Tucker: Modern progressivism destroys the things its designed to help

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Tucker: Modern progressivism destroys the things its designed to help

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host examines why the left thinks democracy is in peril.

This is a rush transcript of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on February 1, 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.

Here is something we've noticed, you may have noticed it, too. All of a sudden, pretty much every powerful person in the country is talking about something called democracy. Democracy. Our sacred democracy.

You hear that word everywhere from "The Atlantic" to NPR to "The New Yorker" Magazine and NBC News in between. Democracy defines the year 2022 the way that "groovy" defined 1968. All the cool kids are saying it.

Liz Cheney has decided her life's mission is now to defend democracy. Jim Acosta's new CNN show in which he uses the word democracy the way some people use prepositions, in every sentence.

Tomorrow at 2:00 PM Eastern, there's a Zoom webinar on democracy, which you're welcome to attend in case you haven't heard enough about it already. Every left of center mid-wit on Twitter will be there, all of them will be fretting about the future of democracy. Pretty amusing.

It's easy to make fun of an event like that, and of course, you have a moral obligation to. David Frum bloviates about democracy -- insert joke here.

But actually, if we're being honest about it, you should be a little worried about the state of our democracy. How is our democracy doing? Well, let's see.

Another way to describe democracy is popular representation. That's a synonym. When the government does what citizens want it to do, you have a democracy, and when it doesn't, you don't. You no longer have a free country that is ruled by its people.'

So what kind of system do we have? It's easy to know, you find out what citizens care about and then you compare those concerns to what the people who run the government say they care about.

If you've got a functioning democracy, there should be a fairly precise overlap. In a democratic system, leaders try very hard to speak for their voters. That's the whole point of the government.

So let's apply that test to the United States of America. What do our leaders care about? We know the answer because they tell us constantly. Our leaders care about equity and climate change. They care about trans-rights, police brutality, the deadly insurrection of January 6th, mandatory vaccinations, more H1-B visas for Indian tech workers, and above all, at the moment, defending our closest ally, Ukraine from Russian aggression.

And of course, they care about third wave academic feminism. That's deeply important to them.

Watch as the most famous Democrat in Congress gives us an impromptu tutorial in Instagram, about the connection between cosmetics and the patriarchy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): There are studies that show that women who wear makeup or regularly wear like a decent amount of makeup kind of show up to the office in glam also make more money.

And so at that point, it stops being -- these calculations and decisions stop being about choice and they start being about patriarchy.

We live in systems that were largely built for the convenience of men, and oftentimes, we are designed with the subjugation of women and queer people in mind.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Give that lady an MSNBC show. Sorry, Mika. I wear makeup because I'm oppressed. Me, me, me, me, me.

Now, the shorthand description of that is narcissism, which in the end is the defining concern of our leaders. Above all, they are interested in themselves. If you work in the media or have multiple college degrees, chances are you're pretty good at making it all about you. You is what you care about most.

What does the rest of America care about? Well, once again, we don't have to guess about that. We've got a huge amount of public opinion polling on that subject. You're seeing the results right now from a recent Gallup survey on your screen.

At the top of that list, you'll see government incompetence, the economy, the cost of living, and immigration. Well, that's weird. This looks completely different from the list that Joe Biden might have made. Equity, climate change, transgenderism, mandatory vaxxes, January 6th, Ukraine -- those turned out to be pretty unimportant to most Americans. In fact, some of those issues are at the very bottom of the list.

But how can that be? If global climate change is the most imminent existential crisis of our time, then why don't voters seem concerned about it? We don't know, but they are definitely not concerned about it. Instead, Americans are very worried about inflation and crime.

As it happens -- and this tells you everything -- those are the two topics the White House has dismissed recently as irrelevant and dumb. The White House isn't at all worried about inflation and crime. Hmm, that doesn't sound like democracy.

Here is the White House Press Secretary taking some time off from her junior year at Oberlin to speak to her fellow undergrads at something called Pod Save America about how rising crime rates are actually an invention of those racists at FOX News.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Right now, just to give you a sense, so CNN, Pentagon, as many as 8,500 U.S. troops on heightened alert. Okay, true. Same on MSNBC. CNBC is doing their own thing about the market. And then on FOX is Jeanine Pirro talking about soft on crime consequences.

I mean, what does that even mean? Right?

