The Problem With Tucker Carlson

Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | March 2, 2023

Kevin McCarthy got the votes he needed to become House Speaker in January by giving the extremist wing of House Republicans pretty much everything they wanted.

In doing so, he empowered the most extreme of these House Republicans, including Representatives Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, James Comer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz, and given them free rein to spend the next two years attacking President Biden, our law enforcement bodies, intelligence agencies, and more.

Some of these extremist Republicans supported former President Trump’s presidential coup attempt. Many are election deniers who want to redefine the January 6 insurrection as simply a protest, undermine the historic work of the House January 6th Committee, elevate conspiracy theories, and continue to foment lack of public trust in our democracy and elections.

One of the “gifts” McCarthy may have given to his party extremists is the exclusive access he has now provided to Fox propogandist Tucker Carlson to more than 40,000 hours of internal video taken at the Capitol on January 6.

Carlson absurdly labeled the vicious mob attack on the Capitol as “a footnote” in history and “forgettably minor.”  He went so far as to call January 6 a “false flag” – designed to look like it was perpetrated by someone other than the group responsible – and that “FBI operatives were organizing the attack.”

Given these and other comments, it will be no surprise if Carlson selectively uses or edits portions of the trove of video to create a disinformation campaign that fits his public narrative that the January 6 insurrection was nothing more than a “forgettable footnote.”

The filings made public recently in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News revealed that Carlson and other Fox News hosts and executives knew that Fox guests were not telling the truth when they claimed the 2020 presidential election was rife with voter fraud, with no evidence to support their claims, and that it was stolen from Trump. Yet, the Fox hosts continued to give Trump’s team, including lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, airtime.

“Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote in a text to a Fox News executive on November 16, 2020.

Then, on his November 19 broadcast, Carlson told his viewers: “What Sidney Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history. Millions of votes stolen in a day, democracy destroyed, the end of our centuries-old system of self-government. … Now, to be perfectly clear, we did not dismiss any of it. ”

Carlson went on to admit that Powell had not provided any evidence to prove her claims despite requests made to her.

But Carlson’s admission that there was no evidence behind Powell’s claims about voter fraud was a “forgettably minor” “footnote,” to use Carlson’s words, in a long monologue that detailed all the claims Powell and Giuliani had been raising.

Carlson never told his viewers what he and other Fox News hosts and executives were saying privately – that the voter fraud claims were lies.

Carlson even texted to a colleague that a Fox News reporter, who had correctly fact-checked false claims Trump had made about Dominion Voting Systems and the vote count, should be fired for “measurably hurting” Fox News’s “stock price.” The reporter removed the fact-check, but later tweeted an almost identical fact-check of Trump’s false claims.

The Dominion Systems filings also reveal that Rupert Murdoch, the owner and man behind the creation of Fox News, knew that repeated lies were being told on his network. Yet, he was unwilling to do anything about it, apparently afraid that it would offend Trump followers who might leave Fox for competitor Newsmax.

Can any reasonable person believe that Tucker Carlson will present an accurate picture of January 6 when he starts showing what will likely be cherry-picked, misleading videos from the tapes McCarthy provided to him?

The election deniers movement did not end with Joe Biden’s election in 2020 or with the defeat of most election deniers running for statewide offices in 2022.

The election deniers, along with the coup participants and Fox propagandists, are moving forward with the aim of minimizing the attempted coup and insurrection and ensuring a Republican victory for President in 2024, regardless of who the voters choose.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.