Tucker: NYC's Board of Elections debacle
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host slams how 'dumb, incompetent, dishonest people are in charge' of the elections
This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," June 30, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: The N.S.A. has been reading our e-mails, we told you that two nights running because it's true. The N.S.A. has effectively conceded that they've read our e-mails. Glenn Greenwald won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the N.S.A.'s extensive surveillance of American citizens. This is not a new thing, it's widespread. We're just the latest to call attention to it.
In a moment, we'll be joined by Glenn Greenwald to explain what we know about what our government is doing to us, but first tonight, good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.
Last week, Democrats in New York City voted for a new mayor. It's the end of the de Blasio era New York is a one-party state, Republicans are as rare and exotic as Esperanto speakers in New York, so the Democratic primary effectively is the same as the general election. That's the vote.
So in New York, they don't really have partisan battles, all the bickering is between various shades of corrupt left-wingers. In some ways, you'd think it would be easier to get elections done, but you'd be wrong.
Eight days later, we still have no idea who the next mayor of New York will be. All the votes are in, they've all been counted supposedly. The problem is that no one in charge can do math. Addition is the main stumbling block.
It's hard to overstate just how embarrassing this is. In Brazil, a very poor country where a lot of people have far less than the homeless do in New York City, the latest national election took a total of four hours to tally. They just added up all the votes and then they announced the result. That's how it's supposed to work.
But not in New York, it's just too complicated -- all those numbers.
After last November's election, it took three months for New York's Board of Elections to figure out who the state was going to send to Congress. It may take that long to determine who the next mayor of New York City is.
The funny thing is that as of yesterday morning, it seemed pretty clear. Eric Adams, a former New York City police captain was well ahead of everyone else in the race. He had a double-digit lead. Then in the afternoon, things changed dramatically.
City officials released new vote tallies indicating that in fact, Adams might lose. His 12-point lead had shrunk to two points and there were still thousands of absentee ballots still outstanding. How could that happen eight days after the vote? It seemed impossible. Nothing like that had ever happened in the history of this country, at least since November in the presidential election.
And Eric Adams understandably wanted to know what the hell was going on, so he asked. And in response to his question, the guardians of our democracy mocked him. Got questions about an election result? You must be Donald Trump. Rachel Maddow impersonator, Chris Hayes, accused Adams of engaging in quote, "corrosive big lie conspiracy theorizing."
This is some Donald Trump crap, explained some kid at VOX. "This is the argument Trump used to declare election fraud," said another, and so on. We could go on.
We were starting to think that maybe QAnon was involved, maybe Eric Adams was staging an insurrection. And then late last night, we found out that Adams was in fact right to be skeptical.
Now, we learned this not from journalists, they were too busy sneering at Eric Adams on Twitter. The facts of the case were brought to us instead by people betting in the online prediction markets, people who put money on the Mayor's race and therefore had a stake in the outcome. They can do math, so they did the math and they realized that the numbers were fraudulent.
Based on their reporting and again, they're not even reporters, a few hours later officials in New York had to release a new statement. Now the statement was not printed on the official Board of Elections stationary assuming that even exists, no, the statement was drafted on the notes application from an iPhone then it was screenshot and then it was posted on social media.
Message, we're totally lame. The statement explained that the city's vote tally had in fact quote, "Included both test and election night results producing approximately 135,000 additional records." Additional records? What's an additional record? Well that's a fake vote, 135,000 fake votes/
Now that's a debacle so profound that even Bill de Blasio gazing up glassy eyed from his one-hitter claimed to be totally blown away.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D), NEW YORK CITY: Deeply disappointing and indicative of the fact that the Board of Elections is broken, structurally broken, and must be changed
Look, I don't know how many times we have to have this conversation. We can no longer have a partisan Board of Elections. It does not work. It's not modern, it's not professional.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: "It's structurally broken," you hear that so often, always to justify some power grab or another rewrite of history. What does structurally broken mean? Well, it means that dumb, incompetent, and dishonest people are in charge in other words the problem is not the system; the problem is the people running the system, and in New York, it is a problem.
Last year, "The New York Times" reported that quote, "Some staffers at the Election Board read or watch Netflix at the office, others regularly fail to show up for work with no fear of discipline. Several employees said some staffers punch in and then leave to go shopping or go to the gym." One employee said the newspaper quote, "Caught workers smoking marijuana at the Brooklyn voting machine warehouse on election night."
But remember, America, don't question the election results, only fascists do that. Fascists -- and the QAnon Army.
This would all be pretty funny if we were confined to New York, like a lot of things, bed bugs for example, they're all over New York. You don't have them. They don't really bother you, it's kind of hilarious that they have it.
But this is not confined to New York. The very same people running the New York City Democratic primary are now demanding -- at full volume and if you don't agree, you're a racist -- control of the whole country's election system. Remember H.R. 1? That's what that is. Put these people in charge of your elections and that should worry you because these people are incompetent. They have no skills of any kind. They could not paint a garage door if they had to.
They do not know where food comes from, they don't make their own beds. They are useless, which is why they are so miserable. People with no skills are unhappy. They're totally incapable of anything that requires discipline or precision.
Now, a long time ago, we created Gender Studies departments precisely so that people like this would have something to do during the day, kind of get them out of circulation and give them a little job they could do. But it wasn't enough for them. Now, they want real power. They'd like control of the power grid. They want to fly your airplanes.
And now, they want to run your elections. Yes, no. Can't do that. Because not only are they without skills, they're crazed ideologues. They think math is racist.
For hundreds of years, the United States had the best election system in the world. You can't really improve on it. You vote on Election Day, you vote in person with an ID to prove you are who you say you are, and you use paper ballots so there's no question about who you voted for because we can all check.
Canada does it to this day. For all of Canada's problems that's how they run their elections. In fact, most of the rest of the world does that. But no, we can't do that anymore because racism.
So instead, we have to put people like this in charge of our elections.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Listen kiddo, I get it. I don't like the two-party. I think our country is corrupt and quite frankly, I don't want to vote for Biden. It feels like voting for a Republican. But I am going to do it.
You want to know why? Because the alternative [bleep] fascist. A fascist. Is a fascist.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I just have [bleep] life, [bleep]. I am in miserable paying job and I just want to say, I want to be myself -- yourself [bleep] stupid.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have to stop sleeping with Republicans. Knock that off. They are all going to die out or start inbreeding anyway.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I am terrified. Listen to me, Republicans, listen. You are the people in history they warned us about. They warned us about people like you.
Pay attention. We're losing our democracy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, that's the coalition. The coalition of the unhappy. Let's keep them on TikTok, shall we. "We're losing our democracy."
It's pretty amusing in this specific case given that just a few years ago, the City of New York changed its election laws to make its process less democratic. Instead of just counting all the ballots and choosing a winner based on who had the most votes, that's called democracy, New York along with the State of Maine and a couple of other highly progressive places now has a system known as ranked choice voting.
In ranked choice voting, people don't vote for one candidate on their ballots. No. Because the system isn't confusing enough now, they rank up to five candidates in order of their preference. It's a multiple choice test, then once all the ballots are counted, the candidate with the lowest number of first choice votes is eliminated, then -- and this is the key part -- all of the votes for that eliminated candidate are then reallocated to the other candidates.
Following this?
So, if you voted for the last place finisher as your top choice, your vote is reallocated to the next candidate on your list. This process repeats for several rounds. It's hard to imagine anything more pointlessly complicated or crazy or undemocratic than this.
Ranked choice voting lets the losers pick the winner.
So, why in the name of democracy would you be for that? Well, as with most bad ideas at this point, ranked choice voting is a product of the equity craze. Democracy is absolutely not the point. The people who have lobbied for ranked choice voting in New York were very explicit about why they were doing it.
One of those who lobbied for it was a woman called Amy Torres and she told lawmakers a couple of years ago in 2019 that ranked choice voting, quote, " ... is an option that would really increase the power of the Asian-American and Pacific Islander electorate because we would be engaged on the same issues that the rest of the electorate is engaged on," end quote.
