Am I the Last Sane Person?
January 6 is "Mostly Peaceful" Because That's How the Left Described the George Floyd Riots.
In Atlanta, domestic terrorists attacked police with Molotov cocktails over the weekend. They burned up construction equipment and threw explosives and firebombs at the police. Much of the press dismissed the story as just protestors. ABC News’s Good Morning America was especially dismissive of what happened, calling it just foolishness and ignoring a Southern Poverty Law Center lawyer charged with crimes related to terrorism.
These terrorists, who the press corps calls protestors, have vandalized businesses, firebombed a youth facility, disrupted church services, stalked the wives and children of their targets, booby-trapped a construction site, and attacked and ransacked a fire station after trying to maim and kill the firefighters. One of them also shot a police officer.
Some in the press have acted as if the police and businesses attacked should not be believed. Others have just dismissed it all as acts of civil disobedience, but no big deal. Even much of the Atlanta press corps has treated the terrorists with kid gloves.
It echos the riots after George Floyd where CNN described one bad night as “fiery, but mostly peaceful.” The general media reaction to the vandalism, firebombings, etc. was to excuse it all. The very same media that excuses those acts condemned small businessmen and women who protested lockdowns earlier in 2020.
More than one reporter suggested that the Floyd protests had to trump social distancing, face masks, and lockdowns. Those same reporters suggested any small business protestor who got COVID should be denied ICU space. The hypocrisy was outstanding and over the top.
The press had done this before. When progressive protestors stormed the capitol buildings in Wisconsin and Texas, Democrats praised the protestors. Nancy Pelosi cheered them on. The press did not condemn the protestors for trying to shut down democratic efforts. The protestors and their legislative supporters like Texas’s Abortion Barbie, Wendy Davis, were lionized by the press. If only Josh Hawley had held up a coat hanger to protest Dobbs instead of a fist to show solidarity on January 6th — he’d get a Beto-level fawning profile in Vanity Fair.
These same reporters, press outlets, and media operations who gave passes to all that stuff then damned the protestors who showed up in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. They were “insurrections” but forgot the weapons when they stormed the ramparts.
I have called it regularly an incursion, but it was not an insurrection. These were second amendment activists who showed up without their guns. That would have been an insurrection. Trump himself could have called on them to storm the Capitol and seize power. That would have been a coup. None of that happened except in the fever dreams of the press and Democrats.
Had the press corps been more honest about January 6th and been more honest about the Floyd protests and Atlanta terrorism, perhaps we would not get the Tucker Carlson revisionism of January 6th.
Put simply — you don’t get Tucker Carlson calling January 6th “mostly peaceful” on Fox without Omar Jimenez talking in front of a burning building on CNN with a chyron that read “fiery but mostly peaceful protests.” The latter directly caused the former. Carlson’s wording is not a coincidence.
All Tucker Carlson is doing is exactly as the rest of the press did regarding the Floyd riots, the Portland riots, the Atlanta attacks, the Capitol incursions in Wisconsin and Texas, etc.
The problem on all sides is so much of it is false revisionism. The Floyd riots were bad and should be condemned. The incursion into the Capitol on January 6th should be condemned as well.
More specifically, Tucker Carlson is doing no different than the January 6th committee did. Instead of hiring an ABC News president to slickly edit selective videos to condemn, for example, Barry Loudermilk for an innocent tour of the Capitol, Carlson is selectively editing videos to suggest the braying bison-helmeted jackass did nothing wrong.
The January 6th Committee started it. Tucker Carlson will discredit it. These things all have consequences, whether you like them or not. We’re at the “ends justify the means” point of Western civilization’s collapse.
The only major difference is that we now have text messages and depositions relating to Fox News wherein talent and executives largely admitted to shaping the news to tell the audience what the audience wants to hear, not the truth. The rest of the press and the January 6th committee have done the same thing without incriminating texts and depositions. They’ll never admit it, but it is true, and you all know it.
Unfortunately, many people I presumed were sane are suddenly latching on to Tucker Carlson’s video edits as gospel, just as so many on the left who I thought were sane have grabbed hold of the rest of the media’s historic revisions as truth.
I feel like the last sane person.
All these people on TV tell you what you want to hear, and you believe it all hook, line, and sinker when there are actually thousands of hours of video showing what you’ve been told isn’t true. We have arrived at the “fiery, but mostly peaceful protest” of the right and are only there because the left arrived first. You must note that the left first went in on stolen election claims. The right just did it with gusto after the left went first.
The braying bison-helmeted jackass is Jacob Anthony Angeli Chansley. If you watch Carlson, you’d see Chansley being escorted through the Capitol by the police. You wouldn’t see the additional video of Chansley storming into the Capitol with the rioters. Likewise, contrary to some claims, Chansley’s lawyers had access to the footage and never tried to claim the police were just showing Chansley around. Why? Because it was not true.
In fact, Officer Keith Robishaw, one of those who stayed by Chansley, participated in an interview. He explained that the Capitol police were vastly outnumbered, and he was in no position to do anything but attempt to de-escalate.
Ashley Babbit was not a murdered innocent woman. She was a rioter attempting to break through a window to open a door for the other rioters so they could capture the members of Congress who were literally fleeing the scene as she was trying to break through. She was a criminal, not a hero. It was all caught on tape.
Lastly, this was all Antifa anyway. Remember that? We went from “it’s all Antifa and the FBI” to “don’t believe your lying eyes; just watch Tucker’s selective edits.” And that came after Steve Bannon tried to discredit Fox at CPAC as lying to you, but now they’re telling the truth. It’s no different from those who said COVID was no big deal but also believe it was a willful leak from a bioweapons lab. It’s no different from the leftists who think firebombing pregnancy centers is fine, but protesting abortion clinics should get you life in prison. It’s no different from leftists burning down Wisconsin and claiming it was all peaceful. It’s no different from demanding we accept boys can become girls, and only bigots refuse to accept it.
I am so tired of having to revisit all of this crap. Yes, fine and innocent people got caught up in the action. But there were deeply nefarious people too. There were malevolent actors who wished to harm people. I’m talking about the George Floyd riots, the Wisconsin and Texas capitol incursions, the Atlanta terror, and January 6th too.
We should be able to distinguish them all. We should not be playing tit for tat and revising truth just because that’s what the other side does.
But, Carlson is playing the same game so much of the rest of the media has played in other riots and protests. He’d have never said the riot on January 6, 2021, was “mostly peaceful,” had a CNN reporter not used the same phrase standing in front of a burning building during the George Floyd riots. He has turned the table on the left, and they are furious with him.
Both sides revising history to fit their preferred telling of it is all so deeply maddening. Being surrounded by people who buy the revisions makes me feel like the last sane person.
Surely there are others. I hope so. The truth, the real truth, must still matter, and two wrongs still do not make one right.
Oh, and below is one of those “mostly peaceful” Capitol rioters smashing a window in the Capitol building to get.
And here’s a “mostly peaceful” protester in Kenosha, WI, during the riots with a building burning down.
Go back a few years to the Obama years and the budget freeze that closed down about 15% of the federal government. Some veterans were pissed that a parking lot was closed off so they carried the barriers to the White House and threw them over the fence.
Erick, last night on Tucker Carlson, Chansley’s lawyer was emphatic that he was never given access to see the tapes Tucker showed and that this was the first time he’d seen them. Do you stand by your comment?