Tucker: Equity is racism

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Tucker: Equity is racism

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host reacts to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot prioritizing Black and Brown journalists

This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," May 19, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

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

For months now, privately, we've been searching for a meaningful definition of the word "equity." We've consulted linguists, we've dusted off moldering reference books, and we've scoured the four corners of God's own internet, all in an effort to figure out what equity is.

We've done this not for pleasure, we have hobbies, but because we feel it's our duty as a news program. Equity is now the organizing principle of the United States of America.

On the very day he was inaugurated, Joe Biden signed Executive Order 13985. That Order makes equity mandatory across the Federal government in all the agencies. And yet strangely, neither Joe Biden nor anyone else in the administration has ever defined the word.

So what is equity? Well, tonight, finally we know what it is. Equity, it turns out is racism. It's as simple as that. Equity is racism.

And to be clear, we don't mean racism in the sense that ice cream and Shakespeare and math are all now supposedly racist, or that Dr. Seuss is now considered an exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan. We're not talking about the Ilhan Omar "Atlantic" Magazine definition of racism, which by the way isn't actually language, but just another blunt political weapon. No, we mean racism in the literal sense in the way that Martin Luther King defined the term, which is the act of hurting some people and helping others purely on the basis of their respective races.

Bigotry, in other words, prejudice, hatred. That's what equity is.

We know this thanks to Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago.

Earlier today, Lightfoot released a two-page Manifesto defining equity, quote: "Equity and inclusion are the North Stars of this administration." Lightfoot explained. Then, she got specific about it, quote: "On the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city, I will be exclusively providing one-on-one interviews with journalists of color."

So in the name of equity, Lori Lightfoot is refusing to grant interviews to white people. Lightfoot took pains to explain she doesn't mean that personally. In fact, you can see that some of the white reporters who cover City Hall in Chicago are talented and hardworking.

But unfortunately, they are, Lightfoot said quote, "white nonetheless."

So there it is, as plainly as anyone has ever said it out loud. White people are disqualified because they are white, not because of anything they have done or said or think, Lori Lightfoot doesn't care about that. She says so.

Lightfoot is not interested in what these white people might be like as individuals, as people. She doesn't even care what kind of white they are. Their ancestors could be from Italy or Luxembourg or Finland or Spain. They could be members of the British Royal Family. They could be penniless Romanian immigrants living in a box on the sidewalk on Michigan Avenue.

Rich or poor, it doesn't matter to Lori Lightfoot. To Lori Lightfoot, all that matters is the fact they are white because all white people are the same. They are entirely defined by the color of their skin. You can see how this makes life a little easier for Lori Lightfoot. She knows who to hate just by looking at them.

If someday, the Chicago Police rounded up the entire population of the city, Lori Lightfoot would have no trouble pulling the right ones out of line for punishment.

By the way, in case you're wondering, yes, that was a Nazi reference. It was deserved.

Lori Lightfoot is a monster.

Any society that allows politicians to talk like this has a very ugly future ahead -- very ugly.

But of course, no one said much at all about what Lori Lightfoot said in her Manifesto, even Chicago reporters, some of them could no longer do their jobs purely because of how they were born, offered only tepid complaints. Listen to this person from NBC.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

MARY ANN AHERN, NBC NEWS REPORTER: Another reporter called and said, "Hey, I'm hearing they're only talking to black or brown journalists." And I said, "What?" It didn't even sound real. And so I reached out to the communications director, Kate Lefurgy, and she texted me back and said, "Yes, that's true."

She said, white reporters have been in the room for the majority of the year and it's time to hear from other people.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

CARLSON: What? Can this be real? What you just heard was confusion, but not outrage. And yet there's nothing confusing about who Lori Lightfoot is.

Lori Lightfoot is a dangerous bigot. Lori Lightfoot is hurting other people because of their race. That's the crime, but of course, it's the one thing nobody wants to say out loud.

Here's the response from a reporter at "The Chicago Tribune," quote: "I'm a Latino reporter whose interview request was granted for today. However, I asked the Mayor's Office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled. Politicians don't get to choose who covers them." End quote.

Talk about missing the point completely. And by the way, of course, politicians can choose who they talk to. All of us have that right, thank God. What politicians cannot do under any circumstances, is attack an entire group of citizens on the basis of their skin color.

Again, to restate the obvious, that is racism. It is immoral. It is also illegal under countless State and Federal laws.

We are not supposed to allow behavior like that from our government. We are all equal in the eyes of law, we are all citizens. We've got an entire granite monument on the National Mall in Washington promising that we will never behave that way again, we will never allow it. But because we've embraced equity, we're not simply allowing it, we are encouraging it.

Meanwhile, how is Chicago? The City of Chicago under Lori Lightfoot is crumbling. Murders last year jumped to 50 percent. Hundreds more dead, many of them young people, children, most of them black. Is that social justice? No, it's not. It's no one's definition of social justice.

Not surprisingly, Lori Lightfoot doesn't want to talk about it.

There are 50 members of the City Council in Chicago. They're called aldermen. One of them, an alderman called Raymond Lopez has repeatedly pressed Lori Lightfoot to explain what she is doing to the city. You should know that Raymond Lopez is not a right winger. He's a Democrat. He represents the 15th Ward, which is overwhelmingly non-white; in some places it is impoverished.

But Raymond Lopez cares a lot about his constituents. So in January, he raised an obvious point with the mayor. Maybe crime is shooting up in Chicago because Chicago as a sanctuary city, is not enforcing Federal law. How did Lori Lightfoot respond to this? She called him a racist.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR LORI LIGHTFOOT (D), CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: Being an immigrant or refugee is not a crime.

Alderman Napolitano and Alderman Ray Lopez, I just have to say, shame on you.

Fear to debate, which is at the heart of our democracy is not the same as using racist tropes and xenophobic rhetoric to promote yourself on the backs of others and demonize them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Calling for an elected official to follow Federal law is now a racist trope according to Lori Lightfoot, again, whose city is falling apart.

We're proud to have Alderman Raymond Lopez joining us tonight from Chicago. Alderman, thanks so much for coming on. So I sense a theme here. When asked -- and you've been in this position a number of times with the mayor -- when asked simple questions about governance, why are you doing this? Here are the consequences of your doing this, she whips around makes it a racial issue and dodges the question. Am I imagining this pattern?

RAYMOND LOPEZ (D), CHICAGO ALDERMAN: No, you're not hallucinating, Tucker. The race card has been pulled out more times than I care to remember to try and deflect from her deficiencies as being Mayor of the City of Chicago.

And as you played in that clip, you know, she herself said that nobody should use racist or xenophobic tropes as a public official, and yet here she is doing that today, creating a controversy to try and stir up racial fears in our city targeting the media as now the enemy of what is wrong with the social ills in our city.

CARLSON: I mean, it goes without saying this is such a familiar game, but if it had been any other group, any group -- I mean, is it ever acceptable for an elected official who is supposed to represent all people who were equal in the eyes of the law, to say I am hurting people and preventing them from doing their jobs because of their skin color. Like what the hell is this? Why isn't anyone saying anything about this?

LOPEZ: You know, I think the hard part was when this first came out yesterday, many of us thought it was a joke. You know, it was like a bad "Onion" headline. You know, the mayor is only going to talk to people of color, white people need not apply.

And whatever her point was, and trying to highlight the need for diversity in media, may be honorable, but it got totally lost in her messaging, in the way she was handling this showing a clear disconnect between thought and action. And that has been the highlight of her two years, and I think it's very telling that she is discussing two years in office, the ability to think and act has eluded her this entire time, as is evidenced by the controversy that she herself created yesterday.

CARLSON: So, how is Chicago doing under Lori Lightfoot? I mean, the question of competence might be the most important question. Is Chicago improving?

LOPEZ: No, I think Tucker, you know, to put it quite bluntly, you know, she's very incompetent and it shows. She has failed the city for the last two years. Granted, she has had to deal with a pandemic, but we've all been in this together. We've all been trying to work together and she has failed at every turn to bring people in and to unite people.

Her abrasive style has been seen not only with the media, not only with members of the City Council or even her own departments, but now she is trying to pit communities and people of the city against each other with these kinds of discussions and these kind of tweets.

And more importantly, she has spent an entire day trying to defend, articulate and define what she meant yesterday. Meanwhile, just on my way to the studio, I've had two shootings in my ward alone in the last hour. Shootings continue in every neighborhood. On Michigan Avenue yesterday, someone was shot. Another carjacking. None of that is part of the discussion, except for the racist whiteness of Chicago media.

CARLSON: You talk to her a lot. I mean, you're one of 50 aldermen. She is the mayor. You're in the City Council. Did she seem aware of the fact that for most people of all colors, the threat of getting shot may be the kind of defining fact of their lives? Does she seem really worried about that? Working to fix it?

LOPEZ: Sadly, I think the disconnect between what her reality is guarded at her home versus what the reality is in the other 77 neighborhoods in the City of Chicago is not one in the same. And recently we saw with her e- mails being leaked, that she clearly is not aware of what is going on in the communities. And whenever people try to pierce her reality with the truth, she questions their motives.

She questions what the angle is, she questions why she is being told these things that she has never heard before. And it comes off in the way she does her policy because nothing she produces or suggests has any impact in improving the quality of life that we have in our city.

CARLSON: Yes, I've noticed. I mean, the clip that we played where she whips around on you and another alderman and says that you're racist, and you're scapegoating immigrants, I don't even know if you have any white people in your ward. You've got an awful lot of immigrants in your ward though, don't you?

LOPEZ: I have plenty of Caucasian, I have a lot of white ethnics from Europe, high Polish and Lithuanian. But all of us understand that you can't have people coming to this country who do not love this country and only are here making more problems.

CARLSON: You can't have people come to this country who don't love this country. Boy that is -- I'm putting that in my fridge. Alderman Raymond Lopez, the hope of Chicago Thank you very much.

LOPEZ: Thank you Tucker.

CARLSON: It's sad for people who love the City of Chicago and all Americans should, it's a thoroughly American city and a great place in a lot of ways to see the city's decline. We've talked a lot about the murder rate, the hundreds of people killed for no reason there every year.

We've talked very little about the physical filth, but that's the reality of life there, too. Chicago is infested with rats. To the extent that one Chicago animal shelter, the Treehouse Humane Society is releasing feral cats to get the rats under control.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice over): For six years in a row, Orkin has named Chicago is the rattiest city in America. As an alternative to poison, the Treehouse Humane Society offers the Cats at Work Program featuring feral cats who prefer to be socially distant.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They will not thrive in a home environment.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice over): To hire a cat crew for a home or business, the cost ranges from $600.00 to $800.00.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So the shelter is for a fee, placing two to three cats outside of businesses and residences that call for help with rats. It seems kind of inspired. Does it actually work?

Well, we wanted to talk to someone who would know the answer. Jordan Reed is a rat wrangler. He says, in fact, dogs would be more effective. We wanted to talk to him for a moment tonight, to put a finer point on that. Mr. Reed, thanks so much for coming on.

First, before you get into your preference dogs over cats, ferrets maybe, describe for us the rat problem in Chicago tonight.

JORDAN REED, RAT WRANGLER: Well, I don't know much about it because I'm out on the west coast. I only know that I get a lot of phone calls and e- mails on a continual basis inviting me to come out.

CARLSON: Right. I mean, that's kind of the point. I mean, you're a thousand miles away, and the City of Chicago was reaching you. That's how desperate they are, overwhelmed they are by the Norway rat problem.

Tell us when you hear of people releasing feral cats to keep rats under control, you chuckle silently to yourself, don't you? The ignorance.

REED: Just a little bit. Feral cats are well known for the problems they cause, the native species and they're not known for catching rats.

CARLSON: Yes, right. And by the way, anybody deeply familiar with feral cats would know that. So what would you recommend?

REED: Well, I like to promote the use of dogs and I'm well known for my work out here in California and Oregon. The use of terriers as well as dealing with the management problems that's creating the rats.

CARLSON: Terriers, as they were called in Great Britain so long ago, ratters, ratting dogs. How many -- how many rats can a well-trained ratting dog, a terrier take out in the course of an evening would you say, just ballpark?

REED: Well, I often take my dogs out for three or four hours to farm locations, and I've caught well in excess of several hundred in that time period with three or four adult dogs.

CARLSON: Several hundred, well, that's remarkable. Do you let your dogs eat them?

