Surprise Surprise, Tucker Carlson Is Defending Brazil’s Jan. 6 Knockoff Insurrection, With Baseless Claims Of Voter Fraud

On Sunday, a mere two days after the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the event got its first major copycat. Thousands of supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolisanaro, who lost re-election last fall (and then had to go pantsless), stormed the nation’s Congress. It was eerily similar to the events that happened in D.C. in the final weeks of the Donald Trump presidency: battles with police officers, barricades attacked, civilians flooding the inside of the building. (One big difference: There were immediately hundreds of arrests.) The incident met with widespread disdain. But the insurgents had one predictable defender.

“Consider what is happening tonight in Brazil,” thundered Tucker Carlson on Monday night’s edition of his Fox News show. He even parroted some of Bolsonaro’s baseless accusations. “Thanks to what was very clearly a rigged election, a convicted criminal – Lula da Silva – is now the president of the most important country in South America. Millions of people in Brazil understand exactly what happened. They know that their democracy has been hijacked, possibly forever.”

Carlson’s allusions to Lula’s criminal background were, of course, misleading. Lula, who was president from 2003 to 2011, was convicted of corruption. What Carlson left out was that that conviction was later annulled by a high court. Lula has claimed the conviction was politically motivated.

After spreading a conspiracy theory and misleading his audience, Carlson then downplayed the insurgency’s participants, calling them merely “protesters.” He did compare what happened to the U.S. Capitol riot, but only so he could downplay that, too.

“What’s happened in Brazil is likened to Jan. 6,” he continued. “And of course, populist leaders in this country are being blamed for it. ‘Oh, it was Trump and Steve Bannon who did it.’ That’s not true, but even if it were true, it would be just the tail-end of the story. It’d be the result of something that happened before. The obvious question is why are protestors in Brazil so angry?”

Carlson then alleged Lula “has eliminated their most basic civil liberties.” How? He didn’t say.

After his tirade, Carlson spoke with journalist Matthew Tyrmand, who spread his own conspiracy theories. He alleged that amongst the throngs were “many an agent provocateur.” He then recklessly said it “looks like this is turning into a Reichstag fire,” a reference to the 1933 arson at the German parliament that the Nazi leadership exploited to further curtail civil liberties and increase their power.

Recently Carlson admitted that he fumbled his predictions for the threatened “red wave” during last year’s midterms that never happened, but only because liberals made him hate them too much. “That loathing clouded my judgment,” he claimed.

(Via Mediaite)