Tucker Carlson has been the most talked about media personality in America this week. The Fox News prime time host was given thousands of hours of footage from January 6th, 2021 at the Capitol and shared never-before-seen video clips to the nation.
Carlson was right to point out that many of these tapes should have been made public long before they appeared on his show. The biggest point I took from his reporting was more about the hypocrisy of the media, and the uniparty, “Get Trump” approach of the January 6th Committee, that was clearly nothing more than a partisan clown car.
And while it’s provided much content for talk radio this week, it also has been misinterpreted by some. Those who want to review Tucker’s tapes, also handpicked from thousands of hours of footage, and come away with the conclusion that this was just a bunch of hooligans who happened to stumble in the Capitol Building, who were “mostly peaceful”, are sounding a lot like MSNBC circa Summer 2020.
Remember the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd protests? Yeah, the ones where billions of dollars in damage occurred in 140 American cities across the country. Well, I want to make sure we don’t end up playing the same card as them.
And let’s drop the semantics. I know the Summer of Love, as some sympathizers called it, was far worse in scale than January 6th. But if we’re going to try and walk the line of insinuating that Tucker’s tapes suggest the day was “mostly peaceful” then we cede all ground to the left on the issue of violence, property damage and law and order.
And there’s no reason for us to do that.
Granted, there are still many unanswered questions around January 6th. If we had an honest, bipartisan January 6th Committee, we may have gotten some of those answers. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet. But the notion that the bulk of Americans, heck the bulk of Republican voters, are living through Joe Biden’s presidency and thinking long and hard about the events of January 6th, 2021, is simply out of touch.
That might be the case in MAGA-ville, it’s not in Realville, to quote the great, late Rush Limbaugh. And I say all this as an enthusiastic two-time Trump voter. The “MAGA bubble” is becoming everything they rightly criticized the liberal press of being: out of touch.
Americans are hurting economically. We’re hurting culturally. Socially. We’re more divided than ever, despite Biden’s predictably empty promises on the campaign trail about unity. America is in decline. And you’ll be hard pressed to find a single thing Joe Biden has done to make it better.
The battle for the future of America is bigger than a few unsympathetic goobers who decided to waltz into the Capitol through a broken door or window on January 6th, 2021.
If the broader point some want to make is about corruption in our oversized government bureaucracies, along with the media’s wild hypocrisy around the day, and how they still use it for political purposes to this day, that’s a worthy conversation to have. And that will only be fixed by a Republican winning the White House in 2024, however this issue won’t help Republicans get themselves back in control of the executive branch.
But to view this through the lens of, “Well, that day wasn’t actually that bad”, is a loser argument for the vast majority of Americans, and becomes a talking point no better than CNN’s “Fiery, but Mostly Peaceful” headlines from 2020. Good riddance to both.
Pete Mundo is a weekly columnist for Barrett Media, and the morning show host and program director for KCMO in Kansas City. Previously, he was a fill-in host nationally on FOX News Radio and CBS Sports Radio, while anchoring for WFAN, WCBS News Radio 880, and Bloomberg Radio. Pete was also the sports and news director for Omni Media Group at K-1O1/Z-92 in Woodward, Oklahoma. He’s also the owner of the Big 12-focused digital media outlet Heartland College Sports. To interact, find him on Twitter @PeteMundo.
