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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American power, politics and society.

On each episode, I will talk to an American expert or an expert on America

about something that's going on in America in 2023. I am delighted to be joined today by

Roger Kimball, who is editor of the new Criterion, publisher of Encounter Books, and a columnist for the

Spectator, among other publications. And we're going to be asking what happened exactly

on January 6th. Roger, to give a little bit of an introduction, this week, the Fox News

host Tucker Carlson started to air bits of footage from the up to 40,000

hours of video he and his team have been given by the new Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

And I think it's fair to say that they show a rather different, they show what happened on January 6th, 2021, the famous storming of the capital, or as Democrats like to call it, deadly insurrection.

They show it in a rather different light, or the bits he's shown so far, he hasn't actually shown that much footage so far, but the bits that he's shown suggests that it's not exactly what we've been led to believe it was from the Congressional Select Committee hearing into the January 6th attack and by a lot of the media.

What do you make of what you've seen so far?

Well, Freddie, I think to put it into context, one has to remember the absolute hysteria

that greeted that protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Tucker Carlson himself actually used a phrase that I think was appropriate. He described it as a protest that got out of hand.

This was back around the time that it actually happened.

But of course, it was instantly baptized as an insurrection.

About a year ago, or a year and a half ago,

I gave a talk called the January 6th Insurrection Hoax,

which elicited a fair amount of comment, some positive.

The negative comment was

vituperative and vicious. But I think that what Tucker Carlson has done in his

...