Over the weekend, as you likely know, officials in New York announced that they are tearing down a bronze statue of Teddy Roosevelt. That statue has stood on Central Park for 80 years. Antifa demanded its removal, so Mayor Bill de Blasio complied, and he is taking it down.
Few people ever could have imagined that Teddy Roosevelt would be canceled. Roosevelt was the most popular president in American history. He was also a war hero, a historian, a naturalist, a rancher, a chief of police, an author, conservationist, as well as a father of six.
PROTESTERS ATTACK WISCONSIN STATE SENATOR IN CHAOTIC NIGHT AT CAPITOL: REPORT
At one point in Roosevelt's extraordinarily busy life, he was also the governor of New York. This morning, the current governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, weighed in on his removal.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo: People are making a statement about equality, about community, to be against racism, against slavery. I think those are good statements. And it depends, you know, can you overdo it? Of course, you can.
But in New York, I don't think we've overdone it. And I think that -- I think it's a healthy expression of people saying, "Let's get some priorities here, and let's remember the sin and mistake that this nation made, and let's not celebrate it."
Were you listening carefully to that? In the state of New York, the governor tells us, we haven't overdone it. Destroying public property is "a healthy expression of people saying, 'Let's get some priorities here.'"
Okay, so that's the standard set forth by a Democratic Party leader. Let's think it through for a minute.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER
Andrew Cuomo lives in the Governor's Mansion in Albany. Teddy Roosevelt once lived there, too. So did Governors Grover Cleveland and Franklin Roosevelt. By current standards, both Cleveland and FDR were racists.
Cleveland extended the Chinese Exclusion Act; FDR, of course, interned Japanese-Americans by the tens of thousands during World War II. Therefore, like the statues now lying smashed on the ground in parks across the country, the Governor's Mansion in Albany, N.Y. is suffused with the spirit of white supremacy. Its very existence as an object is an act of violence against marginalized people. It cannot stand.
Should the mob burn it down? Would torching the racist Governor's Mansion amount to a "healthy expression of people saying let's get some priorities here." What do you think? Are you crazy? Of course not.
Andrew Cuomo lives in the Governor's Mansion. You get within 20 feet of that building, and he'll have one of his goons shoot you to death. Andrew Cuomo is all for destroying things, just not his own things. And by the way, hands off New York's a little latest monument, the Mario Cuomo Bridge, formerly the Tappan Zee, which Andrew named after his father. That's off-limits, too.
Okay, so what exactly is "a healthy expression of moral priorities" in a moment like this? Keep in mind, this is a big country and not everyone has the same priorities. It may be hard to believe if you consume a steady diet of popular media, but not every single person in America is an upper-middle-class white kid from Brooklyn, with the predictable political views to match. There's actual diversity of views out there.
For example, there are quite a few Muslim-Americans in this country, and many of them don't love Mahatma Gandhi. They consider Gandhi a Hindu nationalist. Yet at the same time, there are dozens of statues of Mahatma Gandhi in the United States. One of them, in fact, stands right across the road from the vice president's house on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington.
Are angry mobs allowed to rip them down? Would Gov. Andrew Cuomo consider that a healthy expression of priorities? It's worth asking.
Or what if you didn't like Martin Luther King? Most people do like Martin Luther King, but most people also like Teddy Roosevelt and George Washington. So clearly, popularity has no bearing on whether your statue is allowed to stand in this country.
So can you spray paint obscenities on Martin Luther King's monuments if you don't like him? How healthy would that be? These are theoretical questions. Obviously, you know the answer to them because you know the rules.
The rules are never spoken out loud, but they are obvious. America has two standards of justice. When they do it to you, it is social justice. If you dare to defend yourself, it's a hate crime.
Virtually every American power center now stands on one side of the political divide. What you're watching in the streets is an attempt to crush the holdouts. Ask yourself, who is being targeted for destruction right now? Anyone who is not on board with their program
Consider what we've seen recently. How many stores and parks and statues and public buildings have been destroyed recently by rioters? How many churches and memorials and monuments to our fallen soldiers have been desecrated by them? Too many to count.
Now ask yourself, how many people have been held accountable for these crimes? Some? A few? No -- hardly any.
Politicians applauded this destruction. Law enforcement has ignored it. Why is that exactly? Rioting is a federal crime; so is arson. So far, two people have been arrested and charged in the burning of the Third Police Precinct in Minneapolis. Two.
Video footage, which is everywhere -- you've seen it -- shows clearly that scores of people were involved. Authorities could identify them and charge all of them. We might have fewer riots if they did that. But no, the Justice Department isn't interested in doing that. What are they interested in?
Well, let's see. Recently, a NASCAR driver called Bubba Wallace claimed that someone left a noose in his garage in Alabama. The media reacted as if a war had broken out -- wall-to-wall coverage. They made it precisely clear who the enemy was. And of course, countless syrupy segments on the dopey morning shows framing the whole thing as a milestone in the march toward civil rights.
Reporter: These scenes of unity coming just 24 hours after a noose was found in Wallace's team garage stall, an area restricted to only essential personnel. NASCAR and the FBI are now investigating.
"These scenes of unity." Unfortunately, no one covering this story ever bothered to ask the obvious questions. Where, exactly, was this noose -- the actual noose Bubba Wallace kept talking about? No picture of it ever surfaced. And by the way, haven't we heard this story somewhere before? Like repeatedly?
