Tucker Carlson: The point of this is to suppress political dissent
Fox News host shreds Democrats for politicizing the anniversary of 9/11 and weighs in the Biden administration's alleged targeting of political opponents after the Jan. 6 riot on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Yesterday marked the 21st anniversary of 9/11. That was, as you know, the single deadliest terror attack in all recorded history. If you're over 30, you did not need to be reminded. You remember it vividly. 9/11 changed America completely and changed it forever. Nothing has been the same here since, especially the relationship between Americans and their government.
A decade ago, the New York Times admitted this. The Times marked the anniversary of 9/11 by publishing a piece on the rise of domestic surveillance abuses, which exploded after the 9/11 attacks. The Patriot Act, according to the New York Times, "quickly became a sort of shorthand for government abuse and overreaching," which "inflicted collateral damage on political dissent, religious liberty and the freedom of association." That is still true, in fact, truer than it's ever been, and it is still a tragedy.
What's fascinating is that The New York Times has stopped acknowledging it. In fact, remarkably, there was not a single mention of the 9/11 anniversary on the front page of yesterday's paper, the paper that purports to represent New York, the epicenter of the 9/11 attacks. Now, why would the New York Times ignore 9/11? Well, good question, because The New York Times and the tiny leadership class it panders to and in fact represents now wholeheartedly endorses the nationwide crackdown on civil liberties that 9/11 made possible and why wouldn't they endorse it? They're benefiting from it. It's how they keep power. So, for them, in retrospect, 9/11 was less a tragedy than it was an opportunity and if you don't believe that, watch how Joe Biden, the president of the United States, commemorated that anniversary yesterday.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: It's not enough to gather and remember September 11, those we lost more than two decades ago, because on this day, it is not about the past. It's about the future. We have an obligation, a duty, a responsibility to defend, preserve and protect our democracy.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a rally hosted by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at Richard Montgomery High School on August 25, 2022 in Rockville, Maryland. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
It's not about the past. It's about the future. This was in a speech that was supposed to mark the anniversary of the deaths of thousands of Americans at the hands of foreign adversaries. So, when Joe Biden speaks about the future, you should listen. The future of what? Don't focus on the dead. Focus on what I want to do. OK, but what is it that Joe Biden wants to do? Fight Islamic terrorism? No. Protect democracy. But what exactly is this democracy that Joe Biden speaks of? Why won't he define it ever? And how exactly is that democracy imperiled? These are pivotal questions and for answers, we're going to turn to the source. That would be Chuck Todd of NBC News when practice is a slightly more articulate version of Biden publicist Karine Jean-Pierre.
If you want to know what the Biden administration is really thinking, listen to the guy with the comb over in the anchor chair at NBC. Here is his exchange with Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president yesterday.
CHUCK TODD: Not quite 20 years after 9/11, the Capitol came under attack from domestic terrorists. I began by asking the vice president about how over two decades our focus has had to shift from foreign terror to the threat from within.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I think it is very dangerous and I think it is very harmful and it makes us weaker. So, you look at everything from the fact there are 11 people right now running for secretary of state, the keepers of the integrity of the voting system of their state who are election deniers. You've got.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris smiles during her speech at the NAACP National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, U.S. July 18, 2022. (Reuters/Hannah Beier)
TODD: And what's that sending? What message does that send to the world?
HARRIS: Well, you couple that with people who hold some of the highest elected offices in our country who refuse to condemn an insurrection on January 6.
So, you're slack-jawed watching something like this. Did I just see that? And I'm quoting "I began by asking the vice president about how over two decades our focus has had to shift from foreign terror to the threat within." The threat within? What does that mean? What the hell are you talking about, you freaking lunatic? There is no group of Americans anywhere in the United States half as dangerous as the 9/11 hijackers. To suggest otherwise is literally insane. Drawing a parallel between the election justice protests of January 6 and the fall of the Twin Towers – true lunacy, but Kamala Harris didn't even pause, almost like the whole question was a setup. She just nodded. This unspecified internal threat, she confirmed, is in fact, just like Al-Qaeda, "very dangerous and very harmful."
