Tucker Carlson: The degradation of our people is the real American crisis

The COVID vaccines aren’t like other vaccines that you might be familiar with, so here are some things that we know about them. Unlike, say, the smallpox vaccine, which prevents you from getting smallpox, the COVID vaccines do not necessarily prevent you from getting COVID. The COVID vaccine does not prevent you from spreading COVID to other people. The long-term effects of the COVID vaccines are unknown, and at this point cannot be known. We do know the vaccines are many times less effective than natural immunity in protecting people, and close to 100 million Americans already have natural immunity. We know that in some cases, the COVID vaccines cause potentially fatal heart problems in the people who take them. 

One new study shows that teenaged boys are six times more likely to suffer cardiac damage from the shot than they are to be hospitalized with COVID itself. So it’s a mixed picture. That’s some of what we know about the COVID vaccines. And yet, these very same vaccines — which are far less effective than we were told they were initially, potentially dangerous for some, and completely unnecessary for tens of millions of others — are now, nevertheless, mandatory for virtually everyone in America. So why is that? Why exactly is that the policy? In his speech to the country last week, Joe Biden didn’t bother to explain why. Explanations are not necessary at this point. Your consent is no longer required. So instead, Joe Biden said this:

Joe Biden, Sept. 9: I'm announcing that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their workforces are Fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week. // We're going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers. // We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin and the refusal has cost all of us.

So that speech was on Thursday and it really was a pivot point. If you missed the speech, go back and watch it online. That address, Biden’s address, was the most divisive speech ever given by a modern American president. Virtually every sentence of the speech reinforced a single point again and again. And it was this: Your fellow Americans are dangerous to you. They could kill you. And that includes your family, it includes your friends, it includes the people you sit next to at work. All of these people are threats to you and only the Biden administration can save you. "We're going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers," that’s what the president said. 

Think about that for a moment. Does it make sense? If the vaccine works — and they assure us adamantly that it does work and they punish us if we question how well it works — then how can the unvaccinated possibly pose a threat to the vaccinated? How? What exactly is the risk exactly to the vaccinated from the unvaccinated? Joe Biden didn’t tell us the answer. He didn’t tell us because he doesn’t know. No one knows. There is no answer. The entire argument is transparently absurd. And once you realize that, you realize that none of this endless talking about public health, at this point, is really about public health. 

If it was about public health, the authorities would simply make vaccines available to anyone who wanted the vaccine, call it a victory, which it would be, and leave it there. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about power. These demands are so obviously irrational, that forcing you to accept them without complaint is the whole point of the exercise. It is a form of sadomasochism, it is dominance and submission. It’s about power. If they can make you take medicine you don’t want or need, they’ve won. You are theirs. You belong to them. They want this.

They want it enough that they’re willing to destroy the health care system in order to do it. And one of the many ironies from his speech – the very moment Joe Biden accused the unvaccinated of wrecking our hospital system, they’re going to flood the system – at that moment, actual hospitals around the country were beginning to deny critical services to patients because too many nurses had quit. Why did the nurses quit?  Because of the vaccine mandates. They left their jobs rather than get the COVID vaccine. 

Yesterday, to name one example, a hospital in New York stopped delivering babies. They can’t deliver babies because too many nurses have fled from the mandate. In California, the already third-world state of medicine has declined dramatically and become a full-blown crisis. California can’t hire nurses from out of state because too few will come because they don’t want the vaccine. One health care executive told Bloomberg News that only about half of his front-line nurses who treat COVID every day have received the COVID vaccination. The rest of those nurses have refused. Half! Again, these are people who treat COVID for a living. You can’t dismiss them as uninformed. They know virtually more than anyone in the world about this subject. But they’ve refused the vaccine. Why? No one’s answered that question and until recently, no one thought we’d have to answer that question. Because until recently, mandatory vaccines were unthinkable, even among Democrats. Watch these statements from just a few months ago.

Joe Biden, December: No, I don't think should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand it be mandatory, but I would do everything in my power. It's like I don't think masks have to be made mandatory nationwide. // Jen Psaki, July: Can we mandate vaccines across the country? No, that's not a role that the federal government, I think, even has the power to make // Nancy Pelosi, April: We cannot require someone to be vaccinated.  That's just not what we can do.  It is a matter of privacy to know who is or who isn't. // Anthony Fauci, August 2020: NO. Definitely not. You don’t want to mandate and try and force anyone to take a vaccine. We’ve never done that. // We don’t want to be mandating from the federal government to the general population. It would be unenforceable and not appropriate.

