Tucker: Violent crime skyrockets in Atlanta suburb

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Tucker: Violent crime skyrockets in Atlanta suburb

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host examines increase in Atlanta crime and why Buckhead neighborhood wants to leave

This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," June 14, 2021. 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.

Ever been to Buckhead in Atlanta? It's a beautiful residential, partly commercial neighborhood in the northwest corner of the city. It's not a huge place. Fewer than 80,000 people live there, but it's fair to say that without Buckhead, Atlanta, at least as it is currently run couldn't exist.

Taxes from Buckhead residents account for fully a fifth of Atlanta's entire city budget. So, you'd think that people who run the city would be very polite to Buckhead. They certainly should be. But the opposite is true.

For decades, various Mayors of Atlanta have attacked Buckhead as if there is something offensive or immoral about maintaining a clean and orderly neighborhood.

For the most part, the residents of Buckhead have taken this abuse in silence, complaining seemed impolite. So, they've continued to send huge amounts of money to a city government that hates them.

For politicians in Atlanta, it has been a very good deal -- attack Buckhead then take the dough, but that deal could soon be ending. And the reason for that is the current mayor, a spectacular mediocrity with unusually high self-esteem called Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Like so many big city mayors, Bottoms is an incompetent demagogue. She has no idea what she is doing, but she is willing to say anything. For a while that was tolerable to the people of Buckhead, like most people who live in cities, they know the drill, they are used to it.

But then last summer, things changed. A man called Rayshard Brooks was shot to death in a parking lot at Wendy's by an Atlanta police officer. Brooks was apparently drunk, had fallen asleep in his car in the drive-thru lane. When police tried to arrest him, Brooks went berserk. We showed you the video at the time, it's painful to watch.

Brooks stole a cop's Taser and pointed it at him. That's when an officer called Garrett Rolfe shot Rayshard Brooks. It was a sad story, but it was understandable once you watch the tape and you thought about it carefully.

But Keisha Lance Bottoms didn't wait to think about it carefully or at all. Without pausing for an investigation, she immediately fired Officer Rolfe, and then she issued a predictably self-righteous press release about it.

An independent Board later found that what Bottoms did was illegal, but by then, it was too late. Hundreds of Atlanta police officers had already left the force and those who stayed understood very well that there was no point in making arrests. Who'd want to be Officer Rolfe? Nobody.

So, response times plummeted. You call the police, they didn't come. Crime soared. Criminals found that even when they've been arrested for violent crimes, they were back on the street within days. Can you guess what happened next? Here's what happened next.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You want me to break the [bleep] window?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Please --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice over): Eliana Kovitch and her boyfriend were shocked to learn the man in this video who is accused of attacking them was out on bond. The couple was outside of the Mercedes Benz dealership in Buckhead last June when they say a man started to threaten them.

ELIANA KOVITCH, VICTIM: He took out his knife that he had in his pocket. He said he had a gun. He kept telling us that he was going to kill us.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice over): Kovitch says the violent words soon turned physical.

KOVITCH: He came around the other side of the car, punched my boyfriend in his like left temple and then he punched me and then he punched me again and I fell to the ground. I like blacked out.

KOVITCH: The suspect, Fakhraddivin Moore was arrested and charged with seven felonies for the attack. However, he was released on bond five months later.

And as Kovitch and her boyfriend did some digging, they learned Moore had been arrested just days before in Clayton County.

KOVITCH: For misdemeanor, battery charges, and then was released and then while he was out on bail from Clayton County, that's when he attacked us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: It's pretty unbelievable. Threatened to kill them, punched a woman in the face. What did they do wrong exactly? Nothing. Just down the street in Buckhead.

In Buckhead, murders year-to-date are up almost 50 percent. That's a lot of new dead people. Robberies and aggravated assaults are up by nearly 40 percent. Car thefts, 65 percent rise.

Lenox Square Mall in Buckhead was one of the first indoor shopping malls in the United States. It was a great and famous place. Now, it's too dangerous to visit.

Beginning last year, someone was getting shot at the mall virtually every month. In December of 2019, a Macy's employee was shot during a robbery. In January, a man trying to defend himself of armed robbery was inadvertently shot by a cop.

