Stephen Colbert devoted a huge portion of his monologue on Tuesday’s “The Late Show” to Tucker Carlson and the astonishing lengths the Fox News star is going to minimize and outright lie about the Jan. 6 insurrection. And he had some fun jokes about Carlson’s many, many falsehoods, too.
But before he got to them, Colbert offered an explanation for why Fox News continues to allow Carlson to promote these lies despite all the legal trouble the news network has already gotten into thanks to those lies.
“Some people are just addicted to being dicks,” Colbert joked.
For some catch-up, Carlson recently received several thousand hours of video footage related to the attacks from Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, and on Monday’s episode of his Fox News show, he presented selectively edited footage to misrepresent the attacks as peaceful. He also repeated other lies about the attacks, which prompted even Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to condemn them.
Naturally, Carlson doubled down on those falsehoods on Tuesday — read about that here.
“Thanks to the former president, there’s a whole industry of people who make a good living trying to make you think you’re insane,” Colbert said as he kicked off his monologue. “Well, I make a very good living reminding you that you’re not.”
Then he got to his explanation for Fox News’ actions. “Now you’d think that once the people gaslighting you on a daily basis have been revealed to be liars — say, in multiple text messages in a $1.6 billion court filing by Dominion voting systems — they would pump the brakes,” Colbert said. “But apparently, some people are just addicted to being dicks.”
After this, Colbert did a run down of the numerous lies Carlson told on Monday. In one amusing moment, he claimed Carlson had selectively edited audio of McCarthy condemning the attacks to sound like he was supporting them. And near the end of the segment, he joked, “for something that Tucker says didn’t happen, there sure are a lot of people pleading guilty to it.”
This led Colbert to note that Federal authorities have now made 1,000 arrests related to the attacks, which prompted him to act like a game show host. “Tell them what they’ve won,” Colbert asked.
“Still no consequences for the man who incited the whole coup,” the announcer proudly declared.
Watch the whole “Late Show” monologue at the top of this page.
