Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson warned the same leadership that has brought woes to California is coming to Washington, D.C. in the form of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
According to Carlson, California officials were using race tensions as a way to distract from the shortcomings of that governance.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: We make a lot of fun of the State of California on this show, you may have noticed, but we’re not really joking. California matters and not just because it’s our biggest state. What happens there is at some point almost certain to happen where you live.
Find a national trend that didn’t begin in California. There may be some, but there aren’t many. So if you want to know the future, or if you want to prevent it, look west. California is a roadmap for the rest of us and very often warning.
With that in mind, here is the bottom line on California. It’s falling apart.
Over the course of just the last several decades, California has gone from one of the richest places in the world to the poorest state in our country. More than a third of California’s population now hovers around the poverty line.
Even before COVID, over four million Californians were collecting food stamps. More than 150,000 people in California are homeless. They are everywhere. They’re living on the streets, in parks, under overpasses, in tents on the sidewalk.
Here’s Los Angeles just last month.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): The homeless crisis in Los Angeles is getting worse local say with some encampments so big residents call them McMansion Tents. They’re driving away businesses, too; many of which are already struggling financially because of the pandemic.
This comes as the city sees a spike in violence with a 32% increase in shootings since last year. While police say financial stress from the pandemic is largely to blame, some criticize the leaders for once again being unable to control the issue.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: California didn’t always look this way, even recently. This is a human tragedy. It wasn’t caused by God or nature. It was caused by the selfishness and the stupidity of bad leaders and their bad policies.
If these leaders were judged by their performance, what they do, no big city politician in the State of California would have a job tonight. They know that, so they are working hard to make certain they’re not judged by those standards — rational standards.
Instead, they inflame racial wounds to try to keep the population distracted and divided, to keep the attention away from them and their failures.
Here, for example, is the shamefully incompetent mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, just this summer.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI (D), LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: When I talked about killers, I said, our collective — our collective burden here in this society is that we let black men and women die. I pointed at myself, we collectively have a choice of whether we will be those who heal or whether we will continue being the killers.
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CARLSON: Yes. Whenever they start talking about collective responsibility, you know what they are really saying is, take the gaze away from me. It’s not my fault.
Garcetti wasn’t more specific when he talked about, we, the killers. It turns out there are killers in his city. They’re not collective. They’re individuals. They’re criminals. And there are a lot of them.
Under Eric Garcetti, crime in Los Angeles has skyrocketed and many innocent people have died as the result of that. But he is not mourning that. He is not giving speeches in their memory or apologizing for the policies he supported that led to their deaths, and neither by the way, is the city’s new head prosecutor, a man called George Gascon.
Gascon was elected with the backing of George Soros. Soros was the single largest donor to his campaign. He wouldn’t be the District Attorney without George Soros. And so George Gascon has, from his very first day in office done the bidding of his backer, Soros.
He has now announced he will be using the pretext of COVID to release still more criminals into the City of Los Angeles. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
AL SHARPTON, MSNBC HOST: Do you have a plan of giving priority in terms of vaccinations in the LA County correctional facilities?
GEORGE GASCON, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: I don’t control the vaccination. But the point that we do have is we’re working to you know, expeditiously release as many people as we can, especially those who have been proven to be at high risk, vulnerable people and obviously people that are not a threat to society.
So we are going to try to remove as many people from that confinement. Justice is really about public health and keeping our community safe.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, OK. So there’s the Soros puppet giving us a lecture on what justice means. Justice is not punishing the guilty, keeping the dangerous away from your children, it is not about enforcing laws. No, justice is making certain that criminals get critical government services before you do, before your parents do.
And that right there, that piece of tape and the attitude behind it distills the emerging politics of California, politics that you should be deeply afraid of, because when they come to your town, they’ll wreck your life.
And if we were to put it in one sentence, it’s this: those who contribute the least get the most. Got it? But don’t you dare complain about it, shut up and hate yourself in silence. That’s an order.
Meanwhile, California’s elected leaders divide the spoils. That’s their job: taking what other people built, giving it to themselves and to their supporters. And they divide the spoils, as is now official policy in the State of California in the most divisive, immoral possible way, along lines of color.
Here is Congresswoman Maxine Waters explaining what kind of person Governor Gavin Newsom should pick to replace Kamala Harris in the United States Senate.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): He has a decision that he has to make, and I think that it will be a black woman. I think he understands that, you know, when Kamala Harris leaves, you know, the Senate, that’s only one black woman who was serving, and certainly it would be, you know, kind of, you know, unfair not to have at least another black woman replace her.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: This really is the high point of stupidity in this country’s history. Who cares what color your senators are, who cares what gender they are, you want good government, you want wise competent people in charge of the country, but that’s not what you’re getting because those aren’t the criteria.
In the end, you should know the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom appointed a man called Alex Padilla to replace Kamala Harris in the Senate. And when he did, no one debated whether Padilla might be a good senator, whether he might improve the schools or lower the cost of housing or brings bring jobs back. Instead, they argued about his race. That was the only thing they cared about.
Here’s the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, who by the way is an utter buffoon, most famous not for improving San Francisco, but for defying her own lockdown orders in order to dine at the French Laundry in Napa.
Here’s that person explain that Padilla is a bad choice, because he is the wrong color.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR LONDON BREED (D), SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: When you think about the history of this country, and the challenges that exist for African-Americans, especially African-American women in the Senate, definitely, this is a real, you know, blow to the African-American community, to African-American women, to women in general. It was definitely a surprise.
And it’s an unfortunate situation as we are trying to move this country forward and making sure that black lives truly matter.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: OK, so you have been a terrible mayor, you have hurt the city, which again, you did not build, you didn’t make San Francisco an impressive place that people wanted to move to. You made it worse. So you’ve disqualified yourself from any comment on government ever for the rest of your life. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is, the rest of us who sit by and let people say things like this on television without thinking and saying, whoa, wait a second, color and gender are irrelevant to good government. Thinking that way is poison. We’re not putting up with this garbage anymore.
We’re implicated in the destruction of the country if we sit back and let decisions get made along those lines. It’s such a destructive sideshow.
Meanwhile, the physical reality, the State of California, which is an actual place with tens of millions of actual people, 40 million, our most beautiful state, our most economically important state falls apart. No one is paying any attention because they are debating the color of the new senator.
But the electrical grid is failing. The power flickers on and off like a third world country. The state’s forests are so mismanaged, they keep catching fire and burning uncontrollably.
Climate change isn’t doing that, bad management is doing that.
Women — we care about women, really? Because women can’t jog in public parks for fear of being attacked by the mentally ill homeless. Does anyone care about them? No.
And for the privilege of all of this, for living in a state that’s literally collapsing around them, the residents of California pay the highest and the most burdensome taxes in the country. So guess what people who can are doing? You know the answer, they are leaving.
California’s largest export used to be advanced aerospace products. That was the economy of Southern California, that and the movies. They’re all gone now. Now, the state’s main export is population.
More than 40% of Bay Area residents tell pollsters they want to leave. Really? And that’s one of the happiest places in the state. And it’s no wonder the average rent price in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco fell 20% in the last year. Why is that? Because no one wants to live there.
The most recent estimates show that California lost more than 135,000 people in the last year. Among those people, by the way, is Kamala Harris. She’s in Washington now, your capital, and she is bringing California-style governance to the rest of us. You should pay attention to that.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor