Tucker Carlsons Patriot Purge, a revisionist history of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, clocks in at an easily binge-watchable 70 minutes, spread over three episodes. Its produced with the aesthetics and narrative suspense of an action thriller. The good guys are the patriots who stormed the Capitol. The bad guys are those in the media and government who are persecuting them. The left is hunting the right, Carlson warns his viewers.

It is the most nakedly fascist piece of propaganda Carlson has ever produced. And it comes at a dangerous moment: The insurrection is on its way to becoming as noble an enterprise as the Boston Tea Party for large parts of the American right.

Former President Donald Trump is laying clear groundwork to fully embrace the events of Jan. 6, which he now calls a very beautiful time , during his potential upcoming presidential campaign. He claimed last month that The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest! and has repeated the sentiment during recent rallies.

Trump also defended the chants of Hang Mike Pence! during an interview with ABCs Jonathan Karl. His valorization of the insurrection attempt is having a downstream effect on the entire Republican Party: Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) declined over the weekend to criticize Trump for defending those bloodthirsty chants.

And now, Carlson, through this three-part documentary as well as his nightly top-rated prime-time show on Fox News, is taking the argument to the masses.

Nicole Hemmer, author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics , described Patriot Purge as an overarching fantasy about the insurrection that goes like this: It was not an insurrection, she wrote for CNN . To the extent there was violence, it was stirred up by members of the government and left-wing agitators. All of it was orchestrated so that the full force of federal law enforcement could be unleashed against Trump supporters, marking them as enemies of the state.

Carlsons insurrection agitprop sparked a similar wave of warnings from many experts on fascism and misinformation: Propaganda like this, they argued, could one day render the shocking events of Jan. 6 as a mere preview of the right-wing violence to come.

A White Nationalist Whitewash

Patriot Purge is deeply conversant with far-right mythologies about Jan. 6 and broader fantasies about supposed persecution of far-right groups by the federal government. Thats not surprising, considering who worked on the series: Carlson co-wrote Patriot Purge with a man who previously produced white nationalist movies, and the series counts two white nationalists among its protagonists.

Carlsons narration is shot through with coded terminology: In the first episode, he describes the arrest of Jan. 6 rioters as the precursor to a purge of legacy Americans.

Darren Beattie is the first person interviewed in Patriot Purge, warning the viewer that the domestic war on terror is here. Its coming after half the country.

Beattie made headlines in 2018 after he was forced out of the Trump White House when CNN revealed hed spoken at a white supremacist conference. Since then, Beattie has openly allied himself with white supremacists most notably Nick Fuentes frequently promoting them online. He once tweeted, If white people are targeted as a group, they must learn to defend themselves as a group.

None of this background is mentioned in Patriot Purge. Instead, Carlson says simply: Darren Beattie, of Revolver News, is one of the few in media whos done real reporting on what actually happened on Jan. 6.

Elsewhere, security analyst J. Michael Waller is trotted out in Episode 1 to make the baseless claim that the violence on Jan. 6 was a political warfare operation orchestrated by agent provocateurs. Though Carlson mentions that Waller works for the Center for Security Policy, it goes unmentioned that the organization is one of the foremost anti-Muslim groups in the country.

Sliding these extreme voices into the show with the patina of expertise is in line with how Carlson routinely smuggles white nationalist talking points into the mainstream via his nightly cable show. For Patriot Purge, he had some extra help.

The co-writer for the docuseries is a man named Scooter Downey, who directed movies for white nationalists before joining Fox Nation as a writer. As reported by The Daily Beast , Downey directed a documentary called Crossfire starring Lauren Southern , the Canadian alt-right activist best known for teaming up with European neo-fascists on a cruel mission to stop boats from rescuing refugees stranded in the Mediterranean.

Downey has also directed a live-action movie called Rebels Run based on a comic book written by Theodore Robert Beale, aka Vox Day , an alt-right artist who once wrote that Western civilization rests on white tribalism, white separatism, and especially white Christian masculine rule.

Interview With An Insurrectionist