Let's Watch Tucker Carlson's "Patriot Purge" and Wonder Just How Dumb Things Can Get
On a scale of one to ten, with one being "extremely dumb"
What was the January 6 insurrection? A violent mob? An attempted coup? An ill-conceived lashing out featuring a guy in animal skins who looked like a Village People reject called “The Shaman”?
Yes to all of that. But I struggle to get my head around the event; it was very bad, but how very bad? The mob was violent, and I’m against violent mobs across the board. But their chances of overturning the election were functionally zero.1 It’s also difficult to remain completely serious about an event with so many goofy elements; it would be hard to soberly assess the Battle of Little Bighorn if Custer had taken the field wearing a diaper and a Cat in the Hat hat, spent the moments before the battle trying and failing to do a cartwheel, and then hopped on a baby hippo and charged the Lakota line while yelling “I’ve got a boom boom in my pants so let’s hurry up and get to Sizzler!”
To aid my thinking about January 6, I looked to Tucker Carlson’s three-part special Patriot Purge. Patriot Purge is the series that caused long-time Fox News contributors Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes to quit in disgust. It’s also one of the shows that Fox is using to lure people to its new streaming platform, Fox Nation, which is the Murdoch empire’s attempt to be as Trumpy as Newsmax and One America News. I had to bite the bullet and sign up for a month of Fox Nation, except I couldn’t bring myself to use my own name, so I used the Paula Fox spambot sock puppet account that I created for an article last week. So, Fox Nation now includes this citizen:
