Tucker Carlson is a liar. We know that as a fact both from his private texts and what his own defense lawyers have argued. So when newly crowned House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Carlson—and only Carlson—access to the Capitol’s raw security footage from Jan. 6, it felt politically shameless at best, and nefarious at worst.
Alas, for both men, it has not gone according to plan. Fellow Republicans have questioned the footage decision and said the portrayal of Jan. 6 as a peaceful protest is “just a lie.” And while Carlson is sometimes effective at the lies he tells, he has seemed out of his element with these specials, his strident act showing signs of strain as he attempted to course-correct the conclusion the majority of the country has drawn about Jan. 6.
Still, something about the reaction to Carlson’s rickety narrative has felt a little off to me. I’ve now watched all of his whitewashing specials, and though his narration is irritating and full of falsehoods, the video footage he’s dwelled on does accurately reflect what I witnessed on Jan. 6 myself. I personally followed people from the Trump rally at the Ellipse and into the Capitol. By the time I got there, it had already been breached. The lawn was swarming with MAGA hats and Pepe flags. The Capitol police officers I saw were overwhelmed, standing near the entrances of the building looking helpless as people squeezed in to see the inside of the building for themselves. In one sign of some of the crowd’s lack of sharpness, I distinctly remember one person calling out, “We took the White House!”
Carlson had this to say about the rioters: “The crowd was enormous. A small percentage of them were hooligans. They committed vandalism. You’ve seen their pictures again and again. But the overwhelming majority weren’t.” He added, “They take cheerful selfies, and they smile. They’re not destroying the Capitol. They were peaceful.” Carlson is half right about this. In my own initial dispatch, I wrote, “They were having fun, entertaining themselves. The priority seemed to be to have their friends take selfies with them inside the Capitol.” I saw a lot of people who treated the insurrection like a party. Carlson’s special does show some of the footage we’ve seen of the violence, the breaking of the doors and windows, the smashing of weapons over the heads of Capitol police officers. I saw that too. But he mostly shows what else I saw—people who followed a powerful lie to its logical conclusion, and seemed surprised and thrilled by how far their fellow deluded Americans had taken their “protest.”
It’s the conclusions that Carlson attempts to draw from this that expose his charade: “They were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” he said. We can debate whether or not someone who forced his way into the Capitol and lit up inside was “peaceful”—that was one of the few things I saw a police officer actively try to stop that day—but there is not a real debate about whether these people were insurrectionists. Even the people who treated the riot like a MAGA carnival, and there were a lot of them, were attempting to undermine the transfer of power. They also enabled the most violent actors to overwhelm the Capitol. Court documents include endless interviews and guilty pleas from people admitting to what they really sought: to prevent Joe Biden from taking office and reinstall Donald Trump as president. Some might not have initially realized that what they did amounted to an insurrection—many admitted as much in court—but that’s what it was. It’s exactly what the footage shows, and it’s a part of this story worth understanding clearly.
Carlson also made a big show of his “exclusive” interview with Tarik Johnson, a former Capitol officer who has actually been interviewed before by NPR. The House’s select committee on Jan. 6 did a fine job of connecting larger dots, drawing a straight line from the Stop the Steal rhetoric through to the insurrection. But though it interviewed Capitol police officers, it skipped an interview with Johnson, who was pictured that day wearing a MAGA hat. “The frontline officers and supervisors were not prepared at all,” Johnson said on the air. He told Carlson he asked leadership for direction after the Capitol was breached. “I got no response,” he said. (He said that he used the MAGA hat to avoid being assaulted by the crowds of rioters himself; the Capitol police have denied no one responded to Johnson.) Johnson offered seemingly sincere answers to Carlson’s leading and partisan questions, and gave Carlson’s audience a fair representation of the riot: “They focused on Donald Trump, not the failures of the Capitol police,” he said of the committee. “Some people there had planned on being violent. Some people may have turned violent after what they were going through. I think people wanted to support their president. Some of those people just wanted to support him, and some of those people didn’t commit violence, and some of those people didn’t plan on it.”
There are jump cuts in the interview, and it’s unclear whether or not this was Johnson’s full response. But at least those words are accurate—I talked to several people for whom the day’s events were clearly a surprise. That doesn’t change a thing about their involvement. I previously wrote about the level of helplessness I saw in the Capitol police that day, how the 140 officers injured and one dead cannot be explained away as simple unpreparedness, given what we know about the intelligence that something like this could happen. The House committee did a riveting job piecing together much of the evidence. But in focusing mostly on Donald Trump, it did not give enough attention to the fact the Capitol police could have prevented a breach if they weren’t so dismissive of the threat (in contrast to, say, Black Lives Matter protests months before). Johnson’s account helped make it clearer how the insurrection came to be. As Carlson crash lands his attempt to rewrite the Jan. 6 narrative, we can at least be clear-eyed about that.
