"Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes" They Tell You

By now, if you haven’t seen Tucker Carlson’s Monday night report on the video surveillance tapes from the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, then you must only be watching MSM. In which case, how did you end up here?

So you don’t need me to show you that report. But for the sake of my chronicling what’s going on, I’m going to point out what we already knew (early post here) and what was new in Tucker’s report.

Tucker stated quite boldly that the January 6 Select Committee are liars. Yes, he used the “L” word. The video proves it. This was not a violent insurrection—a betrayal of our country. It was hundreds of thousands of people who were there to protest and never did anything else—no violence, no breaking and entering.

There were hundreds, possibly a thousand, who entered the capitol. The overwhelming majority of these entered peacefully, walked around respectfully, did no damage, obeyed police officers who had ushered them in, and then left, still peacefully.

And then there were a small number, maybe 100 or so, who were violent—but unarmed—who fought police officers, broke windows, and did some relatively minor vandalism. Among these were an unknown number of government assets, hired agent provocateurs, who it appears were inciting the crowds and fomenting violence.

What Tucker showed was not, as Chuck Schumer claims, the big lie that there was no violence that day. Clearly there was some violence. It should have been anticipated better, perhaps, because there were permits granted for the large outdoor protest. Extra help was offered, and requested by some Capitol Police, but denied by Nancy Pelosi who oversaw Capitol security as House Speaker, and Muriel Bowser, the mayor of the city surrounding the Capitol. They didn’t want National Guard troops, “because of optics,” they said—until afterwards, when they wanted things to look like martial law, I guess.

Tucker focuses mainly on three examples.

 

Jacob Chansley, The QAnon Shaman

First there is the guy known as the QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley. According to Carlson, the video footage shows his entire time within the Capitol building. It shows him—never violent—being escorted to the Senate Chamber by Capitol Police. There were as many as nine officers around him. There was no crowd he was leading; most of the shots show multiple armed police and just him. So the argument that police were simply acquiescing to de-escalate possible mob violence seems impossible to square with what we see. Not one officer tries to stop him. They try various doors for him. Once inside the Senate Chamber, he prays aloud, thanking Heavenly Father for inspiring the Capitol Police to help guide him in. He saw them as his allies.

Jacob Chansley, called the QAnon Shaman, surrounded by Capitol Police,
who guided him into the Senate Chamber on January 6, 2021.
screenshot from here

It must have been very distressing to him, after that peaceful exchange with officers, to suddenly be prosecuted for violent insurrection. And it was his word against the prosecutors—because they would not provide this footage to his defense team. For all he knew, they were going to railroad him into a 20-year prison sentence if he didn’t plead guilty. And isn’t it handy for them, in their other prosecutions, to have this “admission of guilt” from the public face of the so-called insurrection?

Now that we have seen the video, it is obvious he should not have pleaded guilty; he should have been allowed to use the video to prove that he wasn’t guilty. His ongoing imprisonment is a grave injustice that should be rectified immediately. How that can happen is another question.

Robert Gouveia talked about that on his law vlog. He said after a plea deal and sentencing, it is nigh unto impossible to take back the guilty plea and call for a mistrial. But there could be something called post sentencing relief. Chansley’s current lawyer talks about that in this interview. 

Along with the lawyer in that interview is Chansley’s mother, who explains that her son had heard there were people who had gone into the Senate Chamber, and he thought he could de-escalate them, calm them down, and had offered to help the Capitol Police do that, which could plausibly explain the way they are seen escorting him, and there being other people in the Senate Chamber when he enters and offers his prayer.

What we know—and can see—that Chansley did not do was attempt a violent insurrection. He remained calm. He was never violent. He took some selfies in the Chamber, and then left with the others who had gone in there. He harmed no one, and Senate business reconvened and completed that evening.

 

Officers Down

One of the continuing lies is that this “violent insurrection” resulted in the deaths of five police officers at the Capitol that day. That is a bit of an exaggeration; the actual number is zero. The main one mentioned was Officer Brian Sicknick. They said he was bludgeoned to death, with a teargas canister to the head, in the crowd outside the Capitol, dying from his injuries the following day.

We knew very quickly afterward that this wasn’t true. He did indeed die the next day—from a stroke, apparently unrelated to the violence that day. There was no head trauma, according to the medical examiner’s report.

Jan. 6 was no doubt a stressful day. But the new video shows Office Sicknick walking through the capitol building, clearly healthy and vigorous—well after the time he was supposed to have been beaten by the crowd outside. And he is wearing a helmet, belying the head trauma narrative.

