Tucker fires back at criticism over immigration, voting comments
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host says the left is obsessed with 'demographic replacement'
Last week, we said something on television that the usual chorus of hyperaggressive liars is now pretending was somehow highly controversial. Ordinarily, we'd ignore all of this. Once you've been denounced as a White supremacist for quoting Martin Luther King Jr., you realize such criticism is all just all another form of social control. Honestly, who cares what they think?
But in this one case, we thought it might be worth pausing to restate the original point, both because it was true and worth saying, and also because America badly needs a national conversation about it.
On Thursday, our friend Mark Steyn guest-hosted the 7 p.m. hour on Fox. He did a segment on how federal authorities are allowing illegal aliens to fly without ID -- something that, in case you haven't noticed, you are not permitted to do. The following exchange took place in response to that story:
TUCKER CARLSON, 'FOX NEWS PRIMETIME', APRIL 8: I'm laughing because this is one of about 10 stories that I know you've covered where the government shows preference to people who have shown absolute contempt for our customs, our laws, our system itself, and they're being treated better than American citizens.
Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term "replacement," if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually.
Let's just say if that's true, if look, if this was happening in your house, if you were in sixth grade, for example, and without telling you, your parents adopted a bunch of new siblings and gave them brand new bikes and let them stay up later and helped them with their homework and give them twice the allowance that they gave you. You would say to your siblings, "You know, I think we're being replaced by kids that our parents love more." And it would be kind of hard to argue against you because look at the evidence.
So this matters on a bunch of different levels. But on the most basic level, it's a voting rights question. In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I'd become disenfranchized as a current voter. So I don't understand. I mean, every wants to make a racial issue out of it. "Oh, the White replacement." No, no, no. This is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they're importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have as an American, guaranteed at birth, is one man, one vote, and they're diluting it. No, they're not allowed to do that. Why are we putting up with this?
At least one prediction came true right away, all those little gatekeepers on Twitter did become hysterical. They've spent the last four days jumping up and down furiously, trying once again to pull the show off the air. Once again, they will fail, though it is amusing to see them keep at it. (They get so enraged. It's a riot.)
TUCKER: EVERY TIME DEMOCRATS 'IMPORT A NEW VOTER,' THEY DILUTE AMERICANS' POLITICAL POWER
But why all the anger? If someone says something you think is wrong, is your first instinct to hurt them? Probably not. Normal people don't respond that way. If you hear something you think is incorrect, you try to correct it. But getting the facts right is hardly the point of this exercise. The point is to prevent unauthorized conversations from starting in the first place. "Shut up, racist! No more questions!" You've heard that before.
You wonder how much longer they imagine Americans are going to go along with this; an entire country forced to lie about everything all the time. It can't go on forever, but you can see why they're trying it.
Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party's political ambitions. Let's say that again for emphasis, because it is the secret to the entire immigration debate: Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party's political ambitions. In order to win and maintain power. Democrats plan to change the population of the country. They're no longer trying to win you over with their program. They're obviously not trying to improve your life. They don't even really care about your vote anymore. Their goal is to make you irrelevant.
That is provably true. And because it's true, it drives them absolutely crazy when you say it out loud. A hurt dog barks. They scream about how noting the obvious is immoral, that you're a racist if you dare to repeat things that they themselves proudly say. Most people go along with this absurd standard and dutifully shut up; they don't think they have a choice. But no matter what they're allowed to say in public, everyone understands the truth: When you change who votes, you change who wins. That fact has nothing inherently to do with race or nationality. It's the nature of democracy. It is always true. You can watch it happen for yourself and you probably have.
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All across the country, we have seen huge changes in election outcomes caused by demographic change. New people move in and they vote differently. As a practical matter, it doesn't matter what they look like or where they're from, even. All that matters is that they have different political views. This is every bit as true when the migrants come from Brooklyn as when they come from Oaxaca.
