This is an excerpt from the March 9, 2023 episode of The Heartland Institute’s In the Tank Podcast, featuring Donald Kendal, Jim Lakely, Justin Haskins, and Chris Talgo.
The gaslighting on this has been instantaneous.
Chuck Schumer stood on the floor of the Senate the day after Tucker Carlson released excerpts of the January 6th surveillance video, claiming that Tucker said that it was “not a violent insurrection.” That’s false. Tucker said it was not a “deadly insurrection.” Then Tucker played clip after clip of Democrat politicians, and our corrupt media, repeatedly calling it a “deadly insurrection.” There is a big difference between a violent incident, even if you want to call it an insurrection, and a “deadly insurrection.” Chuck Schumer knows that he’s lying; He’s doing it on purpose, and nobody seems to care.
By the way, a Senator can say anything they want on the floor of the Senate, and they are immune from any libel or slander laws. Harry Reid famously got away with saying from the floor of the Senate that Mitt Romney didn’t pay any federal income taxes. He knew he was lying; again, he did it on purpose. Then, when Mitt Romney lost the election, Reid said, “Well, he lost, didn’t he?” That’s the kind of people that we have in the Senate.
We should also remember this from Daniel Flynn at the American spectator; he noted that the articles of impeachment against the former president Donald Trump claimed that Trump supporters killed law enforcement personnel by their “deadly and seditious acts.” The New York Times reported that Pro-Trump supporters “attacked the Citadel of Democracy, overpowered Brian Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”
Obviously, that never happened. And, as Tucker Carlson pointed out, in these reports, the New York Times is basically the assignment editor for the national, and even the international, news, especially on a story as big as this. To this day, that story is still up on the New York Times website with the headline, “He dreamed of being a police officer then was killed by a pro-Trump mob.” The only difference in the original story, which was a lie, and the current story, which is also a lie, is there is a vague note at the top that says, “New information has emerged that questions the cause of Sicknick’s death.”
No. It is not just some vague new information. Brian Sicknick was not killed. There was not a single officer killed at the capitol. Some were injured. However, as Trump himself pointed out, a lot more police officers actually were injured at a different riot across from the White House, put on by the left, that nobody ever talks about.
The reason this matters — to myself, to the people on [the Heartland Institute] podcast, and the people listening to the podcast — is we know that the January 6th “committee” was a joke, that the hearings and what came out of the hearings was a joke and were lies. Tucker Carlson and Kevin McCarthy, who gave Carlson access to these tapes, have done the nation a great service for anybody who wishes to pay attention to it; and that is that we are being propagandized by our media, and by our government, about what happened on January 6th.
One can condemn the actions of those who participated in the protest, and we did. And yet, I remember I had a hard time getting all worked up about it. The protests were terrible, but I just had a hard time getting worked up about it, after experiencing a summer of riots, of cities burning to the ground, with no accountability required or even asked for! In fact, at the time, the Democrat Party Vice President-elect was offering to give bail money to the very people who were rioting and destroying our cities. So, I had a hard time getting upset about the January 6th protests, and I’m still having a hard time getting upset about it now.
But there is a reason it’s important to push back on the left and the Democrat-created narrative. They need this narrative: that it wasn’t just a mere riot, that it was a deadly insurrection, that it was sedition, that it was an attempted coup, that this was the greatest threat to the Republic since the Civil War. The White House Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said as much during the March 7th press conference. That is absurd but, again, they need this. They need to believe that the people that committed these acts on that day at the capitol are a “threat to our democracy.” Why do they need this? Because that allows them to do what they’ve done, frankly, since the beginning of the Biden administration, which is to treat everybody who opposes this regime, whether strongly or even mildly, as somehow a threat to the country.
Look how far this has gone. Conservatives who show up at school board meetings objecting to the sexualization of their third graders have FBI files put out on them, because that is a threat to democracy. They’re trying to paint everybody who opposed Joe Biden, and everybody who supported the election of Donald Trump, as a threat to democracy. That’s why they’re doing this, and that’s why Tucker Carlson showing these tapes, that give real context to what happened that day, is getting such a strong push-back from guys like Schumer, our media, and all the rest.
We’re still divided down the middle in this country. There are people who understand what’s going on, and there are people who are lied to, and believe the crap, that they get from our legacy media.
NOTE: This transcript of the In the Tank Podcast was produced by TM Willemse, a big fan of the show.
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Jim Lakely is the Vice President and Director of Communications of The Heartland Institute.
