Friday, FNC’s Tucker Carlson hit the media and Democrat members of Congress for playing up the threat of a so-called QAnon incursion that did not occur.
As Carlson explained, the so-called “invasion” was set to go down earlier in the week in all 50 state capitols and Washington, D.C. However, there was no sign of any such event.
Carlson compared that to the Black Lives Matter riots around the country throughout last year.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: QAnon, the greatest threat we face not inflation, not China, QAnon, everyone is saying it. But you may be wondering just how dangerous is QAnon? Well, here’s the answer.
The District of Columbia National Guard announced today that all troops who took part in the mission to protect our democracy from internet conspiracy theorists will now receive medals in recognition of their heroic sacrifice.
Now, the primary medal is called the Presidential Inauguration Support Ribbon. That’s for people who were there for President Biden’s inauguration. But that medal will be supplemented in cases in which our heroes have earned it by the Emergency Service Ribbon.
So if you’re a D.C. Guardsmen who has been on duty in the city since late January, protecting America from Trump voters, you can add another medal to your chest, and more may be coming.
According to Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert Carver — and we’re not making any of this up, by the way — Carver made the announcements today and said this quote: “Other Federal decorations are also being considered.”
Wow. That seems like a big deal. How big? Here’s some context.
More than 60,000 American soldiers and Marines fought on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific during the Second World War. About 15,000 of them died or were wounded there. But not one of those men, not one, got an official Guadalcanal medal for the experience because the Pentagon didn’t offer them.
Guadalcanal may have been horrible and bloody, but it just didn’t justify its own ribbon. Guadalcanal wasn’t North Capitol Street.
The Imperial Japanese weren’t as fanatical as Trump voters and not half as dangerous. No medal.
So yesterday, they told us the war against QAnon was likely to escalate intensely. March 4 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.
Andy Kim, for example, he’s a congressman from New Jersey. He wrote this, poignant, “This all seems absurd if it wasn’t frightening.” He prepared to flee the Capitol on March 3rd and wrote his, in effect, diary on Twitter, “The Diary of Andy Kim.”
“Now our legislative plan tomorrow has been cancelled as we are rushing tonight to finish the work we plan to do. Thousands of National Guard and Capitol Police will be on edge tomorrow as they stand watch over the Capitol. They will worry about possible attacks by American citizens.”
Andy Kim was panicked. He sounds like a man preparing for the worst. Quote, “Another wave of sadness comes from the fact that this is not getting better. The FBI Director said this threat is metastasizing.” And so Andy King became a refugee in his own country.
But not everyone ran from the sound of the approaching QAnon Shamans. A few hardened war correspondents ran toward that sound. That’s what they do.
Chris Bedford of “The Federalist” is a man like that. While our elected representatives were clinging to the struts of the last chopper out of the city, Chris Bedford was at the Capitol itself, the center of the battle. Here was the scene there.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS BEDFORD, “THE FEDERALIST”: I was told that a lot of conservatives are insurrecting today and am I at the wrong place?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: No, Chris Bedford, you weren’t in the wrong place. There was simply nobody there.
It took The Washington Post five crack reporters to determine this. They rushed to the scene. Their conclusion: on Capitol Hill, wrote the five Washington Post reporters quote, “The streets are quiet. People walk their dogs in the morning sun, masked students sat on steps drinking coffee. Construction crews continued with their projects.” That was their dispatch.
Jeff Bezos spared no expense. One reporter assigned to monitor the construction crews. Another on the dog walking beat. No one there.
So why wasn’t there anyone there? Where was the QAnon battle? What? Said MSNBC, what QAnon battle? Nobody really thought there was going to be a QAnon battle. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHUCK TODD, MSNBC HOST: Have we learned more about any specifics of this threat or are you starting to think this is under the umbrella of maybe we’re being a little more precautious since we under reacted on January 6th?