So there's an alternate universe on some coverage. What's scary about it is a lot of people watch that, and they think that the President isn't doing anything to address people's safety.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So what do your kids getting shot have to do with Ukraine? Nothing, Dumbo. You're living in an alternate universe.

That's Jen Psaki's position. You have to be delusional to think crime was a problem in this country. Unless you happen to be in Georgetown last night around 6:45 PM. If you were there, you may have seen a man shot to death outside Georgetown Cupcakes, that's just off Elm Street. And the funny thing is, that's not too far from where Jen Psaki lives.

But did Jen Psaki acknowledge that happened? Of course, she didn't. Noticing the collapse of your civilization is racist, even when it's happening just down the street. Look away, Jen Psaki, look away, and whatever you do, don't go to Baltimore.

Baltimore is a major American city. It is only about 40 miles from where Jen Psaki lives. It's one of the worst places in the Western Hemisphere. It's a little bit of Haiti in the Mid-Atlantic. Baltimore is exactly what happens when you apply Jen Psaki's ideas to governing.

Baltimore is a city run by people who fervently believe in the equity agenda and consider Gender Studies a legitimate academic discipline. In Baltimore, pretty much everyone in charge is Black. Yet, it is a matter of religious faith that the main thing holding the city back is white racism. In other words, everybody with power in Baltimore agrees with Jen Psaki.

So it's an entirely fair question to ask: Hey, Jen Psaki, what do you think of Baltimore? How did the city get that way? You claim to care so deeply about African-Americans, you never stop talking about that. And yet, here's one of the biggest Black majority cities in the United States. Tens of thousands of Black people who live in Baltimore are in misery because their kids keep getting murdered.

Last year, Baltimore's murder rate was higher than it is in El Salvador and Honduras. Now those are countries the State Department tells us to, quote: "avoid due to crime." So it's fair to say things are incredibly violent in Baltimore, they have been for a long time. And yet under Joe Biden, somehow they've gotten even worse in Baltimore.

Here's a local news report from today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice over): The hugging and crying: Sounds of sorrow, outpouring of emotions over the killing of a loved one. Thirty six homicides in the first month this year in Baltimore City, with only two arrests; one for a deadly shooting, the other a stabbing death.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Thirty six murders in 31 days. That's the deadliest January in Baltimore in nearly 50 years. And remember, 50 years ago, Baltimore was almost twice as big as it is now. Half the city has left. So Baltimore is far worse off than it has ever been in its history and it's not just murders, drug crimes are up dramatically. You might not know that because we're not being prosecuted anymore.

Last spring, the local city attorney and George Soros puppet called Marilyn Mosby announced she would no longer prosecute low-level drug crimes, so arrests plummeted, but drug trafficking exploded. Here's what it looks like.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice over): Guard cameras caught what appears to be one of those open air drug deals happening in broad daylight near the Edmondson Village Shopping Center. It's an issue we've been hearing about in neighborhoods citywide throughout this time.

It comes after City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby stopped prosecuting certain drug crimes in the city, including drug possession. Major policy shift that some believe have left the issue to only flourish.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Jen Psaki is for that. Black people don't want laws to be enforced. That's her view. That's the view of everyone she knows. But what did policies like that do to Baltimore? Well, they turned a once beautiful city into a slum.

According to a report by FOX 45 in Baltimore, public school administrators have instructed the police to stop arresting students for committing crimes, and that would include serious offenses from burglary to assault. So, the cops did stop arresting kids.

The number of students arrested in Baltimore schools has dropped by 98 percent in the last decade. That's good on paper. But it turns out ignoring crime is not the same as stopping crime. Schools in Baltimore got so bad that kids stopped learning anything.

Watch this report and ask yourself: What is Baltimore going to look like in 20 years?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice over): In Reading, 628 Paterson high school students took the test; 484 of them or 77 percent tested at an elementary school Reading level. That includes 71 high school students who are reading at a kindergarten level and 88 students reading at a first grade level. Another 45 are reading at a second grade level. Just 12 students tested at Patterson High School were reading at grade level. That comes out to less than two percent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So the kids can't read. They're illiterate. What does their future look like? What is Baltimore's future look like? What is the country's future look like? How are they going to participate in our society?

You wouldn't know any of this was happening by looking at the official graduation numbers because last year, Baltimore announced that students will graduate from high school even if they fail their courses. Baltimore's so-called Chief Academic Officer that would be a Harvard educated bureaucrat called Joan Dobrowski announced that this policy was designed to, quote, "avoid the punitive approach of failing students." Okay.

