This is a rush transcript of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” June 2, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
BEN DOMENECH, FOX NEWS HOST: We’ll be back tomorrow night at seven.
Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.
Tucker Carlson is up next.
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: Good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.
The utter fraudulence of Tony Fauci is obvious now and it’s widely acknowledged, but it was not always obvious. In March of last year, we interviewed Fauci on this show. We treated him with respect. We took his answer seriously.
We’re Americans, so we assumed the man in charge of protecting the U.S.
from COVID must be rational and impressive. We also assumed he must be honest, but we were wrong. It soon became clear that Tony Fauci was just another sleazy Federal bureaucrat, deeply political, and often dishonest.
More shocking than that, we then learned that Fauci himself was implicated in the very pandemic he had been charged with fighting. Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made COVID possible.
We came to these conclusions incrementally, spurred by evidence that accumulated over the course of a year. Tonight, we have the mother lode.
Thanks to a Freedom of Information request from BuzzFeed, we have thousands of e-mails to and from Anthony Fauci. They go back to the early winter of 2020.
Collectively, they show that from the beginning, Tony Fauci was worried that the public might conclude COVID had originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now, why would Tony Fauci be concerned that Americans would conclude that? Possibly because Tony Fauci knew perfectly well that he had funded gain-of-function experiments at that very same laboratory.
E-mails prove that Fauci lied about this under oath. Consider this exchange, which began the evening of January 31st, 2020. It was a Friday just before midnight. The first e-mail came from an immunologist called, Kristian Andersen, who works at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
Andersen warned Fauci that COVID appeared to have been possibly manipulated in a laboratory, quote, “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome, less than 0.1 percent. So one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features potentially look engineered.”
The next day, on February 1st, Tony Fauci wrote back, “Thanks, Kristian.
Talk soon on the call.” Fauci then sent an urgent e-mail to his deputy, a man called Hugh Auchincloss, the subject of that e-mail in all caps was “Important.” “Hugh, it is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on. Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward. You will have tasks today that must be done.”
Attached to that e-mail was a document it was entitled, quote, “Baric, Shi et al, nature medicine, SARS, gain-of-function.pdf.” Now the Baric in the attachment referred to Ralph Baric, a virologist based in the U.S. who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
Baric worked with a woman called Dr. Shi Zhengli known as the bat lady because she manipulates coronaviruses that infect bats. She was the Shi in the attachment.
Now keep in mind that during the questioning from Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky fairly recently, Tony Fauci denied that this same Ralph Baric had conducted gain-of-function research. Again, this is the Ralph Baric in Fauci’s attachment, which was entitled “Baric, Shi et al SARS gain-of- function.pdf.” And yet under oath before the United States Congress, Fauci denied this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS
DISEASES: Dr. Baric does not do any gain-of-function research. And if it is, it’s according to the guidelines and it is being conducted in North Carolina. And if you look at the grant, and you look at the progress reports, it is not gain-of-function despite the fact that people tweet that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, it wasn’t just on Twitter, it was in Fauci’s own e-mails. In retrospect, that looks a lot like perjury. We do know that starting early last year, a lot of people at N.I.H. were worried that COVID had not occurred naturally. They were concerned it had been instead manipulated in a lab in China. And yet they seemed determined to hide those facts from the public. Again, why?
On the afternoon of February 1st, last year, Fauci held a conference call with several top virologists. Most of the details of that call remain hidden from public view. They’ve been redacted. We know the call was related to a document entitled “Coronavirus Sequence Comparison.” Jeremy Farrar, a British physician who runs a major research nonprofit reminded everyone on the call that what they said was top secret, quote, “Information and discussion is shared in total confidence and not to be shared until agreement on next steps,” end quote.
In other e-mails, Jeremy Farrar passed along an article from the website, Zero Hedge. That piece suggested that coronavirus might have been created as a bio weapon.
We now know that is a more plausible explanation than the one we believed at first and were told by the media, which is that corona came from a pangolin. And yet, for the crime of saying that out loud, a more plausible explanation, Zero Hedge was banned from social media platforms.
Until recently, you were not allowed to suggest that COVID might be manmade. Why couldn’t you suggest that? The fact checkers wouldn’t allow it? Why wouldn’t they? Because Tony Fauci assured the tech monopolies that the coronavirus could not have been manmade. And so the tech monopolies shut down the topic.
Watch Fauci lie.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FAUCI: A group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to human.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: That was April 17, 2020, very shortly into the course of this pandemic. At that point, what Tony Fauci just asserted, as known, could not conclusively have been known. That was a lie.
Tony Fauci suggested that he knew because top researchers had decided conclusively that this must have jumped naturally from an animal to human being. But again, at that point, he could not have known that. That was dishonest.
Two days after he said that, one of the virologists that Tony Fauci had funded to conduct dangerous coronavirus experiments in Wuhan wrote to thank him for the help. That man, a man called Peter Daszak, complained to Fauci that the American tax dollars he had taken for these experiments were being, quote, “publicly targeted by FOX News reporters.” Yet, Daszak remained grateful for Tony Fauci’s support, quote, “I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators,” end quote.
Now strangely, most of this specific e-mail from Daszak to Fauci has been redacted and it was redacted under FOIA Section B -7(a), that specific exemption to the FOIA law applies to quote, “Records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that production of those documents could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”
Are Peter Daszak and Tony Fauci under criminal investigation? We can only hope they are. They certainly deserve it. At this point, we can’t say for sure, we do know that Fauci hasn’t simply lied about the origins of COVID, pretending to know things he could not know. He has also lied about vaccines in key ways.
In March of last year, former Obama officials Zeke Emanuel wrote to Fauci to ask a very simple question, one that we’ve asked countless times: are people who have recovered from COVID generally immune from getting infected with COVID once again? That applies to about a hundred million Americans, so it’s not a small question.
Fauci’s response, quote: “No evidence in this regard, but you would assume that there would be substantial immunity post infection.” Well, yes, you would assume that, we always have. And in fact, studies now show it is true. People who have had COVID and recovered almost never get sick again from COVID, so they don’t need to be vaccinated.
Yet to this day, Tony Fauci has never admitted that in public. In his e- mail to Zeke Emanuel, he admitted something else that’s also now obvious, surgical masks, the paper kind all of us wear don’t really work. They offer very little protection from COVID. In fact, at least one study shows they may accelerate transmission of viruses.
They are in short, a form of make believe. Yet, once again, while under oath in public, Tony Fauci claimed precisely the opposite.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. RAND PAUL (R-KY): You’re telling everybody to wear a mask, whether they’ve had an infection or a vaccine. What I’m saying is they have immunity and everybody agrees they have immunity. What studies do you have, that people that have had the vaccine or have had the infection are spreading the infection. If we’re not spreading the infection, isn’t it just theater?
FAUCI: No, it’s not —
PAUL: You’ve had the vaccine and you are wearing two masks, isn’t that theater?
FAUCI: No, it is not — here we go again with the theater. Let me just state for the record that masks are not theater. Masks are protective, and we ask —
PAUL: If we have immunity, they are theater. If you already have immunity, you’re wearing a mask to give comfort to others. You’re not wearing a mask because of any science.
FAUCI: I totally disagree with you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Rand Paul is a physician. He is smart. What he just said was true and the science shows that it’s true. There’s not much debate about it actually, among honest people.
But Tony Fauci claimed it wasn’t true, he lied. Why would he do that? Well, here’s one reason. The e-mail show that Tony Fauci speaks regularly to Bill Gates. That’s odd.
Bill Gates is not a doctor. Bill Gates is not a scientist. Bill Gates is a very rich man who made billions making mediocre software for office computers.
So why would Tony Fauci be in such regular contact with Bill Gates?
The term “Bill Gates” comes up more than two dozen times when you search the Fauci e-mails. Has Bill Gates profited in any way from Tony Fauci’s COVID guidance? That wouldn’t definitely be worth knowing, immediately. And yet, we don’t know. Our media don’t seem interested in finding out.