In February of last year, a drug deal led to a gun battle outside of Bloomingdale's. In March, a dispute over a parking space outside the Cheesecake Factory led to more gunfire, which killed someone and so on. So, people in Buckhead just stopped going to that mall.

Ultimately, authorities decided they needed security and metal detectors. They put police dogs throughout the buildings. They set up a network of security cameras with software to detect firearms. It seemed like it would work, but it didn't. There was just too much violence.

This past April, a gunman beat a 60-year-old woman next to her car in the mall's parking lot and then stole her purse. The Atlanta Police later said that somehow none of their cameras had caught the crime. A witness called James Glass says he never saw any police officers or security during the assault, even though the attacker took his time beating the woman because he was enjoying it so much.

According to Glass quote: "It seemed like he was celebrating what he had done. He started to rejoice and started shouting just like he was happy for what he had done to this lady." It's disgusting and it's still going on.

On Monday, two, 15-year-olds shot and nearly killed a security guard at the Apple store at Lenox Square Mall.

So, if criminals can terrorize the mall in Buckhead, which is now one of the most surveilled places in the entire city, what can they do in a neighborhood? Well, they can terrorize it and they are. They are attacking people on residential streets in Buckhead. Watch this report from FOX 5 in Atlanta.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice over): Neighbors say they are shocked after two crimes hit their Buckhead neighborhood. Atlanta Police say on Saturday they found a man with a gunshot wound on West Wesley Road. Investigators say the man and two others were shot at while jogging.

Hours later, on Saturday, Atlanta Police responded to the Collier Ridge apartment complex. Police say they found a man who was severely injured on scene.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It did, in fact strike an individual that was picking up trash.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice over): Atlanta Police say they arrested the suspect shortly after that crime. Now, investigators are working to figure out a possible motive.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: The man who was shot jogging on Saturday is called Andrew Worrell, you should know there's no backstory here. He didn't know the guy who shot him. He wasn't doing anything. He was just jogging on the weekend like a good citizen and a guy pulled up and opened fire.

Why? His 911 call is difficult to listen to, but you should listen to it just so you can understand precisely what Keisha Bottoms has done to Buckhead. Here's the call.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

ANDREW WORRELL, SHOOTING VICTIM: Help. Help.

DISPATCHER: Hello, caller?

WORRELL: 1211 West Wesley.

DISPATCHER: Is this a house, apartment, or a place of business?

WORRELL: I'm on the street. 1211 West Wesley. I got shot.

DISPATCHER: Is the assailant still nearby?

WORRELL: I don't know. He drove away.

DISPATCHER: Okay. And is there any serious bleeding?

WORRELL: Yes, I'm bleeding. I've been shot.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

CARLSON: And he was shot -- twice. Something similar happened to a woman called Valerie Kasper on a trail in Brookhaven right near Buckhead. She was stabbed four times in the back by a total stranger in broad daylight as she was walking on a trail.

Kasper was pregnant with their second child at the time. She was forced to deliver her baby more than three months early because she was stabbed by a stranger.

Why was she stabbed? Why was Andrew Worrell shot? These weren't robberies. The only point was physical injury. It was terror. It was brutality.

The victims appear to have been chosen purely for how they look. But don't call these hate crimes. It's not allowed. You can't say that. Privately, though, many people in Buckhead suspect that's exactly what's going on. They've been attacked by reckless politicians for years. Politicians have ginned up hatred of Buckhead for political reasons.

So, why wouldn't others take them seriously? Why wouldn't shootings and stabbings be the end result of that? Some people in Buckhead have had enough of this. They don't think it's going to get better.

Two bills currently in the Georgia State Legislature would allow Buckhead to leave the City of Atlanta, then run its own competent police department and resume being a safe nice place.

CNN for one hates this idea. CNN's headquarters in Atlanta and has been for 40 years. They know exactly what's going on in the city. They don't care.

You don't like getting shot while jogging? Well, then you're a racist.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: The mostly white neighborhood of Buckhead is pushing to separate from the rest of the city. CNN's Ryan Young has more from Atlanta.

RYAN YOUNG, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The Buckhead Exploratory Committee reports they've raised over a half a million dollars and is now pushing state lawmakers to push through a bill that would allow their cityhood petition to be voted on in the next election.

