Tucker: What happened to the QAnon incursion of Capitol Hill?
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host explains why lawmakers fled Washington ahead of an imaginary invasion
QAnon is the greatest threat we face. Not inflation, not China, QAnon. Everyone is saying this, but you may be wondering: Just how dangerous is QAnon? Here's the answer: the District of Columbia National Guard announced Friday that all troops who took part in the mission to protect our democracy from internet conspiracy theorists will now receive medals in recognition of their heroic sacrifice.
The primary medal is called the Presidential Inauguration Support Ribbon. That's for people who were there for President Biden's inauguration. But that medal will be supplemented, in cases in which our heroes have earned it, by the Emergency Service Ribbon. So if you're a D.C. Guardsman who's been on duty in the city since late January, protecting America from Trump voters, you can add another medal to your chest. More may be coming. According to Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Carver, "Other federal decorations are also being considered."
That seems like a big deal. For context, more than 60,000 American soldiers and Marines fought on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific during the Second World War. About 15,000 of them died or were wounded there. Not one of those men got an official Guadalcanal medal for the experience, because the Pentagon didn't offer them. Guadalcanal may have been horrible and bloody, but it just didn't justify its own ribbon. Guadalcanal wasn't North Capitol Street. The Imperial Japanese weren't as fanatical as Trump voters and not half as dangerous.
Thursday, they told us, the war against QAnon was likely to escalate intensely. March 4 would be the Tet Offensive in the fight against right-wing insurrectionism. It was something called "QAnon Inauguration Day." Now, we've never heard of that before, but then we don't work at the FBI. The FBI has been monitoring the enemy through "SIGINT" -- that's "signals intelligence" for the neophytes out there. That means tweets, Facebook posts, TikTok, James Bond stuff.
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According to what our guys were hearing in the field, QAnon was preparing an invasion of Washington. And that means thousands of bearded groovy shamans in Viking hats marching across the Key Bridge to pillage Georgetown Cupcakes and end our democracy. It would have been a gruesome sight. Needless to say, Nancy Pelosi stopped work in the House of Representatives so that members of Congress could flee the city for their lives, and many did.
For example, Rep. Andy Kim, D-N.J., tweeted: "This all seems absurd if it wasn’t frightening ... [N]ow, our legislative plan tomorrow has been canceled as we are rushing tonight to finish the work we planned to do ... [T]housands of National Guard & Capitol Police will be on edge tomorrow as they stand watch over the Capitol. They will worry about possible attacks by American citizens ..."
Andy Kim sounded like a man preparing for the worst. He went on to tweet: "Another wave of sadness comes from the fact that this is not getting better. FBI director said this threat is 'metastasizing.'"
Not everyone ran from the sound of the approaching QAnon shamans. A few hardened war correspondents, like Chris Bedford of The Federalist, ran toward that sound. Chris Bedford of the Federalist is a man like that. While our elected representatives were clinging to the struts of the last chopper out of the city, Chris Bedford was at the Capitol itself.
And what was the scene there? With an empty street behind him, he said, "I was told that all of us conservatives are insurrecting today. Am I at the wrong place?"
No, Chris Bedford, you weren't in the wrong place. There was simply nobody there. It took The Washington Post five crack reporters to determine this. They rushed to the scene, and their conclusion was, "…streets were quiet. People walked their dogs in the morning sun. Masked students sat on steps drinking coffee. Construction crews continued with their projects." That was their dispatch.
Jeff Bezos spared no expense. One reporter was assigned to monitor the construction crews. Another on the dog walking beat. No one there.
So why wasn't there anyone there? Where was the QAnon battle? "What?!" said MSNBC. "What QAnon battle? Nobody really thought there was going to be a QAnon battle."
Anchor Chuck Todd asked NBC News Justice correspondent Pete Williams: "Have we learned more about any specifics of this threat, or are you starting to think this is under the umbrella of maybe where we're being a little more precautious [Author's note: This is not an actual English word] since we underreacted on January 6th?"
MEDIA FEARS OF MARCH 4 VIOLENCE BY QANON DON'T AMOUNT TO ANYTHING
"Definitely the latter. Chuck, no question about it," Williams answered. "The intelligence that was gathered by law enforcement, I'm told, was of a specific group talking about the idea of doing an attack on the Capitol today on March 4th, talking about an idea, in other words, aspirational. I don't think anybody expected anything to happen today. But nonetheless, you know, abundance of caution seems to be the watch phrase here."
Did you catch the key line from Williams? "I don't think anybody expected anything to happen today."
"But wait a second," you sticklers for precision might be asking, "didn’t the FBI issue a bulletin warning the country that a military force was planning to seize control of the Capitol building? Didn't they put up razor wire around the whole place and send in thousands of soldiers with rifles? Didn't Congressman Andy Kim and his friends run away in sadness and terror and then tweet about it?"
Yeah, that all happened. But it wasn't a big deal. It was a drill, just a drill. You can relax now.
FLASHBACK: MEDIA HYPES NON-EXISTENT RIGHT-WING INAUGURATION DAY VIOLENCE
That's one explanation for the empty Capitol yesterday. But, by the time night fell and the city remained quiet -- except, of course, in the poor neighborhoods where people are still shooting one another in ever- growing numbers and no one is noticing -- MSNBC had decided that, in fact, they had saved the day.
It turns out QAnon didn't invade Washington because neo-liberal cable news anchors successfully defended our country. What Joshua Chamberlain was to Little Round Top, Chris Hayes was to QAnon Inauguration Day.
"This was the scene in Washington, D.C. today," Hayes intoned last night, "where two months after the attempted insurrection, the area around the Capitol is still on lockdown because of worries over postings on QAnon forums about a plot for another violent attack today, March 4. Thankfully, nothing happened."
Reporter Brandy Zadrozny chimed in, "I will say that media coverage of how silly this all is made it seemingly less palatable for QAnon people over the last week ... It's a lot, Chris. It always is with these people. Luckily, they stayed behind a computer."
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It turns out QAnon’s battalions look to MSNBC for their news coverage -- maybe it's on in their break room. And after watching Chris Hayes and Brandy Zadrozny flex their intellectual muscles, they realize they were totally outgunned. These MSNBC people are just too clever, so QAnon decided to stay home and fight another day.
Newsweek, for one, was not buying that. One of their reporters came up with this explanation: "QAnon theorists switch the date to March 20 after no Trump inauguration, call the March 4th date 'false flag.'"
Well, how did Newsweek know what QAnon was up to? Well, the story explained that a man called Ken had "told reporter Dave Weigel that Donald Trump will be inaugurated again on March 20."
So, in other words, forget everything you heard about March 4, Ken told Dave, the real invasion is going to be March 20. So be afraid.
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At some point, listening to all this, you have to wonder how the Democratic Party and its minions in the news media are different from any other doomsday cult. They're always telling us the world is going to end, whether it's from global warming or a White nationalist insurrection. When the world doesn't end, they don't even pause and they don't seem ashamed. They just change the date of the world ending. It's all pretty embarrassing, but they never seem embarrassed.
Jeane Dixon used to do this. She was a professional psychic and had a column in hundreds of papers for decades. Dixon once predicted the world would end on February 4, 1962. When that didn't happen, she very cleverly just extended the timeline and predicted Armageddon in 2020. Lucky for Jeane Dixon, she was long dead by 2020 and she didn’t have to explain why the world still existed, not that anyone would have asked.
Nancy Pelosi is our Jeane Dixon, a batty old soothsayer who just happens to run the Congress. How long until that Ken guy, who talked to Dave, the one of the Newsweek article, winds up in an FBI bulletin justifying another indefinite extension of the occupation of the Capitol? More razor wire? Really? I don't think these guns are powerful enough. Let's bring in howitzers. We're not even joking. Remember, the FBI isn't concerned with what's actually going to happen. They're concerned with what one or two random people write online or put on TikTok.
HEAVILY FORTIFIED STATEHOUSES AROUND US SEE SMALL PROTESTS
And as long as what those people put on TikTok justifies more power for the people in charge, the FBI, their slavish servants will put it in a terror alert and scare the crap out of the country to justify even more power for their bosses.
How do we know they do this? Because they've done it a lot. They did it in January and our media repeated it without any hesitation whatsoever. The dummies were terrified. They had a news alert for you: QAnon was coming to "all 50 state capitals and the U.S. Capitol." According to the FBI, QAnon was about to go national, if not international. The sleeper cells were going to activate the week of Biden's inauguration.
Whatever happened to those 51 armed protests? Well, they came down to just one guy. A dude called Mark Leggiero, who was seen peacefully waving a flag at the state capitol in Albany, New York.
"I came out, wanted to be part of the patriot party to join supporters of Trump," he said. "I find myself kind of by myself out here, but [I've] come out here with nothing but peaceful intentions. I wanted to be peaceful, you know, everything to be peaceful."
LIBERAL MSNBC HOST OFFERS NO PUSHBACK AS AP REPORTER CLAIMS GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS WERE NONVIOLENT
Do you ever notice how all the scary internet conspiracy theorists -- the radical QAnon people -- when you actually see them on camera or in jail cells, as a lot of them now are, are maybe kind of confused with the wrong ideas, but they're all kind of gentle people now waving American flags? They like this country. They're not torching Wendy's. They're not looting retail stores. They're not shooting cops. No, that's not them, it's the other people doing that.
Good thing Mark Leggiero wasn't shot to death by the police like Ashli Babbitt. He might be if he tried that today. What's amazing is that even as they lie to us again and again and again about the threat of QAnon, the insurrection, the White supremacist militia hiding in the closet -- hyping it all beyond recognition and doing it for their own psychological and political reasons -- they downplay and ignore actual violence in this country. The violence that is rapidly accelerating in every city in the nation and killing a lot of people. It's been going on for months.
An AP reporter called Jonathan Lemire denied this week that there were violent Black Lives Matter riots this summer.
"In June, these were nonviolent protesters, racially mixed, a lot of young people fueled by the Black Lives Matter movement, those outraged by the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed under the knee of a White police officer in Minnesota. There was no violence there ... And the Biden White House has made it clear that they think that the threat posed by domestic terrorism is equal to that posed by international terror groups like ISIS, which is such a sobering thought that fellow Americans could be perceived as such a dangerous threat to their countrymen and women," he told MSNBC.
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There was no violence in Minneapolis? Have you been there, Dumbo? We were there two weeks ago. Go to the spot where George Floyd died, on the sidewalk outside a market. The whole area is trashed. The police station down the road is still boarded up because the lunatics burned it. No, there was no violence. It was more like a Pepsi commercial. It was multiracial. They were arm-in-arm.
No, it was QAnon. It was QAnon who burned hundreds of buildings, killed more than 20 people, shot more than a dozen cops during the George Floyd riots. Yeah, it must have been QAnon. Everyone knows that, because QAnon is the real threat.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the March 5, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."