Officer Brian Sicknick is seen well and vital, directing traffic
within the Capitol, after supposedly being killed by rioters.
screenshot from here

His death was used for political purposes; it was their “proof” that the “insurrectionists” were violent. They had him lie in state—as a political prop. He didn’t die of violence that day. He wasn’t injured by violence that day. He communicated with family members later in the day, completely fine. And now the surveillance video verifies that long-known story. Yet Biden and others still claim he was violently killed by the angry mob, along with multiple other officers.

There were no other officers that died that day either, nor from injuries in subsequent days. There were a handful who died—of suicide—sometime later, some of them many months later. What we don’t have is a demographic comparison to know whether that number of suicides is a high number for any similar period of time. We also don’t have suicide notes or any other details linking those suicides to Jan. 6.

If all the video surveillance tape were allowed to be viewed on the internet, no doubt there are people who could use AI and face recognition software to follow Brian Sicknick’s movements the entire day. They could do that with a whole lot of people, including those who might have been instigators—agent provocateurs—who just happen to be the only ones known to have done the stirring up of the crowd but not charged.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who gave the exclusive access to Tucker Carlson and team, says he plans for all of the surveillance video to be made public online, so people can see for themselves. Also, he pointed out that there are many more hours of footage than the 14,000 we were told. I have heard 41,000 hours, which switches the numbers around, so I wasn’t sure whether that was just a typo, but McCarthy puts the number at 42,000+ hours, and asserts that this is a lot more than we were originally told.

Also, this video footage does not compromise security at the Capitol. Tucker Carlson’s team ran their clips by the Capitol Police to verify that they weren’t endangering any security. They cooperated fully. The only instance of a change they made was to blur out a particular door. I did notice one blurred door. An officer tries it and then turns to guide Chansley another way. There is a stairway in the background. It looked to me like the location where Ashley Babbitt was killed, although I have no way to verify that. And I don’t know whether this was after that happened. It might have been, because I think she would have been the first to enter. So the blur blocked what would have been broken glass in that door or next to it. If that was the reason, then the location of that camera or any other does not endanger security just by the public seeing it.

 

Agent Provocateurs

This brings us to the third main story from Carlson Monday night: Ray Epps. We know his name. We’ve seen video of him, from the day before, insisting to a crowd that they would need to go into the capitol the next day. People in the crowd, suspicious of him, call out, “Fed! Fed! Fed!”

He had been, for a time, on the FBI’s most wanted list. And then he wasn’t. Investigators had flown to Alaska to interrogate a woman who had been at the rally but never even walked to the capitol (mistaken identity, which she fortunately was able to prove, both by photograph and by phone data). But Ray Epps, known to have been stirring up the crowd, was considered an ally of the Jan. 6 Committee for some reason.

It was known that he had texted a relative, a nephew, boasting that he had orchestrated the crowd that attacked the Capitol that day.

He was so publicly known that the Jan. 6 Committee had to bring him in to testify. They asked him leading questions, to get to the narrative they wanted, which for some reason was that he was harmless and uninvolved, despite evidence to the contrary. In his testimony, he said he never even heard the crowd call “Fed! Fed!” around him. And he claimed he had thought the Capitol would be open for tours, which is why he called for people to go in. He claimed that he never even went into the Capitol on the day of. He left the speech early, to see if he could help with crowd control, and left his companions, whom he claimed he needed to locate. And then he left, inexplicably without them.

But there was that text. He claimed that was nothing, really. Exaggerating his helpfulness in crowd control or something. And that it was after he’d already left the Capitol and gone back to his hotel. Except that video shows him still at the Capitol for a full half hour after sending that inflammatory text.

Yet the Committee defended him, for motives we can only suppose. Why claim he is just an innocent bystander while imprisoning actual innocent bystanders?

And how many actual agent provocateurs were there that day?

Another likely one is John Sullivan, an Antifa member who claimed he was only there to chronicle the day, as a self-styled reporter. (I wrote about him here.) Mr. Reagan podcast reminds us that Sullivan’s original hour-long footage shows Sullivan’s view inside the Capitol. People are walking through respectfully. Sullivan calls for burning and destroying, but people resist and shut him down. No burning. No defacing statues. They prevent any damage, rather than being fomented into it. Despite Sullivan’s efforts to the contrary, the people there respected their government and were not trying to overthrow it, let alone do so violently.