The predominantly white neighborhoods movement is gaining traction with Republican lawmakers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, are you following this? Did you get the dog whistles? Mostly white, predominantly white -- got it? So, if you're opposed to getting murdered outside Cheesecake Factory, you're a white supremacist. They always say that.

Here's the funny thing. They don't mean it. How do we know they don't mean it? Take a look at how they live. How many CNN anchors including the ones you just saw have weekend homes anywhere near Section 8 housing? Let's see.

We'll check our notes here. Right around zero. In fact, not one.

Instead, they run to Martha's Vineyard or they charter helicopters to fly to the Hamptons on Friday afternoon. In other words, in their spare time, they get as far away from diversity as they possibly can, not just some of them, all of them, every one of them. That's the truest generalization ever made.

A recent piece -- to put a finer point on it -- out of "The New York Post" describes how many rich liberals from New York have flooded into the poor, unsuspecting State of Montana.

Bill Gates has been camping out in Big Sky recently, a lot of them have. Why? It's not the fly fishing. Bill Gates couldn't cast a fly rod if his fortune depended on it. No, it's not that.

The appeal is the monochromatic neighbors. Outside of the Indian reservations, Montana has the demographics of 1956 America. Everyone looks the same. It is not a melting pot.

So no, rich liberals don't actually believe that diversity is our strength. They hate it so much that the first sign of spray paint, they run for the widest hills they can find. Then they lecture us some more about how you're the racist because you don't like getting shot outside a Cheesecake Factory. That's how it works.

Bill White no longer cares what they say. Bill White lives in Buckhead. He plans to stay there. He is not hiding in Montana with Bill Gates. Instead, he is leading the effort to make his neighborhood independent of a city that's falling apart. Bill White joins us tonight.

Bill, thanks so much for coming on, for being brave enough to do that. Tell us what Buckhead is like now and why you think it should be independent from the city?

BILL WHITE, BUCKHEAD CITY COMMITTEE: Well, first of all, thank you, Tucker, for having us on. And I was listening to your opening monologue and I can tell you, we're going to need to have you come down here and take you on the road with us because you've hit all the key points.

We are living in a war zone. That's how we describe living in Buckhead, and what has happened here in the last several years is an incredibly dangerous spike in crime and a complete vacuum of leadership. The police in Atlanta are great police men and women. We love them. They just want to do their job and they're not being allowed to do that.

So, Buckhead and the beautiful families, a very diverse community. We, in fact are the most diverse community in all of Atlanta. We have decided to file for divorce, and the divorce is final. And what we are saying to the City of Atlanta is we are going to form our own city.

We have two bills in the State Legislature. We've raised the requisite amount of money we need right now to move this forward. There'll be a ballot initiative, on the ballot next November and we are going to take our city back for the great families of Buckhead once and for all.

Some of the people ask us: what are we going to do differently, Tucker? Right? How is a Buckhead City Police Department going to do anything differently? And I think you're a great team, I sent a video in and I don't know if there's time to show it, but this video is horrifying.

It shows a white car driving past a Mercedes Benz truck.

CARLSON: Yes. It is on the screen right now.

WHITE: Okay, they are shooting out of the car at these helpless passersby on Far Road and they're shooting and they're shooting. One of the bullets comes right through the truck and hits one of the people walking.

And you can see as the car drives by, there's two blue lights shimmering off of that reflection on the truck. You know what those are? Those are two Atlanta police officers in marked cars with their lights on. And my friend who took that video ran down to find out why in God's name they didn't chase that person who attempted to murder all those people. And they were told that Mayor Bottoms issued an order not to chase cars around Atlanta because she doesn't want the police getting in accidents.

All those people shot, two police right there wanted to go do service and put this smack down on that attempted murderer. They did call an ambulance and they rendered help at the scene. But --

CARLSON: I mean, so why should you have to live -- I mean, the same people lecture us day in and day out about democracy, which is, if I can just remind them, self-government. The right to control your own government. Those people are now suggesting you don't have a right or you're immoral, not to want to live under people like Keisha Bottoms who should be ashamed of herself. How does that work?

