Watch: Tucker Carlson accidentally tells the truth about Republicans in mid-gaslight Freudian slip

12 January 2023

On Wednesday evening's edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, its namesake host Tucker Carlson continued to gaslight his Fox News audience about what Republicans in the United States House of Representatives are doing with their fresh five-seat majority. But Carlson inadvertently gave himself away through a revealing Freudian slip.

Carlson was gloating about a subcommittee that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) approved under the auspices of the Judiciary Committee that is tasked with scrutinizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, which has multiple open criminal inquiries into former President Donald Trump as well as his congressional allies who aided his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The FBI and DOJ are also probing who bears legal liability for the Trump-inspired January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection.

Democrats have denounced the commission on the "Weaponization of the Federal Government" that McCarthy agreed to establish as part of his concessions to right-wing lawmakers – in exchange for their votes to make him speaker – as a sham to appease Trump's conspiracy theorist friends, notably Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the new chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. Jordan is one of a handful of speaker alternatives that were floated during the longest fight for the gavel since before the Civil War. McCarthy was eventually elected but only after fifteen rounds of ballots across four days.

"Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy claim to be investigating the weaponization of the federal government when, in fact, this new select subcommittee is the weapon itself," New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. "It is specifically designed to inject extremist politics into our justice system and shield the MAGA movement from the legal consequences of their actions. In order to become speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy sold out our democracy by handing power-hungry Jim Jordan subpoena power and a green light to settle political scores under the phony pretext of rooting out conservative bias."

Similarly, Representative Ro Khanna (D-California) previously told The Intercept on Thursday, January 5th that “to compare these is a total misunderstanding of what the Church Committee did. The question is, if we are going to focus on making sure the government isn’t engaged in surveillance, we should be engaged in passing the Internet Bill of Rights and engaged in passing legislation that will prevent that surveillance. I don’t want a committee that will start casting political aspersions on law enforcement agencies.”

Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-Arizona) compared it to the communist witch hunts conducted in the 1950s by disgraced ex-Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin).

Meanwhile, as MSNBC producer Steve Benen pointed out on Wednesday, eleven of the seventeen Republican committee chairs are individuals who denied that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Benen alluded to a December 15th article by Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump that touched upon said topic:

In the hours after a violent mob stormed the US Capitol, hoping to block Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win and retain Donald Trump as president, more than 130 Republican members of the House voted to do precisely that. The rioters tried to use intimidation and physical obstruction to achieve that goal. The Republican legislators used votes.

In his rant on Wednesday night, Carlson began to manipulate his viewers into believing the opposite:

So this week, as promised, Republicans, who now control the House, set up a new committee modeled after the famous Frank Church committee of the '70s to investigate the FBI and the intel agencies, which are playing what appear to be decisive roles in American politics. Now that's an offense against democracy, you can't have a democracy in which government agencies secretly work to control the outcome. That's tyranny, of course. No decent person should want that.

His tongue, however, momentarily stopped cooperating:

But Republicans, rather, Democrats, rather than welcoming the scrutiny and the transparency, the sunlight, are responding with panic.

Carlson then rolled footage of half a dozen House Democrats voicing their opposition to the subcommittee, and suggested that it proves that they are in cahoots with major federal agencies to persecute Republicans:

So, there's verification right there. If you're wondering if the federal agencies – FBI, CIA, and a bunch of others, are actually being used as tools of the Democratic Party to change political outcomes – now we know for sure. 'Cause if you're a government official and you are panicked at the idea that what you are doing will become public, you're doing something wrong. By definition.

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

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