Ever since a mob of pro-Trump fanatics attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Republicans and their propagandists have been frantically engaged in a gaslighting campaign to convince the public that it didn’t see what it watched unfold that day, primarily by claiming that someone, anyone else—their favorite concocted bogeymen, “antifa” or Black Lives Matter, or their favorite conspiracy theory, the “Deep State”—was responsible for the violence, other than the disinformation-fueled “Patriots” and their cohorts who turned out en masse to try to keep Congress from counting the Electoral College that day. Tucker Carlson, of course, has been leading that gaslight brigade, primarily with a barrage of baldfaced lying, claiming that the people responsible were actually Deep State agents of the FBI, trying to set up hapless MAGA fans with a “false flag” operation. His latest iteration of this conspiracy theory, trotted out Tuesday on his Fox News show, tried to suggest that a seemingly unidentified man in the crowd, notable for his red face paint, was in fact one of these “agent provocateurs”—when a brief bit of digging by HuffPost’s Ryan J. Reilly revealed that in fact the man is a well-known St. Louis Cardinals fan, and an ardent Carlson devotee. Read more