WHITE: Yes, Tucker, that -- all those, you know, we are racists or this, that, and the other thing that is all hateful, very disturbing, unhelpful language that is fear mongering and it certainly will not stop the crime in Buckhead.

What's going to stop the crime is the establishment of the Buckhead City Police Department.

CARLSON: That's right.

WHITE: We plan on having 300 police officers for a prolonged period of time. There are only 82 cops on the beat in Buckhead right now the square footage of San Francisco that has 2,000 cops.

So, one of the things we're positive about is we're going to put this smack down on crime once and for all and we're going to make Buckhead a great place to live again where you can go to the mall and not get shot taking a jog.

This poor woman you had on, Eliana Kovitch, Tucker, she's a saint. She's so courageous. She's a pediatric nurse and they punched her in the face and the guy was out on three different batteries.

CARLSON: So, what you're doing is a model, I think for the rest of the country. People don't have to put up with this. It is not political. It's not racial. It's about wanting to not be shot at the mall.

WHITE: Yes, sir.

CARLSON: And every American has a right to want that and work for it, I think.

Bill, thanks so much for coming on.

WHITE: Thank you, Tucker. God bless you, sir.

CARLSON: God bless.

New footage tonight from inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, proof that a key part of the story that we have been told with a straight face for more than a year is a lie. Sky News has the world exclusive footage and we will show it to you next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: At some point, we should keep a list of all the conspiracy theories that turned out to be not just true, but precisely true. Here's another.

Peter Daszak was one of several virologists who received U.S. taxpayer dollars from Tony Fauci and the N.I.H. to conduct dangerous, in fact, reckless experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Daszak has repeatedly claimed that no bats were kept in that lab.

In December, for example, he said and we're quoting, "No bats were sent to Wuhan lab. We collected bat samples, sent them to the lab. We release bats where we catch them." Exclamation point.

Is that true? Well, thanks to new footage from Sky News, Australia, we know it's a lie.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It is not a conspiracy to say there were live bats at the lab. It is a fact.

And as you can see, this video shows bats in a cage at the Wuhan Institute. You can also see there a researcher feeding about with a worm. And in this image, we can see researchers out capturing bats and a bat even hangs off a researcher's hat.

In another image, there are mouse cages, hundreds of them. We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was using humanized mice for experiments to see which coronaviruses could infect humans.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Yes, a bat hanging off his hat. Okay, no bats.

The footage also shows that officials in the Wuhan lab were very aware that something could go badly wrong.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): This is our control room. Staff in our central control room remain in constant contact with staff in our laboratory. Providing necessary technical support for their experiments as well as for any accidents.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Sharri Markson is with Sky News, Australia. She is the author of the upcoming book "What Really Happened in Wuhan," which we will be buying. She joins us tonight. Sharri Markson, thanks so much for coming. First to this amazing tape, where did this footage come from?

SHARRI MARKSON, SKY NEWS, AUSTRALIA: This was an official Chinese Academy of Sciences video. It was produced for the launch of the Wuhan Level 4 laboratory back in May 2017 and it is this underground team of detectives, they call themselves DRASTIC, who have been investigating the origin of the virus that managed to unearth this video after all of this time.

And as you say, it shows that much of what we've been told about the origin of the pandemic, from the very beginning was Chinese disinformation, which was then propagated by many people who had been working in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who are compromised, who had extreme conflicts of interest.

CARLSON: Yes.

MARKSON: And they, as you just showed, people like Peter Daszak insisted that it was a conspiracy theory. He used the term in a tweet from December 2020, that it was a conspiracy theory to say that there were bats in the lab.

You know, here is an official W.H.O. - World Health Organization investigator who went into Wuhan to supposedly investigate the origins of the virus early this year and it was completely false.

This new footage shows that there were bats being kept in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and it is something Peter Daszak has had to admit, has had to correct just this month.

CARLSON: What is amazing is that -- so Peter Daszak had financial conflicts of interest on this topic, I mean, he was involved in this. This bat video, many must have seen it before. Why has it taken this long, more than a year for the rest of us to learn these basic facts?

MARKSON: I mean, there's so much that he didn't and the W.H.O. team didn't ask when they went into Wuhan. They didn't ask if there were bats at the laboratory. They didn't ask where the virus database was. This is such a crucial thing.

