Tucker: As quality of life declines, you're instructed not to notice
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host describes how the country's quality of life in on the decline
We're going to take you back about a year and a few months to the day America changed. You may have noticed it at the time, but this really was the pivot point. It was the height of the BLM riots early last summer, and rioters in Minneapolis had just torched a bunch of different buildings, and standing right in front of them was an MSNBC reporter who was broadcasting live from the scene.
Now, the mob began by torching small businesses all through the city, including a liquor store, which of course, they looted first naturally. Then, as the rioting accelerated, they walked down the street and burned down the Third Precinct police station, the Minneapolis police station. Now, as you saw that happen, you realize, ooh, this is a little different from anything we've seen before. We've seen riots before, in 1992. Following the Rodney King verdict, rioters in Los Angeles torched a lot of the middle of that city. But they didn't burn any police stations because you can't burn a police station because there are police there and they're armed and they represent the law, they enforce the laws. You can't burn down a police station because if they let you do that, then you know the whole system is crumbled.
And yet that's exactly what happened just days into the BLM hysteria last summer. A police station was burning, and the implication of that was very clear. This is why we don't allow police stations to get burned because the message it sends is this: the police can't protect you, They can't even protect themselves. So the police aren't in charge. Legitimate authority is gone. The mob is now in charge.
So as this is happening, there happens to be, as noted, a reporter standing right there with a microphone and a camera taking those pictures directly into your living room. That reporter, was called Ali Velshi, and he's famously not super bright, but he was on the scene. Here is how he described what was happening right behind him.
ALI VELSHI: The fire engines can't get in here. There is no ability to bring anybody in here to solve this problem, so I want to be clear in how I characterize it, this mostly protests. It is not – It is not, generally speaking, unruly.
It’s the greatest tape ever, you’ve probably seen it a hundred times. We watch it every morning, just for edification. It's mostly a protest, he said. Flames in the background. It's generally speaking, not unruly. While standing in front of a burning building.
So that tape, as we just said, is very famous and a lot of people look at it and they say, "That reporter is a moron." Which, of course, is true. He couldn't even describe what he was seeing accurately. What a gaffe. But it wasn't a gaffe, was not taken out of context. In fact, it was MSNBC's explicit editorial policy to lie about what you were watching live, to characterize violent riots as peaceful protests.
And it wasn't just Ali Velshi. That very day, probably the oiliest of all MSNBC anchors, a character called Craig Melvin, explained the network's approach to the story: "This will guide our reporting in MN: While the situation on the ground in Minneapolis is fluid, and there has been violence, it is most accurate at this time to describe what is happening there as protests – not riots."
Paging Dr. Orwell, not riots, oh they're not riots. The one thing these things aren't – the torching the police station, looting liquor stores – they’re not riots. Oh, not at all. But MSNBC is not an outlier in adopting this policy of reality denial. Here's what CNN's coverage said at the time"
LEMON: And let's not forget, if anyone is judging this, I'm not judging this. I'm just wondering what is going on. … Our country was started because – the Boston Tea Party rioting. So don't get it twisted and think oh, this is something that has never happened before and this is so terrible and where are we and these savages and all of that. This is how this country was started.
Yeah, this is totally normal. We've been dealing with this for hundreds of years. Sam Adams himself torched a Wendy's and looted a liquor store before burning down a police station in downtown Minneapolis. It's how this country started. We've always had riots and looting virtually every day. It's totally normal.
So your job as a viewer, per CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, all the rest of them, was to remain calm. Acknowledge that this is just the way things are. This is the way they have always been and accept it. The country your ancestors built is on fire, but shut up because your ancestors also burned it down.
Now that’s not true. In fact, it's grotesquely untrue, and you have to be historically illiterate to believe it. Many people are, unfortunately, but it worked because propaganda does. That's why they do it. So instead of pushing back against this rioting, most Americans kind of went along with it. Well, it doesn't look quite right to me, but this is how our country started. That's what Don Lemon said. So I’m going to kind of go along with it. In other words, as your quality of life declines, you are instructed not to notice.
And this trend has continued, The Washington Post just ran this headline, "Don't rant about short-staffed stores and supply chain woes." Rather than "living constantly on the verge of throwing a fit … We do ourselves a favor by consciously lowering expectations."
