Taking his Jan. 6 denialism to another level on Tuesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested the Capitol insurrection was a false flag orchestrated by the FBI in an effort to “suppress political dissent.”
Almost since the moment that former President Donald Trump incited thousands of MAGA supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol in order to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory, Carlson has downplayed the violent riots, repeatedly insisting there was “no insurrection” and that it was nothing more than a “political protest that got out of hand.”
At the same time, the far-right Fox News star has rallied to the defense of the Capitol rioters, portraying them as largely peaceful protesters while raging against federal prosecutors for the hundreds of criminal charges filed in the wake of the insurrection. With more rioters still facing potential indictments, many have taken to cooperating with the feds to avoid or lessen jail time.
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And according to Carlson, the reason why the government has “thrown the book” at some rioters and not others is because of a deep-state plot to control the political narrative.
Taking aim at Attorney General Merrick Garland for announcing a new strategy to combat domestic terrorism and violent extremism in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, Carlson said this was just further proof that the government wants to “crush anyone who leads opposition to” Biden.
After invoking Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest whataboutism argument about the Capitol riots, which featured Putin referencing Capitol rioter Ashli Babbit’s death to deflect answering a question about jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, Carlson declared that Putin raised “fair questions.”
“Who did shoot Ashli Babbitt and why don’t we know?” Carlson added. “Are anonymous federal agents now allowed to kill unarmed women who protest the regime? That’s okay now? No, it’s not okay.”
Carlson went on to claim that the government is “hiding the identity of many law enforcement officers present at the Capitol on January 6, not just the one that killed” Babbit, stating that the government’s own court filings reveal that officers violently took part in the riot.
“We know that because without fail, the government has thrown the book at most people who were present in the Capitol on January 6,” he exclaimed. “There was a nationwide dragnet to find them. Many of them are still in solitary confinement tonight.”
“But strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged,” he continued. “Look at the documents, the government calls those people unindicted coconspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?”
Using the indictment of Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell as an example, Carlson noted that the documents show two additional people listed who haven’t been charged yet but were organizers of the riot.
“The government knows who they are, but they have not charged them. Why is that? You know why,” Carlson said with a dramatic nod. “They were all certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol, on Jan. 6, according to government documents!”
Carlson would then go on to also claim that the extremist plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was an FBI plot, insisting that the government was using the same post-9/11 tactics this time around.
“If you empower the government to violate civil liberties in pursuit of a foreign terror organization, it’s just a matter of time before ambitious politicians use those same mechanisms to suppress political dissent,” he grumbled. “And that is what we are seeing now.”