The virus database with some 15,000 or 17,000 bat samples suddenly disappeared from the internet in September 2019 just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. The W.H.O. team didn't even ask what happened to that virus database.

You know, the people like Peter Daszak, who went into supposedly investigate this were riddled with conflict. Anthony Fauci as well, should not be advising the President on the origin of coronavirus given it was his organization that funneled money through a sub-grant through to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And you know, he can issue all the denials that he likes. The scientific papers say that they were funded with N.I.H. Gain-of- function work, genetically manipulating coronaviruses in Wuhan was funded by the N.I.H.

CARLSON: And to this day, Tony Fauci has never been indicted. He is not sitting in solitary, like people who trespassed on January 6th. Sharri, I really appreciate your work on this, very much looking forward to your book and grateful that you came on tonight. Thank you.

MARKSON: Thank you so much, Tucker.

CARLSON: So as just noted, virtually everything we were told during the pandemic about where the virus came from and how we should respond to it turned out to be false. One of the biggest lies came early on when virtually everyone the media pretend that Andrew Cuomo wasn't causing thousands of deaths in nursing homes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC HOST: Governor Cuomo, out there day after day after day, everything Trump isn't -- honest, direct, brave.

JOE SCARBOROUGH, MSNBC HOST: Even lifelong Republicans tell me they look at Cuomo and they are like, God, there's a leader.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: For those of you who've been wondering why New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been garnering the nickname "America's Governor," I think you saw it right there. He is conveying incredible strength in the face of this pandemic.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Maybe Trump is just a little bit mad that Governor Cuomo has become a kind of acting President.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: I hope you are able to appreciate what you did in your state and what it means for the rest of the country now, and what it will always mean to those who love and care about you the most.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: We could spent an hour every night from here until all of us qualify for Social Security just cataloguing the lies. There are that many of them.

We're not going to try. David Marcus has tried, though, and done a great job at it. He is the author of "Charade: The COVID Lies that Crushed a Nation." Nicely put -- and we're happy to have him on tonight.

David, thanks so much for coming on. I mean, this is a book length discussion. But what are the biggest ones, the most significant lies do you think?

DAVID MARCUS, AUTHOR, "CHARADE": I mean, Cuomo is certainly one of them. It's sickening to watch all of that knowing the lives that he cost, and knowing what he did to, you know, the city that I love, along with Bill de Blasio.

But the lies are myriad. I mean, right from the beginning. It is a lie that the Trump administration wasn't doing anything in January. They were already beginning work on a vaccine, on testing, on PPE, much of this before China had reported a single death.

The infection fatality rate was a lie. We knew in early April from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya that it was vastly lower than what the World Health Organization was telling us with their sort of Chinese sponsored fear mongering.

So, much of the masking debate was a lie where good solid information was simply being suppressed and not being told to the American people. It was obviously a lie that, you know, you can't catch COVID at a BLM rally and going to a BLM rally with 10,000 people is fine, but you can't have an outdoor church service.

I mean, all of these were lies.

Quite frankly, you know, I could have saved myself a lot of work by writing a book about the true things that we heard about the coronavirus and the lockdowns, because my friend, that would be a very, very short book.

CARLSON: I mean, you spent many months collecting all of this, thinking it through and organizing it, what effect did it have on you? I mean, your views of the people who run the country, what are they now having sifted through all of this information?

MARCUS: I mean, it was shocking. It was really shocking to be covering the story and writing the book at the same time, and seeing people in October and November pretending like they had never said things that they had blatantly said in March and April.

I mean, there is a myriad examples of that in the book, it was all over the place. And really, you know, the Big Tech lies -- one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, and I wanted it in print, even though that's 15th Century technology, is that Mark Zuckerberg can't sneak into your house and go to your bookshelf and change the words of my book, at least not yet.

And I'm very worried that five or 10 years from now, when people like my 11-year-old son go online to find out what really happened, they are still going to be fed those lies. I hope that's paranoid. I don't think it is.

CARLSON: It's not paranoid at all. Just today, someone sent me a story having to do with unintended consequences of vaccines, but it's a true story. I found out conclusively, no mention of it on Google. None. So, I don't think you're paranoid, unfortunately.

