Tucker: What really happened on Jan 6
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host shows how the media uses history as a tool to distort the truth
In March 1971, a bomb went off in the U.S. Capitol building. There was no mystery about who did it. A Marxist group called the Weather Underground took responsibility for it, even before the explosions. The Weathermen weren’t ashamed of what they did. They planned to overthrow the U.S. government, and they wanted everyone to know it. Yet even at the time, many Americans weren’t aware of this. The media immediately began telling a very different story about what happened. The Washington Post, for example, explained that the radical left wasn’t actually to blame for the Capitol bombings. Instead the culprit was something far more general, something called quote, "the easy contagion of extremism in a time of dark frustrations and deep disillusionment." (Whatever that means. It probably means that there was a Republican president at the time.)
The actual bombers remained welcome in polite society. Years later, one of them became a quote, "distinguished professor" at a supposedly prestigious American university. Even now, fifty years after the fact, the whitewash continues. "Politico" just ran a long piece telling us that the real villain in the 1971 terrorist attack on the Capitol was Richard Nixon, who was not there. According to Politico, the bombing, quote, "supercharged Nixon's paranoia" and led to Watergate. The story ends this way: "Fifty years on, it seems remarkable how fast the 1971 attack faded from collective memory."
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Oh, but is it remarkable? Maybe not so remarkable. Leftists commit violence and the media covers for them? That’s something most of us are highly familiar with. It’s been happening for a very long time. To this day, there are a lot of Americans who think a right-winger killed JFK. Of course, the gunman was a man so committed to communism that he defected to the Soviet Union. But the media told the public it was a conservative, so many believed them. The point here, the thing you should remember, is the first draft of history is very often a lie. That’s not an accident. Partisans understand that history is a tool they can use to accumulate power. So they lie about something to suit their ends, they keep lying, and before long their lies are recorded as truth. They’re on Wikipedia, and your kids believe them. We’ve watched that happen all this year in real-time. We’re living through distorted history as we watch the events of January 6 described by everyone. Here’s how the media described that day:
TARA SETMEYER, CNN: That day will be another day that lives in infamy in history, similar to Pearl Harbor and 9/11
CHUCK SCHUMER: We can now add January 6th, 2021 to that very short list of dates in American history that will live forever in infamy.
BIDEN: The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
ANDERSON COOPER: 150 days since the worst single act of political violence since the Civil War.
CHRIS HAYES: The worst attack on American democracy since the Civil War SCHUMER: The greatest attempt at insurrection since the Civil War.
STEVE SCHMIDT: The 1/6 attacks are likely to kill a lot more Americans than were killed on the 9/11 attacks.
MATTHEW DOWD: Though there was less loss of life on January 6th, January 6th was worse than 9/11.
For the record, we really try our hardest not to put liars, people we know who lie for a living, on television, because we are responsible. Other channels do it every day.
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Because we are literal, let’s go through the evidence: only one person was killed on Jan. 6, and that person was an unarmed female protestor, shot in the neck without warming by a Capitol Hill police officer who happens to have a documented history of extreme recklessness. The protestors, meanwhile, killed no one. Yet they’re telling you those protesters were worse than the imperial Japanese army that attacked Pearl Harbor, killed thousands of Americans and led to the Second World War, the biggest war in history. They’re also worse than al Qaeda. As a talking point that seems a little — how do you say? — over top. Actually kind of insane. But no. It’s apt. Everybody argued that what we saw on Jan. 6 was exactly like 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War. Including a guy who writes popular histories for airport bookstores – he assured us that, historically, those are entirely valid comparisons. Here he is on NBC:
BESCHLOSS: Think of the 6th of January. If those terrorists who committed that attack on our Capitol had been a little bit faster, they could have and probably would have executed the vice president, executed the speaker of the House, executed other members and leaders of Congress.
