Gary Wiggins on The Bulwark

[Gary Wiggins]

Carlson has cherry picked things from the tapes that support his point of view, just as the Democrats cherry picked things supporting theirs. That is what politicians and their public relations people in the media do. It would be foolish to expect anything else. (The way to avoid that would have been to put all the tapes up on the internet, blurred as appropriate, and let people who were interested check them out, and that probably would not be practical.) Even with the cherry picking and despite Carlson’s efforts to sensationalize the stuff he presents, as well as I can tell, there is not much there that matters importantly or is even new. The defense of the Capitol was poorly planned, managed, and coordinated, with some officers behaving well and others not. That does not make it less wrong or not true that the Capitol was attacked. Some of the rioters in the Capitol wandered around harmlessly gawking, guilty of at most trespassing. That is irrelevant to the fact that many others committed more serious crimes. It is possible that the Epps character was somebody’s agent provocateur instead of only a cheerleading blowhard, but it was not agents provocateur who stirred up a mob of fearful, overwrought people and sent them over to rush the Capitol. Some of the poor suckers who went to the Capitol have been treated more harshly than they deserve because of their politics, but that has been obvious for a while - just as obvious as that the man who actually did try to overthrow the republic has skated so far. Right now Carlson's venture is looking more like the opening of Al Capone’s vault than any sort of blockbuster. People who get too worked up about it may be playing into his hand, allowing him to say the establishment is fearfully attacking him to protect some big, dark secrets.