Tucker: Is China too strong to criticize?
While our leaders in Washington wasted years accusing each other of working for Russia, China grew more powerful.
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Tucker Carlson opened his program Tuesday night by bashing proponents of the Russia collusion narrative, saying China was the biggest beneficiary of the controversy that engulfed the first two years of the Trump presidency.
"The beauty of the Russia fable was that it allowed ... our ruling class to ignore the huge number of actual problems the United States faced, problems that in many cases they caused, or at the very least failed to solve," the "Tucker Carlson Tonight" host said.
"The drug addiction crisis that has killed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands over time. The border that is essentially open. A disappearing middle class, the core of our country. The rise of China, and then, of course, any number of counterproductive foreign wars that should have ended long ago."
"For three years, nobody in Washington talked about any of this," Carlson said. "In fact, failing to worry about Russia exclusively invited suspicion on you."
Carlson then turned to a newly declassified email written by Obama national security adviser Susan Rice regarding the investigation into her designated successor, Michael Flynn.
"Susan Rice, who seems smart -- she went to Stanford -- admitted later that she decided Michael Flynn was a Russian spy because he talked too much about China. 'That's what Russian spies do,'" Carlson said. "Now, Donald Trump was elected, no one thought he would be, precisely because he talked about issues like these, the ones that mattered.
"That was a massive threat. So they derailed to a large extent, his first term agenda using a hoax concocted by the administration he replaced."
The host claimed that "while our leaders in Washington wasted literally years accusing each other of working for [Vladimir] Putin, China grew more powerful."
"By the time this version of coronavirus spread west from Wuhan, China was calling many of the shots internationally. We didn't even know it until the crisis hit," Carlson said.
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The host said "China's tentacles extend almost everywhere in our society," including higher education, Hollywood and sports.
"All of this has changed our lives in profound ways," Carlson said. "But all of it happened with very little public notice. Why? Because the people making it possible didn't want to advertise it. They were getting very rich from it."