While the liberal media painstakingly monitor and denote every moment in which President Trump, members of his administration, and supporters at rallies fail to wear a face mask or attend a public gathering, they were noticeably non-hawkish when their Democratic buddies were caught red-handed breaking their own edicts. Such was the case as ABC, CBS, and NBC covered up California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s non-COVID-compliant dinner party earlier this month.
And not only was Newsom in attendance at the party, but some of California’s top health care lobbyists and operatives were too. But instead of covering this let-them-eat-cake moment, ABC was busy suggesting Republicans were going to Hell and NBC was telling viewers to blame Trump supporters for COVID deaths.
Of course, leave it to the Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson to rip into the hypocrisy with his unique brand of panache. Carlson kicked off Wednesday’s opening monologue by suggesting the images of Newsom at the swanky party spoke with the same moment defining energy as “Dorothea Lange’s photographs of migrant farmworkers from the 1930s…”
Carlson laid out the evidence of Newsom’s hypocrisy by talking about the harmful restrictions the Governor was subjecting his constituents too:
Businesses are shuttered, people wear masks even as they eat. Large groups are forbidden to congregate. Thanksgiving itself is on its way to being canceled. It's a tough way to live, but Californians have no choice.
Then there were the facts of Newsom’s ritzy dinner at the disgustingly-named restaurant French Laundry, which was exposed by photographs shared with the local FOX affiliate. “It's a picture of the birthday dinner up in Napa. It turns out it was not held outside, it was held in a private room and not a spacious private room either. All 12 people were packed in tight, shoulder to shoulder, breathing on each other. No social distancing here. Not one of them is wearing a mask,” Carlson explained.
When it came to the lies Newsom and the lobbyist birthday boy tried to feed to Californians, Carlson was on top of ripping into those too (Click “expand”):
It turns out that Newsom was simply celebrating the birthday of a longtime friend of his, a lobbyist actually called Jason Kenny. A spokesperson for Kenny described the night this way, quote, "This was a small, intermittent 12-person dinner held outdoors with family and a few close friends to celebrate a 50th birthday." In other words, no big deal.
For his part, Governor Newsom ensured his suffering subjects, quote: "Our family follows the restaurant health protocols and took safety professions.” So really, ladies and gentlemen, it was nothing. Just a small, intimate dinner held in nature under god's blue skies, just a few close friends staying safe and following the protocols to the letter. As mandated by the state that in fact they run. So relax, people, no one is getting Rona here. That was the story.
“So, if you're wondering why if you live in California you can't have Thanksgiving this year or visit your mother she dies alone in the hospital, it is because of them and people like them,” Carlson declared. “And yet there they were, eating $300 truffle pasta and living with this pandemic thing never even happened.”
And this wasn’t Newsom’s first act of blatant COVID hypocrisy. He was sending his kids to open private schools while he shut down the public school system in the entire state:
Last month, for example, we learned that Gavin Newsom was sending his own children to private school. He made sure they could get in-person classroom education. (…) At the same time, he was sending his own children to class in a real school, the public school districts, which he is in charge of, all over the state of California remain closed because he ordered them closed.
According to Carlson, all of this wasn’t just a normal act of hypocrisy, it was “an act of hostility against the population of the country” because “they despise you, they’re flaunting it.”
He added: “This is how people who don't like you behave. They force you to do one thing, they do another, they get caught, they are not embarrassed and they keep forcing you to do the thing they're not doing. That's an act of hostility. They don't like you.”
The transcript is below, click "expand" to read:
Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight
November 18, 2020
8:00:25 p.m. EasternTUCKER CARLSON: Sometimes a single picture so perfectly crystallizes a moment that you want to hang it in a museum as a testament to history. Dorothea Lange’s photographs of migrant farmworkers from the 1930s were like that. They captured the suffering of the Great Depression more powerfully than any government report ever could. The image of the second flag raising over Iwo Jima was so powerful that we cast it in bronze to commemorate the grit and courage of our Marines in the Second World War. Those images summed up entire periods of American life.
So what sums up ours? What picture tells our story? Well, tonight we've got it for you. Decades from now our descendants will look at this one image and know what it was like to live in America in the year 2020. We’ll show it to you in just a second. But first, some context.
Gavin Newsom is the governor of California, our largest and for a long time are most prosperous state. About 40 million people live in California. So far, two of them under the age of 18 have died of the COVID-19 virus, so naturally Gavin Newsom has shut down the entire state. Businesses are shuttered, people wear masks even as they eat. Large groups are forbidden to congregate. Thanksgiving itself is on its way to being canceled. It's a tough way to live, but Californians have no choice.
This is science, people! And Gavin Newsom is California's epidemiologist in chief. He commands obedience and the serfs obey. With that in mind, the San Francisco Chronicle broker pretty amazing story this week.
Governor Newsom recently attended a birthday dinner up in wine country at the French Laundry, that’s of one of the best and most expensive restaurants in the world. There were 12 people at Newsom’s dinner. And to civilians, that number seemed to be a clear violation of Newsom’s own rules, but as we were told, it really wasn't.
It turns out that Newsom was simply celebrating the birthday of a longtime friend of his, a lobbyist actually called Jason Kenny. A spokesperson for Kenny described the night this way, quote, "This was a small, intermittent 12-person dinner held outdoors with family and a few close friends to celebrate a 50th birthday." In other words, no big deal.
For his part, Governor Newsom ensured his suffering subjects, quote: "Our family follows the restaurant health protocols and took safety professions.” So really, ladies and gentlemen, it was nothing. Just a small, intimate dinner held in nature under god's blue skies, just a few close friends staying safe and following the protocols to the letter. As mandated by the state that in fact they run. So relax, people, no one is getting Rona here. That was the story.
Now photograph. We have the picture thanks to FOX 11 in Los Angeles, one of the rare local stations that still does reporting. It's a picture of the birthday dinner up in Napa. It turns out it was not held outside, it was held in a private room and not a spacious private room either. All 12 people were packed in tight, shoulder to shoulder, breathing on each other. No social distancing here. Not one of them is wearing a mask.
A steam room in central Wuhan could not be more contagious than this dinner. Gavin Newsom’s birthday party was a germ factory and his guests were human petri dishes.
But what a guess list it was. Next to Governor Newsom sat the CEO of the California Medical Association and one over from him, one of the state's top health lobbyists. Together, the two of them represent tens of thousands of physicians, credentialed men of science and women of science in the state of California.
So, if you're wondering why if you live in California you can't have Thanksgiving this year or visit your mother she dies alone in the hospital, it is because of them and people like them. And yet there they were, eating $300 truffle pasta and living with this pandemic thing never even happened. The picture of them doing it known henceforth the history as the French Laundry photograph, is the year 2020 condensed to its essence.
Here you have plutocrats dining with lobbyists, ignoring the very orders they are so self-righteously imposing others, gorging themselves in seclusion as the people they're supposed to be helping with her and die. And then when they are caught, they lie about it. How perfect is that? It's all there, every element. Hypocrisy, greed, selfishness, stupidity. This is our national moment in a single picture. Move over, Dorothea Lange.
So what's Gavin Newsom's explanation for this picture? Well, in the interest of in equal time, and fairness, we’re going to show you now.
GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): I made a bad mistake. Instead of sitting down, I should have stood up and walked back, got in my car and drove back to my house. Instead, I chose to sit there with my wife and a number of other couples that were outside the household. You can quibble about the guidelines, et cetera, et cetera, but the spirit of what I'm preaching all the time was contradicted and I got to own that. So, I want to apologize to you.
CARLSON: Oh, yeah. When I saw it I should have just walked out, got in the car and driven home. Okay, Gavin.
So, you had no idea there would be a dozen people at your own party. You're the governor, but you never saw the guest list. You were totally shocked. That's ridiculous. It's too stupid to be an explanation and we are stupider for pretending to believe it. Why not just tell the truth, which is I don't really totally believe everything I say, at least not enough to let it interfere with dinner. That's the truth. You know it, he knows it. But he's forcing us to play along with an absurd lie.
(…)
CARLSON: So, what is this exactly? It's hypocrisy of course. That word’s not big enough. This is not conventional hypocrisy. This is -- let's stop lying -- an act of hostility against the population of the country. They despise you, they’re flaunting it. This is how people who don't like you behave. They force you to do one thing, they do another, they get caught, they are not embarrassed and they keep forcing you to do the thing they're not doing. That's an act of hostility. They don't like you.
Last month, for example, we learned that Gavin Newsom was sending his own children to private school. He made sure they could get in-person classroom education. And of course he did, there his kids, he loves them. And Newsom knows what we all now know, that children don't learn anything by remote sitting at home on the computer screen. It hurts them. At best it makes them weird. They don't learn a thing.
At the same time, he was sending his own children to class in a real school, the public school districts, which he is in charge of, all over the state of California remain closed because he ordered them closed.
Why did they do that? We never learned. There was no science, he didn't bother to explain it. Schoolchildren don't face a meaningful risk from this virus. When children contract the virus, CDC data show that their survival rate is over 99.99 percent. And that's not a TV term. In this case, it's a scientific term. Literally 99.99 percent.
Teachers and other adults under the age of 70 have between a 99.5 and a 99.9 percent chance of surviving. Again, not estimates, real numbers from the federal government. That's science, but nobody cares about science anymore.
(…)
