A former Fox News editor called Fox and Tucker Carlson’s recent baseless “documentary” on the Jan. 6 insurrection “beyond reckless” as it continues to fuel fury over a legitimate presidential election.
Former Fox digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt compared Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” show on the U.S. Capitol riot to the kind of “garbage” presented by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his Infowars website.
(Carlson praised Jones, a 9/11 denier, as a good “journalist” on Thursday, shortly after Jones was found liable in a fourth defamation lawsuit over his appalling lies about the children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.)
If “you can say stuff and don’t support it, except for without conspiracy theorizing gobbledygook, then that’s no good,” Stirewalt said Thursday on the “Talkline” podcast with Hoppy Kercheval on West Virginia’s MetroNews.
Carlson baselessly claimed that the Jan. 6 riot by supporters of then-President Donald Trump was potentially a “false flag” event staged by the federal government to make the right look bad. That means the FBI, various National Guard units, politicians, judges, police forces, witnesses and thousands of actors across the nation were in on it and haven’t leaked a word about their supposed plot.
Stirewalt, who is currently a contributing editor at The Dispatch and a resident fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, was fired by Fox News soon after his politics team called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden on the night of the 2020 presidential election.
Biden did win Arizona, as several recounts confirmed. The results were even confirmed by a controversial multimillion-dollar audit ordered by the Republican-controlled state Senate.
Stirewalt praised conservative commentators Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, who quit their positions with Fox last month in protest of Carlson’s “dangerous” rewriting of history.
They criticized Carlson’s Jan. 6 program as a “collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions.”
What “Steve and Jonah did in giving up compensation and a high-visibility post was to put their money literally where their mouth is,” Stirewalt said.
Check out Stirewalt’s full interview in the tweet above.
