I’ve got a bad feeling this story may slip off the radar in the coming weeks, but it would be a travesty if it does. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to leak 40,000 hours of January 6 Capitol footage to right-wing extremist and Fox media personality Tucker Carlson is a big, big deal — both in terms of providing a preview of further corrupt behavior sure to come from the newly-empowered Republican leader, and in terms of what it says about the GOP’s obsession with re-writing the events of January 6.
As The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent describes, Tucker Carlson is likely to cherry-pick and otherwise distort this ill-gained footage in order to advance right-wing ideas that January 6 wasn’t an attempted coup. Taking direct aim at GOP claims that the party is simply aiming at transparency, Sargent writes, “But if Republicans wanted transparency, why would McCarthy grant access to only Carlson? What makes McCarthy’s decision odious is the granting of special access to a propagandist with a history of serial deceptions about the attack.” Indeed — McCarthy’s selection of Carlson as his interlocutor annihilates any contention that he made this move in anything remotely resembling the public interest.
Columnist Will Bunch points out that behind McCarthy’s abuse of power lies the far right’s efforts since January 6 to recast the events of that day as something other than a physical assault on the Capitol. For instance, Carlson has claimed that the assault actually was “some type of “false flag” operation in which outside provocateurs — maybe FBI informants, or members of “antifa” — goaded peace-loving Trump supporters into entering the Capitol.”
From this perspective then, McCarthy’s action is best seen, as Bunch describes, as "extending and advancing a criminal cover-up of what really happened on Jan. 6, the date of an attempted coup against the U.S. government.” This is absolutely correct, and the case Bunch lays out is irrefutable (as well as a typically great read), but I’d go a step further by saying that covering up the attempted coup is not meaningfully distinguishable from helping advance its successor efforts.
After all, not only has the GOP largely committed to defending Trump since January 6 (including largely opposing his impeachment conviction and the salutory ban on holding public office it would have imposed on the former president), but has proceeded at the state level to implement voter suppression efforts and other corruptions of the electoral process to ensure a GOP presidential candidate won’t lose future elections. As I’ve written before, the coup attempt never ended, but rather has broadened into a lower-key but incredibly dangerous slow-motion insurrection that continues to this very day.
McCarthy’s release of Capitol Police video footage to a right-wing partisan is yet more evidence of this ongoing effort. Apart from providing a propagandist with fodder for a counter-narrative about January 6, the release apparently provides security risks for the Capitol, revealing as it does camera locations and other information. Indeed, this consideration may well stymie the Democrats from taking the obvious counter-measure of releasing the footage themselves to mainstream news organizations — a strategy that Sargent recommends. But as Sargent notes, Democrats are concerned about this very security issue, which they’ve already cited to attack Republicans for the footage leak.
This detail goes to the heart of what Democrats and the country’s majority are up against — Republicans simply don’t care about security issues at the Capitol, since they’re pursuing a larger anti-government crusade that sees such issues as secondary. From an even more sinister perspective, why would someone like McCarthy care about Capitol security when he’s now applying his considerable powers to covering up an attempted coup at the Capitol? The footage is already out there, and security is already compromised — as Democrats can’t do more harm on this front, they need to fight fire with fire by releasing the footage more broadly. At the same time, they should fully internalize the meaning of GOP willingness to prioritize its political goals over what should be bipartisan commitment to not making it easier for rioters to attack the Capitol in the future.
The larger lesson, though, should be staring Democrats in the face. The GOP’s continued obsession with re-writing January 6 reinforces how very dangerous the truth of that day is to the cause of right-wing politics. The events of that day and its aftermath have revealed the GOP to be an insurrectionist party not averse to using propaganda and violence to achieve anti-democratic ends. So long as a majority of Americans believe the United States should be a democracy, such complicity should be disqualifying for the Republican Party, rendering suspect every GOP politico who is not credibly seeking to take back the party from the religious extremists, fascists, and white supremacists who are now calling the shots in Congress and in many states.
In other words, the lesson here is that Democrats cannot cede the fight over January 6 to GOP revisionism. As Sargent notes of the right-wing media efforts to distort the meaning of that day, “Amid such supercharged information warfare, Americans’ memory of the Jan. 6 hearings can’t be relied upon to help them sort everything out.” Indeed — a naive belief that the revelations of the January 6 commission will somehow stand as an unwavering barrier to ceaseless GOP propaganda will only aid the coverup and the ongoing insurrection.
Instead, as I’ve written before, Democrats should view the events of January 6 as a skeleton key for communicating to the American people how badly the GOP has gone off the rails, and how January 6 is in fact a template for understanding ongoing GOP tactics and goals. From the election results denialism that Trump used to rally his troops at the Capitol, to the fake “solution” of GOP partisans taking control of election machinery in multiple states, to the racist incitement embraced by up-and-comers like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the GOP is a party that has doubled down on the grievances and lies that brought us January 6. No wonder Republicans like McCarthy don’t want to stop fighting the last war — it turns out that war never ended. How very convenient it would be if Democrats didn’t fight back, or convinced themselves that this is just a minor skirmish about history.