Tucker: Maxine Waters believes in mob violence for political ends
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host explains how the left relies on 'intimidation' to get what it wants
Closing arguments in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin's murder trial concluded Monday. Now, Americans have heard quite a bit about George Floyd over the last year and formed their own opinions, but most still cannot say with any specificity just how he died. That, of course, is the essence of the whole story, how Floyd died. So the closing arguments are a chance to assess actual evidence in the case. You would think that would be good news -- more facts, which we could always use.
But no, said the media, facts no longer matter, not when BLM's founding myth is at stake. Evidence only counts in countries that have due process, something that they are now telling us is an ugly relic of institutional racism. When unpopular people seem guilty, you just go ahead and punish them. That's the new rule. Years ago, we called this lynching. Now we call it equity.
CNN's chief legal analyst, a Princeton graduate called Laura Coates, explained this Monday morning on Twitter.
"Defense begins the closing by defining reasonable doubt, not with why #DerekChauvin is innocent," she tweeted. "Think about that."
Well, as it happens, we have thought about that. We've thought about it because that is the core principle of our entire justice system in the United States. You are not required to prove your innocence. That's China. In the United States, the government has to prove your guilt. If they can't prove your guilt, they have to let you go. That's the American system. There's no other system that you would want to live under, but then you're not Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.
Waters has never believed in Western justice. For decades, she supported the totalitarian government of Cuba, which replaced jury trials with summary mass executions of entire groups of people. That was fine with Maxine Waters. She's never had a problem with killing political enemies. Waters is now among the most powerful Democrats in Congress. Over the weekend, she traveled to Minneapolis to make certain the mob outside the Chauvin trial understood its marching orders.
WATERS, APRIL 17: We've got to not only stay in the street, but we've got to fight for justice. But I am very hopeful and I hope that we're going to get a verdict that will say, 'Guilty, guilty, guilty' ... I don't know whether it's in the first degree, but as far as I'm concerned, it's first-degree murder ... We've got to stay on the street and we've got to get more active. We've got to get more confrontational. We've got to make sure that they know that we mean business.
"We've got to make sure they know we mean business," she said. That couldn't be clearer. "Do what we say or we'll kill you." That's the message. Maxine Waters doesn't have much use for those Anglo-Saxon civic traditions, like jury trials. Her demand was very clear. Convict Officer Derek Chauvin of first-degree murder or we will burn it down.
No one asked the question: Is Chauvin actually guilty of first-degree murder? The answer is that you may believe he committed a crime, and he may have. But no honest person who has watched the trial would tell you he is guilty of first-degree murder. Saying that, claiming that, is not a rational, evidence-based position, no matter who you voted for in the last election. And no matter what you think of George Floyd, in a fair system, no jury would convict Chauvin of first-degree murder. But again, Maxine Waters doesn't believe in the system, the one that she helps run. So she's demanding a first degree murder conviction.
What is this called? It's called jury intimidation. Inside the courtroom, Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill got that message. Cahill is not a right-winger (he once worked for Sen. Amy Klobuchar), but he knows a threat when he sees one.
CAHILL, MONDAY: I'm aware of the media reports, I'm aware that Congresswoman Waters was talking specifically about this trial and about the unacceptability of anything less than a murder conviction and talk about being confrontational, but you can submit the press articles about that. This goes back to what I've been saying from the beginning. I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that is disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch and our function. I think if they want to give their opinions, they should do so in a respectful [way] and in a manner that is consistent with their oath to the Constitution to respect a coequal branch of government. Their failure to do so, I think, is abhorrent.
Maxine Waters did not speak in a vacuum and Judge Cahill wasn't the only person who heard what she said. Just hours after Maxine Waters called for violence, someone tried to murder two National Guardsmen in Minneapolis in a drive-by shooting. Until just recently, people bragged about the gentle niceness of Minnesota. Not anymore. Last week, the then-police chief in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center described how his officers were attacked by Biden voters who'd been egged on by demagogues.
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TIM GANNON: I was front and center at the protest, at the --
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Don't do that. There was no riot.
GANNON: There was. So, I was-- We were being-- The officers that were putting themselves in harm's way were being pelted with frozen cans of pop. They're being pelted with concrete blocks.
That was the scene in Minnesota before Maxine Waters showed up to demand more violence. For the second time in less than a year, BLM is burning the state of Minnesota. Maxine Waters knew that when she showed up, and that's why, according to documents obtained by Townhall.com, she demanded government bodyguards on her way to Minneapolis. "Police escort In & Out," reads her request.
It's almost hard to process facts like these. Calling for violence even as you demand that taxpayers protect you from the violence? Calling for whipping a dangerous mob into a frenzy at the very same moment you are trying to eliminate the police and then disarm the population through gun control? What is that? Well, it's totalitarian and we should be honest about it.
Too often, Republicans waste time highlighting the hypocrisy of the left. Is BLM more dangerous than the fake insurrectionists who showed up at the Capitol on Jan. 6? Well, yeah, obviously. Is Maxine Waters greater of guilty of greater incitement than Donald Trump? Well, of course, but that's not the point. People like Maxine Waters don't care if you point out that they're hypocrites. They don't care if you catch them lying. You're wasting your breath. They are not ashamed, and hey never will be ashamed.
So how do you respond to people like this? Well, the only thing you can do is tell the truth about who they are. Maxine Waters is someone who supports mob violence. She always has supported it. We have known this for decades. Almost 30 years ago, when race riots leveled huge parts of Los Angeles, Maxine Waters cheered them on.