In fact, here is how CNN covered the e-mails today, quote, “Thousands of e- mails from and to Dr. Fauci reveal the weight that came with his role as a rare source of frank honesty within the Trump administration’s COVID-19 Task Force.”
Can you imagine a more dishonest characterization of anything than that?
It’s hard to.
By the way, it wasn’t just CNN. No reporters asked about these e-mails at today’s White House press briefing, not one question. But you shouldn’t be surprised. Of course, they didn’t ask.
Tony Fauci is too big to question at this point. Quote, “Oh, my God.” one Biden voter wrote to Tony Fauci back in March. “Is there anything I can do for you besides being grateful?” Wash my feet with your tears, Fauci may have responded. We can’t say that he did respond that way for certain, we don’t have his reply. We do know that in affluent neighborhoods throughout Northwest Washington, D.C., you can still see signs that say “Thank you, Dr. Fauci.”
What does that tell you? It tells you that Tony Fauci is no longer a scientist, assuming he ever was one. Tony Fauci is a figure of religious veneration. He is Jesus for people who don’t believe in God.
Alex Berenson is not a theologian. He is a science reporter. He’s the best science reporter in the United States. He has been covering Tony Fauci since the very first day. And he joins us tonight to assess these e-mails and what they tell us.
Alex Berenson, thank you for coming on tonight. There are a lot of e-mails here. We explained only a few of the. You’ve read them? What jumped out to you? What have you learned today?
ALEX BERENSON, AUTHOR: So yes, there are a lot of e-mails. You know, you did a really great job there laying out the most important stuff. What I would say is, I think it’s really important to think back to January 31, 2020, and February 1st and 2nd 2020. The reports coming out of China were horrifying.
There was fear that the infection fatality rate, that the number of people who died from this was going to be three or four percent, and if you — and that meant that if the Chinese couldn’t contain this virus and it spread worldwide, it might be 10 million Americans who died, okay, three percent of the country’s population is 10 million; 200 million plus people might have might have died worldwide, if the numbers coming out of China were as bad as they seemed at first, okay.
So if you’re Tony Fauci, you know this better than anybody. You know what the risk is here. You know it first. You’re hearing from, you know, from doctors, you’re hearing from people in China.
And so the idea that this might have come out of a lab in China that you helped finance, even minimally, and that experiments that you supported, even if it wasn’t a specific experiment that you supported, but the idea of gain-of-function research that you supported was possibly responsible for this, that you’re going to be tarred and feathered.
And so, I mean, clearly, when he received that e-mail from Kristian Andersen, he was extremely upset. You can see it in what he tells Hugh Auchincloss, his deputy to do. He says, you know, you need to be ready.
Today is going to be a big day. And now we’re going to have a secret conference call to talk about what we really know and don’t know about this.
So here’s what I’ll say. There is still a tremendous amount we don’t know about — first of all, we don’t know.
CARLSON: That’s right.
BERENSON: First of all, we don’t know. We don’t have proof that this came out of the Wuhan lab yet, okay, and we may never have proof because the people who should have been pushing for an investigation in 2020 instead steered us in a completely different direction, and made it impossible for anybody but you and me and a few other, you know, lost souls to question whether or not this might have been a lab leak after all, and we were called racist and anti-Chinese for even doing so when the idea that somehow this might have been the result of Chinese people eating bats and pangolins is not racist, but the idea it’s Chinese scientists making mistake is racist is a joke.
So at best, okay, at best, you have a guy who didn’t want this investigated and who worked in secret, okay, because he worked with Kristian Andersen to put that paper, to put a paper in “Nature” Magazine in March, okay. He consulted with Kristian Andersen. It’s in the e-mails on that paper, although his name is not on it. And that paper became something that steered people away from questioning even the idea of a lab leak for more than a year, and now it may be too late.
CARLSON: What an amazing story. I mean, you’re a novelist in addition to everything else. I don’t think you’d dare write a storyline like this. No one would believe it. This one seems to be true.
BERENSON: No, it is great and the greatest thing is the e-mail where he tells Hugh Auchincloss, you know, it’s going to be a big day. I mean, it’s really movie villain quality. And you know, Tucker, look, we could talk about this all — I know, you have a ton of guests — we could talk about this all day. We’re going to be starting to talk about the failures of the media on this.
But I would just say, you know, I don’t normally say this. If you really want to know more, you should come check out my Twitter feed and you should check out the other people who are pushing this because the media is not reporting it.
CARLSON: No, they’re liars. Alex Berenson, I appreciate you coming on tonight. Thank you.
BERENSON: Thanks, Tucker.
CARLSON: So the official story is that he cyberattack crippled this country’s supply of gasoline on the East Coast of the United States just a few weeks ago. Now, those attacks seem to be everywhere. They’ve even hobbled Martha’s Vineyard ferry. FOX’s Trace Gallagher has the very latest on the story. Hey, Trace.
TRACE GALLAGHER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Tucker. We hear a lot about the mega cyberattacks, but consider this, the firm CrowdStrike identified 1,400 ransomware attacks in 2020 and the number could rise this year because ransomware gangs are now going after targets that are both critical and highly visible. You know the ones that generate fear and big ransoms.
The latest target is JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company. It’s based in Brazil, but the attack was directed at servers here in the U.S.
and Australia. JBS says it’s back online, but it’s very unclear when the company’s nine U.S. processing plants will be at full capacity. Being down just one day can lower U.S. meat production by 25 percent, and even the threat of lower demand will push meat prices even higher.
We don’t yet know if JBS has paid a ransom, but the company acknowledges it did get a ransom demand from a Russian-based operation. And remember, last month, the Colonial Pipeline paid a Russian cyber gang $4.4 million following the attack that shut down the pipeline for several days.
President Biden said today he does not think Vladimir Putin is testing him, others think Putin is, and Russia is certainly not holding the cyber gangs accountable. And as you said, we should note the largest ferry service to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard has now been hit by a ransomware attack.
The steamship authority says customer service will be delayed though we don’t yet know the origin of the attack.
We do know the cyberattack on Scripps Health in San Diego last month compromised the personal and financial information on more than 147,000 patients, staff and doctors — Tucker.
CARLSON: Amazing. Trace, thanks so much.
Someone just sent this, I’ve got to read this. Apparently Fauci did his first interview on MSNBC responding to the e-mails and here’s what Jeb Bush’s former flak said, “The true mark of someone is if they look good even when their personal e-mails come out.” So you pass the test very few of us would pass. Sucking up to Tony Fauci in the wake of learning what we just learned. It is beyond belief.
Joe Biden gave a genuinely disgusting and divisive speech yesterday in Oklahoma. I’m going to tell you what he said and what it means after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: If you really wanted to hurt this country and the people who live here, if you want to divide it even more deeply along racial lines into groups that really hate each other on the basis of how they look, you would give a speech, a disgusting speech like the one that Joe Biden gave yesterday in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
During the speech, Biden declared that the most lethal threat in the United States is not the cyberattacks, for example, shutting down our supplies of essentials like gasoline and meat. It is not terrorism, it is not gang warfare. No, it’s people who don’t agree with Joe Biden. He calls them white supremacists.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: According to the Intelligence Community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today, not ISIS, not al-Qaeda — white supremacists.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So this is the quote, “most lethal threat to the homeland,” more dangerous than al-Qaeda or ISIS. It’s white supremacy. So what is white supremacy?
Well, the weird thing is Joe Biden didn’t define it. What is a white supremacist? We should know, they are the most lethal threat. Corporate America has tried to answer that question through one of their proxies, a think tank called the Minority Corporate Counsel Association.
Now the Board of that group has representatives from U.S. Steel, Freddie Mac, Microsoft — heavy hitters. According to that group, the Minority Corporate Counsel, white supremacy means, quote, “Having a can do attitude”
and a, quote, “Tendency to rugged individualism.”
