NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I am a paid contributor to Fox News, so I’m hesitant to comment on whether it was prudent for Speaker Kevin McCarthy to make available to Tucker Carlson, for selective airing on his nightly program, thousands of hours of Capitol-riot video, much of it never publicly broadcast before. I would note that no one at Fox has ever asked me to bend my opinions one way or the other, even when I’ve been critical (as I was, for example, when Tucker raised the specter of entrapment in connection with the Capitol riot). But being a contributor nevertheless presents a conflict for obvious reasons. Although I have reached the unfortunate age and am in the fortunate circumstances that enable me to say what I think without much worry about the grief it may cause, ethics always counsel avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

To the extent that the media–Democrat critique is that Carlson is an opinion journalist who is apt to present a skewed picture, this is the price they must have known they’d have to pay for the January 6 committee. That panel was a blatantly partisan, monochromatically anti-Trump political exhibition that presented the country with a skewed picture, eschewing cross-examination and perspectives that deviated from its relentless theme: “Trump’s incitement to insurrection had our democracy hanging by a thread.”

For myself, as I said about a zillion times during the committee’s proceedings, I’d have preferred for the committee to have been bipartisan; to have conducted traditional, adversarial hearings; and to have released full transcripts and videos of the witness testimony that it sliced and diced in its public presentations. That way, we could have judged for ourselves whether those presentations were fair and accurate.

But that’s not the way Democrats roll. To the extent this led to distortions that should be corrected, I’d have similarly preferred that McCarthy turn the video cache over to news reporters — there are plenty of outstanding ones at Fox News and elsewhere on the center-right — rather than to an opinion journalist who has as many ardent detractors as devoted fans. (I personally like and respect Tucker, even when I disagree with him. My point here is not to comment on a particular opinion journalist, but to state the obvious: The broad public is likely to view a body of evidence reported on by an opinion journalist more skeptically than the same body of evidence reported on by truly objective news journalists.)

Anyway, as we have lots of occasion to observe, the first rule of politics is: What goes around comes around. If Democrats and their notetakers don’t like this, they should have rethought the January 6 committee, as many of us implored them to do.

As for the videos thus far published, which focus on Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon shaman,” we should be thinking of them in terms of two different things: the case against Chansley himself, and the overarching January 6 political narrative promoted by Democrats and the January 6 committee.

In Chansley’s case, we should be mindful that what is new to us is not necessarily new to him. Knowing what the proof against him showed, Chansley, represented by experienced defense counsel, voluntarily pled guilty to obstructing a congressional proceeding (namely, the January 6 joint session of Congress at which the state-certified electoral votes were counted and then-candidate Biden’s Electoral College victory was affirmed). His lawyers would have insisted on being shown any potentially exculpatory evidence prior to the guilty plea, and the prosecutors would have been obliged to produce it. I presume Chansley knew about this video, or at least images just like it; after all, he was in the Capitol and knew what he experienced there, including his interactions with the police.

And he pled guilty anyway, because there is nothing exculpatory on the video clips that Carlson has published.

Understand: As a matter of law, what is exculpatory or incriminating is not assessed based on a media narrative. It is assessed based on the specific charges in the case. Here, the charge was that Chansley obstructed Congress. One need not engage in an insurrection, or even a riot, to obstruct Congress. One need only be in a place one has no lawful right to be in, and willfully engage in action that prevents Congress from conducting its proceedings. In that sense, the just-released video is the antithesis of exculpatory evidence; it shows Chansley committing the crime charged.

Carlson and others who sympathize with the rioters and nonviolent demonstrators make much of Chansley’s being “escorted” by police in the video images. Escorted is the benign word being used to describe police who walked alongside one of the most visible intruders in the Capitol, observed what he was doing, and at a certain point allowed him to enter the congressional chamber. It’s been noted that this all seemed downright amicable: The police did not treat Chansley as if he were a threat, and they didn’t place him under arrest or otherwise attempt to subdue him.

What’s curious is that, from this commentary, you’d almost think Chansley was the only demonstrator wandering around the Capitol. Of course, we know he was one of hundreds. Police are trained to de-escalate violent or potentially violent situations when doing so is practicable. When they are grossly outnumbered in powder-keg situations, they are trained not to provoke people who are not menacing them, lest they needlessly ignite mob violence. No, Chansley shouldn’t have been inside the Capitol, but he wasn’t physically threatening the police, so why would they have manhandled him in a way that might have attracted attention and sparked a forcible reaction from him and other demonstrators? That would have been dangerous for the police (many of whom suffered injuries during the uprising) and for the demonstrators (one of whom was killed by an officer, and others of whom died during that afternoon’s frenzy). The police objective, in those moments, was to stabilize an already bad situation so that it did not become a bloodletting.

All that said, the media–Democrat narrative about January 6 is not so dry as ho-hum obstruction of Congress. It is startling, horrifying: White-supremacist domestic terrorists engaged in an insurrection, besieging the Capitol at the exhortation of an out-of-control president and leaving our democracy hanging by a thread.

This narrative has always been hyperbolic. Chansley — one of the highest-profile members of the mob — was sentenced, quite appropriately, to 41 months’ imprisonment. Forty-one months, not 41 years or 410 years (i.e., not the kind sentence meted out to terrorists, such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombers who got sentences of 240 years). Chansley willfully impeded a significant congressional session, and he thus deserved every bit of the less-than-three-and-a-half-year term he got. But “democracy hanging by a thread”? Get a grip.

This was a riot. It was not an insurrection — the word Abraham Lincoln applied to the Civil War, and the word for a federal crime that none of the 900 defendants has been charged with. The riot was condemnable but utterly ineffectual.

The mindlessly repeated refrain that the riot “prevented the peaceful transition of power” is overwrought. The transition of power was never in doubt. Was the peace disturbed? Yes . . . that’s why so many people have been prosecuted, some for serious offenses, and many others for trivial crimes that the Justice Department would normally decline to charge. But there was so little damage done to the Capitol that Congress was able to reconvene a few hours after order was restored. It promptly affirmed Biden’s victory, as it was always certain to do. No one tried to blow up the Capitol. No one tried to mass-kill the security forces. Our Constitution held firm, and there was never any reason to suspect it wouldn’t. Our democracy was not realistically imperiled, much less at the precipice of annihilation.

The video we are now seeing does not establish anyone’s innocence. It does, however, bolster the conclusion that the Democrats’ political messaging about the day has been a duplicitous exercise in mythmaking. Is Tucker Carlson presenting a depiction of January 6 that is overly sympathetic to a violent mob? Probably so . . . but then, the Democrat-dominated January 6 committee put its thumb on the scale as it presented Götterdämmerung.

Neither version is accurate, as we already knew from having watched the televised goings-on in real time. What happened on January 6 was a riot. It was as surreal as the QAnon shaman’s getup. It was a disgrace. It has resulted in scores of worthy prosecutions. Though Donald Trump did not incite it in the strict criminal-law meaning of that term, it is an indelible, disqualifying stain on his record as president.

But it wasn’t the end of domestic tranquility and republican democracy, much less the end of the world.