“Last night millions of Americans tuned into one of the most shameful hours we have ever seen on cable television. With contempt for the facts, disregard of the risks and knowing full well he was lying, lying to his audience, Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran a lengthy segment last night arguing the January 6th Capitol Attack was not a violent insurrection. By diving deep into the waters of conspiracy and cherry-picking from thousands of hours of security footage, Mr. Carlson told the bold-faced lie that the Capitol Attack, that we all saw with our own eyes, was not an attack at all.”
—Chuck Schumer
Do you find it strange that a senator is rebuking a journalist on the floor: A move with a distinctly Putinesque flavor to it? I certainly do; isn’t this the very thing that Democrats criticized Trump for—something the Democrats suggested foretold the death of the Republic? Years ago such intimidation would have been decried as McCarthyism, but now the media sits by silently as a colleague suffers calumny on the floor of the Senate: No matter what their political disagreements, journalists of the past would have circled the wagons at such a site. In his harangue, Schumer accuses Tucker of “lying, lying” with artificial rhetorical flourish. He claims Tucker cherry-picked footage without citing a single instance. Most absurdly of all, he claims “We all saw with our own eyes” that it was an attack. Really, did we see the so-called insurrection with our own eyes? Very few people did—And Chuck Schumer most certainly did not. He and his colleagues were evacuated, and almost all of the public only saw segments of footage released on television. To declare that you should believe what you saw when someone is showing you video you were not permitted to see is strange indeed. His line seems calculated to make you think back on what you saw, when the relevant question is what you were allowed to see: It is an expert piece of psychological manipulation worthy of Bernays himself. As for the cherry-picking accusation, how many Confederate flags were at the protest? I can attest that there were many, many more United States flags there than Confederate flags, in fact there were so few that you could count them with the fingers of one hand, but the MSM was certainly careful to make sure you saw the stars and bars without once attempting to interview the men who brought them to the protest---because why would you do that.
Of course, the cherry-picking accusation stands uncorroborated: Schumer never provides any examples. Once you start looking at the video Tucker aired, it is obvious that it was not cherry-picked: He didn’t just show video of some protestors enjoying a moment of tranquility; he showed video of the Q-anon Shaman being escorted through the building and of Brian Sicknick walking about fit as a fiddle. Every piece of video was directly relevant to a part of the Democrat narrative. The fact that the Q-anon Shaman was escorted around the building is incontestable. That Sicknick was walking around uninjured is irrefutable. No, Tucker was not cherry-picking. (On a related not, it seems that Chanley was denied access to exculpatory evidence. The people who prosecuted him are likely guilty of prosecutorial misconduct.)
However, the single most telling evidence is that this footage was never released to the public and that none of these details came to light during the “January 6th Committee Hearings.” What was the purpose of the hearings then? It seems that it was not an impartial investigation into the events of that day. Indeed, the makeup of the committee itself was something of a tell. What does it mean to have two Republicans on your committee who were not even able to win their primaries? What does it mean to have Liz Cheney representing the Republican party in a politically charged investigation? The purpose of the committee was to publicize the propaganda narrative while simultaneously convincing the public that all the relevant material had been made available. (And, of course, to help the Democrats win the midterm, waiting a year and a half before carrying out this most important of investigations and making sure to air it on network television just as the 9-11 committee meetings were---or rather weren’t).
While the media mindlessly repeated talking points that were either fed to them or that all simultaneously emerged from their mediocre minds on cue, Merrick Garland gave a press conference where he stated that "five officers died that day”---an overt lie from a man who graduated at the top of his Harvard law school class and has testified before Congress about the events of January 6th several times. He certainly knows that no officers died that day---rather that four Trump supporters died that day and that one officer died the next day of what the coroner ruled to be natural causes before being, conveniently enough, cremated.
The media coverage of Tucker’s report, the attention it is receiving from government officials, is frankly unprecedented. The reaction of the government and the MSM is itself a form of evidence. Not all is as it seemed: January 6th was a piece of government orchestrated theatre.