Brianna Keilar smashed to smithereens Tucker Carlson’s refusal to admit that the MAGA sedition riot at the Capitol was anything more than a “political protest that got out of hand.”
January 8, 2021

Unable to defend the MAGAites and their cult leader Donald Trump, Carlson has tried to deflect by making the critics and the media the real villains.

CARLSON: What happened yesterday, they're telling us, wasn't simply that a political protest got out of hand after the president recklessly encouraged it. That is in fact what happened, but it's not what they're saying. Instead, they're calling it domestic terrorism. CNN describes it as an insurrection. Today, CNN unveiled a Soviet-style enemies list to make it a little easier to find all those Trump supporters and then destroy them.

Keilar quoted from Merriam-Webster and aired video (“since this guy pretends not to understand big words”) to show that yes, indeed, the armed takeover of the Capitol this week was an insurrection and sedition, “incited by the president calling his supporters to action.”

But what’s especially despicable about Carlson’s whitewash of the MAGA insurrection is how it compares to his demonization of Black Lives Matter protests. Keilar brought receipts:

CARLSON: It’s BLM and antifa, crazed ideologues, grifters, criminals, antisocial thugs with no stake in society, nothing better to do than to hurt people and destroy things.

These are not protests. This is not about George Floyd. This is not about systemic racism, whatever that is. America is not a racist country. They flood the streets with angry young people who break things and they hurt anyone who gets in the way. When they want something, they take it.

They’re the armed militia of the Democratic party. They’re working to overthrow our system of government. They're trying to put themselves in power. That's all obvious now.

Then she pounced. Here’s the shot.

KEILAR: Tucker Carlson rolls his eyes at the idea of systemic racism, at white privilege, but perhaps he should roll those eyes on over to a mirror. It's entirely fantastical to think that crowds of Black or Brown Americans would have been treated as the mostly white insurrectionists at the Capitol were on Wednesday. He doesn’t treat them equally.

Yes, looting is criminal behavior punishable under the law. But what we saw on Tuesday is so much more than that. And saying otherwise is false equivalence. To liken the siege on the Capitol to the violence and property damage during the summer of Black Lives Matter is to ignore that this is the United States Capitol, the seat of government, at a moment in time when the vice president is presiding over a joint session of Congress, both the House and Senate present, as they were in the process of making Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election, a fair election, official.

This isn't a Target store. This isn't a statue. This is the Capitol, supposedly one of the most secure buildings on earth.

Since he needs things explained to him in pictures, here is one. An insurrectionist parading a Confederate flag through the Capitol, the inaugural appearance there of this symbol of the American states that tried to secede from this nation under the mantle of slavery, based on the belief that Black people were inferior to white people and it was God's will to enslave them.

And the chaser:

KEILAR: When Tucker Carlson was arguing against the renaming of military bases named after Confederate generals and against the tearing down of Confederate statues, he said, quote, a country is the sum total of its history, good and bad. He said, quote, eliminating the past leaves us unable to say who we are. Well, he's trying to eliminate the present and he is spoon-feeding it to millions of hungry viewers who tune into his show. Healthy societies do not destroy their own history, he said last summer, but what he didn't cop to is that he is part of the illness, a propagandist, a liar, a parasite.

Brava!

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