Tucker Carlson: Big business, Big Tech and the Democrats are fully aligned and ready to crush dissent

Within hours of last week's riot at the U.S. Capitol, we denounced the violence in the clearest possible terms. We did that for one reason: We are totally opposed to political violence and have said so virtually every night for the past six months, since the riots that began on Memorial Day. We meant it then, we mean it now.

Every person who broke the law this past Wednesday should be prosecuted. Vandalize a building, hurt a cop, go to jail. That's our position and always has been. This show is for law and order. Many of those currently in power are not, but believe instead in selective enforcement.

The crackdown we've watched over the past five days amounts to collective punishment. People who had nothing to do with the violence in the U.S. Capitol are being punished for that violence in a way that is repugnant, immoral and anti-American. It should shock our sensibilities. It shocks Alexey Navalny, the Russian dissident who was poisoned last year, apparently by the Putin government. He's watched the recent crackdown in this country by Joe Biden's allies in big business and Big Tech with growing concern and horror. Here's his conclusion:

Even in Russia, they know what's happening here is dangerous and wrong, because it is. Again, you can oppose what happened at the Capitol (and for the 15th time, we oppose it loudly) and still see this development for the terrifying lunacy it is.

But no one is pushing back against it. Instead, the biggest corporations in this country, the ones that control your checking account and your health care, have decided to radically expand the definition of what is now illegal. 

A total of 139 Republicans in the House of Representatives objected to the certification of Joe Biden's victory. They were joined by several Republicans in the Senate who called for an audit of the election results. They did not urge anyone to commit violence. They did not support the people who stormed the Capitol building. For our part, we did not promote their cause on "Tucker Carlson Tonight". On the other hand, we didn't denounce them as insurrectionists because they weren't and they aren't.

Except now they are. Blue Cross Blue Shield, JP Morgan Chase, Marriott, Citigroup, Commerce Bank -- not small companies -- have all cut off donations to Republicans who objected in any way to the election results. Companies like Dow, AT&T, and Morgan Stanley announced today they will do the same. Here's how Citibank's head of global affairs explained this move: "We want you to be assured that we will not support candidates who do not respect the rule of law."

Now, if that sounds like a brand new standard, of course it is. By the way, it does not apply to any Democrat -- e.g. all of them --  who support flagrantly illegal sanctuary cities all over the country.

Forbes magazine, meanwhile, wants to make certain that no one who worked in the Trump administration will ever have a job again 

"Let it be known to the business world," announced Forbes Chief Content Officer Randall Lane. "Hire any of Trump's fellow fabulists ... and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie."

In other words, dare to hire someone from this administration -- that's many thousands of people -- and we will destroy your business. If you want your country to fall apart completely, keep up fascist insanity like that, because it definitely will.

It's almost boring at this point to point out the steaming hypocrisy in all of this, but we can't resist. In May 2017, six months after Donald Trump's election, Nancy Pelosi wrote this on Twitter: "Our election was hijacked. There was no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy and #FollowTheFacts."

A month later, a Bernie Sanders voter tried to murder Congressional Republicans with a rifle at a baseball practice in Arlington, Va. He almost succeeded. Yet none of these same morally aware corporations suspended donations to Sanders or Pelosi. They shouldn't have either, because Pelosi and Sanders didn't pull the trigger. But they didn't even consider it, nor did they issue statements about respecting the rule of law or threaten Pelosi's "fabulists" with never working again in America.

These same companies indeed remained quiet all last summer after Black Lives Matter set fire to the ancient Episcopal church in front of the White House and then drove the president of the United States into an underground bunker with violence. They said nothing when rioters destroyed downtown Minneapolis or when they besieged a federal courthouse in Portland, Ore. or established their own country in downtown Seattle and shot a guy in the middle of it.

Actually, that's not entirely true. They did comment on it in some ways: They approved of it. Citibank created a $1 billion fund for racial equity. Some enterprising progressives established something called the Minnesota Freedom Fund that raised tens of millions of dollars to bail out the violent rioters. Big Tech and Democratic Party politicians, including Kamala Harris, supported that fund. We were against that kind of crap then and we're completely against it now.