David Marcus, congratulations on the book. It's a real service. Thanks.

MARCUS: Thank you, Tucker.

CARLSON: So, on January 6th, that was the day that will live in infamy like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, actually, only one person was shot to death that day. That person was an unarmed Air Force veteran called Ashli Babbitt. It happened in the U.S. Capitol. Who did that and why? We still don't know.

Ashli Babbitt's husband is suing to find out. He joins us next with an update on what he has discovered.

Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: So within hours, literally within hours of the riot at the Capitol this January 6th, the organized chorus of propagandists began telling us again in unison, choreographed that what we had just seen was not a bunch of angry people who felt the election had been stolen from them, who overreacted, and broke the law, which is what actually happened. But instead, a group of QAnon white supremacist who are attempting to overthrow the U.S. government, insurrectionists who are more dangerous than ISIS.

This was worse than 9/11. This was our Pearl Harbor. They said this, not just a few of them, all of them at once.

The amazing thing is that that claim totally separate from reality, insane actually, was internalized not just by a lot of the population, but by Republican leaders, a lot of Republican leaders and as a result of that, in the month since, they have not asked the most basic questions about what actually happened that day.

And here's first among them. The only person who was actually shot to death that day was a protester called Ashli Babbitt. She was shot and killed in the Capitol on January 6th on tape. Here's the amazing thing. We still don't know who shot her, and we don't know why. No one has ever explained and no one has been forced to explain. That's the key.

Aaron Babbitt is the husband of Ashli Babbitt. He is suing to find who shot her. He is joined by the Babbitt family lawyer, Terrell Roberts.

Aaron and Terrell, thank you so much for coming on.

TERRELL ROBERTS, BABBITT FAMILY ATTORNEY: Thank you.

CARLSON: Aaron, first you, thanks very much for coming on. I am sorry about -- genuinely sorry about what happened to your wife. Who shot your wife on January 6th, do you know?

AARON BABBITT, HUSBAND OF ASHLI BABBITT: I don't know. Somebody knows, somebody up in D.C. knows, I think a lot of people know, but nobody is telling us. And the silence is deafening.

CARLSON: I mean, you're an American citizen. Did you know that in this country, you can be shot to death by a government employee and no one explains who did it or why? Did that even occur to you before January 6th?

BABBITT: No, no, no, no, that never occurred to me. And furthermore, I never expected to lose my wife through political violence. So --

CARLSON: I have to ask, I mean, how do you feel about seeing her characterized the way that you have? How do you feel about the total lack of interest in her death?

BABBITT: It sickens me to hear what people say about Ashli. There's never been a person that Ashli ran across in her daily life that didn't love her and wouldn't remember her in some way, shape, or form for the rest of her life.

But this is the game. This is the social media craziness that, you know, people just run with a theory and just take off with it. And, you know, it's up to us, you know, it's up to us, and the ones that love her and people like you for not giving up on it. So, I appreciate that, Tucker.

CARLSON: Well, yes. And in my case, it has nothing to do with politics. I mean that. You shouldn't be allowed to shoot someone. Cops shoot people all the time, I think it's often justified. I've said that many times. But we have a right to know who did it and why. I mean, those are the rules.

Mr. Roberts, let me ask you. There have been reports online that seem credible. I don't know if they're true, that the Capitol Hill police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt, I'm not going to mention the name was the same officer who left his loaded handgun in a public men's room on the Capitol. Do you believe that is the same officer who seems like a very reckless person who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt on January 6th?

ROBERTS: That's my belief. That's my belief.

CARLSON: So, if it turns out that she was shot for reasons again, they still haven't explained to us by a Capitol Hill police officer who left a loaded handgun in a public men's room and kept his job somehow, do you think maybe that's why they're hiding his identity?

ROBERTS: I don't know. But I think one of the reasons why they're hiding his identity is they don't have a good explanation for this shooting. I think that if Ashli Babbitt had been brandishing a firearm and she was shot, the officer would be identified by now and they'd be pinning a medal on him.

CARLSON: Yes.

ROBERTS: So, I don't think they have a good explanation for this shooting, and that's why they haven't identified him.

CARLSON: And by the way, if she was brandishing a firearm, I mean, you know, I would consider that justified.