PETE WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Definitely the latter, Chuck, no question about it. The Intelligence that was gathered by law enforcement, I’m told was of a specific group, talking about the idea of doing an attack on the Capitol today on March 4th, talking about an idea. In other words, aspirational.
I don’t think anybody expected anything to happen today, but nonetheless, you know, abundance of caution seems to be the watch phrase here.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Being precautious said, Chuck Todd, totally unfamiliar with his native language, precautious, of course, not being an actual word in English.
But the key line from that clip and the one that you need to remember is, “I don’t think anybody expected anything to happen on March 4 at the Capitol.” But wait a second, you sticklers for precision might be asking, didn’t the FBI issue a bulletin warning the country that a military force was planning to seize control of the Capitol building?
And didn’t they put up razor wire around the whole place and sent in thousands of soldiers with rifles? And then didn’t Congressman Kim and his friends run away in sadness and terror and then tweet about it? Yes, that all happened. But it wasn’t a big deal, it was just a drill.
Just to drill. You can relax now. As you were.
Now that’s one explanation for the empty Capitol yesterday, but by the time night fell in the city remained quiet, except of course in the poor neighborhoods where people were still shooting one another in ever growing numbers, no one noticing.
But by the time night fell, MSNBC had decided that in fact, they had saved the day. It turns out QAnon didn’t invade Washington, because neoliberal cable news anchors successfully defended our country.
What Joshua Chamberlain was to Little Round Top, Chris Hayes was to QAnon Inauguration Day. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: This was the scene in Washington, D.C. today were two months after the attempted insurrection, the area around the Capitol still on lockdown because of worries over postings on QAnon forums about a plot for another violent attack today, March 4th.
Thankfully, nothing happened.
BRANDY ZADROZNY, NBC NEWS REPORTER: March 4th is a weird one. So hang on with me, but — and I will say that media coverage of how silly this all is made it seemingly less palatable for QAnon people over the last week.
It’s a lot, Chris. It always is with these people. Luckily, they stayed behind a computer.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: It totally makes sense. It turns out QAnon’s battalions look to MSNBC for their news coverage. It’s on in the QAnon break room.
And after watching Chris Hayes and Brandy Zadrozny flex their intellectual muscles, they realized they were totally outgunned. These MSNBC people are just too clever. So QAnon decided to stay home and fight another day.
Newsweek, for one was not buying that explanation. A reporter at Newsweek came up with this explanation. “QAnon theorists switched the date to March 20th after no Trump Inauguration, they call the March 4th date a false flag.”
Well, how did “Newsweek” know what QAnon was up to? Well, the story explained, because a man called Ken had quote, ” … told reporter Dave Weigel that Donald Trump will be inaugurated again on March 20.” Oh, it’s a Dave Weigel story. So, in other words, forget everything you heard about March 4th, Ken told Dave, the real invasion is going to be March 20th. So be afraid.
At some point, listening to these various explanations, the hysteria never ending, you’ve got to wonder how the Democratic Party and its minions in the news media are different from any other Doomsday cult.
They’re always telling us the world is going to end, whether it’s from global warming or a white nationalist insurrection, and when the world doesn’t end, they don’t even pause, and they don’t seem ashamed. They just change the date of the world ending.
It’s all pretty embarrassing, but they never seem embarrassed. Jeane Dixon used to do this. Remember her? She was a professional psychic. She had a column in hundreds of papers for decades.
Jeane Dixon once predicted the world would end on February 4, 1962. Did it end? No, actually it didn’t. Spoiler alert. The world didn’t end in 1962. And when it didn’t, Jean Dixon very cleverly, just extended the timeline, and then predicted Armageddon in 2020.
Lucky for Jeane Dixon, she was long dead by 2020 and she didn’t have to explain why the world still exists, not that anyone would have asked.
So, it looks like Nancy Pelosi is our Jeane Dixon, a batty old soothsayer who just happens to run the Congress. How long until that Ken guy who talked to Dave, the one with the “Newsweek” article winds up in an FBI bulletin justifying another indefinite extension of the occupation at the Capitol, more razor wire. Really? I don’t think these guns are powerful enough. Let’s bring in howitzers.
