This article by the Huffington Post’s Christopher Mathias takes a deep dive into Tucker Carlson’s propaganda series “Patriot Purge.” I have been meaning to watch it but for some reason (I wonder what it could be?) I just haven’ been able to get myself to do it.
It’s a dangerous piece of work and the only hope is that because it’s on the Fox streaming network, most of the elderly MAGA’s haven’t seen it because they don’t know what streaming is.
The following twitter thread caputured a bit of it:
Tucker Carlson outright says that the people who went into the capitol on January 6 were "set up"
A lot of deranged commentary here but "legacy Americans" might be the most ridiculous way to say "white" I've ever heard.
Been thinking a lot about this specific Tucker monologue from 2020
Tucker's Jan. 6 special straight up argues that the riot could be a "false flag"
Fox really maxed out the action-movie-trailer-audio-effects budget on this thing.
Originally tweeted by nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) on November 2, 2021.
Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge,” a revisionist history of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, clocks in at an easily binge-watchable 70 minutes, spread over three episodes. It’s produced with the aesthetics and narrative suspense of an action thriller. The good guys are the “patriots” who stormed the Capitol. The bad guys are those in the media and government who are persecuting them. “The left is hunting the right,” Carlson warns his viewers.
It is the most nakedly fascist piece of propaganda Carlson has ever produced. And it comes at a dangerous moment: The insurrection is on its way to becoming as noble an enterprise as the Boston Tea Party for large parts of the American right.
[…]
Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” described “Patriot Purge” as “an overarching fantasy about the insurrection that goes like this: It was not an insurrection,” she wrote for CNN. “To the extent there was violence, it was stirred up by members of the government and left-wing agitators. All of it was orchestrated so that the full force of federal law enforcement could be unleashed against Trump supporters, marking them as enemies of the state.”
Carlson’s insurrection agitprop sparked a similar wave of warnings from many experts on fascism and misinformation: Propaganda like this, they argued, could one day render the shocking events of Jan. 6 as a mere preview of the right-wing violence to come.
A White Nationalist Whitewash
Tucker is really just doing InfoWars style “they’re coming for you, viewer” but with a bigger budget
Matthias writes:
“Patriot Purge” is deeply conversant with far-right mythologies about Jan. 6 and broader fantasies about supposed persecution of far-right groups by the federal government. That’s not surprising, considering who worked on the series: Carlson co-wrote “Patriot Purge” with a man who previously produced white nationalist movies, and the series counts two white nationalists among its protagonists.
Carlson’s narration is shot through with coded terminology: In the first episode, he describes the arrest of Jan. 6 rioters as the precursor to a “purge” of “legacy Americans.”
Darren Beattie is the first person interviewed in “Patriot Purge,” warning the viewer that “the domestic war on terror is here. It’s coming after half the country.”
Beattie made headlines in 2018 after he was forced out of the Trump White House when CNN revealed he’d spoken at a white supremacist conference. Since then, Beattie has openly allied himself with white supremacists — most notably Nick Fuentes — frequently promoting them online. He once tweeted, “If white people are targeted as a group, they must learn to defend themselves as a group.”
None of this background is mentioned in “Patriot Purge.” Instead, Carlson says simply: “Darren Beattie, of Revolver News, is one of the few in media who’s done real reporting on what actually happened on Jan. 6.”
Elsewhere, “security analyst” J. Michael Waller is trotted out in Episode 1 to make the baseless claim that the violence on Jan. 6 was a “political warfare operation” orchestrated by “agent provocateurs.” Though Carlson mentions that Waller works for the Center for Security Policy, it goes unmentioned that the organization is one of the foremost anti-Muslim groups in the country.
Sliding these extreme voices into the show with the patina of expertise is in line with how Carlson routinely smuggles white nationalist talking points into the mainstream via his nightly cable show. For “Patriot Purge,” he had some extra help
The co-writer for the docuseries is a man named Scooter Downey, who directed movies for white nationalists before joining Fox Nation as a writer. As reported by The Daily Beast, Downey directed a documentary called “Crossfire” starring Lauren Southern, the Canadian alt-right activist best known for teaming up with European neo-fascists on a cruel mission to stop boats from rescuing refugees stranded in the Mediterranean.
Downey has also directed a live-action movie called “Rebel’s Run” based on a comic book written by Theodore Robert Beale, aka Vox Day, an alt-right artist who once wrote that “Western civilization” rests on “white tribalism, white separatism, and especially white Christian masculine rule.”