So things are changing so quickly that the population is becoming numb to what the state of affairs was just the other day. For a quick recap, a year ago they were telling you maybe you shouldn’t take the vaccine because Trump created it. A few months ago they were assuring you – Nancy Pelosi in April assured you – we’re never going to require vaccines because we can’t do that. We don’t have the power. Your medical status is a matter, a sacred matter, of privacy. Again, that was in April. On Thursday, they required vaccines. Here’s where we are today: 

Anthony Fauci: I would support that if you want to get on a plane and travel with other people that you should be vaccinated. // Dr. Jonathan Reinert (CNN): Flying on an airplane remains a hazard. No one knows the vaccination status of any of the fellow passengers. You're locked in this tube. And it's a privilege to travel. // Dr. Zeke Emanuel (CNN): There's more mandates I wish he would have given. // I think mandating vaccines, for air travel, train travel, or interstate bus travel, would also be important. // Leana Wen (CNN): There are privileges associated with being an American. That if you wish to have these privileges, you need to get vaccinated. Travel, and having the right to travel in our state, it’s not a constitutional right as far as I know to board a plane.

"If you wish to have these privileges, you need to get vaccinated." The person who said that, the last person in the montage we just played, is the former head of Planned Parenthood. Her name is Leana Wen. That’s quite a statement to make. So here you have a woman who moved to this country from China sitting authoritatively in a box on CNN, lecturing Americans that their most basic birthright — the right to travel within their own country, the country they were born in — is now, in fact, a privilege that the Democratic Party may decide to grant you if follow its demands. "Dr. Wen, may I have permission to drive my kids to school?" It’s pretty shocking if you think about it. How dare somebody say something like that out loud on television? What country is this? But more to the point, why doesn’t anyone in authority seem outraged by it? Possibly because a lot of them hope that’s our future.

Congressman Don Beyer of Northern Virginia — a fashionably radical car dealer from Arlington — has already introduced legislation in the House that would require vaccine passports for all domestic air travel in this country. Sound crazy? It’s just the first step, phase one of a much larger program. Once authoritarian measures like Don Beyer’s have made large numbers of otherwise law-abiding Americans desperate enough to use fake vaccine cards, then we’ll move to the next phase, and this will likely happen soon. You’ll start to hear about the dangerous epidemic of fake documents out there — "an epidemic that threatens the public health of this country.... Over to you, Wolf." Now, keep in mind that the term "fake" in this context will refer only to documents designed to evade scientifically unjustifiable and transparently partisan COVID regulations, the kinds we’re seeing everywhere. The forged documents that millions of foreign nationals use every day — to work illegally at, say, Don Beyer’s car dealerships in Arlington — those fake documents will get no mention at all. They will never, never be mentioned on CNN. Because those are the good kind of fake documents. Only racists complain about those fake documents. 

So within a short time, guaranteed, we will have another mass panic, this one about fake vaccination cards. And into this hysteria will step Fauci and Biden and Leana Wen and the rest of the power-grabbers in the political-media axis. And suddenly they will have the perfect solution to this terrifying new crisis of fake vaccine cards and the answer, needless to say, will be digital COVID passports. It’ll be so obvious: All your key personal health information, protected by your unique biometric signature, stored safely forever in the cloud. It’s perfect — it’s highly efficient. Only a Russian Q-Anon operative could oppose something so obviously good and essential to the public health. Just don’t forget to bring your fingerprints with you the next time you want to leave your house, or buy food, or fly on an airplane, or visit your children in college, or have a job, or get access to your checking account. Because Leana Wen is going to need to verify that you are following all of the rules. All of those things are privileges now. They’re not rights. They can be taken away. 

If that sounds like a fever dream or paranoia, rest assured it’s not. Without mass resistance, that’s exactly what’s coming, and it’s coming soon. And once it does come, the question is where does it go from there? In a moment of centralized tech surveillance, combined with mass social conformity, and that’s exactly the country we’re living in right now, there aren’t many limits to where it could go. 