We’re not even joking. Remember, the FBI isn’t concerned with what’s actually going to happen. They’re concerned with what one or two random people write online or put on TikTok. And as long as what those people put on TikTok justifies more power for the people in charge, the FBI, their slave servants, will put it all in a terror alert and scare the crap out of the country to justify even more power for their bosses.
How do we know they do this? Because they’ve done it a lot. They did it in January, and then our media repeated it without any hesitation whatsoever.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: There’s a breaking news tonight. The FBI warning Americans armed protests are being planned for Washington, D.C. and all 50 state capitals in the days leading up to Joe Biden’s Inauguration next week.
CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Capitals all across America, all 50 state capitals under threat of armed protests in the run up to Inauguration.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The worry now is that the targets could expand along with the planning from the U.S. Capitol to all 50 state capitols to so- called soft targets, mirroring those attacked by jihadi terrorists.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: An internal FBI bulletin obtained by CNN now says the Bureau has received information indicating planning is now underway for armed –repeat — armed protests at all 50 state capitals and the U.S. Capitol leading up to President-Elect Biden’s Inauguration.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Armed — repeat — armed.
The dummies were terrified. They have a news alert for you. QAnon was coming to quote “all 50 state capitals and the U.S. Capitol.” That’s 51. OK.
According to the FBI, QAnon was about to go national, if not international. The sleeper cells were going to activate. And it wasn’t simply CNN that obtained the memo. Don Lemon had it, but he wasn’t the only one who had it. NBC had it, too. And NBC assured us that our state capitols were under imminent threat tonight.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A new FBI memo warning about the possibility of armed protests across all 50 state capitals ahead of Inauguration Day.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Starting perhaps on around the 17th of January, there’s going to be the potential for armed protests in state capitals.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh man, armed — armed — all 50 state capitals and the U.S. Capitol. According to the FBI bulletin. Whatever happened to those 51 armed protests? Well, they came down actually to just one guy, a dude called Mark Leggiero. You’ll see him here peacefully waving a flag at the state capitol in Albany, New York. Here he is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MARK LEGGIERO, TRUMP SUPPORTER: I’ve come out wanting to be part of the Patriot Party, join the supporters of Trump, you know, and I find myself kind of by myself out here, but I’ve come out here with nothing but peaceful intentions and to be peaceful. I wanted you know everything to be peaceful.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: You ever noticed 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 are not looting retail stores. They’re not shooting cops. No, that’s not them. It is the other people doing that.
That guy with the beard, good thing he wasn’t shot to death by the police like Ashli Babbitt. He might be, if he tried that today.
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.
It’s been going on for months. Watch an AP reporter called Jon Lemire deny this week that there were violent BLM riots this summer. This clip is real.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONATHAN LEMIRE, ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORTER: In June, these were non-violent protesters, racially mixed a lot of young people in the field by the Black Lives Matter movement, those outraged by the death of George Floyd, a black man killed under the knee of a white police officer in Minnesota.
There was no violence there.
And the Biden White House has made it clear that they think that the threat posed by domestic terrorism is equal to that posed by international terror groups like ISIS, which is such a sobering thought that fellow Americans could be perceived as such a dangerous threat to their country men and women.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: There was no violence in Minneapolis. Have you been there, Dumbo? We were there two weeks ago. Go to where George Floyd died, outside the market where he died on the sidewalk. It’s trashed. The whole area is trashed.
The police station down the road is still boarded up because the lunatics burned it.
Well, there was no violence. No, it was more like a Pepsi commercial. It was multiracial. They were holding arms.
No, it was QAnon who did it. It was QAnon who burned hundreds of buildings, killed more than 20 people, shot more than a dozen cops during the George Floyd riots.
Yes, it must have been QAnon, everyone knows that because QAnon, repeat after us now, 15,000 times, QAnon is the real threat.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor