Democrats must respond to McCarthy’s full capitulation to MAGA
Democrats have loudly expressed outrage about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to grant Fox News’s Tucker Carlson exclusive access to surveillance footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Democrats say this will compromise security and enable Carlson to rewrite the day’s history with cherry-picked footage shaped into cleverly concocted propaganda.
But Democrats have a better response to the California Republican’s tactic than fulmination: They can access the footage themselves. They can either allow news organizations to view all of it or at least respond to any distortions Carlson might conjure up by making whatever footage is relevant available to outlets.
This would be smart politics, but it would also be good for the country. Carlson says his producers have gained “unfettered” access to about 44,000 hours of footage and already insists some of it does “contradict” what’s publicly known.
But Carlson has a track record of falsely depicting the attack as a “false flag” operation, absurdly portraying rioters as political prisoners, and pushing other distortions and lies. It’s obvious Carlson will selectively pick from footage to try to further obscure public memory of that day with confusion and agitprop. Democrats can’t let that go unanswered.
I had heard rumblings that the Senate majority would release the tapes to the public but nothing official. Sargent says the House minority could do it too:
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who served on the Jan. 6 committee, says strategic decisions should be left to Democratic leaders. But Lofgren told me, “Should Mr. Carlson try to distort, we would have the opportunity, I presume, to get information and rebut the distortions.”
Of course, Carlson’s threat to air footage might be pure grift. In this scenario, Carlson and Republicans are just throwing the base a fake sop in the form of advertised revelations to come.
Notably, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has been priming the base to think big things are afoot, tweeting that McCarthy’s decision means “the video tapes are coming.” The goal might be to create the impression that the official story of Jan. 6 is about to collapse. Following this, even nothingburger footage will be hyped by right-wing media as damning.
Democrats might be reluctant to respond to such a pathetically hollow gesture, instead preferring to let the Jan. 6 committee’s revelations speak for themselves. But at a minimum, Democrats should be prepared.
I’m not sure who could be considered a neutral arbiter these days. In the past you could ask retired judges or trusted media like the Shorenstein Center to do it but there really isn’t any agreed upon neutral source these days is there? So perhaps the Democrats should just do it themselves as Sargent suggests by being prepared to counter Carlson’s narrative.
Or, they could just release the tapes to all media and let the chips fall where they may. Allowing Carlson to cherry pick the tapes and put out a “report” similar to Elon Musk’s laughably partisan twitter files un-rebutted is not a good idea.