Interview With An Insurrectionist
There’s an awkward, ultimately untenable tension at the heart of “Patriot Purge”: The core argument that Jan. 6 might have been a “false flag” operation orchestrated by the left is advanced by deeply unreliable narrators — the very people who planned the rally or took part in the Capitol invasion in the name of Trump and who have a vested interest in absolving themselves of that day’s events.
The series is also desperate to exonerate all of the Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, and the wider MAGA movement, for the horrifying violence of the siege. It was all a “set-up,” Carlson says. He blames antifa, agent provocateurs and the FBI separately for orchestrating the attack, all as a pretext for what he portrays as a brutal state crackdown.
Elijah Schaefer, a host for the far-right conspiracy site Blaze TV, declares at one point in “Patriot Purge” that “January 6th was a honey pot,” using the term for a trap set up by law enforcement. “They’re going to use this event for every bit of political persecution they can milk out of it.”
But Schaefer himself entered the Capitol building on Jan. 6, tweeting out videos and cheering on the riot. “BREAKING: I am inside Nancy Pelosi’s office with the thousands of revolutionaries who have stormed the building,” he tweeted. “To put into perspective how quickly staff evacuated, emails are still on the screen alongside a federal alert warning members of the current revolution.”
Schaefer later deleted the tweet and other posts that implicated him in the riot, claiming to have been inside the building as a reporter.
[…]
Something Worse Than Jan. 6
The billionaire owners of Fox Corporation — Rupert Murdoch and his son, Lachlan — would very much like you to watch this series, commercial-free, by subscribing to their digital streaming service Fox Nation for just $5.99 a month.
Produced as part of a contract Carlson signed earlier this year, “Patriot Purge” was designed to attract new subscribers to Fox Nation, which the Murdochs see as the future of their media empire. (It’s also a platform conveniently free of any pressure from advertisers who object to extreme political content.) That they are willing to peddle vile lies and bigotry for profit is not news. But Patriot Purge marks an escalation, even for the Murdochs, at an especially fraught moment in American history. (Fox News and Fox Nation did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
Nikki McCann Ramirez, a senior researcher at Media Matters, is one of the foremost chroniclers of Carlson’s extremism and lies. “Patriot Purge,” she wrote recently, is essentially a “repackaging” of the “InfoWars-style” conspiracy-mongering about Jan. 6 that he’s pushed on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” over the last year.
On his cable show, Carlson is mostly limited to talking into the camera, but in “Patriot Purge,” he gets to play with “lens flares, overwhelming graphic imagery” and a “sound effect budget big enough to make Michael Bay jealous,” Ramirez wrote.
The alleged “purge” targeting conservative Americans — thus far, mostly misdemeanor charges against hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol — is compared to “any kind of torture porn imagery Fox News could find in its archives,” Ramirez observed. “Viewers are treated to montages of waterboarding, terrorist attacks, an ISIS beheading, drone strikes, and even comparisons of the arrest of Jan. 6 rioters to de-Baathification in Iraq.”
Episode 2 ends with a video clip of someone being hung. The message is clear: this kind of state violence will be visited upon you, the good patriotic viewer, very soon, unless something is done.
None of the conspiracy theories the series peddles are true, of course, and fall apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny. But Hemmer argues that “Patriot Purge” is unconcerned with truth, despite Carlson’s claims to the contrary. Carlson told “Fox & Friends” the series was “rock-solid factually.”
“Patriot Purge,” Hemmer wrote, is “politically, historically and logically confused, but its point isn’t to make sense, or to stand up to critical scrutiny. The point is to convince watchers that the insurrectionists are victims and government is the enemy.”[…]
Ultimately, Carlson and Downey’s deliberate erasure of the extremism of the people in “Patriot Purge” could have dangerous consequences.
“In an environment in which the same right-wing ‘patriots’ who attacked the Capitol and condoned it afterwards have been shouting for a ‘civil war’ waged against their political opponents — and in which some of them are now wondering aloud ‘when do we get to use the guns’ so ‘we can start killing these people’— this kind of propaganda is akin to throwing napalm onto a bonfire,” wrote David Neiwert, author of “Alt-America: The Rise Of The Radical Right In The Age Of Trump” in a recent column for The Daily Kos.
Neiwert argued that the central message of “Patriot Purge” — that a tyrannical government is going to target, incarcerate and possibly kill conservatives — could lead to another Jan. 6, or something even worse.
“It is impossible to accept this message in total without taking it to justify violent mass action against the current government, or something like a police and military coup,” Neiwert wrote.
Yes, it is justifying violence. That’s obviously a central pillar of this extremist movement’s platform. I don’t see how anyone can dispute that at this point. This propaganda is just part of the larger effort by various far-right organizers and establishment opportunists to give a justification for it.