Tucker: Democrats are doing everything they can to stay in power
Tucker Carlson discusses Afghan refugees being placed in swing states on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight'
This is a rush transcript of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on September 1, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST, TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT: Good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.
Well, Washington's mass delusion tour continues. It's amazing to watch.
Just hours ago, in the latest installment, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held a press conference at The Pentagon and they told us what they've been telling us all week, from the White House and the State Department and everybody in charge. They are telling us that our departure from Afghanistan, the one that looks like a disaster to you, has in fact -- and this is directly from Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense -- been a resounding success.
Of course, if you subtract the 13 dead Americans, the two dozen trapped school children, the Afghans falling off airplanes, or the fact that we armed the Taliban with $90 billion worth of automatic weapons and helicopters, it's been great.
They're saying this so often, however, that it may not be propaganda. It is starting to seem like everyone in the Biden administration actually believes they just won. And that might explain why they're promoting Jennifer Rubin columns from "The Washington Post" and walking away from reporters without taking any questions. They don't have to explain themselves. It's obvious, this is a victory.
Watching all this should worry you. There are only two explanations for it.
Either every senior government official in Washington has been chugging Ayahuasca and is departed from reality on the early train and that's possible, or on some deeper level, maybe they're actually telling the truth as they understand it.
When they say this is a victory, maybe from their perspective it is. Maybe what looks like chaos is in fact a plan of sorts and maybe that plan is working just fine. Now how can that be? You ask. This is all clearly a disaster. It's on television. Voters hate it. The polls show that very clearly.
So by any normal calculation, politically, Democrats would be very worried about the next election. They are going to be punished, obviously in the midterms. Then Republicans are all excited about the whopping they think they will deliver.
And yet, Democrats seem strangely content and self-confident. Why?
Well, here's one theory. Unproven of course, just throwing it out there to think about.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the Biden administration has evacuated about 125,000 civilians from Afghanistan. Only 6,000 of them, Lloyd Austin told us are Americans, the rest are Afghans and of those very few of the Afghans were translators or aides or contractors, the allies we're hearing so much about who fought with the U.S. military and who deserve our support and may deserve our support.
Of that group, there are only a few thousand. You can be sure of this from a lot of different signs, but here's one sign. The Health Department in Alexandria, Virginia.; a very liberal town that's taking thousands of refugees and the Health Department there just put out this urgent request,
quote: "Alexandria Health Department is looking for Pashto/Dari speakers to assist with translation support for recent arrivals."
Oh, so the one thing we know about these recent arrivals is they are not translators because translators probably wouldn't need translators. These are instead refugees who don't speak English.
So the question is, where are they going next? Where will these people be living three years from now? That's a fair question. You could tell it's a highly relevant question because whenever you ask it, the Biden administration servants in the national news media start to screech about how you're a racist and you need to shut up immediately.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: They're getting caught up in what I call the brown menace, which is this Trumper right-wing fear of people coming into the country from Central and South America. These people seem to be getting swept up into that xenophobia.
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST, "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS": Stephen Miller's response to the collapse of Afghanistan, the fall of Kabul, the takeover of the Taliban was, look at Biden, he is trying to get brown people to come into the country.
It's sickening and it's pathetic.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: As we told you before, the little moron on the right did that hit from Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard, and we've been begging the State Department, please, send 125,000 Afghan refugees to Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard because the people there are open-minded. Clearly, they are.
How many refugees do you think are going to wind up in Chilmark? Right around zero.
But the funniest part is when those two characters describe the Pashtuns coming to our country as brown people. That's hilarious because for the record, they are not brown. They are likely whiter than you are, but whatever. The point is CNN wants you to know that you don't have a right to know how many of these people are coming here from Afghanistan and where they're going, what neighborhoods are they going to be living in?
But of course you have a right because it's your country. You own it. You pay for it. You were born here. It belongs to you, so you have a right to know what happens in your country.
We looked into it because that's what we're paid to do.
So, if you've gone online recently and visited the official website of the State Department run by Mr. Tony Blinken, you'd have found a list of what they call "Welcoming Communities." These are places where Afghan refugees, in particular, Special Immigration Visa holders will be settling in the United States.
