Tucker Carlson: Self-defense is the cornerstone of all liberty

Good evening and welcome to "Tucker Carlson Tonight." Here's a story that tells you a lot. Last Friday, a 35-year-old convicted felon called Austin Simon walked into a neighborhood convenience store in Harlem in New York City and pushed his way behind the counter. Austin's girlfriend had just had a dispute with the clerk in the store. The clerk was a 61-year-old Dominican immigrant called Jose Alba.  

The woman wanted a bag of potato chips, but there was no money left on her government issued food stamp card, so the clerk tried to take back the chips. The woman became enraged and went and got her boyfriend. Now, the boyfriend, Austin Simon, had a long history of violent crime. Simon has spent at least three years in prison for assault. His most recent parole expired last May.  

Though Simon had no apparent job, he was wearing a $300 designer T-shirt and a gold earring, and he was extremely angry. He was furious. Austin Simon threw Alba into a wall, then leaned down and screamed in his face. When the older man stood up, Simon grabbed him by the neck. Here's a local news account describing what happened next.  

REPORTER VOICEOVER: Surveillance video shows 37-year-old Austin Simon push the clerk behind the bodega counter and then stand over him. Moments later, a struggle ensues. The two wrestle and the clerk stabs Simon multiple times. This happened late Friday night in the Bluemoon convenience store off West 140 Street. Police were called for an assault in progress and found Simon bleeding from two stab wounds in his chest and one in his neck. He later died at the hospital and police arrested the deli clerk, 51-year-old Jose Alba, for second degree murder.  

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Alba was 61, by the way, he's every bit as old as he looks. Now Simon died. Every death is sad, but at the same time, decent people can acknowledge that some deaths are much sadder than others and Austin Simon's death is not one of those. Simon was a thug. He was a taker. He was a cruel and vicious bully. Austin Simon was the sort of person who beats up old men simply because he can. Functional societies have zero tolerance for people like Austin Simon because people like Austin Simon hurt the weak and prevent the productive from producing.  

They themselves contribute nothing. They are, in fact, the mirror image of men like Jose Alba. Jose Alba came to the United States 30 years ago to work, and working is exactly what he was doing at the bodega in Harlem and almost midnight on Friday, selling chips to people who don't bother to work, holding up the retail economy for minimum wage. A healthy society celebrates, venerates men like Jose Alba, men with jobs and families, men with independence and dignity and above all, a healthy society affirms the right of men like this to self-defense.  

Self-defense is the cornerstone of all liberty. If you can't defend your own life and property, you have no rights at all. That was obvious in America for centuries. This was a country whose leaders encouraged decent behavior, who held up the common man as a hero, but that has changed. Jose Alba wasn't lauded for his bravery or his resourcefulness. He wasn't congratulated for defending himself in the face of a violent felon much younger than him. Though every single normal person who watched that video on social media applauded, every single one, and yet Alba was arrested at the scene and he was sent to jail. 

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An openly racist Soros-backed prosecutor called Alvin Bragg, then charged Jose Alba with felony murder. He sent to Rikers Island, a jail famous among Democrats because it's so squalid and so dangerous that they have spent decades trying to shut it down, but it wasn't so bad they didn't send Jose Alba there and then Bragg set his bail at a quarter of $1,000,000—$250,000 in a city that very recently was considering getting rid of all bail.  

Compare that to the bail of other violent criminals. Now, a judge later lowered that bond to $50,000, but the message that Bragg sent was very clear to everyone watching and it was this: If the criminal who assaults you is a member of a favored group, you don't have the right to fight back. You may not defend yourself. You must take whatever he gives you because thugs have more rights than you do, you being the person dumb enough to be working in almost midnight in a bodega in Harlem on a Friday. That's the message and it wasn't simply Alvin Bragg who was sending it.  

