‘I’m not lying. Period.’ Tucker appears on Redacted, opens up about the fallout over Jan 6 videos

“Just to decide, ‘I’m not gonna lie. I’m not gonna go along with these lies,’ is the most liberating thing you can do,” says controversial Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

As frantic liberals do their level best to portray Carlson as the Devil incarnate for his release of previously unseen videos from the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Carlson told friend, former co-worker, and the host of “Redacted,” Clayton Morris that the truth doesn’t just set you free, it makes you stronger — and that’s not a feeling Carlson is willing to relinquish, consequences be damned.


(Video: YouTube)

“Whether it leads to professional success or failure, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “It enhances you as a person. It makes you stronger. Every time you tell the truth, you become stronger. You feel this power coming into you.”

“By contrast,” he continued, “every time you lie, you get smaller and weaker and more afraid.”

And if there is one thing Carlson definitely is not, it’s “afraid.”

“Are you gonna fire me?” he asked. “Okay. Fine. Go ahead. I’m still not lying. Are you going to arrest me? Go ahead. I’m not lying. Period.”

It was with this sense of internal strength that Carlson approached the more than 40,000 hours of Capitol surveillance videos released to his staff by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

By showing the videos the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 didn’t think the American public needed to see — footage that showed, among other things, Capitol police escorting a calm and respectful Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. the “QAnon Shaman,” to the Senate doors — Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Carlson is “siding with the enemies of democracy.”

If Schumer thought his urgent calls for Fox to pull Carlson off the air would cause the host to genuflect or cower, he was sorely mistaken.

According to Carlson, Schumer’s opinion — and those of politicians like him — are “meaningless.”

“Being attacked by people I don’t respect, like Mitt Romney or Mitch McConnell or some other, you know, buffoon — Schumer! — I mean, it’s like it doesn’t even rate,” he told Morris. “It doesn’t even mean anything to me. It’s a foreign language.”

And language, Carlson notes, has been weaponized.

With insults and labels like “white supremacist,” “racist,” and “anti-vax,” words, he argues, have become “unmoored” from reality.

“It’s totally unmoored from physical reality or any variety of reality. I mean, words just aren’t tethered to real things at all,” he said. “And I love words, and, of course, I use words as you do, for a living. That’s what I do is work with words.”

“I think they have inherent power,” Carlson continued. “I respect that power. I think words are the most powerful thing in the universe, which is why despots try to control them.”c

Carlson — whose son was actually working in the Capitol on Jan. 6 and heard the shots that killed protestor Ashli Babbitt — says he began asking for the unseen videos “since the first week.”

Despite having been “highly, highly critical” of Kevin McCarthy “ever since I’ve been on TV,” he believes the speaker chose him to review the tapes “probably because I asked.”

“I think we’re the only people who asked,” he added.

He stressed that “no one got in our way, including the Capitol Police who later denounced us.”

“We ran all of our footage by Capitol Police before putting it on TV, and said, ‘just to be clear, you are saying this could be a security risk. Is it a security risk?'” he explained. “And only in one case he said, ‘we don’t want you to show the details of this door,’ so we blurred the door.”

“I announced that on the air,” he added. “That’s the only change we made, but we vetted this.”

“We had full cooperation from Capitol Police and from the speaker’s office,” he recalled. “But what we couldn’t do, which is the main thing I wanted to do, which was show that there were FBI agents in the crowd, and there were. The FBI’s admitted that.”

“It’s obvious to me they played a pivotal role,” Carlson continued. “Ray Epps clearly was working for somebody. He was not a pure civilian. He encouraged violence. And then the January 6 committee and Adam Kinsinger and Liz Cheney and Benney Thompson and Adam Schiff — they all defended him. He’s their friend. What? He’s not an insurrectionist. He’s an ally.”

“Like, explain that,” he said. “It violates common sense.”

But, in an effort to be “responsible,” Carlson chose not to identify other suspected government agents in the crowd — “guys with earpieces breaking things and then running away when they’re filmed” — because face-recognition software was not available to his team, and he did not want to falsely accuse anyone he couldn’t verify for himself, “because you really could get someone in trouble.”

However, he stated, “I know what’s going on here. A lot of this was clearly influenced by federal agents or informants. It was.”

“From my perspective,” Carlson said, “the core claims about January 6th were a lie. It was not a ‘violent insurrection,’ ‘a deadly insurrection.'”

“It was a violent political demonstration,” he continued, “one of many in the year in which it took place. From January of 2020 to January of 2021, there were a lot of violent political demonstrations, including one at the White House, where police were injured.”

“So, if we could kind of leave it there and stop lying about it,” he said, “I’m not defending vandalism or hooliganism or violence… just don’t tell me it’s the same as 9/11.”

“If you start talking like that,” Carlson said, “if you start lying to me, I’m gonna push back.”

You can watch the entire 41-minute-long interview on “Redacted” here.

Melissa Fine

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