Tucker Carlson: These criminals 'know they will get off'
WARNING-Graphic footage: Fox News host Tucker Carlson voices his concerns over national rise in carjackings on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Turns out the symptoms of societal decay are universal. They're not unique to a specific society. You recognize them in any country at any time, now or a thousand years ago, always the same. The men become weak. The leaders get decadent. Law enforcement gets politicized. The currency gets devalued and then things begin to come apart.
Pretty soon, it doesn't take long, the society can no longer perform its most basic function. The reason we have societies in the first place, which is to protect the weak from the strong. That's where you have a society. Well, in places like this, it becomes, among many other things, very hard to travel anywhere. You just can't go where you want to go. With legitimate authority in retreat, roads are not controlled by the police. They're controlled by armed predators and the armed predators take exactly what they want from travelers because they can.
This is an ancient problem. It used to be called highway robbery, and for most of history, it kept people very close to home. Turns out it still exists, but now it's called carjacking. Carjacking is the clearest possible sign that your civilization is falling apart and that's why you find it in places like Somalia and South Africa, places where force, violence and clan loyalty have replaced law and order, places where might makes right. In the city of Johannesburg, for example, a vehicle is hijacked on average once every hour of the day. Now, once that happens, there's really no coming back from it. Nobody's going to build anything in the city with endemic carjacking.
In fact, most normal people will leave as fast as they can, as they have in Johannesburg, as they are starting to do, we are sad to tell you, in the city of New Orleans, where carjacking is now a permanent feature of life. Last summer, a law student called Madison Bergeron pulled into the driveway of her home in New Orleans. As she gathered belongings in the car, a young man appeared out of nowhere, stuck a gun in her face, and demanded that she hand over everything she had, including the car. He screamed at her. Terrified, she complied, and that's what carjacking is always like. It is an act of violence.
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People don't want to give up their cars. They have to be terrified into doing so. That's why the majority of victims are women, old women, young women, and that's why the people who do it will do anything. If you will carjack, if you will steal someone's car at gunpoint, you will also rape. You will also murder. You have no limits. You are willing to violate on the most basic level, the civil rights of another person and in this case, that was certainly true because that same perpetrator went on, after terrifying Madison Bergeron and stealing her car, to do the same to other women in the city, a lot of them.
"There was a car blocking me in," one victim recalled. "And next thing I turn around, there's yelling and there's a gun barrel in my face. The kid is yelling to get the F out of the car, get the F out of the car,’ or else he will shoot me." In all, the carjacker would terrorize five women and steal five cars in just two days before New Orleans police finally arrested him and it's amazing that they did because there are virtually no police left in New Orleans.
In a city that probably needs about 2,000 cops, they're under 500 active-duty policemen left in New Orleans. In New Orleans, they have definitely defunded the police. But in this case, the carjacker, a young teenager was ultimately caught, tried, convicted and sentenced for his crimes. Now, these crimes got a lot of attention in New Orleans.
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So, the mayor of the city, Latoya Cantrell, showed up to the sentencing, but here's the twist in the story. Mayor Cantrell didn't show up to support the victims, the women who'd been terrorized by this predator. No, the mayor showed up to support the carjacker and to let the entire city know that she was doing it, to let everyone know whose side she was on. Watch.
REPORTER VOICEOVER: The mayor showed up in court as a character witness for a 14-year-old offender during sentencing. The teen robbed three women in separate incidents with a fake gun, stealing their cars and belongings. The victims told Fox 8 they were traumatized by what happened and then they felt victimized all over again when the mayor showed up in support of the young criminal.
WOMAN VICTIM: I was in shock she wasn't there for us. She was there for the assailant and his mother and it felt like she was supporting the crime.
REPORTER VOICEOVER: Juvenile Judge Darensburg sentenced the juvenile to a three-year suspended sentence, meaning no jail time.
It felt like she was supporting the crime, said the victim. Well, yes, it did, because that's exactly what the mayor was doing. Cantrell was taking the side of the carjacker over the traumatized, law-abiding woman. Now in New Orleans, Cantrell is known by her nickname Teedy, but many people call her exactly what she is: "Latoya the destroya." She is, in fact, a destroyer. The mayor is incompetent. Mayor is an open race hater.
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The mayor is an encourager of violence and she is destroying an already wounded city. We reached out to Mayor Cantrell's office to ask why she is doing all of this. Why did she pressure a judge to release a convicted armed carjacker with no prison time? But of course, she didn't reply to us. It turns out the mayor of New Orleans had a connection to this carjacker. Cantrell had enrolled this person in one of her administration's welfare programs called "Pathways Youth Internship Program." Using taxpayer money, the program says it provides young people who commit crimes with a reward, paid internships and a stipend.
