A senior US politician admitted to Tucker Carlson that members of congress and other elected officials are being blackmailed by the intelligence agencies, the former Fox News host told Joe Rogan during a wideranging podcast.
Carlson revealed during the three-hour-plus episode that not only are people like him afraid of being framed for child sex crimes if they criticise the spy agencies, but that even legislators are frightened of going against them.
After calling former CIA boss and Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a “criminal” for allegedly plotting the assassination of Julian Assange, Carlson said: “People don’t say that because they’re worried about being punished.
“They’re worried about someone putting kiddie porn on their computer. Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. I’m not guessing at that. They’ve told me that – including people on the intel committee, including people who run the intel committee.
“The people whose job is it to oversee and keep in line these enormous secretive agencies whose budgets we can’t even know, their ‘black budgets’. They’re the parents, the agencies are the children. They’re afraid of the agencies. That’s not compatible with democracy.
“Whenever you have unelected people who are not accountable to anyone making the biggest decision, you don’t have a democracy. You have something else, another system. I would call it a tyranny or whatever you want to call it. It’s not a democracy.”
Carlson went on to say that while he doesn’t have evidence that specific lawmakers are being compromised or blackmailed, he knows they all have “things to hide”, such as alcoholism or sexual perversions, and “don’t want to be exposed”.
He then relayed a recent conversation he had with a senior elected official in his own kitchen.
“I was going crazy, I was so mad about the warrantless spying, the funding for these insane wars, and said to the guy, who serves in one of the legislative bodies. I was like, ‘All these people are controlled. They’ve all got weird s*x lives, and all these things they’re hiding, and they’re being blackmailed by the intel agencies’.
“And he said, and I’m quoting, ‘I know’.”
A day after the podcast aired the US Senate – including 30 Republican senators – voted to reauthorise a controversial warrantless spying bill that allows the government to intercept and store calls, texts and emails from Americans communicating with foreign nationals.
The bill was then signed into law by Joe Biden, extending the surveillance program for another two years.
Later in the conversation Carlson again unleashed on the state of democracy in the United States, saying “the government is not acting on behalf of the population, so it’s inherently illegitimate, because its only legitimacy derives from the citizenry”.
“The only reason the government can do things that it does – kill people, collect money by force – all the powers that is has come from one place and that’s the consent of the governed. That’s the only legitimacy they have.”
Carlson also claimed his phones were hacked by a spy agency who then leaked the contents to the New York Times, which he described as a “vessel” for the intelligence services, and opened up on the role of the FBI in taking down Richard Nixon.