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You may be wondering at this point, what is this threat since we've just declared a new war on terror, but against whom? Who is the threat? Well, of course, it's you and anyone else in the way of the Biden administration, and especially as the vice president just said and you saw it, anyone who questions the legitimacy of the last election, but wait a second, you ask, didn't Kamala Harris herself call the 2016 presidential election illegitimate? Your memory is not failing. Yes, she did and so did every leader of the Democratic Party and they will say the same to this day and yet she is telling us, the sitting vice president, that anyone who questions the 2020 election should be in jail. Watch.
TODD: What is a semi-fascist?
HARRIS: Listen, I think that when we, let's not get caught up in politicizing the fact that most people in America know that it is not helpful to our country when we have people who are denying elections or trying to obstruct the outcome of an election where the largest number of people in our country voted for the president of the United States and when we look at where we are, I think that we have to admit that there are attacks from within to your first question and we need to take it seriously.
So again, that's the sitting vice president who they tell us over and over—and you just heard her say it—received more votes than any vice president in history and if you don't believe that (and there are reasons not to believe that) if you don't believe that, you're like Mohamed Atta, your beliefs are acts of terror. You're comparable to a mass murderer and you need to be pursued by law enforcement. They're saying that. She just said the greatest threat to our country is that Republicans might be elected to statewide office in 11 states. That's comparable to 9/11. Is no one noticing this? The Biden administration's message, and of course, as it always is, completely consistent across the board on 9/11, on the anniversary of 911, was that any American who disapproves of Joe Biden's performance is a terrorist. Here's the DHS Secretary Mayorkas:
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HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: The threat landscape has evolved considerably over the last 20 years. We are seeing an emerging threat, of course, over the last several years of the domestic violent extremists, the individual here in the United States radicalized to violence by a foreign terrorist ideology, but also an ideology of hate, anti-government sentiment, false narratives propagated on online platforms, even personal grievances.
Is no one paying attention to this? Does no one see this happening? That's the DHS secretary saying that opinions he doesn't agree with expressed online, which most of us thought were constitutionally protected, in fact, we thought that was the whole reason we lived here. That's why this is a different nation from, say, Iran, but the fact that people have different political opinions, including about the last election, Stacey Abrams has spent the last five years saying she's the rightful governor of Georgia, we think she's a lunatic. We also believe that view is constitutionally protected. There's the DHS secretary saying those people are Al-Qaeda. This is terrifying and it's not just words. They're acting and they're acting at scale. It was just a few weeks ago, on Thursday, September 1, two months before the midterm elections, not an incidental fact that Joe Biden declared his political opponents enemies of the state. You remember it. Here's a clip:
BIDEN: Too much of what's happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. We're all called by duty and conscience to confront extremists who put their own pursuit of power above all else. Democrats, Independents, mainstream Republicans, we must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to destroying American democracy.
So, the upside of having a senile president is that no one takes him very seriously and so it's possible for the rest of us to see something like that, a declaration of war on an entire political party in a two-party system, which would leave this, if we were to follow his urging, a one-party state. It's very easy to dismiss that as the ramblings of a man who has no idea what he's saying and a lot of people did and yet the very next day, the morning after Joe Biden delivered that speech at 8:30 a.m, a woman called Lisa Gallagher was sick in bed at her home in suburban New Jersey.
Her daughter came upstairs and told her that the FBI was waiting outside. Now, Lisa Gallagher is not a criminal, never has been. She is an active Trump supporter, particularly on Facebook. She did Trump (flag on her lawn). She's a patriotic American. She describes herself as a rule follower. She's never once been in trouble with the law at any level, and she had nothing whatsoever to do with January 6 and yet, outside her door with three FBI agents with guns. "We got an anonymous tip you were at the Capitol on January 6." That's what they said. Gallagher was terrified. "I thought they were going to take me out of here in handcuffs," she told the show this morning.
