Tucker Carlson’s Naughty List

Tucker Carlson aired the second installment of his Fox News nightly program’s analysis of surveillance footage from January 6 on Tuesday night. Whereas the first installment focused on simply playing never before seen footage that completely discredits crucial pieces of the corporate media and January 6 Select Committee’s narratives about that day, the most powerful portion of Tuesday’s programming was Carlson’s monologue, which in part addressed the reaction to what Carlson aired the previous night.

“Last night, we aired video from surveillance cameras on Capitol Hill… We felt it was a public service to bring what we could to you. There was no justification for keeping the secret any longer and a powerful argument to be made that sunlight is always and everywhere the best disinfectant and in fact, because it was video evidence, it is to some extent self-explanatory,” Carlson said of the previously withheld footage. “Anyone could look at the tape and decide what he or she thinks of it. The tape we showed last night indicated very clearly that Capitol Hill police in some cases escorted protesters through the Capitol as if they were giving a tour.”

Yet, despite “running everyone by the Capitol Police to make certain that we didn’t imperil anybody,” Carlson’s report was met with condemnation by some of the most powerful players in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “urge[d] Fox News to order Carlson to cease propagating the big lie on his network,” on the Senate floor monday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, holding up a letter from U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger titled “Truth & Justice,” claimed, “it was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks.”

Other GOP Senators sided with McConnell too. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said it’s “really sad to see Tucker Carlson go off the rails like that.” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina simply said it was “bullshit.”

“From this, we learn two things,” Carlson said of the similar response of Schumer to McConnell and other GOP senators:

One: You’re getting close to what they really care about, and you have to ask yourself why? Why is it so important that they would degrade themselves by telling such obvious lies and calling for censorship? Why? What are they trying to protect? That might be worth exploring, and we plan to, and the second thing that we learn from this is that they’re on the same side. The Senate majority leader joins the Senate minority leader — Thom Tillis, Mitt Romney. They’re all on the same side. So, it’s actually not about left and right. It’s not about Republican and Democrat. Here you have people with shared interests, the open borders people, the people like Mitch McConnell, who are living in splendor on Chinese money, the people who underneath it all have everything in common are all aligned against everyone else, and that would include almost all news organizations in this country as well.

So, if you’re watching, this might be kind of interesting to keep a list, because one thing we learned today is that they’re all in agreement with each other. They kind of outed themselves. They sort of showed their membership cards and whatever club this is to the public, so keep a list. If you want to know who’s actually aligned, despite the illusion of partisanship, we found out today.

This is exactly right. I hinted at this yesterday in my summary of Carlson’s first installment, making appeals to the “uniparty” and its false “narrative surrounding the events of January 6.”

But what is the uniparty? The uniparty is an aisle-crossing class of political operators that coalesce to essentially function as the party of government itself. Like all political parties, this party of government serves its constituents before the country, and does so by entrenching the government’s power, thereby increasing the power of its individual constituents. This consolidation of government power occurs in both Democratic and Republican administrations, and is most commonly achieved through expanding and diffusing federal power in the administrative state, which decreases transparency and minimizes accountability for uniparty members that are elected officials, and policies of globalization that weaken the perceived underclasses’ ability to challenge their authority. 

The fundamental belief that holds these political actors together is the idea that self government is incompatible with the modern world; rather, the complexity of modern systems and their maintenance requires technocratic oversight from a static, insulated technocratic class. While they may squabble over strategy—left-leaning members of the uniparty suggest command and control should come predominantly from the administrative state whereas right leaning members say the private sector, given the proper incentive structures, will do the work more efficiently on the uniparty’s behalf—their ends are the same.

Which is why I said Monday that the uniparty is “so clearly reflected in the members selected to serve on the January 6 Select Committee.” Few families have benefited more from the uniparty’s work than the Cheneys, and when Adam Kinzinger lost his congressional seat, he found a soft place to land over at CNN.

But in instances such as this, the members of the uniparty show their hand. Schumer came out plainly in favor of censoring a news host—or at least pressuring the host’s bosses to do the censoring themselves. McConnell didn’t go that far. He appealed to the expert class, in this case the U.S. Capitol chief of police, to filter what your lying eyes may be telling you—never mind that one of the central questions at hand is how was the U.S. Capitol Police were poorly prepared on January 6.

“Keep a list,” Carlson implored his viewers Tuesday. We over at The American Conservative certainly are, and you should do the same.

The post Tucker Carlson’s Naughty List appeared first on The American Conservative.