Thursday night’s primetime hearing by the House January 6 Committee was little more than a “deranged” spectacle and “show trial,” Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson has suggested.
“This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it,” Carlson said in a segment of his cable news show Thursday night, justifying Fox News’ decision not to cover the event.
Accusing the “ruling class” of seeking to use the hearing to “lecture” Americans, Carlson suggested that the comparatively “forgettably minor” violence at the Capitol in January 2021 has remained at the center of officials’ attention, notwithstanding far bigger problems facing ordinary Americans.
“In the meantime, in the 18th months since January 6, gas prices have doubled. Drug ODs have reached their highest point ever. The US economy is now careening toward a devastating recession at best and scariest and least noted of all, this country has never in its history been closer to a nuclear war,” the host said.
Characterizing the attack on the Capitol as an act of “mob violence” and “vandalism,” but not the deadly “insurrection” described by Democrats and some Republicans, Carlson pointed out that “not a single person in the crowd that day was found to be carrying a firearm,” and that “in fact, the only person who wound up shot to death was a protester.”
The host emphasized that while he was “not defending” and would never defend vandalism, violence, and rioting, 6 January could not be characterized as “an insurrection.”
“But, you know what will get you to insurrection? If you ignore the legitimate concerns of a population, if you brush them aside as if they don’t matter when gas goes to $5 and you say ‘buy an electric car’. When cities become so filthy and so dangerous that you can’t live there, when the economy becomes so distorted that your own children have no hope of getting married and giving you grandchildren, when you don’t care at all about any of that and all you do is talk about yourself, nonstop – you might get an insurrection if you behave like that,” Carlson warned.
The host also accused Democratic-leaning media of spreading propaganda with claims that the riots caused “the deaths of five police officers” (in fact only one Capitol Police officer died of natural causes a day after), and said there were many details about 6 January that remain fuzzy to this day, such as potential agent provocateurs like Ray Epps present among the crowds.
“The January 6 committee will not explain that after a year, millions of dollars and a thousand interviews. They won’t tell us, nor will they tell us how many FBI agents and assets were in the crowd that day and what were they doing there. Why can’t we know that? And why are they still hiding thousands of hours of surveillance footage from within the Capitol? If the point of the committee was to get the truth out there, why can’t we see the tape?” Carlson asked.
The 6 January committee laid out its case against former President Donald Trump in the first of eight planned public hearings on Thursday night, juggling an array of footage, testimony from members of Trump’s inner circle, text messages, guest logs and social media to put forward the argument that the Capitol attack constituted an “attempted coup” and a “premeditated attack” by Trump and his cronies.
The former president dismissed the claims against him ahead of the hearing, accusing “Crazy” Democratic House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi of turning down his offer to deploy 20,000 National Guard troops in Washington, DC beforehand.
“The Unselect Committee didn’t spend one minute studying the reason that people went to Washington, DC, in massive numbers, far greater than the fake news media is willing to report, or that the Unselects are willing to even mention, because January 6th was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our country to Make America Great Again,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social on Thursday.