Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is taking aim at Republican senators who criticized his decision to air footage from the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
In a segment of his show on Tuesday, Carlson shot back at his critics as he said, “We should also tell you that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, was joined in this outrage by the Senate minority leader, and that would be a Republican, Mitch McConnell.”
“And they were joined by a cascade of other Republicans: Thom Tillis from North Carolina, Mitt Romney from Utah,” he continued, adding, “And from this, we learn two things: one we’re getting close to what they really care about.”
The host claimed, “The second thing that we learned from this is that they’re on the same side. The Senate majority leader joins the Senate minority leader, Thom Tillis, Mitt Romney. They’re all on the same side. So it’s actually not about left and right. It’s not about Republican and Democrat.”
“Here you have people with a shared interest, the open borders people… The people who underneath it all have everything in common are all aligned against everyone else,” he added.
Watch the video below:
Tucker now lashing out and accusing Republican Senators who criticized him of lying and wanting open borders. Tells his viewers to keep a list of them pic.twitter.com/Yruvak3QzJ
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 8, 2023
Finally, he suggested viewers should “keep a list” because the senators who criticized him had “outed themselves” as being against them.
Earlier this week, Carlson released some of the 40,000 hours of footage from the Jan. 6 riot he was given in an attempt to downplay the violence that day. Carlson focused on one part of the footage, which appeared to show law enforcement walking with the so-called “QAnon Shaman” in the Capitol and declining to stop him.
“The tapes show the Capitol police never stopped Jacob Chansley. They helped him. They acted as his tour guides,” Carlson insisted, adding, “If he was in the act of committing such a grave crime, why didn’t the officers standing right next to him place him under arrest?”
He told his viewers there was a “small percentage” of “hooligans” who engaged in vandalism. However, the rest he claimed were “sightseers”:
“They were peaceful, they were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers. Footage from inside the capitol overturns the story you have heard about January 6. Protesters cue up in neat little lines. They give each other tours outside the speaker’s office. They take cheerful selfies and they smile. They are not destroying the Capitol. They obviously revere the Capitol.”
His attempt to re-write what happened on Jan. 6 by minimizing the violence and the deaths that day and in connection with the riot drew a rebuke from several Republicans.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters, “It was a mistake, in my view, [for] Fox News to depict this in a way completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) called Carlson’s depiction of the riot “bullsh*t.”
“I was here. I was down there, and I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up in things,” he explained. “But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that … if you were just a tourist you should’ve probably lined up at the visitors’ center and came in on an orderly basis.”
Sen. Mitt Romney also weighed in as he said, “It’s a very dangerous thing to do, to suggest that attacking the Capitol of the United States is in any way acceptable and it’s anything other than a serious crime, against democracy and against our country.”
“And people saw that it was violent and destructive and should never happen again. But trying to normalize that behavior is dangerous and disgusting,” he added.
The Republicans who spoke out about his effort to re-write history might, in a way, be on the same side as Democrats in this matter. But it is not against Carlson’s viewers. It is in favor of upholding an accurate history of what happened.