And if you look at that list long enough, you may notice something, especially if you cover politics. You may notice that these communities include an awful lot of swing districts and swing states all over the United States. It's not just Virginia.
Three of these communities are in Texas, a state the Democratic Party has tried to flip for years now. It's their first priority. One of these cities is Austin, one is Dallas, another is Houston.
The State Department has also urged Afghans to go to the state of Pennsylvania. Does Pennsylvania need more people? Probably not. A lot of unemployment between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but Pennsylvania is also a state that Donald Trump won in 2016, so maybe they should go there.
Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, Nevada, Colorado -- they're also on the list.
Are you surprised by this? Funny.
One swing state that's not on the official list is Wisconsin, but they're getting a lot of refugees from Afghanistan, too. This hasn't been publicly announced. We learned on Monday when Congressman Tim Tiffany joined us to describe his visit to Fort McCoy in the State of Wisconsin. He said, of the
2,000 Afghan nationals there, none were Special Immigrant Visa holders, meaning none had worked for the U.S. military, none of them were quote, "allies," the people to whom we owe free healthcare.
He also said that these Afghans, despite not being allies were free to walk off the base anytime into our country. They just moved here, like whatever.
No paperwork for them. Nobody was stopping them.
And there are about to be a lot more people like this at that base. CBS News is now reporting that Fort McCoy is being asked to hold up to 13,000 Afghans. Is the Governor of Wisconsin aware of this? What do the people of Wisconsin think of it? Nobody cares what they think, it's not their country. Oh, but it is, and you should be nervous watching this.
In a truly democratic system, in a functioning democracy, the people who wrecked Afghanistan and humiliated the United States and sapped American power, maybe forever, would be punished badly in the midterms. They would lose power over this. They'd be held accountable -- and they know that.
So, they are doing everything they can to avoid accountability, to avoid an election they will lose. They are flooding swing districts with refugees they know will become loyal Democratic Party voters. They are opening the southern border to more than 200,000 illegal migrants per month. That's the equivalent of nearly two Afghan airlifts every 30 days.
And above all, they are using COVID to change how we vote.
These are the tools they are using to maintain power and maintaining power, let's be completely clear and never forget has always been, and always will be their only goal. And that's why the C.D.C., which for generations was a respected public health authority and for good reason. It was created to fight malaria and did a good job at that, now seems to be in charge of housing policy.
Remember when Rochelle Walensky defied a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year to tell you that you can't evict people from your home for any reason even if they're not paying rent. Walensky has not been fired for that. She didn't apologize for it, for desecrating our Constitution, for mocking the Supreme Court. No. Instead, the Biden administration has given her more power, which she now has.
Watch as she tells you, you probably shouldn't travel for the holiday weekend even if you've been vaccinated.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, DIRECTOR, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND
PREVENTION: We have actually articulated that people who are fully vaccinated and who are wearing masks can travel, although given where we are with disease transmission right now, we would say that people need to take these risks into their own consideration as they think about traveling.
First and foremost, if you are unvaccinated, we would recommend not traveling.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Okay, so this is a partisan Democrat for whom the concerns of the Democratic Party are never far from mine, so you have to think of it through a political lens because trust us, they do.
Why are they making you more fearful than you necessarily need to be? Some people should be very afraid of COVID, but not everybody should be. What is this about?
Well maybe, it's for the same reason they would like hundreds of thousands of Afghans to flood into swing states. It gives them the power to change the rules of our democracy so they don't lose another election.
Considering what's happening right now in California's recall election, which is about two weeks from today. In February, the state's legislature in California passed a law requiring that all registered voters get a mail- in ballot even if they didn't ask for a mail-in ballot. Why would you do that? Well, COVID, of course, quote: "The pandemic has not gone away," said one California assemblyman.
Now, here we are in September, and of course they're telling us the pandemic has still not gone away and that is convenient for them and specifically for Gavin Newsom who knows that mail-in ballots, which by definition lack any form of voter ID, cannot be verified, those kind of ballots overwhelmingly benefit his party because they abet voter fraud.
In Connecticut, the Democratic Party is now allowing anyone to vote absentee as long as they say they're afraid of getting sick, quote: "Anyone who is afraid of contracting COVID or expects they'll be sick," one town clerk announced, is entitled to a mail-in ballot.
Now, these orders came directly from the State Secretary of State, who is of course a partisan Democrat. The town clerk told the local media outlet that the changes to Connecticut's voting system are likely to become permanent no matter what happens with COVID.
So, this isn't about public health, this is about elections.
If it was about public health, they'd be telling you to lose weight, but they're not. This is about elections. But whatever you do, don't notice that, don't ask questions about the thousands of Afghans they haven't vetted.
We're quoting now, "I can absolutely assure you that no one is coming into the United States of America who has not been through a thorough screening and background check process," that's what Joe Biden's Press Secretary said just today, but it's a lie.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of unidentified illegal aliens stream across the southern border every month. Who are these people? We don't know, we can't know.
In a functioning democracy, this wouldn't work. Voters wouldn't put up with it. Even partisan Democrats would say, come on, now. You have to have a border, it's a country.
So, when you start behaving this way, so outside the bounds of normal behavior, so far from what the population actually wants, clearly, you don't plan to be held accountable at the election, you plan to change the way the election works, and that's exactly what they are doing.
Sorry, it's true.
Stephen Miller is fully aware of this. That's why they hate him. He is a former senior adviser in the White House. He joins us tonight.
Stephen Miller, thanks so much for coming.
STEPHEN MILLER, FORMER WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: Thank you.
CARLSON: Look, I think for normal people, you know they tend to be very literal, so you know, COVID is a real disease, it has killed a lot of people. Everyone wants to be safe. Okay, we'll hear you out.
Refugees, Americans are big hearted, they want to help the people who helped us. They want to help in general. You know, they want to do the right thing.
I don't think a lot of normal Americans of both parties see that there is a political motive behind these policies, but there clearly is.
MILLER: Well, what we are witnessing right now, Tucker, is the greatest bait and switch of all time. Joe Biden callously played on America's sympathies for a small core of Afghans who worked closely in difficult conditions with American troops, left all those people nearly in Afghanistan and then in their stead, brought over a hundred thousand randomly selected Afghan nationals and he is not bringing them to the United States through any lawful process or through any lawful vetting channels.
And my sources inside of the government are very clear that most of these individuals, when you run a background check, it comes up blank. They are ghosts. Nobody knows who they are.
Of course, if they worked for the U.S. government where you take their fingerprints, it would come up right away, but there's no matches, because they didn't work for the government and nobody knows who they are.
But it gets worse. I have also been informed very credibly that this is the beginning not the end of the refugee resettlement operation. As we speak, the Biden administration is making preparations through its foreign consulates and missions to accept in an open-ended unending way, Afghan nationals, who leave the country and apply at any U.S. mission around the globe and most of that will be happening in Pakistan.
Again, they will bypass lawful visa channels and if necessary, abuse and in fact violate a law known as parole which is meant for very exceptional case-by-case circumstances and bring these individuals into the country with no real vetting and no real knowledge of who they are, but more important than all of this, Tucker, is commonsense.
If you bring in several provinces worth of individuals from Afghanistan, you will replicate the conditions in Afghanistan here in the United States of America and all the horse that entails.
CARLSON: Which is why I think Martha's Vineyard is a perfect place for them to go. The island is big enough for a hundred thousand Afghan refugees and if the people on that island can afford to help, they say they care, every single Afghan refugee should be moved to Martha's Vineyard tonight, I don't think --
MILLER: Open their homes, open their clubs, open their private schools, and open their private dinner clubs.
CARLSON: That's exactly right.
MILLER: All of it.
CARLSON: Amen. Tonight. Stephen Miller, I appreciate your coming on tonight. Thank you.
MILLER: Thank you.
CARLSON: So Americans were completely shocked by what happened in Afghanistan. The question is, why were they so surprised? Because they had no idea that the Afghan Army was going to fold and it wasn't a real government. Why didn't they know that? Because permanent Washington had lied to them for years.
