Watch: Tucker Carlson’s Orwellian gaslighting about the parallels between Brazil's insurrection and January 6th

10 January 2023

Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson ordered his right-wing audience on Monday's edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight to ignore what their eyes and ears detect in an Orwellian rant about this past weekend's failed insurrection in Brasilia, Brazil.

Carlson's latest gaslighting was nearly verbatim to that of former President Donald Trump.

"What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening," Trump said at a 2018 event for veterans in reference to supposed "fake news."

Similarly, Carlson declared that American news is "fake" and that its coverage of the riot that mirrored the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021 is hiding the truth. Like Trump, Brazil's ousted President Jair Bolsonaro insisted without evidence that the election that he lost to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was rigged and stolen.

As is the case in the US, Bolsonaro's allegations were demonstrably false.

But Carlson – who is regularly featured on Russian state television by propagandists who gaslight on behalf of President Vladimir Putin – claimed otherwise:

The Biden Administration is spending your tax dollars trying to replicate the disaster you just saw in France, here, and around the world and most people have no idea it's even happening. And that's by design because our media are controlled. And if you don't believe that, if you don't believe that what you see and read from our news outlets is fake, consider what is happening tonight in Brazil. So, thanks to what was very clearly a rigged election, a convicted criminal called Lula da Silva is now the president of the most important country in South America. Millions of people in Brazil understand exactly what happened. They know their democracy has been hijacked possibly forever. But there's not much they can do about that. Lula may be a criminal, in fact, he is, but he has the full support of both the Biden Administration and the Chinese government. So yesterday in frustration, a group of Brazilian protesters swarmed their legislature. Watch.

Carlson played a clip of the mayhem that erupted in Brasilia on Sunday, after which thousands of people were arrested. Bolsonaro even tried to condemn his supporters' actions while hiding from authorities near Trump in Florida.

And although Carlson noted the parallels to Trump's coup, he nonetheless repeated his instructions to disregard reality:

Now, you may actually have seen some of that video in the United States over the last couple of days and you saw it because it has political uses. What's happened in Brazil is being likened to January 6th, and of course, populist leaders in this country are being blamed for it. 'Oh, it was Trump and Steve Bannon who did it.' That's not true, but even if it were true, it would be just the tail end of the story. It would be the result of something that happened before. So the obvious question is, why are protesters in Brazil so angry? Well, they're angry because the new Lula government has eliminated their most basic civil liberties, Lula is working to turn Brazil into a Chinese-style dictatorship and he's doing it very quickly with maximum aggression. And our media don't want to talk about that. They refuse to. Why? Well, for reasons that should make you very nervous.

Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.

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