Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson questioned Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) for going along with the Democratic Party’s narrative on the January 6 incident on Capitol Hill and the future of the Republican Party.
Carlson speculated Cheney’s decision was tied to downplaying her view on foreign policy.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: When you think of an authoritarian leader, you picture some power-mad autocrat, working fiercely defend his own regime. You think of Nicolae Ceausescu pacing his study, steady, plotting diabolical new ways to smash the latest peasant revolt.
And that’s right, but it’s not the full picture. Reality is more complicated than that. Fascism is a style of government, but it’s also a form of religion. So the goal isn’t simply to make you obey, the goal is to convert you.
Before he executed his political rivals, Stalin forced victims to profess their love for him and for the Soviet State. He staged a kind of religious ritual.
Stalin claimed to be an atheist, but he was in fact closer to the kind of secular Ayatollah. Why are we telling you this? Because you’re seeing the same impulses at work now here in this country.
It wasn’t enough for Democrats to win control of the entire fderal government in November, they got the power they wanted, but it did not satisfy them. They barely paused to celebrate. In fact, they seemed angrier. Why? Here’s why.
Because there were still Americans out there who disagreed with them, and thinking about that made it hard for them to sleep, it agitated them and the numbers show it.
According to one new survey, the single most pressing issue for Democratic voters right now is the existence of Trump voters. Not inflation, not drug ODs, not the teetering national economy, not even global warming. It’s people who don’t share their views. Democrats believe they’re the real threat.
It’s amazing how disconnected from reality this is. There aren’t that many Americans left to dare to disobey the emerging techno state. The few who remain have never had less power than they have now.
At this point, the pockets of resistance to corporate conformity are scattered and diffused. They are gun shop owners and commercial fishermen at sea, a few free-thinking families living in outer suburbs 30 miles from the city, three guys on a smoke break behind a transmission shop in Bangor, a non-compliant waitress in Brooklyn. In other words, the least powerful people in our society.
You don’t see people like that on television very often. But they do exist and Democrats know they exist. So they won’t rest until every last one of them, every last apostate has embraced the one true faith, by force if necessary.
Democrats definitely want new laws. But more than that, they want their catechism repeated back to them by the entire population and that’s why they spend so much energy, a stunning amount of energy, if you think about it, trying to police speech.
They care what you think even more than they care about what you do. They need you to agree with them. So they force you to mouth their slogans.
“Diversity is our strength. Climate change is an existential threat. The riot at the Capitol was a white supremacist insurrection.” The more absurd the claim is, the more hysterically they demand that you repeat it.
At the moment, Democrats are completely fixated on forcing you to agree that yes, January 6 was a racist event. And it’s been fascinating to see who in America complies with this demand to say that out loud.
In a speech this week, Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming decided to obey. Here she is talking about the riot at the Capitol. Watch.
REP. LIZ CHENEY (R-WY): It’s very important for us to ignore the temptation, to look away. And it’s very important, especially for us as Republicans to make clear that we aren’t the party of white supremacy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, so it’s very important, she says, to make it clear that as Republicans, we are not the party of white supremacy. OK.
But who claims otherwise? Who is saying the Republican Party is the party of white supremacy? It is a corporate party. Sure. It’s the embarrassing party, often. It’s the stupid party, definitely.
But the white supremacy party? Only Democrats and their propagandists in the media say that and now Liz Cheney, because some guy brought a Confederate flag to a rally. It’s strange.
When Jeffrey Epstein got arrested, you didn’t see Adam Schiff giving defensive-sounding speeches about how we’ve really got to make absolutely certain no one thinks we’re the party of child molesters. Right? Schiff never even considered giving that speech. No Democrat did.
Democrats don’t reflexively parrot the slurs of their enemies. They don’t hate themselves. They’re not morons.
Liz Cheney isn’t a moron, she is smart. Her self-regard seems fully intact, too. So it’s not she hates herself.
More likely, Liz Cheney just knows what she needs to say in order to get what she wants. What Liz Cheney wants is an expanded American military presence around the world, more wars in the Middle East.
Cheney is sincere about this, this is not a pose. She’s a genuine old-fashioned neocon, an ideologue who means every word she says about killing people in faraway places. She’s not kidding.
In order to get those new wars, Cheney can’t stray too far from the rest of the war lobby in Washington. She’s long been close to Bill Kristol. She made certain to smirk at Donald Trump when he said pull the troops out of Afghanistan.
This summer, Cheney was quick to denounce the quote, “horrific murder” of George Floyd, long before anyone could really say whether it was a horrific murder or a fentanyl OD.
