Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson opened his program on Thursday by making the assertion Democrats were using unfortunate circumstances of COVID-19 and civil unrest to create the perception the country was on the wrong track.
According to Carlson, they were doing so to gain an advantage for November’s presidential election, and he explained they were succeeding.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: The president announced this afternoon that the Republican Party has canceled its traditional nominating convention in Florida next month. The reason? Coronavirus.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This afternoon, my political team came to me and laid out our plans for their convention in Jacksonville, Florida. It’s a place I love, and I love that state.
But I looked at my team, and I said, the timing for this event is not right. It’s just not right with what happened, recently — the flair up in Florida. To have a big convention is to have the right time.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Well, that news will inconvenience some people. It’s without precedent in recent history. But in the end, it’s hard to believe that canceling a political convention will affect the outcome ultimately of this year’s presidential election. Yet it’s very likely that the coronavirus lockdown it themselves will affect the outcome. And here’s why: The most basic question in political polling never changes — is your country on the right track or the wrong track? In a reelection campaign, especially that is always the central question, and every political consultant in America knows that that. There is no poll the Biden campaign pays closer attention to than the daily right track-wrong track numbers, especially now.
The presidential election, believe it or not, is, in fact, almost here. In some places of early voting begins in just over a month. The result of that voting will define the country’s future. If the Democrats take the Senate at the White House, and they could do, you will not recognize America a year from now. Think about how much has changed over the past six months. Now, imagine what would have happened if there had been no meaningful opposition to the mob if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been able to impose her plans without any restraint.
That’s exactly what they intend to do if they win. They aren’t hiding it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: If Mitch McConnell tries to do what he did to President Obama, then we should get rid of the filibuster.
NBC’s SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: Raise your hand if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: That is why we will implement legislation based on the principles of the Green New Deal.
ABC’s DAVID MUIR: Are you proposing taking away their guns, and how would this work?
FORMER REP. BETO O’ROURKE: I am if it’s a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield.
Hell yes, we will take your AR-15, your AK-47.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: It’s funny because people ask me what the world for defund the police looks like. I tell them it looks like a suburb.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Say what you will about the people you just saw — they are not moderates. This is not the Democratic Party you remember — dopey liberals with flaccid ideas that you probably had contempt for but in the end, could live with.
No, these are radicals. They despise the country they seek to govern. They claim to remake it completely. These people want power with an intensity that you, as a normal, well-adjusted person cannot even begin to understand. They will do anything for control. So the question is, what are they doing to win? Well, they are working the right track-wrong track numbers. Democrats understand that the unhappier Americans become, the more likely they are to win. Unhappy people want change.
It’s not complicated. So every ominous headline about the state of the country makes it more likely that Donald Trump will lose his job. The more the people suffer, the greater Joe Biden’s advantage. Democrats have a strong incentive, therefore, to inflict as much pain as they can, and that’s what they are doing.
On March 1, New York State confirmed its first case of the coronavirus. At the time you may not remember, the media was still attacking the president for taking the Wuhan coronavirus too seriously. They said his travel ban on China was hysterical in the xenophobic. Two days later, citing the pandemic, the Ohio Governor Mike DeWine banned spectators from a sporting event. And The Washington Post scoffed at him. The paper called DeWine’s restrictions, quote, “radical.”
On that day, March 3, more than 40% of Americans thought the country was headed in the right direction. And for the Biden campaign, that the number was way too high. Then within a week, higher education started to shut down at a life started to change for many people. Hundreds of thousands of idle college-aged kids return home. Stores began to empty — hand sanitizers and cleaning supplies disappeared.
On March 12, the NHL hockey league canceled at season and Major League Baseball followed suit. They ended spring training. Suddenly there were no sports. Movie theaters closed. So did bowling alleys.
And yet, 40% of Americans continued to believe their country was headed in the right direction. And that was bad news for the Joe Biden campaign. So then came the shutdowns. The CDC recommended canceling all public events with more than 50 people present. Public schools closed. So did bars, restaurants, gyms and churches. Critically millions lost their jobs when businesses were shuttered, and then the employment rate rose to the highest level in nearly a century.
At the time, they told us that mass quarantines were essential. They were a public health measure. We were saving lives with our suffering. Most people wanted to believe that because most Americans are decent people. But as summer approached, it became clear the people telling us that were lying. Science had nothing to do with this. Studies from around the world showed that being outside was far safer than staying at home. That was conclusive. And yet governors continued to maintain mandatory shelter-in-place orders.
In Michigan, which is not coincidentally is a swing state, Democrats banned citizens from visiting their own weekend homes or using outboard motors. In New Jersey, people were arrested for going to the beach. After a while, the authorities issuing these orders stopped trying to pretend that they were backed up with reason or data.
Anthony Fauci, who for a long time, seemed like a serious man of science, announced it was dangerous to shake hands with people you love, but it was fine to have sex with strangers online. Like Anthony Fauci himself, the coronavirus lockdown were revealed to be capricious and transparently political.
Above all, though, and this was the point, they made Americans miserable. Prescriptions for antidepressants rose 21% in a single month. By the end of April, the right track-wrong track numbers inverted. Just 22% of those polled believed the country was on the right track.
And yet for the people pushing Joe Biden for president, that number was still too high, so we had riots. As the entire country watched in real-time, mob looted and burned at the police station in Minneapolis. We saw Americans dragged from their stores and beaten unconscious on camera. Some were killed.
Most people watching were horrified by this, of course. Professional Democrats were thrilled by it. They slashed police budgets to ensure it would continue, and it did. Crime rates soared. The crackdown on normal people accelerated. Your kids were not allowed to have graduation ceremonies or get married. But hundreds of thousands of confirmed Joe Biden voters were allowed to flood the streets and break things.
And then midsummer came. With the election, just months away at America’s suffering had to be intensified. It was a political imperative. So schools across the country announced they would stay closed in the fall. No one bothered to explain the science behind this because there wasn’t any.
Schoolchildren remain nearly immune to the fatal effects of coronavirus. To this day, there was not a single reported case in the entire world of a student passing COVID-19 to a teacher — not one case. But schools shut down anyway. Desperate parents wondered what they would do with their kids in September. “Good luck,” they were told, “figure something out.”
Residents of Washington, D.C., were told they would be required by law to wear masks everywhere they went for the foreseeable future. And yet, the people who made that law exempted themselves from it. They already know they are voting for Joe Biden. Everyone else in the country became dramatically unhappier. Nearly three-quarters of Americans now say the country has become a much worse place than it was.
Doctors have prescribed is so much Zoloft, the antidepressant, it’s not on the federal drug shortage list. In fact, it’s likely Americans have never in the history of this country been as unhappy as they have right now. It’s a tragedy, but for Democrats, it is a win. According to polls, Republicans may now lose once-safe Senate seats in Iowa and Montana. So say what you will about the destruction of America. But as a political matter, it has been a stroke of genius.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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