12/13/21: We learned today what many right-wing types thought was really going on as the January 6 riot unfolded. They watched the mob storm the halls of Congress with their very own peepers, and they understood who the attackers were and who stirred them to fury and violence.
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“He’s got to condemn this shit Asap.”
Donald J. Trump Jr.
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Thanks to the Democratic-led committee – on which only two principled Republicans have had the nerve to serve – we know that even as the riot exploded, Donald Trump Jr. sent a text to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. He wasn’t blaming Joe Biden for what was transpiring. He wasn’t claiming left-wing plants were leading the mob on. He was begging Meadows to talk to his dad. “He’s got to condemn this shit Asap. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough,” Don Jr. insisted.
Meadows didn’t respond with outrage and try to say that Black Lives Matter types were stirring the mob.
He replied: “I’m pushing it hard. I agree.”
So Don Jr. knew.
And
Meadows knew.
Even the Trump enablers at Fox News – who play dumb now and claim the attack wasn’t so bad, or if it was, it was because left-wing types tricked “patriots” into rioting – knew as events unspooled on television. They weren’t blind to reality. They saw what we all saw. Laura Ingraham texted Meadows, pleading with him to get the man in the Oval Office to call off the attack. “Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home … this is hurting all of us … he is destroying his legacy.” (For an entirely different take from the people at Fox News, see my post for 5/19/21.)
And he was.
And she was destroying her legacy as a journalist. She was collapsing the boundary between reporting and kissing ass. She was conflating herself and Fox and the attackers and the president into a grotesque “us.”
Brian Kilmeade, another Fox News host, wasn’t blind. “Please get him on tv,” he said of Mr. Trump, in yet another call to Meadows. The mob is, “Destroying everything you have accomplished.”
Sean
Hannity urged Meadows to get Trump to do something, too. “Can he make a
statement? … Ask people to leave the Capitol,” Hannity implored.
The answer, of course, was “yes.” Trump could have quelled the riot. Instead, he dallied and diddled and enjoyed watching democracy eat itself.
The president’s goal was simple and entirely self-serving. He wanted to overturn the results of an election that he fairly lost. (See: 12/4/21; 12/28/21; 12/29/2 and 1/1/22.)
The
mob the president helped stir was just one of several deadly weapons he was ready
to employ.
*
OF COURSE, when you are revealed to have known the truth about who you believed stirred the mob on January 6, and you work for Fox News, you must wrestle the messenger to the ground and trample that person into the TV turf.
At Fox, every day is a day for democracy to eat itself.
After other networks dared to air Rep. Liz Cheney, heretofore all her life a Republican, reading the Fox hosts’ texts aloud, Ingraham used her show to blast the “regime media.” Those commie rats, you know she wanted to say, were “somehow trying to twist this message to try to tar me as a liar, a hypocrite who privately sounded the alarm on Jan. 6, but publicly downplayed it.”
Well, yeah.
You did, Laura, sweetcakes. You knew Trump had to regain control of the mob – which mob you and your peers knew full well he stirred to attack. Then you told your viewers that the rioters were “people who can only be described as antithetical to the MAGA movement.”
You added helpfully that there “are some reports that Antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.”
And you said this:
“I have never seen
Trump rally attendees wearing helmets. Black helmets. Brown helmets. Black
backpacks. The uniforms that you saw in some of these crowd shots … Those knee
pads and all the pads on their elbows,” you hinted. “I have been to dozens of
Trump events and the criminal actions we saw today do not represent this
movement.”
(We know, if we
simply bother to read the indictments prepared by the Department of Justice
since that day, that those folks in tactical gear were indeed right-wing types from the Oath Keepers and
Three Percenters, and groups of that nature.)
You made it as clear as you could. You hinted at others committing the violence. You had never seen Trump fans act like this. You even grabbed the mantel of patriotism and tried to drape it over the rioters that day. “We’re trying to save this country,” you said, “not to tear it down.”
Then there was Hannity. He knew, too. He had called Meadows to have the president call off the dogs. Now, it was time for Hannity to describe those dogs on his show. The Trump people, “They were there to peacefully protest. Then we had the reports that groups like antifa, other radical groups — I don’t know the names of all of them — that they were there to cause trouble.”
