You already know Carlson, the man in the button-down shirt; the preppy turned propagandist who adopted extremism after his career as a moderate Republican failed; the living, breathing embodiment of the word cynic. Downey, a less familiar figure, is the director of previous documentaries, including Hoaxed, an apologia for the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich and other denizens of the online alt-right. Hoaxed was designed to provoke feelings of danger, anger, and mistrust around “the media.” Patriot Purge uses the same combination of violent, rapidly changing film clips, ominous music, and earnest “witnesses” to provoke feelings of danger, anger, and mistrust around the FBI, the U.S. military, the White House, the American government as a whole.
To comprehend the full scope of the conspiracy, viewers will have to watch all three episodes. But even in the first episode, the goals of this project are already clear. The point is to describe the events of January 6 as a false-flag operation cooked up inside the deepest layers of the American deep state—and thus to cast doubt on everything that will come out of Congress’s January 6 hearings, everything revealed by every Washington Post or network-television investigation, everything turned up by the FBI. For Fox viewers, this will come as an enormous relief. If all the disturbing facts can be ignored, then no lessons need be learned. Republicans in Congress and the Trump White House need never be blamed for their assault on the Constitution. The people who supported them need never question that support.
Equally important—and with longer-term significance—the documentary is deliberately designed to make viewers question the most important institutions in their society, the very same ones that, until now, inspired faith and belief among American conservatives. FBI agents were once good guys who produced law and order. Now they are a sinister cabal who created a fake demonstration on January 6 (a “honeypot”) with the aim of drawing in and eventually persecuting and repressing patriotic Americans. The U.S. military once consisted of heroes who fought our enemies overseas. Now the armed forces are part of the same conspiracy, as they seek to identify those same American patriots and “purge out of the military every dissenting voice.” This, someone warns, will be the “War on Terror 2.0,” the “same corrupt interests in Washington pushing the lie of domestic white terrorism.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member