Tucker Carlson’s anti-Americanism took another sickening turn Friday night as he praised QAnon supporters as “gentle people” who “like the country,” and blatantly suggested they are more patriotic than Black Lives Matter supporters.
This was a bit of evolution for hate-monger Carlson. Late last month, he suggested QAnon didn’t exist, saying, “If it’s out there, we could not find it.” Later, he said, “CNN itself has become a disinformation network, more powerful than QAnon and far more destructive.”
Friday night, Carlson apparently “found” QAnon – and it was just in time to paint them as the good-guy victims of the bad guys (especially Blacks!) on the left. Fox News, which won a libel case by successfully arguing nobody should believe what Carlson says, nevertheless let him claim he was giving viewers the truth.
CARLSON: You may be wondering, just how dangerous is QAnon? Well, here's the answer.
I’ll spare you the details of Carlson’s following rant against the District of Columbia National Guard for possibly adding a medal for those who served during President Biden’s inauguration (never mind how much Carlson supposedly loves the police).
Carlson’s so-called “answer” was to mock intelligence that some kind of violence had been planned for March 4, based on a QAnon theory that Donald Trump would be inaugurated that day. (I explained this in a post for Crooks and Liars.)
CARLSON: So yesterday, they told us the war against QAnon was likely to escalate intensely. March 4th would be the Tet Offensive in the fight against right- wing insurrectionism. It was something called QAnon Inauguration Day.
Now we'd never heard of that before, but then we don't work at the FBI. The FBI has been monitoring the enemy SigInt, that Signals Intelligence for the neophytes out there. That means tweets, Facebook posts, TikToks -- James Bond stuff.
According to what our guys were hearing in the field, QAnon was preparing an invasion of Washington, and that means thousands of bearded groovy shamans in Viking hats, marching across the Key Bridge to pillage Georgetown cupcakes and end our democracy. It's a gruesome sight.
Needless to say, Nancy Pelosi stopped work in the House of Representatives so that Members of Congress could flee the city for their lives, and many did.
It's hilarious to see Carlson talking tough here since there’s little doubt Carlson would be one of the first to flee. This is the guy who turned a protester knocking on his door during a peaceful demonstration outside his house into “Antifa cracked my door,” then sold his house soon thereafter because he claimed it wasn’t safe.
But Carlson’s real point was to suggest that white QAnon supporters are the real patriots and that Black Lives Matter activists and their supporters are the true enemies of America:
CARLSON: You ever notice how all like the scary internet conspiracy theorists, radical QAnon people and you actually see them on camera or in jail cells, as a lot of them now are, maybe they're kind of confused. Maybe they've got the wrong ideas, but they're all kind of gentle people and they are all kind of waving American flags. They like the country.
They're not torching Wendy's. They’re not looting retail stores. They're not shooting cops. No, that's not them. It is the other people doing that.
What's amazing is that even as they lie to us again and again and again, about the threat of QAnon and the insurrection, the white supremacist militia hiding in the closet, hyping it all beyond recognition, doing it for their own psychological reasons, obviously, but also for political reasons.
Even as they do all of that, they downplay and they ignore actual violence in this country, violence that is rapidly accelerating in every city in the nation and killing a lot of people.
FACT CHECK: As ABC News reported in January, QAnon supporters were, according to officials, "some of the most prominent and violent offenders" in the January 6 insurrection. A 2018 article in The Guardian listed 12 instances of violence connected to its supporters, which it summarized as follows:
The QAnon conspiracy theory has been linked to several violent acts since 2018, with QAnon supporters arrested for threatening politicians, breaking into the residence of the Canadian prime minister, an armed standoff near the Hoover dam, a kidnapping plot and two kidnappings, and at least one murder.
So was Carlson lying or just too lazy to bother with the facts – or both? I report, you decide.
What’s not in question is that Fox is presenting Carlson's dangerous disinformation as truth, regardless of how it pretends otherwise.
You can watch Carlson shower white nationalist love on QAnon below, from the March 5, 2021 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Trump was also especially adept at and enthusiastic about riling up mobs.
I am, however, quite willing to believe that many of the rioters were normally peaceful folk caught up in the frenzy caused and manipulated by unscrupulous elements.
The rhetoric heard at the rally had riled them to fever pitch and they followed the invitation to walk towards the Capitol. On the way there, and when there, they were egged on by a minority who wanted violence. Trump’s speech had mentioned “peacefully” only once, not enough to get that message across. The mob broke its way into the building and marched around chanting slogans for the killing and hanging of elected officials. Had they not been riled up the speech, many of them would have probably ignored the calls to participate in lynch mob action.