And in particular, one Republican member of the United States Senate lied to them for years. We'll tell you who that was. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Well, it's hard to overstate the damage the Biden administration has done to the United States over the past couple of weeks. They abandoned hundreds of American citizens in Afghanistan including school children, even as they imported thousands of unvetted Afghan tribesmen into the United States.
And then on the way out, as one final insult, they armed the Taliban, which is now the best equipped army of its size in the world. It's all beyond belief. Most people are stunned by it.
We've got to be honest and tell you that the Biden administration didn't do this alone, they've had a lot of help over a very long time from the reckless neoconservatives who run our foreign policy establishment.
The main reason Americans were so shocked by the fall of Kabul last week is that for years, people in Washington have been lying to them about it and telling them everything in Afghanistan is just fine. It's improving, forever improving. Our sacrifice is well worth it. Our strategy is successful. Just keep sending us money and young soldiers, we will make the world safe for America.
For decades that's what they've told us. One of the main mouthpieces for these lies has been Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Graham identifies as a Republican, but his views in real life are indistinguishable from say Tony Blinken's or Mark Milley's.
Graham's real constituents are in permanent Washington, not in South Carolina.
We've pulled together tonight three representative soundbites that tell you the story of Lindsey Graham's personal responsibility for the debacle now on display in Afghanistan. Here is the first of them. This is from 12 years ago.
In it, Graham explains that as an Obama super fan, he is totally in favor of sending 35,000 more troops to fight a pointless war despite the fact he knows perfectly well that many of them will die. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): when it comes to Afghanistan, I am completely supportive of the President-elect's decision to send 35,000 troops into Afghanistan. They are needed.
I would like every American to know that not only are the troops needed, unfortunately, casualties are likely to increase, but we have a game plan in Afghanistan that I think justifies the expenditures of blood and treasure that's about to come.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Nuzzling with Obama, telling us that unfortunately, casualties will increase, but we have a game plan in Afghanistan that I think justifies the expenditures of blood and treasure. So, now is the moment to ask, really, Lindsey Graham? What exactly was that quote "game plan"? And at what point did you realize that it wasn't working?
Well, if Graham ever knew that his plans were failing, somehow he forgot to mention it to the rest of the country. So here he is, two years later telling us that we're really, really close to winning in Afghanistan and not just in Afghanistan, but also in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
This clip is hard to watch, but please make yourself.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GRAHAM: We're on the verge, in my view, of turning this thing around. I see Afghanistan, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen as incredible opportunities to change the world for the better.
If we as Congress accelerate the withdrawal schedule because it's popular at home, we will undercut all the gains we have made.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So the beauty of videotape is it lives forever. That was 10 years ago. Afghanistan, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen -- Lindsey Graham described them all as little laboratories to test his theories.
All those places still exist, they are still countries. The question is, how are they now? Has any one of those countries been improved by Lindsey Graham's game plan? That's a good question. You have to ask the people who live in those countries, many of whom have since fled as refugees to Germany and Sacramento, California.
Lindsey Graham himself has not weighed in on the results of his game plan.
He doesn't like to look backward. Reflection suggests accountability.
If there's one thing Lindsey Graham is strongly opposed to, it's that.
Instead by this spring, Lindsey Graham had dropped the talk of winning the war against terrorism or bringing democracy to the great unwashed. Those were yesterday's goals.
The new justification for keeping troops in Afghanistan was the fight for global feminism. We've sent Marines to Kabul to tear down the patriarchy, Lindsey Graham told us.
Keep in mind that Lindsey Graham said this with a straight face right into the camera.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GRAHAM: And here's the saddest of all news, as difficult as Afghanistan has been and will be, things have changed. I went over right after the fall of the Taliban. Today, there are over six million women who've been educated. Kabul is a very commerce driven area.
People can sing and dance and live their lives without the oppression that the Taliban brought on them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: He's been going there for 20 years. We're sad to tell you tonight that Lindsey Graham's dream has died. The last Gender Studies class in Afghanistan has shuttered its doors. Everyone in that country is now thoroughly binary.
So the question is, was the whole experiment worth it? We'd love to know what Lindsey Graham thinks about that. You see him on television quite a bit all the time on his never-ending fundraising tour. "I'm a conservative.
Send me money."
It's political televangelism, but weirdly, Lindsey Graham won't come on this show and that's a shame, because it would be a worthwhile conversation for everyone. The invitation remains open.
Well, Joe Biden told us that the fall of Kabul has been a quote "extraordinary success." An extraordinary success, and everyone around him is saying the very same thing. So, it's a moment like this that you need -- what we used to call them -- a reality check from someone who knows the country and has been following it closely and who doesn't lie for a living, and that would be Lara Logan. She is the host of "Lara Logan has No Agenda"
on FOX Nation and she joins us tonight to assess that claim.
Lara, thanks so much for coming on.
An extraordinary success. Is that your view?
LARA LOGAN, FOX NATION HOST, "LARA LOGAN HAS NO AGENDA": Tucker, I mean, I just was stunned when I heard that and you know so were hundreds, and in fact thousands of Americans who know what's going on, on the ground, including many, many Democrats.
I cannot tell you how many Democrats I've heard from who say that they regret voting for Joe Biden, that they're ashamed to be American, that never in their lives have they ever felt that sense of shame because this is the kind of thing we're talking about, right?
There are literally wounded Afghan Special Operations soldiers who were wounded before we pulled out, who are lying in their hospital beds waiting to be executed by these Islamic terrorists, who they were fighting, and now the U.S. is supporting and saying, well, maybe we'll give them aid. We don't want to call them an enemy, and this has just been a great success.
I mean, the thousands of desperate Afghans, I've lost count, Tucker. I'm drowning under the cries for help and it is heartbreaking, and I cannot tell you how many soldiers and veterans and other people are just -- they're trying to put their shock and their heartache aside to do what the government isn't doing, which is live up to America's promise to leave no man behind.
CARLSON: I wonder how long it'll be since the Afghan government is now the Taliban and we're supporting the Taliban. We've armed the Taliban. How long will it be until we're told that criticism of the Taliban is racist?
LOGAN: Well, it's interesting you raise that point, Tucker, because do you remember when islamophobia became a thing?
CARLSON: Well.
LOGAN: This happened under the Obama administration, right? Yes. So you weren't allowed to talk about it. That was one of the early subjects that you know that radical sort of progressive ideology that came for all of us.
You know, don't talk about any of this. You're pushing hate. Don't talk about this, you're a white supremacist. Don't vote for Trump, you're a terrorist threat. Right?
We see this play out now, and you know what? Americans realize this now.
It's been going on too long, it's happened to too many people. People on both sides know it. You ever wonder why the Democrats are so disciplined in their messaging. You know why? Because they come for their own.
These people will eat their own alive, Tucker. You know, and then ask for seconds. That's how they are. They are the embodiment of evil.
And when you have Afghan -- you know, we actually -- there's other Afghans like Afghan Special Operations Forces with no legs, whose legs were blown off in combat. You know one guy that I spoke to, his wife is on the run and he is there waiting for these execution squads.
And what you're having is, Afghanistan is being locked down right now. The borders are being sealed. The entire country is being turned into a killing zone. And the United States is not doing anything to persuade the neighboring countries to open those borders.
They are letting the Taliban shut them down on their side and begin to systematically hunt the most vulnerable, high-risk, high-value Afghans including those who created leadership schools and can train terrorists for generations to come.
CARLSON: Yes, our new allies. Lara Logan, thank you for that. It doesn't sound like an extraordinary success at all. We appreciate it.
LOGAN: No.
CARLSON: So, the C.D.C. was created to fight malaria. They did a pretty good job. Then they oversaw the nation's public health and they were fine.
Then they became in charge of housing, and now they're in charge of language.
So now, the C.D.C. has come up with a list of new words you're not allowed to say ever again. In the interest of public health, we'll tell you what those are, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: One of the defining characteristics of our ruling class is this impulse to come up with labels for large groups of people. It doesn't matter whether the people want those labels, they get it. The point of course is to strip people of their individual identity. There is nothing unique about a member of a group, he is just a drone working toward the greater good.
So for example, something like three percent of Latinos say they want to be called Latinx, but the Biden administration does it anyway. They don't care what the people who they are calling these names actually think. Nobody cares. It's all political.
Many public libraries now have whole sections dedicated to writers who identify as LGBTQIA Plus or whatever. They're really running out of letters for the acronym, but they can't help themselves.
The point is to dehumanize and segregate millions of people into arbitrary categories in the name of empowering them.
Aldous Huxley caught on this a long time, quote: "To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior righteous indignation, this is the height of psychological luxury," which is deep and true in this case.
The COVID pandemic has led our public health establishment to indulge that psychological luxury for a year and a half now and there are no signs they are giving it up. The C.D.C., which again was created to stop malaria now controls public housing policy in this country, has now announced a new commandment in the name of health equity.
According to the C.D.C. you're no longer allowed to talk about quote, "people who don't want the COVID shot" or any of the reasons they might be hesitant to take that shot. Those are irrelevant. Instead, you must refer to those people by their new name, a new category. They are people who have yet to receive the vaccine.
It's hard to describe how creepy that is because it suggests free will plays no role in who they are. They just haven't been forced hard enough yet in other words. There are many more examples of this. You're also not allowed to refer to smokers anymore, instead you need to call them people who smoke. You shouldn't call anyone disabled, but rather a person with disabilities.
This is social control masquerading as sensitivity. As always, we'd laugh it off, but there's really nothing funny about the C.D.C. at this point, unelected, unaccountable, more powerful the United States Congress.
Most of us imagine that when democracy died, our new masters would be wearing military uniforms. Who guessed they'd be in lab coats. We should have guessed.
So, the Federal Reserve is supposed to be nonpartisan. Their mandate is defined by law. It's to ensure two things: Stable prices and stable employment. But beginning this summer, Democrats in Congress have tried to transform the mission of the Federal Reserve.
Now, Sandy Cortez who literally couldn't balance a checkbook, who's never had a real job has decided we need to turn the Fed into a vehicle to fight global warming. Imagine a world where Sandy Cortez weighs in on Fed policy or the power grid, but she does, quote: "We urge President Biden to reimagine a Federal Reserve focused on eliminating climate risk and advancing racial and economic justice." How is that going to end when people with literally no skills whatsoever, who can't do anything, who couldn't program a microwave are in charge of the most complex and significant systems in the country?
Go back to the Gender Studies Department. You could really break things.
Dave Rubin is the host of "The Dave Rubin Show." We're happy to have him.
Dave, thanks so much for coming on. So, it seems like the least qualified people are grabbing massive amounts of power. I mean, massive amounts.
DAVE RUBIN, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR AND AUTHOR: Tucker, for the record, programming a microwave can be a little complex. I've never really understood defrosting.
CARLSON: Yes, a fair point.
RUBIN: It just doesn't make any sense. Like what's it really doing? But the point is, yes, you are completely right. You know, I think you know this. I just took a month off. I do a month off the grid every August, and I get to step away and then try to think about some of these issues at sort of a further level than the day-to-day political fight that we're constantly in.
And the truth is, as your lead-in is pointing out, they are here to have a government takeover of absolutely everything. There is no institution that AOC and the progressives don't want to take over. There is no governmental structure that they don't want to change or alter or completely destroy.
And until the rest of us really realize that fact and it is a fact -- until we realize that everything that we hold dear is now being either dismantled or ready to be put on the chopping block, they will keep coming for these things. They want government control. They want giant government institutions and government layers to control everything you do from what you eat, to what you think, to where you go, when you can leave your house and down the line.
CARLSON: It's all about the group. I mean, these are clearly people who feel powerless and inept and only by controlling large groups of faceless people beneath them do they feel any satisfaction at all. I mean, they are only about power, not about competence.
RUBIN: No. Well, they hate the individual. The individual, your ability to think for yourself, make decisions for yourself, decide how you want to live, how you want to work, what relationships you want to have, what type of family you want to have, what type of community you want to live in -- those are the biggest threats to people that want top down power.
