Tucker: Democrats want to deny jobs based on race
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host on the two senators who oppose American civil rights
It’s funny how no one really covers the big stories. Instead the news media bring us minutia, all the time. Cartloads of it.
A middle-aged professional golfer hurts his leg in a car accident, and the networks go wall to wall. They literally give his car crash more coverage than they give the bombing of Syria.
Then, a few weeks later, some weird, fake duchess from Los Angeles gives a boring interview to Oprah and we stop the presses. It’s all we talk about for days. Meanwhile, something legitimately momentous happens, and it’s crickets.
On Tuesday, for example, two sitting members of the United States Senate announced they oppose the entire foundation of American civil rights law, and then proceed to attack the core principle, the main principle, of our country. Some people on Twitter were shocked by it, but otherwise you’d never really know it happened.
But it did happen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii publicly informed the White House that until the Biden administration puts more people they like in powerful jobs, they will refuse to confirm White nominees.
"I am a no vote on the floor on all non-diversity nominees," Duckworth said, out loud, with cameras rolling. "I will vote for racial minorities and I will vote for LGBTQ, but anybody else, I’m not voting for."
Just in case you missed it, or were unclear on the meaning, Duckworth said this several times. And then Mazie Hirono backed her up.
SEN. MAZIE HIRONO: Tammy’s position is that until she gets a commitment from the White House that there will be more diversity representation in the Cabinet and senior White House advisory positions, she will not vote to confirm anyone who does not represent diversity. So this is not about pitting one diversity group against another. I think this is a well-articulated, focused position, and I am prepared to join her in that.
ALEX WAGNER, MSNBC: Do you think the Biden administration has been adequately receptive to your entreaties for more diversity?
HIRONO: Obviously not, otherwise Tammy and I wouldn’t be taking our position. We would like to encourage them to do better.
So here you have two actual U.S. senators announcing in public they will deny jobs to people who have the wrong skin color. That’s not news? Oh yes, it is news, though Mazie Hirono and Tammy Duckworth may not realize it’s news. In their defense, Hirono and Duckworth are well-known as the dimmest politicians in Washington. Neither one could carry a dinner conversation. But not everyone in Congress is stupid or oblivious.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., certainly isn’t. The Senate Majority Leader misses nothing. Chuck Schumer has spent his entire life telling us at high volume that racial discrimination is wrong, which obviously it is. Then, this week, two of his colleagues went on television to demand racial discrimination. What did Chuck Schumer think of that? Schumer didn’t say a word about it. No one in the Democratic Party did.
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These are moral pygmies. Some of them would sell their kids if the price was right. Some of them are actually race haters, probably, and they agree with it. But whatever their motives, the fact that his happened in public and no one in power said anything about it seems like a turning point in the history of our country.
To recap the most basic principle we have: All Americans have an inalienable right, given by God and guaranteed by the Constitution, to be judged solely and exclusively on the basis of what they do and of what they choose. Not on the basis of their race, or their genes or who their parents were. That is the entire promise of the country. It’s why we’re different. It’s why people move here from other countries. It’s why we’re a self-governing republic, because everyone is equal.
It’s also, in addition to everything else, federal law. It’s written down. What Mazie Hirono and Tammy Duckworth did is not simply morally repugnant (although it is). It’s also illegal.
Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act opens this way, "No person in the United States shall, on the grounds of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
You cannot deny an American a federal job because of his race. That is against the law, and has been for nearly 60 years.
Racial discrimination in government hiring is a crime. You may have heard that before. It’s on the wall of every break room in every office in the United States. In fact, the Civil Rights Act may be the most famous law we have. But then, as now, many prominent Democrats opposed it. Critical race theory is not a new idea, despite what they tell you. In 1964, a third of Senate Democrats voted against the Civil Rights Act. One of those who did was a man called Robert Byrd.
Byrd was a strident supporter of "equity" — or, as it was called at the time, Jim Crow. In 1944, at the height of the Second World War, Robert Byrd wrote a letter to Theodore Bilbo, who represented Mississippi in the Senate. Byrd was upset that the Roosevelt administration was giving federal jobs to people with the wrong skin color. Robert Byrd was the Tammy Duckworth of his day.
"I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side," Byrd wrote, amazingly. "Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."