"People want to know why I'm not saying exactly what they want me to say," she said at the time. "They want me to walk out in Watts, like [B]lack people did in the '60s, and say, 'Cool it, baby, cool it.' ... Well, I'm sorry. The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, riot is the voice of the unheard."
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Fifty-eight people were killed during those riots in 1992. Many more were seriously injured. One of those most seriously injured was a man called Reginald Denny, who was beaten nearly to death and left with permanent brain damage. Why? Because he looked the wrong way. He had the wrong color. A mob pulled him out of his truck and smashed his skull with a cinderblock. It happened on camera. If you haven't seen it, here it is.
How could you watch that and not feel sick? No normal person could, but Maxine Waters defended the men who did that. The ringleader of the mob who pulled Reginald Denny out of his truck was a man called Damian Williams. The day that the jury was set to deliver a verdict in the Williams case, Maxine Waters visited Damian Williams's home and offered her support. "We have an opportunity for justice to prevail," Waters said. In the end, Williams served only a short part of his sentence. He was released from prison, then went on to murder someone else.
Waters paid no price for any of this this. She kept rising in the Democratic hierarchy. No one told her to stop inciting violence, So naturally she did. In 2018, she called for mobs to attack Trump supporters.
WATERS: And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they're not welcome.
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These aren't aberrations. This is a decades-long theme. What do we conclude from it? The obvious: Maxine Waters doesn't believe in the Western understanding of justice or self-government. She believes in mob violence for political ends. That's why she's been calling for it for decades. How has the Democratic Party responded to this? Maxine Waters is now the chairman of one of the most powerful committees in the entire Congress, the House Financial Services Committee. Maxine Waters oversees Wall Street. That was her reward.
Now, you're hearing Republicans call for Maxine Waters to lose her chairmanship or be expelled from the Congress. Those are obviously worthy goals, but let's not lie to ourselves. That's not going to happen. Leading Democrats aren't going to punish Maxine Waters because they're not embarrassed to Maxine Waters. Because they agree with Maxine Waters. A CNN reporter asked Nancy Pelosi Monday if Maxine Waters should apologize for what she said, for whipping the mob into violence.
"No." Pelosi said, "Maxine talks about confrontation in the manner of the civil rights movement." (What an insult, by the way, to the actual civil rights movement.) Then she was asked if Maxine Waters' comments might violence, Pelosi said this: "No, absolutely not."
In the face of that grotesque display, silence from the Democratic Party's usual moral chorus. The Lincoln Project, which tells you it so deeply cares about democracy, is not running ads against Maxine Waters. Obviously, David Frum hasn't scolded her in The Atlantic, and he's not going to. The Washington Post doesn't seem to care.
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Why is that? Why aren't they saying anything? Beause, obviously, they support Maxine Waters. They either think her calls for violence are justified, or at least they're afraid to say otherwise, which is a distinction without a difference. The sooner we understand it, the better. Below is an excerpt from a show called "Burn it Down with Kim Brown." You can get it on iTunes or you can watch it on any number of social media platforms, none of which has even considered censoring it. As you watch, ask yourself how much influence should something like this have over the country where your family lives?
KIM BROWN, APRIL 13: For the record, I support all that s---. I support them looting the damn Dollar Tree. I support the looting of ... Advance Auto Parts. I remember last year they looted Target. I support all that s---. All that s---. Do you know why? Because Black people and marginalized and oppressed people could loot every store in this whole f---ing country for 200 f---ing years and it would not even come close to the debt that America owes us ... Tear all that s--t up. Tear it up. Because really, that's the language, that's the only language this country understands.
"Tear it up," she says. Burn it down. How are the people in charge responding to this? We're pretty sure the FBI isn't at Kim Brown's house tonight? We're confident that "60 Minutes" isn't planning some extensive hit piece on her. Those are reserved for Florida governors. In America's many newsrooms, Kim Brown is not considered a threat to anyone. She's considered an ally.
Who's the threat? It's people who didn't vote for Joe Biden. They must be hounded into submission by the American news media.
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Here's the latest example: a few days ago, an ABC reporter in Utah brought a TV camera to the home of a paramedic -- just a paramedic, not anyone with power, a guy who helps injured people. The TV crew showed up because this paramedic had made the mistake of donating $10 to Kyle Rittenhouse's legal defense fund. The website was hacked and the paramedic's donation became public. So ABC Local in Utah decided to destroy the paramedic's life and put his family in peril. He stepped out of line. That's not allowed.
Few outside of Utah seemed to notice this, just as no one outside of Stillwater, Minnesota, seemed to notice when a mob showed up at the home of the county attorney there. The mob demanded more charges filed in the case of that cop who accidentally shot someone last week. They didn't petition the court to get new charges. They went right to physical threats. That used to be very rare in this country. When it happened, we clamped down on it hard. Now no one's clamping down on it, so, of course, it's happening more often.
This weekend, another mob came to a home they thought belonged to one of the witnesses in Derek Chauvin's defense. They smeared pig blood all over the house. What do you call that? Well, it's textbook witness intimidation. Fighting things like that is precisely why we have a Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department -- to protect people's civil rights, especially the right to speak freely at criminal trials. That's what due process is.
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Where was Joe Biden's DOJ Monday? Swarming the scene to protect the civil rights of everyone involved, to protect the legal system itself? Nope, sorry. They were too busy rounding up more elderly, poor people who made the mistake of stepping inside the Capitol on Jan. 6.
So let's stop lying to ourselves about what's happening here. It's very obvious.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the April 19, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight"