Almost three years after a violent attack on the Capitol, in Washington D.C., people are still trying to downplay, to ignore, to rewrite history. This week, new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, has decided to release 44,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from January 6 to the public.
He has the right. The previous speaker had provided all the video coverage to Tucker Carlson, who played selected minutes out of the entire collection, attempting to portray regular folks walking through the halls of Congress, with apparently no malice intended toward police, legislators or even Mike Pence.
Carlson didn’t show the gallows that was erected on the Capitol grounds or the people’s chants to hang Pence. And he left out the beating of police officers with flagpoles and bear spray. It was encouraging that most people seemed to pay little attention to Carlson’s edited sample.
But now, with the release of all video to the public, in small doses spread out over time, the deniers are back, claiming that people NOT being confrontational in a five-minute clip proves that the chaos and crimes that we all saw live during the insurrection didn’t happen.
They claim that those snippets are proof that there were no physical attacks, no violence, no break-ins, no defecating in the halls of Congress, and no damage to the historic centuries-old décor that makes up the Capitol. It was just a Capitol tour, although the tourists did break windows and knock down doors to get in.
If you fall for this narrative… well, I don’t want to insult anyone, so let’s just ask who would fall for this?
On April 10, 1912, passengers boarded the Titanic mid-morning, in Southampton, England, before departing for a luxury cruise at noon. They sailed to Cherbourg, France and picked up additional passengers, and then reached Queenstown, Ireland by noon on the 11th.
For the next two days, they sailed through calm waters, enjoyed gourmet dining, professional entertainment, and opulent accommodations. By all accounts everyone had a wonderful experience. On April 14, their route took them past several icebergs, but the ship maneuvered easily around them… until it didn’t.
At 11:40 p.m. the Titanic struck a large iceberg on the starboard bow and within ten minutes, water was 14 feet deep in the bow of the ship. The crew radioed for help at midnight, dispatched the last lifeboat at 2 am, and the ship sank at 2:20 with 1,500 souls still on board. At 3:30 am a nearby ship arrived and picked up some survivors. Less than 800 survived. However, most of the 1,500 that were on the sinking ship drowned or froze to death in the frigid waters of the Atlantic.
It was a nice cruise for the first four days, and if video were available in 1912, it would have revealed 100+ hours of people having a really good time, up to and including the band playing as the ship sank into the ocean. If you didn’t include the ship breaking in half, and the screams as people hit the icy water, you could spin this into a Love Boat episode. In today’s deeply divided world, 30 percent of the audience would believe it. It was a great day, until it wasn’t.
So, let’s not overreact with the new video “evidence” about January 6. Politics has crept into our life interactions, and we now seem to find a need to pick a side (another column coming soon on that subject) on almost every issue, and the video you watch, the video you believe, tends to be the one that fits your side.
That is dangerous for democracy because no matter what version you watch, no matter which side you choose, the iceberg looms.
Curt MacRae is a resident of Coldwater, MI
All columns are tweeted (@curtmacrae) — comments to rantsbymac@gmail.com
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