Ten minutes of dishonest fury, presented to an audience of millions

Ten minutes of dishonest fury, presented to an audience of millions

Every night Tucker Carlson is given an hour of airtime by his employer to say whatever he wants. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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By Philip Bump

National correspondent

December 15, 2021 at 11:03 a.m. EST

My original plan in considering Tucker Carlson’s monologue from his Fox News program on Tuesday night was to contrast his framing of the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his prior, multipart effort to cast the events of that day as part of a concerted federal plot. But listening to his program reminded me that this one particular dishonest hypocrisy is simply part of a pattern, even within the constraints of one show, of misrepresenting reality with the goal of accelerating his audience’s anger.

Every night, Carlson is given an hour of airtime by his employer to say whatever he wants. They give him more opportunities than that, of course, including time on their streaming platform. But it’s his nightly show that reaches the most people — more than 3.2 million on Tuesday of last week. He uses that platform to thread together surreal allegations and add more bricks to his narrative of a government hellbent on destroying God-fearing American patriots, knowing full well that there’s no counterweight to his doing so. Other outlets, including this one, will dismantle his claims, assertions that even Fox’s attorneys admit are not defensible as facts. But the pipeline from Carlson to his viewers is almost entirely unmitigated by third-party analyses or skepticism. He makes claims and they permeate.

So I decided to do something different. I took a bit over 10 minutes of his monologue and transcribed it. It is presented below — admittedly lacking the intonations and accompanying graphic that heighten the sentiments — with notes and corrections so that those who don’t watch his program regularly can see how it is constructed.

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As you read this, recognize two things. First, that articulating the flaws and gaps in Carlson’s rhetoric is categorically exceptional: 99 percent of the time his claims are uncontested. And, second, recognize that it’s like this five days a week, every week of the year.

Carlson began his Dec. 14 show by suggesting that the interest of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) in participating in the House select committee investigating the riot at the Capitol was born of pure political ambition. Cheney’s insincerity is central to one undercurrent to his show, that all of the focus on Jan. 6 is born of opportunism and a desire for power.

With that foundation, he began his discussion of the committee’s recent work; specifically, the release of text messages from Mark Meadows, who was President Donald Trump’s chief of staff on Jan. 6. You probably heard about those messages. A number of high-profile individuals, including Fox News pundits, contacted Meadows to urge Trump to push for the rioters to halt their siege, understanding that they were acting on his behalf. That it took Trump so long to make any statement or to try to curtail the violence is one of the issues under consideration by the committee. Was it apathy? Strategy? It’s unclear.

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Here, though, is how Carlson introduced the subject.

“The Jan. 6 committee has somehow awarded itself the power to seize the personal communications of its political enemies and then make them public. The argument’s really simple: Turn over your text messages or we’re going to send you to jail.”

“Let’s not lie about this, the point of this exercise is not to uncover crimes. The Jan. 6 committee hasn’t found any crimes and at this point will not find any crimes. The point is to harm and humiliate the people you disagree with politically, and that’s what they’re doing.”

The committee has subpoena power as part of its mandate as an investigatory body. It didn’t give that power to itself; the House did. You’re welcome to object to the existence of the committee, but it’s not as though this is some bizarre extension of its power. Nor is it the case that Meadows faces jail time for not turning over text messages. He may, however, face criminal contempt charges for failing to offer testimony to the committee after subpoenaed. That was the point of the committee (in the person of Cheney, its vice chair) releasing the messages: They revealed that Meadows was integrally involved in the effort to get Trump to act, something the lawmakers wanted to be able to question him about.

Carlson is right about one thing: The point isn’t to uncover crimes. It is, instead, to better understand how the attack happened and where the government failed in its response, as the resolution establishing the committee makes clear. What Carlson is doing is framing the committee as nefariously drifting from its unachievable mandate — a mandate that he invented.

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It took Carlson about 30 seconds to say that. It took me about five minutes to contextualize it. This is the imbalance.

