Tucker Carlson: Russia-Ukraine war is causing moral panic

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Tucker Carlson: Russia-Ukraine war is causing moral panic

Fox News host reflects on the U.S. response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'

This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," March 7, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST: Good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.

Yesterday morning, Joe Biden's Secretary of State, a man called Tony Blinken went on to the Sunday show over at CBS News to announce a new policy toward Russia.

Going forward, Blinken explained, the Biden ministration will use Poland as a cutout to send fighter jets to the government of Ukraine. Those jets will be used to fight the Russian military. Blinken announced this in a calm even tone that suggested this was conventional procedure, business as usual, nothing to worry about, just another weekend at the State Department.

But in fact, it's not typical. It's a very big step, it could turn out to be a pivot point in history. And for that reason, we want to show you the entire exchange. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARGARET BRENNAN, CBS NEWS ANCHOR: If for instance, the Polish government, a NATO member wants to send fighter jets, does that get a greenlight from the U.S.? Are you afraid that that will escalate tension?

ANTONY BLINKEN, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: No, that gets a greenlight. In fact, we're talking with our Polish friends right now about what we might be able to backfill their needs, if in fact they choose to provide these fighter jets to the Ukrainians.

What can we do? How can we help to make sure that they get something to backfill the planes that they're handing over to the Ukrainians.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Are you afraid that will escalate tension? Asks the script reader because even a CBS News anchor knows that sending fighter jets to a war usually does that. No, replies Tony Blinken. That gets a green light.

It's a remarkable exchange. What are we watching here apart from a conversation between two incredibly shallow people who have limited contact with reality?

What we're watching is the beginning of a war between the United States and Russia. If that sounds jarring, what else would you call it?

Now, you may support everything that Tony Blinken just said, maybe you do support it. But let's not lie about what's happening. Let's be as honest and clear-eyed as we can be, especially now because it matters.

The Biden administration just inserted itself with force into the middle of a Hot War between two foreign powers. That means the United States is now an active participant in a war. We are at war with Russia. Whether or not that war has been officially declared, whether or not Congress has authorized that war, all of that is irrelevant. That war is happening right now as we watch.

Why is no one in Washington saying anything about this? Because they support it. They always have.

Almost five years ago, way back in 2017, Congressman Eric Swalwell of California came on this show for another Russia-gate debate, one of many. He came to let us know how Vladimir Putin had gotten Donald Trump elected President. It was all as stupid as you remember it, until the end of the interview when Swalwell said something odd and interesting.

Swalwell explained that because Putin had installed Donald Trump secretly in the White House, the United States should now quote: "Do everything we can to expand NATO's role." In other words, we should let Ukraine join NATO. That's odd. Why would he say that? Why would a policy so seemingly obscure -- NATO? Ukraine? What?

Why would that be a priority for some forgettable Congressman from the East Bay? Well, simple, because getting Ukraine to join NATO was the key to inciting war with Russia. We didn't get it at the time. Now, it's obvious.

Vladimir Putin just invaded Ukraine because he didn't want Ukraine to join NATO. Putin certainly had other motives as well. People always do have multiple motives.

But that's the main reason Russia invaded. The Russians don't want American missiles on their border. They don't want a hostile government next door. Now, that's true, whether you're allowed to say it in public right now or not. It has been true for a long time.

A lot has been written about this over many years by serious people. No one who knows anything and is honest, will tell you Putin invaded Ukraine simply because he is evil. Putin maybe evil, he certainly seems to be. But he also has strategic motives in doing that whether or not you agree with those motives. That's irrelevant. Those are the facts.

So with those facts in mind, the Biden administration's behavior in the days before the Ukraine invasion tells you a lot about what motivated them. With Russian troops massed by the thousands on the Ukrainian border, Joe Biden sent Kamala Harris, the least capable diplomat in Washington to explain America's policy to European heads of state.

At a public press event at the Munich Security Conference, Kamala Harris encouraged Ukraine to become a member of NATO, quote: "I appreciate and admire President Zelenskyy's desire to NATO." Message: Up yours, Vladimir Putin. Go ahead and invade Ukraine, and of course Vladimir Putin did that just days later.

So the invasion was no surprise to the Biden administration. They knew that would happen. That was the point of the exercise.

We watched all this happen. We missed it. How? Honestly, because it was insane, and therefore, very hard to take seriously. Why in the world would the United States intentionally seek war with Russia? How could we possibly benefit from that war?

We still don't know the answer to that question, but it is obvious that permanent Washington has been fixated on a war with Russia for a very long time.

A couple of years ago, you may remember, we'd forgotten, they impeached a sitting President. Why? For threatening to withhold military aid to President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. Failing to back a proxy war in Ukraine was the one thing Donald Trump was not allowed to do as President. Again, they impeached him for it.

