Thursday, FNC host Tucker Carlson opened his program questioning how Democrats and their political and ideological allies have blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for the increase in crime, including homicides, in the country in recent months.
Carlson disputed the claim that the coronavirus was to blame but said it was instead a product of poor leadership.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: One Sunday afternoon last September, a 16-year-old boy called Aaron Pryor was shot to death in a driveway near his home in Oakland, California. Even by the standards of midday drive-by shootings, it was an awful crime. Surveillance footage showed the killer firing more than a dozen rounds before fleeing.
No one was arrested for the murder, but local media did not seem especially interested in finding out who did it because they already knew. The coronavirus killed Aaron Pryor. That’s what they told us.
When local television stations noted that violence in the area had risen since the pandemic began, they must be connected.
Aaron Pryor’s football coach agreed with this. It was COVID that really killed this kid, he told reporters. The coach didn’t explain how exactly COVID had done this killing or what COVID’s motive might have been. But no one asked.
Everyone, particularly people in power seemed happy to blame COVID, the pandemic did it. You’ve heard that a lot, and not just in California. Across the country in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio blamed rising crime rates squarely on the virus.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
QUESTION: Police organizations will say that part of the reason that crime is up is because there has been a cut in funding to the NYPD. What do you say to that?
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D), NEW YORK CITY: This predates any funding decisions. That’s just the truth. The perfect storm I mentioned started in March and April when everything shut down and we saw the violence start in earnest May into June, into July. And it’s clearly because things came unglued.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Right? It must have been the pandemic. That makes sense. The quarantine did it. We forced everyone to stay home and that’s why there are many people on the streets shooting each other and pushing strangers into oncoming subway cars.
Does that make sense to you? No. It doesn’t make sense to anyone. But thankfully, experts soon emerged to explain why something so obviously untrue must in fact be true, quote, “Because of the stresses of the pandemic, they are everywhere,” explained the former CIA officer called Jeff Asher to The New York Times. “You’re seeing this everywhere.” Except we’re not seeing this everywhere. That’s not true.
The coronavirus may be global, but rising crime rates are not global. Police in Canada, for example, reported that crime fell by 18 percent between March and October of last year. In the U.K., crime saw its biggest annual decrease in a decade. In Sweden and Russia, crime dropped, too. Even in Mexico, which is in the middle of a drug war. There were fewer homicides in 2020 than there were in 2019.
So for normal countries, pretty much all countries, the pandemic meant more Netflix, but less killing. Not here. In the United States, the opposite happened. A lot of Netflix, even more killings. You’re seeing the data on your screen right now. It’s from a nonprofit called the Council on Criminal Justice and researchers at the University of Missouri.
It shows the average weekly homicide rate in 21 major cities. Killings spiked in late May, well after the pandemic began. According to Council on Criminal Justice, quote, “Homicides, aggravated assault, gun assaults rose significantly beginning in late May and June of 2020. They jumped by 40 percent during the summer and 34 percent in the fall when compared to the previous summer and fall.
So far this year, these sad trends have continued. Murders are up 800 percent in Portland, Oregon. They’re up 56 percent in Minneapolis, scene of George Floyd’s death. They are up 27 percent in LA, 22 in New York, they’re up 40 percent in Philadelphia.
So you have to ask yourself — because your life may depend on it — why is this country different from say, Sweden or Russia or Mexico? And you know the answer. It’s not COVID. It’s that in our country, stupid, malicious people took full control, the Democratic Party took full control of the country, and their policies resulted in a huge number of killings.
That’s not speculation. They bragged about it. Here they are bragging about their plans.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The folks in law enforcement that share the goals of reimagining police.
REP. JERROLD NADLER (D-NY): Reimagining policing in the 21st Century.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Rethinking and reimagining policing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Community efforts to reimagine policing.
REP. RASHIDA TLAIB (D-MI): Reimagine policing.
AL SHARPTON, MSNBC HOST: We have to reimagine what policing looks like.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Reimagining policing, reimagining our public safety.
ALI VELSHI, MSNBC HOST: Reimagine a citizen-led approach.
JULIAN CASTRO (D), FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We can begin to reimagine law enforcement.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Reimagine public safety in this country.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What can we do to reimagine public safety?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Reimagining public safety.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: To reimagine public safety.
KAMALA HARRIS (D), VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We must reimagine what public safety looks like.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Well, they definitely reimagined public safety, they made the public much less safe. According to a report in AXIOS, 20 major U.S. cities have slashed their police budgets in the last year, they defunded the police. Collectively, they cut more than $840 million from law enforcement.
In Atlanta, in a story that we love to read, one city councilman who voted to strip $73 million from the police, a genius called Antonio Brown just had his car stolen in broad daylight by children who were not held back by the police, they had been defunded. It must have been COVID that did it.
Meanwhile, at least 25 cities have pulled police out of public schools. They’ve canceled the contracts. How’s that going to work? You know the answer?
At universities, activists have pushed for the same, total abolition of the police When they said we’re going to defund the police, they meant it.
At the University of Chicago, dozens of students swarmed the home of the college President. One of them, an especially entitled young lady called Madeline Wright shouted this through a megaphone, quote: “We’re going to fight to abolish this effing system, not reform it.”
Professors at the school joined her. One of them a character called Damon Jones led seminars on the problem of over-policing in the neighborhood around the University of Chicago, it is called Hyde Park. It is where Obama is from.
The professors have dozens of posts on Twitter last summer explaining that because the University of Chicago’s police stop more African-Americans than white people in a predominantly black neighborhood, keep in mind, they are racist.
What’s interesting is that Damon Jones hasn’t said anything on Twitter about the police since January of this year. Why January? Well, that’s when Yiran Fan, a 30-year-old PhD student at the University of Chicago was murdered in a killing spree on Chicago’s south side along with two other people killed for being there.
And at that point, it’s possible that even morons like Damon Jones realized there’s a reason the University of Chicago has one of the largest private police forces outside the Vatican. Why? Because the neighborhood around the school is a very dangerous place. That’s not the fault of the police. That’s the reason they have police.
And that can be true for the entire City of Chicago, which is dangerous and becoming more so by the day. Now, why has that happened? It’s happened because people with a political agenda have taken over law enforcement.
It was in Chicago, for example that BLM activists declared that looting, stealing is a form of reparations. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ARIEL ATKINS, BLACK LIVES MATTER CHICAGO ORGANIZER: They get upset when people start looting. People in this city are struggling through a pandemic. So I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike because that makes sure that person eats, that makes sure that that person has clothes, that makes sure that that person can make some kind of money because the city obviously doesn’t care about them. Not only that, that’s reparations.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So you’ve got to steal from Gucci to eat, stealing is reparations. Now that’s insane and only a very sick society would listen to someone like that, someone like that would be dismissed automatically in a healthy society. But in this case, not a single Democratic politician pushed back. So, guess what happened?
Well, in the City of San Francisco, for example, Walgreens has closed 17 different stores. Why? Because prosecutors in San Francisco and in many other places throughout the State of California, for example, but not just there, no longer charge shoplifters. So people steal whatever they want.
There is so much theft on such a scale that the stores cannot afford to stay open. They’re not closing as a political statement, they are closing because they can’t afford to have their merchandise stolen.
This is not the country you were born in. Here’s what it looks like.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): The Walgreens at Van Ness and Eddy in San Francisco will close the stores for good, November 11th. Customers say the store is known for being a notoriously easy place to shoplift.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I’ve heard the Walgreens is really easy to steal for them —
QUESTION: Why is that?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Because they don’t chase you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): And neighbors agree, shoplifting has been an ongoing problem at this location and may be a major factor in why it will soon be closed. Customers say the shelves are bare, the company not even bothering to restock.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So to be clear, it’s not that Americans have become more prone to steal, it is that stealing is now allowed. And when you allow something, you get more of it. So, this is the result of intentional policies designed to give us more stealing, designed to give us more murder, more rape, more pushing strangers in front of subway cars. It’s happened because the people in charge allowed it to happen.
And it’s happening everywhere. It’s particularly happening in New York.
Several candidates for Mayor of New York, people running to replace Bill de Blasio have announced that anyone who opposes stealing is quote “criminalizing poverty.” Who are the people with views like that? They’re not normal people. They are, it goes the saying, pampered out-of-touch liberals. They are the only ones who can afford views like that.
Actress Cynthia Nixon certainly fits that description. Nixon expressed outrage the other day that the CVS in her neighborhood was trying to prevent thieves from walking off with their entire inventory. Quote, “I can’t imagine thinking that the way to solve the problem of people stealing basic necessities out of desperation is to prosecute them.”
So you’ve got to wonder what would happen if you showed up at Cynthia Nixon’s place tonight and tried to help yourself to some quote, “basic necessities.” Would Cynthia Nixon understand your theft is a profound form of social protest? As a form of social justice? Will she applaud it? Or would she tell her bodyguards to shoot you? And then thank them profusely when they did?
It’s not a tough question. You’d be dead in seconds.
Cynthia Nixon doesn’t mean a word of what she says about crime. None of them mean a word of what they say about crime. They’re just trying to feel like good people in a world that confuses destruction for virtue. These people need to help, they should be nowhere near power.
Unfortunately, at the moment, they run the Democratic Party and all of us are seeing the results of that.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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