Tucker: This is happening every day in Chicago
WARNING—Graphic footage: Fox News host voices his concerns over the crime spike on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Here's an interesting story. If the New Yorker was still a real magazine, they might write it up, but of course they won't. Here it is: Last summer, deep in the bowels of the Transportation Department in Washington, some nameless federal analysts came across a highly puzzling trend in a pile of stats on traffic deaths.
It turns out that in the year 2020, the number of American motorists who died on the roads spiked dramatically. Traffic deaths rose by more than 10% in a single year. Now, in any year, that would be odd and distressing, but coming as it did in 2020, it was flat out bizarre because as you'll remember, in 2020, there was a pandemic. It had just started. Millions of people stayed home that year. They did not drive to work. Many didn't drive at all.
In 2020, roads were less crowded than they had been in decades in this country. So, of course, you would expect far fewer traffic deaths—less traffic, fewer people dying in traffic—and yet there were more traffic deaths. You think that's weird? It gets weirder. If you look deeper into the numbers, you saw that not only were more Americans dying in cars in the year 2020, a staggering number of those who died were Black.
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Traffic deaths among African Americans rose by nearly 25% in a single year. That's unprecedented. So, in a normal presidential administration, that question, "why is this happening?" would be the subject of urgent academic study. "People are dying, let's figure out why." But in this administration, it was not the subject of urgent academic study. Why? Because Pete Buttigieg is now the secretary of transportation. Buttigieg once worked at McKinsey, so he already knew the cause of these deaths and it was, needless to say, racism.
Racism did it because America's roads are racist. They're killing Black people. As the Washington Post put it, the Transportation Department "concluded that Black communities tend to be crisscrossed by more dangerous roads." Now, that made sense to the Washington Post and you can see why. Civil engineers, road builders, bent on genocide would, needless to say, put all the dangerous roads in Black neighborhoods. That's who they are and that kind of thing happens all the time in America. This is a racist country; Joe Biden has told us that countless times.
What doesn't make sense is the timing here. Very few of these racist roads are new. Most of them had been there a long time. So, why did so many Black motorists suddenly start dying in the year 2020? Pete Buttigieg had no idea. He didn't even bother to guess because honestly, he didn't really care, but we do care. We've got a theory and here it is: If you look at the numbers, you will notice that traffic deaths among African Americans in the year 2020 surged in the month of June.
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Fatalities among Black drivers in June 2020 were fully 55% higher than they were in June of 2019. You never see increases like that. What could have happened? Well, let's see. It was in the last week of May of 2020 that a convicted felon called George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis and after that you'll recall everything changed. What changed, most of all, was how we regard the rule of law.
As Russ Martin of the Governors Highway Safety Association put it, Floyd's death "accelerated national discussion about equity in transportation" and that discussion would include "questions about enforcement." Oh, there it is, right there. That's the answer. Cops across the country were told to stop enforcing traffic laws against Black drivers. No one wanted to be accused of arresting somebody for the crime of "driving while Black." So, in the name of equity, the law no longer applied to huge numbers of people. Result? Thousands of Americans died.
This is a trend, you may have noticed, and it doesn't just apply to traffic and it doesn't just cause traffic deaths. If you look closely at a chart that shows the number of Black Americans murdered every year from 2010 to 2020, you'll notice two major spikes. One spike came in 2014. That was exactly the moment the media decided to lie to us about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Activists then used that false story to drive police out of Black neighborhoods in many parts of America. That was supposed to make things better. Fewer cops, less racism. Right? No. And that effect? A lot of people got killed and most of them were Black.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot speaks during a press conference at City Hall, Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2021, in Chicago. (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune via AP)
Then there's the second spike in the last decade, the biggest one yet. As we said, it came in the summer of 2020 and it's continuing today. Same reason, same effect. There aren't a lot of trends in social science that can be explained in a single graph, but this is one of them. Less law enforcement means more crime and over time it means more dead children, more grieving parents. You don't need to be a criminologist to understand this. It's very obvious. Even Lori Lightfoot gets it.
Lori Lightfoot is the mayor of Chicago. Thanks to her equity-based policies, the city of Chicago is falling apart. People are dying in huge numbers. Shootings in Chicago jumped 60% last year. Lori Lightfoot knows perfectly well this is happening. She knows why it is happening, but Lori Lightfoot doesn't care. Lori Lightfoot is so uninterested in all of those deaths, mostly of Black people, that she won't even answer questions about them when asked. This comes from Tuesday of this week.
CHICAGO RADIO HOST WILLIAM J. KELLY: Every time you have a press conference, you say crime is down, the economy is booming.
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LIGHTFOOT: Well, that's not, that's not true, but get your question sir.
