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June 16, 2023 - Jim Fetzer
12:52
Tucker on Twitter - Episode 4 - Joe Biden is NOT a Wannabe Dictator!
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Hey, it's Tucker Carlson.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Biden administration had Donald Trump arrested.
It was a pretty big news story.
You may have seen it.
Just before 9pm that night, as part of its coverage, Fox News ran two live video feeds next to one another.
On the right, Donald Trump addressed his supporters in New Jersey.
On the left, Joe Biden spoke at an event for the Secretary General of NATO in Washington.
Beneath those videos, at the bottom of the screen, Fox's banner read this way, quote, Those words were up for less than 30 seconds, but the effect was immediate.
Inside Fox, the women who run the network panicked.
First, they scolded the producer who put the banner on the screen.
Less than 24 hours after that, he resigned.
He'd been at Fox for more than a decade.
He was considered one of the most capable people in the building.
He offered to stay for the customary two weeks, but Fox told him to clear out his desk and leave immediately.
Then the company issued a public apology for the 27-second-long wannabe dictator line.
Quote, The Chiron was taken down immediately, Fox's PR department said, and then added ominously it was, quote, addressed.
That was all true.
But it was not enough to save Fox News from the ensuing scandal.
For a time in the rest of the media, Fox's assessment of Donald Trump's arrest seemed to overshadow Trump's arrest itself.
Suggesting that Biden is a dictator, declared the Washington Post, quote, Alexander Vindman agreed strongly.
Vindman is the perennial MSNBC guest and full-time Ukraine promoter you may remember from Russiagate.
On Twitter, he demanded that the Pentagon pull Fox News from all military bases.
It is, quote, absolutely unacceptable for American Forces Network to carry programming that directly, spuriously attacks the Commander-in-Chief of American Armed Forces, Vindman wrote.
In other words, Joe Biden must ban all criticism of himself because that's what non-dictators do.
John Cusack went further still.
For the crime of calling Biden a dictator, Fox should be shut down, wrote the 80s-era movie star.
Quote, the government has to take away their broadcasting license.
And so on.
It was all over the internet.
Democrats were very, very angry.
But why were they angry?
If the banner on Fox was false, why the hysteria?
Lies don't seem to bother anyone anymore.
If some cable news producer had called Joe Biden a genius, or accused him of being secretly Sudanese, would anyone be yelling about it?
Would Fox News have apologized for it?
Probably not.
But calling Joe Biden a wannabe dictator, that stung.
So you've got to wonder, if you're being honest with yourself, is Joe Biden a wannabe dictator?
That question came up yesterday at the White House briefing.
Here's how it went.
Last night, Fox News ran a chyron that referred to the president as a wannabe dictator.
And I'm wondering if the White House has any comment on that.
So look, there are probably about 787 million things that I can say about this that was wrong about what we saw last night, but I don't think I'm going to get into it.
There's no comment the White House has on that.
I think I just commented.
Oh, no comment necessary.
Of course Joe Biden's not a wannabe dictator.
Just because he's trying to put the other candidate in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he himself committed doesn't mean he has a totalitarian impulse.
Come on, that's absurd.
It takes a lot more than jailing your political rivals to earn the title wannabe dictator.
That's the consensus in Washington tonight.
And in some ways, for once, the consensus may be right.
It is not a small thing to be a wannabe dictator.
It's quite a process.
There are a lot of steps.
First off, there is the money.
The one thing that all dictators have in common is they enrich themselves and their families, their tribe, even as the countries they govern grow steadily poorer and more desperate.
They take kickbacks from businesses and from other dictators.
They use the official functions of their government to funnel cash to themselves.
They don't bother to hide the fruits of this.
They live in garish mansions with big lawns, far from the teeming cities, even as their own citizens languish in growing poverty.
In some cases, literally living in tents on the street.
So they don't really hide it.
It's all pretty blatant.
And ordinary people resent it.
Of course they do, and wannabe dictators know they resent it.
But they don't care.
There's nothing the population can do about it in a dictatorship.
It's no longer possible to fight injustice in a system like that.
People can't gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator.
If they try that, they'll be arrested by his state security services, even years after the fact.
A visit for men in body armor at the breakfast table.
That happens.
And if citizens persist in believing they can gather in groups to protest, they may be shot to death.
A bullet to the throat.
And then, just to make the humiliation complete, to make the lesson gin clear to everyone else watching, their relatives can be arrested for daring to complain that their children were killed for complaining.
That actually happens in some places.
Ask Ashley Babbitt's mother.
Here she is in handcuffs.
You murdered her inside the Capitol, now you're gonna arrest her?
Come out of there.
How do you transport this?
All right, you're gonna have to get a sidewalk.
So don't be like Ashley Babbitt's mother, much less like poor Ashley Babbitt.
She's dead now.
That's the message a wannabe dictator would send.
And by the way, it's not just public protest that would be banned in a dictatorship.
You wouldn't be allowed to complain from your own home.
Unauthorized opinions expressed on the internet would be censored, go too far, press too deep, tell too much truth, and they'll just erase your opinions.
They have no choice, really.
It's a matter, as they say, of trust and safety.
You must trust the leader, or else you will jeopardize his safety.
Not that you really can jeopardize his safety at this point.
The leader has nuclear weapons, and you don't.
He'll remind you of that from time to time.
In any case, you're in the process of being disarmed anyway, along with everyone else who has shown questionable loyalty to the leader.