We contacted the Pathways program this morning. We want to know how many people enrolled in that program go on to commit violent crime within five years. We also asked how much taxpayer money they spent, but of course they didn't answer. But we don't need an answer. We know exactly what this is. Pathways, like most social justice scams, is not, in fact, designed to reduce crime. It's about siding with the criminal, giving the criminals as much support as they need, even a courtroom visit from the mayor, if necessary, so they can go out and commit more crimes as soon as possible. So, why would you do something like this if you were the mayor of a city of New Orleans? Why would you force people to leave your city, the people who pay all the taxes of all colors, by the way? Why would you do that?
Well, possibly because the people who are left tend to be the ones who vote for you. So, it is a kind of electoral strategy. It's not just happening in New Orleans. It's happening in a lot of places. The downside is it leads to carnage. There have already been 191 carjackings in the city of New Orleans this year alone. To all of last year, they were a total of 177. Now, most of these carjackings and this is true in a lot of other places, Washington, D.C., we think, most of these are committed by people under the age of 18.
Why? Because they know they'll get off. There's no cost. The local station, WWL-TV found that in 2021, juvenile carjacking suspects outnumbered adults by more than 2 to 1. Now, that doesn't mean that these are Nerf versions of carjackings. They're very violent. In fact, they're always violent and sometimes they're fatal. In March, several juveniles age 15 to 17, mutilated the body of a grandmother, an elderly woman, as they carjacked her in Mid-City New Orleans. They dragged her body down the street. Here's Fox 8 New Orleans reporting on it.
ANDRÉS FUENTES, FOX8 NEW ORLEANS MULTIMEDIA JOURNALIST: 17-year-old John Honore, 16-year-old Briniyah Baker and 15-year-olds Mar’Qel Curtis and Lenyra Theophile will be tried as adults on second-degree murder charges. Police say that the teens carjacked Linda Frickey in Mid-City, back in March, Frickey was beat and then dragged outside of her car until her arm was eventually severed from her body. She then bled to death in the middle of the street.
So again, society exists not to protect 17-year-olds with guns. On the most basic level, those are the strongest people in society, people willing to use force to get what they want. No, society exists to protect people who need the protection, the helpless, the weak, grandmothers who might be dragged and have their arms ripped off without police protection and of course, in the absence of police protection, in the absence of leadership that cares about the weak, those are exactly the people who are murdered and it's not just happening in New Orleans.
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What's interesting, if you pull back a little bit and we have because we think that carjacking is a really clear indication of things unraveling, you find that cities with Soros-backed DAs and well-funded diversion programs for at-risk youth are seeing surges in carjackings. Could there be a connection? Philadelphia, for example, consider that city. This is reporting from a local station there, Fox 29.
VOICEOVER: Carjackings in Philly, a crime that's been exploding over the last several months and according to Philly police numbers released to... by a source, it's getting worse. From January 1 of this year through July 31, a police source says there have been 757 carjackings citywide. There were roughly 850 carjackings in all of 2021. The latest sourced police statistics show that the majority of these carjackings, more than 500, happened at gunpoint and also happened while the victims were at their parked cars.
So, why is this happening? Well, it's happening for very deep reasons. Any 15 or 17-year-old who sticks a gun in the face of strangers, threatens their lives or kills them in order to steal a car, is the product of something that is very hard to fix, disintegrating families, that's the real reason, but society, the authorities still have an obligation to try and stop it for the sake of the rest of us. So, what are these cities doing to stop it?
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Well, Philadelphia, like New Orleans, sends so-called at-risk youth to violin lessons through something called the Philadelphia Arts and Education Partnership. So, the idea is, after a month of violin lessons, these young criminals, people who've been busted committing crimes, get the records expunged. That was the plan that Philadelphia's D.A. put into place last year.
Has it worked? Well, sad to tell you that despite the violin lessons, crime has gone up among young people, carjackings in particular. As Philadelphia's police commissioner, Danielle Outlaw, put it, "I don't want to say it's surprising, but it's definitely concerning." Really? Well, it's not surprising to us, but it is for sure an understatement. From 2020 to 2021, there's been a 108% increase in carjackings in Philadelphia.
Chicago, too, putting up similar numbers. Chicago has had more than a thousand carjackings this year alone. What does that do to a city? A thousand carjackings? For every carjacking, there is a much larger group of people now afraid to drive. Hmm. Now, Chicago is the place where Soros-backed D.A. Kim Foxx recently implemented something called the Juvenile Intervention and Support Center. Right.