Ultimately, her husband came home and the two of them showed the FBI agents her daily calendars from January of 2021 and finally convinced the agents that she was not at the Capitol that day. Imagine armed FBI agents showing up at your house because you supported Trump on Facebook and demanding records of your whereabouts on a date nearly two years ago and of course, the FBI already knew that Lisa Gallagher was not there because they have sophisticated facial recognition software, so they were never planning to arrest her. The point (and this is a theme in every authoritarian regime), the point was to use government agents to intimidate enemies of the regime on the basis of an anonymous tip. "I have never been so frightened in my life," Lisa Gallagher said.
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The rest of us should feel the same way. Snitches? Anonymous snitches? The secret police showing up at your door when you're in bed? This is Soviet and there's no other word for it. But it's not just Lisa Gallagher. The same thing is happening to dozens, maybe scores of other supporters of the former president.
Amy Kremer, for example, is a former Tea Party member and a candidate for the House of Representatives. She also obtained special permits for the National Park Service, which authorized Donald Trump's rally on January 6, 2021. To be perfectly clear, Amy Kremer never went to the Capitol on that day. She never encouraged anyone else to go, either. But for the crime of organizing a lawful political event, an election justice rally protected by the Constitution, Amy Kremer is now being terrorized by Merrick Garland's DOJ.
On Wednesday morning, FBI agents showed up at her home, first at the home of her ex-husband, carrying a subpoena for her daughter Kylie. Kremer received a call from Kylie's stepmother saying, "The FBI is here for her." The FBI subpoenaed demands, all communications from Amy Kremer and Kylie, including their social media posts (what) from October 1st, 2020 to the present day.
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Now, why would the FBI, Joe Biden's FBI need Amy Kremer’s daughter's Instagram posts? Because this isn't about the events leading up to January 6. Obviously, it's about mining all of her personal information. This is harassment on political grounds. It's illegal. It's unconstitutional. It shocks the conscience of everyone who sees it, but the number of people who see it is very small because it is not covered by any media and it's not just happening to Amy Kremer. This show has obtained a subpoena from Merrick Garland's DOJ issued in the past week and what it demands is both unlawful and without precedent in American history. The subpoena claims to be investigating, "any claim that the vice president and/or president of the Senate had the authority to reject or choose not to count presidential electors."
Now keep in mind that any claim you make as an American citizen about electors, any claim you make about American politics, period, is protected explicitly under the First Amendment. That's our core freedom. It's why we live here. It's why we're proud to be Americans. It's why so many American servicemen died protecting our country. Those are the freedoms that they fought to preserve. That's why nobody prosecuted leading Democrats in 2016 when they sought to reject electors for Donald Trump. Right. It's why none of those people, including Kamala Harris, is now in jail.
But right now, according to the subpoena that we have obtained, Merrick Garland's DOJ is demanding all communication from the following people on this topic and let's be clear before we read their names, that it is not clear what the investigation is actually about and that's the most terrifying part.
What is this? On what grounds are you demanding my private communications with people? They never say but included in this precedent-breaking sweep of political opponents of the Biden White House would be former White House adviser Bernie Kerik, who was the former police commissioner of New York City; Boris Epshteyn, who is the current attorney for Donald Trump (At no time in American history has it been okay to grab the personal communications of someone's lawyer because those are privileged. Not anymore.) Matt Morgan; Justin Clark; Kenneth Chesebro and Mike Roman; RNC official Joshua Findlay; Trump Attorneys John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Joe DiGenova, James Troupis, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Victoria Toensing, Cleta Mitchell, and Bruce Marks. We could go on and on and on and on.
The DOJ is now going after former White House official Stephen Miller, a frequent guest on this show, with a subpoena. Why? Well, it could be because Stephen Miller went on this network and said, "If we win these cases in the courts, then we can direct the alternate state of electors are certified."
In other words, he didn't call for the insurrection, much less violence or a coup. He called for alternate electors to be seated if the court ordered them to be seated. In other words, he was following the constitutionally prescribed process post-election. He's doing what is supposed to do. He was following the rules, but under Joe Biden, that apparently is now a crime. By the way, every one of these people has to hire lawyers to defend him or herself and a lot of them at this point, after two years of harassment by Joe Biden, can't afford it.
In addition, we should say, we've obtained the subpoena, this subpoena goes on to demand the communications from dozens of other Republicans and people who have spoken to them, including State Representative Jake Hoffman in Arizona, Republican National Committee member Kathleen Berden in Michigan, former U.S. Representative Lou Barletta in the state of Pennsylvania and Republican State Party Secretary James DeGraffenreid in Nevada, among dozens and dozens of others.
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So, what is this about? It can't possibly be about January 6, the fake insurrection, the only insurrection in history with no guns, the insurrection in which the only person shot to death was a Trump supporter. No, the point of this is to suppress political dissent, to hobble an entire political party and to keep any of these people from ever participating in American politics again and by the way, the cost to each one of these individuals or to any person at whose house the FBI shows up is enormous. Ask anybody you saw the FBI showed up with guns at their home what that's like. By accusing these people of insurrection for asking questions about electors by comparing them to Confederate soldiers, Merrick Garland's DOJ plans to disenfranchise them if not jail them. Really?
So, prohibit people from participating in American politics in the name of democracy? Too ironic to be real? Oh, it's real. It Just happened in New Mexico. A state judge in New Mexico just removed an elected county commissioner from office, overturning the will of the voters. Why? Because he had dared to exercise his constitutional rights by participating in the election justice protest on January 6. So, this is a full-blown political purge. That's not a talking point. It is not in any sense a conspiracy theory. It's completely real and it began shortly after January 6 when Republicans, as usual, just as they were after the death of George Floyd, were so blown back, so intimidated by the aggression of the rhetoric from the other side that they let it happen.
And because they let it happen, as with the BLM riots, its effects are accelerating now. So, if you're accused of supporting Joe Biden's political opponents, you could be visited by armed agents from Joe Biden's FBI. As you reported last year in our documentary, which was mocked, turned out to be prescient, it has happened to people living as far away as remote Homer, Alaska.
PAUL HEUPER: It really felt like it was a violation of our space, definitely, to have people barge in uninvited. We gladly would have sat down and had a cup of tea with them went, "Okay, what do you need?" You have to tear my door down. You don't have to terrorize me with guns and handcuffs and all of that.
MARILYN HEUPER: I turn around, they cut me with my hands behind my back and put me in a chair.
PAUL HEUPER: Initially, they would not present a search warrant.
MARILYN HEUPER: And then we ask, "What is this about?"
PAUL HEUPER: What are you doing inside my house with guns and handcuffs?
MARILYN HEUPER: It never occurred to me they would actually think we had anything to do with anything inside the Capitol because we never made it inside the Capitol.
So, why is this happening? Because no one pushed back against it. Why did the lunatics get to defund the police, something that no normal person supported, the overwhelming majority of Americans never supported them, but they did it anyway. How did they get to do that? Because there is no opposition, no one pushed back. George Floyd died. They started screaming, calling everyone a racist and everyone just obeyed their most ludicrous demands.
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January 6 is exactly the same thing. "It was an insurrection. It was a racist insurrection." No, it wasn't. What are you talking about? No one said that. No one pushed back at all. So, it got completely out of control, and at this point, it's not just a threat to the Republican Party. On one level, a lot of conservatives say, "Well, who cares? Mitch McConnell is inconvenienced? No one cares."
That's not what it's about. It's a threat to the American system. This kind of behavior, politicized federal law enforcement, is a threat to democracy. It's a threat to the system we live under. It's a threat to everything we have that's valuable. We cannot allow this, but no one's even mentioning it.