“The Biden administration’s response to the invasion of Ukraine is the single-most damaging thing any American president has ever done to this country and to the world,” said Tucker Carlson on Friday night. “Not to Putin — to us.”
It’s not just that, though. Tucker is putting that at the coup de grace on years of destruction, the killing blow after some 20 years of a thousand paper cuts and hundreds of body blows to our economy, societal structures and institutions, and the very concepts of American freedom, dignity, restraint, inventiveness, entrepreneurialism, logic, creativity, liberty, morality, and common sense.
“You wonder if looking backward many years from right now, historians will notice the remarkable coincidence in timing. Have you noticed?” he asks at the beginning of this long but devastating and frankly terrifying monologue. “At exactly the moment when the emergency powers they awarded to themselves to fight COVID started to wane, our leaders began pushing for conflict with Russia, and then, on the basis of that conflict, they assumed historic war powers. Without even pausing, the Biden administration declared total economic war on a sovereign country.”
Yes, we’ve noticed. The left seized power through an “any means necessary” collusion in 2020, and they won’t give up one scintilla of it. They simply transition the rationale.
And it’s worse than that even, it’s a massive collusion.
“For the past two years, you have watched these companies, above all, define who you, as an American, must hate. Depending upon their directive of the day, our citizens dutifully change their social media avatars from BLM signs, to mask-up slogans, to now Ukrainian flags. Each is a crisis and each new crisis is carefully stage-managed from Silicon Valley at the direction of the White House,” said Carlson. “How does the human brain compete with this? How does it understand it? Well, it doesn’t. Clarity and perspective become impossible. In the hysteria, even the recent past just evaporates.”
And it’s not new:
In the months after the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve assumed emergency powers to respond to the financial collapse. Now, if you’re noticing a theme here, the people in charge giving themselves emergency powers in the face of a crisis they created, you may be on to something. But in any case, after 2008, the Fed dropped interest rates to near-zero and then began printing money. This was supposed to save our economy, and maybe it would have saved the economy if it had ended at some point, but it did not end. It went on to the present day. That’s nearly 14 years and in the process, what was designed to save our economy destroyed our economy.
Several times over the years, wiser heads at the Fed talked about dropping the emergency measures and reintroducing reality into the American economy, reintroducing market forces. Remember those? But each time they contemplated this, Wall Street revolted in very public ways. Wage growth and the productive economy had stalled, but the market for private jets was booming. So, asset inflation became the basis of wealth for many people at the top end. Buy things, then sell them for more. Make nothing.
Now, no society can continue like that for very long because it’s not inherently productive. It’s a shell game, but ours did for more than 14 years, and in the process, this country became more lopsided economically than it’s ever been. Fewer people owning more of everything. The Fed was fully aware of this. They’re not stupid. They knew they were causing these trends and that most of these trends were dangerous and bad for America, but the truth is, nobody could stop it.
Fed governors understood that markets would tank if they tried to pull back. So, it was really a classic Ponzi. It was criminal mismanagement of our economy, but nobody could stop doing it for fear the whole thing would collapse, and now we’re at the end stage. The Fed is out of tricks. The problem with inflation — and some economists want limited inflation at certain periods, some people in Davos have been calling for it for years — but the problem with inflation levels like this is there is no simple way to pull them back.
And oh yeah, gas prices?
Jen Psaki said, it’s about Vladimir Putin. It’s Vladimir Putin’s fault that you’re paying more for gas. Now, the truth is, Vladimir Putin did invade Ukraine. That’s true. That’s bad, but that’s not why you can’t afford to fill your tank.
It was the White House, and we should say the Congress’ reaction to the invasion, that is roiling our economy. That’s true. So among many other things, the White House just banned Russian oil imports, for example. Oil prices immediately rose. That’s what happens when you shake up a market like that. Americans immediately suffered. We were told, many people told us, it’s worth it because this is a moral victory against Putin, and some people took solace in this, but you have to wonder, how exactly is this a moral victory against Putin? Think about it for a minute.
Russia is a major oil producer. Jen Psaki said that in her interminable video a moment ago. That would mean that higher oil prices help Putin. They make Putin, and the Saudis, and the Venezuelans, and Iran much, much richer. Why? Because Russia can still sell its oil in global markets because the world has not joined our boycott. What does this tell you? It tells you that the loser in this policy is not Vladimir Putin. He’s the winner. It’s the United States, and it’s not just oil.
Thanks to the Biden administration’s mismanagement, commodities across the board are up dramatically — potash, fertilizers, wheat — huge. Nickel went up 250 percent in two days. Who’s going to pay for all this? You are. This is the biggest tax increase of your life, and, by the way, it could very easily get worse. Why? Because oil is traded in U.S. dollars. Ever hear the term petrodollars?
Why would the rest of the world continue to trade oil in U.S. dollars, a fact that greatly benefits us, when there’s uncertainty imposed by political forces on oil markets? There would be a huge incentive to trade oil in another currency. Maybe the Chinese currency? Maybe the euro? Maybe crypto? Who knows? But there will be new and competing markets in which oil is traded in something other than U.S. dollars, and that’s a massive loss for us.
And the consequences are dire.
Here’s the bigger truth: Our global financial systems benefit us. That may not be fair, but it’s true, and they’re the basis of our wealth. So, if you destroy them in an effort to get Putin, who are you really destroying? You’re destroying the United States, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. When you attack and destabilize the global financial systems, to restate, you are attacking and destabilizing the United States, not Putin.
You can’t see this right now, because there’s so much hysteria being ginned up by the media, particularly on social media, but when that hysteria lifts, when the cloud finally evaporates, it will be obvious that the Biden administration’s response to the invasion of Ukraine is the single-most damaging thing any American president has ever done to this country and to the world — not to Putin — to us and to a lot of small countries that didn’t deserve it.
It’s hard to see that now. All you’re seeing are Ukrainian flag emojis on Twitter, but someday we will assess this moment with clear heads, and when we do, we will be horrified.
What a way to start a Saturday. But true no matter how depressing it is.