Fox News issued a public apology recently because somebody over there called Big Joe a wannabe dictator. Tucker’s here to tell us why that assessment is wrong. Highlights include:
“On Tuesday afternoon the Biden administration 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, ‘Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested’. 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 had 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.”
“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 had apologized for it? Probably not. But calling Joe Biden a wannabe dictator, that stung.”
“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.”
“It’s not just public protests 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, they’ll remind you of that from time to time. And in any case, you’re in the process of being disarmed anyway, along with everyone else who has shown questionable loyalty to the leader.”
“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.”
“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.”
Find the link to the video below and leave us your thoughts in the comments.
Ep. 4 Wannabe Dictator pic.twitter.com/MDcs5g0gxB
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 15, 2023