Got that? So if you don't like the fact the shelves are bare in your local store, don't throw a fit. Don't be an entitled little tool. Lower your expectations. What did you expect in America? Come on. Bread lines, we've always had bread lines. It's sort of charmingly retro, these bread lines. Don't complain as your life becomes worse and as your country degrades. That's the message, and not surprisingly, that message is coming directly from the people who are making your life worse and destroying the country. That would, of course, would be the White House. Here's his grouchy little flack today, almost impossible to believe this person is real and not just some sort of mockup of like a Wesleyan gender study student. Apparently, she is real. And today she was asked about these supply chain problems like our ports are shut down – What do we do? She mocked the reporter's question. How dare you ask.
REPORTER: Just a question on the timing on the supply chain issue, actions that the president has taken, it was clear in March 2020 when COVID hit that their supply chains across the world had been disrupted, even as the sort of work to fight back against COVID proceeded people. It was crystal clear that things were not improving on supply chain. People couldn't get dishwashers and furniture and treadmills delivered on time, not to mention all sorts of other things.
JEN PSAKI: The tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.
REPORTER: But the serious point is, why didn’t the president act sooner in a more aggressive way?
Were you complaining about not having a treadmill? Settle down, Karen. What do you want to exercise? You've got Netflix and weed. Shut up. Get back to your cube, be happy, lower your expectations. And if you do go outside, if you notice the Walgreens is, for example, closed, and shows the CVS because everything in there has been stolen by thieves who've now been redefined in civil rights protesters.
Stop complaining, Karen. It's always been this way. Now, San Francisco has very few Walgreens or CVS or stores like that left because they've all been looted by civil rights protesters. But that's not a problem, according to the mayor of San Francisco. In fact, as she explains, it's really Walgreen's fault.
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SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR LONDON BREED: Ultimately, you know, they've made their decision. We have tried to work with them in order to ensure that we are covered in terms of having pharmacies all across the city. This is going to, of course, impact a lot of our neighborhoods. But I wouldn't say go as far as to say they can't do business. They still have a lot of stores everywhere you look, almost every corner you'll see a Walgreens. And some of these stores are not just closing because of retail theft, they're closing because they're not necessarily bringing in the sales that they once did. So I don't want to attribute that completely to just retail theft.
So you’re tempted to say, well, if you elect a mayor that dumb, then you kind of deserve what you get. But the truth is, not everybody in San Francisco voted for London Breed, despite her alluring name. They don't deserve this. No one deserves this. The truth is, you shouldn't have daily looting in American cities because it's a first-world country. This isn't some Third World hellhole. This is once again the country that our ancestors built. This is a great country, it’s a clean country, it’s an orderly country.
People don't steal. You’re not allowed to steal, period. But all of a sudden, you can steal and our leaders are telling you you've always been able to steal. It's OK. You bring your kids to school and oh, wait, a second, they're junkies living in tents right across from your kid's school. Well, they've always been there too. They were there when you were a kid, you just never noticed. Just readjust your expectations. Settle down, Karen.
Seattle's Mayor Jenny Durkan explained that children are going to have to deal with the junkies living in tents right next to their school. Here's a local news report from Seattle.
REPORTER: Broadview Thomson is a K-8 public school. Its property includes this greenbelt which was taken over by dozens of homeless that neighbors say are bringing in even more problems
WOMAN: This morning in my garden I found an empty packet that had drugs in it
REPORTER: Despite outrage from parents and neighbors whose kids are just now able to return to school, two Seattle school board members are refusing to let the encampment be cleared. … Mayor Jenny Durkin decided not to intervene, claiming the public school property is private property and off-limits without an invitation.
Yeah, so the one thing you can't do is expel the junkies. Not the homeless. Homeless makes it sound like some sort of protected class of protest. No, they’re junkies. There are people shooting up, breaking into cars to support their habit, selling themselves, pimping out women. They're junkies, OK? And they're on your kid's school lawn. But we can't intervene in that because it's always been that way. Just lower expectations. Karen.
In New York City police have just been ordered not to intervene when they see junkies shooting up on the sidewalk or in a park. You can't get in the way. And you shouldn't because we've always had junkies in our park. Sam Adams was actually smoking meth on the Boston Common once upon a time.
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In Washington, D.C., the Metro just basically shut down and pulled 60% of its train cars from service. So commuters, the ones who pay for it, are just going to have to find another way to get to work because the train service isn't working anymore. Just lower your expectations.
