Tucker Carlson has always downplayed the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. After all, those are his people, and many of them are now rotting away in jail. Last month, new Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, possibly giving into the extremist wing of his party, gave him a present that would allow him to more easily bend the truth to his liking: He gifted him with 40,000 hours of security footage from that day. Surely a lot of that is pretty boring. And surely Tucker would take that raw footage to bolster his own ridiculous argument. On Monday night, that’s exactly what he did.
Tucker Carlson shows never before seen footage from Jan 6: “It does prove beyond doubt the Democrats in Congress assisted by Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney lied about what happened that day.” pic.twitter.com/B0ncxybc3t
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) March 7, 2023
The Fox News titan devoted a chunk of his latest episode to rewriting history. Instead of blood-curdling footage of officers being assaulted by an uncontrollable mass of violent Trump supporters, he showed the parts where they just walked around inside a building they were not supposed to be in. They weren’t insurrectionists, he said, but mere “sightseers.”
“The protestors were angry. They believed the election they had just voted in had been unfairly conducted. They were right,” Carlson said, repeating the same nonsense that helped kickstart this mess. “In retrospect, it is clear the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy. Given the facts that have since emerged about that election, no honest person can deny it.”
He then showed dull footage that was presumably meant to erase all the harrowing footage that’s been shown on the regular over the last two years. If you don’t show that footage and only show the parts where people were walking, guess what? It seems less violent, if only by omission.
“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” Carlson said of his edited montage. “Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that Jan. 6 was an insurrection. In fact, it demolishes that claim. And that’s exactly why the Democratic Party and its allies in the media prevented you from seeing it. By controlling the images you are allowed to view from Jan. 6, they controlled how the public understood that day. They could lie about what happened and you would never know the difference.”
QAnon Shaman? Now just a peaceful guy who got along with the cops who escorted him around. Carlson also wrote off the ones who destroyed things and wounded officers and tried to locate Nancy Pelosi and AOC as a couple of bad eggs.
“The overwhelming majority weren’t [violent],” Carlson said. “They were peaceful. They were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers. Footage from inside the Capitol overturns the story you’ve heard about Jan. 6. Protesters queue up a neat little lines. They give each other tours outside the speaker’s office. They take cheerful selfies and they smile. They’re not destroying Capitol. They obviously revere the Capitol. They’re there because they believe the election was stolen from them. They believe in the system.”
This was bound to happen, and surely Carlson’s base, like those who watch discredited Dinesh D’Souza movies, will buy it, forgetting that there’s scores of footage that proves the Capitol insurgency was anything but peaceful. Perhaps, though, some higher-up at the network will pull him aside and ask that he please not peddle more voter fraud nonsense, at least not while they’re underground a possibly all-destrroying lawsuit.
(Via Mediaite)