McCarthy’s gift is in part a fulfillment of Carlson’s own demand. In early January, as McCarthy scrapped and clawed for the support necessary to gain the speakership, Carlson cited releasing all files and video related to January 6 online as something he could offer to win over House Republicans. Carlson’s team will get to cherry-pick what they want from the footage instead of it being released to the public, but the request is pretty close to what McCarthy eventually did. (McCarthy also carried out Carlson’s other suggestion, establishing a House select subcommittee on “the weaponization of the federal government.”)

It wasn't difficult to predict what Carlson was going to do with it. The Fox host’s history of deceptively editing and recontextualizing video to serve his false narratives is so robust that it is unwise to believe anything he says about a particular clip. And now he has more than 40,000 hours of footage to play with that no honest journalist can currently access.

Carlson will find some snippets from the footage, take them out of context, lie about what they show, and argue that this proves that everyone else has been lying about January 6. It doesn’t really matter what he seizes on to do this — the “myth” he claims to be debunking is that violent Trumpists stormed the Capitol and assaulted scores of law enforcement, so perhaps he’ll dig up some clips he will claim show calmer moments between the rioters and the police, or law enforcement using excessive force during the melee, or rioters he says looks suspiciously like feds.

More credible journalists, hamstrung in any effort to debunk his claims in a timely fashion because they won’t have access to the video until later, if ever, will be pressured by the right to promote his stories as bombshells and denounced if they show skepticism. The result will bolster Carlson’s influence at Fox and within the GOP, while sending his viewers and other Republicans deeper into the conspiratorial fever swamps.

That is apparently what McCarthy wants. It is ludicrous for the speaker to argue that January 6 was a “very serious attack” but that it is important to get “sunshine” on the situation by giving the footage to Carlson. The Fox host’s noxious conspiracy theories about January 6 are not a secret — several of his former colleagues very publicly broke with the network over them. And just days before news of the speaker’s arrangement with Carlson broke, Dominion Voting Systems released a filing in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox which revealed that Carlson and the network’s other stars and its top executives had been fully aware that Trump’s election fraud claims had been false, but promoted them anyway to keep their viewers happy.

There was never any plausible chance that Carlson’s team would look at the footage and decide to tell their audience that it proved they had been wrong all along. He’s not an impartial finder of fact — he’s a propagandist who is in the business of telling his viewers what they want to hear. In this case, they want to believe that they and their political fellow travelers were the victims, so that’s what they are going to hear.