Mark Steyn Club members can enjoy Mark's content in whatever form they wish - video, audio or text. For more about this episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, visit this page. The transcript of Mark's monologue follows below.
Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. I'm Mark Steyn in for Tucker – but he will be here a little later, because it's our last 0LIVE show of 2020 before tomorrow night's special Bobulinski Special– and I don't know about you but I'm so enjoying 2020 I wish it could go on for another two, three, four months. The salient point about 2020 is that it's Chairman Xi's world, and we just live in it – if you can call it that. There used to be an old expression: He who pays the piper calls the tune. Well, you the American taxpayer continue to pay the piper, but China calls the tune. Here's Dr. Tedros – he's a doctor in the same sense as Dr. Jill Biden – here's Dr. Tedros of the World Health Organization (funded by you) back in January reading the fax straight off the printer from the Chinese Politburo:
TEDROS ADHANOM, DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE WHO: The Chinese government is to be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak.... China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response. And it's not an exaggeration.
Mark: No, it's not an exaggeration. It's a new record. For its quote "outbreak response," China shut down domestic flights out of Wuhan Airport but ramped up the priority boarding for flights to Milan, Barcelona, Vancouver, New York... Within two months the Chinese Communist Party had successfully exported the COVID to almost all two hundred nations and territories on earth. Wow! That is one serious Operation Warp Speed. It's not in North Korea (officially) or Turkmenistan, where back in 2005 the late strongman Turkmenbashi banned lip-synching and slowed the spread, flattened the curve, because the country isn't full of lousy pop stars mouthing badly and expectorating to their ancient hits...
If only we had thought to ban lip-syncing. Instead the entire western world except Sweden decided to drive their economies off the cliff. His Holiness the Infallible Pope Fauci conceded that eliminating your job and shutting down your entire industry might cause some temporary "inconvenience"...
FAUCI: I know it's difficult but we're having a lot of suffering and a lot of death. This is inconvenient from an economic and a personal standpoint, but we just have to do it.
Mark: Among other 2020 novelties, there was no Hollywood, no Broadway, no rock concerts, no live music, but fortunately our beleaguered, overworked exhausted front-line health-care staff made a point of busting out of the ICU to do highly choreographed routines on social media prancing around the hospital corridors...
[Clip of hospital workers dancing]
That's entertainment. It wasn't just hospital workers taking over show business; Governor Andrew Cuomo won an Emmy Award for artistic innovation – the first vaudevillian COVID prop comedy...
CHRIS CUOMO/ANDREW CUOMO NASAL SWAB BIT
Chris Cuomo: Is it true that this was the swab that the nurse was actually using on you and that at first it went into your nose and disappeared so that in scale [holds out giant swab] this was the actual swab that was being used to fit up that double barreled shotgun that you have mounted on the front of your pretty face?
Mark: Ha-ha-ha. In the long-term care facilities of New York, the old folks were ...oh, what's the showbiz term? Corpsing. In the new America, they let rapists and muggers and career criminals out of jail to free up space for hairdressers. Not our rulers' hair stylists of course...
MAYOR LORI LIGHTFOOT (D-IL), CHICAGO: I'm the public face of this city. I'm on national media, and I'm out in the public eye. And, you know, I'm a person who -- I take my personal hygiene very seriously. As I said, I felt like I needed to have a haircut. I'm not able to do that myself and so I got a haircut.
Mark: She needs a haircut because she's out in the public eye holding daily press conferences on why you can't get a haircut. Just as Governor Newsom and California's top public-health experts need to dine on Sabayon of Pearl Tapioca with Island Creek Oysters and Royal Osetra Caviar accompanied by a hen egg custard with a ragout of white truffles from Alba washed down with a bottle or three of Remoissenet Montrachet at 975 bucks a pop to strategize about why it would be dangerous to let you losers go to Taco Bell.