REED: No, sir. Just a case of poison, training to drop it is one of the first commands they learn.

CARLSON: Yes, so like a bird dog. You don't eat the quail, you drop it at the feet of your master.

And last -- I'm sorry.

REED: I just go around and collect them after they're dead.

CARLSON: What do you do with them?

REED: We give them to falconers and we compost them.

CARLSON: Yes, nothing is wasted. Use the whole rat. I like that. And last question, do you -- what do your dogs think of it? I mean, how proud are they after killing 200 rats in a night?

REED: Well, I would answer that question by saying the reason I have chosen this as my fun activity is because I'm embracing the true nature of the dogs. So it is my belief that this is truly in the nature of the animal and because I like terriers, I have to give them an activity.

CARLSON: I love that. I love dogs, too, and I agree with you completely. Jordan, thanks so much for coming on tonight. It's great to talk to you. I hope you come back.

REED: Thanks for having me.

CARLSON: So Chicago, a great city though it is, has an awful lot of problems not just rats and a racist lunatic mayor. We traveled to the city for a deeper look into the crisis there. We got hours of -- many hours -- hundreds of hours of never before seen surveillance footage from the city, some of it is too shocking to air.

You can see what we did assemble though on our new show "Tucker Carlson Original." It is on FOX Nation. Here's a clip from it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Kim Foxx let the vast majority of looters walk with no charges. Of the handful of looters who did face prosecution, most were granted pretrial release.

LOPEZ: It is very demoralizing for our residents to be told "Call 911" when you see crime happening, only to see that same criminal be arrested and released within 24 hours.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: That's our documentary series on FOX Nation. And there's more.

We spoke to Kirstie Alley the other day at great length for "Tucker Carlson Today." The interview came out this afternoon.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KIRSTIE ALLEY, ACTRESS: If you can't be happy without drugs, if you can't -- and it makes -- then it starts making you crazy and I felt that glimpse of what real insanity was, not what you know me being crazy Kirstie at a party or playing around, I wasn't playing anymore. I couldn't control feeling kind of insane.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Kirstie Alley turns out to be a really interesting, smart person and very fun to talk to. Apparently former President Trump was watching, he put out a statement about it, about 20 minutes ago. We'll show you an extended preview of our conversation just ahead.

And the C.D.C.'s Director is out today with a stunning admission about where the coronavirus came from. In the end, the truth emerges. We'll tell you what she said, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Well, the Director of the C.D.C. just made a remarkable admission about where the coronavirus likely came from. FOX's Trace Gallagher has that story for us tonight. Hey Trace.

TRACE GALLAGHER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Tucker. This back and forth between Louisiana G.O.P. Senator John Kennedy and the C.D.C. Director is enlightening because it illustrates a significant shift.

Example, last week Dr. Tony Fauci said there needs to be a thorough investigation into whether COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan. Last year, Fauci knocked down that lab theory.

And today Dr. Rochelle Walensky was asked her thoughts on the origin of the virus. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): What are the possibilities?

DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, DIRECTOR, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION: Certainly the possibilities that most coronaviruses that we know of are of origin from -- that have infected the population -- SARS- CoV-1, MERS generally come from an animal origin and --

KENNEDY: Are there any other possibilities?

WALENSKY: Certainly a lab based origin is one possibility.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GALLAGHER: Lab based origin, that answer is key because just a few months ago, liberal media maligned that theory as baseless and political, mostly because former President Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former C.D.C. Director Robert Redfield all said the evidence was compelling and should be investigated.

Even the Director General of the World Health Organization went against his own team and said China needs to provide answers. And breaking today, Republicans in the House Intel Committee say there is significant circumstantial evidence that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan including that in the fall of 2019, several lab workers got sick with COVID-like symptoms.

Bottom line here, Tucker, the Wuhan lab theory is gaining steam and gaining supporters -- Tucker.

CARLSON: Amazing, but not surprising. Trace Gallagher, thank you so much.

GALLAGHER: Yes.

CARLSON: For more than a year they lied about it. They lied. They attacked us for saying it.

They are not the only ones who lied though, we know that Andrew Cuomo lied about nursing home deaths in the State of New York. That's come out, too.