They probably would have, therefore, they were as bad as people who did. You look at that, and say ‘that guy’s stupid,’ and that’s fair, by the way. But then you look at 15 other guys just like him saying exactly the same thing, and you have to ask yourself, why are they all saying the exact same thing, maybe there’s a purpose here.
And that might lead you to ask what actually happened, and how can we find out? How can we make up our minds for ourselves? It’s clearly a significant day in American history. It’s being used to change the country. So maybe we should get to the actual facts of that day, what are they?
Well, it turns out, the Biden administration didn't want to tell us what they were. They refused to release thousands of hours of surveillance footage from within the Capitol on January 6. Why wouldn’t they want us to see that? Well, we’re not sure. But we know they really didn’t want us to see it. In fact, they went to court to keep the footage under seal. In one court document, the Justice Department argued that releasing the camera footage from January 6 would "compromise the security of the United States Capitol and those who work there." The footage might "create a visual pathway which other bad actors could use in planning their breach point and pathway for future attacks."
No word if ISIS-K was involved in those plans, or even if ISIS-K, in fact, exists. But that’s not the point. The point is they can’t let you see the video because it’s just too dangerous to national security. Keep in mind, the Capitol is a public building, which technically speaking, you own. You’ve probably been inside, because until the other day, you were allowed to, because it’s your country, or was.
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So, the idea that you’re not allowed to see the inside of the Capitol is insane. The idea that the public has a clear interest in knowing what happened that day is real. Footage we have seen up to this point -- shot by journalists and citizens -- contradicted the official storyline. The Chewbacca guy, for instance, was wandering around in the Senate chamber, looking more like a confused street performer than an insurrectionist:
CHEWBACCA GUY: Heeyy, "F*** A, man, glad to see you guys, you guys are f*** patriots.
OFFICER: You good, sir? You need medical attention?
RIOTER 2: I’m good, thank you, I got shot in the face with some kind of plastic bullet.
OFFICER: Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?
RIOTER 2: We will, I’ve been making sure they ain’t disrespecting the place.
OFFICER: O.K., I just want to let you guys know—this is, like, the sacredest place.
CHEWBACCA GUY: I know, I know.
So if you look at the guy in the Viking horns, the Chewbacca guy, you may reach the obvious conclusion maybe Psilocybin mushrooms aren’t good for you. And that’s fair. But no honest person could look at that video and decide America is under attack from terrorists. So then you have to ask, is that what the rest of the so-called insurrection looked like? Now we answer that question. A federal judge just rejected the Biden administration's strenuous attempt to hide some of the surveillance footage from January 6.
The footage that was just released, and obtained by Buzzfeed, covers 15 minutes on January 6 -- from 2:25 p.m. to 2:40 p.m eastern time. Those were key moments in the so-called insurrection.
When you see images from a surveillance camera positioned at the entrance to the Senate wing of the capitol, you don’t see people hiding bombs, or using bayonets or firing weapons, trying to take over the country, an insurrection. You see people walking around taking pictures. They don’t look like terrorists, they look like tourists, and all of them, by the way, are Americans. The rest of the footage, including shots from surveillance cameras outside the crypt at the capitol, is similar. You can look up all of this footage online right now.
And you should. Because you'll notice that contrary to what the DOJ – we’re going to have to start putting air quotes around that - claimed, none of the footage shows a secret route into the capitol. Oh, that ISIS-K could use. So why did they keep it secret? Here's one theory. You can compare the footage that was released with what Democrats showed us during the impeachment hearings earlier this year.
Surveillance footage shows a squad of people, dressed in all-black, systematically entering the capitol and kicking open one of the exterior doors on the Senate side. They appear to be well-trained and coordinated. They’re not high on hallucinogenic mushrooms. The question is, who are they? And why don’t we know their names? And why aren’t they dressed like any of the other people in the footage that's just been released?
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Remember, we were attacked for saying this, but we have already been vindicated for this. We still don't know how many federal agents were involved in the events that day, but we have reason to believe from court documents that it's a significant number. And here’s one clue: at a recent rally in Washington, the feds managed to arrest one of their own undercover agents. How many undercover agents. There were so many feds at the event, that they lost track of each other, and arrested one of them. So we ask again: how many federal agents were there on Jan. 6? Why can’t we know?