CHICAGO RADIO HOST WILLIAM J. KELLY: Across the street, we had a police officer on duty, the victim of a hit and run. We have Michigan Avenue, the Magnificent Miles now referred to as the "Mile of Fear." The Water Tower Place has thrown the keys back to the lender. They say they don't want to be in Chicago anymore. Real Chicagoans are asking me, "How could you possibly even consider running for reelection as mayor of the city of Chicago, after all the harm you've caused?"
LIGHTFOOT: Well, I disagree with you fundamentally and I don't think I need to address any and dignify your comments one second further. Next question?
"Next question?" So, Lori Lightfoot won't answer the question precisely because she knows the answer. In the name of equity, officials in Chicago have stopped enforcing the law and not some esoteric tax law that no one really understands, the basic laws like you can't hurt other people. They're releasing criminals who go on to murder more citizens. This is the triumph of ideology over human life. Here's just one example it comes from FOX's Chicago station:
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Chicago Police Officer Marni Washington, left, walks with then-Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot on Sunday, May 19, 2019 at Resurrected Life Church International in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
REPORTER: The details on the offender's prior history does call into question how he was released. This document from the Cook County State's Attorney's Office says in June of 2021, 16-year-old Anthony Brown led police on a foot chase. That's when they recovered a loaded .22 caliber Glock handgun with an extended magazine. Five days later, he was released on electronic monitoring. Fourteen days later, the bracelet came off and he was put on a curfew. Six months later, they say he was involved in a carjacking. This time, police recovered a loaded Glock 9mm handgun with a round in the chamber. That's when he was put back on monetary. In the case of Tuesday's shooting, the 16-year-old is charged with first degree murder and carjacking. He carjacked a Lyft driver earlier in the day and took off in that same Infiniti after the alleged shooting of a teen he didn't even know.
Stories like this constantly in the city of Chicago, cities across the country. They are always the same, but the details of this one tell you everything. A criminal runs from the police carrying an illegal gun. Then the same politicians, who never stop lecturing you about gun control, ("It's immoral to defend yourself," they scream at you.) those same people at this guy who used a gun to commit a crime, out of jail immediately because equity. Then he gets rid of his ankle monitor and commits a carjacking. Then what happens? Well, Lori Lightfoot's friends release him once again because "incarceration, bad." So, what does he do? He drives off to shoot and kill a 15-year-old, because why wouldn't he? There's no penalty.
Now, if tragedies like this happened, occasionally you would call them accidents. You would feel sad, but you wouldn't be bothered. These are not accidents. This is happening every day in the city of Chicago. Fully, 43% of all criminals convicted in the state of Illinois commit new crimes within three years of being released and some are released very early. That's a high number compared to other states.
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In saner places like Texas, South Carolina and West Virginia, the recidivism rate after three years is about half of that. What's the difference? Politics. Honestly, it's not a partisan talking point. It's true. For the last decade, for example, the most liberal state in the country, California, has recorded a recidivism rate of nearly 50%.
Now, keep in mind the irony here. They tell you that we shouldn't incarcerate people because incarceration doesn't work and if you want to rehabilitate people, we have to let them out. But they're not rehabilitated. That's what they're re-offending and almost 50% in the state of California. Incarceration has two purposes. One is to improve the prisoner so he won't re-offend, but the main purpose is to protect the rest of us who aren't committing crimes, who've got kids who just want to live a normal life. They've forgotten that part.
So, every day in California, politicians release truly dangerous criminals back into the public sphere and this is why you're now taking a very big risk if you dare to use public transportation in the city of Los Angeles. You could be shot or sexually assaulted and we're not guessing. We have the tape.
There's surveillance footage from L.A's. transit system. It includes pictures of a woman being raped in public as she's sitting down. That happened in public and it happens a lot, that kind of thing. We went to L.A. for the premiere of season two of our documentary series. We went there because we want to understand, how one man, a man called George Gascón, a prosecutor backed by George Soros, could have done so much in such little time to destroy the city and of course, he did it in the name of equity. We talked to the family of a murder victim called Fatima Johnson. It was a bracing conversation.
TUCKER CARLSON ORIGINALS: Fatima Johnson, a mother of six, was found brutally murdered in her apartment.
TUCKER CARLSON ORIGINALS: She was violently murdered, beaten to death, hog-tied and gagged.
TUCKER CARLSON ORIGINALS: The suspect is a career criminal called Daryl Collins. Collins served decades in prison for two murders, as well as a string of armed robberies.
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TUCKER CARLSON ORIGINALS: He had quite an extensive criminal history, a series of armed robberies. He killed two different people on two separate occasions. He was under 25 when he committed those murders. He was eligible for youthful parole and the parole board decided, "Oh, it looks like you know you've rehabilitated yourself and we'll go ahead and release you." That was a huge mistake.
TUCKER CARLSON ORIGINALS: He came in and told my mom he was going to marry her and you know, he would be our stepdad. Prince Charming b-------.
TUCKER CARLSON ORIGINALS: Despite previous convictions for murder and despite the fact that Fatima Johnson was bound and horrifyingly tortured before she was killed, George Gascón is refusing to add any enhancements to this case.
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District Attorney George Gascon speaks during a press conference at Alamo Square Park about a new bill to close a loophole in prosecuting automobile break-ins on Monday, November 26, 2018 in San Francisco, Calif. ( Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
George Gascón is not the only corrupt prosecutor who is doing this. George Soros has paid for people just like George Gascón in many American cities: Kim Foxx in Chicago; Larry Krasner in Philadelphia; Alvin Bragg now in Manhattan; others. In every case, many Americans, thousands overall, have died as a result. So, who's benefiting from this slaughter and how exactly are they benefiting? That's a fair question. You've got to wonder. We do know for certain that voters don't want it.
Americans want the laws they voted for to be enforced and that is true of Black voters just like any others because why wouldn't it be? Sorry, White liberals, Black people don't love crime. Actually, you're not helping Black people by increasing the amount of crime in their neighborhoods and a new Pew Poll proves this.
The poll asked Black adults what they cared about most and guess what? It wasn't racism and diversity or equity. That was near the bottom of the list. What they cared about most was "violence and crime." That's what they cared about. Why wouldn't they care about it? So, as Pete Buttigieg frets about racist roads, thousands of Black people are dying of gunshot wounds. Normal people are sick of this. In San Francisco, the lunatic equity mongering D.A., there Chesa Boudin is facing recall, which could succeed. Boudin has, among other things, encouraged open-air narcotics markets throughout the city of San Francisco and as a result, you guessed it, more than twice as many people have died from drug ODs in San Francisco than from COVID.
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Who could support something like that? You'd have to be pretty out of touch. Well, singer John Legend does, "I endorse Chesa for D.A. when he ran for election," Legend tweeted, "and I support him now." Of course, you do, John Legend. The Biden administration supports him, too. Just days ago, police in Washington rented an apartment where they found a dog called Pablo. The dog had been stolen at gunpoint by thieves who also took drugs and money at gunpoint. Police arrested four men, three juveniles in the apartment. A few hours later, Joe Biden's Justice Department announced he was refusing to charge any of them.
STEPHANIE RAMIREZ, WTTG REPORTER: The U.S. Attorney's Office has decided not to move forward with what they were charged with and also confirmed that the four adults that were arrested have been released. I can tell you the seven people arrested yesterday were charged with receiving stolen property. So, receiving Pablo in this case. Pablo was one of two dogs stolen during a Wednesday violent crime spree that police say lasted nearly an hour. There were four incidents reported within that time frame, including a double shooting in northeast D.C., along with the armed robberies of two dog owners. Police tell us that when they recovered Pablo in a northeast D.C. apartment, that they also took, apprehended some items here, including drugs, a pistol and an AR-15 style rifle and ammunition.
So what happens when you allow people to commit violence, the one thing the state can never do? The state has a monopoly on violence. In a democracy, we decide when violence is appropriable. What happens when you allow anti-social elements to commit all the violence they want? You get a lot of violence and your city start to resemble Third World hellholes. People were executed in broad daylight and no one bothered to call the cops. That just happened in Atlanta.
REPORTER: That's 51-year-old security guard Anthony Frazier getting out of his vehicle on Monday near Cleveland Avenue in southwest Atlanta. Little does Frazier know he's about to be murdered. Now watch as the suspected gunman walks toward him with a pistol in his right hand. Another man, sitting there on the curb, will watch the whole thing happen. Police don't show the actual shooting, just the aftermath. Frazier laying there on the ground dead. His bloodied body has been blurred. The alleged gunman goes through his belongings before casually walking away from the scene. Remarkably, the witness who was sitting at the corner, gets up and walks by Frazier's lifeless body, just shaking his head in apparent disbelief. Then two other men approached the victim and also appear to search him. Take a closer look. We've zoomed in on the video as they then walk away with what appears to be the deceased victim's wallet.
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Something really wrong with everyone in that video, except the dead man. There's something really wrong with the rest of us for putting up with this and not figuring out why exactly it's happening. It's a little more complicated than racism and mass incarceration. Something really dark is going on, but we can say that these sorts of things happen a lot more than they otherwise would when you decide that law should be applied on the basis of skin color.
When you decide that, a lot of people die. They bleed out in gutters, on city streets as the rest of the neighborhood hides indoors in terror and as it happens, most of the dead come from the very group our leaders say they're protecting. "We love you so much, we're letting you die." That's the equity agenda. Too bad BLM never told us how it was going to end.
This article was adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening monologue of the April 21, 2022 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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