Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson argued there was evidence of inconsistencies in Democrats’ impeachment case they are presenting in a trial underway in the U.S. Senate.
After pointing out these inconsistencies, Carlson declared Democrats were “lying” with their presentation, and he asked why.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: It’s funny how change happens. You thought the big change came on Election Day. That’s when the incumbent President lost, but that turned out to be nothing compared to the change that came two months later.
On January 6, supporters of Donald Trump swarmed the Capitol Building, some forced their way inside, and Washington has never been the same. It may never be the same.
As a result of what happened on January 6, your descendants will live in a very different country. It was a pivot point in our history looking back. Some in Congress have compared that day to 9/11.
The Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has likened it to Pearl Harbor, the day that spurred America’s entry into the Second World War. Every day we hear new and more florid comparisons from Democratic partisans.
But last night, CNN outdid all of them. Chernobyl? The Bhopal disaster? The Irish Potato Famine? No. What happened on January 6th was worse than any of that. It was, CNN told us, very much like the Rwandan genocide.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: The idea of other rising people is something I think we saw a lot of over the last four years.
I mean, certainly, we’ve seen a lot over the last decades, but it’s so easy to otherwise people, to make people other than, other than American, other than patriotic other than human, you know, and we’ve seen it in Bosnia, we’ve seen it in Rwanda where the radio was telling people that you know, Hutus, were telling the radio listeners that Tutsi were cockroaches, for — you know, getting them ginned up for genocide.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: The Rwandan genocide, that’s what it was like. Keep in mind that close to a million people were murdered in Rwanda in 1994. That’s about 70 percent of all ethnic Tutsis in the country. Entire towns were hacked to death with machetes, they were set on fire, crushed alive by bulldozers. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped.
It was among the most horrifying crimes in human history. How does a country recover from something like that? From a genocide?
Well, first, obviously, you punish the guilty quickly and severely. In our case, you impeach him. But then — and this is more important — you set about reordering your society from top to bottom to make certain nothing like that ever happens again. So you purge the military, you suspend basic civil liberties.
To emphasize the point, you send troops to the Capitol. You tear down the old, you destroy all vestiges of the past in order to save the future. That’s what’s going on now.
But hold on, before we remake America to prevent future genocide at the Capitol, maybe we should know a little bit more about the crime that occurred on January 6th, if only to understand the justification for overturning our lives permanently.
What exactly did happen that day? Simple question. You may be surprised to learn how little we know even now. In fact, it’s remarkable how many of the most basic questions remain unanswered more than a month after the fact.
Let’s start with the headline of the day. Five Americans died on the Capitol grounds on January 6. You’ve heard that, you hear it incessantly including from Republican officeholders — five dead.
But that doesn’t really tell you very much. It’s the details as always that matter. Who were these people and how did they die? That’s how you understand what actually happened.
So with that in mind, here are the facts as of tonight.
Four of the five who died that day were Trump supporters. The fifth was a Capitol Hill police officer who apparently also supported Donald Trump.
Why is this relevant? Of course, the political views of the deceased shouldn’t matter. But unfortunately, in this case, they do.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and many other elected Democrats claimed the mob was coming for them that day. Yet, the only recorded casualties on January 6 were people who voted for Donald Trump.
The first among them was the 34-year-old woman from Georgia called Rosanne Boyland. Authorities first announced that Boyland died of a quote, “medical emergency.” Later, video footage suggested she may have accidentally been trampled by the crowd. We’re still not sure, that’s the best guess.
The second casualty was 55-year-old, Kevin Greeson. Greeson died of heart failure while talking to his wife on a cell phone outside the Capitol. Quote, “Kevin had a history of high blood pressure,” his wife later said, ” … and in the midst of the excitement, he suffered a heart attack,” end quote.
The third was 50-year-old Benjamin Phillips of Ringtown, Pennsylvania. Phillips was a Trump supporter who organized a bus trip to Washington for the rally that day. He died of a stroke on the grounds of the Capitol. There is no evidence that Phillips rioted or was injured by rioters or even when inside the Capitol Building.
The fourth person to die, the only person to die that day of intentional violence was 35-year-old, Ashli Babbitt, a military veteran from San Diego. Babbitt was wearing a Trump cape when she was shot to death by a Capitol Hill police lieutenant.
Babbitt’s death was caught on video, so hers is the best-documented death that took place that day. And yet it is surprising how little we know about it.
Babbitt was shot as she tried to crawl through a broken window into the Speaker’s lobby within the Capitol, and that’s essentially the extent of what we know. Authorities have refused to release the name of the man who shot her or divulge any details of the investigation they say they’ve done.
We may never know exactly why this unnamed Capitol Hill police officer took her life. According to that officer’s attorney quote, “There is no way to look at the evidence and think that he is anything but a hero.” Of course, we can’t actually look at that evidence because they’re withholding it, we can’t even know his identity.
Killing an unarmed woman may be justified under certain specific circumstances, but since when is it quote, “heroic”? When the dead woman has read QAnon websites? Republicans aren’t asking that question.
One Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma says he immediately hugged the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt. “You did what you had to do,” the Congressman said. But did the officer really have to do that? We don’t know. It would be nice to know, maybe someone could ask.
