Anne Applebaum writes:

All around you are swirling scenes of violence—explosions in Baghdad, ISIS operatives slitting the throat of an infidel, the chaos around the U.S. Capitol on January 6. You see jarring images of blood and brutality; you hear the grating sound of screaming; you feel the rush of fear and rage.

But then a calm, sympathetic man steps forward, dressed in a button-down shirt. He explains all of it. He connects the disconnected images; he makes sense of the disturbing noises; he puts everything you have just witnessed into a single narrative. These stories are confusing, he says, because they have been staged or manipulated. None of them has ever been what they seem. Underlying them, however, is a deeper truth: Good people, honest people, true Americans, patriots, people just like you, are being cheated. Sinister forces inside the American government arranged all of this bad imagery in order to oppress you, to remove you, to eliminate you. Finally, it all makes sense.

This, in essence, is the plot and structure of Patriot Purge, a documentary produced by Tucker Carlson and Scooter Downey. The first of three parts is now airing on the streaming service Fox Nation—about which more in a moment. You already know Carlson, the man in the button-down shirt; the preppy turned propagandist who adopted extremism after his career as a moderate Republican failed; the living, breathing embodiment of the word cynic. Downey, a less familiar figure, is the director of previous documentaries, including Hoaxed, an apologia for the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich and other denizens of the online alt-right. Hoaxed was designed to provoke feelings of danger, anger, and mistrust around “the media.” Patriot Purge uses the same combination of violent, rapidly changing film clips, ominous music, and earnest “witnesses” to provoke feelings of danger, anger, and mistrust around the FBI, the U.S. military, the White House, the American government as a whole.

To comprehend the full scope of the conspiracy, viewers will have to watch all three episodes. But even in the first episode, the goals of this project are already clear. The point is to describe the events of January 6 as a false-flag operation cooked up inside the deepest layers of the American deep state—and thus to cast doubt on everything that will come out of Congress’s January 6 hearings, everything revealed by every Washington Post or network-television investigation, everything turned up by the FBI. For Fox viewers, this will come as an enormous relief. If all the disturbing facts can be ignored, then no lessons need be learned. Republicans in Congress and the Trump White House need never be blamed for their assault on the Constitution. The people who supported them need never question that support. [Continue reading…]