But Liz Cheney didn’t wait for the facts to emerge. She dutifully read the script, and she’s still reading the script. Here’s Liz Cheney suggesting that any news organization that aired questions about election fraud, presumably, including this, bears moral responsibility for the Capitol riot of January 6, and that’s why, Liz Cheney says, we’re going to need a quote “9/11 style commission” to get to the bottom of it all, because really, people, January 6 was a lot like 9/11. Thousands dead.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHENEY: I think that, you know, any media organization that was perpetuating the notion, continues to perpetuate the notion that the election was fraudulent or was stolen, is contributing to a very dangerous set of circumstances. And I think, the American people need to know the truth about what happened.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, the American people need to know the truth about what happened. Well, yes, they do. We agree with that completely. Thanks to silly propaganda, like the clips we just played, there is some confusion about who exactly was at the Capitol on January 6.
Was it really a gang of white supremacists? We’ve heard that a lot, so we looked into it. We went through the list compiled by the Department of Justice of the 199 people arrested for breaching the Capitol grounds that day, then we looked them up.
How many of them were open racists? By our count, five of them. Five people out of 199 people arrested.
Racism is bad. More than any show on television, we make that point endlessly. We oppose hurting people on the basis of their race, no matter who is doing it, no matter how they are justifying it.
So again, we are always against racism, but five people out of 199 arrested? How is that a white supremacist insurrection? If it is, then we have other questions such as, how many black supremacists are there at your average BLM riot? We don’t know the answer to that because no journalist would ever ask that question.
The media are happy instead to take BLM purely at face value. We’re here because we’re mad about police brutality, says BLM. OK, say the reporters furiously transcribing.
Did anyone ask the people at the Capitol on January 6 why they were there? No one we have seen in the countless videos of that day was yelling about an ethnostate or trying to harm people because of their skin color or even complaining about affirmative action. Why?
Because the rally wasn’t about race at all. And neither was the riot. It was about the election.
The people at the Capitol really believed the presidential election was unfair, and they had reason to believe that and not because of any nonsense about rigged voting machines.
Silicon Valley really did weight the scales in this election in an unprecedented and completely immoral way. That is true. Big Tech attacked our democracy much more effectively than any foreign power ever has.
Social media platforms censored criticism of Joe Biden and promoted criticism of Donald Trump. In the final weeks of the campaign, Google sabotaged the Republican Campaign’s fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts by throttling reminders and solicitations on their way to the Gmail accounts of Trump supporters. That actually happened and many more things like it.
So it wasn’t entirely the protesters’ imagination. Here’s the question, has Liz Cheney or any other Republican done anything about that? They’re outraged by the riot, so were we.
But do they actually care why it happened? Is there a quote “9/11 style Commission” on the way that’s going to uncover the full extent of Google and Twitter and Facebook’s crimes against our democracy and finally hold them all accountable?
We haven’t heard of that 9/11 style Commission. Instead, we’ve heard Liz Cheney and countless other members of Congress, talk about the people at the Capitol like they’re al Qaeda and should be droned. And maybe they will be droned someday, like the terrorist that Washington claims they are.
Before that happens, here’s something you should know. And no, it is not an excuse for rioting. Nothing is an excuse for rioting, as we have said consistently on the show since Memorial Day.
But this is true, and therefore it’s worth telling you about. Most of the people at the Capitol on January 6 we’re not racists, but most of them were poor.
We know this because The Washington Post did an analysis of their finances. Who knows why the paper did that, but here’s what they found. Nearly 60 percent of the people charged with crimes on January 6 had serious financial problems, including overwhelming debt, foreclosures, evictions and unpaid taxes.
As a group, they were about twice as likely as the average American to have declared bankruptcy. Twenty-five percent had been sued at some point by creditors, a fifth face losing their home to the bank. One protester from San Diego, a veteran called Ashli Babbitt found herself so deeply in debt trying to keep her small business afloat that she took out a loan for $65,000 at an interest rate of 169%.
In the end, she didn’t have to pay it back. A still unnamed Capitol Hill police officer shot Ashli Babbitt in the throat that day and killed her. Now Ashli Babbitt is being denounced as a white supremacist.
There’s no evidence that she was. There was a lot of evidence that Ashli Babbitt was a patriotic American who was reckless and angry. Why was she angry? She’d been left behind by our economy.
She was disgusted by the corruption of our most powerful institutions. Those are the real reasons.
Liz Cheney doesn’t want to talk about those reasons. She wants to continue talking about Donald Trump and racism and white supremacy.
Are you sensing a theme here? They’re covering their tracks, all of them.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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