An alleged Proud Boy accused of attacking police officers on January 6 says a bloody jailhouse brawl broke out over whether Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight could be shown on the communal TV.
“The Jan 6ers liked to watch Tucker Carlson on it, and that was never an issue until a small group of individuals came in and they decided that Tucker Carlson was racist. It was a little confusing to us, but it is what it is in today’s standards and time,” Barry Ramey, who allegedly hit Washington police with an irritating chemical spray on January 6, told the Political Prisoner Podcast on Monday.
“We were kind of almost hunted down and told we weren’t going to be watching tucker anymore.”
Mr Ramey said he and his fellow January 6 suspects being held in Northern Neck Regional Jail in Virginia ahead of trial decided to “take a stand,” leading to a fight where the Florida man says he was stabbed in the nose, while another January 6 individual dislocated a shoulder.
The January 6 defendant added in his interview that the whole incident put a “target on our back” as racists.
“The rumour spread throughout the facility that we were a bunch of racists, even though there was a lot of good inmates who knew us, who knew our caliber of character, when this rumor spread throughout the jail, we had target on our backs to say the least,” he added.
According to the Department of Justice, Mr Ramey sprayed a noxious chemical at police officers on January 6, which “caused them to become disoriented and have their vision impaired.”
Officials say Mr Ramey also made a menacing phone call to an FBI officer investigating his case, allegedly reading the agent’s home address and other identifying details to the agent as a threat.
A New York Times analysis of over 1,000 episodes of Mr Carlson’s show declared it “may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful.” On the programme, the Fox host regularly invokes the white supremacist great replacement theory, among other racist ideas.
Federal prosecutors have charged nearly 950 people in 48 states for their alleged roles in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, according to aUSA Today database.
Five members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing street militia, are currently on trial in Washington for seditious conspiracy charges.
