Three Cheers for Tucker Carlson - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Three Cheers for Tucker Carlson
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Three cheers for Tucker Carlson. 

Speaker Kevin McCarthy made the decision to release the 40,000 hours of Jan. 6 video from inside the Capitol to Tucker. And to his everlasting credit, and that of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, Tucker ran with it.

And Washington elites — Democrats, some Republicans, and the media — went berserk. They were utterly panicked. Which in its own way tells you everything you need to know.

My American Spectator colleague David Catron got to the heart of exactly why there are all these squeals of horror about releasing video that should have been released long ago. David wrote: 

What is actually at risk, of course, is the carefully crafted Democratic narrative about what really happened at the Capitol on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021. They have invested an enormous amount of taxpayer money and political capital in an attempt to convince the public that it was an insurrection perpetrated by MAGA extremists who have taken over the GOP and are likely to launch another attack on “our democracy” in the future.

Bingo. 

As if purposefully illustrating David’s point, a hysterical Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor to demand that Fox News censor Tucker and remove his show from the air. Schumer also said this in his letter: 

And by handpicking Tucker Carlson, Speaker McCarthy laid bare that this sham is simply about pandering to MAGA election deniers, not the truth. Tucker Carlson has no fidelity to the truth or facts and has used his platform to promote the Big Lie, distort reality, and espouse bogus conspiracy theories about January 6. If the past is any indication, Tucker Carlson will select only clips that he can use to twist the facts to sow doubt of what happened on January 6 and feed into the propaganda he’s already put on Fox News’ air, which based on recent reports he may not even believe himself.

Bunk. What complete bunk.

Tucker was back on his show after that and answered Schumer by saying this: 

Chuck Schumer went on the Senate floor today to explode and to say that showing that video, evidence of wrongdoing by the federal government, including the security forces, the police department that Nancy Pelosi personally controlled, letting the public see any of that is a threat to democracy.

Tucker also made this point:

One of the hallmarks of people who are telling the truth, in case you were wondering how to tell the difference, is that people who are telling the truth are calm. You don’t wave their hands around and make wild accusations. They don’t need to do that. It’s enough to say what they know and if honest people turn out to be wrong about something they have claimed, they’ll admit it. They don’t double down on false. They made a mistake and that’s okay. It’s not like they’re claiming to be God. 

Liars behave differently. Liars are touchy, sometimes to the point of hysteria. They’re hiding something. That’s the whole point of lying and they’re worried you’re going to find out what it is. Liars are fragile because over time, lying makes you weak and afraid and has the same effect on countries by the way. 

We’re living through one of those clarifying moments. Actually, we’re thankful for it, where we’re learning exactly who the liars are. On Monday, we showed you unreleased videotape from January 6. It proved, that tape proved, that three of the most important claims our leaders have made about that day were untrue. Their claims were lies. We were not shocked to discover that. We knew there was a reason that congressional leaders had been hiding the tape and that reporters in Washington weren’t demanding to see it. They were lying to us obviously. That’s why you hide things.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

The fact here is that this footage should have been released long ago by the Jan. 6 Committee. In fact, over there in a Breitbart exclusive, Speaker McCarthy now says he is also going to release the 40,000-plus hours of footage to the public at large. 

But the full footage was withheld by the Jan. 6 Committee for the simplest of reasons. The committee was corrupt from start to finish. Stacked 100 percent with Trump haters, it had but one objective — and finding the truth was not that objective. It was getting Trump. There was no manipulation of the video footage that was too little, no lie too big for the members of that disgraceful committee to peddle.

If you haven’t seen the videos Tucker has released, you should look them up. Notably, the colorful protestor made famous — infamous — by the media is one Jacob Chansley, a Navy veteran. Chansley was dressed like some sort of shaman, shirtless with a headdress bearing two horns, his face painted red, white, and blue. He was put out there in the media as an apostle of violence at the Capitol. He was charged with “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.” For which he is serving a four-year prison term. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 18: Free Jacob Chansley)

The reality, as vividly illustrated in the released videos, is that Chansley did nothing more than wander around the Capitol accompanied by Capitol Hill police officers — as many as nine at one point — who made no attempt to stop him. He not only was decidedly not violent, he offered a prayer of thanks for the Capitol Police.

Not only do these tapes reveal Chansley did nothing violent, worse, Tucker reveals they were not given to his lawyer for use in his defense, a decided miscarriage of justice. A quite deliberate obstruction of justice.

For which someone should be prosecuted. My suggestion for prosecution: the Jan. 6 Committee.

