect us from this, they wondered?

What we're living through right now, despite what people have told you is
not a local problem. This is a national crisis. The riots are designed to
produce a national result. The destruction of our system of government and
the removal of Donald Trump.

People expect a President to respond to a moment like this, to fix it, and
they have a right to expect that. The President runs the country. If the
rioters were Saudi nationals, it would be very clear that there was nothing
local about what we're watching. We would understand immediately that it is
terrorism. The President would give a prime time address.

Within hours, the Feds would be hunting these people down and arresting
them. If the rioters were white supremacist, they'd already be in prison
facing life.

So the question is, why isn't the Justice Department responding like this?
That's not clear. Some blame the White House Counsel's Office. They say is
dominated by Bush partisans who are hostile to Trump. We don't know if
that's true. If it is true, there's an easy solution to it. Just ignore
their counsel. Send the lawyers to the basement until November and have
them reorganize the card catalog, or read "Reader's Digest" from the 70s.

Only a fool lets lawyers make critical decisions anyway. They're not wise.
If they were, they probably wouldn't be lawyers.

Others say career bureaucrats at D.O.J. or Federal prosecutors in the
states are dragging their feet. The Attorney General Bill Barr says he is
overseeing 500 separate investigations into rioters. Good for him.

Presumably one of them is into the destruction of the Albert Pike statue in
Washington. It took place last Friday. It was on live television. So far,
no one has been arrested for it.

It would change the course of this country's future if the Justice
Department rounded up the leaders of Antifa tomorrow, along with every
single person caught on camera torching a building, destroying a monument,
defacing a church and put them all in shackles and then frog march them in
front of cameras like MS-13 and call them what they actually are --
domestic terrorists.

Not protesters, not Civil Rights activists, not CNN contributors, but
domestic terrorists. That would be their new government approved title.

Once they're charged. It's official, in fact, they are literally as a
factual matter accused terrorists, and that would change minds right away.

The people destroying this country are criminals. Few are brave enough to
call them that. So, naturally their popularity grows. Everyone supports
protesters. This is America, we believe in protest.

But watch what happens when you start calling them what they really are.
Most people don't like terrorists. Terrorists will never be popular, even
among Democratic voters. So charge them for the crimes they've committed
and call them what they are.

Right now, the opposite is happening. The terrorists are more popular than
the President of the United States, and not just more popular than Donald
Trump personally, but more popular than the system he represents and
administers. And it's obvious why.

Our system is weak. It refuses to defend itself.

Mayors let new countries sprout in the middle of their cities. Our leaders
act like laws are irrelevant. Everyone watches this happen. It's a
potentially fatal problem.

Weak institutions die. Citizens develop contempt for them, and then they
get overthrown. The same is true by the way for heads of state. When you
refuse to fight for the system you run, you're done.

Spend an hour on Google and see if you can find a single leader in the
history of the world who stayed in power after failing to quell a
rebellion. You can't.

The saddest part of all of this is that our system is very much worth
saving. It administers justice more fairly than any system in the world. If
we want to keep that system, we have to use that system and that means
enforcing America's laws with certainty, enforcing them right now, at the
moment of greatest peril.

If we don't do it now, we never will do it. Ignore a law long enough and it
becomes unenforceable. You'd be shocked if you got pulled over for doing 58
in a 55 mile an hour zone, obviously.

Antifa's leaders would be shocked if they arrested for destroying a statue
of Abraham Lincoln. Just a month ago destroying statues was a felony. Now,
it's allowed. What will we allow a month from now? What will we allow by
November?

The point is, things change fast, and that includes social standards. They
change very quickly, too. Just a few weeks ago, defunding the police
sounded like a crackpot idea. Now, it's happening. Millions of Americans
support it.

Many Republican officeholders haven't thought very deeply about why this
is. Even now, you'll see them grin at the latest insanity from the left.
Can you believe this? They've gone too far this time, they'll say. There's
going to be a backlash. Really? When exactly will that backlash arrive?
Because the opposite seems to be happening.

