Tucker Carlson: China's COVID policy is a tool of social control
WARNING-Graphic footage: Fox News host Tucker Carlson rips the reaction from the Biden administration and the left to protests in China over the COVID-19 lockdowns on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Here's something that we didn't know, but now do. In the winter of 2020, Tony Fauci wanted to know how the Chinese Communist Party was responding to COVID. They had COVID. We had COVID. He'd want to see what they were doing, so we sent one of his deputies, a man called Clifford Lane, to China to find out, and Lane seemed stunned by what he saw there.
Entire Chinese cities had been quarantined, the whole city. Huge numbers of people were forcibly locked inside their own homes, in some cases to starve to death. Secret police cruised the streets forcing pedestrians into windowless vans for the crime of being outside. Household pets, dogs and cats, were declared unclean and beaten to death on the sidewalk. It was a hellish dystopian scene.
So, Lane returned to the U.S. to tell Tony Fauci what he'd seen there. But Tony Fauci was not disgusted. He was not appalled by the human rights abuses that Clifford Lane had seen in China. According to a new report in The Epoch Times, based on depositions that emerged this month, Tony Fauci was envious. "This is what we have to do" in the U.S., Fauci told Wayne.
So, it's very obvious now that from day one, China was the model that American officials, public health officials, were using to respond to COVID here and in fact, it still is the model. In fact, lockdowns are still happening in China. They never really ended and our public health officials have never stopped applauding those lockdowns.
CHINESE POLICE GET VIOLENT AS COVID-19 LOCKDOWN PROTESTS SWEEP ACROSS THE COUNTRY
In April of this year, the Chinese government shut down Shanghai. Shanghai is the largest city in China. It's one of the biggest cities in the world. Shanghai has a population three times that of New York City, 25 million people. And all of those people, all 25 million, are now suffering indefinite lockdown. Shanghai is the largest prison camp in human history.
So, why is the Chinese government doing this to its biggest city? Well, no honest person believes it has anything to do with public health because it doesn't probably.
A man has his swab sample taken for nucleic acid test for the coronavirus disease at a testing booth, in Beijing, China on Nov. 11, 2022. (Reuters/Tingshu Wang)
As of Sunday, yesterday, there were no COVID deaths reported in China, a nation of nearly a billion and a half people, not one COVID death. COVID is not a threat to the Chinese government. Political unrest, however, is a threat to the Chinese government. It always has been and that's the point. In China, as in the United States, COVID policy is not a public health matter. COVID policy is a tool of social control. COVID policy is a way for the people in charge to strip from their population the most basic civil liberties and remain in charge.
That's very clear and that's exactly why our leaders support what's happening in China tonight, because they'd like to see it happen here, too. Hundreds of millions of people imprisoned across the country. That according to Harvard epidemiologist Eric Feigel-Ding is in "everyone's interest." Really? Well, here's what it looks like in China.
CNN REPORTER SELINA WANG: In Lanzhou City, some were forced to quarantine outside in the cold, in parking lots. This viral video, which CNN could not verify, shows others forced to stay in male bathrooms, sleeping under urinals and this one, the video says it's a quarantine site for kids in Gansu Province. A little boy jumping on bricks to avoid the pool of dirty liquid. This is where they use the bathroom. This woman sobs on the ground, crying that after she was caught with her mask pulled down, the government suspended her business for 30 days, losing a month's income. Metal spikes, which the man filming, says were installed on a compound gate to prevent residents from leaving.
Those are ad hoc COVID concentration camps, but there are new purpose built COVID concentration camps under construction right now, all throughout China. The city of Urumqi in the west of China has effectively been its own concentration camp for the last three months. It's been completely locked down. Residents have been unable to leave their homes for any reason, including to get food or medicine. Last week, a huge fire broke out at an apartment complex in that city. The government had sealed most of the doors in the building, including the exit to the outside.
It took firemen more than three hours to control the blaze, and by that time, 10 people had roasted to death inside, including a three-year-old child. News of this fire spread throughout the country. In China, as in the United States, social media are censored by the people in charge who spend a lot of time and a lot of money there and here censoring it.
But in the end, it doesn't always work. Outrage has a way of getting through even the tightest filters. Protests began to form across China and those protests have since grown to become the biggest challenge to communist rule since the Tiananmen Square massacre more than 30 years ago. Here's what the protests look like.
We'll see where this goes, but again, these are the biggest protests that we know about to occur in China since 1989. But what's interesting is the reaction in this country. You watch those clips and you wonder: who could be rooting for the secret police in those clips? How could any decent person possibly be on the side of the Chinese government against the population of the country, the people against human rights, against human decency?
Who could root for the tank against the lone brave man standing in front of it? And the answer is, unfortunately, some people could be on the side of the tank. Some people could support the oppressors against the oppressed, and in this country many people do.
One of them is Tony Fauci. Here he is from yesterday as people were being killed in China for seeking the most basic human freedoms. Here is Fauci suggesting once again that the Chinese government is the model for our country and that's why we may need to close down our schools once more, even as COVID has become about as threatening as the annual flu. Watch.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Coming out of the holidays, should parents expect schools to shut down?
ANTHONY FAUCI: I don't know, Margaret. I'm not sure. When you talk about shutting down schools, there's always the collateral effects
MARGARET BRENNAN: That's also radioactive to talk about.
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Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
ANTHONY FAUCI: Exactly. There's always the collateral issues. So, you have to balance and you do it in real time depending upon the viral load of disease in your region.
