Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Friday evening on his show that the domestic terrorists who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January and killed a Capitol Police officer are nowhere near as dangerous as the protesters who marched for police reform last year following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Engaging in absurd whataboutism, Carlson painted the thousands who rioted on Jan. 6 as “gentle” and spoke of them as if they were saints:

“You even notice how all like the scary, internet conspiracy theorists, radical, QAnon people, and you actually see them on camera — or in jail cells, where a lot of them now are — maybe they’re kind of confused, maybe they’ve got the wrong ideas, but they’re all kind of gentle people and they’re all kind of waving American flags, they like the country.

“They’re not torching Wendy’s, they’re not looting retail stores, they’re not shooting cops. No, that’s not them.”

Gentle people? Some of them were chanting that Mike Pence needed to be hanged while others were smearing their feces on the walls of the nation’s Capitol. As the New York Times noted in February, Jan. 6 will go down in history as one of the most dangerous and deadly days for American law enforcement:

“The Capitol assault resulted in one of the worst days of injuries for law enforcement in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At least 138 officers — 73 from the Capitol Police and 65 from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington — were injured, the departments have said. They ranged from bruises and lacerations to more serious damage such as concussions, rib fractures, burns and even a mild heart attack.”

Carlson himself said back in January that former President Donald Trump had “recklessly encouraged” the rioters.” But now he wants us to believe that these criminals are gentle souls who were merely protesting the results of the election?

Attempting to normalize terrorism and violence will only serve to encourage others to engage in the same acts. Then again, maybe that’s exactly what Tucker Carlson and his cohorts at Fox have in mind.

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