Tucker Carlson And Those Tapes

I haven’t written much about the events of January 6th. Not because I didn’t care. But because we don’t live in an age of nuance.

Sadly, we live in a world of sound bites and snap judgments. Where you either believe the mob at the Capitol that day committed acts as cataclysmic and appalling as Pearl Harbor and September 11th or you’re a Trump-loving-election-denying insurrectionist.

I don’t fall into either category.

Fact is, two things can be true at once.

You can believe that the riots at the Capitol didn’t in any way compare to the attacks of Pearl Harbor or 9-11 and certainly weren’t “the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War,” while also believing that Americans should not interfere with the certification of elections nor should they riot when they don’t like the results of the vote. We don’t live in a banana republic.

I believe Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and I believe part of the reason he lost was because the GOP didn’t engage in the chicanery Democrats did, who took advantage of covid hysteria to hastily change election laws to allow bad practices such as ballot harvesting, drop boxes and massive mail-in voting.

Those were last-minute changes that cast a shadow over the integrity of the election. Covid truly was, in the words of Jane Fonda, “God’s gift to the left.”

Which brings us to the January 6th tapes that Fox’s Tucker Carlson exclusively reviewed and is analyzing this week on his show.

I watched Tucker last night and - like him - I had been bothered by the slick, heavily edited professional film the January 6th Committee showed the nation during their televised hearings.

Their footage was cherry-picked to show an angry, violent mob storming the Capitol, swarming over barricades and battering down the doors. There were hideous scenes that had no place in our country with our history of the orderly transition of power.

Yet everything the committee showed happened.

But in Carlson’s also heavily edited film the Fox host shows scenes of these “rioters” strolling through the halls of the Capitol, obediently staying between velvet ropes. He also has footage of Jacob Chansley, the infamous crazy man in the horns and bare chest, as he was apparently escorted by a phalanx of police down mostly empty corridors. In one scene it appears the police are opening doors for him.

Not the picture Elaine Luria and pals painted when they controlled the narrative.

This man, Chansley, was sentenced to more than three years in prison for obstructing an official proceeding. That’s more than you get for carjacking in DC.

By the way, it appears no one has been convicted of taking part in an insurrection despite the Democrats’ promiscuous use of that inflammatory term.

Look, it’s curious that Speaker Kevin McCarthy has released more than 40,000 hours of never-before-seen video surveillance footage to Carlson exclusively. He’s as hated by the left as Trump is. Nothing he shows will convince Luria’s loyalists that this was anything less than an attempted coup directed by President Trump.

Those tapes belong to the people. Why not make the entire January 6th Film Festival public?

Frankly I don’t want the footage filtered through the left-wing media, which is also itching to get its paws on the tapes and would almost certainly reach the same conclusion as the committee, which was an unbalanced body composed solely of Trump haters.

Broadcast them on C-SPAN and let the American people decide who’s telling the truth and who’s exaggerating.

January 6th was a blemish on American history. An ignoble moment. It was not, however, quite the horror the Democrats painted.

McCarthy promised he’d release the tapes more widely soon. He says he was simply following the lead of the January 6th committee when he released the tapes to a single network before the public got a peek.

Karma is a you-know-what, Democrats.

Release them now, Speaker, then let’s move on.