Aaron, one last question to you. Again, you're an American citizen, presumably you have a congressman who is supposed to represent you. You have two senators. Has any politician reached out to you to say, hey, I'm going to find out who killed your wife?

BABBITT: Senator -- Congressman Darrell Issa did the night of the 6th.

CARLSON: Good.

BABBITT: And he was confused as to why he was calling me because he's not my Congressman. My Congress -- my business is in his district. I've never heard from the congressman that supposedly represents me here in San Diego.

CARLSON: Yes, well, maybe someone could get on that. It's an American citizen dead. It's not a small thing. And if we act like it's a small thing, then I think all of us are in trouble.

Aaron and Terrell Roberts, thank you both very much for coming on tonight. I appreciate it.

ROBERTS: Thank you.

BABBITT: Thank you, Tucker.

CARLSON: So, all the debates right now are about identity, who I am. Let's talk about me. We're so deep in the well of narcissism that it's pitch black. We can even see what we're doing. And as we talk about ourselves without ceasing, the economy has taken some ominous turns.

Niall Ferguson has noticed this. He is one of the world's leading historians of the economy. We talked to him a great length about why this is. Why are we not talking about something that matters as much as this? You'll hear from him next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: So, it was last summer that everything changed completely, particularly in the business we are in, the news business, and all of a sudden, coverage in this country is starting to resemble game of "Mad Libs." Remember that? Remember that game?

You could pick a noun, any noun, and someone on national television would be denouncing that noun as racist. Punctuality, racist. Ice cream trucks, super racist. Shakespeare, white supremacy. At one point it got so crazy that the Feds told ABC News that national parks were somehow racist.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The National Park Service says the persistent whiteness of its 419 parks is an existential crisis. The American Wilderness, a playground for old and for young and overwhelmingly white.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When you look around, you don't see people that you identify with. You don't feel welcome. You feel out of place. You feel literally like you are an outsider.

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CARLSON: So, here's the game. Here's how it's played those sound like complaints. Oh, poor me, but they're not complaints. They're attacks. Yes, they are. And they're continuing. In fact, they've accelerated.

"The Washington Post" has now decided, and this is a real headline, in fact, it's only Monday. But we're starting with the most amazing story of the year. Here's the quote, "The racist legacy many birds carry." Birds like avian, animals that fly. "The Post" included a sketch of an innocent looking Jameson's Firefinch. Now that bird might look red, but deep down, "The Washington Post" tells us, it is white, as in white supremacist.

Of course, bird bigotry is needless to say systemic. So according to "The Washington Post," other avian oppressors include the Bachman's Sparrow, the Wallace's Fruit-Dove, and the Audubon's warbler -- the warbler.

Now, the warbler is named -- that one -- is named after John James Audubon, the guy who literally wrote the book on birdwatching. He has, of course been cancelled, because he was impressive. He thought about things other than himself, he observed the natural world and wrote and painted it.

But that doesn't go far enough, just canceling Audubon, you can do more than that, because as Ibram X. Kendi taught us, it's not enough to simply oppose bird racism, we must become actively anti-bird. We must defend and dismantle all systems of bird supremacy immediately, or else we're implicated in those systems.

We need to decolonize every bird's nest. Until we do the work, bird racism has the high ground. It is literally dumping on us, not just on our institutions, our windshields, and it's not coming off.

Now, you may have noticed that almost none of our national conversations revolve around the economy anymore. Instead, they're all about us and me and my identity. Let's talk about me and you've offended me.

But meanwhile, there is an economy out there. And in fact, for most Americans, it's kind of the most important thing. If you don't have enough money, kind of hard to live. So, for the latest episode of "Tucker Carlson Today," we sat down with perhaps the greatest historian of economic trends still alive, Niall Ferguson, and we asked him, why doesn't anyone talk about the economy anymore? Here's part of our conversation.

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NIALL FERGUSON, MILBANK FAMILY SENIOR FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY: The people on the left didn't really want to have a conversation about economics because they had lost their arguments in the 1980s. They really hadn't been able to make the case for socialism successfully.

And the conclusion was that there was more money to be made or more power to be gained by exploiting identity politics and emphasizing cultural, racial, and gender differences, and that's where all the energy moved to.