But from their perspective, violence and insurrection are not necessarily bad, it's a matter of "situational ethics". Remember that from the 1960s? When our side does it, it's a good thing because the arc of justice is long. But when the other side does it, we unleash the FBI to conduct one of the biggest manhunts in recent history.

But actually, it's worse than that. Something bigger is happening here, something we've never seen in American history. Corporations, which are now more powerful than they have ever been, are colluding with one another and the political class to silence any opposition. Not opposition to some ideal, because they don't have those, but to their rule.

You thought things would calm down again once the election was over, even if you voted against Joe Biden? No chance. That's one campaign promise these people  don't intend to keep. Why? Because calm doesn't serve their purposes. Most normal people in this country would like a placid political environment, but our overlords don't benefit from that because their coalition has nothing in common with one another. They need an enemy to unite them. And so they're going to keep torquing up the pressure.

PELOSI: CAPITOL RIOTERS CHOSE THEIR 'WHITENESS' OVER DEMOCRACY

How much pressure can our society take before it breaks? We may find out. People are going to get hurt if we keep this up. But Nancy Pelosi plans to keep it up. Nancy Pelosi is not calling for unity. She doesn't want unity. Instead, she's leveling the most divisive attack you can make, a racial attack. The real problem with Trump voters, she explained Saturday, is the color of their skin. 

PELOSI: There are people in our country, led by this president ... who have chosen their Whiteness over democracy. 

When Donald Trump said, "Yeah, people should go to the Capitol," we thought that was reckless and we said so, because we want to be Americans and responsible before anything else. Nancy Pelosi just attacked people who oppose her agenda for the color of their skin.

What the hell does that mean? What does talk like that do to our country? What it does is send a very clear message: Anyone who disagrees with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is a Nazi or a White supremacist or just White, which is the same thing. They're not Americans. They don't have human rights. They have no right to speak or to fly or to use banks or to hold jobs.

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Where is this going? We'll tell you: Wherever corporate America wants it to go, because they're effectively in charge. Corporations are now fully aligned with a political party. How much distance is there between the Biden campaign and Google, the most powerful company in the world? Right around none. Publicly held multinationals like Facebook and Twitter and Google can do whatever they want and what they want to do is become partisan actors. They've silenced Donald Trump, and they will silence you if you dare dissent, make no mistake. 

By the way, this is also baldly illegal. The coordination between these companies violates the most basic tenet of antitrust law. It's not even a close call. They are breaking the law, and it doesn't matter if no one in Washington is brave enough to say that out loud. It doesn't make it less true, and that's exactly what they're doing.

Over the weekend, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple set their sights on the social media app Parler and booted them off the Internet and not just them. According to the CEO of Parler, John Matze, "every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, ditched us on the same day."

What did Parler do wrong? We still don't know. Not one person in law enforcement or the media has shown any connection between any of the criminals caught on camera at the Capitol building -- you've seen them time and time again by now -- and Parler

Parler committed no crimes, so why are they gone? Well, conservatives speak to each other on Parler, and that's dangerous. So the left shut Parler down, and they did it in a lot of different ways. But here's the way that you should think about most deeply.

Amazon, in addition to being the biggest retailer in the world, also controls the largest collection of servers in the world. It's called Amazon Web Services. Now, a huge percentage of the Internet flows through Amazon servers, everything from digital Mozart recordings to hardcore pornography to Bible verses to invoices for illegal shipments of fentanyl. In fact, almost everything is hosted on Amazon servers.

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So until this weekend, no one imagined that Jeff Bezos could decide who gets to speak on the Internet. That's too much power for one man, can we agree? We thought the left could do that, but they didn't.

No one thought that Jeff Bezos could silence an entire political movement in an instant simply because he thought they were expressing inconvenient views. But that's exactly what Jeff Bezos did, and Parler went dark.

What's next? You will likely find out soon.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the Jan. 11, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."