What seemed awful the other day is normal now. It turns out that if you
don't bother to explain precisely why certain ideas are bad, if you don't
vigorously defend your own worldview, then you lose.

Bad ideas spread. They quickly congeal into conventional wisdom, and then
you're done. This is especially true right now, when everything in American
life is up for grabs. The lockdowns shuffled the deck completely.

Four months ago, you'd assume you were going to spend the next 20 years
going into an office somewhere. Now, you're working from your couch. You're
starting to consider maybe moving to Bozeman, and why wouldn't you? And
while we're at it, what else should we do differently?

Normal people are starting to think like this. Once big things start
changing, they tend to change more quickly than we expect. All of this
means, this is precisely the time, right now tonight to defend the
institutions that we desperately need to keep in this country.

Those institutions include the nuclear family, our freedom of speech, small
independent businesses, absolute colorblindness under the law, the noble
tradition of nonviolent protests. Those are the things that make us proud
to be Americans. Those are the things that make America a place worth
living in.

We need to defend these things with everything we have, all of us must
defend them, including the President. That is his hope of re-election.

For the rest of us, it's our only hope as a country.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: Well, defending the country means also planning for the next major
pandemic. It's going to happen in the globalized world that's inevitable.
And when it does, people are not going to cower in their homes on
Thanksgiving Day for years. That is not a solution.

So if we made any progress on useful policies, things like controlling our
border and our ability to manufacture vital drugs over the past eight
months, we'll tell you next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ASHLEY STROHMIER, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Live from "America's News
Headquarters," I'm Ashley Strohmier. President Trump and President-elect
Joe Biden both staying close to home this Thanksgiving amid another surge
in coronavirus cases.

Biden celebrated the Holiday in a Delaware seaside town with his wife,
daughter and her husband. The President who often celebrates Holidays at
his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida stayed in the D.C. area. He played golf in
the morning then spoke to members of the military via video.

And Americans could soon travel to Italy without having to quarantine for
14 days. Italian authorities are considering so-called COVID tested flights
from three U.S. airports. Now, if this is approved, passengers who test
negative for coronavirus within 48 hours of departure and again upon
arrival would not have to quarantine.

I'm Ashley Strohmier. Now back to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.

CARLSON: Well, back in March, the government told us about a plan called 15
Days to Slow the Spread. Fifteen days became eight months to slow the
spread, and we're still counting. In many states, as of tonight, governors
are telling you not to celebrate Thanksgiving with your family.

So the one obvious assessment we can draw from this is we never want to go
through it again. This is a disaster. How do we prevent it? That's a
question that's as relevant now as it was back in March when we made our
best effort to answer it. Here's what we said at the time.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: Anyone who thinks this is the last global pandemic America will
face lack sufficient imagination. There's no question this will happen
again. In a world connected by jet travel that is guaranteed.

So as we suffer through this virus, maybe we should learn something useful
for the next time. Going forward, our leaders ought to be certain we have
enough medicine and tests and hospital beds at the least in case something
awful happens unexpectedly because it will.

There should be a plan to respond quickly in ways that assure the public
that the people in charge know what they're doing. Those are the obvious
lessons from the epidemic now in progress.

But there's more to learn. Here are a few other things to think about.
First, borders matter. It turns out that immigration isn't some boutique
political issue that only activists need to care about. The question of who
lives in your country is the most basic issue that any nation faces ever.

Immediately after the coronavirus began to spread globally, sane countries
started to secure their borders. They wanted to know exactly who was coming
in and out and they wanted to control it. That was the first thing they
did.

In Israel, where leaders care deeply about their country, border controls
were swift and highly aggressive. The Israelis did not want a single person
who was even potentially infected to cross into Israel and good for them.

Unfortunately, nothing like that could ever happen here in the U.S.
Democrats would denounce it instantly as racist and xenophobic. So maybe
Nancy Pelosi will give us a stern lecture about how immoral Israel is.
We'll be waiting for that speech, probably forever.