In Vermont, White liberals fleeing the mess they made in New York turned the state blue. As recently as 1992, Vermont was reliably Republican, as hard to believe as that is. Vermont is now a parody of lifestyle liberalism. That's demographic change at work. You see the same thing happening in the state of New Hampshire as refugees from Massachusetts flood north and bring their bad habits with them.
Montana, Idaho, and Nevada all face similar problems. The affluent liberals who wrecked California aren't sticking around to see how that ends. They're running to the pallid hideaways of Boise and Bozeman, distorting local culture and real estate markets as they do it. Pretty soon, people who are born in the Mountain West won't be able to live there. They'll be, yes, replaced by private equity barons, yoga instructors and senior vice presidents from Google. Beautiful places are always in danger of being overrun by the worst people. Ask anyone who grew up in Aspen.
But in most of this country, it is immigration from other nations more than anything else that has driven political transformation. This is different from what we've seen in places like Vermont. Americans have every right to move to new states if they want, even if they have silly political opinions. But our leaders have no right to encourage foreigners to move to this country in order to change election results. Doing that is an attack on our democracy. Yet for decades, our leaders have done just that, and they keep doing it because it works.
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Consider Virginia. The counties across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. now contain one of the largest immigrant communities in the United States. Most of these immigrants are hardworking and decent people. Many have been very successful in business. Good for them. But they also have very different politics from the people who used to live there. Their votes have allowed Democrats to seize control of the entire state and change it into something unrecognizable. Governor, Blackface Klanrobes in Richmond owes his job to immigrants in Arlington and Falls Church.
Similar trends are now underway in Georgia, North Carolina and many other states. Mass immigration increases the power of the Democratic Party, period. That's the reason Democrats support it. It's the only reason. If two hundred thousand immigrants from Poland showed up at our southern border tomorrow, Kamala Harris wouldn't promise them health care. Why? Simple: Poles tend to vote Republican. That's the difference. Democrats would deport those migrants immediately. N hand-wringing about how we're a nation of immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of likely Republican voters massing in Tijuana would qualify as a national crisis. We'd have a border wall by Wednesday.
For Democrats, the point of immigration is not to show compassion to refugees, much less improve our country. It's definitely not about racial justice. Mass immigration hurts African-Americans, perhaps more than anyone else. Immigration is a means to electoral advantage. It is about power. More Democratic voters mean more power for Democratic politicians. That's the signature lesson of the state of California.
Between 1948 and 1992, the state of California voted for exactly one Democratic presidential candidate. Among America's big population centers, in vivid contrast to Chicago and New York, California was reliably, proudly Republican. For eight years, no less a figure than Ronald Reagan ran the state. California had the country's best schools, the best infrastructure, the best economy, not to mention the prettiest national environment on the planet. California was a model for the world.
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In 1980, Ronald Reagan, California's former governor, became president of the United States. In retrospect, it never got any better for California. Midway through his second term, Reagan signed something called the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Though he likely didn't realize it at the time, that law made future Ronald Reagans impossible. The Immigration Reform and Control Act brought about an amnesty, and a path to citizenship, for nearly three million foreign nationals living in the U.S. illegally. The next year, by executive order, Reagan added to that number. He halted the deportation of another 100,000 illegal minors, the Dreamers of his day.
The rest of the world watched carefully as this happened. Would-be migrants everywhere concluded that there was no real penalty for breaking America's laws. In fact, there was a reward. Reagan also signed a law that required hospitals to provide free medical care regardless of immigration status. The Supreme Court had already guaranteed free education to anyone who showed up without a visa. So: Free hospitals, free schools, and amnesty if you get caught. Why wouldn't the rest of the world come? They soon did.
If you're ever bored, go back and read the coverage of the 1986 amnesty bill the day it passed. Everyone at the time, in both parties and the media, assured Americans that the new law would control our border. It was called the Immigration Reform and Control Act, after all. Well, the opposite happened: Huge new waves of migrants arrived immediately, many of them illegal. California was transformed virtually overnight into a Democratic state. In 1988, George H.W. Bush narrowly won California in the presidential election, but no Republican has won that state since. No Republican ever will win in California, not in our lifetimes. There are now about twice as many registered Democrats in California as there are Republicans.