What is clear is that, once again, this footage reveals that the first draft of history was a lie. An intentional distortion. A mirage created to control you. It was the work of a specific political party, it was the work of the Democratic party.
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So it turns out, the vast majority of people inside the Capitol on January 6 were peaceful. They were not insurrectionists. They shouldn’t have been there, they weren’t trying to overthrow the government, that’s a total crock. And with that in mind, some of the other lies about January 6 start to make more sense. Remember this?
ANA CABRERA, CNN: Officer Brian Sicknick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher in the hours-long attack.
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC: They beat a capitol police officer to death with a fire extinguisher.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: Officer Brian Sicknick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher after the fight.
CRAIG MELVIN, MSNBC: He died at the age of 42 after he was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher.
So here's a rule of thumb going forward if you ever watch television again or read the newspaper: When they are absolutely insistent that you believe something, when they keep beating you over the head with the same talking point again and again, beware. There’s a reason they’re saying that. When all of them are using exactly the same line, maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe it’s coordinated. Maybe they’re lying. In this case, they were lying. Brian Sicknick was not murdered – there’s no evidence of that at all, the medical examiner said he died of a stroke. So, the reason they told you that is they wanted to establish a storyline before all the facts were in.
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That's a common theme for virtually everything that happens in the news right now. Something happens, you’re not exactly sure what the outline is, you don’t know all the facts, nobody does, and all of a sudden, they hang a story on it that helps them politically, and they ram it down your throat day after day. It used to be called propaganda. Now it’s so ubiquitous, I don’t know what to call it. Remember the lies you heard again and again about the McCloskeys, who were White supremacists, or the Covington kids, who were also White supremacists. Remember how they claimed George Floyd was choked to death, even though an autopsy showed he had a fatal level of fentanyl in his system and zero signs of suffocation. That’s what it said, we’re not making it up. What, medical reports don’t matter anymore? That’s true. And remember what they said about the laptop showing that Hunter Biden was selling access to this father for years, but no it wasn't real:
FRANK FIGLIUZZI, MSNBC: disinformation that he knows to be fabricated and supplied by a foreign intelligence service and despite the warning, he’s still doing it.
TIFFANY CROSS, MSNBC: You have said this entire thing is so obviously a Russian plot.
JOHN AVLON, CNN: It’s sort of a crazy quilt that has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. That said it wasn’t for lack of trying.
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC: Rudy basically functioning as a Russian asset by pushing Russian disinformation.
BRIAN STELTER, CNN: CNN reported on Friday that U.S. authorities are seeing if those e-mails we just talked about, are connected to an ongoing Russian disinformation effort. Huh.
These people are so shameless. They know they’re being used by liars and the Democratic party and the so-called intel community and they just mouth the words anyway. They say whatever they’re told to say. And then, of course, the tech community gets involved and shuts down all conversation about it. Facebook and Twitter censored the New York Post for this reporting the truth. Joe Biden went on stage at a presidential debate and repeated the lie.
BIDEN: We are in a situation where we have foreign countries trying to interfere in the outcome of our election. His own national security adviser told him that what is happening with his buddy, Rudy Giuliani, he's being used as a Russian pawn. He's being fed information that is Russian. Information that is not true.
They all knew it was true at the time. They knew within hours of the first New York Post story that really was the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Everybody knew it. Everybody. Especially Joe Biden. His texts and emails were all over the laptop. Of course he knew they were real. He wrote them.
But, the media lied on his behalf, and Biden got elected because they covered for him. And now that he is President, they can admit it is, in fact, all true. Too late, it’s true.
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Politico finally got around to confirming that every bit of the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop was absolutely accurate. It wasn’t Russian disinformation, it was totally real. When are they going to admit there was no insurrection? Never.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the September 23, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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