Next, gun control takes on new significance when things fall apart. It
doesn't take much for law and order to collapse. Civilization itself can
evaporate quickly and over the centuries, it often has.

On some level, all of us know this. We're animals with the collective
memory of prior chaos embedded in our genes. So at times like this, we're
reminded how precarious any society is. Given that, you've got to wonder
about our leaders demands that we disarm.

Anyone who increases the threat to you and your family, and at the same
time tries to prevent you from defending yourself is your enemy -- by
definition.

It's scary when you think about that in the context of what is happening
now. And apparently a lot of people have thought about it.

Ammunition sales jumped by hundreds of percent this week. If Americans
really believed their leaders would protect them when it came down to it,
that wouldn't be happening.

And speaking of our leaders, who's really in charge of this country? We
think we know the answer. The people on the ballot at election time. But if
you want to know who's actually in control of anything, ask yourself, who
can make you beg for mercy?

If one of your kids had a bad infection, you would do anything for
antibiotics. But our leaders don't control those drugs. China does. The
Chinese manufacture our entire supply of antibiotics. Not to mention
countless other goods your family literally could not live without.

And here's the worst news. The Chinese hate us and have threatened to
withhold life-saving medicine from us.

Our most powerful enemy in the world has the power of life and death over
our country. We should not let a single day pass before fixing this.

But we should also recognize that not all of our opponents are foreign. In
the next few months, American hospitals are likely to overflow with the
desperately ill. It's possible that many people who need immediate care
will be turned away to suffer and die. That's a horrifying prospect.

So does this seem like the right time to open our entire healthcare system
to the rest of the world for free? What would happen to sick people in
America if we did that? It sounds like a form of sabotage.

Yet that's exactly what every Democrat who ran for President proposed in
public. Even now as we face an unprecedented strain on our healthcare
system, thanks to coronavirus, they have not changed their view on that.

What are they thinking? Well, they're not thinking. They're believing --
believing fervently in the cult of identity politics.

Joe Biden released his plan for coronavirus today. The first bullet point
proclaims this, quote, "Acts of racism and xenophobia against the Asian-
American and Pacific Islander community must not be tolerated." That's
number one on Biden's list.

Is racism against the, quote, "Pacific Islander community" really our
country's most urgent problem right now? No, it is not. It is not even in
the top 500 problems.

You're not going to see angry mobs lynching people in the streets because
of coronavirus. You never will see that, it won't happen here. This is not
that kind of country.

America is a welcoming place filled with unusually kind and open hearted
people. The merchants of wokeness cannot see that, they refuse to see it.

As a matter of faith, they believe that all bad things emanate from
America. They will always put America last. It's their creed.

Biden's plan goes on to demand that we change the Trump administration's
so-called public charge rule. Changing that would allow more penniless
immigrants to move into this country at taxpayer expense, and use our
already dangerously overburdened healthcare system in the middle of a
terrible epidemic.

How does that help? It doesn't help. It hurts. That's the point of it.

People like this are dangerous. They're the reason things are falling
apart. Suddenly, they seem to run everything. But they are not in the
majority in this country, and we should remember that.

Most Americans are not cult members. They're not ideological. They're
sensible. They understand what our leaders need to do. They need to treat
us as we would treat our own children.

If there's a threat to your kids, you don't pause to think of an excuse or
pretend it's not happening. You act. You do whatever is necessary to
protect them. Period.

If you die trying, it is a life well spent. If you're forced to choose
between your own children and the kids next door, you understand that's not
really a choice. You have only one duty to the lives in your care, your
people, the ones who depend on you.