So that’s the threat that Joe Biden’s D.H.S. and the F.B.I., the Intel Community, the U.S. military, they’re all warning about. Could it be? Well, according to the Global Terrorism Database, managed by the University of Maryland, a total — and we’re always about getting the numbers — “a total of 64 people in this country were killed between the years of 2015 and 2019. Due to those rugged individualist white supremacists and/or nationalist,” end quote.
Now those numbers aren’t real, actually. Dig a little deeper and they don’t stand up to scrutiny. In fact, that total 64 counts the Parkland school shooting as a white supremacist attack. Which as far as we know it was not.
But even if you take that number at face value, if you assume it’s accurate, it would mean there are a total of 16 quote “white supremacist nationalist killings per year on average.”
For comparison, 774 people were murdered in the City of Chicago alone just last year, and very few of the perpetrators were white nationalists. We can tell you, those trends hold up nationally. In 2019, there were 11,000 arrests nationwide for murder. Young black men made up a majority of those arrests despite being about six percent of the overall population. So there’s no credible way to argue that white supremacy is the most lethal threat that we face.
That’s not an argument, it is its own form of racial attack. But Joe Biden kept claiming it. White supremacy, he told us is all around us.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: Millions of white Americans belong to the Klan and they weren’t even embarrassed by it. They were proud of it. And that hate became embedded systematically, and systemically in our laws and our culture. We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened or it doesn’t impact us today, because it does still impact us today.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: The Klan defines modern America? That’s a disgusting lie. But more to the point, why are you doing this to us? You’re the President of the United States. And by us, we mean the whole country, people of all colors. Why are you dividing us like this? It is the last thing we need right now.
And yet, there was Joe Biden telling us that white supremacy, the legacy of the Klan is so bad that African-Americans right now in 2021, can’t vote.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: … assault is not just an echo of a distant history. In 2020, we
faced a tireless assault on the right to vote, restrictive laws, lawsuits, threats of intimidation, voter purges, and more.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Maybe we’re too literal. Maybe we’re too linear and Western in the way we think, maybe that’s its own form of white supremacy. But we have to go back to the numbers because we don’t know how else to respond, and here’s what they are.
The number of African-Americans eligible to vote for President reached an all-time record high last year of 30 million. So that’s another lie. But the question is, why are you telling the same kind of lie again, and again, when the only outcome is to make people born in this country hate each other irreparably? Why are you doing that?
Horace Cooper is the co-chair of Project 21. He may have the answer.
Horace, it’s great to see you tonight. Why are they doing this? It’s really
— it’s overheating the country and it is making it very hard to continue in a happy way. What’s the point of this?
HORACE COOPER, CO-CHAIR, PROJECT 21: You know, this is really, really sad what the President is doing. This is perhaps one of the worst race hoaxes since the Jussie Smollett charge, when the President of the United States stands up and lies to the American people about the American people.
He says that we are so racist, and that in particular, if you look around in your community, you need to keep your eye out for one particular type of individual — white men, white nationalist, white racist. There is no evidence of any of this. There is no evidence that this problem exists in the workplace. There is no evidence that this problem is happening at our jails. There is no evidence in any place.
And in fact, I ask right now for the President of the United States to declassify whatever Intelligence that he is purporting to rely upon in making this claim. It is a flat falsehood.
CARLSON: Well, if that’s ever declassified, I think Horace Cooper, you will find yourself on the white supremacist list. I mean, I think that’s kind of the point. No, you laugh, but I have known other African-Americans who have been denounced as a white supremacist. If you haven’t been, you will be.
We were denounced for it in this show for quoting Martin Luther King. So like, it’s purely political. Why doesn’t anyone ever say that?
COOPER: We’re having a circumstance where we’re told that what we see we must deny, and then only listen to the lie. Record numbers of black Americans participated in the elections in 2020. Also, in 2018, record numbers of black Americans gained job opportunities, record lows in terms of the number of people complaining about hate crime, or actually filing charges. You know, what the spike in hate crimes are? Anti-Semitism and now, anti-Asian and disproportionately, the six percent of the population is identified as to blame, black men. Where is the white male, white nationalist, white racist threat?
CARLSON: Yes, I mean, I think it is people who don’t vote Democrat are the ones who are being about to be hounded by D.H.S. and the F.B.I., and that’s a concern.
Horace Cooper, I appreciate your coming on tonight. Thank you.
COOPER: Thank you.
CARLSON: It is worth from time to time, and we try to do it, to worry about the animals. We have dominion over them. That doesn’t mean we should mistreat them.
A Federal program intended to protect horses is hurting horses. We’ll tell you where those horses are going straight ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Two years ago, the Bureau of Land Management, the other BLM set up an incentive program to encourage people to adopt mustangs and burros and give them a good home. It was expensive, but a good idea. Thousands of people signed up for it. Now, we’re learning that many of those horses wound up in slaughterhouses and many more are on their way there. How did that happen?
Carol Walker is a horse photographer and an advocate for horses, and we’re happy to have her on tonight. Carol, thanks so much for coming on. So, a program designed to save wild horses, is instead sending them to the slaughterhouse. How does — how did this happen?
CAROL WALKER, HORSE PHOTOGRAPHER AND ADVOCATE: Well, it’s not really designed to save wild horses. It is a way for the Bureau of Land Management to launder them, basically, to get them out, get rid of them, and not be responsible for sending them to slaughter.
At the time that they set this program up in 2019, I was horrified because I knew what was going to happen. And what happens is people will take the horses, they’ll get their money, and then — their $1,000.00 — and then they take them to auctions and get another say $500.00 for them, and the horses go to slaughter, and it’s very inhumane and it’s a terrible solution. It’s not a solution.
What we need is for people to stop — we need the Bureau of Land Management to stop rounding up wild horses, to manage them on our Federal public lands humanely, and use birth control instead of rounding them up and removing them and then stockpiling them. $70 million, the BLM spent last year warehousing the wild horses. This is 70 percent of their budget. And they just got an extra $35 million in their budget for round ups and warehousing horses, and they are planning to take over 90,000 horses over the next five years and stockpile them.
Instead of saying, well, gee, it would be much cheaper to manage the horses where they belong on our public lands, and much more humane. These horses live in families. There are stallions, mares and youngsters and sometimes the stallions and mares have been together for over a decade and they have real bonds and they are families and to rip them apart, to rip the families apart and stick them in holding facilities is the most insanely cruel thing that can be done to these horses.
Right now, there are — yes go ahead.
CARLSON: I’m sorry. I mean of all the things going on in this country that need fixing, is there some reason we need to bother the wild horses in the first place? If they’re on federal — you know, we have vast reserves of Federal land. We do have a lot of that. Why are we hassling the wild horses? Do you know?
WALKER: Because the livestock industry has a huge, huge amount of power and money and they want all the horses gone. They want the horses removed from public lands. They don’t want to share. And even though right now, we have livestock grazing on 155 million acres and wild horses are only on 27 million acres. They want them all gone.
And so this is why this whole cycle has been set up, and there are currently 1,200 horses at Canyon City, Colorado that were rounded up last year that the public has not even been able to see or adopt even though we have been trying really hard. The excuse has been COVID.
But if you want horses to find good homes, you would want to make them available to people.
CARLSON: Yes, you would.
WALKER: And I’m just horrified that this plan is a continuation of the same old same old thing that the Bureau of Land Management is doing, which is rounding up and warehousing these horses. It is not right. It’s not good for the horses. It’s not good for the American people who love wild horses.
CARLSON: Of course. I mean, it just seems —
WALKER: I’ve spent hundreds of hours each year with them. And they are — it is tremendous. It’s wonderful to be able to spend time with them.
CARLSON: I believe you. I think it’s okay to have wild horses on public land. It sounds like a good thing to me,
Carol, I appreciate you coming on tonight. Thank you. I think most people weren’t even aware that was happening.
WALKER: Thank you.
