Tucker Carlson: Mainstream media is turning on Joe Biden

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Tucker: Media cannot deny the Biden calamity they created

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host examines why Biden appears to be losing the left-wing media.

For Joe Biden the past few months amounted to the greatest political disaster of his life. In his case that’s not a small place to be. This is a man with three failed presidential campaigns on his resume, but this year has been different. We don’t mean to overstate it, but you can pick your humiliating ashes and sackcloth world-historic defeat, Stalingrad, Corregidor, Gallipoli and that is pretty much where Joe Biden is right now politically. 

Polls show him losing astounding levels of support from virtually every group of Americans who voted for him just a year ago. That would include Hispanics, moderate Democrats, African-Americans, and by big double digits, independents. At this point the White House is down to just two core constituencies: Anxious upper-income women with multiple college degrees and baron personal lives, and members of the national news media. And even that might be overstating Biden’s support given that there is such dramatic overlap between those two groups. Essentially they are the same people. Now, because it can always get worse, Biden appears to be losing even the media. This is an ominous development. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if this trend continues, it is the end of the Biden presidency. 

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The media are the only reason Joe Biden is president and the first place. Biden didn’t campaign for the job, he didn’t hold rallies or give speeches or tell the public what he might do if elected. No, for nearly a year Joe Biden stayed home hiding in terror from infectious voters. Instead, he let news organizations make his case for him, which they did. The media hid Biden’s faults, they attacked and censored his critics. In general, they gave no hint at all that you might be electing a senile mannequin with a lifelong history of sleazy behavior. Voters had no clue, they didn’t know who Joe Biden actually was. And yet suddenly, news organizations have decided to tell them. It’s pretty amazing to watch it. 

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN: President Joe Biden has had a very tough week with setbacks for his agenda. COVID complications and the Supreme Court blocking his vaccine mandate.

CHUCK TODD, NBC: One year in Mr. Biden has the second-lowest approval rating ever measured in the White House. And it has never been less popular nationally.

MARGARET BRENNAN, CBS: 2022 is not exactly off to a good start for the Biden administration. 

JOHN KING, CNN: The country is frustrated, his party is frustrated, we are two weeks into a midterm election year, a few days away from a one-year anniversary, and it is very dark for him right now. 

ERIN BURNETT, CNN: Now he’s in the midst of what famous children's book writer called "a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad" time.

A very tough week of setbacks, the country is frustrated, that is CNN’s assessment. If it sounds mild to you, you could consider the source. CNN criticizing a sitting Democratic president? That’s like the College of Cardinals attacking the pope. It’s a violation of ecclesiastical authority. You never see it. And when it happens it means something. MSNBC went even further than that. One of the contributors decided to tell the channel's viewers something they had never heard before. Joe Biden is old. Really, really old. Possibly too old to govern a nation of 335 million people.

DONNY DEUTSCH, MSNBC:  Your audience is not going to be happy with what I have to say. I don’t think he’s come across as an inspirational figure. I could give a litany of things he accomplished, and obviously there are things that have not gone well. But there is something else different. How many people do you talk to and they say, ‘he seems old.’ And I don’t mean that as an ageist thing. It really started with Afghanistan where he just didn’t seem to have his hand firmly on the wheel. I think a lot of this has to do with the messenger versus the messages itself. He doesn’t feel in charge.

Wait a second. You are telling us that Joe Biden doesn’t "seem to have his hand firmly on the wheel." Really? You sure we're talking about the same president here. Wasn’t this the guy not so long ago was challenging strangers to push up contests at town halls. He single-handedly rescued Nelson Mandela from the hell of Robben Island. This is the man who faced down Corn Pop with a chain at a public swimming pool. Now you are saying that man, that chiseled monument to decisive masculinity may be losing his grip? 

Joe Biden spoke about Democrats voting legislation in Georgia.

Yep, that is exactly what they are saying. And they seem almost bashfully apologetic as they say it. They had no idea Joe Biden was a lumbering, desiccated husk. No idea at all. They never saw Biden call anyone a dog-faced pony soldier. They didn’t notice him sniffing anybody’s hair or staring blankly into the middle of the distance like a lobotomy patient. They never saw it. They are as shocked as you are. CNN’s resident Nobel Prize winner came to the awful conclusion that maybe Joe Biden isn’t doing an amazing job as president.

DON LEMON: President Biden left Washington tonight to spend the weekend at home in Delaware. He probably couldn’t wait to get out of town after one of the worst weeks of his year-old presidency. A series of setbacks from voting rights, the Supreme Court blocking his vaccine mandate for large businesses, and soaring inflation driving up prices for consumers. And today we saw the news that retail sales last month were awful. Plus omicron is still causing havoc, with staffing shortages and empty shelves, and some say Democrats are upset with the White House over testing shortages. I could go on. It’s a bad week for the president. Is there any other way to cut it?

Joe Biden is never at the White House and he is right about that, but it’s possible CNN missed the larger point. Biden isn’t fleeing Washington because he’s upset about political defeats, Biden is being dragged into isolation by advisors who are terrified he will get COVID. They want him out of the city as quickly as possible. They know exactly how well masks and vaccines work. They’re not betting on Dr. Fauci’s guidance. The point is CNN is running away from Joe Biden. Even Don Lemon can see where this is going, he may be stupid, but his animal instincts are fully intact. Don Lemon could recognize a sinking ship when he sees one and he’s decided to disembark as swiftly as he can. 

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Make for the lifeboats - CNN anchors first. Maybe if people like Don Lemon repeatedly make disappointed noises about Je Biden, no one will remember how they sounded a year ago and hold them responsible for this disaster. But we will, we remember. We saved the tape. Don Lemon wept with joy over Joe Biden’s election like Jesus had just returned to make gym memberships free and forgive everybody student loans.

CHRIS CUOMO: How are you feeling?

DON LEMON: I almost can’t talk right now because of the emotion. … Everyone is welcome under this tent. We don’t care who you are. We don’t care if you voted for us or not. You are all part of this American experiment. I was so overwhelmed to hear that. I don’t care what people think of me if they think I'm biased or not. I don’t care. I’m very emotional. So when you ask me how I’m feeling right now, I’m sorry, that is all I can tell you. This is how I feel right now. I’m so happy to have this platform to be able to do this. I may not have it after this, but I really don’t care. I am so happy.

We don’t care if you voted for "us," not Joe Biden, for "us." Meaning Joe Biden’s friends and coconspirators over at CNN. "I really don’t care, I’m so happy." That is the tape. There you have it. If this were a trial, that would be the pivotal evidence. The glove fits, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. You cannot acquit. The media foisted this Biden calamity on the United States, they got him elected, then they lied and distracted the population as he and the marionette operators who controlled him wrecked a lot of this country. That happened and it’s too late now to deny responsibility. These people are fully implicated in what they did. Lots of them are. Not just Don Lemon. 

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This member of Congress from Silicon Valley, one of the smarter members, decided that actually, maybe Big Tech shouldn’t have censored legitimate stories, truthful stories, about Hunter Biden’s laptop after all. Maybe that was a mistake.

RO KHANNA: I am not for having either the government or tech companies ultimately being the arbiter of truth, I’m for making sure we don’t have speech that incites violence, but I’m very wary of censorship. In the book I write about how I thought it was a mistake for Twitter to take down some of the stuff about Hunter Biden or Facebook to do that and I think that story was still hogwash. I think Joe Biden was unfairly attacked because of his son, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t belong in the public sphere.

Oh. You are not for censorship? Thanks for that, congressman. But where were you when it mattered? Say, last October right before the election when people were trying to figure out who to vote for. You were staying dead silent like the rest of them. You were letting it happen. You were allowing democracy to corrode and die because of the time he thought it was worth it. Donald Trump was just too scary. Trump was an emergency so we had to suspend the constitution to make this into an unfree country. We had no choice. 

But now that Biden is in office some of these people are having second thoughts. But why now? What is going on here and why is everyone suddenly saying the same thing at once. We can answer the second part of that question with absolute certainty. Everyone in the Democratic Party sounds exactly alike because messaged discipline is what they do, it’s who they are. No one in the party thinks independently. That is not allowed. Everybody in the group must say the very same thing in concert with everybody else in the group all the time. Period. It's like a North Korean singing troop. Deviations are punished. Think for yourself, even for a second, and you are denounced as a conspiracy theorist who thinks horse dewormer is medicine. We could give you a million examples of this. Our producer, Tom Fox, the genius who finds our tape every night the show often since he is the most repetitive job in television because everybody on every channel sounds exactly the same all the time. 

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN: Lies that would bring us to one of America’s darkest days. 

MSNBC REPORTER: …became one of the darkest days in American political history. 

DON LEMON, CNN: The very next day was one of the darkest day in our history. 

CNN REPORTER: one of the most dramatic and dark days in American history. 

CBS REPORTER: One of the darkest days in US history. 

YAMICHE ALCINDOR, MSNBC: This was one of the darkest days in American history and we expect the president to say just that.

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All these very same people are simultaneously trashing the president they got elected and have defended through everything for a year. Why? We are not alleging a potential conspiracy here. We don't take horse dewormers. We’re not saying there was a secret conference call between Jeff Zucker and Joy Reid and the staff of The Atlantic magazine. Who would even want to endorse something like that? More likely it’s a conspiracy of instinct. For all the talk you hear of diversity, there is precisely zero diversity in our national media. People may have different skin tones or different sexual interests, but it’s not relevant. They are all from such backgrounds with such similar beliefs and values and life experiences that their gut reactions to everything have aligned into perfect synchronicity. Like menstruating teenagers at summer camp, they speak as one, because on the deepest level they’re indistinguishable from each other. 

Still, you wonder: There’s got to be some political point to all this? No one at CNN has going to undermine the long-term prospects of the Democratic Party, at least not intentionally. If they snatch the walker from Joe Biden’s hands, and that is exactly what they’re doing, who did they think is going to take over when he falls? 

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the January 17, 2022, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."