But somebody is failing students in Baltimore, somebody, in fact is failing the entire city, and you have to ask yourself: Who would that be? You'd like to ask Jen Psaki, who do you blame for Baltimore? Did white men do this to Baltimore? Was it the patriarchy? Was it structural racism that caused all those murders?

Do you agree with Pete Buttigieg that Klansmen urban planners put the highways in the wrong place? And that's the real problem, racist roads?

Or could it be that the real problem with Baltimore is something much more obvious? Could it be the progressive policies designed to, quote, "lift up marginalized communities," in the end destroyed those communities? What's the answer, Jen Psaki?

In a functioning democracy, people like Jen Psaki would have to tell us the answer. They would be required to live in Baltimore until they learned something, just as the people who wrecked Afghanistan probably ought to explain what they've learned before they move on to Ukraine and Russia. That ought to be a requirement.

And in fact, honestly, you'd think that people like this would welcome a chance to reflect on what they've done. They have screwed up very badly. They've hurt the weakest among us.

For Christians, that's the greatest sin. But these people aren't Christians. They worship only themselves, so they turn away. You can bet money that Jen Psaki rarely goes to Baltimore, it's just too depressing, and it raises too many questions.

Instead, Jen Psaki and her friends are planning their fun little summer trips to Bozeman or Martha's Vineyard or East Hampton or some other remote and blindingly white outpost of privilege.

Funny how that works. You wreck stuff and then you ignore it. This allows you to wreck more stuff without feeling guilty. That's modern progressivism distilled to 18 words.

Candace Owens is the host of "Candace." We're always honored to have her on this show. Candace Owens, thanks so much for coming.

So Baltimore is right next to D.C. No one in D.C. ever goes there. I can tell you that firsthand, and you have to wonder like you wake up with these new policies, you're going to, you know, make the country better. You don't notice what's 40 miles away?

CANDACE OWENS, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Oh, they definitely notice and I want to say this, Jen Psaki is not delusional, she is intentional. She is every bit intentional and she knows exactly what she's saying. The Democratic Party came in to do exactly what you see them doing.

People like to think that they're stupid. No, they're lying and they're Machiavellian. This is a part of their plan. When you look at these inner cities and you talk about these rates of children that are illiterate, you have to understand that illiteracy is so crucial to any individual that wants to put in place what I view as a modernized slave system. I talk about this all the time.

Black America, I've been preaching to for the last four years, trying to get them up to this. Democrats look back at their old handbook, they've got it open again. What they want is power. They want power over people. If you want power over people, people cannot be educated, right?

The greatest freedom given to Black Americans when slavery was ended was the right to go and get educated. The slave codes literally did not allow people to become educated. What they are doing in terms of lockdowns, people are like: Oh, it is fighting a virus. No, what you are seeing is a deletion of the middle class.

The Democrats are after power, they're after an oligarchy. They want to be at the top and they want to rule over people and they want people that they're ruling over instead to be focused on ridiculous causes because when you're uneducated, by the way, I have a toddler. I have a one-year-old, he runs around, he cries and he screams, he stomps his feet about things that don't mean anything in the scheme of things, because he's ignorant and because he is young.

Or if you turned functioning adults into ignorant one-year-olds, what you have are people that are going to go outside and scream about trans issues, not realizing that they're upon a plantation that has taken virtually everything that they have from them, and that is that the Democrats are recreating the very same plantations they had in this country centuries ago.

CARLSON: Isn't that the opposite of democracy? In a democratic system, you want, you need, you encourage independent, independent-minded, well- educated, informed citizens, otherwise you can't have a democracy, right?

OWENS: And that's the point. If these were well-educated citizens, they will be looking into these policies. They would say: Wait a second, this doesn't make any sense. What do you mean you're going to keep giving us money and that's going to be enough? What do you mean? How is welfare going to work if you're de-incentivizing people to marry their loved ones? To marry the father of their children? Why are these policies incentivizing families to break down? Right?

An educated person will look at these policies and understand that everything that they're trying to do is to garner more power for themselves, to create more departments within the government, to grow the government, you know, to the size that we see it today or another department to take care of you, to be your mother, to be your father.

It is just so unfortunate that people did not understand this before we got into this predicament, but I am hopeful through the disasters of this administration that after this, they will begin to wake up and we will see opposite when people begin electing leaders that actually want to create a functioning democracy.

CARLSON: Man, I hope you're right, and really, we all need to pause just to ask how did Baltimore happen before we spend another dollar making people more miserable and hurting them, which is clearly what these policies have done.

Candace Owens, appreciate your coming on tonight. Thank you, as always.

OWENS: Thank you.

CARLSON: So there are more people living on the streets than ever before since the Great Depression, but we're not in a Great Depression, so why has this happened?

Well, Joe Biden is finally on the case and he has named an aspiring musician to solve the crisis.

Plus, Biden's pick for the F.C.C., the Federal Communications Commission wants to censor this channel. Ooh, perfect. We're not going to let that happen.

We do want to tell you about it in some detail, we will back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: More people living on American streets at any time in a hundred years getting very noticeable. It's obviously a sign of decay. It's scary, actually. So Joe Biden has finally named someone to be his new homelessness czar.

It turns out the problem is we're all too transphobic. That's why we have the homeless, so Biden has appointed an aspiring musician called Jeff Olivet.

Jason Rantz has been looking into Mr. Olivet. Jason Rantz is the host of "The Jason Rantz Show" on KTTH. We are always happy to have him join us.

Jason, thanks for coming on. Who is this guy?

JASON RANTZ, SEATTLE RADIO SHOW HOST: He is someone who is deeply unimpressive and a long established member of the homeless industrial complex. He most recently became an anti-racist consultant who tells white people to curb their white privilege, which is ironic because he probably used that to land this new job.

So Olivet basically views homelessness through a critical race theory and social justice lens, which basically means he blames homelessness on racism because the homeless population is disproportionately Black. So what he is basically saying is, look, if you're Black, if you have a mental illness or an addiction and you're homeless, he says it's because of institutional racism in the healthcare system that didn't give you affordable healthcare treatment to begin with that led you to become homeless.

CARLSON: Are you frickin serious? Are you serious?

RANTZ: That is --

CARLSON: Is there any end to these people? They just stop breaking things. Are you fairly characterizing this guy's views? Because it's like, how much more of this can we take?

RANTZ: Yes, no. I was in the same way. I've been looking over and over a lot of his interviews, and it is pretty clear where he stands. He is basically saying, look, if you're going to end racism, you have to get at the root causes and then that turns into ending homelessness, and he actually explains what needs to happen. He says in this interview here with a nonprofit called "Family Promise."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEFF OLIVET, HOMELESSNESS CZAR: If we don't pull it out by the root, if we don't address the deep structural underlying racism that is driving high rates of homelessness for people of color and families of color, then there's no way we'll ever end it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RANTZ: So that doesn't actually explain why white people are homeless or Asians or Latinos, but it is not a priority for this White House. So moving forward, this is what we can expect. He is going to pour billions of dollars into a housing first strategy, which kind of functions the way it sounds.

So the homeless get housed first, meaning, there is no conditions on the housing, like getting addiction treatment, so you're not shooting up in a subsidized home. And usually, proponents will look to Salt Lake City because they use this model and it has been really effective in getting like 95 percent of the homeless people that they get into contact with into housing.

However, the studies show, they don't actually become self-sufficient. So, that's in part because of the underlying conditions that are never treated successfully. So using this approach nationally, basically means you're going to be spending billions of dollars on housing and case management where the homeless never actually live.

And so your question, which I think is a legitimate one is something like, how did someone like this get to this position? And maybe it has nothing to do with homelessness, maybe it's the other skills, maybe he came from the White House interns.

CARLSON: But you know, exactly -- it is the same gig all the time. You blame Whitey and then you take money from developers. So this is a pay-off to developers, of course, private equity is buying up all the single family homes. So we're going to build a lot more multifamily housing. Developers needed to get rich all under the cover of wokeness. Like, we're on to the game now. I mean, it's just totally --

RANTZ: Yes, it is clear as day and we know exactly how much money they're going to be putting into it. It is absolutely ludicrous, and people better step up, because otherwise all we're doing is creating a situation where they never actually get out of the homelessness.

CARLSON: Right. It doesn't help anybody except the developers, of course. Jason Rantz, great to see you. Thank you.

RANTZ: Thanks, Tucker.

CARLSON: Well, here's a wild story. Joe Biden has nominated someone called Gigi Sohn to fill a vacancy on the F.C.C., the Federal Communications Commission. She is a left-wing activist who wants to weaken copyright and speech protection -- speech protections. She has also gone after FOX News and called for censorship of this network.