And no one said much about it even in his own party, because of course, they support a war with Russia, too, maybe even more than the Democrats did.

As far back as 2016, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, hysterical little Lindsey Graham was jumping around acting out his war fantasies in front of foreign soldiers in Ukraine.

If we saw this tape at the time, we don't remember seeing it. Back in 2016, Ukraine seemed like a faraway place. We should have paid more attention. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): Your fight is our fight.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Speaking in foreign language.)

GRAHAM: 2017 will be the year of offense.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Speaking in foreign language.)

GRAHAM: All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Speaking in foreign language.)

GRAHAM: Enough of a Russian aggression.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Speaking in foreign language.)

GRAHAM: It is time for them to pay a heavier price.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: "Your fight is our fight." That's a very strange thing for an American lawmaker to say to a foreign military. Why would the Ukrainian government's fight in 2016 possibly be our fight? On what grounds is it our fight? What does that even mean? We don't know. And yet now it is demonstrably true.

Ukraine's fight is our fight. Ukraine's war is our war. It's here, but most Americans did not see that coming. Yet, permanent Washington certainly did. Permanent Washington understood that the second Vladimir Putin's forces rolled across the border into Ukraine, we would inevitably be on a course toward war with Russia. They knew.

Here is the President of the august Council on Foreign Relations on the day of the invasion.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD HAASS, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: We need now a response of necessity to his war of choice and there has got to be to raise the economic costs at home, to raise the military costs on the ground.

I hate to be so blunt, but he the most vulnerable thing that Putin is vulnerable to is dead Russian soldiers. So we have to make sure Ukraine has the means to resist.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: "Dead Russian soldiers." At the time that seemed a little bellicose, right out of the gate and it just happened. Maybe there is some way to de-escalate this. Invasion is terrible. But isn't America's role a steward of the West to make things better?

Wouldn't a prompt Russian withdrawal from Ukraine be the wisest course for everyone, including and especially the Ukrainians, on whose behalf we claim to speak but whose country would be leveled by a protracted war? You would think so, but that's not what anyone in Washington wanted. They wanted a war and now they have one.

So where is this going? That's the question for the rest of us who had no role in making these decisions. Well, it's worrisome. You should keep in mind that the U.S. government is currently run by the same people who planned the Afghanistan withdrawal, the ones who tanked the U.S. dollar. The people who run Baltimore, the ones who tried to send crack pipes to junkies. These are people with a long history of destroying things and no history at all of building anything, so a lot could go wrong.

They tell us that Vladimir Putin is unbalanced. We'll take that at face value. We know that Putin has thousands of nuclear weapons. Putin has said that if he is pushed, he will use nuclear weapons.

It could it be wise to believe him.

Harry Kazianis does believe him. Kazianis is a foreign policy analyst in Washington. Like a lot of people in his business, he regularly participates in government sponsored war games. These are designed to map out what would happen if various countries fell into conflict with one another.

A couple of years ago, not long ago at all, Kazianis participated in a war game predicated on a war with Russia. He wrote about this the other day in "The Federalist," quote: "In the course of what we call the NATO-Russia War of 2019, we estimated one billion people died, one billion. And if we aren't careful what happened in the simulation could happen if a NATO- Russia War erupts over Ukraine."

That war has just erupted.

The fact that no one in charge seems to worry about where this could go should concern you quite a bit. But nuclear war is not the only risk. The economic consequences of this were already profound. They are history changing actually.

And if you don't believe it, check out commodity prices. They are out of control.

Wheat is up nearly 60 percent over last year. That's the highest price ever recorded for wheat. Not good news if you plan to eat, and it won't get better. Russia is one of the largest fertilizer producers in the world.

So for example, a ton of urea fertilizer that cost American farmers $265.00 per ton last January, now goes for $846.00 this year. And thanks to sanctions, that number will get much higher. No one who farms has ever seen anything like this. You probably don't farm, but you do buy groceries, it will be obvious to you soon.

In fact, thanks to Biden's foreign policy, everything you buy is shooting up in price and shockingly fast.

Gasoline is now higher than it's ever been in the history of gasoline. In Los Angeles, it is selling for $7.29 a gallon. So, if you make under 100 grand a year, and most people in this country do that qualifies as a crisis for you.

But for the people in charge, it's not high enough, they'd like to make it worse. Their latest idea that a lot of people seem to be buying is that we have a moral obligation somehow to stop buying Russian oil. It's tainted.

Okay. What would happen if we did that? Well, needless to say, oil prices would jump likely to over $150.00 a barrel, even higher prices for you. But then if that boycott spread and moral boycotts tend to and Europe joined it, buckle your seatbelt.