The attacks on Tucker were also incoming from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). Jeffries circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter containing this melodramatic nonsense: “MAGA Republicans in the House have provided tens of thousands of hours of sensitive Capitol security footage to a FOX News personality who regularly peddles in conspiracy theories and Pro-Putin rhetoric.”

Yeah. Right.

Let’s be clear. Was there some violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6? Yes. It was a decidedly small riot. And those who perpetrated the violence should be punished. But what Schumer, Jeffries, and their allies in the media don’t want you to know is that the vast majority of protestors were completely peaceful — and the Tucker video shows them wandering the Capitol in respect of where they were. 

But Schumer didn’t want the American people to see the reality of what happened on Jan. 6. Tucker was wrecking the Schumer/Democrat/media narrative. So Schumer wanted Tucker Carlson shut down. Censored.

“You don’t often see the Senate majority leader openly call for censorship on the floor of the Senate as if that was totally normal and didn’t contradict the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment,” Tucker said. He went on to call out Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Mitt Romney of Utah for siding with Schumer. Unreal. Republican senators deliberately siding with Schumer’s disgusting lie and demanding taxpayer-paid evidence be withheld to perpetrate a lie.

Tucker said of these so-called Republicans: 

From this, we learn two things: One, you’re getting close to what they really care about. And you have to ask yourself why? Why is it so important that they would degrade themselves by telling such obvious lies and calling for censorship? Why? What are they trying to protect? That might be worth exploring and we plan to. And the second thing we learned from this is that they’re on the same side. The Senate majority leader joins the Senate minority leader. Thom Tillis, Mitt Romney. They’re all on the same side!

And let me add a personal note. I was not at the Capitol on Jan. 6. But I had a front-row seat at the rally that took place on the White House Ellipse before that. The rally where I heard President Trump say this:  “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

When that rally ended, I went back to my hotel room to do some television appearances from my room and watched everything unfold on TV.

To be crystal clear, there is no excuse for violence. It should never be ignored — except it was ignored back there in the summer of 2020 when the media looked at those over 574 riots over George Floyd and said that they were “mostly peaceful.”  

Really? Really?

As noted by Fox News, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, “a professional association comprised of local law enforcement heads from the 69 largest police agencies in the United States and nine in Canada” reported that more than 2,000 — say again 2,000 — law enforcement officers were injured during those riots. And the congressional investigation of those attacks on police officers by the Nancy Pelosi Democrats? Nowhere.

There is no excuse to use Capitol security videos to completely misrepresent an actual event that was far, far from the so-called insurrection Democrats and the media want you to believe.

In fact, it was crystal clear to me that day as I looked around from my front-row rally seat that there were easily 100,000 people there that day in Washington. The people around me were, yes, dancing to rock and roll music. They were laughing, shaking hands with others. There was not the slightest indication of any violence. They were protesting peacefully. Say again, just as requested by President Trump, they were protesting peacefully and patriotically, well in the tradition of American protests.

But if you listened to the so-called Jan. 6 Committee, you never heard any of this. To be blunt: The members of this committee should be investigated if not prosecuted for the incredible abuse of power that was the conduct of the committee and its members. Why didn’t they show the rest of the footage that Tucker is showing? Why didn’t they call witnesses who had a different view than all the Trump-hating members of that committee had?

There is an answer. That answer is that the Jan. 6 Committee was a put-up job from start to finish. It had one purpose and one purpose only, and it wasn’t finding the truth. It was to, at a minimum, so smear Donald Trump that he would never be able to run for president again. And at a maximum, they wanted to arrange for Trump to be indicted. They were corrupt from start to finish.

Let’s be clear. What Tucker Carlson has done here by releasing the tapes Speaker McCarthy gave him is an enormous public service. It not only reveals the truth of what was going on on Jan. 6, it shows in videotaped detail what has been deliberately withheld from the American people by Washington elites who made it their mission in life to lie relentlessly, all in their obsessive quest to bring down Donald Trump and increase their own power.

Thanks to Tucker, the American people now know what the real game was.

It wasn’t simply not good. The withholding of this footage was the real insurrection. It was the deliberate withholding of public, taxpayer-paid information for the sole purpose of seeking power in a decidedly anti-constitutional fashion.

And the fact that Tucker Carlson has stood up against a tidal wave of bitter, panicked attacks deserves three cheers — if not more.

READ MORE:

Jan. 6 Hearings Fail to Make an Impression

More Americans Want BLM Riots Investigated Than January 6

The Jan. 6 ‘Criminal Referrals’ Against Trump Are Political Bunk

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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