Practically within minutes of January 6, the Democrat establishment, both politicians and the media, had their narrative in place: It was a violent insurrection that justified the biggest FBI manhunt in history, saw Democrats conduct a kangaroo congressional hearing to cement the narrative, deprived hundreds of people of their constitutional rights, and cowed Biden’s opponents into silence lest they too be accused of “insurrection.”
For those same two years, the Democrat establishment resisted making public 14,000 hours of video footage showing J6 events in and around the Capitol, claiming that to do so was too dangerous. Now, though, with Kevin McCarthy having made the footage exclusively available to Tucker Carlson, the media are singing a very different tune.
One of the sure things about Democrats is that they firmly believe that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…. With consistency a great soul simply has nothing to do.” Or, put another way, when you’re a narcissist, the one consistent point when it comes to “truth” and “narrative” is that both must always serve your needs. (I’ve never had a high opinion of Emerson, and I have a very low opinion of Democrats.) Nothing shows that more clearly than the “turn on a dime” response in the media regarding the 14,000 hours of video.
For the past two years, the media have insisted that the 14,000 hours of video footage are irrelevant and that making the footage public would permanently endanger those who work (and posture) in the Capitol. Even more disgracefully, the DOJ has had the same attitude, refusing to make exculpatory footage available to J6 defendants and doing so selectively only when the courts applied force.
However, when it comes to footage that advances the narrative, the DOJ and the media have been thrilled to squeeze out a little here and there. A few months after events on January 6, the media became positively orgasmic when the DOJ released small, carefully curated snippets intended to show that a group of unarmed people, mostly elderly, waving flags and taking pictures, was about to take down the entire American government.
Image: Ray Epps urging people into the Capitol. Rumble screen grab.
However, after two years of (1) the J6 Committee’s secret hearings and public passion plays, (2) the media’s “insurrection” drumbeat, and the (3) the Biden administration’s police actions, all coupled with the refusal to make the footage public, we know that there’s another story in those tapes. Indeed, the Revolver has done extraordinary work with publicly-available videos from outside the Capitol to show that there were figures in the crowd doing everything they could to cajole and force people into the Capitol, including breaking windows, removing barriers, and issuing orders—and the FBI and DOJ have protected all those black-clad people (or, in Ray Epps’s case, red-hatted person) from arrest or even questioning.
That all changed last week when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to his credit, handed all 14,000 hours of video to Tucker Carlson. It would have been better if he’d put them online for crowd-sourcing. I have a dim view of the alleged “security concerns” leftists raised to oppose the tapes’ publication. In any event, the information is sufficiently important that the Capitol police simply need to figure out new ways of doing security. But still, at least one person who is not in thrall to the narrative has the footage.
What’s amazing is the U-turn the media instantly made. After two years of studied disinterest or vocal opposition to the tapes’ release, writes John Nolte,
The same corporate media that never showed any interest in seeing the full police video taken during the mostly-peaceful January 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol are now demanding all 41,000 hours of it.
That’s not an exaggeration. CBS News, CNN, Politico, ProPublica, ABC, Axios, Advance, Scripps, the Los Angeles Times, and Gannett together sent a letter to Kevin McCarthy demanding that they, too, get to see the tapes. The justification is mind-boggling unless you accept the narcissistic worldview that they are never hypocrites because they always consistently serve their own immediate needs:
“Without full public access to the complete historical record, there is concern that an ideologically-based narrative of an already polarizing event will take hold in the public consciousness, with destabilizing risks to the legitimacy of Congress, the Capitol Police, and the various federal investigations and prosecutions of January 6 crimes,” wrote attorney Charles Tobin.
So the same people who, for two years, said it was imperative that we see only the J6 committee’s and DOJ’s carefully curated snippets of footage now insist that, “without full public access,” there is a republic-threatening risk “that an ideologically-based narrative of an already polarizing event will take hold in the public consciousness, with destabilizing risks to the legitimacy of Congress, the Capitol Police, and the various federal investigations and prosecutions of January 6 crimes.”
In other words, there was no risk when they were persecuting ordinary Americans. However, there’s an incredible risk when those ordinary Americans not only prove their innocence but also (and I’m guessing here) point to a massive government entrapment scheme. If my guess is correct, Congress, the Capitol Police, the FBI, and the DOJ deserve to be destabilized into the dustbin of history.
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