Now the first tip off to the insanity of all of this is a system that empowers people based on their skin color or ethnicity. That is racist and wrong and we should reject it out of hand every time, but as a literal matter, what did she just say? And of course the answer is nothing. It was, as it so often is, meaningless word salad. It was meant to hide rather than expose the real point of ranked choice voting.
And the real point is that it gives the people in charge a lot more power than they had before. It gives them more control over the outcome and you're seeing this in New York. It should not be a surprise to anyone that the people running New York are now using ranked choice voting to shaft Eric Adams.
Now why is that? Eric Adams is African-American. He is liberal. He's the Brooklyn Borough President, you'd think that white liberals in New York would love him. Oh no, they hate him.
Interesting. Why is that? Because he says things that are true, things like maybe we shouldn't allow criminals to knife people on the subway.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ERIC ADAMS (D), NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL CANDIDATE: It doesn't make any consolation if a police officer shoots someone illegally or if some -- a gang banger in blue jeans -- no matter what community I am in, people want their families to be safe and that resonates with everyday New Yorkers and I know my message will resonate with them.
If we're not safe in this city, companies are not coming to New York. Our multibillion dollar tourism industry is not going to return if tourists are shot at Grand Central Station, and so the first order of business is to get violence under control.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, it's interesting. So by saying maybe it's a good idea to have a subway you can use where you don't get shot while waiting for your train, Eric Adams predicted that he would unite the city across racial lines and guess what happened? He did. Because every normal person agrees with that.
Eric Adams won most black and Hispanic neighborhoods in New York City and on Staten Island. You'd think white liberals would be happy about this. They hate it, and they want to stop Eric Adams.
Now, Eric Levitz at "New York" Magazine was pretty honest about this last week. In a column, he described Eric Adams who is a full-blown liberal by the way as too right-wing and then he said in a line that is worth remembering, he said, Eric Adams is conservative because his base is non- white voters.
How interesting is that. He is acknowledging that Eric Adams is pulling non-white voters, "he has strong ties to non-white voting blocs" is the exact quote and that's why he, as a white liberal cannot support him. That's amazing. In other words, Eric Adams is not under their control.
He is against defunding the police. He is not funded by George Soros. He doesn't have some dystopian nihilistic view of what the city should be. He doesn't talk about equity as much as the rest of them, so they're not under his control and they want to crush him. He is too right-wing. They're admitting that out in the open.
Meanwhile, the Board of Elections is admitting it just invented a hundred thousand votes to bury Eric Adams. It's not hard to see why they're doing this. When you don't need voters, you don't need to lie to them anymore. Unbelievable.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the "New York Post." We're happy to have her on tonight. So, Karol, just two quick questions. One, the Democratic Party of New York -- and I've got to say, I don't want to be mean, but nationally has proven incapable of running a simple election, count the votes, announce the results -- and now they want total control of all elections nationally. Is there anything in their track record that gives you confidence?
KAROL MARKOWICZ, COLUMNIST, "NEW YORK POST": There isn't, no. And you know, this is actually not the first election in New York that this has happened. In 2019, when Governor Cuomo signed this modernizing of our election laws, every election since then has been a disaster. The Democratic presidential primary in June, it wasn't ranked voting, but it was a complete debacle.
We had a special election in February, that was a disaster. It took weeks and weeks to count the votes, and here we are again, and it's just -- they don't learn anything and we keep repeating the same mistakes.
I think you said it best where you went into the voting booth, you got a paper ballot, you produced an ID, and this was a system that made sense. What we have now makes no sense, and the fact that they want to spread it to other states should worry everybody watching.
CARLSON: Yes, I mean people should stand up and say no. We're not giving people who are totally incompetent, who literally have no skills of any kind control of our elections or of our -- you know, power grid, I would say.
Second, Eric Adams, a very liberal guy, black, Brooklyn Borough President. They hate him because he is not for defunding the police, I would think that white progressives would love the guy. Why do they dislike him so much?
MARKOWICZ: So, progressivism has become now an anti-police movement and it's always rich progressives who don't want police departments. As you said, normal people all over the city voted for Eric Adams. "The New York Post" endorsed him with a front-page endorsement because he was the most sane candidate running in that race.
