On Sunday, The Washington Post released a major investigative project on the January 6 Capitol attack, revealing that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies received numerous tips warning of the riot but still failed to prevent it. As is his wont, Tucker Carlson took this personally. The Fox News star claimed that the Post’s exposé was published to counter his Patriot Purge documentary series, whose first part became available on Fox’s streaming platform, Fox Nation, on Monday morning. The series portrays the Capitol riot as a “false flag” operation orchestrated by federal officials to target Trump supporters.
“The idea that The Washington Post spent 75 reporters’ time rebutting [the Patriot Purge] trailer tells you they don’t want you to know what actually happened—they’re hysterical,” Carlson told Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade on Monday while promoting his docuseries. “Ask yourself, why are they hysterical?” When Kilmeade questioned if the FBI might have been “actually pushing for” the riot, Carlson added that “there were people working for the FBI in the crowd that day” and said his series “is rock solid factually—it’s totally not only defensible, but we believe [it] portrays the events in the correct light.”
The show is about what you would expect from a host who has been floating January 6–related conspiracy theories for months. In the first episode, Carlson claims there’s increasing “evidence” showing that the riot was the result of “direct incitement by federal agents.” (He does not provide any such evidence in the half-hour installment.) “The very same corrupt interests in Washington that pushed the Iraq war under false pretenses are now pushing the lie of a domestic white-terror army,” Carlson says. “They’re tying millions of law-abiding Americans to al-Qaida and ISIS. January 6 is being used as a pretext to strip millions of Americans—disfavored Americans—of their core constitutional rights and to defame them as domestic terrorists.” Darren Beattie, one of Carlson’s interviewees and a former Trump administration staffer forced out of the White House due to his ties to a convention featuring white nationalists, adds that “the establishment narrative [about January 6] was MAGA blood libel.” (Blood libel is a centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that accused Jewish people of spilling the blood of Christians for religious rituals.)
While much of the episode is spent rehashing debunked January 6 theories that Trumpworld figures have trotted out before—namely the idea that members of “antifa” dressed in MAGA garb started the riot, even as Trump supporters were supposedly working to deescalate the situation—one of Carlson’s subjects, security analyst Michael Waller, takes a more novel approach. He goes so far as to imply that “January 6 was a political warfare operation” similar to those carried out by U.S. intelligence agencies to subvert the Soviet Union. Waller, who claims to have served as a professional agitator for the U.S. government during the Cold War, adds that the attack was organized by “different cadres of agents provocateurs…who had a sort of military-like precision in what was to become a storming of the Capitol building.”
Carlson likewise insists that the Trump supporters present at the Capitol riot were innocent, hardworking Americans who happened to get caught up in a far-reaching plot—despite all evidence to the contrary. “Is it possible that the real conspirators were hidden in the crowd of middle-aged Trump voters?” he asks.
The show has received immense backlash starting with its trailer, which premiered last week. Interestingly, Carlson’s network seems to be attempting to distance itself from the blowback. When the Daily Dot ran a story that failed to note the docuseries was specifically a Fox Nation production, a Fox News spokesperson contacted the outlet to request a correction. “Can you please add so it’s clear that these new episodes are for FOX Nation?” the spokesperson wrote. “The subscription based streaming platform that is behind a paywall. I don’t see that noted anywhere in the piece. Tucker Carlson Originals is not for the channel.”
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