There's not much debate about how this happened. The counties in California with the highest percentage of Republicans are, not coincidentally, those with the lowest percentage of immigrants and vice versa. California changed because the population changed. Analysis of the 2012 presidential election, for example, showed that if you lived in the state of California in 1980, you probably still voted Republican. Your views hadn't really changed. But as your state swelled with foreign voters, your views became irrelevant. Your political power, the power to control your own life, disappeared with the arrival of new people who diluted your vote. That was the whole point.
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That's not democracy, it's cheating. Imagine watching a football game where one team decides to start the third quarter with an extra 40 players on the field. Would you consider that fair play? The Democratic Party did something very much like that in the state of California. They rigged the game with more people. They packed the electorate. As a result, Americans who grew up in California lost their most basic right in a democracy, the right to have their votes count.
This was true for all native-born Americans, by the way, not just Republicans. Los Angeles now has the largest Latin American population outside of Mexico City. Whites make up fewer than 30% of the population, down from more than 90% in 1960. But a less noticed decline has occurred among African Americans. According to demographer Joel Kotkin, over the last 30 years, the proportion of Black residents in Los Angeles has dropped by half. San Francisco is now just 5% Black; in 1980, it was 13%. You've heard a lot lately about the necessity of Black political power. In California, that power is evaporating due to mass immigration.
Democratic leaders never mention this trend, but it's obvious to the people who live there. One poll found that almost 60% of black people in California would very much like to leave. Many already have. The exodus of American-born Californians of every color began shortly after the 1986 amnesty. It has grown to a panicked rush. It can now cost you five times as much to drive a U-Haul out of California than to drive a U-Haul in. That's supply and demand at work. Not many Americans are moving to Los Angeles.
Yet for every Californian who abandons the state, several other people arrive from foreign countries. That's why since 1990, the total population of California has grown by 10 million people. That's the equivalent of an entirely new Michigan and North Carolina in just 30 years. It's an awful lot of people in a very short period of time. Most of these new arrivals come from poor places. Their standard of living rises once they get to California. The state, however, has become much poorer. In 1986, California was the richest landmass of its size in the world. California now has more poor people than any state in the country as of this year, according to the best measurements available from the federal government. California has a higher poverty rate than Mississippi, indeed the highest in the nation.
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How did this happen? In a healthy country, one that prized honesty and free inquiry and legitimate social science, we wouldn't be asking that question urgently. How did a place as idyllic as California become so miserable that huge numbers of people who were born there decided to abandon their homes and flee? If you cared about the United States, you would want to know the answer and you'd want to make absolutely certain it didn't happen anywhere else. Yet the Democratic Party is working to make certain it happens everywhere else. That's not a slur. It's not a guess. We know it because they brag about it constantly.
The left becomes unhinged if you point out that American voters are being replaced by Democratic Party loyalists from other countries. You're absolutely not allowed to say that, but they're allowed to say that. And they do. They say it all the time. They've done studies on it, written long books about it, talked about it endlessly on television, often in the ugliest racial terms. They're not ashamed at all, they don't think they have to be ashamed. In the fall of 2018, a columnist for The New York Times wrote a piece that was literally entitled "We Can Replace Them".
In case you wondered who the "them" was, the column told you explicitly. Thanks to demographic change, the author noted with hearty approval, the state of Georgia will soon be controlled by Democrats: "The potential is there. Georgia is less than 53 [%} non-Hispanic [W]hite". Again, that's a New York Times columnist, not some QAnon blogger.
They tell you that demographic replacement is an obsession on the right. No, it's not. They say it's some horrifying right-wing conspiracy theory, that the right is obsessed with it. No, the left is obsessed with it. In fact, it's the central idea of the modern Democratic Party. Demographic replacement is their obsession because it's their path to power. In 2013, future Obama Cabinet secretary Julian Castro went on CBS to explain why Texas will soon be a Democratic state.
