Heads have been rolling at the famed British Broadcasting Company, the BBC. A leaked memo about BBC bias, most notably in its editing of President Trump’s J6 speech for a 2024 documentary, set the tumbrils in motion. CEO Deborah Turness and director general Tim Davie have already gotten the ax. More heads may follow.
What is unusual about this turn of events is not that BBC corruptly edited Trump’s speech, but that the brass have been held to account for it. The American media has done so for years casually and without consequence. So, too, even more problematically, did the House January 6 Committee and special counsel Jack Smith.
In the way of background, President Trump began his speech at the Ellipse at noon on January 6, 2021 He marveled at the size of the crowd, and this time there was no need for exaggeration. “Many of you have traveled from all across the nation to be here,” said Trump, “and I want to thank you for the extraordinary love.” The crowd responded by chanting, “We love Trump.”
“If this happened to the Democrats,” said Trump of the perceived theft of the election, “there’d be hell all over the country going on. There’d be hell all over the country.” About this, he was absolutely right. Protests—or worse—had been planned at some four hundred sites if Trump prevailed. Trump, however, did not expect violence from his supporters. “You’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation,” he told them. “You’re not the people that tore down our nation.”
Trump soon followed with the speech’s most quoted line—most quoted on conservative media, that is—“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” As liberal apostate Naomi Wolf observed, Trump’s caution “had been deleted from all of the news coverage that I read.” Said Wolf, “Because of lies such as these in legacy media—lies which I and millions of others believed—half of our nation’s electorate was smeared and delegitimized, and I myself was misled.”
Near the conclusion of his speech, at the 70 minute-mark on the video, Trump said rhetorically, “And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun.”
At 1:06, while Rep. Paul Gosar was challenging the certification of the Arizona vote inside the Capitol, USCP deputy chief Eric Waldow ordered the “less lethal” team to open fire on the protestors now numbering about a thousand. Trump was still speaking at the Ellipse, a 45-minute walk from the Capitol. The crowd that he allegedly incited to insurrection would not arrive there for close to an hour.
The truth did not interest the BBC. Early in the speech, about the 15-minute mark, Trump had said, “We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.” (Italics added)
The BBC edit was actually worse than reported. They had Trump saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you, and we fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” In the speech, the “and we fight” comment comes 54 minutes after “I’ll be there with you.” This everyone noticed. What has gone unnoticed is the BBC switch of “to the Capitol” from a later sentence to an earlier one to make Trump’s rhetoric seem more direct and belligerent.
To be fair to the BBC, the House J6 committee butchered Trump’s speech even more brutally. Ignoring harsh truths, The committee doomed its report to frivolity by their obsession with Trump. “The rioters were inside the halls of Congress,” wrote committee chairman Bennie Thompson, “because the head of the executive branch of our government, the then President of the United States, told them to attack.”
In the foreword, Thompson alluded to a quote that would be reported in the body of the report, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The report does not quote Trump’s more specific directive, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” The report writers dismiss this instruction, observing, “Trump used the word ‘peacefully,’ written by speech writers, one time.”
In a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith, conveniently unsealed in October 2024, Smith consciously omits Trump’s exculpatory statements. If proof were needed of his ill intent, consider his damning analysis of Trump’s speech on the White House Ellipse:
“When the defendant soon after told his supporters ‘we’re going to walk down to the Capitol,’ that they would ‘never take back our country with weakness’ and that they had to ‘show strength and to be strong,’ members of the crowd shouted, ‘Invade the Capitol building!’ and ‘Take the Capitol!’”
The deception here is as blatant as the Left’s “very fine people” Charlottesville smear. Upon reading this paragraph, literally millions of Republicans—and maybe even a handful of media people—can tell you what Smith chose not to report, namely Trump’s comment just seconds later: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” As to crowd members shouting, “Invade the Capitol building!” and “Take the Capitol!” Smith cites as his source a “Rallygoer video.” That’s it. No names.
Trump is suing the BBC for $1 billion. Jack Smith and the J6 Committee deserve about 5 to 10.
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It still feels personal to me even though I wasn’t there. I listened to Trump’s speech live and marveled at how little bitterness he expressed. It felt like a whirlwind of truths & lies from there. Up until that day no one who ever went to a Trump rally could deny the cheerfulness of the average crowd member. I’d never seen anything like it—the rallies were almost like a party. You made friends with almost everyone around you & the sullen, the quiet, the undecided couldn’t help but be drawn to visit with others like you would with a new neighbor. Once in we ended up in the front but there was a quiet, awkward & sullen 20-something kid beside me who looked alone and nervous so me so the ladies I’d barely just met started trying to include him in the conversation. He clearly didn’t know what to do with that but 90 minutes later he quietly admitted to me he was told he was supposed to be protesting & implied that he was hired to do it. I asked him what he objected to & he couldn’t really say. I have no problem with protest—I’d made protest signs before when the Clinton’s came to our hometown and refused to let us come inside our own hometown courthouse square because I couldn’t prove I was a democrat. I said “this is Missouri, in our primaries we don’t vote for a party, we vote for a person” but I might as well have been speaking a foreign language. None of the Clinton handlers would let me or my quiet children in. It was shocking. That was my first taste of partisan hate. So all those years later to be cheerfully circulating with people of all stripes seemed normal & right & healthy but to later watch J6 unfold live on TV felt completely unnatural. All I can say for sure is that nothing about J6 matched any previous experience.
When the "Legacy" media became just a Pravda-like propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, our country was put on the road towards a second civil war. Progressives (an oxymoron if there ever was one) function on the theory of "I believe, therefore I KNOW!" That. allowed the fallacies of "lawfare," open borders, trasgenderism, and other insanities. Americans, once known for the virtue of common sense, have fallen into an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole of fantasy triumphing over truth. That is a very dangerous place to be in an increasingly dangerous world.