Kevin McCarthy gave Tucker Carlson the January 6 footage. Carlson went big with his lies
“It was something like what I had seen in the movies,” Caroline Edwards, a United States Capitol police officer, told the Jan. 6 panel on national over-the-air television. ” I could not believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground, they were bleeding. They were vomiting. … I saw friends with blood on their faces. I slipped into people’s blood. Edwards herself suffered a concussion.
But Carlson found pictures to put on this voiceover“They were neat and gentle. They weren’t insurgents, they were tourists. Images from inside the Capitol subvert the story you’ve heard about January 6th. Protesters line up in neat little lines. They give each other visits outside the speaker’s office. They are taking happy selfies and they are smiling. They’re not destroying the Capitol, they obviously worship the Capitol. They are there because they believe the election was stolen from them. They believe in the system.
Visits outside the speaker’s office? Was it before or after they burst into the office? Before Bigo Barnett, with a stun gun hidden in his pantsput his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk and left her a note calling her a bitch?
“They’re here because they believe the election was stolen from them” – but they’re just there for a nice little sightseeing tour, not for TO DO something about their belief that the election was stolen? At least 1,000 people were arrested and 500 pleaded guilty for their participation in the insurrection. Two leaders of the Oathkeepers have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy and three others were found guilty of charges including conspiracy to obstruct official process, obstruction of official process, conspiracy to prevent officers from carrying out their duties and civil disorder.
Carlson then spent some time arguing that Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon shaman, was a peaceful visitor who was given a personal tour of the Capitol by several police officers. “To this day, there is a dispute over how Chansley entered the Capitol building,” Carlson said. The reality is different.
Even if you don’t know the door was breached less than 40 seconds earlier, you can see people entering through a window in this image. This is a hint that this is not a standard tourist visit. Other images show Chansley outside the Capitol near the front of a crowd break through police barriers.
As I said, even by Carlson’s standards, this is an elaborate and brazen lie.
Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell responded directly to Carlson’s report with photos of his injuries:
The family of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died in the Capitol attack, issued a scathing statement. “Carlson’s ‘truth’ is to choose images that support his delusional views that the January 6 insurrection was peaceful,” they wrote. In doing so, he “downplays the horrific situation facing the USCP and the DC Metro Police, who were incredibly outnumbered and literally fighting for their very lives.”
Later in the statement, they ask, “What will it take to silence the lies of people like Carlson? What will it take to convince people that the January 6 uprising was real, very violent, and that the event was orchestrated by a man just as corrupt and evil as Vladamir Putin?
But Carlson isn’t just using the footage to argue that the attack on the Capitol wasn’t a violent attack, but was a sightseeing tour of people worshiping the Capitol. He uses it for revisiting the lies about the 2020 election having been robbed – the argument is that these people weren’t violent, but they had every right to be.
“The protesters were angry. They thought the election they just voted in had been conducted unfairly,” Carlson said. “They were right. In retrospect, it is clear that the 2020 election was a serious betrayal of American democracy. Given the facts that have since emerged in this election, no honest person can deny that.”
This is, of course, false. The Trump campaign and its allies have filed fraud and theft complaints in court dozens of times. Since then, Republicans in several states have combed through ballots for evidence of theft and repeatedly failed to find it. There are no facts that would cause an honest person to question the validity and integrity of the 2020 presidential election. Carlson is working hard to rally the Fox News audience for the next coup attempt. of state by portraying it as innocent patriotism. And he was activated in this by McCarthy who gave him these images before any other news agency, so that Carlson could feed his viewers lies that they would then cling to when more images appeared.
Meanwhile, Tucker should understand this:
Here are some other reminders of what really happened on January 6, 2021:
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What do Americans really think about the problems? They turn out to be a surprisingly liberal bunch, as Rachael Russell of Navigator Research tells us in this week’s episode of Downvoting. Russell explains how Navigator conducts in-depth research to fill the gaps in policy debates with hard data instead of expert speculation. The challenge for Democrats is that many voters say they hold progressive beliefs but still pull the lever for Republicans. This imbalance, however, presents an opportunity — Democrats simply need to seize it.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap the first ballot in Chicago’s mayoral race, which saw a gradual apocalypse averted; the resolution of the longstanding uncertainty over the presidency of the Pennsylvania State House that saw Joanna McClinton go down in history; Representative Elissa Slotkin’s entry into the Michigan Senate open race, making her the first high-profile candidate to run; and the conservatives’ inexplicable decision to go dark on the airwaves for a full week following last week’s primary in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
