Tucker: This is America, not a 'third-world hell hole'
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host says rise in crime can be blamed on bad leadership across the country
A year ago this month, a University of Chicago economics professor called Harold Uhlig questioned the wisdom of defunding the police. Uhlig is German by birth and a macroeconomist by trade. He’s a fairly rational person. It struck him that maybe a functioning society might want to have police around from time to time — so that, say, old ladies don’t get beaten on the way to the grocery store, and fewer people get shot to death. The basics. That seemed reasonable to him. Unfortunately for Uhlig, in the weeks after George Floyd’s death, rational thinking of any kind had been prohibited. Nothing true could be said out loud—the truer it is, the more forbidden it is. The Federal Reserve of Chicago promptly fired Uhlig from his job as an advisor, and then they went online and attacked him for his support of police as quote, "not compatible with our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion." All of which require no police apparently.
Then the University of Chicago—his employer—began an investigation into Uhlig’s racial views which went on for some time. Janet Yellen, then the chairman of the Fed and now the secretary of the Treasury, denounced Uhlig, effectively, as a racist. "Defund the police! We’ll be safer if we do." That’s what they were saying a year ago, everyone in charge. It was lunacy — and precisely because it was lunacy, no one was allowed to disagree with it.
Here’s the formula: The more self-evidently absurd a statement is, the more viciously they attack anyone who points out that it’s untrue, who dissents. "Trans women are women!" "January sixth was a racist insurrection!" "Defund the police!" It’s childish, it’s all so ridiculous and no sane person believes a word of it. But until the fever of the moment passes, most people who have no power feel obligated to play along with whatever orthodoxy it is until reality re-emerges, as inevitably it does because you can’t beat nature.
That may be happening now. The White House announced today that, on Wednesday, Biden will outline a new plan to fight rising crime rates that are skyrocketing and body counts that accompany them. We haven’t seen the plan, we can’t know what’s in it, the White House won’t tell us. But we have two fairly informed guesses. First, there will be no apologies.
You won’t hear Joe Biden beg forgiveness from the thousands of families whose loved ones have been killed by the Democratic Party’s nihilistic embrace of crime and disorder. Looting is reparations, you go looters! They should apologize for that, they never will. The leftist ideology destroyed America’s cities but they will never under any circumstances admit it. Instead, they’ll blame you, that’s guaranteed.
The second guess is this: whatever Democrats propose to fix the problems they created will, in the end, make them more powerful. See that? They create a problem and the solution empowers them. That’s always the way it goes. So with that in mind, we expect Joe Biden to remind us on Wednesday who the real criminals are, who the threat is: They’re people who didn’t vote for Joe Biden. Or as Biden puts it: They’re white supremacists.
BIDEN 2/4: We've taken steps to acknowledge and address systemic racism and the scourge of white supremacy in our own country (edit) BIDEN: 1/26: And yes, forcing us to confront systemic racism and white supremacy. It's just been weeks since all of America witnessed a group of thugs, insurrectionists, a political extremist and white supremacist violently attack the capital of our democracy. (edit) BIDEN: 1/26: I believe we are in a battle for the soul of this nation and the simple truth is our soul will be troubled as long as systemic racism is allowed to persist.
Yes, White supremacy is America’s biggest problem. As we’ve noted many times before, we still don’t know, despite fervent efforts to find out, what a white supremacist is. The White House has never told us. They have refused. As of tonight, It’s a term without a definition. They should send it to us, we would read it on the air. And yet, they scream, it’s the greatest threat we face. Because we are highly literal on this show, we went looking for the numbers. Are there numbers to prove that? They’re busy trying to create them right now. Researchers are the University of Maryland run something called the "Global Terrorism Database." Some of the data they produce are clearly political. They count the Parkland school shooting as an act of white supremacist violence—it wasn’t. There’s no evidence but they say it anyway. But even with the inflated numbers, the researchers could find fewer than 70 people in the entire country who died from white supremacist violence between 2015 and 2019. Of course, it’s too many—any death is too many. But, for some perspective, more people die every year from lightning strikes, literally. So, no, white supremacist violence—as bad as it may be—is not a major threat.
What’s at the top of the list? Crime. There’s no second place on that list. In the year 2019 alone, there were more than 10,000 arrests for murder in this country. By the way, there were more murders than that, but 10,000 were arrested. In 2020, more than 750 people were murdered just in the city of Chicago. We can say with some confidence the overwhelming majority of those suspects in the city of Chicago were not practicing white supremacists. How do we know this? Well in some cases, there’s video.
This show has obtained exclusive surveillance footage of a shooting this weekend on Chicago's Northwest side, shortly after the Puerto Rican Day Parade. You may have seen an abbreviated version of this on social media today.
The full version is on your screen right now, taken from a CCTV camera in the city of Chicago. As you watch this, ask yourself, what country is that? It’s America. It’s not some third-world hell hole—it’s not Haiti. It’s a major street in your third-largest city. A couple with a Puerto Rican flag waving from their car—apparently minding their own business--is ambushed by a mob and shot execution-style, right in the road. The men who shot them take off. Maybe the worst part, the victims just lie there bleeding. No one comes to help.
What country is this? Who’s running the place? And why haven’t we brought those people up on felony neglect charges? They deserve it. If we accept a country where things like this happen then we are the savages. Joe Biden does accept it. He hasn’t said a word about that shooting and he won’t because there are no white supremacists to blame. It’s one crime he’ll never mention:
FOX 32 REPORTER: Here’s [video] of the horrific altercation. The brother who didn’t want to be identified says his brother had rear-ended a parked car. After that, a group of up to 6 men inside of that car jumped out, starting attacking them and also throwing up gang signs. //24-year-old Gyovanni Arzuaga was shot in the head, hip, and thigh. He died at St. Mary’s hospital. His wife, 23-year-old Yasmin Perez was shot in the neck and remains in critical condition.