We talked to someone in the energy business this morning, energy traders, to get a little perspective on this. He said a total boycott of Russian energy would cause quote, "an absolute global disaster." That means recession, depression, uncontrollable inflation, and the rest. Economic devastation to us and our allies.

And at that point, in fact, we're already there, we'd be forced to make up the difference by getting more oil from other countries because we need the energy. Batteries aren't going to supply it. So, what would those countries be?

Well, let's see. They would be pretty clear -- Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela -- to repeat, in order to wage a moral boycott, we become more dependent on Saudi Arabia, governed by Sharia law; Iran, a rogue state, and Maduro's Venezuela because this is a moral statement we're making. This is a moral victory. So feel good about it as you go bankrupt. That's the short term picture.

The long term picture of a war with Russia is even scarier than that. Thanks to Biden's policies, Russia and China now form a bloc against the United States. This was the nightmare scenario. Now, it's real.

Just today, the Chinese Foreign Minister described Vladimir Putin as China's quote, "Most important strategic partner." So are we going to see a boycott of Chinese goods in the United States? They're making this war possible. Oh, don't bet on it. That would be racist.

But we should prepare to lose our position as holder of the world's reserve currency. That is happening in slow motion. It's unmistakable.

Now, the Biden people seem to have no idea this is going on or maybe they want it to happen. Joe Biden was up there at the State of the Union bragging about how we took 30 points off the Russian ruble in a single day. Hurray. Good for us.

But once we stopped celebrating our win, the destruction of the Russian economy, they deserve it. You've got to wonder, is there a downside to this? Could it be a pyrrhic victory? Let's see.

These policies have driven Russia, China, India, Turkey, and other countries to accelerate their flight from the U.S. dollar. Now, to be clear, that's the majority of the global economy. This may be the most reckless and destructive thing any American President has ever done with the United States.

If the war in Ukraine ended tomorrow, we would live with the consequences of that loss of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency for the rest of our lives. No one in Washington is even acknowledging this is happening. They're looking for more moral victories to win, and the companies love it. The woke companies -- Apple, Mastercard, lots of other American companies are taking victory laps for their role in punishing Russia.

Great. Punish Russia. We're not against that.

But you've got to wonder, you've just seen a handful of woke corporations crash a country and impoverished its citizens indiscriminately. Now that country is Russia. So most of us aren't even thinking about the precedent it sets, we're fine with it. It's Russia, who cares?

But is it possible these same techniques might be used someday against someplace or somebody that you care about? What if one morning you woke up and they decided that you're Vladimir Putin and you must be erased? Could that happen? Don't think about it. You're probably not able to think about it clearly right now, even if you tried. Why? Because there's a moral panic in progress.

For the record, this is the third moral panic we have had in the United States of America in less than two years. You don't want to live in a country in which moral panics breakout regularly by the way. Moral panics diminish the people engaging them and hurt the people who don't.

They're degrading. They're crazy. They're the opposite of what you want. You want to live in a country where wisdom and restraint and rational behavior and decency determine the outcomes, not screaming.

But we live in a country of moral panics. The first one began in May of 2020, with the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. That changed America completely. The second moral panic was COVID. You've lived through that.

So for nearly two years, the shouting has not ended. Hysteria is now the official language of public discourse in the United States. That's not good for anyone except those benefiting from it. Who is benefiting? Anyone who lies for a living. The liars have perfect cover.

Ask yourself, how much of what you first heard about BLM and then about the coronavirus turned out in the end to be true? How many of the first stories were true? Not many. It was almost all lies.

But you didn't know that at the time because you were busy being yelled at. If you dare to point out that actually all lives matter, they denounced you as a racist. If you expressed concern about vaccine mandates, of course, they called you an ant-vaxxer.

Sound familiar? The pattern never changes. Hey, maybe a war with Russia is not a good idea for the United States. Say that out loud sometime. It's not an extreme position. Most Americans would agree with you. But you will immediately be denounced as a tool of Putin. What is this? It is name calling as a means of social control.

The people in charge have decided their primary job is to decide who you should hate. In an environment like this, everything feels like propaganda and that's because much of it is.

On Thursday, we told you that Russian forces had bombed a nuclear reactor in Ukraine. That seemed to be true. President Zelenskyy of Ukraine had said it repeatedly. But it was not true. No reactors were hit.

An unnamed Ukrainian official claimed that radiation levels in the area had risen. That turned out to be untrue as well.

In the words of Mark Nelson who is nuclear energy analyst, quote: "I'm afraid to say this looks like a coordinated effort to induce panic." Of course. It is what we call disinformation and it was designed to get you to support a war against Russia.

Now, maybe you support a war against Russia anyway, but you should at least know that you're being lied to and manipulated, which you are.

Watch this segment from "Good Morning, America" the other day.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ukraine's mothers, daughters, teachers, politicians, beauty queens, now on the frontlines defending their country under siege.

And there is Anastasiia Lenna, of former Miss Grande Ukraine, photos of her on Instagram in fatigues, rifle in hand, underneath patriotic hashtags.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Miss Ukraine with a rifle, defending her homeland. Is there anything more inspiring than that? It would be more inspiring if it was real, it wasn't. It was fake.

Miss Ukraine was not defending her homeland. That wasn't a rifle. It was an airsoft gun.

So the whole thing was not a news story that you read it as such, it was a propaganda shoot. It was meant to deceive you. It was meant to make you want war with Russia, sympathize with one side over the other. It works. That's why they do it.

It's why the tech companies have censored so many news sites recently, including from Russia, but not exclusively from Russia. Now, we're supposed to think this is a victory over Putin or something.

But a victory for what? Less information, fewer perspectives.

If getting to the truth was the point of the exercise, we as American citizens will be able to read whatever we wanted to read. That was the rule for centuries in this country. It no longer is because truth is no longer the point.

Instead, Twitter and Facebook are proudly censoring any information that might quote, "Undermine trust in the Ukrainian government." Really? Since when are we required to trust the Ukrainian government or any government? Don't ask.

By the way, over the weekend because everything in America is unintentionally hilarious, now, "The New York Times" attacked Vladimir Putin for censorship. It turns out, he engages in censorship. He tries to control his people can read.

Lost in the relentless focus on war in Ukraine, by the way, is any perspective about the world or war, which is always lacking in D.C., but never more so than now.

The fighting in Ukraine is terrible. Of course, you're seeing it happen. No decent person could fail to be moved by the images. But it's not unique. It's not the only war in recent memory or even currently in progress right now.

Many thousands died in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war that was between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Ever heard of it? It ended less than a year and a half ago. No coverage. There's been a gruesome war underway in Ethiopia for a couple of years now. It's again in progress as we speak. Tens of thousands of women have been raped by militiamen. Many of them intentionally infected with AIDS. Can it get worse than that?

How many people have died in the war in Ethiopia? We don't really know. Because no one in our media cares enough to keep track. It is just Ethiopia.

We do know that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians have died in the war in Yemen. It's a war the Biden administration has continued to fund. It doesn't get a lot of attention. It's just Yemen. Who cares?

All human life is equal. All of us are equal in the eyes of God. The death of someone in Ukraine is exactly equivalent to the death of someone in Yemen in its importance. Period.

But hardest of all to ignore, though our media have pulled it off and ignored it is the civil war that's underway a hundred yards from El Paso, Texas right now -- the Mexican Drug War. That's what we call it. It has likely killed more than 100,000 people.

In 2019 alone, close to 10,000 Mexican citizens just disappeared. Most of them young men. More journalists are murdered in Mexico every year than any other country in the world.

You're seeing pictures on your screen right now of that war. They're horrifying. We're keeping the bad ones off the screen. Trust us. They're awful. But it's not a crisis. It's totally normal says the Biden administration. Open the Southern border. The border we care about is Ukraine's.

Now, Republicans in Washington to their eternal shame have no problem with any of this. In fact, many of them are more for a war with Russia than Joe Biden seems to be. That is a disgrace. It will hurt them in the midterms. It will hurt them on some deeper level, because it does not serve the interests of this country. A war fought on behalf of democracy that ignores the will of the country fighting it?

At some point, we will explain exactly what's going on here, we are out time for tonight, but it is enough to know Republicans are not representing their voters when they move to a position that is way more warlike than Joe Biden's, when they embrace the lunacy that could really hurt this country that aren't representing people like Bryce Mitchell. Bryce Mitchell seems like a Republican voter.

He is a 27-year-old mixed martial arts fighters. He was a cattle farmer from Cabot, Arkansas. The other day someone asked him what he thought about Ukraine at a press event. Here is what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: I just wanted to get your thoughts on the whole Russia and Ukraine situation.

BRYCE MITCHELL, AMERICAN MIXED MARTIAL ARTIST: You know, here's my first thought because I'm not going nowhere to fight none of these wars for these politicians. I'm staying at home and when the war comes to Arkansas, I will dig my boots in the ground, and I will die for everything I love. And I will not retreat.

If this country is invaded, and everybody is saying, well, we've got to evacuate. We've got to leave, we've got -- I will not. I will dig my boots in Arkansas soil and I will fight for the people that I love, for the land that I love and the way of life that I love.

But I'm not going overseas to fight. I don't know what's going on to be honest, brother. I really don't. There's so much stuff and I don't think nobody knows what's going on fully.

There has been so much political corruption in that area. You've got Biden and his son making a [bleep] ton of money off of -- and using our tax dollars to bribe their people. That's treasonous in my opinion.

So you've got Hunter Biden, his son, using our tax dollars: Hey, Ukrainian government, if you don't do this, we're taking your tax dollars. He shouldn't be giving our tax dollars to that country anyway. We've got veterans out here sleeping on the street and you're going to give our frickin tax dollars to these Ukrainians and --

My brother, I don't know what's going on over there, but I'm not going over there and fighting.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Tell us how he is a Putin stooge, Lindsey Graham and David Frum and Anne Applebaum, Liz Cheney, tell us how he's immoral.

"When the war comes to Arkansas," he said, "I will dig my boots into the ground and I will die for everything I love." That's the American position. Fight to the death to defend what you love. Your people, your family, your country -- to defend it. That's what we call it the Defense Department. It is not called the Department of Nation Building or the Bureau of Trans- evangelism.

Bryce Mitchell may not have good grammar, but he understands exactly what's going on here. Even people who claim to represent him and our country have no idea.

This is a FOX News Alert: As we opened tonight, there is news reporting out of Ukraine that there is some sort of firefight over the skies of the capital city, Kyiv. Planes reportedly being shot down. Is that true?

Where is all of this headed? We're going to take that breaking news to Doug Macgregor. He is a former Senior Adviser to the Secretary of Defense and retired Army Colonel who has seen combat, knows its costs and has gained wisdom from it.

Doug Macgregor, thanks so much for joining us tonight.

How do you assess what little we know about this report and others like it coming in from Ukraine?

COL. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR (RET), U.S. ARMY: Oh, well, first, let me say God bless Arkansas and Bryce Mitchell. He's got it right.

We're in a very dangerous position right now. We have a President of the United States who wants Ukrainian pilots to come to Poland, climb into fighter jets on the ground in Poland and then fly them into Ukraine to join the fight against the Russians.

He made a very good decision about the no-fly zone. He needs to reverse this decision immediately. This is the first decisive step across the line in to what could make us a co-belligerent in the war in Ukraine.

Moscow will not take this lightly. They have exercised great restraint towards us, even though we have continued to pile great quantities of military equipment into the people that they are fighting. But this is a step too far.

And there are a whole range of responses from tactical ballistic missiles and cruise missiles to destroy all the airports and all the airfields in Poland, or, frankly, anywhere else in Europe where we have U.S. aircraft, potentially, all the way up to a nuclear strike.

The good news is that Putin will not launch a nuclear strike unless we use one, and I can't imagine the President doing that. But nevertheless, it's a danger. And this seems to escape everybody's attention.

The other point that's very important about the Russians. For the Russians, this is an existential question. They will not allow Ukraine to join NATO or any other Alliance that is aimed at Russia. They want a non-aligned neutral Ukraine. That is the first condition and it is one that we should accept.

We should be de-escalating this, not escalating it. That's very important.

As far as what the Ukrainians have to say, we should treat whatever we hear right now with a grain of salt. You cannot know with absolute precision based upon my experience what is happening on the battlefield unless you are there. And we'll know a lot when this is over.

But right now, we should be very careful to assume that much of what we're hearing from both sides may not be accurate.

CARLSON: Can you just sum up the extent you understand what the mission here is? I mean, I think many people would be willing to take some measure of risk on behalf of this country if they understood what the plan was. The plan seems to be to prolong the fighting in Ukraine to what end? Exactly. I mean, I honestly don't understand it, do you?

MACGREGOR: Well, it's a damn good question and it is one that is worth answering. I do think the plan is to prolong the fighting on the assumption that over time, the Russians can be driven out of Ukraine, and if the Russian Army cannot be driven out, which I think many people realize is not going to happen, then the plan is to complete the destruction of Ukraine by turning it into a quasi-Afghanistan. That also is not going to happen.

These things won't happen because the Europeans will not go along. The Germans have already made it very clear that they are going to continue to buy energy and food from Russia; so will other European states. The sanctions, as you rightly point out will do a lot of damage to us, they're not going to make much difference to Russia.

China will stand with Russia. It knows it has to. Russia has an abundance of food and energy. China will take it all. Russia will not suffer as a result of our sanctions. In fact, it may break down the financial system that we have set up to punish everyone in the world we don't like.

CARLSON: It's just what a tragedy to see all the people of goodwill I know personally, a lot of conservatives who are supporting this stuff don't understand how malicious the intent is and don't understand how destructive the effect on our country is. And I appreciate your being brave enough in the face of scurrilous attacks from people like Liz Cheney, to tell the truth. I mean it.

Thank you, Doug Macgregor.