Those who support the regime can keep their weapons and use them freely, including on public transportation.
That's a core civil right for them.
But for those who dissent from the program, self-defense is an unaffordable privilege.
Turn in your guns, Mr. and Mrs. Peaceful Opposition.
You're a danger to society, and we know who you are.
And in fact, the wannabe dictator does know who they are because he knows everything.
Technology has made him all-seeing.
A report in Wired Magazine just this week revealed that the highly non-dictatorial Biden administration is busy tracking the phones of millions of Americans without their knowledge and without bothering to get a warrant.
And at the same time, this same non-dictatorial administration is stockpiling a massive trove of damaging information about these same Americans.
To be used at some point, we are sure, for entirely noble purposes.
So the administration now knows everything.
Where you spend your days, who you talk to, what you think, your porn habits.
Not a big deal.
The administration already knows what you buy, of course, because they've leaned on the big banks to turn over your confidential credit card information.
Not because anyone here is a wannabe dictator, to be clear, but just because.
It's nice to have that information, just in case, in the words of the Fox News PR department, a situation arises that needs to be, quote, addressed.
It's all totally normal.
It's not a dictatorship, okay?
But in the end, the main reason you know Joe Biden is not a wannabe dictator is because he just does not fit the profile as a man.
Dictators have that look.
You know one when you see one.
Dictators build cults of personality around themselves, and they use those cults to deny the glaringly obvious.
In his later years, to name just one example, North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung developed an enormous baseball-sized tumor on the back of his neck.
It was huge.
It was grotesque.
It was right there.
You couldn't ignore it.
You couldn't possibly not see it.
But in North Korea, state media did ignore it.
They pretended it didn't exist.
And so, in some important sense, it didn't.
If a tumor grows on a neck but no one acknowledges it, is it really there?
Thankfully, nothing like that is happening in our country or ever will.
If Joe Biden ever developed some profound physical or medical problem that was obvious to everybody, journalists would say something.
This is not North Korea.
We don't have state media here.
If Joe Biden was, say, incapable of completing a full sentence, or mistook his sister for his wife, or suddenly started falling down in public for no reason, the New York Times would report on that and then get to the bottom of what was actually happening.
That would be its duty in a free country like ours.
It's not like they would cover it up.
The very idea of a cover-up sounds like a conspiracy theory.
A dangerous one, actually.
So stop it.
And by the way, if Joe Biden was a wannabe dictator, he'd have the family to match.
All dictators do.
Saddam Hussein had Uday and Qusay.
They were princelings who lived above the law, indulging their most decadent fantasies with total confidence they would be never held to account by the police.
As the sons of a dictator, they knew they could do exactly what they wanted.
And so that's what they did.
There's no one like that around Joe Biden.
He doesn't have weird sex scandals at the heart of his family that no one in the media will ever talk about.
He doesn't have a ne'er-do-well former nightclub-owning brother who's made a living for 30 years by being related to him.
Not at all.
That's dictator stuff.
Joe Biden doesn't award ridiculous inflated titles to his relatives that the media are then required to take seriously.
He doesn't call people doctor who didn't go to medical school and then force you to nod along like it's real when everyone knows it isn't.
Nikolai Ceausescu did that with his wife Elena.
Joe Biden would never do that.
Nor does Joe Biden dress like a dictator.
He doesn't do photo ops in mirrored sunglasses driving a sports car to convince you that he isn't frail and senile, but instead powerful, virile, and wise.
That's just not his style.
If Joe Biden was a dictator, he'd be wearing epaulettes and carrying a tasseled riding crop.
And he isn't yet.
So calm down.
If he was a dictator, Biden's speeches would look like Nuremberg rallies.
A blood-red backdrop, armed soldiers by his side, screaming about crushing his eternal enemies.
Honestly, Biden did come close to that one time last September at a speech in Philadelphia.
But it wasn't in any sense dictator-y.
It was necessary.
As MSNBC assures at the time, See, it was about democracy, not dictatorship.
No cause for alarm.
in the military apparatus and its ability to back the democratic order.
See, it was about democracy, not dictatorship.
No cause for alarm.
He is not a dictator.
A dictator would stockpile ammunition for his own bureaucrats, including his tax collectors.
He'd redefine the legal code to make disloyalty to the regime the most serious crime.
He'd claim dominion over the most intimate parts of his citizens' lives.
He'd define what attitudes they were allowed to have about sex and religion and how to raise their families.
He would even, in his final grandiose stage of dictatorship, claim ownership of their children.
And Joe Biden wouldn't do that.
And to prove he would never do that, Biden just this week released this video.
These are our kids.
These are our neighbors.
Not somebody else's kids, they're all our kids.
And our children are the kite strings that hold our national ambitions aloft.
It matters a great deal how we treat everyone in this country.
LGBTQ Americans, especially children, You're loved, you're heard, and this administration has your back.
See?
Joe Biden isn't saying your children belong to him like a dictator would.
He's saying something very different from that.
He's saying America's children are, quote, our children.
Not his alone.
Ours.
You share your children with Joe Biden, evenly, right down the middle, with alternating weekends.
You've got joint custody with Joe Biden, and you can thank heaven that you do.
A nation is like a family.
Every family has a head, a father.
That's Joe Biden, our nation's father.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is now his fatherland.
Just don't call it a dictatorship, or we'll have to issue a statement disavowing you.
John Deere people say the news is full of lies.
Kennedy's motorcade.
239 people.
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