More from Opinion
Between 2015 and 2018, there were six high profile so-called hate crimes involving nooses, all of them are promoted heavily by the media. Every one of them turned out to be a hoax, every single one of them. And that's not even counting Jussie Smollett.
The odds that this news hate crime was real were always very small. It's just not a very racist country, actually, in the end. Most of us know that.
But you'd never know it from listening to the authorities. The U.S. attorney suggested federal charges would be brought -- brought against whom? That was never clear.
Meanwhile, the FBI swooped in by the vanload. The Bureau sent at least 15 agents to investigate this provocation against a millionaire racecar driver -- 15 agents -- at a time when mobs were roaming the country completely unchallenged by law enforcement, burning things, assaulting people.
Democratic politicians don't fear the mob. Notice that? Why? Because they don't need to. They control the mob. The mob operates with their permission. These are their foot soldiers. This is their militia.
In the end, as you may have heard, it was needless to say, yet another news hoax. There was no hate crime in Bubba Wallace's garage. What does it tell you, that the FBI and federal prosecutors fell for this hoax so completely? Well, it tells you everything.
At the very moment Bubba Wallace was doing his star turn as America's latest victim of injustice, lecturing his fans about the racism, being backed up completely by the morons who run NASCAR, a mob of violent lunatics was ripping down a statue of American patriot, Francis Scott Key, in San Francisco. On Key's empty pedestal, they spray painted these words, which effectively are their slogan: "Kill the colonizers. Kill whitey."
In other words, murder Americans for the color of their skin.
Now, you can argue about whether hate crimes ought to exist as a category in American law, and that's an argument worth having. But as long as they do exist, that would seem to qualify as one and that the FBI did not swoop in with 15 agents to investigate. It's not clear if anyone ever investigated because no one in power cared. If anything, they agreed.
And that's the point. The mob does not operate independently from the Democratic establishment. The mob is an arm of the Democratic establishment.
In the city of Philadelphia, both the mayor and Larry Krasner, the district attorney we've told you about repeatedly, cheered as mobs set fire and destroyed public property there. But when a group of working-class Philadelphians tried to protect the statue of Christopher Columbus from being destroyed, Krasner threatened to prosecute them.
You'd think the mob will ever show up at Larry Krasner's house? Not likely. In fact, no. Never. And by the way, Nancy Pelosi is also safe at her estate in Napa.
Democratic politicians don't fear the mob. Notice that? Why? Because they don't need to. They control the mob. The mob operates with their permission. These are their foot soldiers. This is their militia.
In unguarded moments, Democrats make it very clear that they know this. Here's a revealing video shot just on Tuesday. In it, you'll see Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting Democratic delegate from D.C. to the Congress. You'll see her being interviewed by a well-known MSNBC anchor near the White House.
Our institutions are not serving all of us equally. Some are actively trying to hurt us. When this is over, we need to do something about that -- this time for real.
Out of nowhere, a man dressed in women's underwear charges at them because that's the kind of moment we're living in right now. And for a second, they were frightened. Watch what they said.
Andrea Mitchell, MSNBC anchor: Where are the police when you need them?
"Where are the police when you need them?" It was their first reaction. At the moment they said that, the two were standing on a street with a mural that demands we defund the police.
Of course, they missed the irony of that completely. It never occurred to them that the slogan might apply to them, too, because they know it doesn't apply to them. They know they will always have police protection.
And the thing is, they're right. They will. Federal law enforcement is entirely on their side. That's why there have been so few prosecutions of rioting and so much FBI attention to Bubba Wallace's fake hate crime.
Career bureaucrats in the federal agencies support the Democratic Party. That means they support the mob as well. It's their militia, too.
Virtually every American power center now stands on one side of the political divide. What you're watching in the streets is an attempt to crush the holdouts. Ask yourself, who is being targeted for destruction right now? Anyone who is not on board with their program.
That includes local police departments, Orthodox Jews, gun owners, Fox News, NASCAR fans, traditional Christianity. That's not a random assortment of institutions. It's the people standing in their way. There's a reason that Black Lives Matter leader, Shaun King, yesterday called for the desecration of churches. That will bring those Christians to heel.
None of this should surprise us. We should have seen it coming. It was obvious. We've known for 50 years that much of the poison in our society emanates from the universities, but we have done nothing whatsoever to fix that. We've continued to fund them, no matter what they charged. We keep sending our children there.
We've known for more than three years that the federal government's intelligence and law enforcement agencies are dangerously corrupt. They act as armed enforcers for the Democratic Party. That's why Roger Stone is going to prison. They no longer even try to hide this or their partisan affiliation.
On Tuesday, a group of dozens of former National Security officials announced they will be campaigning for Joe Biden this fall. And yet, once again, in the face of mountains of evidence, we've done nothing about it. There has been no meaningful reform of the CIA or the FBI or any of the other terrifyingly powerful agencies that operate independently from our democracy and on the side of the Democratic Party.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
We know all of this, but we still pretend they're legitimate. We dutifully send in our taxes every quarter to pay their salaries. If there's any good to come out of this moment -- and we hope there is -- it's that we can no longer lie to ourselves about what is happening.
Our institutions are not serving all of us equally. Some are actively trying to hurt us. When this is over, we need to do something about that -- this time for real.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on June 23, 2020.