CARLSON: Yes.
MARKOWICZ: And so, we got into a place where you know, the outer boroughs vote for Eric Adams but you know white liberals in Manhattan don't, you know it's a real issue, and a real spread in the --a real divide in the Democratic Party where the white liberals don't like the crime-fighting black guy.
CARLSON: Whose side are you on, Karol Markowicz?
MARKOWICZ: I'm on the side of safety, Tucker Carlson.
CARLSON: Amen.
MARKOWICZ: I like safety, you know, I like safety in my streets on the subways. I like a candidate that will make that a priority and if he's the best of the Democratic bunch, well that's what it is.
CARLSON: Yes, I'll take Queens over Williamsburg any day of the week. Karol, great to see you tonight. Thank you so much.
MARKOWICZ: Oh, yes. Thank you so much. Thank you.
CARLSON: So we told you that the N.S.A. had read our e-mails and threatened us, which they did. They effectively admitted last night that they did read our e-mails. We asked them a series of questions on air about the extent of this surveillance, Glenn Greenwald joins us next. He is the one who exposed N.S.A.'s mass surveillance of Americans under the Obama administration and he'll assess their response, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: A couple of days ago, we told you that the National Security Agency had read our e-mails and was effectively threatening us with them, leaking them. It's not a statement you would make lightly. No one wants to go on TV and say, the government is spying on me. You'd sound like a lunatic. Except when it is true, and in this case, it is true, and of course, it is not just this show.
They are spying on a lot of people, and they should stop because it's illegal.
Yesterday, we had a long conversation with officials at the National Security Agency. We got a statement out of them, and they effectively conceded, yes, they read our e-mails. They have some justification for it, but it is not justified. It never is, except in cases when national security is threatened, and nothing that we did would ever threaten national security. Period.
Liberals, used to understand that. They were very worried about this program. Back in 2006, Joe Biden himself said he was worried about the N.S.A. spying on American citizens.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), THEN SENATOR OF THE UNITED STATES: I don't have to listen to your phone calls and know what you're doing. If I know every single phone call you make, I am able to determine every single person you've talked to, I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive.
And the real question here is, what do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with al-Qaeda? And we're going to trust the President and the Vice President of the United States that they are doing the right thing. Don't count me in on that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So now that Joe Biden is in charge of the national security apparatus, and his administration has turned it on Americans who he has redefined as combatants, domestic terrorists, white supremacists, where does this go from here? We think we know and we're deeply concerned about it.
We know the N.S.A. is collecting data from American citizens, spying on them. They'd have a heart attack if you call it spying, that's exactly what it is. Let's stop using BS language, it's spying.
In A House Judiciary Committee meeting today, a senior Microsoft executive said that most Americans would be stunned if they knew how often the Federal government used secret orders to collect information on them.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: While the recent news about secrecy -- secret investigations is shocking, most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American's e-mail, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the Cloud.
Throughout the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, up to a third of all legal demands we receive from Federal law enforcement include secrecy orders up to 3,500 in just one year and these are just the demands on Microsoft, add the demands likely served on Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and others and you get a frightening sense of the mountain of secrecy orders used by Federal law enforcement in recent years.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, what we need is an investigation into what exactly is going on. We have the largest bureaucracy in the history of mankind. There's never been a human organization larger than the American Federal government, and so we need to know what the important parts of it, the parts with a lot of power are doing in our name.
We need an investigation and today, at that hearing, at least one Republican Member of Congress, Matt Gaetz of Florida called for that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MATT GAETZ (R-FL): The most watched cable news host has been stating for the last several nights that the N.S.A. has been monitoring his communications and amazingly, the N.S.A. has issued a statement that is so couched, it is functionally an admission, and it's not like the N.S.A. has never lied to us.
I mean, we were told that there was no bulk collection of Americans' data. It turns out there was bulk collection of Americans' data.
We cannot count on these people to police themselves.
Join me in calling for an Inspector General investigation into any monitoring that the N.S.A. or any other element of the Intelligence Community has engaged in relative to Tucker Carlson because these denials, these couched denials raise more questions than they provide answers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: They gather the information and they threaten you with it, information is power. The more they have, the more power they have over you, and if they don't like your politics, it's a problem, so we do need an investigation.