MACGREGOR: Sure.

CARLSON: Liz Cheney called that man a tool of Putin. Can you imagine? He served this country.

Well, we've got a lot more on what's happening in Ukraine later this hour. But just ahead, Kamala Harris clearly has a new strategy. We're going to use the war to force you to get an electric car. Right. Okay.

We've got an exclusive report on that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Gas prices have gone up steadily throughout the Biden presidency. We've lurched from crisis to crisis, but that's remained consistent. You're getting poorer every day.

Today, gas prices broke a new record. The national average for a gallon in this country is $4.10. That beat the record set in 2008 during the financial crisis.

So in response to this, the Biden White House -- because you can't make any of this up -- sent a delegation to Venezuela to discuss importing their oil instead of producing more of our own, helping them instead of ourselves, of course.

Meanwhile, the increasingly ludicrous Pete Buttigieg, he's not a midget, but seems like one, is telling everyone to buy electric cars. They're only 60 grand apiece, no problem, and don't worry about where the electricity comes from. That's not important now.

Now, if all that sounds insane, relax, we've got this handled. We've got someone very competent in charge of the gas crisis. It's the very same person oversaw the border crisis and the Ukraine crisis. It's Kamala Harris.

Today, Kamala Harris explained -- you can't even make this up -- the administration's master plan.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAMALA HARRIS (D), VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We are all in the midst of a turning point. We have the technology to transition to a zero emission fleet. We can address the climate crisis and grow our economy at the same time and I am here today to say, together we all are doing just that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So this is someone who knows nothing about energy, which is very complicated, nothing about economics, which is pretty complicated, has never built a single thing in her entire life, only been a parasite on our political system. That's it. And she is telling us she is in charge of our energy grid, and how you live day-to-day.

The single most important factor in any society is where its energy comes from. That makes civilization possible.

And now, Kamala Harris has decided she is in charge in it in the name of something called zero emissions. Well, if you're concerned about emissions, the two things you would look to immediately because they're already available, are natural gas, which is a low emitting energy source, and nuclear, which is a non-emitting energy source, both of which are being ignored completely by the administration. Why is that?

If they really cared about climate change, they will be all in on gas and nuclear, but they're not. They are all in on sleazy green energy projects that their donors are invested in. Oh, it's another scam.

It's like the President's son getting rich and the government of Ukraine, which oh, we have a moral duty to defend. Oh, I get it. Someone is getting paid. And they are, they're all in on it. And because they are, you're getting completely shafted.

And they're telling you, you should feel good about that. But you shouldn't, at all.

Sorry.

Well, the invasion of Ukraine has highlighted something called ESG, what's ESG? It stands for Environmental Social Governance. So most big investors ascribe to this principle. It means investing in things like equity and windmills and solar panels.

So the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler has pushed for ESG to become mandatory in the business world. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GARY GENSLER, CHAIRMAN, SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION: Why am I talking about climate risk? Simple, because investors are.

They want to know how climate related risks will affect the companies they own. That could mean the physical risk associated with climate change or it might be the steps those companies are taking to lower risk associated with regulation or commitments to lower emissions.

This will be good for our economy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Okay, it's not going to be good for the economy. But one thing we know for a fact is that investors are not thinking about climate change. Sorry, that's a flat out lie. And if you're telling us that with a straight face, you're a liar. Okay. And there's something in there for you.

So in a very clear and smart new op-ed in "The New York Post," Charlie Gasparino argues that ESG is what it obviously is fraud. And, in fact, it could have helped fund the invasion of Ukraine.

Charlie Gasperino is a FOX Business Network senior correspondent. He joins us tonight.

CHARLIE GASPARINO, FOX BUSINESS NETWORK SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: And maybe the invasion of Taiwan, I think.

CARLSON: So how does this work? I mean, it is such a great piece. I hope our viewers read it. But sum it up if you would?

GASPARINO: Well, you know, I just want to back up a minute. You were talking about electric vehicles, which clearly fits in the ESG mandate. It is environmental, right? Electric.

CARLSON: Yes.

GASPARINO: But guess what is in the batteries of an electric car? It is cobalt. It's a mineral called cobalt. Guess where most of that cobalt is located. China?

I mean, think about that. They don't tell you this. They leave it out. And how do I know that? Because I know a lot of people on Wall Street who are laughing at these ESG mandates especially the strict ones.

Listen, everybody wants the environment to be better. Everybody wants us to go carbon -- listen, we can go carbon neutral tomorrow. Wouldn't that be great? But if you transition to carbon neutral, as a lot of these green energy nuts want us to do, particularly through ESG guidelines, you do it tomorrow without nuclear, without natural gas, guess what? You're going to start taxing poor people and the middle class with wickedly higher oil prices, and you've got it right now. That's one part of the charade.