Now the amazing thing here is that Chris Ruddy who claims to be conservative and runs Newsmax, the guy who gave a million dollars to the Clinton Foundation is supporting her nomination. Now, if this person actually gets the seat, it would give Democrats a majority among F.C.C. Commissioners, again, this is a party that's committed to squelching free speech. So it's a meaningful story.

Charles Gasparino has been covering this in great detail. He's a senior correspondent at FOX Business. We're honored to have him tonight. Mr. Gasparino, can you summarize who this person is, please?

CHARLIE GASPARINO, FOX BUSINESS NETWORK SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Gigi Sohn is -- I mean, listen, she's a brilliant lawyer. She's a brilliant progressive activist, but she is to the left of Rachel Maddow. She's probably as liberal as Bernie Sanders when it comes to government controlling the internet and big business. She hates FOX.

And you know, she's left such a massive paper trail of conflicts of interest of saying things that there's really a question whether she can be in the job as F.C.C. Commissioner.

Now, listen, everybody has an opinion, right? We have an opinion on all the F.C.C. Commissioners.

CARLSON: Right. For sure.

GASPARINO: But they also have to abide by the Administrative Code. They have to follow the law. And she's been so out there on the spectrum in some of her things she said about FOX and Sinclair, you name it all down the line, that there's a real question.

And now Roger Wicker, the senator from Mississippi has persuaded the Senate Commerce Committee to postpone her hearing, her vote was supposed to yesterday. They're actually going to have a new hearing, a second hearing for her next week, and we're going to hear everything, including this whole sordid tale of her involvement in a nonprofit called Locast, which was essentially set up.

And what it did was, it siphoned, some people would say, stole broadcast signals from major broadcast companies, us included, NBC, put it into essentially at the Internet and allowed people and this was their basic goals, and they were nonprofit -- allow people to see that programming at a high quality if you can't afford cable. It sounds like a noble idea.

The broadcast company sued. The Judge sided with the broadcast company saying Locast and Miss Sohn, she is on the board of Locast, you owe $30 million. And then lo and behold, some documents came out last week I wrote about it in "The New York Post," I wrote about it in FOX Business, where it showed that Locast only paid $700,000.00, and that deal was struck with the big broadcasters, again, FOX was part of that a day after she was named F.C.C. nominee for Biden.

So think about the conflict of that. She is negotiating with people who know she is going to be the regulator, and this sweetheart deal appears. So now this is out there and my guess, Tucker, that sweetheart deal and her role in it, she says it's de minimis. Just so you know, I did a whole story, got both sides of the story. You can look at it in foxbusiness.com, and also "The New York Post." She says it's a de minimis role. She was just a Board member. It's not a big deal.

But let me tell you something, it looks -- it doesn't look good that she is sitting there on this company that gets the sweetheart deal with the people or the entity she is going to regulate, and that's going to come up in this hearing next week.

CARLSON: Of course not. The whole thing is criminal. If I shoplift from CVS and sell it at a discount, it's not virtuous, it's theft. Duh.

Charlie Gasparino, thank you for your reporting. I appreciate it.

GASPARINO: Any time, pal.

CARLSON: So you kind of knew that Pete Buttigieg wasn't going to improve your life, so here is his version of infrastructure, put robot cops across the country to bust you for speeding, turning us into even more of a surveillance state and enriching people like Pete Buttigieg. We've got details just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Pretty funny that of all the people Joe Biden could have picked to be Transportation Secretary, he chose a guy who wasn't able to fix the potholes in South Bend, Indiana. That's literally true. He picked Pete Buttigieg, he was a first of some kind because he breastfeeds.

But Buttigieg is not deterred by his total demonstrated inability to deal with infrastructure. He has a new plan. He has just announced that he's going to ensure that no one in this country ever again dies in a traffic accident. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

Buttigieg Another thing that is going to take in order to change the trajectory of roadway safety in this country is a single ambitious shared goal. And today, we commit that our goal is this zero. Our goal is zero deaths. A country where one day nobody has to say goodbye to a loved one because of a traffic crash.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: But why stop there? Why not just eliminate death itself? I mean it's sad People die. If you worked at McKinsey you'd think the guy could figure out how to end human suffering and death, there is no reason life should end, and if you're god and clearly, Pete Buttigieg is or considers himself to be, why not do that? I'm sure that goal is coming.