Carlson stayed on this subject for a while. He noted that Cheney had presented the text messages, including ones from several Fox News anchors which, he said, Cheney took “special delight” in reading. But then he looped this idea into one of the themes he’s been hammering this year: The Biden administration and its allies are targeting regular-Joe Americans as some mixture of proto-terrorists and modern-day serfs.

“Now, before we get into the details of what is in those texts, just step back for a second and consider what we just saw. We now live in a country where none of your private communications are safe from the eyes of power-drunk politicians like Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney can harness the awesome power of the national security state to seize your personal text messages and then read them into the congressional record. And guess what? There’s nothing you can do about it, Mr. Citizen. We don’t care. So your texts, effectively your daily diary, now belong to Liz Cheney. And the question all of us, no matter who we voted for, have to ask ourselves is, do we really want to live in a country like that? Well, probably we don’t. Privacy isn’t just a nice thing to have. It’s not an ancillary concern. Privacy is morally essential. Privacy is a prerequisite for freedom. You can’t have liberty without privacy. And that, needless to say, is the whole point of the spectacle: To let you know that we don’t have freedom anymore and Liz Cheney is really in charge.”

You see the escalation here? Meadows’s text messages were subpoenaed, revealing that multiple outside actors were pushing Trump to do something when the president was doing nothing. That then becomes power-mad legislators are stealing your privacy! It’s deranged.

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Here’s the thing. Your personal messages can, in fact, be obtained by the government under a variety of auspices. In some cases, that’s understandable, when it’s part of a law-enforcement investigation for example. At times, this power has been abused. But Carlson here is pointing to a long-standing platform of American jurisprudence and insisting that it’s a slippery slope to the country’s destruction.

In private text messages on Jan. 6, Fox News hosts condemned President Trump’s response to the attack. In public, those same hosts deflected blame from Trump. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

Next, Carlson rose to the defense of his colleagues at the network, including hosts Brian Kilmeade, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. All three pushed Meadows to get Trump to act on Jan. 6. Ingraham’s message was the most revealing, exhorting Meadows to get Trump to do something as the rioters were “hurting all of us.” Yet, on her show that evening, she tried to downplay the scale of the riot and to suggest that somehow leftists were involved in it. Over the months that followed, all three hosts tried at different times to downplay the events of that day.

This is not how Carlson saw it. Before rising to the defense of his colleagues — who, he preened, simply showed that they always opposed rioting, regardless of focus — he declared that the release of the messages somehow proved that the committee was a sham.

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“But what’s extra amazing about what Liz Cheney just did — and this is the reason you know, this is a show trial, purely political and totally disconnected from reality, much less law — is that the text messages that she read yesterday were exculpatory. They didn’t make her case. They undercut her case.”

It’s not clear how this is the case. Because outside people were upset about the riot? Because they felt the need to urgently push Trump to act after seeing that he wasn’t? Okay.

Then Carlson made a remarkable set of assertions.

“Because she is a liar, Liz Cheney attempted to twist these texts into proof of some kind of conspiracy. Part of the insurrection story line, which, by the way, is getting very old. If Jan. 6 was an insurrection, we’ll believe anything, where’s the evidence of that? Has Liz Cheney shown that a single prominent Republican in the United States of America plotted to overthrow the government of the United States? Well, no, she hasn’t. Not one. As with the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse, Liz Cheney is proving the defendant’s case inadvertently, and of course, she’s lying. They all are the entire Jan. 6 committee is lying, and they’re not even lying very artfully.”

Again, Cheney was presenting the texts as evidence of Trump’s inaction. Meadows understood that; on Hannity’s show on Monday night, he insisted that Trump had, in fact, acted quickly that day.

But let’s stop and consider this line, which I will put in bold: “Has Liz Cheney shown that a single prominent Republican in the United States of America plotted to overthrow the government of the United States? Well, no, she hasn’t. Not one.”