And tonight, the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California has called for that, an investigation by the House Intelligence Committee. We'll see what happens.
Glenn Greenwald, meanwhile, is one of the people who is responsible for what we know about what the N.S.A. does. He broke the original story of the N.S.A.'s mass surveillance under the Obama administration. He writes now for "Substack." We highly recommend it. He joins us tonight.
Glenn, thanks so much for coming on. So, your position on this has remained consistent for more than a decade, American citizens, unless they pose some obvious national security threat, imminent national security threats shouldn't be targeted by their own government for spying.
Why is that not the position of everyone in journalism?
GLENN GREENWALD, JOURNALIST: That's a really good question. You know, it's interesting when I did the reporting with Edward Snowden in 2013 and 2014, liberals loved that reporting so much that they gave us every award that they have to offer, the Pulitzer, the Polk. The film that was done about my work with Edward Snowden was given an Oscar. I went up on the Oscar's stage, they couldn't lavish enough prizes and praise on us.
And now, here we are after the Trump years and we know that the Democratic Party and journalism in general has aligned with the C.I.A., the N.S.A., and the F.B.I., and has aligned and merged with the security state, and so in response to the report that you did, you would think other journalists just out of self-interest even if they dislike your ideology and you, would say, we want to know whether the N.S.A. is abusing their powers in order to spy on journalists they dislike.
And instead, they mocked it. They said that, oh, he has to be paranoid in order to think this, and they took the N.S.A. statement that I have seen over and over, Tucker, over the last eight years that is designed to mislead the public. They use their carefully constructed words to say Tucker Carlson is not an intelligence target of the N.S.A., which may be true, but what that leaves out is that there are so many other ways that they have to spy on the communications of American citizens without making you a target, without getting a warrant.
They have huge authorities that really haven't been reined in since 2013 and 2014. I'm glad to hear Kevin McCarthy and other G.O.P. leaders calling for an investigation, but the reality is that in bipartisan Washington, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have been joining with the likes of Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell to expand the N.S.A, to kill any attempts to reform it, so these are kind of empty words.
CARLSON: I totally agree with that. Mitch McConnell is a hundred percent on board with what they do.
I got a number of calls and texts, I have one from POLITICO asking me, well, who are you e-mailing? And I think, clearly you would never claim your e-mails are being read by the government unless you could prove it -- again you sound like a crazy person -- we can prove it. It happened.
But now the line is, well you must have been e-mailing the wrong people. I was under the impression as a journalist and an American citizen, I have the right to e-mail anybody I want. Is that not the standard any longer?
GREENWALD: Tucker, ponder the authoritarianism needed for them to say that. Think about the premise there. They are saying that if you talk to somebody that the N.S.A. has decided should be spied upon, it means that that person even though they've been charged with no crime and convicted of nothing is up to no good. They're like a terrorist or a threat and you, yourself are also.
The whole point of the reporting that we did is that the N.S.A. spies on millions and millions of people indiscriminately. If you're a journalist, it's almost impossible not to talk to a target at the N.S.A. They target everybody constantly all the time. That's why they're this huge sprawling agency.
But the authoritarianism that is pervading journalism says, if you're talking to somebody the N.S.A. doesn't like, you're a bad person.
CARLSON: It's -- and we're not going to put up with it at all. Once they have the information, then they threaten and control you, and that's what they were trying to do to us.
Glenn Greenwald, I appreciate it, and your reporting, which we have new appreciation for. Thank you.
GREENWALD: Thanks, Tucker.
CARLSON: Dr. Li-Meng Yan was one of the very first people to say that the coronavirus had in fact originated in a lab in Wuhan and she knew this because she was a Chinese virologist who was tasked with studying where this virus came from.
She told the truth and she had to defect to the United States.
We just had an hour-long conversation with her, one of the single most interesting conversations ever on this show about why the Chinese government developed this virus. We'll talk to her, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Dr. Li-Meng Yan is a physician and a virologist. She is an expert on coronavirus. Until last year, she was living and working in China, in fact she was investigating the outbreak in Wuhan from the very beginning, but in April, she had to flee to this country because she had reached the wrong conclusion.
