Allow Tucker Carlson to air the Jan. 6 tapes

When it comes to January 6th, a day dishonestly cast as equivalent to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor to launch a massive, civil liberties-eviscerating War on Wrongthink, the likes of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Congressman Benny Thompson believe “you can’t handle the truth.”

Or rather “they can’t handle you handling the truth.”

That’s the dirty secret behind their outrage in response to Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to fulfill a commitment to release the 44,000 hours of Jan. 6 footage the Capitol Police had been sitting on, beginning with Tucker Carlson’s reporting on the tapes.

The purpose of the transparency should be obvious: The tapes will tell Americans the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about what transpired that day.

Democrats would’ve demanded that kind of transparency in a different era, from a security apparatus they were naturally skeptical of if not hostile towards. 

No longer. Why?

Leftists are now the national security apparatus’s greatest protectors because it’s been weaponized against the right.

Democrats and their Deep State allies have repeatedly sought to use national security concerns to cover up the incompetence, corruption, politicization and weaponization of the national security apparatus – obfuscating, redacting, and burying materials that would demonstrate perverse behavior – as we saw at mass scale in Russiagate, an effort to destroy Trump and his movement.

With J6, Democrats themselves are implicated. 

It was Speaker Nancy Pelosi who was disproportionately responsible for the J6 security lapses.

That’s in part why it was so imperative for her to turn the J6 Committee into a sham, Soviet style show trial led by Democrats and Trump-hating RINOs, and to tightly control the information and footage that it released. 

Schumer and Thompson’s main argument against releasing the J6 tapes then – that it poses a security risk – has to be weighed against this background.

Is this about national security, or narrative security?

Democrats’ argument would also hold more water if Democrats demonstrated they cared about national security.

But this is the party of defund the police, no-cash bail, and pro-criminal prosecutors – the party uniquely culpable for the massive spike in violent crime and dysfunction in Democrat-run cities.

Democrats didn’t care about security during the BLM riots.

They don’t care about security at the Southern border.

They had no qualms about security risks when they showed footage from the Capitol they felt was beneficial to their political case via the J6 Committee.

And again they apparently didn’t care about security on January 6! The 44,000 hours of footage will no doubt corroborate this.

Which is precisely the point – why they don’t want you to see it.

Let’s also note: The Capitol was breached without anyone having ever seen a minute of footage. 

With the building having already been compromised, shouldn’t new protocols be crafted under the assumption that whatever could be learned from the J6 tapes is already known to bad actors?

For their part, Republicans are apparently taking pains to vet the footage for security purposes before it is released.

Now Democrats’ attacks on Carlson in particular are unhinged, but characteristic. 

They hysterically call him a Putin stooge and conspiracy theorist – the lines they go to every time to smear someone who violates the Official Narrative.

On his show, viewers have been presented with evidence that challenges the established January 6th narrative in myriad, intolerable ways, including:

• That it was not an armed insurrection
• That Capitol rioters were the only individuals murdered that day, including Ashli Babbitt, who may have been the victim of a bad shoot by a Capitol Cop
• That protesters were subjected to police brutality contributing to the escalation of the riot
• That informants were on the ground, and agent provocateurs may well have been too
• That Ray Epps was captured egging people on to storm the Capitol yet curiously never prosecuted, while people who weren’t have been convicted of seditious conspiracy
• That authorities violated civil liberties in pursuing J6 perps
• That Capitol riot defendants have faced a double standard in justice versus progressive activists during the 2020 BLM riots
• And that the government and media have covered much of this up 

If Tucker’s an unhinged conspiracy theorist, shouldn’t they welcome his J6 footage review? Shouldn’t it be self-evidently discrediting?

Presumably, Democrats think Carlson’s going to cherrypick January 6 clips to present a dishonest counter-narrative to their own.

Carlson has teased that what his team has seen does challenge Democrats’ narrative. Let’s say for the sake of argument he was operating in the worst possible faith. 

Could it be worse than the Jan. 6 Committee itself – again run by zealous partisans and MAGA-haters hellbent on smearing half the country as domestic terrorists, who selectively aired footage and weaponized their power as congressmen, in proceedings literally stage-managed by corporate media producers Giving Tucker the first crack at the footage at very worse is just tit-for-tat.

It also appears Jan. 6 defendants themselves will get access to that footage – which is just. How many people have been convicted of crimes who never had access to footage held by the Capitol Police that could’ve been exculpatory?

Releasing the footage is also in the public’s interest. As a new poll shows, Americans overwhelmingly agree – some 80% of likely voters across the political spectrum want to see the unreleased footage.

The tapes will tell us whether January 6 was as harrowing as has been claimed; it will show us the rioter’s conduct and the police’s conduct alike; it may reveal what role government actors and informants may have played; certainly it’ll show us the security lapses.

We Americans deserve clarity on what transpired that day.

Release the tapes. Let the truth contained in them prevail.