On Monday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson offered his theory as to why CNN and other media outlets covered all the tedious details of the Derek Chauvin trial, which began earlier in the day.
Carlson speculated CNN wasn’t concerned about George Floyd, Chauvin’s alleged victim, but was instead seeking to hype racial aspects of the trial.
He also compared media coverage to the Chauvin proceedings to a recent D.C. carjacking and tied it to the so-called Defund the Police movement.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Happy Monday. I hope you spent a restful weekend with the ones you love, away from the insanity.
And if you did, you were reminded this is still the best country in the world for a very simple reason. It has the best people, the happiest people. Most people are happy. Worth being reminded that, there’s a lot of drama going on, though, of course.
And as if we needed more, the George Floyd trial has finally started in Minneapolis and the other channels are covering it like a championship game, which makes sense if your job is to make Americans hate each other. If your job is to divide the country and that’s how they see their job, the opportunity to talk about George Floyd all day is like your Super Bowl.
So this morning, CNN spent hours airing footage of prosecutors questioning one of the emergency dispatchers who happened to be on duty the day that George Floyd died.
It wasn’t very interesting. It had no inherent news value. “Is that your voice on the 911 recording?” The prosecutor asked at one point. “Yes,” the dispatcher replied. And so it went interminably on.
Suddenly, at one point, it stopped, without warning, the recording just ended. Apparently, there were technical difficulties. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just live TV programming.
But CNN’s control room cut to a legal analyst to assure viewers the pause was only temporary. “This isn’t Law and Order,” the analyst explained, “It won’t all be wrapped up in 55 minutes.” This could go on a while, in other words, stay in your seats, don’t turn away.
The trial may be boring, but it’s important.
It’s not about George Floyd, obviously, it never was. No one on CNN cared about George Floyd while he was alive. He was unemployed and on drugs, like a lot of people in this country. They paid him no attention.
And no one on CNN actually cares about George Floyd now. What they care about is you and your role in the systemic racism that supposedly killed George Floyd.
If the Floyd trial ends in acquittal, there could be riots. We accept that as a fact of life in this country. No civilized country should accept that, but suddenly we do.
And if there are riots, innocent people may die, as they did in large numbers this summer. CNN will downplay those deaths or justify them as they did this summer as they have so many times before when those deaths are politically convenient.
The point isn’t to save people from dying. The point is to punish you and to change America. So from that perspective, it’s worth it. And that’s why they are replaying that video of George Floyd dying in the sidewalk, to remind you of all of that, of your culpability in his death.
And that’s why even as they rub the country’s face in the death of George Floyd, there were other tragic deaths, some on video they ignore completely.
Here’s one. A 66-year-old Pakistani immigrant called Muhammad Anwar died in Washington recently. As in George Floyd’s case, his death was on video. Unlike George Floyd, Muhammad Anwar was not a violent career criminal with a drug habit. He worked at the very bottom of the so-called gig economy. Anwar made his living driving for Uber Eats. It’s a tough gig.
On Tuesday, he was driving near Nationals Park in southeast Washington when two girls assaulted him with a Taser gun. The girls were 13 and 15 years old.
Muhammad Anwar, resisted. It was his car. It was the key to his living, he didn’t want to lose it. A bystander recorded what happened next and it’s awful, we warn you.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: Anwar’s last words, “This is my car.” And it was.
Bystanders watched all of this happening. You saw them in the video. They videotaped it, but no one stepped forward to help Muhammad Anwar.
The two girls hit the gas, they flipped the car over. Anwar flew out of the vehicle, landed face down in the sidewalk, dead, crushed.
But the girls who killed him didn’t seem bothered by this, “My phone is in there. My phone,” one of them screamed. She cared more about her phone than the life of the man she just killed.
Well, this raises all kinds of questions, not just about them, but about us. What kind of society produced children like this? Who raised them?
And again what does it say about our country that no one jumped in to help this poor man before he was killed? Those are real questions, but CNN wasn’t interested in asking any of them. In fact, the network refused even to call it a killing. It didn’t help their politics.
So in their account quote, “The girls assaulted an Uber Eats driver with a Taser while carjacking him, which led to an accident in which he was fatally injured,” which led to an accident. It wasn’t a killing. It just kind of happened. It was an act of God, like a tsunami or a hailstorm. Unfortunately, he died.
In fact, as the Mayor of Washington, D.C. explained the next day, it may have been Muhammad Anwar’s fault. Mayor Muriel Bowser sent a tweet reminding her subjects to pay attention to their surroundings the next time they go outside, quote: “Auto theft is a crime of opportunity,” Bowser wrote. “Follow these steps to reduce the risk of your vehicle becoming a target.” Those tips included locking your car and not walking away as the engine is running.
Oh. Got that D.C. residents? Staying safe is your job. It’s not the job of the Mayor you hired to protect you, the Mayor who sits barricaded in her home surrounded by a massive security detail you pay for, as the city she is supposed to protect descends into chaos.
No, it’s up to you. You’re on your own. Follow these steps to reduce the risk. Not surprisingly, carjackings are up all over the city and if you know people who live there, they will tell you that. That is true.
Neighborhoods that were safe last year aren’t. There are carjackings going on in residential neighborhoods, 300% rise in one year in carjackings. Shootings and robberies and theft are rising, too. Of course, they are. Washington is becoming a scary place again.
It’s the capital of our country. It was the murder capital in the 1980s. That’s not acceptable for a civilized country, to have as its capital the murder capital, but it’s becoming that way again. Why is this happening? We don’t have to guess. It’s very simple.
Last summer, the D.C. City Council voted to cut $15 million from the police budget. It devastated the police department. They are basically not recruiting cops right now. One class left at the Police Academy, massive retirements from the police department.
If it continues at this rate, there won’t be police in Washington in a few years. So what happens when you do something like this? Well, like clockwork, six months after they defunded the police department, Washington, D.C. recorded its highest murder rate in 15 years.
When you defund the police, people die. That happens every single time and that’s why Muriel Bowser, the Mayor, must surround herself with cops. She doesn’t want to get hurt. She doesn’t care if you do.
But it’s a very simple lesson and everyone knows it’s true. That’s why we have cops in the first place. They have never really gotten credit for the gravest policy screw up maybe in living memory. They defunded the police across the country and our leaders are ignoring the consequences. In some places, they’re doubling down.
In Baltimore for example, the city that does not need more tragedy, officials have announced they will no longer prosecute what they call low-level offenses. These include drug possession and prostitution. What’s low level exactly?
Well, that kind of depends where you live and how much police protection you have. Prostitution and drugs aren’t a big deal if they’re not near you, but when your kids can’t go outside because prostitution and drugs are taking place right outside your house, they are not low-level crimes. They wreck your life.
The people who run Baltimore don’t care about this. They have no interest whatsoever in what is happening outside your house.
So the Mayor of Baltimore and the local prosecutor recently sent a press release describing this policy as a success because it reduced systemic inequity, and by the way, it also led to lower arrests. Imagine that.
When you stop enforcing the law, you have to arrest fewer people. But mostly, it reduced inequity, so Baltimore has equity now. What a relief. Many of us were hoping Baltimore would have more equity. What does that look like?
Well last week, Baltimore recorded seven murders in six days. That’s a killing every day of the week plus one — two on Saturday. That’s deeply equitable and it’s happening in cities across the country. Once again, no one is noting this, but if you live in one, you well know what’s happening.
In Chicago for example, the Soros-funded DA, Kim Foxx, a hard ideologue stopped prosecuting what she called low-level crimes. Last year the mayor called for an $80 million reduction in the police budget.
What happened next? Can you guess? Have you read the story before? Oh, yes. By January, Chicago’s carjacking problem looked like — wait for it — Washington, D.C.’s.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice over): This is where a 73-year-old man had to run for his life after he faced four-armed carjackers. They pulled him out of his red Mitsubishi. They chased him and punched him repeatedly in the face.
Security teams from Kates Security Services are now manning gas stations in Inglewood hoping to make carjackers rethink who and where they target.
Using information from the Chicago Police Department, security officers will go to gas stations and hotspot areas for carjackings. They monitor five to six gas stations per day.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So you have to laugh at it. So if you’re CNN or MSNBC or “The New York Times,” and you feel like it’s really your mission to protect people of color from violence, which by the way, is a great mission. No one is against that. You think you would note the huge spike in deaths among poor people of color in America’s cities, but they’re ignoring them completely.
What you just saw was in January. We’ve got new data now. Through mid-March, more than 370 carjackings reported in Chicago. Crime data showed the most carjacking Chicago has seen in a three-month period in at least 20 years, maybe much longer.
But it’s not just Chicago. This is happening everywhere. As we advance towards a full year of mourning the death of a single man in the sidewalk in Minneapolis, thousands of Americans have been murdered, thanks to the policy changes justified by the death of that man.
Ponder that for a minute. Has there ever been a more perverse moment in this country?
It’s not clear what we can do about it, but you can tell the truth out loud. That’s a start. And that’s what’s happening.
According to “The Washington Examiner,” the murder rate in virtually every city in the United States is at its highest levels in more than two decades. That’s people being killed.
Last year, there were more homicides in the United States than in any year since 1998. How did that happen? Oh, BLM. Thanks, BLM. BLM did this to us.
Well, the people who are funding them or posturing about how great they are and this is going to make America more equitable, poor people were paying the price with their lives, and no one has admitted this and no one is accepting responsibility for it and no one has been punished for it.
Irony of ironies, few places are more dangerous than the actual physical place where George died in Minneapolis. A place we visited a couple of months ago because we just couldn’t resist. What does it look like?
We’ll show you, but keep in mind, Minneapolis was the first city in this country to defund the police. What happened next? Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAMAR NELSON, SPOKESPERSON, CUP FOODS: Well, it’s almost bringing that out daily down there. It has become totally unsafe.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Jamar Nelson is the spokesperson for Cup Foods, the market that called police on George Floyd for allegedly passing a fake bill, considered the site of Floyd’s death.
Nelson did not want to meet us in Floyd Square because he considers it too dangerous.
NELSON: I’m an unapologetic black man. So, I absolutely understand the solidarity and understand the angst and anger. But at some point, do we continue to make others suffer while we are Mourning?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Police say shootings in the area have increased by more than 2,500% compared to 2019. A city survey revealed 65% of 900 people that work or live nearby want George Floyd Square reopened immediately.
NELSON: They think is in honor of George Floyd, but it’s really disrespectful to continue to hold a community hostage.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: What a disaster, and it’s not getting better, it is getting worse. No one has asked the most basic question: why is this happening? It’s not all political.
The 13 and 15-year-old girls who killed the Pakistani Uber Eats driver weren’t acting out of political solidarity with anybody. What is that exactly? Why do people do that?
Jordan Peterson sent a very interesting tweet out the other day, it was just a simple graph of the out-of-wedlock birth rate. Among African- Americans, it was 70%.
So if you took the out-of-wedlock birth rate, broken down by demographic group and put it next to the crime rate, one thing you notice, they track exactly. Close enough to suggest a profound connection.
Why is no one interested in pursuing that? No one even asks why this is happening. You’re not supposed to, just like you’re not supposed to see how Muhammad Anwar died. Instead, you’re supposed to watch endless loops of video of the death of George Floyd. So you can tell yourself, it’s all one bad cop or it is all systemic racism.
That’s the problem — racism.
But if you look away from the propaganda and you look toward the reality of what’s happening to your country, on the street in Washington, or Chicago or Minneapolis, you might have a few questions for the people in power. They’re the ones who created the society. They’re the ones responsible.
And that’s exactly the conversation they don’t want to have, so they tell you much more about George Floyd.
Watch the 911 dispatcher testify some more. Don’t change the channel.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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