And I think it is bad luck for the working classes. I mean, it was hard luck for the economic losers from globalization and financialization, because they really ceased to figure in the debates that were going on in the elite universities and then in the educational system as a whole.

So, I think the answer is that partly, there was just a shift of strategy on the left, away from economics into what seemed like the more fertile ground of culture. But it was also partly because the people who lost out in that period that we could date from maybe 2001, that's when China joined the World Trade organized.

CARLSON: Yes.

FERGUSON: The people who'd lost out, were of no interest to the academic left. The working class of Middle America just ceased to figure -- and I think one of the things that we don't fully realize, although it's becoming more and more clear is that what the left now offers, wokeism, is in fact, a religion.

CARLSON: Oh, yes.

FERGUSON: It's not a secular political ideology. That's why as you were saying earlier, it's not really about economics. It is about salvation, membership of the elect of the woke. It's about persecuting heretics. It's about elaborate rituals of speech that can only be pursued by the believers. It's rather cult-like.

Matt Yglesias is not somebody I usually agree with, but he called it the Great Awokening. This was a very astute observation.

So, we are dealing not just with the decay of traditional religion, but far worse, the rise of new fake religions, political religions. And one thing that's very clear from the 20th Century is that when people take their religious feelings, and they apply them to political ideologies, terrible things can happen.

Central to what made communism so deadly, was it is ultimately a religion. Marx is ultimately a prophet. And Marxism is a kind of religion. The same was true of Nazism, the most ardent Nazis thought of Hitler and explicitly called him a redeemer of the German nation.

So, we've got to be very careful of political religions. Politics is not something that you should approach with a religious impulse. If you start feeling religiously about politics, take a lie down, you know, have some sleep, take a long walk and try again, because politics should not be imbued with religious sentiment.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: We were honored to have Niall Ferguson on foxnation.com. Amazing person. You can watch that streaming anytime.

So speaking of the economy, inflation is rising. How bad is it going to get? Our next guest is the man we trust to answer that question. We'll be right back.

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CARLSON: Inflation is bad. It's at its highest level in more than a dozen years. Will it be getting worse? What does the future look like? Is this a snapshot? Or is it the new reality?

Peter Schiff is an economist, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital. We're happy to have him on tonight. Peter, where do you see this going? Inflation?

PETER SCHIFF, CEO, EURO PACIFIC CAPITAL: Well, it's already actually getting worse because the year over year number is five percent, but if you annualize the last three months, it's eight percent increase. But I think the back half of the year is going to be a lot worse than the front half because businesses have been somewhat reluctant to pass on their exploding costs to their customers.

I think they've been hoping the Fed was right, but I think they're going to give up hope later in the year and they're really going to start increasing prices at a much greater rate.

CARLSON: Do you see a way out of it?

SCHIFF: Well, unfortunately, no. I mean, the Fed is pretending that it is transitory because they really have no ability to control it, because it's the Fed that is creating it.

CARLSON: Right.

SCHIFF: You know, every dollar of government spending has to be paid for. And right now, they're not taxing and spending. They're printing and spending. So, every time you're paying higher prices, you're really paying higher taxes and taxes, unfortunately, are going way up, especially on the middle class.

CARLSON: But that won't reduce inflation.

SCHIFF: No, that is inflation. The government is causing inflation. That's where all the stimulus money is coming from. The reason the economy looks like it is growing is because the government has created inflation, which creates the illusion of economic growth.

But the reality is, the economy is not growing. And you know, the CPI doesn't even come close to capturing the real extent to which prices are rising. You know, a lot of people point to the 1970s and all the inflation we had back then, but we had a totally different CPI in the 1970s.

If we were using the 1970 CPI today, we would already be experiencing double digit inflation.

CARLSON: Very hard to explain these concepts, clearly. And I think you do a great job with that. Peter Schiff, I appreciate your coming on tonight. Thank you.

SCHIFF: My pleasure.

CARLSON: We're out of time. Amazingly, I didn't expect an hour to go that fast. Again, we have a great conversation with Niall Ferguson on FOX Nation, which is we'd say worth watching.

But for now, it is no longer ours to talk, but Sean Hannity's, and so we hand the hour over to him.

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