The tech companies, as always, joined with government as a unified force to send this message. GoFundMe deleted Jose Alba's fundraising page from the Internet. Contrast this with how the left's militia are treated. Now, GoFundMe explained we don't allow fundraising for anyone who's been charged with a violent crime. Really? Well, that's just a lie and provably so. BLM rioters were encouraged to raise money for bail and their legal defense. They can have lawyers, but not bodega clerks. They are powerless and they must remain so. So, GoFundMe openly encouraged rioting in the name of George Floyd on behalf, in effect, of Joe Biden two years ago, but Jose Alba, they shut his family down in hours.  

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So, who made this decision specifically? We should know their names. GoFundMe is a company. Here's who runs it. Tim Cadogan is the CEO of GoFundMe. Juan Benitez is the president. You're seeing their pictures right there. The chief corporate affairs officer at GoFundMe is called Margaret Richardson. These are the people who made this decision to crush Jose Alba and his family, but they're not the only ones. Virtually every power center in the United States agrees that self-defense is no longer allowed. You can no longer fight back and if you don't believe it, remember how the media covered the Rittenhouse trial. 

"He carried a gun across state lines. He's a White supremacist." Here was a man exercising his lawful, his fundamental right of self-defense, but he was charged with murder and corporate media backed the prosecutors. During Rittenhouse's trial, one prosecutor called James Kraus told the jury openly that Rittenhouse should have just allowed the thugs to beat him to death.  

He had no right to defend himself, "Everyone takes a beating sometimes," Kraus says, a man who's never taken a beating in his life, and then another prosecutorial call called Thomas Binger, declared that if you own a gun, you are effectively waiving your right to defend yourself. Watch. 

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THOMAS BINGER: They have to convince you that Joseph Rosenbaum was going to take that gun and use it on the defendant because they know you can't claim self-defense against an unarmed man like this. You lose the right to self-defense when you're the one who brought the gun.  

So, there's the closing arguments in Wisconsin during the Rittenhouse trial. You lose the right to self-defense when you're the one who brought the gun. Now, legally, that is nonsense. It's insane. There's no reference point whatsoever in American law for that statement, but the law is not the point. 

They don't need the law. They now have the unilateral authority to destroy your business, ruin your reputation, throw you in prison, prevent your family from hiring a lawyer to defend you or get you out of jail.  

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You saw that happen in St Louis when another Soros-backed D.A., this one called Kim Gardner, targeted the McCloskey family. Now the McCloskeys were sitting having dinner outside their house bothering nobody in Saint Louis when a mob out of nowhere came to the gate, broke the gate, stormed their property and threatened them.  

So, they went inside and got their legally retained firearms and displayed them. They didn't shoot anybody. It was their property. They held up their guns and said, "Get off our land, stop threatening us." What did these Soros-backed prosecutor do? Charge the McCloskeys with felonies.  

GARDNER: I am disturbed by the events that occurred over this weekend where there were peaceful protesters who are met with guns and a violent assault. Since learning of these events over this weekend, I've worked with the public and the police to investigate these tragic events. I will use every extent of Missouri law to hold individuals accountable. 

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Another Soros-backed prosecutor. Now you have to wonder, why would a Hungarian currency trader be interested in spending untold millions and millions and millions of dollars to invert our justice system, to put the state on the side of the lawless, to put prosecutors on the side of the criminal against the law abiding?  

What source is interested in doing that? It's clearly working and what gives him the right to change our ancient justice system? None of the media asked that question. Instead, they celebrated the days that he installed. Kim Gardner was celebrated by the news media. As CBS 60 Minutes reporting gleefully Gardner, "stopped locking up nonviolent offenders, dropped low level drug cases and ended cash bail." Right.  

What 60 Minutes didn't tell you is that under Gardner's tenure, the city recorded its highest per capita murder rate in over half a century. Many more people died. Died. And not just in Saint Louis and not just in New York and not just in Baltimore, Philadelphia, everywhere. Arlington, Virginia, experiencing a significant increase in violent crime this year.  