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Well, Trump and his allies very explicitly and obviously plotted to seize power in the wake of the 2020 election, yes. They used months of dishonesty about “voter fraud” as a predicate for trying to block the counting of electoral votes and, as the riot unfolded on Jan. 6, used the time to cajole legislators to block that effort. Is there evidence that Trump explicitly sent violent actors directly into the Capitol with the aim of disrupting the count? No. Was there a plot to block the Biden administration from taking office? Yes, obviously.

Next, Carlson looped in some of the right’s favorite targets, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). He calls her “Sandy,” a college-era nickname that the right seized upon several years ago as somehow constituting evidence that she was exploiting her Hispanic identity.

“Repeatedly in just the last few days — nearly a year after it happened, the record is settled, we know the facts — Democrats have continued to claim, contrary to the facts, that many people were killed at the Capitol on January 6. Sandy Cortez, who has some kind of power in American society, wrote that, and we’re quoting. ’138 were injured, almost 10 dead’ in what she called ‘the terror attack’ on the Capitol. Meanwhile, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts told America that the insurrection, quote, ‘brought great trauma, injury and loss of life.’ Really, great loss of life? Who are all these dead people? Can you be a lot more specific, Ayanna Pressley, AOC, Jan. 6 Committee? No, they can’t. Because they’re lying.”

The tweet from Ocasio-Cortez was in late October and did overstate the death toll. Carlson continued on to point out that the only person intentionally killed that day was Ashli Babbitt, the Trump supporter who saw shot as she tried to enter an area of the Capitol through which legislators had been evacuated. Carlson had a prominent role in trying to cast Babbitt as a martyr.

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His claim about Pressley is interesting, though. She did, in fact, say those words, but she didn’t say there was “great loss of life.” She said there was great trauma. Carlson, knowing that many of his viewers would recognize the legislator’s name and politics, simply applied that descriptor to the rest of her statement to mock her, speaking as a photo of Pressley appeared beside him. “How can you trust a congressional committee that tells lies this obvious?” Carlson asked after his Babbitt aside, despite the fact that neither Ocasio-Cortez or Pressley sit on the committee.

“The White House has endorsed all of this,” Carlson claimed. “Joe Biden himself claims, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that Jan. 6 was an outbreak of white supremacy.”

To prove this point, he showed a clip of Biden speaking at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the dedication of the memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in D.C.

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The clip Carlson showed had Biden saying this:

“We’re confronting the stains of what remains — the deep stain on the soul of the nation: hate and white supremacy. … The violent, deadly insurrection on the Capitol nine months ago — it was about white supremacy, in my view.”

Here’s what was omitted.

“We’re confronting the stains of what remains — the deep stain on the soul of the nation: hate and white supremacy. You know, there’s a through line of subjugation and enslaved people from our earliest days to the reigns of radicalized terror of the KKK to Dr. King being assassinated. And [that through line] continues to be the torches emerging from dark shadows in Charlottesville, carrying out Nazi banners and chanting antisemitic bile, and Ku Klux Klan flags; and the violent, deadly insurrection on the Capitol nine months ago — it was about white supremacy, in my view.”

Carlson described Biden’s claim as being “just ugly race politics,” and that there was “no racial angle to Jan. 6.” There were, however, prominent white supremacists in the crowd that day, as well as a surfeit of racist iconography present. Nor is Biden alone in his argument. As I’ve written before, it’s useful for Carlson to suggest that the left calls everyone on the right a white supremacist in the same way that it’s useful for a wolf to bolster the idea that everyone in the meadow is a sheep.

Finally, the Fox News host got to the description of the riot that first piqued my interest.

“What was January 6th? Well, there was destruction of property, which we’re totally opposed to. But what motivated it? Why were all those people there? Well, for the most part, a year later, it’s very clear Jan. 6 was essentially what it appeared to be. Thousands of ordinary American citizens, voters, people who believe in our democracy far more fervently than Liz Cheney ever has, came to Washington because they sincerely believed democracy had been thwarted. They believed the presidential election was unfair, and they have a right to believe that.”

