In the wake of yesterday’s bombshell Jan. 6 hearings, Tucker Carlson deflected in a 12+ minute harangue about Stephen Colbert, who just happened to have comedically shredded him the night before. Carlson continued suggesting Colbert’s staff were the real insurrectionists and accused Colbert of contributing to the collapse of civilization.
The New York Times summed up yesterday’s hearing, saying, it “directly tied Donald J. Trump on Tuesday to a scheme to put forward fake slates of pro-Trump electors and presented fresh details on how the former president sought to bully, cajole and bluff his way into invalidating his 2020 defeat in states around the country.”
But Kremlin-propaganda star Carlson wanted his viewers to think that Stephen Colbert was the big story of the day. By wild coincidence, I’m sure, Colbert demolished to comic smithereens Carlson’s previous accusation that Colbert’s production staff had “committed insurrection” when they were arrested in a Capitol Hill office building last week.
I’ve previously written about Carlson’s thin-skinned and vicious responses to the slightest hint of disagreement (no wonder he loves fascists!). But since he can’t push Colbert out of a job, the way he did Shepard Smith and others and since he can’t likely infect Colbert with coronavirus, the way Carlson wanted to with Dr. Jill Biden, and since yesterday’s January 6 hearing was so devastating that a Fox News host opened an interview by remarking how “just awful” it made Trump look – well, what’s Fox’s top seditionist hate monger to do other than to pretend Colbert is a major issue facing this country, especially when you’re known as a January 6 gaslighter?
An apparently triggered Carlson began with a fresh pack of lies about the Colbert show arrests
CARLSON: Last week on Thursday, talk show host Stephen Colbert dispatched a group of seven of his employees to Washington, D.C. Their job? Break into the US Capitol complex and harass lawmakers inside.
So, the group dutifully arrived in the afternoon and were met almost immediately by uniformed Capitol Hill police officers who threw them out. But apparently on orders from Colbert, they returned.
At about 4:00 PM on Thursday, the group reentered the building.
Accounts vary as to what exactly happened next, but it seems clear that Colbert's employees were let inside by an ally within the building, that would be a freshman Member of Congress from Massachusetts called Jake Auchincloss.
Once on Federal property, Colbert's employees did what they came to do, which was disrupt the business of Congress, and apparently they were not subtle about doing it. They pounded on doors and yelled. Whatever they did, it got people's attention.
It’s worth pointing out that F***y Tucky did not host anyone on the show who offered this version of events. It vastly differs from what Colbert and CBS say what happened: which is that the production staff had been invited into the Congressional offices of those they interviewed and later remained on the premises “doing some last-minute puppetry and jokey make-em-ups in a hallway when they were approached and detained by the Capitol Police,” as Colbert put it.
I’m totally willing to believe there’s more to the story than what Colbert and CBS say but Carlson offered no reason to believe his version. He wouldn’t even tell us from where or whom he got it.
Carlson didn’t try to answer the question he claimed to have about why the Colbert staff was treated differently than January 6 insurrectionists
But Carlson’s real aim was to pretend, again, that the violent, “Hang Mike Pence” shouting insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol with the goal of overturning a democratic election were just the same as some comedy producers who apparently overstayed their visit at an office building and were maybe behaving obnoxiously.
CARLSON: Capitol Hill police arrested seven Colbert employees and brought them to jail. All seven of them were charged with unlawful entry. Now, that's the identical charge that hundreds of January 6 defendants have been prosecuted for. But unlike the January 6 defendants, Colbert's employees were not sent to the DC jail for a year and a half in solitary confinement. No, they were released after only a night behind bars, and then they fled back to New York.
Why is that? What exactly is the difference in the crime?
As a legal question, we still don't know the answer.
Carlson has any number of legal analysts who might have been able to answer or at least address that question. Funny how he didn’t call on them. He didn't even mention asking anyone. We can only conclude it’s because Carlson doesn’t want to hear the answer. More importantly, he doesn’t want his viewers to hear it.
Carlson further deflects and distracts from the damaging J6 hearing
But Carlson’s real goal was not truth (Fox has told us nobody should believe what he says!) but to deflect and distract by drumming up more hate for Americans, i.e. to suggest that some Democratic mischief is worse than a MAGA insurrection:
CARLSON: In fact, Jake Auchincloss has a recent history of condoning criminal behavior in the Capitol. Just this March, surveillance cameras in the complex caught Jake Auchincloss' Chief of Staff, that would be a former Adam Schiff staffer called Tim Hysom, vandalizing the front door of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene's personal office.
Hyssop did this not once but several times violently, like a man obsessed. Capitol Hill police quickly filed an arrest warrant against him because Tim Hysom clearly posed a threat to a member of Congress.
But Jake Auchincloss did not fire him. Instead, Jake Auchincloss defended Hysom's vandalism as noble and justified. "Our office is not going to apologize," read a long and self-righteous statement from Jake Auchincloss.
