(LifeSiteNews) — In an overlooked program just before Christmas, Tucker Carlson and guest Victor Davis Hanson revisited the relentless leftist claim that the January 6, 2021 disturbance at the U.S. Capitol was an “insurrection” led by Donald Trump and the unprecedented efforts to destroy the former president extralegally, including the most recent and “preposterous” decision of the Colorado Supreme Court to ban the former president from their state ballot.
“The idea that [Trump] is guilty of an insurrection is preposterous,” explained Hanson, who is a visiting professor at Hillsdale College and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
He was commenting on the rationale offered by the Colorado Supreme Court in a 4-3 decision last month that ruled the U.S. Constitution excludes the former president from running for office. The 14th Amendment adopted after the Civil War bars from higher office anyone who swore an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” and later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the government.
Democrats have argued that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an “insurrection” that attempted to stop the peaceful transfer of power and that Trump was responsible for provoking it.
In March 2023, while Carlson remained at the top of the cable news industry on Fox News, he covered newly released Capitol surveillance footage from that important day, exposing several significant “lies” by the Democrats’ House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 uprising. This coverage served to discredit, even further, the narrative zealously put forward in conjunction with the deep state and legacy media outlets.
But when Carlson received a vehement and unified denunciation of his reporting on this matter from leaders in both parties, even calling for his ouster from Fox, he concluded at the time that the establishment’s January 6 “insurrection” narrative was “the foundation of something that they’re colluding on.” This “story is at the center of what they’re doing and what they’re planning, obviously.”
The answer to what this plan was came with the decision from the Colorado Supreme Court, Carlson proposed in the December 21 program.
“This [ruling] seemed like lunacy because it was lunacy,” the former Fox News host said during his show on his own new network.
“Whatever else January 6th was … it was not a Trump-led insurrection,” he said. “The crowd had no guns. They had no plan to overthrow the government. Nothing like that has ever emerged. And above all, Trump was not leading it. He was miles away at the White House at the time, where he issued a public statement calling for calm and nonviolence.”
Additionally, “Donald Trump has never been convicted by any court of insurrection,” he said. “And although the 14th Amendment specifically does not apply to the presidency, [the Colorado Supreme Court decided] Donald Trump cannot run for president because he’s an insurrectionist.”
“A conventional legal process is no longer necessary for the left to get its way,” Carlson observed. “No more trials or evidence or jury verdicts. An accusation made on television is now enough to remove a frontrunner from the presidential race. If Nancy Pelosi and Joe Scarborough call you ‘bad,’ Americans are not allowed to vote for you.”
“None of this seems very American. All of it looks like the actual end of democracy,” he said, and Hanson agreed.
‘Not an insurrection’ when ‘supposed leader’ tells ‘unarmed people to assemble peacefully’
“No one has ever charged Donald Trump with a formal crime of insurrection, nor has he been convicted of it. So, if a particular judge just by fiat says he’s guilty of insurrection, it’s contrary to the Constitution, it’s contrary to [an earlier section of] the 14th Amendment that says people shall not be denied … the right of due process.”
Furthermore, “you don’t have an insurrectionist when the supposed head of the insurrectionists tells a group of unarmed people to assemble peacefully,” Hanson said. “That’s not an insurrection.”
He went on to summarize much evidence covered by LifeSiteNews since the riot itself exposing the “insurrection” narrative to be an intentional misrepresentation.
This included the fact that professionals in the Capitol Police warned that the security detail for that day was insufficient and yet “for some mysterious reason, the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, would not beef up security.”
Hanson also discussed the evidence revealing FBI informants to be “everywhere” that day “and when asked about that, the director of the FBI would not answer.”
The professor further emphasized the lies regarding the numbers of alleged deaths that day, and under what circumstances they died, and further stated how the January 6 Committee managed “to suppress free debate and cross-examination.”
“So, the idea that [Trump] is guilty of an insurrection is preposterous,” he said.
Ruling could ‘boomerang back’ against Biden, Harris, removing them from ballots in red states
Hanson, who has been a featured political commentator for a broad variety of print and television news outlets, went on to recall examples of Democrats challenging elections themselves, including Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, who with 30 congressional representatives declined to certify the electoral vote from Ohio in 2004 when George W. Bush was reelected.
Further, regarding examples of leftist insurrectionist activity, he cited Kamala Harris’ support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots that included fundraising and fully encouraging such violence, and of particular concern the incident in Washington, D.C. at the White House grounds.
“That was an insurrection, by their own definition, because [the BLM mob] torched a federal courthouse, a police precinct, [and] the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church. They tried to swarm the White House grounds and sent the president of the United States into a bunker,” he said.
“And during that very incendiary time, Kamala Harris” said these violent activities “‘were not going to stop.’ And then the key word she said, ‘they should not stop’ and they’re going to go on and on and on all the way to the election,” Hanson said.
He additionally recalled the apparent threats Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer issued to Justices Paul Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh before a mob in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020, when he stated “you won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
“That was pretty [much like an] insurrection. That was almost a call to violence,” the professor assessed. Thus, if the left wants to “redefine ‘insurrection,’ that’s going to boomerang back.”
In fact, red-state governors could potentially follow suit, accepting the precedent that states now have the authority to “disqualify candidates based on their opinion” they had violated their oath of office and engaged in insurrectionary activity, he said.
READ: DeSantis ‘looking at’ barring Biden from 2024 ballot if Trump’s removal is allowed to stand
Such governors may perhaps say “we’re not going to have Kamala Harris on the ballot in our state for what she said that contributed to the violence of 2020.” Further, they may be able to do the same to Joe Biden, arguing he “deliberately destroyed federal immigration law” and allowed eight million people into the country illegally in order to “change the demography or get a future constituency.” Should the precedent of the Colorado Supreme Court stand, this could be considered an “insurrectionary act,” Hanson proposed, allowing such governors to remove Biden from the ballot in their own states.
‘The country is at stake’
As assessed by Hanson, this most recent Colorado Supreme Court ruling is part of a series of “precedents” he refers to as a “pattern of firsts” with regard to President Trump. These include the first time the government has ever impeached a president two times, including this trying of “a private citizen, an ex-president in the Senate when he had left office.”
This also involved the first time the nation has spent “22 months and $40 million on a complete hoax, the Russian collusion hoax, [in order] to destroy an administration.”
“We’ve never had 51 prior intelligence authorities rounded up by Mike Morell, former CIA interim director, and Anthony Blinken, the current secretary of state, who deliberately lied to the American people on the eve of a debate and an election to throw that election, in a sense, by lying that this Hunter (Biden) laptop in the possession of the FBI was ‘Russian disinformation,’” Hanson recalled.
“We’ve never had an ex-president have his home raided by the FBI on a dispute over classified documents which traditionally have been settled bureaucratically or civilly,” the military historian listed.
“So, this is something that’s in a pattern of trying to destroy Donald Trump extralegally and without a voice from the people,” he concluded.
“It does seem like the country is at stake,” Carlson reflected. “But this sort of pushes it right to a head. If you are allowed to prevent voters from voting for your political opponent, if people can be punished for crimes they’ve never even been charged with, then both our electoral system and our justice system are corrupt and meaningless, and our democracy itself is fake.”
“This is a pivotal moment for the country,” he observed. “Where are the responsible people in both parties who understand that our system itself is at stake?”
Recent polling shows Trump crushing his closest competitor in the Republican presidential primaries by over 50 points, with even CNN currently projecting the former president to beat Biden in a 2024 rematch.
Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider a Trump campaign appeal of the Colorado Supreme Court ruling with oral arguments set to take place on February 8. The Colorado primary is on March 5.
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