Media organizations didn't cover that story. Instead, they accused the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis who they worry could run for President of manipulating his state's coronavirus data, and they had evidence to prove it.

Various news outlets cited the supposed whistleblower who had previously worked at the Florida Department of Health. It was a woman called Rebekah Jones. Now Rebekah Jones claims she was instructed to delete data on COVID deaths. And over at CNN, Andrew Cuomo's brother treated Rebekah Jones like a living Oracle.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: And I want to bring in former data scientist for the Florida Department of Health who co-founded the COVID Monitor. Why do we keep closing down schools when the rate is so much lower than it is in the rest of the communities? For example, in New York City, they just hit the three percent mark, but the schools are only 0.17, why shut down our schools? You're saying I've got my facts wrong.

REBEKAH JONES, CO-FOUNDER, THE COVID MONITOR: Part of the reason of shutting down a school or school system is to prevent the case rate from getting higher. If you allow the case rate to become high, then you've acted too late.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, she's a data scientist says Andrew Cuomo's brother.

Over at MSNBC, Rebekah Jones is more like a religious figure.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALI VELSHI, MSNBC HOST: Rebekah Jones, the light is shining on you. Don't be scared because the whole country now is watching you and your family and what they do to you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So anyone who pushed back on any of this, well, of course they were sexist for questioning Rebekah Jones.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JONES: Yes, I unfortunately personally experienced a lot of misogyny in the last seven months. Governor DeSantis at a forum for trying to get rid of the stigma of mental health this week actually used the term "she's got issues," referring to me.

So there's an absolutely coordinated effort to just dismiss women in any instance that they speak out to make them seem irrational or overly emotional.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: It was an effort to dismiss women. Well, one long and genuinely fascinating new magazine piece takes Rebekah Jones very seriously, it doesn't dismiss her at all, but concludes that she is a total fraud.

The piece says Rebekah Jones did not have the authority to delete records of COVID deaths in the Florida system. The piece also points out that she changed her story about what happened multiple times. Charles Cooke is a senior writer at "National Review." He is the one who wrote this piece which you should read, because it's amazing and he joins us tonight.

Thanks so much for coming on.

CHARLES COOKE, SENIOR WRITER, "NATIONAL REVIEW": Thanks for having me.

CARLSON: Unfortunately, in the space of a TV segment, we don't have time for you to unfurl this amazing story, but just give us some of the highlights on who Rebekah Jones is.

COOKE: Well, the key thing here is that the central claim is false. And this is not a political question. It's not a question of Republicans and Democrats. It's not a question of whether you like Ron DeSantis or you like Florida or you think he got it right.

As you said Rebekah Jones made a clear claim, an objective claim, a claim that can be falsified, and that is that she was told by Dr. Shamarial Roberson, who is the Deputy Secretary of Health in Florida, is a chronic disease epidemiologist, to fudge the numbers, to edit the raw data.

Now, if that were true, that would be an enormous scandal. But it's not.

First, it didn't happen. There's no evidence that it happened. But suppose for the sake of argument it had, Rebekah Jones was not in a permission -- a position to do what she said she was asked to do. She didn't have the permissions. She's not an epidemiologist. She's not a scientist. She's not a politician.

She was a dashboard manager. Her job was to manage the public facing dashboard with the numbers on it. She got copies of the data in Excel format. She could not write the Merlin database, which is what Florida uses, she could not have done that. The story is false.

CARLSON: And she also had kind of amazing backstory that really has to be read to be enjoyed. And again, I hope that our viewers will read it because it's -- it really made my afternoon one day, but what's amazing is you verified this, you put a lot of work into this piece, but you'd think that Andrew Cuomo's brother could have called over there and said, hey, did this lady actually have the ability to do what she says? Nobody did that so far as I can tell.

COOKE: Well, that's another key point. The documents that are used and they are all referenced throughout the piece, they're all linked on the online version of the piece are public information, all of them. The criminal records are public information, the labor file is public information.

These have all been in the public domain for months, maybe longer. Anyone could have looked them up and read them.

And when you read them, what you find is that this is somebody who was indulged by the Florida Department of Health, not targeted -- indulged. When she was hired, they knew that she had a pretrial intervention program in Louisiana that had wiped away four misdemeanors including assaulting a police officer. They knew she had a deferred prosecution in Florida. And as her behavior got worse and worse within the department, they kept her around. They took her off the dashboard, but they reallocated her. They didn't fire her.