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That’s real. Robert Byrd wrote that. At the time, he was working as a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, which was very much the Yale University of the time, the source of so much poison in our society. Two years later, Byrd wrote to a well-known critical race theorist called Joel Baskin, who was serving as the grand wizard of their beloved organization.
"The Klan is needed today as never before," Byrd wrote, "and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia. It is necessary that the [Klan] be promoted immediately and in every state in the Union. Will you please inform me as to the possibilities of rebuilding the Klan realm of West Virginia?"
Once again, that’s real.
Shortly after he wrote that, Byrd abandoned his Klan career, which never paid well. Instead he decided to run for office as a Democrat. Robert Byrd served in Congress for nearly 60 years. When Byrd died, during Barack Obama’s first term, the entire leadership of the Democratic Party came forward to slobber over his memory — including, amazingly, Barack Obama himself.
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"It is almost impossible to imagine the United States Senate without Robert Byrd," said Hillary Clinton. "He was not just its longest-serving member, he was its heart and soul. From my first day in the Senate, I sought out his guidance."
Of course Hillary Clinton said that.
"While some simply bore witness to history," remarked an emotional Nancy Pelosi, "Senator Byrd shaped it and strove to build a brighter future for us all."
Vice President Joe Biden, always big on memorials, went on perhaps the longest. Biden described Robert Byrd as "a very close friend of mine, one of my mentors." Joe Biden even misquoted William Shakespeare as he celebrated his Klansman mentor.
BIDEN: When I learned of his death, I was on an errand for the President in Cleveland, and I said, you know, to paraphrase the poet, we shall not see his like again ... Mr. Leader, we’re not going to look upon your like again. I’m not even going to ask God to bless you because he already had and I know where you are."
"Oh," you’re thinking, "that was a long time ago, and Biden probably doesn’t even remember. That was way back in the summer of 2010, when people just didn’t know any better. They thought the Ku Klux Klan was some sort of harmless fraternal organization, like the Elks, or Rotary." Right.
No, they knew. Underneath it all, they never really disagreed with the core idea. Only the colors have changed. There exists in the darkest parts of human nature the instinct to form a mob and attack other people for how they were born. "Fear of the other," is what sociologists call it. They say it’s a function of evolutionary biology.
Whoever it comes from, however you describe the phenomenon, it’s real, and it’s a grave threat to America. This is an enormous, complex — and, yes, diverse — society. We have very little in common with each other, apart from the fact we’re all Americans. There are 350 million people living within the borders of our country. Most of us can’t leave, so we have to live together. If you want Americans to live peacefully without hurting each other, you have to treat them as individuals, not as members of warring tribes. You have to guarantee every American identical opportunities to work and live and go to school, as well as identical judgement under the law. Equality under the law.
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You can’t just announce that Americans of a certain color can’t have jobs. If you do that, things will tend to fall apart very quickly. We fought a war over this once, by the way, one that killed 700,000 people.
Not that long ago, all Americans understood this. But then a new generation of Robert Byrds took control of the Democratic Party, and dark and primitive forces have been unleashed. You see them everywhere, so you hardly need to be reminded, but here’s one example: The Nation magazine, the flagship publication of the American left, just ran a piece with this title: "I Am Not Ready to Reenter White Society."
It was written by a Harvard Law graduate named Elie Mystal. The open reads, "I’ve said, here and elsewhere, that one of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and [W]hiteness generally from my day-to-day life. Over the past year, I have, of course, still had to interact with [W]hite people on Zoom or watch them on television or worry about whether they would succeed in reelecting a [W]hite-supremacist president. But [W]hite people aren’t in my face all of the time. I can, more or less, only deal with [W]hiteness when I want to ... White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them."
That’s someone who went to Harvard Law School. That’s not normal, and it’s not healthy. It’s open race hate, and it’s the beginning of our actual destruction. As with Senators Hirono and Duckworth, no one in power says a word about it. So naturally, exhibitions like that accelerate and it becomes more dangerous.
Last week, a corporate-owned website called The Root published a kind of terrorist manifesto written by a New York Times contributor named Damon Young.
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The tract begins like this: "Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousness, and it kills people."
With that established, Young wrote this: "White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it."
"And kill it." You have to ask yourself, where is this going? Let’s pull back now before we find out.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the March 24, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."