In fact, they're lucky. In Philadelphia last week, several people on the train, they got on the train and then they got to watch as a man raped a woman on the train for minutes. Witnesses describe what they saw on Fox29 in Philadelphia. Here's part of it.
REPORTER: At Upper Darby 69th street station, passengers of the Market-Frankford Line are outraged.
WOMAN ON STREET: The attack was brutal, it was wicked. The worst part is that people were watching.
REPORTER: Several people watching, some within arm’s length says Darby’s superintendent of police. … Arrested is 35-year-old Fiston Ngoy, who investigators say is seen on a train security camera sitting next to the alleged victim, touching her and then raping her. Investigators say a female SEPTA employee called in the attack, which was relayed on radio about the attacker disrobing on a train at 56 street station. … SEPTA says Ngoy was arrested at 69th street station in the act.
But this has always been the way America works. Remember Kitty Genovese? She was killed, nobody said anything. The difference, though. We were shocked by that. Fifty-five years ago, when she died. In this case, passengers watch this woman get raped, but they were on their phones. They were online gaming. The police chief of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania's transportation authority, said that nobody who saw it did anything about it.
MAN ACCUSED OF RAPING WOMAN ON CROWDED TRAIN WAS RELEASED FROM IMMIGRATION DETENTION, NEVER DEPORTED
POLICE Chief Thomas J. Nestel: I can tell you that people were holding their phone up in the direction of this woman being attacked.
And by attack, just to be totally clear, and I hate to use the word, but it's the right word. She was raped in front of all these people and they did nothing. So how does this happen? Now we're saying about root causes, what were the root causes of this rape? We can tell you tonight that the 35-year-old Congolese man who apparently raped this woman, his name was Fiston Ngoy, has a criminal record and shouldn't have been here in the first place. He was on an overstayed student visa. He should have been deported. This should never have happened. He should not have been here. And the only reason he was is because he had a lot of people like him have been invited here and allowed to stay by the people who run the country, but who don't ride the train.
This particular man first came the United States in 2012, on a student visa. Now that visa ended in 2015 because he was no longer a student. Court records show that Ngoy racked up "multiple arrests" and two misdemeanor convictions, one for controlled substances and one for sexual abuse.
OK, so here's someone in the country illegally who is convicted of sexual abuse and drugs, but he's still here? So why aren't the people who allowed him to remain here in jail themselves? They certainly should be.
Now, this guy was put into immigration detention back in January of 2018, but he never got deported because the immigration legal system decided that he should receive a special stay of removal. Oh, so he got what's called a withholding of removal from immigration judge two years ago, back in 2019. According to court documents, that decision came after "The Board of Immigration Appeals found the petitioner's misdemeanor sex offense was not a ‘serious crime,’" just a minor sex offense, and therefore he was ineligible for withholding from removal.
So to recap, you can walk into our country at the invitation of our leaders at public expense. You can overstay your visa and in so doing, mock our laws. Then you can get busted for drugs and a sex crime, not deported, allowed to stay. And then you go on – probably inevitably at this point – to rape a woman on a train in full view of a crowd that does nothing to stop it.
But it's always been this way. Don't get uptight, readjust your expectations. You want more of this? We may be getting it. Today, Joe Biden's nominee to lead the Border Patrol, a guy called Chris Magnus sat for his confirmation hearings. Now it turns out that Magnus, if anything, is to the left of Biden, even to the left of Barack Obama on immigration matters.
Just a year ago, when he was the police chief of Tucson, Arizona, Magnus rejected a federal grant that was part of a program called Operation Stone Garden that was supported by the Obama administration. Now, the point of the program was to help border towns fight cartel violence and drug trafficking. That would seem a worthy goal, not really directly related to immigration, directly related to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
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But Chris Magnus, in his wisdom, rejected that money. His own police department was outraged by this, but Chris Magnus didn't care because he's a deeply good person, unlike you. He's happy to abet the deaths of thousands of Americans by drug ODs. He said that this money and this mission – stopping drug cartels – didn't align with the work he's doing. That work, of course, is opening our country's borders.
So here you have the person who's about to oversee our country's border security, who does not believe in borders. Now, if that bothers you in any way, if you think we should be deporting rapists instead of letting them rape women on trains, then the White House has a very clear message for you: Shut up, Karen. Stop complaining. Those arsonists aren't arsonists, they're mostly peaceful protesters. That treadmill? You don't deserve a treadmill. Lower your expectations. Get used to it.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the October 19, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."