That's why they want everything always to be done federally. That's why they want the Federal government to take control. They don't like states'
rights. They don't like local rights, because they don't like you. They like themselves.
CARLSON: They don't like you. Man, is that true. Certainly, in my case.
RUBIN: They don't like you.
CARLSON: No, they don't.
RUBIN: They certainly don't like you, Tucker.
CARLSON: Dave Rubin, great to see you. Thank you.
RUBIN: Good seeing you.
CARLSON: Speaking of skills, Jack Carr has a lot of skills. What an impressive and good guy. Former Navy SEAL sniper. He served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, now a best-selling novelist, amazingly.
He analyzed the Biden administration's strategic failures in Afghanistan and joins us to explain what they are.
Plus, we're planning to bring you a brand new website, a new tuckercarlson.com this fall. Before we do, you can order a signed copy of "The Long Slide" and cut Big Tech out of the equation.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: For the past two weeks, a lot of Americans have been shocked by how stupid and unwise the people in control of the U.S. military are, at the same time, you're always so impressed when you talk to the people at the front end, the people with guns in their hands. Jack Carr is one of them, one of the smartest people we've talked to in a long time.
For 20 years, he led -- he was an Intelligence officer on the SEAL team. He was a sniper. He was in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, he is a best-selling author. He writes thrillers.
We spoke to Jack Carr for a brand new episode of "Tucker Carlson Today"
about what's happening in Afghanistan. Here is part of it.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
JACK CARR, THRILLER AUTHOR, FORMER NAVY SEAL: We've given them legitimacy on the world stage. Obviously we're leaving in defeat. We rushed. We have a saying in the SEAL team, don't rush to your death, and that's what we did.
CARLSON: Don't rush to your death.
CARR: Don't rush to your death. That means evaluate the situation, take a breath, make a good call for the guys that you're commanding.
In this case, we had 20 years to prepare for this moment and we did it about the worst you could possibly do it.
Let's say -- let's give everyone the benefit of the doubt and say since April, we could prepare. Even from April to now, we still don't know how many American citizens were in the country, where they were, as city after city started to fall, province after province started to fall to the Taliban, we didn't make any moves to try to locate American citizens just in case we might need to evacuate them, just in case the Taliban took over Kabul or took over the country.
And you can see it as we get into June, as we get into July, then as we get into August, and then everybody in the White House goes on vacation apparently and puts auto replies on their e-mails and Kabul falls.
And we've given up strategically advantageous positions to put once again that E1, that E2, that E3, that junior officer in the most tactically disadvantageous position that you possibly could put them in and it was completely unnecessary if you applied commonsense to the problem.
CARLSON: Well, so that's what -- this has been my obsession for last week as someone who was never in the Boy Scouts, I don't know anything about military strategy.
CARR: We should have given this to the Boy Scouts, but they don't exist anymore.
CARLSON: But that's kind of the point I'm making. They don't exist anymore, that's right. They were bigots.
The mistakes were so obvious, even I can understand them, but they made them anyway. So then you ask well, you know, why is that? There's not one or two mistakes or even a series of mistakes. This is like an uninterrupted chain of mistakes.
What do you think drove this?
CARR: Well, we call it a snowball effect. When you make one error, it turns into multiple errors.
CARLSON: This is how planes crash.
CARR: Exactly. That's exactly right. But we can go back to 2001 to start seeing this snowball take effect, and then it takes up speed here in mid- April until we get to where we are today, where we're leaving apparently we left dogs behind, we left American citizens behind, we left all of these weapons behind, which that just blow.
So, we've armed the enemy we've been fighting for the last 20 years, even though we conflated the enemy Taliban harboring al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda we kind of dumped them together, we didn't really understand tribal nature of things, how people change sides and move around.
CARLSON: Right.
CARR: We didn't quite get that, so we ended up going to war to crush al- Qaeda, okay, and then we wanted to degrade, I think the exact wording from the National Security team back in 2001 was that we wanted to degrade the military capability of the Taliban. That's how it started off.
Then the Taliban got conflated with al-Qaeda and we started fighting al- Qaeda and they became our enemy for the last 20 years, while at the same time, we're nation building, but same time we're shifting focus to another war in the region that's draining resources from Afghanistan.
