Tucker Carlson, traitor
The average finished 2 hour movie comprises about 100,000 feet of film. Perhaps 2 or 3 times that much is actually shot before being edited down to its theatrical release length. Tucker Carlson was given the equivalent of more than 2 billion feet of film, or 41,000 hours of video from the January 6 insurrection.
From that amount of rough footage Carlson could make any movie he wanted. And that movie could tell any story he wanted to tell. Guess what kind of story Tucker Carlson told?
It’s the kind you would expect. Carlson made the horrendous, violent attack on our nation’s Capitol building look like a love-fest that became, perhaps, a bit too boisterous. In other words, he took a page straight out of Dinesh D’Souza’s playbook and he twisted what he saw into something completely the opposite. He told a narrative of relative peace and backed it up with an explanatory voice-over.
What he showed on Fox News Monday and Tuesday nights may go down in history as one of the most cowardly and shameful and treacherous acts of any broadcaster at any time. Carlson deliberately — and with malicious intent to deceive — broadcast a lie calculated to cause millions of Americans to draw a false conclusion about the January 6th insurrection. And he did it in the cynical service of Donald Trump. He did it to poison any potential jury pool that may one day be called upon to try the former president for fomenting an attempted coup d’etat.
And he also did it to rehabilitate the flagging Fox News audience. Many viewers had ditched Fox News for more extreme news sources like OAN and Newsmax, because Fox wasn’t MAGA enough for them any more.
But, you might be saying, didn’t Carlson and Fox News learn their lesson about lying about the insurrection? Aren’t they facing a $1.6 billion lawsuit precisely because of that kind of lying? Yes they are, but they can’t be sued for the kind of lying they’re doing now.
It isn’t about truth, it’s about money. As long as it doesn’t cost the Fox organisation any money they are going to go right on lying as much and as often as they like.
Kevin McCarthy gave Tucker Carlson the footage so he (Carlson) could deceive everyone and create the illusion that the very insurrection that put McCarthy and his colleagues in deadly danger was a mere nothing, a trifle, a group of overly-excited tourists. And since most of Fox News viewers never watch anything else they will never find out otherwise.
Tucker Carlson is an anti-American traitor, and when the history of these times is finally written, I hope he’s portrayed exactly as that. Because if he isn’t then it will mean that the traitors, liars, insurrectionists and hypocrites won in the end. That is why, for us, failure is not an option. We must beat them. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.