Tucker Carlson describes January 6 rioters as “passionately patriotic Americans” “who genuinely love America”

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Citation From the June 8, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

TUCKER CARLSON: Tonight we want to get to the most basic question of all that you never hear asked. And it's this: Why did so many Trump voters show up at the Capitol in the first place? Somehow, no one's ever really explained that.

For a year and a half, Democrats have searched for a smoking gun that would prove some sort of preplanned conspiracy to storm the Capitol. They haven't found that because there wasn't a preplanned conspiracy. So instead they've told us the crowd converged on the Capitol that day because their orange cult leader commanded them to. Now, Trump did encourage a protest that day, that is true, but it's not a real explanation for what happened next.

The people you saw outside the Capitol on January 6th were not brainwashed robots mindlessly following their leader. Whatever you think of them, they weren't sociology students from Wesleyan telling you with a straight face there are 400 genders because their professor told them so. No, they were just the opposite. These were mostly sober, middle-class people. Older, for the most part, small business owners from small-ish towns far from the fashionable coasts. They were mostly passionately patriotic Americans, the kind who believe in the Bill of Rights and know what it says. These were people who genuinely love America, far more than say, Chuck Schumer loves America.