The other part of the charade, Tucker, is simply this. All this comes up under this rubric of the great corporate awakening that came out of, I don't know where it came out of, but the last three years. All of these companies have been adopting woke corporate policies and that's how I got into this.

NASDAQ developed a listing policy. If you want to list on the NASDAQ, you have to have this many transgender people, you have to do business this way. You have to give this much money to Black Lives Matter.

So I looked at this and I asked the people at the NASDAQ, you're a Chinese company. How many directors do you have to have that belong to the persecuted Uyghur minority? Well, none. It doesn't extend to them.

So think about that? It doesn't extend -- so they Uyghurs which is a real genocide, they get screwed while we can virtue signal here at home and you know, that went down the line. You could, under ESG guidelines, invest in Putin's oil companies and of his oligarch friends. Those oil -- those companies can under this sort of great corporate awakening, these woke guidelines list on the NASDAQ.

They are throwing them off now or they're suspending trading, but trust me, they listed. McDonald's can no problem operate in Moscow while Vladimir Putin is wiping out the Chechens. I mean wiping out Chechnya, carpet bombing, killing people it was -- it's the biggest crock of you know what that I've ever seen. It is adopted by many companies, many companies have been forced to adopt it by big investors who want it to be adopted that are embracing this stuff and it is clearly political and it is scary.

And it's also -- I will tell you, I talk to a lot of people about this. I'm not an ESG hater necessarily. Some people get like tarred with being far to the left of ESG. Some people like and I think unfairly like Larry Fink of BlackRock. If you listen to Larry Fink, what he's saying is, let's do a transition. Let's not do this radical stuff, which essentially means that ExxonMobil has to reduce its carbon footprint. We can't -- they can't drill, but it allows us, but it forces us to buy oil from Putin's Russia. And that's kind of what I was trying to say in this column and I hope people wake up to this.

CARLSON: Right. I hope so, too. Let's have a democracy where voters decide where the country goes and not Larry Fink or anyone else like that.

GASPARINO: Well, I would say he gets a bad rap. Listen to him. He's much more for a transition and it is the zealots that are taking over here.

CARLSON: Yes, I've noticed. I love your Uyghur question.

Charlie Gasparino. Thank you. Great to see you.

We are monitoring everything that's happening in Ukraine. It is just after 3:00 AM there. We're hearing that planes were shot down. Can't vouch for that. We do have a reporter live on the ground though.

There are also new developments from the last election, which honestly shocked us if we are being honest about it. We will tell you what they were, after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: This is a FOX News Alert. We should tell you there are reports tonight that two planes have been shot down in or around the city of Kyiv in Ukraine. FOX's Lucas Tomlinson is on the ground in that country for us tonight.

Hey Lucas, what do you know?

LUCAS TOMLINSON, FOX NEWS CHANNEL PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Tucker, the Ukrainian's military top general claims those two Russian fighter jets were shot down today and that's on top of claims over the weekend where he said nine Russian aircraft were shot down, five Russian fighter jets and four attack jets. FOX News cannot independently verify those claims.

But if true, Tucker, this would be likely to be the largest losses for an Air Force since the Falklands War, and definitely the Vietnam War. Russia has already launched over 600 missiles in this country according to U.S. officials.

[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]

TOMLINSON: These eight Russian cruise missiles struck an airport three and a half hours southwest of the capital, Ukraine's top diplomat is urging the West to send air defense systems to stop. There are more than 600 are missiles fired into this country.

Now, a new Intelligence report, Tucker, says that over 4,500 Russian soldiers have been killed fighting here in Ukraine in the past 10 days -- Tucker.

CARLSON: Awful. Lucas Tomlinson for us in Ukraine. Thanks so much.

So you learn a lot about what the people in charge care about by what they won't allow you to say, and at the very top of the list of things you're not allowed to say, can literally get you silenced and censored for saying is that there was voter fraud in the last election. But the fact is there was and the deeper you dig the more of it you find.

The Wisconsin Office of Special Counsel has just released its second report on the subject and it is pretty unbelievable. The report found among other things, quote: "A hundred percent voting rates in many nursing homes in Brown, Dane, Kenosha, Milwaukee, and Racine Counties."

Several of these nursing home residents that had voted, had been previously declared incompetent.

Michael Gableman is the Special Counsel to Wisconsin Assemblies, also a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice. By the way, we will be speaking to Mr. Gableman at much greater length at "Tucker Carlson Today," but we wanted to preview the conversation right now.

Mr. Gableman, thanks so much for coming on. Now, the report is, in my opinion pretty shocking. But just give us -- give us the overview of what you found.

