A fascism too far (for some)
By 
RINO alert!
A handful of other Senate Republicans on Tuesday pushed back on Carlson’s claim that Jan. 6 was “peaceful chaos,” with Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina blasting those remarks as “bullshit.”
Carlson, the popular but controversial figure on Fox, made those comments to his millions of viewers Monday night as he aired select clips of never-before-seen surveillance footage of the Capitol on Jan. 6 and downplayed the violent insurrection that injured 140 police officers during an hourslong assault.
“I think it’s bullshit,” Tillis told reporters in the Capitol.
“I was here. I was down there and I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up in things,” he added. “But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that … if you were just a tourist you should’ve probably lined up at the visitors’ center and came in on an orderly basis.”
Tillis said Carlson’s depiction was as “inexcusable” and compared it to those who downplayed the fires and “devastation” during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020 following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man.
Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota conservative, said he was in the Capitol on Jan. 6 and firmly rejected Carlson’s portrayal of that day as “some rowdy peaceful protest of Boy Scouts.”
“I think that breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the United States Capitol against the borders of police is a crime. I think particularly when you come into the chambers, when you start opening the members’ desks, when you stand up in their balcony — to somehow put that in the same category as, you know, permitted peaceful protest is just a lie,” Cramer said.
Tucker is a not terribly bright man with (an admittedly justified) utter contempt for the intelligence of his audience, and his “argument” about 1/6 is literally that if there is isolated footage of people not acting violently in the Capitol on 1/6 then there could not have been violence:
It was a toweringly dishonest piece of programming, a shameless exercise in propaganda meant not only to give cover to Trump and other Republicans who fomented the attack on democracy, but to himself and the other Fox News hosts who propagated the former president’s 2020 election lies, even as they clearly knew it was all bullshit. That last part is what makes this especially galling. Fox knows it’s bullshit. Carlson knows it’s bullshit. McCarthy—who pressed Trump to put a stop to the violence before crawling back to Mar-a-Lago seeking the former president’s support—knows it’s bullshit. And yet, unsurprisingly, they are pushing ahead with it. Republicans and the right-wing media have spent more than two years now trying to downplay the insurrection and erase their responsibility for it. This is simply the culmination of that effort.
In airing just a few clips from the 41,000 hours of footage McCarthy gave him, Carlson has also claimed that he is telling a story that Democrats, the January 6 committee, and the media do not want to tell. But that, again, is a flat-out lie: An entire coalition of other outlets have demanded that footage from McCarthy. However, the speaker, despite claiming that the tapes “belong to the American public,” apparently refused, allowing Carlson sole access to the footage.
Nothing in Carlson’s first segment on the Capitol footage comes close to “demolishing” our previous understanding of January 6, which speaks to how pathetic his case to the contrary is. Even some prominent Republican senators, including Thom Tillis and Mike Rounds, slammed Carlson’s reporting. But Carlson also knows that his job isn’t necessarily to convince anyone of anything—it’s to validate those already on his side and to give cover to those responsible. He’s already succeeded on those grounds: The right seized on the report—and Trump, who is in legal jeopardy for his role in the riot, cheered Carlson and McCarthy on, calling members of the January 6 committee were “CRIMINAL FABRICATORS” and claiming that “most others” involved in January 6 are “totally innocent.”
The McCarthy/Tucker whitewash is propaganda so nakedly dishonest and abjectly stupid that only the most credulous moron or cynical partisan hack could even pretend to take it seriously:
Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday joined the right-wing chorus denying that a violent riot took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after Fox News aired cherry-picked footage of the incident provided by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Replying to the communications director of a Freedom Caucus-aligned organization who alleged that members of the House committee investigating the riot had lied, Elon took to his social media platform to write: “Besides misleading the public, they withheld evidence for partisan political reasons that sent people to prison for far more serious crimes than they committed. That is deeply wrong, legally and morally.”
I rest my case.