The coronavirus, she said was not naturally occurring, it had been designed, she said by the Chinese military.
Now, at the time in this country, Dr. Li-Meng Yan was censored for saying that, but now we know it is likely that the virus did come in fact, come from a lab.
We spoke to the Doctor for a new episode of "Tucker Carlson Today" just out now about what she knows about COVID and why she thinks it was developed by the Chinese government. Here is part of it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: I want to be clear about what you are saying. SARS happened years ago, the Chinese military decides, this is an effective virus to turn into a bio weapon, they find SARS-CoV-2, they are doing research on it to make it a bio weapon. They tested in Wuhan and it gets out of control. They didn't expect that to happen.
And at that point they realize, okay, it is out. They lied about that, but then they intentionally allowed some huge number of people, some infected from Wuhan to travel around the world to infect the rest of the world.
DR. LI-MENG YAN, VIROLOGIST: Exactly because, first, they learned the SARS and you know, China is the best country which has the SARS experience in the world.
CARLSON: Yes.
YAN: And have all of the materials from SARS time. So, like bat woman, Zhengli Shi and the other military scientists, they go to the U.S. and other countries, learned some -- the best technology and used it to the coronavirus modification for many years, and then later, when they found the appropriate virus backbone from Eastern China -- it is like playing LEGO.
CARLSON: Playing LEGO.
YAN: They make it like that -- yes -- add to function, the functions are from different teams which has different expertise in making this gain-of- function things.
So, they added it to the virus and finally, the whole virus becomes the SARS-CoV-2 which carried different kind of gain of functions and attacked humans. That's why later on, you see there are a lot of unexplained symptoms in the population and also why I insist that we should understand the real backbone from the military because back to that, you can start to study how many functions they added to SARS-CoV-2 and then solve it.
CARLSON: So many questions. Let's just start with the virus itself. You heard eminent, very famous highly respected American researchers and virologist say, we have taken a look at this virus and there is no chance it could have been manufactured in a lab.
YAN: I know this kind of people always tell you that there is now way it comes from a lab, but what I can tell is, China government actually spent many years to infiltrate the scientific world. And also, I know these people, they actually tried to help the China government for their own purpose.
So except for some innocent scientists who may not have enough experience in virus, those top scientists like Peter Daszak or like Ralph Baric or like Kristian Andersen, they are lying. They know they are lying. They just try to use misinformation to help China government for their own benefits. And these are all later reviewed again, gradually.
CARLSON: Well, they should be in prison if that is true, immediately.
YAN: Yes.
CARLSON: So, you are a virologist. So, you look at this virus and is it obvious to you that it is manufactured?
YAN: Yes, this is based on the real virus and as I said, the LEGO things, and all of the functions that I can examine and presented in my paper, my scientific report, these functions all target humans like one function is learned from SARS-1, it likes a human receptor, ACE-2 very much, so they purposely changed the structure of that genome -- that part of genome, make it like the hand can carry your receptor very well and even much better than any other animals.
So that's why you cannot find the nature, no intermediate host because the other animals' receptor cannot bind it so well.
CARLSON: Yes.
YAN: The lockdown in China is totally different that happened in U.S. They just locked down you in your room and lock your room, and you can be hungry, die at home which happened in Wuhan at that time.
CARLSON: People starved to death in their homes.
YAN: Yes. You don't know whether he has COVID or not.
CARLSON: But they weren't allowed to leave, so they just died of starvation.
YAN: Yes. Because government controlled it. That's why China claim that they can control COVID very well and they use propagandas through TikTok, media, to show it to democratic countries, even make Americans, some innocent people say China is great, we should learn from them.
But trust me, none of you will really experience such terrible policy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Well, that was a conversation. It was shocking. It was fascinating, I learned a ton. Hard to assess some of it, but it was definitely worth watching.
By the way, Dr. Li-Meng Yan goes on about her life in the United States during that conversation and the efforts of the Chinese government to silence and even hurt her here. You can watch the whole thing on foxnation.com. It is up right now.