If they can force you to take a vaccine that you don’t need, what can’t they do? Why don’t they, I don’t know, make you take psychiatric drugs if you’re persistently disobedient? Express the wrong view, get a Thorazine shot. Why couldn’t they do that? What’s the limiting principle on them? In fact, you can imagine a panel of CNN doctors explaining that we’d all be a lot safer if the mentally ill propagandists on the radical right got the treatment they need, and stopped spreading their dangerous conspiracy theories. So giving them psychotropic meds is an urgent matter of public health. Does that sound far-fetched? 

How about if these school therapists convince your 6-year-old to switch genders and accept chemical castration? At this point, why should you be able to able to stop that from happening? Why should you have any say at all? You’re not a doctor. You’re just a parent and you have no power. If you’re no longer in control of your own body — and thanks to the vaccine mandates, we’ve established that you’re not in control of your own body — what gives you the right to control your child’s body? It’s a good question. 

As Joe Biden himself told the country on Thursday, "This is not about freedom." And that’s true, it’s not about freedom. Keep in mind it wasn’t so long ago that authorities in this country forcibly sterilized and lobotomized American citizens against their will. Why? In the name of public health. And it wasn’t just a few people, by the way. It was a lot of people. So explain slowly so we can understand why that can’t happen again. Tell us why some version of that isn’t unfolding right now. 

Suddenly things are moving very fast, and they’re all moving in a very specific direction. Just the other day, one of the most prominent members of the United States Senate — the former Harvard Law professor called Elizabeth Warren — wrote a public letter to Amazon demanding the site ban books she disagrees with. So here you have a self-described liberal, who was a law professor at a premier law school, calling for book burning. Did you think you’d live to see that? The most amazing thing is that no one seemed to notice. 

Not that we can assure people noticed or not because at this point you can’t really know what average Americans think of anything because they’re no longer allowed to tell you. Express a forbidden opinion and you’re pulled off the internet, you could be fired. So there’s not a lot of incentive left to speak your mind in the United States. And yet occasionally you do get glimpses of what the public thinks, especially when large groups of people have had a few beers. Here’s something, for example, that’s been happening at sporting events recently:

Huge crowds at sporting events in Tennessee, Indiana and New York chanting "F*** Joe Biden"

Now you might agree with that or not but think about it for a second – It’s kind of a weird thing to chant at a game. Joe Biden’s not on the field so why are the fans swearing at Joe Biden? Well because they’re mad. What are they mad about? Maybe they know they’re being played. Maybe they know perfectly well that, no matter what Joe Biden and his minions say in public, COVID, as it is, isn’t even close to the greatest crisis this country actually faces right now. And neither is White supremacy, by the way, or the mullahs in Iran, or ISIS-K, or whatever bloated threat the industrial lie machine has manufactured this week for you to fear. 

Most people understand it’s all crap. And they know it’s crap because they live here. And they know the greatest crisis that America actually faces is the disintegration of America itself — and not just of the social fabric — what do we have in common again? — more than that. The physical reality of the country is disintegrating: the buildings, the natural landscape, and above all, the people. A lot of them are falling apart. 

Look around. Yes, Americans are dying in large numbers, but it’s not from a Chinese flu virus. The real dangers to the population are much more obvious than that and they’re omnipresent. It’s loneliness, it’s suicide, it’s fast food, it’s broken relationships, it’s Xanax and fentanyl, and cheap beer. Americans are dying in large numbers of self-inflicted deaths, caused by sadness and neglect. That is true. 

New video was shot in downtown Philadelphia not along ago, but it could have been in nearly any big city in America: Chicago or San Francisco or Seattle or New York or Washington, D.C. Pick one. And the video is not a secret. It has millions of hits on YouTube. And here’s the interesting thing. No one in Washington we’ve heard has mentioned it. That’s the real crisis that we face. It’s right in front of us. The walking dead, haunting our cities and forgotten rural towns. How did they get there? There are hundreds and hundreds of them just in Philadelphia — shuffling, moaning, shooting up, dying — all under daylight in a major American city. And by the way, right down the street from where our founding documents were written. 

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Imagine the selfless geniuses who framed our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, returning 250 years later to see what their country has become. So that is the actual crisis that we face; it’s the degradation of our people. But rather than fix it or care about it, which is the first step toward fixing it, they increase the degradation. 

Bow to our will or we’ll punish you. Violate your own beliefs. Give us your dignity. And the very moment when the American population desperately needs to be loved, helped, understood, uplifted, they are being degraded and punished by their leaders. How is that going to end?

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the Sept. 13, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."