CARLSON: Thank you.
So one of the greatest tragedies in the lifetime of any living American is the opioid epidemic, which has killed more people than most of the wars we fought in over the centuries. How did this happen?
Well, companies like McKinsey made it happen, and certain specific companies made billions because it happened. No one has covered this more carefully than investigative reporter Gerald Posner. He joins us next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: So many Americans, many of them young people have died from drug ODs in recent years that has changed the demographics of certain parts of the country and completely changed the economy. How did this happen? Where did the opioid crisis come from?
Well a man who has written the definitive history of it is a well-known investigative reporter and author called Gerald Posner. He has written a new book showing how exactly the Sackler family, the F.D.A., greedy physicians, and McKinsey made this epidemic possible. We had a long conversation with him recently for a new episode of “Tucker Carlson Today.”
Here is part of it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GERALD POSNER, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: So one of the sorriest parts of this story, on the drug industry in general, but the sorry part in particular on opioids is the F.D.A., and it’s not that they are complicit in terms of sitting there and taking a bundle of money over the table, under the table and saying, okay, we’re going to do this. They just weren’t very effective regulators, and that comes from the very time they approved OxyContin.
So for instance, Purdue went to them and said, we’d like a couple of things on the label. We’d like on the label that the odds of addiction are very rare because this is a time release formula and we believe that these studies show that there’s something to that.
The F.D.A. had no studies. There was no proof of that. Purdue had done no studies of that, but the F.D.A. put that on the label.
CARLSON: They had done no studies?
POSNER: They had done — because they had no long term studies of whether a time release formula that really would mean less addiction down the road.
And then there was one big like road bump, so, okay, road bump, 2007, Purdue had to plead guilty to felony misbranding. Misrepresenting the drug is not addictive enough and too safe and everything else.
$600 million fines, $34 million paid by the top three executives. And if we spoke the week after that, I would have said to you it is over. That’s it.
It doesn’t matter if they are Frank Luntz or they have McKinsey or whoever else. They’re not going to sell big numbers anymore. And boy, was I — I have been wrong because it’s from 2008 after they plead guilty, after this compliance agreement, after the Department of Justice that is supposed to watch them, they have their biggest sales from 2008 on.
They bring in McKinsey the great, you know, firm, to say okay, Frank Luntz is good, but we need the big guys here. We need McKinsey. And McKinsey tells them how to turbocharge sales in 2013, when sales are down $100 million.
And every year, they’re taking out $800 million in the family, $900 million, a billion. In 2015, they make the “Forbes” wealthiest families list and “Forbes” calls them the Oxy Clan when they came on to the “Forbes.”
CARLSON: What did McKinsey tell them?
POSNER: McKinsey told them — this is fantastic — you need to increase the sales representatives who are going out, the detail team, those who are selling the drugs directly the doctors convincing them do it by 20 percent.
Make them make more visits and don’t have them waste their time on the low prescribing doctors because that’s not really worth it. Go just for the high prescribe.
CARLSON: So the pill mills.
POSNER: Yes, go to the ones who are sending out a lot —
CARLSON: I think a lot of people who first read about this story 20 years ago said to themselves, well, that’s really sad. People are dying of drug abuse in their hand, you know, addicts OD, and they’re addicts, and like your sympathy for an addict is limited because they’re an addict and they are reviled.
My mind was changed when I read the numbers, the numbers of pills coming into certain zip codes, particularly in Appalachian, in Kentucky and West Virginia and parts of Ohio were so high that it didn’t seem to me that any honest and decent pharma executive could read these in the monthly report and think that was okay.
POSNER: Yes, it is impossible. You know, you can’t get away with it. They knew there was heavy concentrations. They never reported any of this to the F.D.A. They never reported anything back to the D.E.A. They just said, they put on their blinders and said, let’s pocket the money.
There’s a lot of responsibility by the way to go around on the opioid crisis, not just Purdue. It’s not just the Sacklers, it is the F.D.A., it is the lax F.D.A. It’s the middle distributors, it is greedy doctors, it is doctors running pill mills. There’s no question. It is pharmacists who are willing to cut the rolls and look the other way to fill a prescription that shouldn’t be done.