So we told you about the plan in the Infrastructure Bill to eliminate the suburbs by banning their ability to zone for single-family housing. Oh, how would you like Section 8 on your block? Oh, you don't like it? You are a bigot.
Well, there has been a major escalation in that effort next in Atlanta, in Buckhead. We will tell you what they are doing next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: So equity is the idea that the outcomes have to be the same for everybody. Now, whether or not you agree with that idea, if you had to put it into practice, you would say, well, okay. Let's take people who aren't doing well and help them to do better, but that is not all the approach of the current administration.
The idea I, we will take people who are doing well and we will hurt them and bring them down to the level of people who aren't doing well.
So, the first thing they'd like to do is destroy the suburbs. Why? Because suburbs are nice. That's why we have them. They're leafy, lots of open space, not too many people. They work well. They're safe.
So, let's wreck them, and that's what they're planning to do. They're going to wreck the suburbs, eliminate them actually.
And the way they're going to do this is by cutting funding from local governments including for roads unless they eliminate single-family housing.
Now, that's what's happening now in Buckhead, which is a safe and pretty -- or once was safe, anyway -- neighborhood in the City of Atlanta. According to a report by the Housing Committee, it was adopted by Atlanta officials, quote, "Atlanta should amend the city's zoning code to allow more housing flexibility in the existing exclusionary single-family zoning areas designed for race and class discrimination."
So, in other words, if you don't want an apartment building or Section 8 housing on your block, you're a bigot. It's the same cudgel they use for everything that they want. The question is, will Buckhead fall for it?
Bill White is the CEO and Chairman of the Buckhead City Committee. He joins us tonight.
Bill White, thanks so much for coming on. You know, you don't have enough mentally ill vagrants, I've noticed in Buckhead either. There are not enough panhandlers, maybe you're a racist. That kind of seems like what they're saying, it's just too nice.
BILL WHITE, CEO AND CHAIRMAN, BUCKHEAD CITY COMMITTEE: Well, Tucker, thanks for having us on. I just want to say I just got off the phone with Senator Clint Dixon from Georgia and he just informed us that the Atlanta Police Officer that was literally shot in the face is going to make it and we are so happy to report that to you and to your viewers that our great heroic policemen are making it.
But you have a lot of commonsense on this, Tucker, and if Atlanta needed more low-income housing they would easily find a way to build residential towers in existing zones versus rezoning old established neighborhoods that have a hundred-year-old oak tree canopies.
There's an agenda here and Buckhead residents are on it. The lack of interest in cracking down on crime is linked to the agenda as well. We have a mayor who has opted not to run again, but she won't resign. It's obvious she has an agenda to destroy the beautiful community of Buckhead on her way out in a three-fold process, if I may.
She is going to let crime continue. She is going to let infrastructure deteriorate and she's going to rezone to destroy the quality of life in our beautiful Buckhead. This will decimate Buckhead.
I mean forget my property values would go basically to zero because how am I going to sell my house when a developer is building condos right next to me in Buckhead? It's absurd. It's a Marxist land grab for sure, and we have to reject that, Tucker.
CARLSON: Well, not just reject it, but reject it with maximum aggression and speed. They hate you. They want to hurt you. They couldn't be clearer about that.
Are people in Buckhead prepared to put up some resistance to this? This is really kind of existential, it feels like.
WHITE: Yes, sir. We are prepared to fight and I found this out in the last 48 hours in advance of telling folks that we were going to talk about this tonight. We have Republicans, Democrats, Independents, we even have our tree canopy environmentalists, we are furious with this and she is trying to insert this by the way on the way out as a slip in mayoral executive order and this, Tim Keane who is the design genius who thought this up, who is our Planning Commissioner, he has lied to the public on a public testimony that he is really not doing this, but it's still on the city's website.
So, this garbage has to stop. That's why Buckhead City is going to make a great municipality without any of these crazy policies going forward and thanks to your help, Tucker, people know about what we're doing.
CARLSON: Well, I hope so, because it's just -- it's just so clearly an act of hate and aggression. They just don't like you. They couldn't build the neighborhood that you live in and so they want to destroy it and I really hope you fight them.