So, it becomes this quagmire, this is the best way to describe it, and then we get to what we're seeing today where we're now not just elevating them on the world stage because we had to leave, but we're also arming them and we are also recognizing them as a legitimate government.
So, okay, they are better armed, better trained, and better situated on the world stage than they were before 9/11, which I think is a hard part for veterans, for people that fought there, for people that are dealing with that emotional and physical trauma of the battlefield, that's why these suicide hotlines are ringing off the hook right now because veterans are looking back and saying wait a sec, all those things that I just said are true. Well, what did I sacrifice for?
CARLSON: Yes.
CARR: What did I give my leg for? What did the family of my friend give their son or their daughter for if we just we just armed this Taliban that I was fighting over there in 2006, 2007, 2008. 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 whenever it was.
So I can see how veterans are going to have a very hard time dealing with this going forward and what's important is that they take that rage and they channel it in a way that moves the ball forward for the rest of their country, which means not taking, not robbing their family of their tomorrow because of the horrible decisions of our senior leaders.
CARLSON: That's right. That's exactly right.
CARR: And take that rage, take that and channel it in a positive direction.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, with guys like Jack Carr fighting the war, you know it wasn't their fault. It was the decisions far above them.
It was a really interesting conversation. The full episode with Jack Carr right now on foxnation.com.
So the Biden administration famously abandoned dogs in Afghanistan, but finally, a good news tonight. A former Royal Marine has just left that country with more than 200 dogs and cats. He joins us next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: If you're an animal lover -- and many Americans are -- it has been crushing to watch the Biden administration and American authorities prevent dogs from being loaded on planes and leaving Afghanistan. But here's a happy story.
Pen Farthing is a former Royal Marine from the U.K. who runs an animal charity in Kabul and has since he served there in the British Military. He just escaped from Afghanistan with 200 dogs and cats. We are honored to have Pen Farthing join us tonight.
Thank you so much for coming on. Tell us what you did. Make us feel better about this disaster, if you would?
PEN FARTHING, FOUNDER, NOWZAD: I'm still in shock from listening to your show earlier when you were saying that Joe Biden said it was a complete success. I am absolutely lost for words on that to be honest.
CARLSON: We all are.
FARTHING: But yes, I had an animal rescue shelter in Afghanistan, I don't anymore. Obviously, that's all gone now, 15 years of hard work is now down the drain, but we managed to rescue the 94 dogs and 79 cats that we had at that shelter. We managed to get them out of Afghanistan on basically the last possible flight I could.
We had a privately charted commercial flight. It flew out just after the last British troops left Afghanistan.
CARLSON: What can viewers -- we have a lot of dog lovers who watch the show and cat lovers -- what can our audience do to support you and these animals that you've rescued?
FARTHING: Right now, obviously all our animals are in the U.K., they're going through their quarantine procedures and final health checks to be released. We're still asking for funding because we've still got our staff stuck in Afghanistan. We need to get them out, and sadly the Taliban wouldn't let me take them through the last checkpoint into the airport. At gunpoint, we were turned around.
And so we're still trying to fund now their transport to get them out of Afghanistan, so anybody can visit our website and help us with that process.
CARLSON: And people who love dogs are welcome, I would say. One of the heroes of this story. I appreciate your coming on, Pen Farthing, thank you.
FARTHING: Thank you.
CARLSON: That's it for us tonight. You can watch a brand new episode of "Tucker Carlson Today" with Jack Carr, man, an impressive guy and a great novelist. It's on foxnation.com and of course, we'll be back every week night, 8:00 p.m., the show that is the sworn and totally sincere enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink.
Have a great evening.
And now, Sean Hannity takes over the 9:00 p.m. hour about 20 seconds early.
SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST: Thank you, I'll take it. I appreciate it. Thank you, Tucker.
And welcome to "HANNITY." And tonight, coming up, a phone call transcript Joe Biden does not want you to see. He has been lying about Afghanistan from the very beginning and it appears his top priority, a victory lap on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. That's how sick this is.
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