So you know, the Sacklers will take the brunt of the blame because they are the owners of this star drug that caused so much devastation left in its wake. But there’s plenty of blame to go around with.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: That conversation went on for nearly an hour. Again, it’s one of the great tragedies, maybe the great tragedy of the age, striking how ignored it often is, but not on the show.
Anyway, that’s the newest episode of “Tucker Carlson Today.” You can watch it anytime. It’s on FOX Nation.
Well, as the schools go completely crazy and teach racial division as a central part of the curriculum, very few elected officials have pushed back. The Lieutenant Governor of Idaho has pushed back, not the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, she joins us next to explain why.
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CARLSON: Bitter hard edge race politics are everywhere, in schools at the moment. In some places, antiracism has taken over curriculums. Very few elected officials even acknowledge this is happening. One is trying to end it.
That official is the Lieutenant Governor of Idaho, not the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, Janice McGeachin. She has assembled a task force to fight the indoctrination we are seeing.
She is running for Governor of her state. She joins us tonight.
I’m really glad you came on tonight. Thank you so much. First, let me just ask you, it’s a little confusing since you are the Lieutenant Governor of Idaho. Why isn’t the Governor doing this?
LT. GOV. JANICE MCGEACHIN (R-ID): Well, I am a constitutional officer and we all have our duties. When I see — I am learning about this and I’m seeing from students, there is a tunnel of oppression at the Boise State University, a big city coffee got chased off the campus, and big donors at BSU are coming to me and telling me this is a problem.
And so, as a duly elected official, I don’t sit around and wait for action.
I take action.
CARLSON: Well, Amen.
MCGEACHIN: And so I formed this task force committee and we are set. You would think that a red state like Idaho would be safe from this, but this is a theory, an indoctrination of our young people that is threatening the very fabric of our conservative American values, and since I started up this task force, I have been attacked by media, their attorneys and education union come after me. But they are coming after all of us and we are not safe.
They may think that they are going to intimidate me to back down and not really understand what’s happening in our state, but they don’t know me very well because I’m not going to be backing down. I’m going to make sure that we protect our kids in Idaho from this theology.
CARLSON: Yet, it is theology. And if you can’t keep Idaho free of explicit racism in schools, then I guess all is lost at that point.
I mean, big companies have funded a lot of this stuff. They traditionally have given to Republican candidates. You are a Republican candidate. Have you heard from corporate donors on this question? Are they onboard or no?
MCGEACHIN: I have not heard that yet, but we are just getting started, and really, what we are trying to do is understand what this is. We had our first meeting last week. This is what I found the way the left operates.
They use these nebulous terms so that we don’t really understand what it is that they are talking about. Is this American imperialism? Is this critical theory? Social justice agenda? Critical race theory?
What this is — critical race theory is a religion of secularism and guilt which is an attempt to undermine and supplant our American values with fear and suspicion, and so whatever they want to attempt to label it as, we are going to get to the bottom of that and make sure that our laws are sure to protect and make sure that this doesn’t happen in Idaho, we are going to do whatever we need to do and be proactive here in the State of Idaho to protect our kids and to protect all of us as Americans and Idahoans to be what President Trump did so well and that is protect America, protect Idaho first.
We are looking forward, and like I said, I’m not going to be backing down.
CARLSON: Well, good for you. All of us are created equal by God. Nobody is responsible for the sins of his ancestors. Collective punishment is immoral. Those are American values. Anyone who is against them, I think should be taken on.
I’m glad that you are doing that. Thank you very much. Good luck.
MCGEACHIN: Absolutely. Thank you, Tucker.
CARLSON: So just before we go, you can now watch full episodes of FOX primetime, this show, Sean, and Laura on FOX Nation. We will be online the morning after they air. It is a new development and we think it is a good one.
We will be back tomorrow, of course, 8:00 p.m. Sean Hannity right now.
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