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CASTRO: In a couple of presidential cycles, you'll be -- on Election Night, you'll be announcing that we're calling the 38 electoral votes of Texas for the Democratic nominee for president. It's changing. It's going to become a purple state and then a blue state because of the demographics, because of the population growth of folks from outside of Texas.
No one attacked Julian Castro for saying that. No one asked who these "folks from outside of Texas" might be or why they had a right to control the future of people who already lived in Texas. Nobody said a word about it. It seemed normal, it was normal, it still is normal. In Washington, what qualifies as shocking is any real attempt to protect democracy.
In the summer of 2019, then-President Donald Trump promised -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he was going to deport huge numbers of foreign nationals living here illegally. Kamala Harris's response to this was revealing. She could have argued, as Democrats often do, that deportation is cruel and it's un-American. But she didn't say that. Instead, she told the truth about it,
"Let's call this what it is," Harris wrote on Twitter. "It's an attempt to remake the demographics of our country by cracking down on immigrants. That this threat is coming from the president of the United States is deeply reprehensible and an affront to our values. We will fight this."
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But wait a second, Trump had announced had announced he was deporting illegal aliens, who aren't allowed to vote in our elections. They're not even allowed to live here. How was sending them home to their own country "an attempt to remake the demographics of our country"? Illegal aliens shouldn't even count in the demographics of our country. They're not Americans.
Kamala Harris's response only makes sense if you believe that the millions of foreigners breaking our laws to live here are future Democratic voters, and that's exactly what she does believe. It's shocking if you think about it, and that's why you're not allowed to think about it. Thinking about what Kamala Harris is planning, Kamala Harris herself would like you to know, is deeply reprehensible and an affront to our values. In other words, submit to our scheme or you're immoral.
If you heard prominent people talk like this in any other country, you'd be confused. A nation's leadership class admitting they hope to replace their own citizens seems grotesque. If you believed in democracy, you would work to protect the potency of every citizen's vote, obviously. You wonder if people even debate questions like this in countries that don't hate themselves, like Japan or South Korea or Israel.
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Go to the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) website sometime if you'd like a glimpse of what an unvarnished conversation about a country's national interest might look like. In a short essay posted to the site, the ADL explains why the state of Israel should not allow more Arabs to become citizens with voting rights:
"With historically high birth rates among the Palestinians and a possible influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants now living around the world," the ADL explains, "Jews would quickly be a minority within a bi-national state, thus likely ending any semblance of equal representation and protections. In this situation, the Jewish population would be increasingly politically -- and potentially physically -- vulnerable.
"It is unrealistic and unacceptable," the ADL continues, "to expect the State of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and nationalist identity and become a vulnerable minority within what was once its own territory."
Now, from Israel's perspective, this makes perfect sense. Why would any democratic nation make its own citizens less powerful? Isn't that the deepest betrayal of all? In the words of the ADL, why would a government subvert its own sovereign existence? Good question. Maybe ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt will join "Tucker Carlson Tonight" some time to explain and tell us whether that same principle applies to the United States. Most Americans believe it does. Unfortunately, most Americans don't have a say in the matter.
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Most Americans aren't even allowed to have the conversation. So they watch from the sidelines as their democracy is murdered by people who claim to be its defenders. "Democracy! Democracy! Democracy!" screams the Twitter mob, even as the votes of the people who were born here declined steadily in value -- diluted and increasingly worthless, like the U.S. dollar. This is what it looks like when an entire native population -- Black and White, but every one of them an American -- is systematically disenfranchized. Middle class Americans become less powerful every year. They have less economic power, and thanks to mass immigration, they now have less political power. The leaders making these changes have no sympathy for their victims. They blame the country for its own suffering. You always hate the people you hurt.
That's all true. Every honest person knows that it's true. As long as we're here, we're going to keep saying it out loud.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the April 12, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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