Count me among those skeptical of the efficacy in Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson’s collaborative effort to rehash and whitewash the Jan. 6 attack.
In his capacity as House speaker, McCarthy obtained about 40,000 hours of unaired surveillance footage during the pro-Trump siege of the Capitol. And to date, he has not released the footage to anyone but Carlson and Fox News.
That last point should be as sure a sign as any that the footage — some of which Carlson aired Monday night — likely isn’t as favorable to conservatives as McCarthy seems to think.
Carlson is effectively a right-wing court jester who exists to entertain and placate a conservative base, no matter what levels of depravity are required. McCarthy, however, is an elected official. And he leads a party of elected officials.
Sure, some of those elected officials serve bases likely to applaud this reopening of the Jan. 6 wound, but many of them represent large swaths of Americans who would rather not downplay one of the most devastating moments in U.S. history.
In allowing a television host to cherry-pick from the footage, McCarthy seems to be assuming that the isolated moments of dormancy Carlson chooses to air will overtake the images of feces-smearing, violent seditionists that have been etched in Americans’ minds. It’s a gamble, to say the least.
After all, what could possibly indicate the GOP’s detachment from reality more than a presumption that Americans reliving Jan. 6 in any fashion would play well for Republicans.
On Tuesday, the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, Thomas Manger, sent a letter to his officers saying the segment on Fox News was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack.”
“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” Manger wrote. “The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”
Manger also…
Read the full article here