A few months ago, Carlson produced and starred in a three-part program on Fox’s streaming platform that sought to explicitly cast the events of Jan. 6 as a false flag operation by the government and those arrested for their involvement as victims, not culprits. The quote above comports with that bipartite presentation: There were lots of good people there who were naughty and broke windows, but who could blame them? They just got overwhelmed with their love for democracy.

And besides, Carlson continued, they were basically right!

“By the way, in many ways they were correct. The presidential election was unfair, and you don’t have to get into anything about voting machines to believe that. Consider the facts that we know. As Election Day approached, Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T shut down the Trump campaign’s ability to send text messages. And then Google — this has never even been reported, but it is widely known — Google prevented the Trump campaign from raising money over Gmail. There’s no precedent for that. The Trump reelection campaign lost millions in donations, and that was the whole point of it. So the most powerful companies on planet Earth — heavily regulated by the government, benefiting from government contracts — swung behind Joe Biden and tried to stop Donald Trump, the sitting president, in his tracks. Is that fair? Is that the democracy that Liz Cheney is always lecturing you about? Honestly, what’s the answer? These are legitimate questions.”

This is a not uncommon dance from Trump allies, pivoting from his nonsensical claims about fraud to something else that purportedly showed how the deck was stacked against Trump. In the abstract, it’s compelling: the “most powerful companies on planet Earth” working to block Trump’s election? Gosh. But then you stop for a moment — a pause Carlson never allows his viewers, of course — and you think about that assertion. Stopping text messages led to Biden winning by 7 million votes?

Then you learn, in this very paragraph, that this story is wildly overblown. For five days in July, the Trump campaign’s text-message system was inadvertently blocked by anti-spam measures. It then resumed. And that led to Biden winning, apparently. As for Carlson’s this-happened-and-everyone-knows-it-but-no-one-has-reported-on-it, I will trust you to evaluate that on its own merits.

At this point in his monologue, Carlson went back to his roots, suggesting that the failure of law enforcement to catch the person who’d planted explosive devices on Capitol Hill was suspicious in a it-was-a-setup sense. After all, they’ve “stopped talking about this person.” That’s not true, of course; the Justice Department released a slew of new evidence in September. But, as you may have noticed, reality is not a constraint for Carlson.

He then highlighted one of the key figures on the conspiratorial right, a man who purportedly encouraged Trump supporters to storm the Capitol and was accused of being a federal agent — though he was later identified by name and has neither been shown to have actually stormed the Capitol (warranting federal charges) or to have been linked to law enforcement.

Carlson seized the eternal shield of the conspiracy theorist: I am just asking questions.

“American citizens have a right to know the answer, but Liz Cheney won’t answer it. Why? We asked her to come on tonight and explain. She refused, of course, because she’s a coward. Most neocons are. But until Liz Cheney answers that basic question, there is no reason to play along with her charade. There are certainly no reason that any American citizen should even consider surrendering personal text messages to her or the Jan. 6 Committee. If they’re going to lie to us and hide essential information from the public, there’s no reason to participate, no matter what they say.”

There you go. Rationalization for obstruction of the probe, tied up in nonsense and obvious though covert appeals to partisanship. An insistence that viewers, too, are the targets of this probe and this purported abuse of power. It’s a clean bit of judo, parlaying Meadows’s clumsy efforts to keep Trump happy into a national effort to silence Republicans who are just sitting at home, watching Fox News and minding their business.

And it’s this every night. Every night. This cascade of accusations and world-ending conspiracies, of a democracy on the brink or already gone at the hands of the left. It’s unending and unchallenged. It’s unchallengeable, given how long it takes just to walk through those 10 minutes.

But it apparently keeps people watching.