October 19, 2021
Tucker marks Colin Powell’s passing by citing the meritocracy America once stood for, and how far we’ve fallen
by Tom Tillison
bizpacreview.com
Fox News host Tucker Carlson marked the surprise death of Gen. Colin Powell to open Monday’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” saying Powell embodied the meritocracy America once stood for.
Powell, 84, died Monday from what was reported as complications of COVID-19, with the so-called experts saying his death highlights the importance of getting vaccinated — he had been fully vaccinated, but had yet to get a vaccine booster. According to various reports. Powell had multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that would have affected his immune system. His chief of staff also said that Powell suffered from Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder.
“General Colin Powell died this morning at the age of 84. What a life that was,” Carlson began. “In his later years, Powell became enmeshed in partisan politics and younger people may remember him for that. But for most of his life, he was much bigger than mere politics.”
“If you’re old enough to recall the first Gulf War, you know that Colin Powell was one of the last public officials that most Americans believed in,” he continued. “Powell’s life, his story, seemed to confirm everything that was good about this country. Powell grew up in the South Bronx, a son of immigrants from Jamaica. In 1958, he received his commission in the U.S. Army. At that time, much of the country was living under Jim Crow laws, but Colin Powell thrived regardless. He served two tours in Vietnam with distinction. He went on to advise presidents, and in the end, he made it all the way to the top of the U.S. military. After he retired, he became secretary of state.”
The Fox News host brushed aside what he said was Powell’s own take that his remarkable career was proof that affirmative action worked.
“Anyone who knew Powell personally can confirm that he was as impressive as any person in the U.S. government and far more than most of them,” Carlson said. “He was legitimately smart, deeply knowledgeable about the world. He was openly patriotic. He was hardly a diversity hire. He was so obviously superior to a lot of the people around him. When the supposedly brilliant Harvard-educated neocons in the Bush administration assured us that the occupation of Iraq would be quick and simple. Colin Powell knew better. He may have gone to a lowly city college, but he was smarter and wiser than they were. Unlike other people in Washington, Colin Powell got where he was on merit, and that was inspiring to watch. Powell’s success meant that our system worked. Our system was meritocratic at the time. It elevated the best. Thirty years ago, our meritocracy was the country’s unifying principle. All Americans were proud of it. Colin Powell embodied it.”
All of which explains why the left views meritocracy, a system where progress is based on ability and talent, as a bad thing, as seen from Princeton University Press: “In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.”
“A lot has changed in the years since, and that’s one of the reasons that Colin Powell’s death tonight is so poignant,” Carlson observed.
As for the cause of death, Carlson said “many thousands of vaccinated Americans have died of COVID,” citing former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, who he said announced on Monday that about 40 percent of all recent COVID deaths in the state of Maryland are among those who have had both shots.
“So what does that tell you exactly? Well, it tells you you’ve been lied to. Vaccines may be highly useful for some people, but across the population, they do not solve COVID,” Carlson explained. “That’s not speculation. It is an observable fact. People who have been fully vaccinated can still get the virus. They can still transmit the virus to others, and they can still die from COVID. Colin Powell is hardly the only example of that.”
As for the reason for the deception, Carlson said the answer is simple: “They’re telling us that to divide us from each other to set the country against itself.”
He then turned his attention to President Joe Biden.
“During last year’s presidential campaign, Joe Biden, repeatedly and always with a straight face, told us that every single American who died from COVID died because of Donald Trump’s negligence.” Carlson said. “That’s not an overstatement. Every single one. Just look at the data, Biden said. But there were no data that was false, and yet no public health official contradicted Joe Biden. Now, Biden is telling us that the only reason people are still dying from COVID is because stubborn, mostly working-class Americans won’t submit to his shot.”
“Only the unvaccinated are dying, Biden claims,” he continued. “And yet, at the very same time, Biden tells us the unvaccinated somehow threaten the lives of the vaccinated. It’s not logical. It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not simply divisive. It’s absurd. And still, some percentage of the terrified population believes it.”
Carlson then questioned what that does, over time, to our most cherished relationships with friends and family? To our country?
“It means that at the very deepest level, below the level of law, the level of your own neighborhood, at the level of your own family,” he said. “America has once again become what it was when Colin Powell got his commission in the Army. America has become segregated not between Black and White, but between vaccinated and unvaccinated, clean and unclean.”
The question is, how long will this go on and how long once it ends, will it take for us to recover?” Carlson asked. “That’s impossible to know now, but we do know that it’s a tragedy and it did not happen by accident.”
The Fox News host then cited “a small group of credentialed partisans” who he said did this on purpose — people like Biden, White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC director Rochelle Walensky, who all pushed the narrative that we now have “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
“But that claim is a lie. This is not a pandemic of the unvaccinated. It never was that,” Carlson said. “This is a pandemic of the Chinese government born in a lab in Wuhan and brought here either accidentally or not. That’s the fact of it.”
He would eventually conclude with this observation: “Colin Powell, whatever you think of him, didn’t grow up in a country like this. And you don’t want your children to grow up in one, either.”
http://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/10/19/tucker-marks-colin-powells-passing-by-citing-the-meritocracy-america-once-stood-for-and-how-far-weve-fallen-1150989/
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