Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily eagerly swallowed Tucker Carlson's narrative of a peaceful Capitol riot based on cherry-picked video that he got from Kevin McCarthy, despite the fact that people who actually know about the riot pointed out the cherry-picked editing.When Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell pointed out Carlson's dishonest portrayal of riot events, Peter LaBarbera rushed to attack in a March 7 article:
Conservative reaction is now pouring in after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said it was a "mistake" for Fox News to allow Tucker Carlson to use the newly released Jan. 6 tapes to depict the events that day in a way contrary to the view of Capitol law enforcement.
"It was a mistake in my view for Fox News to depict this in a way that's completely at variance with what our chief law-enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks," McConnell said Tuesday.
McConnell's statement circulated widely on social media and was used by left-leaning media who have slavishly echoed the Democrats' "insurrection" narrative for more than two years to level their own attacks on Fox News and Carlson. Conservatives pushed back against the Kentucky senator and hailed Carlson for exposing the Democrats' J6 "insurrection" claim.
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Missing in McConnell's statement was any mention of Carlson's key findings, especially that the newly exposed footage undercuts the Democrats' and media's mantra that Jan. 6 was a "deadly insurrection" inspired by Trump.
LaBarbera even defended one Republican senator caught running away from the riot he helped provoke:
Curiously, McConnell also failed to defend his fellow Republican colleague in the Senate, Josh Hawley of Missouri, by not mentioning Carlson's revelation that the Democrat-run J6 Committee had used its selective release of Capitol surveillance footage to make Hawley look like a coward.
As Carlson explained on his show Monday night, one of the J6 Committee hearings showed a clip of Hawley running out of the Capitol building, seemingly alone, thus making it appear as if Hawley was fleeing like a frightened chicken from the building. At the time, that potentially doctored clip actually drew derisive laughter from many attending the committee hearing, including reporters, as it purposely humiliated Hawley, one of the few GOP senators who supported Donald Trump's challenge to what Trump said was a "rigged" election.
However, the new footage aired by Carlson, thanks to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opening up the full 41,000 hours of video footage, shows many legislators and their staff running out of the same Capitol exit, amidst the chaos, with Hawley actually one of the last people shown in the video clip to run out of the building.
In other words, even though Carlson's critics are accusing him of "cherry-picking" J6 footage to support his own, allegedly "conspiratorial, undemocratic" narrative, the popular Fox News anchor is actually exposing the cherry-picking done by the Democrats and the now-expired J6 Committee to sustain their overwrought "deadly insurrection" narrative.
LaBarbera omitted the fact that Hawley's fleeing was newsworthy and irrelevant to the "cheery-picking" accusation because he displayed a raised fist in a show of solidarity toward a crowd of Trump supporters shortly before the riot.
WND's columnists bought into Carlson's bogus narrative too, starting with editor Joseph Farah in his April 7 column:
They lied!
That was the conclusion of Tucker Carlson's review of 40,000 hours of the so-called "insurrection" at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was a sham. A not-so-clever ruse. Are you surprised?
The media establishment, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, every Democrat in Congress, Big Tech – they all lied to the American people. It wasn't an "insurrection" after all.
Five cops were not killed; only Ashli Babbitt was murdered by a deranged Capitol policeman. Most of the "protesters" were peaceful, cameras revealed. They were taking pictures, mostly, as they were ushered into the building by the police.
Jacob Chansley, a Navy veteran and the man dubbed as the "QAnon Shaman," never posed a threat. He was escorted, instead, by three to nine policemen. He prayed for them, the tapes revealed, which should make you wonder why he's serving four years in jail now for his role in the kerfuffle.
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One person who became a household name was Officer Brian Sicknick, whom the media alleged was "attacked" by the mob and for days falsely claimed was hit in the head and murdered by Trump supporters with a fire extinguisher. Yet Sicknick was seen on one of the newly released videos, after his supposed murder, walking normally while guiding Trump supporters out of the building as he wore a helmet. He later died of a reported stroke unrelated to Jan. 6 events.
As we've documented, prosecutors pointed out that the Chansley footage ignored that part of the initial breach of the Capitol, repeatedly confronted law enforcement and surrendered only after enough law enforcement arrived to take him down, and that officials agree that what happened to Sicknick during the riot led to his deadly stroke the next day. Also, the police officer who killed Babbitt was not "deranged" -- that would be Babbitt, a domestic terrorist who was part of a violent mob trying to crawl through a broken window inside the Capitol and reasonably posed a threat to law enforcement.
Laura Hollis used her March 9 column to criticize right-wing writer Andy McCarthy for seeking "a happy middle ground between the factions warring over Fox News host Tucker Carlson's access to (and coverage of) 41,000 hours of video footage taken on that day":
McCarthy's criticisms of Democrats are, in essence, "Tsk, tsk – see? We told you guys you should have had a bipartisan committee," and "Democrats' narrative about Jan. 6 has been a bit overwrought."I enjoy reading McCarthy, respect his expertise and generally appreciate his analyses of legal issues. But he's missing the larger point here.
It's not merely that the "mythmaking" of J6 has been used as an excuse to smear half the country as "domestic terrorists," weaponize the Justice Department against irate parents at school board meetings, sic the FBI on pro-lifers praying at abortion clinics and create a new bogeyman – "white Christian nationalism" – as the greatest threat facing the republic.
It's that the J6 manipulation is just one of many instances of Democrats flat-out lying to the American people for political gain.
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The point Andy McCarthy's NRO editorial misses is that the J6 hysteria is not merely unfortunate political hyperbole; it is part of an ongoing scheme to deceive the public and deflect attention away from the behavior of Democrats that legitimately threatens the health, stability and prosperity of our country and its people.
Tucker Carlson is unintimidated by those like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer who object to the release of the J6 video footage to the public, accusing them of spreading "panic" and "fear."
Jack Cashill used his March 15 column to suggest that the Capitol riot should be treated as a sort of indepenence day based on Carlson's cherry-picked footage:
On Jan. 10, 2021, I submitted an article to another publication titled "President Trump Takes a Hit for the Team." The article appeared on Jan. 12 of that year minus only the last sentence.
It read as follows, "If we the people refuse to apologize, refuse to back down, refuse to submit, January 6 may one day be celebrated as a mid-winter 4th of July."
I understood the publisher's prudence. At the time we all labored under the belief that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick had been struck dead by a fire extinguisher-wielding "insurrectionist."
That, of course, proved to be a lie, one of many. As Tucker Carlson showed last week, the helmeted Sicknick was captured on video doing his job a half-hour or so after his alleged murder.
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The Democrats excite themselves by comparing January 6 to Sept. 11, 2001, or even Dec. 7, 1941, but a more apt point of comparison might be July 14, 1789.
On that steamy day, Parisian rioters stormed the Bastille. Although they behaved far worse than the January 6 crowd – they actually killed people – the French subsequently made July 14 their national holiday.
America doesn't need another national holiday in January. What we do need, once the rot is cleared, is a day of truth and reconciliation. And January 6 is as good a day as any.
Given all the falsehoods and conspiracy theories he has promoted over the years, Cashill is the one who could stand to face a little truth and reconciliation.