That wasn't the only shooting this weekend in Chicago far from it. In Chicago -- a city which, by the way, just banned its police officers from chasing many suspects on foot In all, a total of 54 people were shot this weekend. And it’s not just Chicago. Chicago gets a lot of attention but it’s not constrained. In New York -- where the geniuses also defunded the police -- surveillance footage shows two children were nearly shot to death on Thursday in the middle of an attempted murder in the middle of the day:
NewsNation/Pix 11 pkg REPORTER: This disturbing surveillance video shows a gunman firing his weapon at a 24-year-old man, inches away from two young children. Brother and sister ages 10 and five. It happened in broad daylight while kids were walking to his bodega before they were caught in the middle of this. You can see the sister trying to shield her younger brother. With her own body.
Normal people who watch that would say to themselves, whatever we are doing we have to change them. You can’t have things like that. Innocent people are getting killed. And we can’t have that in a civilized society. This is a decent country and the one thing you can’t allow is that.
In New York, the city is holding its mayoral primary tomorrow—which is essentially the election because it’s a Democratic-run city—fewer than 20 percent of New Yorkers would like to see fewer cops on the streets. So most people aren’t for that at all because it’s insane. People in charge apparently haven’t noticed. New York may still change its approach in the wrong direction. Just days ago, officials in New York announced they were dropping charges against hundreds of rioters and looters who were arrested last year. So you wreck the city and you’re not punished.
It’s scary, but it’s not as scary as the attitudes displayed in this clip. This really gets you asking deep questions about the future of our country. This is from Oakland, California. Several people were shot -- and one died -- during Juneteenth celebrations this weekend. That’s bad. But the worst part is how the people in the neighborhood reacted. They didn't seem bothered at all. Here’s how they responded to the ambulance when it arrived:
Video of local people twerking on the arriving ambulance
Last week we showed you the footage of people in Chicago dancing on the police cruiser. Now we have that: sociopaths celebrating a shooting by twerking. What kind of society produces people like that? Who would behave like that? Do you know anyone who would behave like that? When you see people behave like that you have to ask yourself—what is society doing wrong? Is it no fathers, is it the schools? Who knows what the answer is, but if we’re not trying to find the answer, there's going to be guaranteed more of it. Anybody who celebrates a shooting is not someone we want to share a country with. So we should fix that. Is there a more important task? Probably not.
Instead, our irresponsible, low-IQ political leaders patronize us with the same mindless talk about gun control and assault weapons. Like AR-15s are the problem and not our political class which is clearly the problem. This is the mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot featured in a local news report:
April 2021, WFLD REPORTER: Tuesday, little Cayden Swan (21-month-old) was shot on Lake Shore Drive. 18 others were shot. Five of them died (edit) Wednesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said part of the issue is gun control LIGHTFOOT: If you can go over the border in Indiana and literally buy military-grade weapons at any quantity REPORTER: CPD numbers show that crime is up. This time last year, there were 521 people shot. Now that number is 743
It’s tiresome even to repeat it here but again because we are literal and connected to physical reality, we feel honor-bound to tell you once more something that Lori Lightfoot of course knows herself, virtually every gun crime in the of Chicago is committed with a handgun, not with an AR-15. Why is she focused on assault weapons? Because the people who own assault weapons don’t live in Chicago and did not vote for her. So she would be happy to disarm them and the Biden administration feels the same way. That’s why in March the White House lawyers argued before the Supreme Court of the United States and the development that didn’t get the attention it deserved, that police should be able to enter the homes of law-abiding citizens and seize their firearms. No judge involved. Neither is any finding of mental impairment or threat of violence or any of that. Your means of self-defense belongs to the Biden administration.
This will not solve crime, it will only disarm you. The real problems here have nothing to do with the weapons used and nothing to do with the race of people committing the crimes and it’s not a Black person problem, not a White person problem, it’s not White supremacists, it’s not Black supremacists--it’s bad leadership of the people in charge and it’s on display all around us.
Prosecutors, many of them funded by one man, George Soros refusing to enforce the law. In the city Philadelphia, for example, where George Soros helped elect Larry Krasner as D.A. -- arrests are hitting record levels, but convictions are dropping. In other words, the cops are doing their part and the prosecutors are refusing to do theirs. The city is now on pace to far exceed its homicide rate from 30 years ago. 1990 was the previous record high and there are about to beat it.
What happens when prosecutors do enforce the law and target the people committing the crimes? That’s the way the country used to work and by the way, it works and we have new academic research to show that.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton found that gang takedowns by cops explain nearly a quarter of all reduction of gun violence in the housing projects in New York City after 2011. In other words, You go after the people you know are committing the crimes and then you’ve got a lot less crime.
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The gangs are committing the crimes in these cities, particularly in Chicago, so Joe Biden is serious about protecting children from being murdered on the street or people at the Puerto Rican day parade next to their car. He would go after the gangs. But he’s probably not going to do that on Wednesday.
He’s also not going to say a word about prosecutors like Larry Krasner funded by his friend George Soros calling them to enforce the law, no. We also don’t think he’s going to call and criminals to stop twerking on ambulances in Oakland or police cars in Chicago—those are Biden voters. The people they’re going to target on Wednesday are the ones who don’t support him and far from the collapsing cities—in other words, it’s your fault. He’ll tell you that, you watch.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the June 21, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."