Could we close the schools again, fascism with a chirpy face? Sure, says Fauci. We could once again deny your children an education. We'll see. We'll see. We'll make that decision at a future time.
Over at The Washington Post, our internet reporter, Taylor Lorenz, was not so circumspect. She just came out and said it. Lorenz rightly praised what China is doing to its own people, unlike the United States, she said China isn't choosing to "kill off millions of vulnerable people." In other words, deporting your population to concentration camps is compassion.
So, you have to ask, since China is the biggest country in the world, our main rival, largest economy, what does the Biden administration think of this? We must have a position on it. We have a State Department that exists to think up positions on things like this. So, what does the Biden administration think of what's happening in China? Apparently they agree with it. Today, a White House spokesman, John Kirby, the famous John Kirby, was asked for official reaction to the human rights protests raging today in China and here's what he said.
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PHILIP WEGMANN, REALCLEARPOLITICS: What is the president's reaction when he hears protesters in China chant "Freedom or Xi Jinping step down?"
JOHN KIRBY: The president is not going to speak for protesters around the world. They're speaking for themselves.
WEGMANN: So, there's no reaction?
KIRBY: These protesters are speaking for themselves. What we are doing is making it clear that we support the right of peaceful protest.
The protesters are speaking for themselves? Haven't we spent $60 billion to prop up the corrupt government of Ukraine because they're on the side of freedom and democracy, even though it's not a free or democratic country? But that's the pretext. We're for freedom. Here you have people saying, "Hey, I don't want to be thrown in a concentration camp or starve to death in my own apartment" and the Biden administration can't even take their side.
Really? They speak for themselves. They don't speak for the U.S. government? The U.S. government doesn't stand for basic human rights anymore? Really, John Kirby? You should be ashamed of yourself. It's hard to believe that's real. It is real and the U.S. Congress has by and large adopted the same posture.
Eric Swalwell spends a lot of his life yelping about human rights on Twitter (Abortion is human rights) and yet he said nothing about what's happening tonight in China. We were not able to reach his former girlfriend, the Chinese spy Fang-Fang, for comment either, unfortunately, nor did we hear a word from the NBA commissioner. That would be Adam Silver. Now Adam Silver also spends a lot of time yelping about what an authoritarian country this is and threatening the people who live here with punishment. He has no problem threatening American voters in North Carolina, for example, or in Texas who wanted separate bathrooms for little girls.
What does he think of killing people for wanting to leave their apartment? Or throwing people en masse into concentration camps? Well, we decided to find out. So, we emailed this office today to get his view of Chinese concentration camps. What does Adam Silver think of that, one of our premier moral voices? We didn't get a reply. Why is that? Maybe because he has made millions personally and the NBA itself makes billions of dollars in China. So, the NBA has no word to say about China throwing its population to the concentration camps, turning Shanghai into a prison and in fact, when you ask NBA coaches about civil rights abuses in China, what you get is a lecture about how we're worse. Watch.
FAUCI COULDN’T RECALL CRITICAL COVID DECISIONS DURING DEPOSITION: REPUBLICAN AG
U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping as they meet on the sidelines of the G20 leaders' summit in Bali, Indonesia, November 14, 2022. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
STEVE KERR, COACH, GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS: It has not come up in terms of people asking me about it, people discussing it. No. Nor has our record of human rights abuses come up. People in China didn't ask me about, you know, people owning AR-15s and mowing each other down in a mall. I wasn't asked that question. The world is a complex place and there's more gray than black and white.
Oh. China commits genocide against Muslims and locks down a city of 25 million people, but we've got the Second Amendment and they're pretty much the same. That's the word from Steve Kerr, a very famous coach.
These people are all in the take from China. The NBA is literally on the take from China and therefore, they will not say a single negative word about their masters. This is not an American League. These are not people were loyal to the United States. They despise the United States. They are on the payroll of China. That's true. How is it not true?
So, they can't even criticize children burning alive in a high-rise apartment building because the doors have been nailed shut because of COVID, which doesn't actually pose a threat to anybody.
The NBA has taken a pass. Eric Swalwell and his Chinese by girlfriend are taking a pass. The White House is taking a pass and the State Department. MSNBC is taking a pass. So, you have to ask: what about the basic ideas behind this? One of the most basic ideas in American life is that "it's my body, my choice." We have bodily autonomy in this country. Bodily autonomy!
Bodily autonomy is central to the abortion debate. You can't force me to carry my child to term because it's my body. I control my body, not the government. In case you haven't heard that argument before, here it is. This is from recently. Watch.
MICHIGAN GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER: The right to choose is on this ballot.
CHUCK SCHUMER: We want to protect a woman's right to choose.
RAPHAEL WARNOCK: Are you ready to stand up for a woman's right to choose?
NANCY PELOSI: Remove all doubt that a woman has a right to choose.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks at a press conference. (Getty Images)
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JOHN FETTERMAN: Protecting a woman's right to choose.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: I mean this sincerely about what's on the ballot this year. Your right to choose is on the ballot.
Oh the right to choose, the right to choose abortion. What about the right to go outside or the right to choose whether to send your children to school or the right to choose what drugs go into your body or the right to choose not to be thrown into a concentration camp? Are those viable rights too? Are those also examples of bodily autonomy?
Do the 1.5 billion people who live in China or the 340 million who live here, do they have bodily autonomy? No, they don't, according to those people. They don't care about bodily autonomy. They don't care about human rights. What they care about is controlling you forever, and that's true.
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