What the Tucker Tapes have revealed about January 6

Everybody knows that free speech is protected in America under the First Amendment of the nation’s constitution. It’s quite striking, then, to see the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer demanding that a major television network stop its leading anchor from airing footage he doesn’t like.  

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a primetime cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night,’ said Schumer, referring to Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, who this week began showing new security camera images from the Capitol building on 6 January 2021.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anchor treat the American people and American democracy with such disdain,’ he said. ‘Fox News, Rupert Murdoch: tell Carlson not to run a second segment of lies. I urge Fox News to order Carlson to cease propagating the big lie on his network and to level with their viewers about the truth — the truth behind the efforts to mislead the public. Conduct like theirs is just asking for another January 6 to happen.’

What exactly is so ‘shameful’, to use Schumer’s word, about what Carlson is doing? He’s been given thousands of hours of Capitol surveillance video by the new Republican House Majority Speaker Kevin McCarthy – and he’s using it to show that what happened on 6 January 2021 is not the simple story of a ‘deadly insurrection’ most US politicians and journalists have had us believe.

Lots of very peculiar things happened that day. As the Tucker Tapes reveal, Jacob Chansley, the so-called ‘QAnon Shaman’ – the absurdly dressed man who became the face of January 6th and who was sentenced to more than three years in prison for his part in the riot – was, in fact, escorted around the Capitol by police officers as if they were giving him a tour. The footage also appears to show Officer Brian Sicknick, who reporters and politicians repeatedly claimed was beaten to death with a fire-extinguisher, walking around healthily after he was involved in an altercation with protestors. Sicknick, it turns out, died on January 7 from a stroke, though his family yesterday criticised Carlson for ‘ripping wounds wide open.’

Pundits have been queueing up to echo Schumer in attacking Carlson for being sleazy and dangerous. But Carlson has gone to some lengths to avoid being irresponsible: he ran the footage he’s used past Capitol police and complied with their requests to avoid security risks.

Last night, Carlson further explored the biggest and most mystifying question around January 6^th: how did the Capitol’s security forces, then presided over by Democratic House Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi, fail quite so spectacularly? All sorts of intelligence analysts had warned that January 6, the day the 2020 election result was confirmed in the Senate, was likely to be an occasion of angry protests. Yet the Capitol police were unprepared and some of their behaviour was perplexing. Asking questions about that failure isn’t dangerous. It’s good journalism.

There’ll be plenty more in the coming days, and plenty more backlash against Carlson and Fox. But the upshot so far has been to confirm what most observers already suspected: the Congressional Select Committee on the January 6 attack was a sham. The Committee, which was nominally bi-partisan, was really just a group of politicians on a mission to condemn Trump and brand his supporters as ‘domestic terrorists.’ The people now accusing of Carlson of ‘selectively editing’ the security films for political purposes are themselves clearly guilty of the same crime. They had access to all the same footage and showed nothing that went against the ‘deadly insurrection’ narrative they wanted to push. The videos they did release were little more than stylised propaganda. That was and is truly shameful.