In a world of hypocrites, only one man had the integrity to talk the talk and then walk the walk. He didn't go to fancy-schmancy French restaurants, he didn't go to Nancy Pelosi's salon de coiffure to get a blue rinse for his hair plugs, he just walked the walk straight down to his basement and self-quarantined for nine months until CNN certified his "victory." Every two months, every quarter or so he would emerge from the basement to hold a rally in front of three second-hand Honda Civics and impart words of wisdom...
BIDEN: Play the radio, make sure the television -- excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night
Mark: "Make sure you have the record player on at night" is the secret-code phrase to Chairman Xi to let him know to wire ten per cent for the big guy to the Shanghai branch of the First National Bank of Scranton, Pennsylvania. In another rare emergence from his basement, Joe Biden announced his plan to end the scourge of violence against women: You gotta man up and beat the crap out of it...
BIDEN: No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman in anger, other than in self-defense, and that rarely ever occurs. And so we have to just change the culture, period, and keep punching at it and punching at it and punching at it.
Mark: Yeah, keep punching, punching, punching at that violence against women, slap it around a little, then get it off-guard by stroking its hair and throwing a sucker punch. Joe Biden's Jimmy Cagney and he's shovin' a grapefruit in the face of violence against women...
'cos that's the only language violence against women understands. Like Joe says, baby, keep the record player on all night 'cause he'll be purring "Baby, It's Cold Outside" into your left ear all the way till dawn.
In the most cunning conspiracy of all, presidential candidate and House Intelligence Committee bigshot Eric Swalwell warned us of the dangers of glamorous exotic foreign spies plying their sexual wares:
SWALWELL QUIZZING COMEY ON "HONEY TRAPS"
Yeah but then it turned out Eric Swalwell himself had been penetrated by Chinese intelligence ...which is impressive because he's never shown any sign of being penetrated by any intelligence. Yet a Chinese spy was able to get to Swalwell and play his record player all night long, if you know what I mean, till his poor old needle wore out. Meet the crack Chinese agent dispatched by Chairman Xi. The name's Fang. Fang Fang. You only fang twice.
Congress passed a 5,593-page bill – that's the longest bill since Gavin Newsom and his health-care experts dined at the French Laundry – a 5,593-page COVID Relief bill. It had two paragraphs on COVID relief and the other 5,592-and-a-half pages were giveaways of bazillions of dollars of your money for the quote promotion of democracy... Promotion of democracy where? Michigan? Pennsylvania? Georgia? No. Cambodia, Venezuela, a couple of up-country stans round the back of Waziristan. What the hell did Cambodia ever do to deserve having Yankee imperialists inflicting Pennsylvania-style democracy on it? It should be the other way around. I'll get behind the first candidate to demand the introduction of Afghan-style dyed purple fingers to American elections. Still, you gotta hand it to Congress's gag writers. Giving money for democracy promotion everywhere but America is way more deserving of a Best Comedy Emmy than Andrew Cuomo's nasal swab.
And yet the American people survived, and a grateful populace was happy to give what was left of its money after Sudan and Pakistan were done to erect a statue of the All-Powerful Fauci releasing the American citizen from his shackles temporarily to enjoy a masked Christmas dinner with no more than three persons from a single household...
[Picture of Emancipation Memorial]
Oh, sorry, my mistake – that's Abe Lincoln freeing the slaves, and being removed from public view in Boston. He took a bullet for his country, but the schools have been closed for a year so nobody knows that anymore. President Trump argued that the most pressing issue of the age is Chinese global dominance, but it turns out it's Confederate statues. Everyone's a Confederate general – Lincoln, Washington, the guy who wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner", Kate Smith, Dr. Seuss – so the entirety of American history held a spectacular closing-down sale: Everything's priced to clear. Take down two Confederate generals, and we'll throw in the Washington Redskins. Take five, and grab all the Eskimo Pie you can eat. The Atlanta Braves have given the Tomahawk Chop the chop, presumably because it offends residents of CHOP – the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest breakaway republic in Portland, Oregon, where you can always gather round and roast your chestnuts on a mostly peaceful protest.
A land without history – the end of 2020, and the dawn of Year Zero.