But in the meantime, Pete Buttigieg has a very specific plan to eliminate all traffic deaths and that is putting a lot more robot cops on the street -- speed cams. The good thing about speed cameras, he explained is that they're not racist, because they're just robots. They can't be racist. So that's equity.

Now, those have been tried in New York City. New York City went all in on speed cameras a few years ago. Joe Borelli is from New York. He is now a member of the City Council and he joins us now to tell us how that experiment went.

Joe, thanks so much for coming on. So you guys went to robot cops in New York. What do you think?

JOE BORELLI (R), NEW YORK COUNCIL MINORITY LEADER: Well, I mean, we should look back to the conclusions of this program. I mean, when Mayor de Blasio started, he started with 20 cameras. By the end of his reign of terror, there were about 1,400 in 750 school zones. And if you ask "The Times" or POLITICO or even the statistics themselves, they reveal that New York City streets are deadlier than ever.

Now, on the other hand, if you look at the program in terms of being a revenue generator, or an indirect tax on cars, then the program was actually wildly successful. $215 million a year generated by our cameras right now, that's $25,000.00 an hour, and that's actually more than the entire revenue generated by the City of South Bend when Mayor Pete was in charge over there.

CARLSON: So why doesn't some civic minded billionaire set up an NGO to supply every New Yorker with say, a dozen Kansas spray paint every year so we can go full Boston Tea Party and end this tyranny?

BORELLI: Well, I think you certainly are seeing some signs pop up warning drivers. But even some counties here in New York are actually fighting back. Nassau County, one of our biggest counties, one of the biggest counties in the country, their legislature was bipartisan, unanimous in pushing back and saying we don't want these cameras.

Unfortunately, for those of us who live in the city, we are governed by a radical far left anti-car City Council and we are governed by our State Legislature who thinks this is just the cat's meow.

CARLSON: And also anti human, I mean, who drives in New York? Commuters, cab drivers, delivery men -- the same people by the way, who smoke the $20.00 a pack of cigarettes that you guys sell in New York City. I mean, this is another tax on poor people.

BORELLI: It's certainly a tax on middle class and poor people. You know, we have $20.00 tolls on our bridges. We're soon going to pay an undetermined amount yet for the privilege of driving from one part of Manhattan to a fancier part of Manhattan.

So ultimately, yes, it is a war on the middle class, but it's also a war on drivers that I think you're seeing elsewhere in the country. I mean, this is sort of the stated goal of most Democrats in power at this point.

CARLSON: Yes, again. That'll be the last picture they see of you. I hope that happens. Not encouraging law breaking, just freedom. Councilman Borelli, it's great to see you tonight. Thank you so much.

BORELLI: Thank you.

CARLSON: So the City of San Francisco couldn't get more perverse, you would think, but now the city is running an illicit drug operation in the tenderloin. People are allowed to use potentially lethal narcotics inside the facility. Residents are also openly dealing drugs just outside their door. Here's a local news report on it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice over): San Francisco continues to struggle with homelessness and open air drug use. Now, the city has launched a new Linkage Center at U.N. Plaza aimed at meeting immediate and long-term needs. The project got up and running in about two weeks as part of the city's Tenderloin Emergency Initiative.

The Linkage Center offers short-term services like food, beverages, and showers with the hope that by forging a bond with those who need those services, it will then have them take advantage of longer term opportunities to get health treatment and permanent housing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: We love you so much, we are going to help you shoot heroin. Michael Shellenberger has thought a lot about this. He's the author of "San Fran-sicko: HOW Progressives Ruin Cities." He broke this story. He joins us now.

Mr. Shellenberger, thanks so much for coming on and for your amazing reporting on this sad subject.

So how can you say you care about people if you help them shoot heroin?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER, AUTHOR, "SAN FRAN-SICKO": Well, you can't, Tucker, I mean, nobody thinks that this is the right way to go, at least in the world of addiction specialists and drug policy experts from around the world.

I had a very senior government insider come to me to complain that this is part of a strategy to spread supervised drug consumption sites across California and the rest of the United States in the name of helping people. They are corrupting rehabilitation. This is called a Linkage Center that is aimed at linking homeless drug addicts to rehab clinics, but it's now been completely perverted.