In the end, that's what it means to lead a family, it means no less to lead
a country.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: Well, there are many more lessons that all of us have learned
since this spring, things we could not have imagined when we first taped
that segment. Alex Berenson is here to discuss where we go next. We'll be
right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Well, if you're celebrating Thanksgiving tonight with other living
human beings, you're a crazy person. We assume your other hobbies are free
solo rock climbing, skydiving without a parachute, tightrope walking while
drunk. You're into risk. In fact, you're a law breaker and needs to be
disciplined.

That's what our political leaders are telling us. That's where we are in
this country right now. How did we get here? And how are we ever going to
get back what we thought was normal?

Alex Berenson has thought more about this maybe than any person in the
United States. He's the author of "Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and
Lockdowns." We're happy to have him on tonight. Alex, good to see you. So
that is the question. We talk a lot about this.

You're our main source of scientific data on this pandemic. But I've never
asked you I don't think how do we get back to normal? How do we?

ALEX BERENSON, AUTHOR: How do we -- that's a great question. I want to
respond to one point that you made a bit earlier about, you know, what we
knew in March and what we didn't know, because it got me thinking about
something, which is, can we please have an independent investigation, a
truly independent international investigation into the origins of SARS-
CoV2?

Because we are almost a year in and we have no plausible animal host. I
mean, we have you know, guesses, but no one has ever found the animal host,
no one has found a closely related animal virus. For the original SARS,
they already found those things by this point. It is time to find out where
this really came from.

And by the way, that is not necessarily to punish the Chinese. But there
has been an argument about what's called gain of function research for
viruses, that is essentially trying to make viruses more dangerous in
laboratories that's been going on for about 15 years.

We're better than we've ever been at being able to manipulate these viruses
and we need to decide not just in the United States, because China has the
ability to do this, European countries have the ability to do this, whether
or not we're going to permit this as a world.

Because this virus was very close to, you know, really, really having
destructive and terrible effects. Okay, if it were a little bit more
dangerous, you know, if it killed even 10 times, or five times the number
of people it's likely to kill, I can't imagine what we'd be like as a
society much less if it were a lot more dangerous. So let's figure out
where this came from. And let's make some reasonable decisions about
whether we're going to allow gain of function research going forward,
worldwide. Okay.

Once is an accident, twice as coincidence, three times is enemy action.
Once is enough for this.

CARLSON: That is such a good point. I'm really glad you raised that. We
need to know. So give us just the briefest thematic outline of what we
ought to do next to get back to normal.

BERENSON: What should we do next to get back to normal? Well, first of all,
we have this vaccine coming. It would be really, really nice if we had more
safety data on it before we pushed it out. That's not going to happen. But
let's make smart decisions about who we're going to prioritize.

And that really obviously should be the elderly and the very sick, but
really the elderly, because risk is so age stratified by -- you know, risk
is so stratified by age here.

I think if we just encourage people over 70, and it's probably -- or 65 to
70, wherever you want to set the limit -- to get the vaccine, and it
probably won't be that hard, we will be a long way towards getting back to
normal. That's assuming the vaccine is actually safe as it seems to be
based on the data we have now.

CARLSON: So older people get the vaccine. Start there. That seems really
wise to me, and I hope you will come back so we can have a much longer
conversation with the origins of the virus. I think that really matters. I
appreciate it.

BERENSON: We need that.

CARLSON: Alex Berenson. Amen.

BERENSON: Thanks, Tucker.

CARLSON: Well, 2020 was the year that Democratic voters decided to tear
down all of the statues, it didn't matter what the statue was, it could
have been a statue of Teddy Roosevelt, one of the greatest Americans in
history or a Spanish missionary.

Our politicians sat back and allowed it to happen. Why did they do that?
That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Anything older than last Wednesday in this country is under
attack, of course that includes Thanksgiving. History itself is being
erased.

We saw all of that over the summer when BLM and unemployed grad students
did their best to take down every statue in this country no matter who it
portrayed, that included monuments of former Presidents, even the Spanish
missionary and saint, Junipero Serra.