We do know that Ashli Babbitt was not holding a weapon when she was killed. Nevertheless, at the impeachment hearing this week, Congressman David Cicilline of Rhode Island described what happened at the Capitol as quote, “an armed insurrection.” Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. DAVID CICILLINE (D-RI): He incited an armed, angry mob to riot.
… and inciting an armed insurrection against the United States government.
… an armed, angry and dangerous crowd —
… armed violence against the government of the United States of America.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: David Cicilline is a former mafia lawyer from Providence, so presumably he knows what it is to commit a felony with a firearm. That is what he does.
There are no reports of rioters at the Capitol Building that day discharging weapons or threatening anyone with a gun.
So what exactly is David Cicilline talking about? Well, apparently, he is referring to the death of Officer Brian Sicknick.
In the hours after the riot, The New York Times reported that Trump supporters had brutally beaten Officer Sicknick to death with a fire extinguisher. The fire extinguisher apparently is the deadly weapon, the armed in the armed insurrection.
Now the news of Sicknick’s death by violence was quickly picked up by countless other media outlets. Cable television anchors repeated and then amplified it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Officer Brian Sicknick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher during the hours’ long attack.
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC ANCHOR: They beat a Capitol Police officer to death with a fire extinguisher.
COOPER: Officer Brian Sicknick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher during the fight.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He died at the age of 42 after he was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Capitol Hill police officer beaten to death with a fire extinguisher by a white supremacist mob. It’s horrifying. And that is the story they were telling. It’s a story they still are telling. That account forms the basis of the myth that Democrats have constructed around January 6.
Sicknick’s remains lay in state at the Capitol Building, streams of politicians, the very same people who just months before had told us that cops were racist by definition, those same people praised Brian Sicknick as a hero. They had finally found a police officer who served their political uses.
Kamala Harris and her husband, for example, arrived to pay their respects and as they did, they said not one thing about defunding the police.
But in fact, the story they told was a lie, from beginning to end. Officer Sicknick was not beaten to death, not with a fire extinguisher, not with anything else.
According to an exhaustive and fascinating new analysis on Revolver News, there is no evidence that Brian Sicknick was hit with a fire extinguisher at any point during the day. None. No video. Nothing.
The officer’s body apparently bore no signs of trauma. In fact, on the night of January 6, long after rioters at the Capitol had been arrested or dispersed, Brian Sicknick texted his brother from his office.
According to his brother, Sicknick said he’d been, quote, “Pepper sprayed twice and he was in good shape.” Twenty-four hours later, Officer Brian Sicknick was dead.
How did Officer Sicknick die? The head of the Capitol Police Union has said he had a stroke, no cause given. More than that, we still don’t know. Sicknick’s body was cremated immediately. Authorities have refused to release his autopsy.
No one has been charged in his death. No charges are pending.
Whatever happened to Brian Sicknick was tragic, obviously. But it was also very different from what they have told us. They have lied about how he died.
They’ve lied about a lot. For example, how did this riot start? Was it a spontaneous event incited by a reckless President on his way out in a fit of vicious peak? That’s one version of the story.
Or was the riot long-planned? Was it a conspiracy? That’s another version of the story. Both cannot be true.
This weekend the former Chief of the Capitol Hill police Steven Sund claimed in a letter to Nancy Pelosi that there was no intelligence suggesting that a riot might be imminent at the Capitol. Apparently, The Washington Post has better sources than Chief Sund does.
Days after January 6, the newspaper reported that it was well known that a group of Trump supporters was headed to the city to cause trouble. The FBI almost certainly knew this. The feds likely had paid informers in the ranks of protesters.
One of the rioters, we learned this yesterday, was a former FBI employee. Was he still on the FBI payroll? He wouldn’t be the first.
So if the authorities knew that violence might be coming to the Capitol, where was the necessary security? It wasn’t there.
In fact, the response of law enforcement on the scene that day is baffling the more deeply you look into it. In some publicly available videos, Capitol Hill Police seemed to be all but inviting rioters into the building. Here’s one example.
[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]
CARLSON: What does all of this mean exactly? We’re not sure what it means, and we’re not going to speculate. We do know for certain that the known facts of what happened on January 6 deviate in very important ways from the story they are now telling us, including the story they told us today in the impeachment hearings.
And in many places, the known facts bear no resemblance to the story they are telling. They’re just flat-out lying. There’s no question about that.
The question is, why would they lie about this?
For an answer, think back to last spring. Beginning on Memorial Day, BLM and their sponsors in Corporate America completely changed this country. They changed this country more in five months than it had changed in the previous 50 years.
How did they do that? They used the sad death of a man called George Floyd to upend our society. Months later, we learned that the story they told us about George Floyd’s death was an utter lie.
There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop. The autopsy showed that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose – – fentanyl. But by that point, facts didn’t matter. It was too late.
Cities had been destroyed along with the fabric of this country itself. Scores of people had been killed. Democratic partisans used a carefully concocted myth, a lie, to bum rush America into overturning the old order and handing them much more power. It worked flawlessly.
So why wouldn’t they do it again?
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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