Tucker Carlson used footage from January 6 to rewrite the story

Tucker Carlson has always downplayed the January 6 riot in the Capitol. After all, these are his people, and many of them are now rotting in prison. Last month, new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, potentially giving in to his party’s extremist wing, gave him a gift that would allow him to more easily bend the truth to his liking: he gave him 40,000 hours of security footage a day. Certainly a lot of it is pretty boring. And surely Tucker would take that raw material to back up his own ridiculous argument. On Monday night he did just that.

The Fox News titan dedicated part of his latest episode to rewriting history. Instead of taking gory footage of officers being attacked by an uncontrollable mob of violent Trump supporters, he showed the bits where they were just walking around a building where they weren’t supposed to be. They weren’t insurgents, he said, just “sightseers.”

“The demonstrators were angry. They believed the election they had just voted in was conducted unfairly. They were right,” Carlson said, repeating the same nonsense that helped start this mess. “In retrospect, it is clear that the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy. Given the facts that have since become known about this election, no honest person can deny it.”

Then he showed boring footage, presumably intended to erase all the harrowing footage that had been shown regularly for the past two years. If you don’t show this footage and only show the parts where people walked, you know what? It seems less violent, if only through omission.

“The footage shows no riot or riot,” Carlson said of his edited montage. “Taken as a whole, the videotape does not support the claim that January 6th was a riot. In fact, it refutes that claim. And that’s exactly why the Democratic Party and its allies in the media blocked you from seeing it. By controlling the images you are allowed to see from January 6th, they controlled how the public understood that day. You could lie about what happened and you’d 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 those who wrecked things and wounded officers, trying to track down Nancy Pelosi and AOC as a couple of rotten eggs.

“The overwhelming majority wasn’t [violent]’ said Karlson. “They were peaceful. They were neat and gentle. They weren’t insurgents. They were onlookers. Footage from inside the Capitol turns the story you’ve heard about January 6th on its head. The protesters stand in pretty little lines. They show each other around in front of the speaker’s office. They take happy selfies and smile. They don’t destroy the Capitol. They obviously worship the Capitol. They are there because they believe their election has been stolen from them. They believe in the system.”

It had to happen, and surely Carlson’s base, like those who watch discredited Dinesh D’Souza films, will believe it and forget that there are dozens of footage proving the Capitol riot was anything but peaceful. Perhaps, though, someone up on the network will pull him aside and ask that he please stop peddling any more voter fraud nonsense, at least while they’re underground in a potentially devastating lawsuit.

(Above mediat)