Clip of John Sullivan's footage inside the Capitol on J6
records him urging destruction, but people shut him down.
screenshot from here

 

Mostly Peaceful

Robert Gouveia has done some math and charts to show that this was “mostly peaceful.” Using the conviction records, he’s got this list:

Total Crimes:	950
Violent—Impeding, Resisting, Assaulting:	284	29.89%
Violent—Weapon or Serious Injury:	99	10.42%
Entering the Capitol:	860	90.53%
Entering the Capitol—Weapon:	91	9.58%
Destruction of Government Property:	59	6.21%
Theft of Government Property:	36	3.79%
Corruptly Obstructing:	295	31.05%
Conspiracy:	50	5.26%
Insurrection:	0	0%

 

And he put them into this pie chart for perspective:

Robert Gouveia charts the conviction records of January 6, 2021.
screenshot from here

There’s some explanation that is helpful. Total charges do not equal total number of people charged; people were often charged with more than one supposed crime. 90.53% of all charges were for entering the Capitol, which means the total number of people charged would be very close to 860. This is out of the several hundred thousand, possibly a million, people who attended the rally. And it’s close to the estimate of about 1000 people who entered the Capitol that day. And we now see footage that most of those people did nothing worse than trespass—and most of those at the invitation of Capitol Police.

We know that weapons charges did not include any firearms. Zero. They counted things like flagpoles and water bottles as weapons. It may be that some people, particularly in the melee outside, may have used anything at hand as a weapon, including flagpoles and water bottles. But inside the Capitol—have you seen any footage of anyone using a flagpole as a weapon? Aiming a pointy top at a police officer perhaps? They have had all the footage. They have had facial recognition and any other tools available to them. But they haven’t shown flagpoles being used as weapons. I wonder why.

So, of those 90% who were charged with entering, under 100 were charged with carrying a weapon, whether they used it or not. Under 60 did damage to or stole government property; if they did those things, those are legitimate charges.

Of those who assaulted officers—no more than 284, since that number includes simply impeding or resisting officers’ orders—those would be legitimate charges but not necessarily violent. Many of these altercations happened outside, with police throwing teargas into the crowds, escalating rather than de-escalating the situation.

Conspiracy is rather vague. Was it planning to meet up with friends at the rally? Or was it planning to do damage and harm? Out of the 860 or so people charged, only 50 of them were charged with conspiracy. And we’re not yet privy to the evidence.

For insurrection, zero charges. Of the 860 or so people charged with entering the Capitol, plus possibly something else, zero were charged with insurrection.

It’s hard to claim there was an insurrection when there is no evidence to charge anyone with insurrection. Not one.

The worst attack on our “democracy” since the Civil War seems a bit of an exaggeration, according to the numbers. It appears Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the anti-Trump team tried to stage an insurrection—because that charge carries the weight of preventing running for public office—but the enormous America-loving crowd simply couldn’t be goaded into insurrecting, drat them!

It looks as though footage of actual violence—and there was some—was more cherrypicked than the footage Tucker Carlson showed, which coincides more with the numbers given by the government’s charging documents, which we know in themselves exaggerate what actually happened.

Chuck Schumer, in his fuming response on Tuesday, fails to explain how Carlson selectively edited the video by adding peaceful moments galore, but the Committee did not selectively edit by showing only the violent moments to create a narrative that the evidence does not bear out.

Among liars, when faced with mounting evidence of their falsehoods, most give in and admit to the lie. It’s too hard to keep it up when everyone knows better than to believe you. But there are some liars who double down, fume, blame the messenger, and insist that you believe them rather than your own eyes.

This is the type of liar we are facing. They wield power in our government. They are indeed swamp creatures. We need them gone so we can get our country back. And truth seems to be the best weapon. You can tell by how much they fear it.

 

Worth Viewing

·        Tucker Carlson Tonight, March 6, 2023. 

·        Tucker Carlson Tonight, March 7, 2023. 

·        “Tucker Carlson on Jan. 6 video: ‘I know DECEPTION when I see it’”—Glenn Beck interviews Tucker Carlson, March 8, 2023. 

·        “January 6th Conviction Records DESTROY Fictional Narrative” Robert Gouveia law vlog March 9, 2023. 

·        “January 6th Tapes DESTROY Insurrection Narratives and Politicians FREAK” Robert Gouveia law vlog March 7, 2023. 

·        “Tucker: The government hid this from you about Jan 6”—Tucker Carlson interviews Martha Chansley and her son’s attorney, Fox News, March 9, 2023. 

·        “New Jan. 6 Footage Shows Falsehoods in Mainstream Narrative; Trump Proposes Freedom Cities”—Joshua Philipp on Crossroads for EpochTV, March 7, 2023. 

·        “The Real Story of January 6 Documentary” EpochTV, premiering (again) March 10, 2023. 

·        “As the January 6 'Insurrection' Narrative COLLAPSES, Media & Politicians DOUBLE DOWN!” Viva Frei vlog, March 8, 2023. 

·        “The Stuff Tucker Can't Talk About” Mr. Reagan podcast, March 10, 2023. 

·        “BREAKING : Previously Unseen January 6thFootage” @StevenVoiceOver, March 7, 2023. This is satire, for your entertainment.