Unlike some of my friends on the Right, I understand the criticism of Kevin McCarthy’s decision to give Tucker Carlson exclusive access to the footage of January 6. Partisans can manipulate video, especially 41,000 hours of it, and even Tucker presumably wouldn’t disagree that he’s a partisan. It’s easy to slice up video to serve the narrative you prefer, to enhance and manipulate it, and to add dramatic flourishes to increase its emotional impact.

And we can understand that by discovering what the January 6 committee did with the video, which appears to include all of the above. I missed this over the weekend, but Miranda Devine reported that the early word from Carlson’s review is how silent the source video was:

But when you see what Carlson’s team has put together over the past two weeks of combing through thousands of hours of video, you will be struck by how different the reality was inside the building that day compared to the J6 committee’s deceptively edited primetime dramas, produced by a former ABC News president for maximum emotional impact.

For instance, Carlson’s team says the J6 committee added audio to silent CCTV footage, inserting screams and other crowd mayhem sounds, to make it seem more ominous. The bookmarks on the video trove show the J6 committee had access to the same footage yet chose to show America only what suited its divisive narrative.

There’s no sugarcoating what happened that day: J6 was shocking and violent in parts. It remains a stain on the nation, but it was not an “insurrection” or a “terrorist” attack.

Sound effects? Really? The use of a former ABC News exec to package the video was well known prior to McCarthy’s grant of exclusive access to Carlson, but it was assumed that editing was limited to ensuring that the evidence fit the committee’s conclusions. (It should be the other way around, but that’s another issue.) Adding sound to silent surveillance video would be a bald-faced attempt at emotional manipulation, utterly dishonest, and would completely undercut the integrity of the committee.

If that turns out to be true, that is.

But if it is, it makes Democrats’ hyperventilation over Carlson’s access look like yet another case of projection, as John Hinderaker notes at Power Line:

Democrats have voiced a faux concern that there might be something suspicious about Carlson’s editing of the clips he shows on his program. Of course, there is no evidence of that. On the contrary, it looks as though the people who have deceptively edited January 6 footage are the Democrats, through their risible “January 6 Committee.”

The Democrats’ fake investigation of the January 6 demonstration has been shot through with dishonesty from the beginning.

Former J6 committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MI) denies trying to selectively edit the video. Kerry Picket cornered him yesterday to address the accusations after Carlson aired the video:

Mr. Thompson also said it was “not true” that the committee selectively edited 14,000 hours of security footage to make the riot inside the Capitol seem more chaotic and violent than it was.

The charges of deception made by Mr. Carlson on Monday’s program included adding sounds of screaming people; withholding video of deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick; and editing a clip to show Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, fleeing the Senate by himself, implying he was a coward.

One might take that claim at face value, except that Thompson made an even more laughable denial:

The Mississippi Democrat and former committee chairman also claimed he was unaware of Jan. 6 defendant Jacob Chansley, the “Q-Anon Shaman” who was sentenced to almost four years in prison.

“I don’t know who he is,” Mr. Thompson said of Mr. Chansley, the protester best known for wearing a fur-horned helmet, exposing his tattooed bare chest and wearing face paint.

Er … what? If the former co-chair of the J6 Committee doesn’t know who Chansley is or was, then he must have slept through most of the last two years. He’s literally the poster boy of the insurrection. The committee report published by Thompson mentions Chansley by name fifteen times, including this memorable passage:

At 2:36 p.m., the mob pushed through a line of USCP officers guarding the House Chamber.264 Rioters also entered the Senate Chamber.265 Within minutes, Jacob Chansley (a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman) entered the Senate Chamber, making his way to the Senate dais, where Vice President Pence had been presiding over the joint session. An officer asked Chansley to vacate the dais, but instead he shouted, “Mike Pence is a fucking traitor.”Chansley also left a note that read: “It’s Only a Matter of Time. Justice is Coming!”266 Surrounded by others, Chansley held a conspiracy-laden prayer session, saying: “Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”267 Other extremists, including at least one associate of the white nationalist “America First” movement, also sat in the Vice President’s seat.268

This, by the way, is why my sympathies for Chansley only cover the extent of the charges and sentencing he received, given the greater context of the tape. Carlson painted him a little too sympathetically, but the more-full look at the video raises questions about Chansley’s prosecution, which Jonathan Turley takes up today with the appropriate balance and perspective.

Thompson’s outright denial on Chansley is ludicrous. And it raises even more questions about what else Thompson and the other members of the cooked J6 committee are hiding about its film production and other aspects of its work. In this environment, it’s all too easy to believe that the panel went along with creative soundtrack additions to whip up political and media support of their narrative.

With that said, McCarthy would still have better served the public by allowing a broad grant of access to the video trove right off the bat. Contra Devine, I’m not sure I was struck about “how different the reality was inside the building that day.” What Carlson showed gave us — along with the previously released footage — a somewhat more complete view of what the reality was. And even then, there’s no denying that violence took place in the riot, mainly outside but also at times inside. At least some of the people who broke into the Capitol had the intent of hunting down lawmakers and stopping the constitutional process of formally (and entirely ceremonially) completing the presidential and vice-presidential elections. Chansley’s declaration certainly provides evidence for that. And for those who had that intent, that certainly looks insurrection-y, if a really stupid and futile attempt at one.

And on that basis, those “autonomous zones” of 2020 and beyond in major cities also qualify as insurrections, where armed revolutionaries declared their independence of US authority. Too bad the media didn’t cover those as insurrections, because if they had, the people within those zones might not have had to endure it for weeks and months.

Even so: Carlson has done some good work in at least raising awareness about the selective editing and narrative manipulation that the J6 committee conducted, and that the mainstream media both swallowed and amplified. Now let’s get a broader range of reliable journalists to really suss out the hundreds of hours of video and get enough debate and discussion for Americans to reach their own conclusions about the Capitol riot.

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