WHITE: We're going to fight, Tucker, and I hope you'll follow the story. We'll keep you posted. We love you, sir.
CARLSON: Yes, I will. Thank you. Bill, good to see you.
WHITE: Thank you, sir.
CARLSON: Hard to believe we're saying this, but actually it has turned out to be really interesting. Britney Spears, that saga has a new turn tonight from a judge. She is under conservatorship that's been controlling her life for years -- can't get pregnant, can't get married. Amazing that could happen here.
Anyway, there's a new development and we'll tell you about it right after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: FOX News Alert for you. A judge has just denied a request from Britney Spears's lawyer to free her from that conservatorship we told you about and remove her father, Jamie Spears, as the conservator.
According to TMZ, which we are quoting on the air, "The judge has approved a plan to name a co-conservator." Now, we're going to start with Francey Hakes to determine what exactly this means.
Francey, thanks so much for joining us tonight. This is one of those cases you never thought we'd be interested in, but it tells you something about the country, I think.
So, what do we know tonight based on this Judge's order?
FRANCEY HAKES, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR (via phone): Well, Tucker, it looks to me like the Judge is not really listening to Britney and what really concerns me are some of the other stories that also came out today where one conservator is defending herself against claims that the father is making against claims that Britney is making, and now you've got people that are supposed to be looking out for Britney Spears's best interest arguing with Britney Spears in public about what they're doing or what they're not doing.
I want to know who is looking out for Britney. It certainly doesn't look to me as though the Judge is doing so.
CARLSON: What am I missing here? I mean, so the underlying claim is that Britney Spears is so crazy that she can't make even basic decisions about her own life, but she also has a highly paying job. So, how do -- I mean, how do you square those two those two points?
HAKES: Well, Tucker, it's really hard to square those two points especially after you listen to Britney's impassioned and intelligent plea for herself last week in that hearing. She seems to be -- she completely understands what's happening. She understands she is under conservatorship.
She understands the ramifications. She knows what the limits are on her. It is very hard to understand how a Judge, 13 years after they imposed a conservatorship when she had a mental health issue continues to say that she cannot make her own decision.
CARLSON: It's all very, very, very strange. I hope they don't do it to us. Francey Hakes, good to see you tonight. Thank you so much.
We're going to go now to Jeanine Pirro, Judge Jeanine. She is in for Laura Ingraham tonight by the way and we'll be all over this at 10:00 p.m.
Judge, good to see you tonight. So what does this tell you, this ruling from the Judge?
JEANINE PIRRO, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST, JUSTICE WITH JUDGE JEANINE: You know, I must tell you that my instincts tell me that there's something that is very wrong here and whether Britney needs new attorneys or whether there needs to be, you know, a Judge here who makes more sense than this particular Judge.
She is a highly functioning woman who is able to discipline herself, practice, go on tour, and all of a sudden she's not capable of making a decision as to whether she can have a child or not have a child, whether or not she can redo her kitchen? Something smells here.
And I must tell you that the way to start is to get new attorneys on this because if as the prior attorney -- I don't know what her name -- was saying, if the opposing parties are agreeing with each other, then something smells here and it is not it -- this isn't something that a lot of people are getting involved in because she is a functioning individual.
She is almost 40 years old and she is not being allowed to make basic decisions about her own body and about whether or not she can redo her kitchen. This is bizarre. It's absurd and it's unfair.
CARLSON: That whole, your body your choice stuff, they didn't really mean anything. What bothers me is if a Judge thinks that what you're saying is irrational, then he can control your life, I think you and I would be in trouble under that standard.
PIRRO: Depending on the Judge, but that's really for psychologists and psychiatrists to say. You know, judges are in a position to assess evidence and not to form their own opinions as to whether or not someone is competent.
CARLSON: Exactly.
PIRRO: That is based upon evidence and scientific evidence. I'm not seeing any of it here in fact I'm seeing just the opposite, and I worry.
CARLSON: Judge Jeanine, we'll see you at 10. Thanks so much.
PIRRO: I'll be there.
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