MICHAEL GABLEMAN, SPECIAL COUNSEL TO WISCONSIN ASSEMBLIES: Tucker, the overview relates right back to what you said in your opening segment, the relatively unremarkable observation that all lives are equal.

Well, it should be relative, it should be also unremarkable to say that all votes in a democracy are equal. But that wasn't the case in Wisconsin in November 2020.

We had a wave of massive election bribery, in which government officials in the five Zuckerberg-sponsored cities participated, as well as what you related when you introduced your audience me, which is the government sponsored elder abuse, all to wring out votes from people who frankly were victimized by the very people at the Wisconsin Elections Commission who are supposed to keep our voters safe.

CARLSON: I'm a little confused because -- so Mark Zuckerberg is a tech billionaire. He's not a government official. He has no legal or constitutional right to control our elections, but it sounds like he had a great deal of control over the elections in Wisconsin.

GABLEMAN: He had a great deal. He adopted a plan by a guy who became his employee named, David Plouffe, who wrote the unsubtly titled book "A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump," and on November 11, 2016, David Plouffe did a post mortem on the Hillary Clinton Campaign failure to win, and he said the two big mistakes that the Hillary Clinton Campaign made were failing to target cities like Milwaukee, and failing to drive out the numbers of the African-American vote.

And so Mark Zuckerberg has $330 million that he is going to spend to defeat Donald Trump, and he puts David Plouffe's lessons of the 2016 campaign into operation in Wisconsin, and now we are seeing a complete cover up and obstruction by the very so-called public servants who ran this election, who should have been in charge, but who delegated it out to Mark Zuckerberg's agents and virtually employees.

We had one guy, Michael Spitzer Rubenstein, a lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, who was running the election site on Election Day in the city of Green Bay, one of our five largest cities, also one of the five cities to receive Zuckerberg money, $8.8 million between the five.

CARLSON: It's just -- it's all beyond belief, and you'd think that people who wanted to defend democracy would be outraged. But of course, they're in favor of it.

Michael, this report -- and again, we haven't always highlighted voter fraud on this show, but this report proves it. It's horrifying. And I really look forward to speaking to you at much greater length on "Tucker Carlson Today." So we will see you soon. Thank you.

GABLEMAN: Thank you.

CARLSON: Speaking of which, for that program, we took a very hard look at the Digital Civil War unfolding in this country, the effect of technology and our politics and on our minds. James Poulos is one of the few people who seems to understand it. He described in our conversation, how investors have fueled growth in the technology industry, and also what it has done to the country. Here is part of that conversation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMES POULOS, AUTHOR: The digital medium has certain characteristics, specific characteristics, and what it is doing to us is, it is really causing us to understand that machines that can remember more powerfully than we ourselves can imagine, reduce our human stature in a way that has never been experienced before.

And in the face of that kind of apocalyptic unveiling of this new form of technology, this new medium, all the -- you know, the standard boilerplate answers that have come to us that have been handed down, you know, through modern philosophy, postmodern philosophy, you know, sort of self-esteem stuff, if you can dream it, you can do it, follow your passion, all that kind of stuff, those answers to the ultimate questions.

Who are we? Why are we here? Why bother? What's the point?

Those answers start melting down. They don't have the grip on us, the hold on us that -- they don't capture our imaginations. And so in the face of this big sort of unveiling, where do we look for answers about who we are? About why we should bother?

Well, these are -- these ultimate questions, you know, have theological answers. And so the advent of digital technology is return to people the sort of perception, the understanding, the sensibility that reality is fundamentally theological.

You've got to be worshiping something. You've got to have a theology. What's it going to be? And that is why we're in a state of spiritual war and as that spiritual conflict is playing out, you know, we've got political conflict, too. And those things are starting to sync up in a way that you know, sort of secular life, that's not supposed to happen that way.

So people are resistant feeling like that's the way it's going to happen. But look around you. We've got a digital civil war going on. We've got people with deep seated differences, fundamental differences, different wagers about the meaning of life, why we're here, and those different wagers are coming into conflict.

And so it's this kind of -- there is a wrestling match going on right now in America for control of the technology, yes, but also for control of our souls.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Boy, is that true, and never better explained than in that conversation, things that are all around you that you never think about that are worth thinking about once in a while.

It is on FOX Nation. You can head over to tuckercarlson.com.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: That's it for us. We appreciate your spending an hour with us. There's an awful lot going on, very little honesty, lots of unspoken agendas that are malicious and that will affect how we live for the rest of our lives and how our children live, so it's worth paying attention. We'll try to be as honest as we possibly can be.

We'll be back tomorrow night, 8:00 PM, the show that is a sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink.

Have the best night with the ones you love.

Here is Sean Hannity.

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