They've opened a center where literally city contractors are overseeing young people smoking meth and fentanyl. We've had a team of three reporters reporting from the inside shooting videos and cameras proving that on public property, a major public plaza in downtown San Francisco that the government is overseeing open drug use and drug dealing we've documented. It's really quite disappointing.

You may know that I actually defended Mayor Breed of San Francisco for promising a crackdown back in December. The whole thing is now in shambles. It's an embarrassment to San Francisco.

CARLSON: Yes, she's an embarrassment. I had high hopes, too. I mean, I guess this is always the question you ask about government policies. Would you treat your kids this way? If you find out you had a kid with a drug problem, you say: You shoot up in your room. Smoke meth in your room, at least you're safe, it's supervised. Would you do that?

SHELLENBERGER: Absolutely not. This is they are normalizing drug use, and by the way, they're justifying this by pointing to what they do in Europe, but I interviewed the top drug policy experts in Portugal and Netherlands. In Portugal, the head of the drug policy program said, we do not normalize. If people are caught using heroin and other hard drugs in public, all drugs in public, they are arrested and brought to the police station.

In Amsterdam, they do not allow people to shoot heroin or smoke fentanyl in public or smoke meth. That's what's occurring in San Francisco. It's really an abomination, Tucker. I'm sort of still shocked by it. They're attempting to normalize this. They're attempting to make it seem okay for people to just freely smoke some of the most dangerous drugs, the drugs that are killing two people in San Francisco per day.

CARLSON: If you've ever been around it, addiction, it is the saddest thing, and this is the way you treat people you hate. It really is. This is the way you treat people you want to hurt. There is no doubt about it.

Michael Shellenberger, again, thank you for your reporting on this because it matters.

SHELLENBERGER: Thanks for having me, Tucker.

CARLSON: So all of a sudden, people don't trust doctors in this country, which is sad because we've long had the best medical care in the world and the most impressive doctors. But now, all of a sudden, you're meeting people saying, I'm not really into doctors. I'm going to figure it out on my own.

Now, why is that? Why do people no longer trust doctors? Well, we don't put all the blame on one guy. Put some of it, Dr. Peter Hotez, a frequent MSNBC guest out there spreading misinformation and full blown lunacy. If there is anyone who makes you not want to go to the doctor, again it is Dr. Peter Hotez.

We will explain after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: You might have noticed that a lot of people in your world don't trust doctors these days. That's not a good sign probably half the people you know are exploring alternative medical cures right now. Why is that happening? Well, there are a lot of reasons. But Dr. Peter Hotez is definitely one of those reasons.

Hotez is a pediatrician who spent his life studying tropical parasites. He wouldn't seem to be the obvious go to guest for cable news bookers looking for someone to speak knowledgeably about COVID, but Hotez is a crazed publicity addict. He will do any public appearance anywhere at any time. He never stops.

Unfortunately, for all of us, when Peter Hotez speaks, he discredits American medicine. He is a misinformation machine constantly spewing insanity. Coolly compare Hotez's views on COVID to say Alex Jones's views on COVID and ask yourself, who is saner? It is not even close.

Very few things Peter Hotez says has any relationship to reality. Here he is explaining back in July that there is no conceivable way that Joe Biden will ever announce a vax mandate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. PETER HOTEZ, DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE, BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE: This is months and months of anti-science, anti-vaccine aggression coming from the far right elements of the Republican Party and you saw it play out at the CPAC conference where they said this is nothing more than an effort for power and control and they're going to use -- first they're going to force vaccines on us, then they're going to take away our Bibles and our guns and all of that disinformation, meaning deliberate misinformation came out of CPAC, the conservative news outlets.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Now, this guy is apparently a prominent figure at a big Texas hospital, I think Baylor Hospital. Why in the world would they let them do an MSNBC hit like that? If anybody is discrediting vaccines, making people afraid of them, he is such an obvious lunatic and politicizing medicine, it is Peter Hotez. He's totally ignorant.

A couple of months after he said that Joe Biden announced in fact, vaccines would be mandatory. Now to be clear, it's not just Peter Hotez's predictions that are wrong. He's also a charlatan.

Here he is warning that schools have no reason to lift their mask mandates. Now, this came weeks after the C.D.C., following Fauci's lead admitted that cloth masks don't actually work. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOTEZ: If you start lifting mask mandates now, you're basically condemning all the kids to get infected with omicron, and having to live with those consequences, which can mean that some kids will have to be hospitalized or possibly worse. So, it makes no sense to lift mask mandates at this point.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Yes, we are right, it is Baylor, if you look at his shirt, it says "Baylor" right on there. Now, why are the morons at Baylor letting their employee go on TV and say stuff like that? What a quick way to discredit your hospital and again, all of American medicine.