He didn’t “know the names.” Probably because he was making it all up.
“There were reports that some of these groups were telling
their members to dress up in, quote, ‘MAGA gear,’” Hannity added, in case his
audience members still hadn’t sniffed the clues he was feeding.
Then there was Kilmeade texting Meadows – but on the air offering this delusional take for his poor uninformed viewers to swallow. “I do not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence that I know of in a big situation,” he said in the wake of the violent attack.
More recently, Kilmeade, who knew on January 6 that the mob was destroying everything Trump had achieved (biggest federal deficit ever – loss of three million jobs during his time in office – not one, but two impeachments) offered up a brand new take. Now in November 2021, he invited Tucker Carlson onto his show, and posed this softball question: “Do you think maybe, perhaps, and maybe you don’t want to give away your series, [but do] you find indications that the FBI was actually pushing for this invasion?” Kilmeade wondered.
Sure. The F.B.I. stirred up the mob – even though no one at the F.B.I. ever spoke on that fateful day.
The plain fact is this. It was Trump who said
his followers had to “fight like hell” that day, or they “wouldn’t have a
country anymore.”
*
A riot that “targeted the heart of American democracy”
SO IT WAS. Fox News hosts knew on January 6 what was going on and then they got dumber as the weeks passed. Tucker Carlson, the top-rated host on the network, showed footage from the day of the riot during one evening show and said of the people inside the Capitol, “They don’t look like terrorists. They look like tourists.”
That’s true if you looked at only the carefully selected clips Tuck decided to show. It’s not true if you select others, even if both sets of clips show part of what happened that day. I’ve looked into the arrests, so far, of 564 rioters from January 6. I would agree that a hundred or more were relatively harmless, caught up in the emotion of that day, and who went inside the Capitol just to experience the spirit of that day. But who stirred them up? Who plotted to overthrow a fair vote in several states? And if you mention the fact that dozens of police were inured that day, the idea that these were just “tourists” can only be called absurd.
Sadly, absurdity sells at Fox News. So they
sell all they can.
In one recent confrontation, Geraldo Rivera was a guest on Sean Hannity’s show. He had this to say of events of that awful January day: “This was a riot that was unleashed, incited and inspired by the president of the United States, which targeted the heart of American democracy.”
Hannity told Rivera to stop talking. He told viewers that his guest’s words represented only his opinion. Then Hannity started spouting opinion like the Fontana di Trevi in Rome. What about that diabolical House committee in Congress, Hannity demanded to know! (None of the nine members of the committee attacked any police officers on January 6 and none have been charged with any crimes, as a result.)
“The question is, this corrupt committee. The question is,”
Hannity shouted, “why this riot and not 574 other riots?”
Me. Me. I taught history. I can answer that question. I know why the January 6 riot is far more important. The destruction that resulted during any number of Black Lives Riots was regrettable and counter-productive. That much is true. We have also had far deadlier riots in American history. (That was the argument Ingraham soon tried to make, as if to show what happened with all those Trump supporters running amok, wasn’t so bad.) I can list a few. The Watts Riot. The Tulsa Riot. The Hamburg Riot. The Zoot Suit Riot. The New York City Draft Riot in 1863. Even the Courthouse Riot in Cincinnati, which ended in cannon fire and dozens killed.
But we have never had a riot, by people encouraged by the President of the United States, to attack one branch of the federal government, to serve the selfish needs of the other. In fact, it was a riot meant to overturn the results of an election – and served only the selfish interests of the head of the executive branch.
After Rivera asked Hannity to try to “remember the frame of mind
you were in when you wrote that text on January 6,” the host decided it was
time to turn to a second guest, Dan Bongino.
This is Fox News, remember, where Laura Ingraham could speak of Team Trump and Team Fox as “us.”
Bongino knew his job. He’s a bulldog, snarling and making biting verbal attacks on anyone with whom he disagrees. “The back-stabbing of the president you’re engaging in is really disgusting,” he tells Rivera.
“We’re all Team Trump at Fox New,” is what Bongino meant, and if you forget that, you’re not just stating opinion. You’re “back-stabbing” the president, the man that Sean, Laura, Brian and Dan all love.
Love more than democracy, itself, really.
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