This show has taken a look at why this was happening and how it will get
worse if our politicians continue to refuse to protect the nation.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: City officials announced their plan to remove the statue of Teddy
Roosevelt from outside New York's Museum of Natural History. The bronze
statue has stood there in the Theodore Roosevelt rotunda facing Central
Park since before the Second World War, soon it will be gone.

People who erected that statue 80 years ago would be confused by this, no
doubt. They did not consider Teddy Roosevelt a controversial figure. In
fact, Roosevelt was the most popular President in American history.

Personally, Roosevelt was a famously decent man. In 1901, he invited his
friend Booker T. Washington to dinner. No African-American had ever eaten
in the White House. Democrats roared with rage at the idea.

For the crime of having a meal with a black man, they attacked Teddy
Roosevelt and his wife for the rest of their lives. But Roosevelt never
bowed. He gave the finger to the mob, and he continued cheerfully on.

Teddy Roosevelt was a hero to millions of Americans. He still is. That's
precisely why they are tearing down his statue. They know that if they can
force you to watch as they topple your heroes, they have won. There's
nothing they can't do next. They can decide how you raise your children,
how you vote, what you're allowed to believe.

Once they've humiliated you, they can control you and that's why across the
country, mobs are tearing down America's monuments.

In the cities of Richmond and St. Paul, Minnesota, they've torn down
statues of Christopher Columbus. They did the same thing in Boston.
Boston's Mayor now says it's time to remove a statue of Abraham Lincoln,
the man who freed the slaves. It's racist.

In Dallas, they pulled the Texas Ranger statue out of the airport after
more than 50 years. In Dearborn, Michigan, they toppled the statue of the
former mayor. They did the same thing in Philadelphia.

In Nashville, they pulled down a statue of a former U.S. senator. Same in
Albany. In Oregon, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were torn down.
In San Francisco, the mob demolished statues of Ulysses S. Grant, Junipero
Serra, and Francis Scott Key.

On the pedestal of the Key monument, they spray painted, "Kill the
colonizers" and "Kill whitey," just in case you missed the point.

One thing all of these Americans now canceled have in common, not one of
them fought for the Confederacy. Pulling down their statues had nothing to
do with the Civil War, at least not the first Civil War, the one that took
place 150 years ago.

Democrats understand that very well and they support all of it. In every
place where the mob has destroyed public monuments, Democratic leaders have
backed them as they did it. But at the same time, and you should know this,
so have many Republicans.

Elected Republicans, almost all of them are in no hurry to stop the
disorder. They appear to believe what we're watching is a version of the
Rodney King riots from 1992. People saw an upsetting video on the internet,
they're angry and that's understandable, but they'll calm down soon and we
can get back to cutting capital gains taxes and sanctioning Bashar al-
Assad. That's their view of it. They are wrong.

This is not a momentary civil disturbance. This is a serious and highly
organized political movement. It is not superficial. It is deep and
profound. It has vast ambitions.

Even now, so many of us continue to pretend that this is about police
brutalities, about the death of a man called George Floyd in Minneapolis.

We still imagine we can fix it by regulating chokeholds or spending more on
de-escalation training. We are too literal. We're too good hearted to
understand what's really happening. Our decency is the mob's main weapon
against us. We have no idea who we're up against.

Just this afternoon, around lunchtime, an activist called Shaun King issued
the following demand on Twitter, quote, "All murals and stained glass
windows of white Jesus and his European mother and their white friends
should also come down. They are a gross form of white supremacy created as
tools of oppression, racist propaganda. They should all come down." End
quote.

Before you dismiss that idea as absurd, the rantings of some crank on
social media, keep in mind that Shaun King is the most famous Black Lives
Matter leader in this country. Black Lives Matter is now more popular than
either major political party. So, don't be surprised when they come for
your church. Why wouldn't they? No one is stopping them.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: That's it for us tonight. We will see you 8:00 p.m. Eastern every
night.

Happy Thanksgiving to you. Whatever you do, give thanks. We have a lot to
be thankful for. We'll see you tomorrow.



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