TUCKER CARLSON'S JANUARY 6 REPORTING IS JUST A CALCULATED WAY TO MAKE HIS AUDIENCE FEEL PERSECUTED

Why did Tucker Carlson want access to the January 6 footage?

Did he think he'd emerge with new scoops and exclusives? Of course not. He isn't stupid. He knows that the established narrative of that day is accurate. Carlson wanted to slap a new coat of paint on his own well-worn narratives: that the insurrection was peaceful; that Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed as part of a mob trying to bust down a door, was an innocent martyr; that Ray Epps was an agent provocateur paid by the FBI to encourage violence and discredit the Trump movement.

So what was the point? It was to say, Nyah nyah -- I have the footage and you don't, and of course I'm going to deploy it irresponsibly. It was to make decent people angry, so he and his degenerate audience can have the satisfying thrill of feeling that everyone else in America hates them.

Carlson got exactly what he wanted. Predictably, Chuck Schumer and January 6 committee member Adam Kinzinger are outraged -- but so are several Republican senators:

A handful of Senate Republicans on Tuesday pushed back on conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson after he characterized the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as “mostly peaceful chaos,” with Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina blasting those remarks as “bullshit.”

... Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota conservative, said he was in the Capitol on Jan. 6 and firmly rejected Carlson's portrayal of that day as “some rowdy peaceful protest of Boy Scouts.”

“I think that breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the United States Capitol against the borders of police is a crime. I think particularly when you come into the chambers, when you start opening the members' desks, when you stand up in their balcony — to somehow put that in the same category as, you know, permitted peaceful protest is just a lie,” Cramer said.

The Capitol Police are angry.

US Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger on Tuesday ripped into Fox News host Tucker Carlson over his commentary about footage from the January 6, 2021, insurrection that he aired Monday night....

“Last night an opinion program aired commentary that was filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack,” Manger wrote in an internal department memo obtained by CNN, adding that Carlson’s show didn’t reach out to the police department “to provide accurate context.”

“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments,” Manger said.

The family of a dead officer is angry:

The family of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who was attacked and injured during the January 6 insurrection and died the day after, has issued a damning statement denouncing Fox Corporation’s decision to air cherry-picked video portraying the attack on the Capitol as largely peaceful and reframe the events the led to Sicknick’s death.

“The Sicknick family is outraged at the ongoing attack on our family by the unscrupulous and outright sleazy so called ‘news’ network of Fox News who will do the bidding of Trump or any of his sycophant followers, no matter what damage is done to the families of the fallen, the officers who put their lives on the line, and all who suffered on Jan 6th due to the lies started by Trump and spread by sleaze slinging outlets like Fox,” the Sicknick family’s statement begins.

Carlson's audience doesn't really hate everybody in the world of politics. They claim skepticism about Republicans as well as Democrats, but they always vote GOP. They say that Fox News has sold out, but they keep watching it. Nevertheless, they like believing that it's them against the world. Carlson delivered that pleasing sense of persecution.