Tucker Carlson spotlights 'how similar to China we have become' in just seven months

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Tucker: America was a very different country 7 months ago

U.S. leaders taking cues from communist China.

It's time to reclaim the freedoms and principles upon which the United States was founded before the country becomes completely unrecognizable, Tucker Carlson warned his viewers Thursday.

The "Tucker Carlson Tonight," host opened Thursday's show by asking his audience to recall "what a very different country this was on New Year's morning."

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"Back then, a little over seven months ago, the U.S. felt politically volatile. There was an election coming," Carlson said. "But it [was] still fundamentally American. There was no mistaking this country for any other country. We were not Mexico ... we definitely weren't China.

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"Yes, most of our goods were manufactured in Asia," Carlson went on, "but our way of life, our system and society seemed to be the very opposite of China. The Chinese were enslaved. We were free. That was the difference and it was permanent. It would never change."

Carlson then played a sound bite from a January interview with  Dr. Anthony Fauci, who discussed the authoritarian measures the Chinese government had taken to contain the virus and described how officials "shut out traffic out of Wuhan, planes, trucks, buses, ferries ..."

Then Fauci added, "There's no chance in the world that we could do that to Chicago or to New York or to San Francisco."

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"None of that would ever be allowed here in a free country. It just couldn't happen in America," Carlson said. "Fauci himself has since become one of the most strident advocates of the Chinese response to coronavirus, but he's hardly alone in that."

As he had the previous night, Carlson spotlighted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's institution of "armed checkpoints" at various points of entry into the city.

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"It would've been impossible to imagine any of that in January," Carlson said, "yet de Blasio's announcement didn't seem especially shocking. We are used to it. That is how similar to China we have become. It's a big change. But like all seismic shifts, it happened incrementally before it happened overnight."