Tucker: Capitol 'Insurrectionists' Just Nice Old Folks Wanting To Chat With Representatives

It's getting so you risk getting shot just for dropping by a senator's office.

Yr Wonkette has tried, we really have, not to pay too much attention to Tucker Carlson, who seems to be trying to fill the rightwing white nationalist news hole left behind when the previous occupant of the White House buggered off to Florida. But Jebus Kine, Carlson's monologue last night, marking the three-month anniversary of the January 6 riots, was some fucking dishonest bullshit, even compared to the usual run of Carlsonian lies. "Revisionism" doesn't even seem adequate to describe how Carlson reframed the events of January 6; what he said last night was a wholesale Ministry of Truth distortion of reality in which the perpetrators of the riot are now the innocent victims of a totalitarian Biden administration bent on exercising raw power against them.

And so, like poor blameless Michael Corleone, we keep getting pulled back in, and for that, we'll probably be sorry later. Now just look at this unbelievable bullshit, which some portion of Fox News viewers will nonetheless believe, because they discarded reality long ago. Or else they'll say they believe it, because they lie too.

Carlson started with the sarcasm dialed to eleven and only went up from there, mocking the notion that there were any racists or QAnon people at the Capitol, because those things are just media inventions. You might remember seeing footage of rioters beating cops with flagpoles or trying to crush them in doors, but Carlson hopes to Jedi mind-trick all that nonsense away from you.

Instead, he explains, all we saw on TV that day was "A mob of older people from unfashionable zip codes" who "somehow made it all the way to Washington DC, probably by bus." Just ordinary folks who certainly never made extensive plans about invading the Capitol and taking back America from people who voted wrong, and certainly weren't motivated by racial animus. It was kind of like a tour group, he says, except that for some reason, jackbooted federal thugs killed one of them for no reason at all!

They wandered freely through the Capitol, like it was their building or something. They didn't have guns, but a lot of them had extremely dangerous ideas. They talked about the Constitution, and something called their rights. Some of them made openly seditious claims. They insisted, for example, that the last election wasn't entirely fair.

How did they get into the Capitol? No need to go into any detail on that. Just a bunch of nice senior citizens, many of them in their 20s and 30s and kitted out in full tactical gear, with flex cuffs, some of whom chanted that Mike Pence should be hanged. Which is OK, because the Capitol belongs to Americans, as does the neck of the vice president.

Some of the visitors to the Capitol even played a jolly game of follow-the-leader with a Black police officer , Eugene Goodman (oh no, we're playing the race card now!). But Goodman, that silly, cheated by leading the kindly tourists away from where the Senate was in session, even though they really wanted to meet their elected representatives a whole lot. That wasn't very nice of him.

Then Carlson moved on to the serious business of insisting that there wasn't even any actual violence at the Capitol because you see, we only know the precise cause of death for one person, meaning the others may actually still be alive somewhere, you never know:

By the time thousands of soldiers arrived to restore order, an unarmed woman, an Air Force veteran lay dead. To this day, that woman is the one completely verified casualty of the insurrection, the only person whose death we can say definitively was caused by specific events on January 6th. We know how she died. The funny thing is, you almost never hear that woman's name. Possibly that's because she was not a Democratic member of Congress or even a Joe Biden voter. She was a protester, her name was Ashli Babbitt. She was 35.

We still don't know who shot Ashli Babbitt or why — no one will tell us.

We're going to guess her attempting to climb through a smashed door into a hallway that House members were still using to escape from the building may have had something to do with it, but we only saw a video of that with our own eyes, so we could be brainwashed.

Carlson didn't see fit to mention Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died after a couple of the visitors shared their bear spray with his face , because suggesting any link between the bear spray and his death is pure speculation and media hype. Besides, Fox News taught us long ago that pepper spray is merely "a food product, essentially." And now we want to call people killers simply for sharing some food, in spray form? What's next, rounding up fans of cheese in a can?

All in all, it was a sad day for America, Carlson explains, because it really proved just how out of touch Washington politicians have gotten, because nobody in Congress was even willing to meet with the visitors!

When a group of sad disenfranchised people who have been left out of the modern economy show up at your office, you don't have to listen to their complaints. Not for a second. Why would you? You thought listening to people's complaints was democracy? No, these people threaten democracy.

You could even shoot one of them if you want, and get away with it. Killing people without explaining yourself is an established part of counterinsurgency.

Now that's some gaslighting! It wasn't a riot at all, it was just some constituents — poor folk! please disregard all the ones who flew private planes there and also they were pretty much all upper middle class or plain rich — dropping by their representatives' offices to say hi. To be sure, most office visits don't end up with the offices looking like this, but it's only a bit of scattered paper after all.

Offices trashed after mayhem in the US Capitol building https: //t.co/rlfse0qX0I

— The Sun (@The Sun) 1610065800.0 

Carlson went on to explain that really, the nearly 400 people arrested so far (out of an estimated 800-1,000 who broke into the Capitol) weren't actually breaking any laws , but were victims of a witch hunt intended to scare anyone who dares speak up against Joe Biden. As proof, he presented video of Trump-appointed prosecutor Michael Sherwin saying on "60 Minutes" that his goal had been to charge as many of the rioters as possible prior to Inauguration Day, to deter troublemakers from trying to do a sequel. "We wanted to take out those individuals that, essentially, were thumbing their noses at the public."

Aha! Carlson exclaimed, Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Nobody broke any laws, you see:

Their crime, said the federal prosecutor, was, quote, "thumbing their noses at the public," meaning the Democratic Party. So it wasn't really an insurrection, the problem was they showed disrespect to Joe Biden, and his enforcers like Michael Sherwin, and that can't happen anymore. And that's why Michael Sherwin decided to use "shock and awe": to teach them a nasty lesson, a permanent lesson, about expressing their political opinions in public.

What really impresses us here is that Carlson blithely slides right past the minor detail that Sherwin, a Trump appointee, was explicitly talking about preventing a recurrence of rioting at Biden's inauguration. Clearly, that simply proves what totalitarians Biden and Democrats are: Even before Biden took office, they were able to make the previous administration do their bidding!

(Also, please leave aside the tiny fact that by going on TV, Sherwin may have made actually convicting a lot of the rioters impossible. He's Biden's enforcer, after all!)

In conclusion, Tucker Carlson was even more Tucker Carlson than usual last night, and he'll be on Telescreen again tonight, possibly to tell us why the most virile men must "date" 17-year-olds because some of the Founders certainly did, the end.

[ Media Matters ]

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