In other words, "We don't like Marjorie Taylor Greene's politics. Therefore, we can do whatever we want to her and we will."
I'll pause to highlight the hypocrisy here: Carlson is not only just fine with harassing people whose politics he dislikes, he deliberately endangers them or tries to.
And guess who he got that story from? None other than “Perjury” Taylor Greene, herself – who thinks her job description is to troll and harass those whose politics she dislikes.
Carlson has called the January 6 hearing a “forgettably minor outbreak.” But he wants us to think the insult to Greene is a bigger deal:
CARLSON: Now, whatever you think of her politics, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a sitting member of Congress. Preventing her or any other member of Congress from carrying out official duties as a public representative is, by definition, an attack on democracy.
I’m not condoning vandalism but “vandalizing” Greene’s door is certainly no equivalent to January 6.
Carlson goes into his deranged rant against Colbert
Carlson played a clip of Colbert calling Carlson’s Colbert/J6 analogy “a shameful and grotesque insult to the memory of everyone who died and it obscenely trivializes the service and the courage the Capitol Police showed on that terrible day.”
Call a WAH-MBULANCE for Tuckums!
CARLSON: In other words, "When you criticize me, you're really criticizing the brave Capitol Police officers who arrested the people who work for me, the ones who committed the crimes I asked them to commit and I, for one, will not stand for that." That's what he just said.
Actually, that’s not what Colbert said at all. But the inability to take criticism perfectly describes Carlson.
Carlson then devolved into his seething and bonkers demagoguery:
CARLSON: [I]t's a master's class on whiny, rich, liberal self-righteousness. It's a distillation of a worldview that is so concise and so perfect, it is certain to be studied by cultural historians of the future, seeking to understand how our civilization collapsed.
"Not only am I not sorry, you're the criminal for bringing it up. Stop hitting me," he screams as he punches you in the face. That is passive- aggression taken to the level of art. In any way, Colbert says, "Shut up. I'm a comedian with a toy dog, you can't criticize me."
Carlson went on to accuse Colbert of sounding like “the notably unfunny Karine Jean-Pierre” and “a Biden flack delivering whatever talking points the White House tells him to repeat.” Part of his “proof” was that Colbert did not laugh at the QAnon Shaman who joined the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6.
CARLSON: "Get the vax, peasants, surrender your guns, support Ukraine and remember, it's called Kyiv now." This isn't comedy. It's a very sad midlife crisis, but more than that, it's information war being waged against television viewers on behalf of the Democratic Party.
[…]
At this point, he's just a partisan scold, and you know that for certain, because even as he watched the QAnon Shaman parade around the Capitol on January 6, Stephen Colbert did not laugh.
Now, an actual comedian whatever is politics would have found that spectacle hilarious because -- let's be honest -- it was.
[…]
Now, that's how Maoist countries act. That's not how comedians act. So, Stephen Colbert may be a late night host still for some reason, but he has zero sense of humor. He ought to step aside and let some young person who still gets the joke to have the job, but he won't.
[…]
Stephen Colbert is a Karen. He's a brittle, middle-aged woman who is always lecturing you about something. In fact, he's Elizabeth Warren. They even look alike. Have you seen them in the same room recently? No.
[…]
His audience is entirely self-hating White liberals like him.
So nobody watches him anymore. And that's fine, that CBS' problem. But don't tell us you're a comedian, and therefore exempt from the normal rules of behavior and the normal federal laws about trespassing, because you're not.
You did what they did, and you should be punished in exactly the same way.
Carlson continued his diatribe into the next segment with “comedic perspective” from Joel Berry, of the satire site, Babylon Bee.
You can watch the kind of demagoguery that Lachlan Murdoch admires below, from the June 21, 2022 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Converging evidence consistently points to DJ Trump as most responsible for Jan 6, with the singular exception of Trump’s having said on Jan 6, in contrast to the tone of the rest of his speech, the one sentence “I know that EVERYONE HERE [MY CAPS] will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” . On one level this was mobster-style CYA, pretending one scripted, isolated disclaimer removed all moral responsibility for the overwhelmingly repeated, belligerent thrust of Trump’s speech. On another deeper level, when Trump said “everyone here” will be peaceful, that was an interesting qualification. That technically excluded the tip of the alt-right insurrection spear, paramilitaries and quasi-paramilitaries that had already left (or not been to) Trump’s rally. Trump must have known the timetable for that loose proto-Sturm Abteilung that Bannon et. al. seemed to have inkling of. In any case, at a technical and literal level, Trump’s one-sentence peace directive did not extend to Trump supporters outside of his presence, notably the significant numbers already at or approaching the Capitol. This sheds new light on the 2nd impeachment-era BS excuse that Trump couldn’t have incited the riot because it had started without him.
That anybody could consider that man putting his feet on Pelosi’s desk to be “hilarious” tells it all. My parents would have given us hell for doing anything like that in order to show arrogance and disrespect. 72 years on and I still cringe whenever I see a cowboy doing that in the movies.