It was only when things got untenable that the department fired her, and as a thanks for that, she started lying about them in public, and then she illegally accessed their computer information and downloaded the personal information of 19,000 State employees.

So yes, this is somebody who has a history.

CARLSON: She is an ambitious young lady. Has she been signed yet to a CNN contributor contract?

COOKE: Well, I don't know. She has two trials coming up both in the State of Florida. So we'll have to see how those go first.

CARLSON: All right. Well, we'll wait to see her on Don Lemon's show, again, Mr. Cooke, thank you.

COOKE: Thank you.

CARLSON: Kirstie Alley has been around Hollywood for 40 years. Lost a lot of friends recently because of her political views, but she has not stopped talking. She has a lot to say.

Our interview with Kirstie Alley was really interesting, kind of inspiring. Part of it straight ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: We don't talk to a lot of actors on the show. Honestly, most of them hate us and would never come on. But even those who would come on aren't that interesting when you talk to them. When they're not reading a script, they don't have a lot to say. Sad but true.

Kirstie Alley is not that person at all. Kirstie Alley has been in films and on television for 40 years. When she has no script in front of her, she has a lot to say, more than we even imagined.

It was an amazing conversation. It went on for about an hour on "Tucker Carlson Today." It's on FOX Nation. Here is part of it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALLEY: Four years ago, I was on a set and I spoke up, I didn't know it was going to be some big -- you know, I think I am going to vote for Trump. Oh my God, some of the producers took me aside and go I'm going with you, but if I -- if anyone hears me say that I will never work again especially for this group. And I was like, "What?"

So it was a little bit ignorance, you know?

CARLSON: Did you take it seriously when they said that?

ALLEY: That they would be fired?

CARLSON: Yes, that they will never work --

ALLEY: I knew they would be.

CARLSON: Oh, wow.

ALLEY: I -- when they first said it, I thought, right? Who cares?

CARLSON: Right.

ALLEY: Then in the last four years I've seen like, right, who cares? Because people go, you're so brave. I don't know, I think I'm stupid. Because honestly, it is a real situation. It is a real -- and it is a real blackballing situation. And it's so strange to me, because artists are free thinkers, for the most part.

CARLSON: Yes.

ALLEY: You know and they all think differently -- and my whole career, let's say when I did "Cheers" everybody was different.

CARLSON: Yes.

ALLEY: They had different political views. They had different -- that's what made everyone interesting. So I -- this whole thing -- it is just psycho to me. I don't --

CARLSON: So it wasn't that way. I mean, people were liberal or gave to the Democratic Party but there was a freedom of thought and expression that allowed artists to create.

ALLEY: Right. I'm not saying we never sit -- like on "Cheers." I think there was only like one of the cast members that was going to vote Republican. And I remember us all going like, well, he is crazy. So of course, he is going to vote Republican.

CARLSON: Right.

ALLEY: You know, we -- but it was like, who cares?

CARLSON: Did you try and kick him off the show? Or --

ALLEY: No, we didn't try to get him fired.

CARLSON: Repaint his house or anything.

ALLEY: But there weren't any of those kinds of things. You know, in most of my career, you know, guys doing blow -- you have guys in rehab, and they're not kicked off. Women tend to get kicked off shows more if they're doing drugs and with prostitutes.

You know, men get like 12 chances.

CARLSON: Yes.

ALLEY: And that's the only thing I can say about show business was women may get one chance if they're lucky, and men get 12 or 15.

CARLSON: But that's such an interesting point that it's endlessly tolerant of certain people's deviation from the norm. Their eccentricities, their drug problems.

ALLEY: Yes.

CARLSON: Sleeping with the wrong people. That's kind of fine.

ALLEY: No, you can be cooking meth and sleeping with hookers.

CARLSON: Yes.

ALLEY: But as long as apparently you didn't vote for Trump. So, you know, I feel like I'm in the "Twilight Zone" a bit with the whole concept of it, because, you know, an example is on Twitter. I had many celebrities followed me and now I think like three follow me.

So it's --

CARLSON: They actually took you off the list. They unfollowed you.

ALLEY: Oh, yes. And I am going -- I'm the same person. You know, I'm the girl who voted for Obama twice.

CARLSON: Right.

ALLEY: And I'm like, oh, see you liked me when I voted for Obama, and now you're this and it sort of had me -- it's made me have to rethink weirdly, my whole friendships.

I just started watching certain things in the world. Like I wanted it simple things. I'm not, you know, a rocket scientist, I was like, I want people to have jobs. I want people to have, you know, I'd like gas to cost less money. I'd like people to have good schools -- and just really commonsense kind of things.

So when I was listening to Trump say what he was going to do. I thought, well, you're saying you're going to do it, I think we should, too. He's not like Mr. Drug Drugged. Do you know what I mean?

CARLSON: Yes.

ALLEY: He is not Mr. Pharmaceutical, he's not -- and I have my own views on what's going on in our country. And how many artists we've lost to fentanyl and other drugs and the [bleep] is sitting right in front of our faces. So I felt like I'd like to give this guy a chance.

CARLSON: So his firmness on drugs, drugs kill people. They're obviously hurting the country. He said that out loud.

ALLEY: He said, the pharmaceuticals -- you know, like, why is everybody doing drugs now? Why is everybody on pharmaceuticals?

CARLSON: That's such a great question.

ALLEY: Why? Why are we all suddenly mentally ill? Why? We aren't. And if we -- it is not that I don't agree that everything and this is -- he may say this or he may not, I don't know. I don't want to put words in his mouth. But it's not like -- it's not like depression doesn't exist. It's not like postpartum doesn't exist. It's not like anxiety doesn't exist.

It's what do you do about it?

CARLSON: That's right.

ALLEY: So in my universe, it is what do you do about it? And my -- I said something on Twitter the other day, I said, "Let's stop drugging everybody." It was like, "Oh, are you a doctor?" And I thought, do I have to be -- God, I really want to cuss right now. I want to say the F word.

CARLSON: Go ahead.

ALLEY: I want to say the F word so bad, do I have to be an effing doctor to not want to take a million pharmaceuticals? Or how about if I'm depressed, I find out why. Do I have to have a disease?

CARLSON: We will find out why?

ALLEY: Yes. If I'm anxious, why? It's like when I did Coke, I was anxious all the time. Duh. I was drugging myself to death.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: As are many. Well, apparently former President Trump watched the entire hour. We think it's worth it. Hope you do. It's as simple as going to foxnation.com.

Well, we learned this week on Sunday that UFOs have entered airspace restricted by the U.S. military every day for years. So, there's a big story here. We're going to speak to the man who made all of this information possible, really, the person who's driven transparency on UFOs more than any other person. The one who ran The Pentagon's UFO unit. Lue Elizondo joins us now.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Well, he's waited a while to tell us, but that was former President Barack Obama conceding that the UFO thing seems to be real, we can't explain what they are. That is the consensus all of a sudden. "60 Minutes" did a long piece on it on Sunday night. This, after decades of mocking anybody who suggested maybe there's something to this.

The consensus has changed.

And more than any other person, Lue Elizondo is responsible for that. More than any other person, he is the reason we're having this conversation tonight.

Elizondo spent nearly two decades in military intelligence before he was named Director of The Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. And ever since he's been pushing for transparency on this issue. We're honored to have him on tonight. Lue, thanks so much for coming. So we are getting --

LUE ELIZONDO, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE PENTAGON'S ADVANCED AEROSPACE THREAT IDENTIFICATION PROGRAM: Tucker, my pleasure.

CARLSON: We are getting this much anticipated report, June, the law requires The Pentagon to kind of fess up and say what they know. What are we going to learn, do you think, next month?

ELIZONDO: Well, what we should learn is exactly that, what the U.S. government knows about this topic and has known for a while. It is a threat assessment that's supposed to be conducted at the unclassified level and then provided to Congress, which is a report that is expected to be comprehensive and certainly, that's a report that Congress deserves.

Unfortunately, what we might get is something that is much more watered down, and I think from my perspective, that's probably the most concerning part of this. The last thing we need is more obfuscation.

