The Left Is Right To Fear Tucker Carlson

The news broke last week that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given Tucker Carlson of Fox News access to thousands of hours of surveillance video from the day of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

Naturally, this has led to panic on behalf of the usual suspects – the leftist mob who are not outside the Capitol but within its halls. These petty tyrants think only they should have access to information – and control its release.

First up was Rep. Bennie Thompson, the former chairman of the House Select Committee on January 6, who could have released the footage any time he wanted during the 18 months when he was supposedly seeking the truth.

His statement was typical of the smears progressives employ to kill the messenger before the message can get out. You know the type. Just think back to the phony claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “Russian information operation” and the accompanying attacks on the New York Post for trying to get the laptop’s incriminating information to the public.

Thompson’s statement suggested that providing the footage to Carlson created “significant security concerns” and said Carlson “routinely spreads misinformation and Putin’s poisonous propaganda.” Not to be outdone, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and known liar Adam Schiff, called Carlson a “right-wing propagandist” and “a man who spews Kremlin talking points.” The California Democrat was joined by fellow select committee member Jamie Raskin of Maryland who smeared Carlson again as a “Pro-Putin journalist.”

How did one of America’s top journalists become a Putin puppet? Well, to decipher that, you have to go back at least to the 2016 campaign and the two years after, when the New York Times and Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for making up stories about how Donald Trump was either a willing partner of Russia or an unwitting stooge. Carlson never bought into the hoax. He was exposing the Democrats’ narrative as the cynical nonsense it was, and therefore he had to be destroyed.

Then when he asked hard questions about the war in Ukraine, Carlson became an enemy of the national security state – yes, the same national security state that President Eisenhower warned us against as long ago as 1961. Unfortunately, the national security state now controls most of the national media, and the pro-war forces don’t like not being able to control Carlson, so they have to attack him endlessly. His coup in obtaining access to the Jan. 6 footage is just the latest opportunity.

You can be sure that the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC will do everything they can over the next week to smear Carlson for having the temerity to actually allow the American public to make our own judgments about what the footage shows – and reach our own conclusions about why Nancy Pelosi hid the Jan. 6 footage for two years.

Instead of condemning Carlson and Speaker McCarthy, all loyal Americans should be thanking them for deciding that “we the people” ought to be trusted with the facts, not spoon-fed them selectively. Heck, the Democrats didn’t even think we could be trusted with knowing how much surveillance video existed. For months, we have been told there were 14,000 hours of raw footage, but now we find out it is actually as much as 44,000 hours. Did anyone on the Jan. 6 committee even try to wade through that footage to see if it confirms their pre-established narrative of an armed insurrection? Or were they afraid of what they would find?

Whatever they thought then, it is obvious what they think now – that it will be dangerous for the American public to see what really happened. And until the footage is aired on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” there’s no guarantee we will see it. You can be sure that Democrats in the House will be working overtime to keep that from happening, just as Democrats in the White House worked feverishly to convince Twitter and Facebook to suppress Hunter’s damning laptop. The common thread always seems to be that anyone opposed to Democratic Party politics is a Russian stooge or a Putin puppet.

When I heard those criticisms of Tucker Carlson, it reminded me of a similar canard used against another journalist many years before, a journalist who like Carlson was unafraid of entrenched power and who stood up for American principles at every opportunity.

That journalist was Edward R. Murrow, who exposed the anti-American demagoguery of Sen. Joseph McCarthy at a time in the 1950s when most members of the media – like most citizens of the country – were terrified of being labeled a Communist if they didn’t carry a torch for McCarthy’s witch hunt.

Murrow’s program “See It Now” was noted for fearless journalism, and the March 9, 1954, episode entitled “A Report on Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy” was the high-water mark of Murrow’s career, leading to the eventual condemnation of McCarthy by the Senate.

Being a fair-minded journalist, Murrow offered McCarthy a full episode of “See It Now” to respond to Murrow’s report. In that response, McCarthy resorted to the same name-calling tactics that Thompson, Schiff, and Raskin used last week in attacking Carlson. The only difference was that McCarthy smeared Murrow, the most reputable journalist of his day, as a Communist rather than a tool of Russia, though the difference is mostly academic when you think about Putin’s past.

McCarthy attacked Murrow as “a symbol, a leader and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual Communists and traitors” and claimed that Murrow, “as far back as 20 years ago, was engaged in propaganda for Communist causes.”

Most significantly, McCarthy dressed up in the mantle of a defender of freedom just as the members of the Jan. 6 committee tell us they are defenders of democracy. He proclaimed that his wish to humiliate, harass, and lock up anyone who had ever spoken a kind word about communism was to ensure that “We Americans live in a free world, a world where we can stand as individuals, where we can go to the church of our own choice and worship God as we please, each in his own fashion, where we can freely speak our opinions on any subject, or on any man.”

So, too, do the Democrats in charge of the Jan. 6 committee proclaim that they are defending democracy against those who have different opinions about an election, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who can apparently be locked up for years without trial. But if democracy needs defending, it is not from protesters, but from those who believe only their truth can be spoken, only their narrative can be heard.

Like Murrow, Tucker Carlson can be counted on to follow the facts, and for that reason he is indeed dangerous – not to democracy, but to demagogues.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.