Peter Hotez is arguing on TV that anyone disagrees with him even when he lies which is often, anyone who believes in the primacy of scientific data over the opinions of some nutcase from Baylor is spreading misinformation and not only that, he believes that's a crime.

He wants the Federal government to deal with those people. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOTEZ: And I've been saying, you know, for the last year and a half that the Biden administration has to realize that that anti-science is a killer, disinformation. It's not even just disinformation, this is an anti-science empire right now and we need Homeland Security. We need the Justice Department.

We've really got to figure this out and the Health and Human Services will not be able to figure this out on their own.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Hey, memo to Baylor, a lot of people give you money because they think you're a legitimate organization. This guy is discrediting you and our medical system. He is arguing in his little Baylor scrubs that people who don't agree with him belong in jail. The Justice Department needs to go after people who disagree with Peter Hotez.

Sorry, Peter Hotez, we have freedom of speech in this country, and no one should be more grateful for that than you.

So here's the interesting story. "The New York Times" has just sued the State Department, they're seeking access to U.S. Embassy e-mails that mention Hunter Biden. Now, lawyers to the newspaper says the State Department is withholding those e-mails unlawfully. They've submitted a Freedom of Information Act request, it's been ignored.

Glenn Greenwald has been following the story, which is really interesting. He is of course, a journalist, one of the most famous. He is on Substack now. He joins us tonight.

Glenn, thanks so much for coming on. So what does this mean, the story, do you think?

GLENN GREENWALD, JOURNALIST: Well, first of all, anytime anyone asks me about Hunter Biden, I have to say that I don't think we've ever fully processed how extraordinary it was that right before the election, every media outlet, now concerned about Joe Rogan's disinformation spread the C.I.A. lie that the Hunter Biden e-mails were Russian disinformation, and that was used to censor the entire story.

These are the people so deeply worried about disinformation, and then they never went back and retracted that story, even when a POLITICO reporter proved those e-mails were actually real.

Now, "The New York Times" reporters who actually have been quite good about trying to follow this story are back at it pursuing the possibility that Hunter Biden in Romania was trading on his father's influence in order to represent corrupt Romanians at the time that his father was Vice President.

This was always the story, Tucker, was whether Joe Biden was trading on his influence as Vice President to generate profit for his son and for his family. And now that there's no election, I guess we're allowed to hear about it.

CARLSON: You have such a good memory, I have to say. I mean, the news tsunami, you know, overwhelms most of us. We can't remember what the facts were, but you always do. So why do you think and how do you think the U.S. government could deny a news organization access to materials like this?

GREENWALD: I don't think that we can overstate how desperate and eager agencies in the United States government were to ensure that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. We have so many examples, the one I just gave being one of them, where they just outright lied and spread a complete falsehood to justify the suppression of that reporting that could have really undermined Joe Biden's campaign brand of truth.

I don't know that they did that deliberately here, but what clearly seems to be the case is that they withheld information. They told "The Times," oh, we'll get this information to you in 2023, namely, after the next election in 2022 even though the law requires that they get it in 20 days.

So there are a couple of reporters to their credit at "The New York Times" serious about pursuing this story, and I feel like they have more space to do that now that there's no election pending.

CARLSON: Yes, I know. It's all so -- that of course is always the backdrop, it is domestic politics, but I do hope they get it anyway because you shouldn't suppress the truth. That's not democracy.

Glenn Greenwald, thank you as always for your reporting. Appreciate it.

GREENWALD: Good to be with you, Tucker.

CARLSON: We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Before we go, I want to bring you a quick update from Truckistan, formerly known as Canada, the nation to our north.

Justin Trudeau who runs it, probably most repulsive neoliberal leader in the world just tweeted this quote: "Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti- Black racism, homophobia, and of course transphobia we've seen in display in Ottawa over the past couple of days. Together, let's keep working to make Canada more inclusive."

Of course, he's referring to the working class people demanding an end to tyranny. They are now transphobic.

Moments later, the motion condemning the wearing of blackface was shot down in the Canadian Parliament meaning the opposition party is totally pathetic, they should be ashamed.

Go truckers.

That is it for us tonight. Sean Hannity takes over now.

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