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For this initiative, Fox partnered with, and we are quoting "Black-owned, Black run businesses" called "CHI by Design," which pledges to "be bold in our collaborative approach to create anti-racist outcomes."
Really? So, it's been completely politicized. The point of law enforcement traditionally has been to enforce the law, laws that are passed by legislatures. That's a product of the democratic process in order to protect everybody else. Now, the point of law enforcement is to effect anti-racist outcomes, in other words, political outcomes. How's that working in Chicago? Well, here's Fox 32 Chicago to tell you.
POLICE: There's a carjacked car. Chicago, we have eyes on it.
REPORTER VOICEOVER: One of the passengers in the stolen SUV eventually fled. When police caught him, they discovered he was 17-years-old, released to his mother. Sadly, he's not the youngest suspect that members of the carjacking task force have seen.
POLICE: A well-known 11-year-old.
REPORTER: That have been in contact with police before?
POLICE: Yes
REPORTER: An 11-year-old was arrested in Chicago as part of a carjacking crew and it was not his first time.
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11-years-old. One of that carjacker's victims said that, "He actually skipped like a child all the way up" to the car he stole. We can't tell you his name because he's an at-risk youth. Apparently, he needs more violin lessons and he will soon be a productive member of society. This is a joke. The people administering the program know it's a joke.
It doesn't achieve the main overriding goal, which is to protect people who just want to go to the grocery store, to protect grandmothers who want to go to church, protect everybody else who wants to go to work in the morning, who wants to live in a city where you can travel on the roads without being killed? Chicago's leaders don't care. The same is true, by the way, of the unnamed 16-year-old girl who hijacked a man's Audi while his child was in the car. That's an atrocity. Here's Fox's 32 in Chicago.
Police scanner: Getting an auto theft just occurred, child in the car.
REPORTER: The frantic father reports his car stolen.
Police scanner: Somebody jumped into his black Audi Q7 with the dealer plate, his child is in the car.
So, as you so often see in these cases, the person who commits the crime has committed a ton of other crime because it turns out most crimes are committed by a very small number of people and in this case, the girl stole that car, stole several other cars that month, which makes you wonder, maybe violin lessons and visits in the courtroom from the mayor don't really work. Maybe these people need a father at home. The nuclear family. Right. Those things are not, in fact, racist.
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They are essential to any functioning civilization and in lieu of them, it is clear that things fall apart and the only thing you can do is to put people out of the public sphere away so that other people aren't hurt by them. That's the best we can do and it's obligatory that we do it because people are being killed and if you don't do that, you wind up the society in which 11-year-olds treat carjacking like a sport because they know they can get out of jail very quickly. Here's Fox2 in Detroit.
REPORTER: Detroit police arrested an 11, 12 and 14-year-old for stealing high-end hellcat cars off the Jefferson North lot.
REPORTER: Head of the Detroit Police Commercial Auto Theft Unit, Lieutenant Clive Stewart, stunned over the trio of kids arrested Monday right here on the storage lot of the Jefferson north plant. In a separate incident, this kid, 14-years-old, an alleged repeat carjacker, arrested this weekend. He was out on bond from a carjacking in May. Then last week, police say he jacked two cars on the city's east side, the same night.
So if you look closely enough at this specific problem, carjacking, and it's one of the many problems in our society that seem to be getting worse, but just look at this one and you begin to realize, because everything is irony at this point, the youth violence prevention initiatives that are supposed to stop this, actually enable it, indeed appear to be encouraging it and yet they're still getting millions of dollars from the Biden administration. The youth diversion programs that make these kinds of crimes more common have a lot in common with the equity programs for unhoused people that seem to encourage homelessness. Those two have led to more carjackings. Here's a report from Fox 11 in L.A.
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REPORTER VOICEOVER: Carjacking caught on camera. Witnesses keeping their distance as a homeless man punches a street vendor, then steals his van. The street vendor was carjacked by a homeless man over the weekend. Esteban says he'd even seen his attacker before and that he had never had a problem with him, adding that he gave the man food shortly before he punched him in the face.
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Yeah. So, if they're happening in New Orleans and Los Angeles and Chicago, of course, this is happening in our biggest city, New York, which is also run by yet another Soros D.A., but as evidence of the collapse of social order is in Philadelphia, Detroit, L.A. and Las Vegas, nowhere in the country is experiencing a bigger increase in carjackings than the birthplace of our new civil rights movement, Minneapolis, where this all started.
According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, Minneapolis saw the largest percent increase in carjackings in the country from 2019 to 2021, a 339% jump. What the hell is going on and why is no one saying anything about it and why are these cities doing nothing to stop it?
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