CARLSON: That's for sure. It's infuriating even to think after 70 years of lying they would continue to lie. So two questions: one, why? Why all the lying at this point?

ELIZONDO: Yes, well first of all, why all the lying? Probably because certain elements in The Pentagon have backed themselves in a corner. They've spent such a long time and amount of energy trying to obfuscate the truth from the American people, that they backed themselves into a corner and they really don't know how to get out of it. And I think the more that we shine a spotlight onto this topic, the more people are going to realize that there really is something there.

I think with the announcement of the new I.G. -- Inspector General evaluation into this into this topic and more importantly, the last three years of Pentagon obfuscation, hopefully, the those elements of resistance in The Pentagon will realize that that type of resistance at this point is rather futile.

CARLSON: You worked for the U.S. government for decades, when we learned Sunday night that maybe pilots had seen these objects, unidentified flying objects every day for two years in restricted airspace, the obvious response was, well, didn't that raise alarms? Wouldn't that scare the hell out of The Pentagon? That their airspace was being violated? Why didn't -- yes.

ELIZONDO: I mean, you're absolutely right.

CARLSON: I mean, were they afraid? What --

ELIZONDO: And this is part of my frustration.

CARLSON: What's the posture here?

ELIZONDO: Yes, I saw the reports and there were times where you'd look at a monthly report, and there were 25 to 26 incidents occurring in a 30-day time period and the question is really, you know, what the hell is wrong with you? How can you not -- how can you not realize that this is an issue? Let's take away for a moment the source of what this possibly could be. And let's just pretend to see the Russian or Chinese. Either way, it's not a good scenario.

Someone with some sort of technology that we don't have is encroaching into controlled U.S. airspace on a regular and routine basis and no one wants to do a darn thing about it.

CARLSON: So one of the reasons we're having this -- I mean, you're the reason we are having this conversation, you, I think more than anybody really pushed hard to bring this stuff to the public, to bring it to light.

If this report that we get next month is watered down, redacted to the point of pointlessness, do you think that whistleblowers internally will continue to leak the truth to the public?

ELIZONDO: Tucker, I do and also, let me just say, for the record, I appreciate the compliment towards me as being part of this. But I also have to give a lot of that credit to folks like you and people in the media that were brave enough, three years ago to cover this topic when nobody else in your industry wanted to cover it and it turns out that you were right.

So first of all, thank you for doing what you do.

CARLSON: Of course.

ELIZONDO: And then secondly, yes, I do. I think there's more and more people that are going to come out. We saw Alex Dietrich and Dave Fravor this weekend coming out for the record, and these people have a lot to lose.

Alex Dietrich is still in the United States military. There's a lot at risk here. And by the way, for every one of those brave Americans that are coming out having this conversation, there's dozens more in the shadows waiting to tell their story.

CARLSON: We keep hearing whispers that there is physical evidence of the existence of these objects that might tell us what they are. Do you believe that's true?

ELIZONDO: I do believe it's true. And I think we should be looking at this and I think we should be more transparent with the American people. And the last thing we need to do is lie to the American people.

I'll tell you one thing, Tucker, from my perspective, you know that type of position where you continue to lie to the American people and obfuscate is the reasons why people like me decide one day to run for Congress. And I can tell you, the last thing DoD wants right now is someone like me in Congress.

But that's what happens when you're not -- when you're not when you're not honest and open and fair with people, you know, we pay for it.

CARLSON: Amen. I agree with that completely. Is there debris, do you believe from any of these vehicles, whatever they are?

ELIZONDO: Tucker, you know that the United States government is in possession of exotic material, and I'll leave it at that. More analysis needs to be done. There's enough uniqueness about it where it demands additional analysis, additional expertise. And thankfully, there are pockets in the U.S. government that are willing to have the conversation and conduct the analysis.

I'm not going to say those right now what those elements are, because I'm worried, frankly for the same type of reprisal that I'm facing currently. But there are pockets of people that are willing to do the right thing. And fortunately, these individuals are patriotic and willing to do the job.

CARLSON: Amen. It's also crazy and amazing. Lue Elizondo, thank you so much. I will see you again.

ELIZONDO: Tucker, as always, my pleasure. Thank you.

CARLSON: Thanks. The night is young, the show continues. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: And here is Sean.

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