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Why? A Soros-backed prosecutor called Parisa Dehghani-Tafti has also prosecuted clear cases of self-defense. You can't defend yourself. The people who are favored by the regime can do whatever they want. You can do nothing to protect your life, your family, your property. 

Burglars broke into the Arlington Smoke Shop in March of 2020, middle of the night. A store employee who was sleeping in the store because there were so many break ins shot at the robbers, as is his right, in fact his duty and he should be applauded for that, but no, he was prosecuted. We spoke to the store owner about what happened. 

JOWAN ZUBER, ARLINGTON SMOKE SHOP OWNER: But they had broken into the store, three men with mask on. The neighbor upstairs said when they broke the window, it sounded like a car smashing into the store. Hamza, the employee, he said it sounded like a shotgun and when he woke up, he said he just reached for the pistol and opened the door and shot three times to scare them and one of them hit the suspect and what happened after that, when the police came, we thought we're in the right. Three masked men, 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, how can we? So, I was watching the Hamza across the street with boxers on, with a tank top in cold weather, 40 degrees. The cops treating us like we're the ones who caused the harm. Do you know what the police officers told him? Why didn't you run out the back door?  

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So, at this very moment, the Biden administration is letting in millions, literally millions of illegal aliens, foreign nationals whose identities we can't actually know because they work hard, the American Dream, the Statue of Liberty. Give us your tired, huddled masses, etc., etc.. Okay, but then when those immigrants come here and work in a bodega in Harlem or a smoke shop in Arlington and they're faced with violent crime, this same party, the Democratic Party, punishes them for defending themselves.  

Whose side are they on exactly? Now, in the Arlington smoke shop case, that prosecution resulted ultimately in an acquittal. Thank God, but what about the employee who was in prison? He spent months in jail. His life was destroyed. Again, the point of this is not just to hurt him, but to send a message to the rest of us. Whether you're in Arlington or Kenosha or Saint Louis or New York City, you do not have the right to self-defense in the United States. This is national policy and Joe Biden has effectively articulated it.  

You might remember he delivered his big anti-gun speech shortly after he took office, the one where he declared the Second Amendment isn't "absolute." He'll decide what your rights are. Biden did not even mention self-defense a single time and that's because Democrats don't believe it is a right. They've said as much. Here's Claire McCaskill. Some kind of washed up Democratic politician, one of the dumbest senators ever to serve in the body from Missouri, explain on MSNBC why people don't actually need ammunition to shoot at home invaders.  

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MCCASKILL: Let's talk about high-capacity magazines. Let's talk about zeroing in on the type of weapons and these magazines that are designed only for one thing, Joe, and you've talked about it over and over again. That's to kill people quickly. To kill people quickly. Now, if you have a home intruder, you don't need to fire seven rounds. 

Claire McCaskill will decide how you defend yourself. You don't need seven. How many do we need, Claire McCaskill? Do you know anything at all about anything? Give us a list of the things you know. That would not include anything about firearms. So-called high-capacity magazines don't have 70 rounds and they don't have half of 70 rounds. No one in the Democratic Party knows what a round is anyway. Here's Dick Durbin claiming that people are walking around with clips with multiple pieces of ammunition. Watch the ignorance on display.  

DURBIN: It's still beyond any understanding that I can offer as to why in the world, individuals have to purchase and own a gun that was made for military purposes and put a clip on this that has multiple pieces of ammunition that can be shot at an individual.  

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They haven't learned. They've been talking about guns for 50 years. They haven't learned a single thing about guns. Why? Because they don't care about guns because it's not actually about guns. It's about power. They make the society far more dangerous than it was three years ago.  

They make it far more chaotic than it has ever been in its history. It's their voters doing this and then they tell you there's nothing you can do about it. You can't even defend your own life or the life of your family. That's what they're saying. That's not a reassuring message. It's really ominous.