How Republicans successfully "both sided" January 6

They got a lot of help from the mainstream press.

This NYT headline from earlier this year encapsulates the problem. (Source: Mikel Jollett on twitter)

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This year, Republicans treated January 6 like just another Saturday. Members of Congress who ran and hid from Donald Trump’s mob either ignored or minimized the anniversary of a violent assault on the nation’s Capitol.

But it’s not lingering trauma that erased that dark day from Republican memories — just base politics. And those who want voters to forget the insurrection are getting help from a mainstream press that’s proven increasingly unwilling to call them out.

Consider the case of Sen. Tom Cotton, who publicly opposed efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, which led to a gangster-like threat from Trump himself. Yet, on January 5 of this year, Cotton defended Trump’s conduct:

Cotton accuses Biden of playing Chicken Little about democracy when Trump is criminally charged with trying to overturn democracy. The message to insurrectionists past and future is clear: The nation was better under Trump so perhaps your actions that day were just. (Also, inflation was also lower because we weren’t yet recovering from a global pandemic that Trump epically mismanaged, but I digress.) Cotton’s new line is a stark and craven shift from his words on January 6: “It’s past time for the president to accept the results of the election, quit misleading the American people, and repudiate mob violence.”

Meanwhile, living brain donor Donald Trump Jr. posted on what was once Twitter: “Happy Fake Insurrection Day!!! The first ever insurrection with armed tour guides and unarmed participants!”

The “armed tour guides” were police officers who were hopelessly outnumbered against Trump’s mob. The “unarmed participants” committed more than 1,000 assaults on law enforcement.

Then, echoing Rep. Lauren Boebert’s “Today is 1776” tweet from shortly before the attack began, Trump Jr. framed January 6 as the start of a larger MAGA revolution: “I do hope that it was the start of something real though, where people realize that their government is not what they thought it to be unite to take back their country!!!”

Yet on January 6, even Trump Jr. was horrified by what he witnessed. He texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows: “[Trump’s] got to condemn this shit. Asap. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.”

Now, a new Lost Cause narrative has emerged in the aftermath of Trump’s (first) coup.

What a difference three years makes

On January 7 of this year, Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker, “I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages. We have a role in Congress in oversight over our treatment of prisoners.”

Stefanik stressed the word “hostages,” a term that Trump has frequently used.

The January 6 insurrectionists are not “hostages” by any definition. They either pleaded guilty or were tried and convicted for crimes committed in broad daylight and broadcast on national TV.

Stefanik didn’t make her appalling remarks on Steve Bannon’s podcast. She spoke directly to NBC’s mainstream audience. She’s also not Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has long defended the insurrectionists and protested most bitterly over the government daring to treat them like normal prisoners.

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For a time, the general Republican position on January 6 was to repudiate the mob but otherwise support the “soft coup” in which a majority of House Republicans attempted to illegally keep Trump in office. They didn’t deny the violence that occurred, but tried shifting blame, often to the most implausible places. Greene, for instance, suggested the rioters were antifa or leftist plants: “I was very upset [on January 6]. I never expected anything like that. And when that happened I thought, this is antifa, and no one can convince me it was so-called Trump supporters.”

After replacing Cheney as conference chair, Stefanik grotesquely claimed that Nancy Pelosi — a direct target of the mob — was somehow responsible for the Capitol breach. But while a growing number of her colleagues argued that the rioters were simply “tourists” on a peaceful visit, she personally didn’t take that position. She wrote on January 6, 2022, that she “strongly and clearly condemned the violence and destruction that occurred at the US Capitol” before grossly equating the attack to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and falsely claiming that an “entire year of violence and lawlessness … raged across our nation throughout 2020.”

Stefanik added, “Our nation owes a debt of gratitude to the US Capitol Police for their bravery and heroism on that day.” But now, she argues that the very people who attacked the Capitol Police are the victims of a “weaponized” Department of Justice.

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RELATED FROM PN: MAGA Republicans are normalizing violent threats

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Stefanik follows her MAGA king’s lead, and Trump demands a reality where the January 6 rioters are fully vindicated. It’s not hard to understand why: Trump is a malignant narcissist who was delighted to see his supporters break into the Capitol like a pack of wild animals waving flags bearing his name. It perhaps pleased him even more that so many of the insurrectionists were what he’d consider “normal Americans” (white, middle class, without any prior criminal history).

By the summer of 2021, Trump was promoting the MAGA narrative that insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt was “murdered” at the Capitol. Once again, his supporters were told to “reject the evidence of [their] eyes and ears.” Babbitt was in fact part of an riotous mob trying to breach a barricaded door to the Speaker’s Lobby as they shouted "f--k the blue.” She ignored multiple warnings before she was fatally shot attempting to climb through a shattered window.

Babbitt, in short, was not a victim. But Trump siding with a violent (white) insurrectionist over a (Black) police officer hasn’t come up once during the sham Republican primary debates.

The mainstream media is culpable

Fox News hosts were even quicker than elected Republicans in pushing back hard against the reality of January 6, even though their private text messages, released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News, revealed that they were horrified by the coup attempt and knew Trump was to blame for it.

Nonetheless, Fox host Laura Ingraham told her audience in July 2021, “There was certainly a lot of violence that day but it was not a terrorist attack. It wasn't 9/11. It wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to America. It wasn't an insurrection.” Then she proceeded to mockingly hand out “acting awards” to the Capitol police officers who testified at the January 6 committee. Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson was a reliable fount of misinformation.

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RELATED FROM PN: For Fox News, J6 was the cost of doing business

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But Fox News didn’t operate in a vacuum. Even the mainstream media eventually backed off from calling January 6 what it was — an attack on democracy.

The January 7, 2021, editions of the Washington Post, New York Times, and Associated Press ran the following stories, respectively: After inciting mob attack, Trump retreats in rage. Then, grudgingly, he admits his loss; A Mob and the Breach of Democracy: The Violent End of the Trump Era; Chaos, violence, mockery as pro-Trump mob occupies Congress. Those headlines made it almost impossible to imagine Trump as even a welcome guest at the next Republican National Convention, let alone triumphantly accepting the nomination, which now seems likely. But recent headlines from these outlets help explain the current situation.

From the Times: Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024. The lede even frames Biden as the precedent-breaking candidate: “Rarely in American politics has a leading presidential candidate made such grave accusations about a rival: warning that he is willing to violate the Constitution, claiming that he is eager to persecute political rivals and calling him a dire threat to democracy.”

And the Post: Trump tries reappropriating ‘insurrection’ on Jan. 6 anniversary. Note that the Post puts “insurrection” in quotes as if what happened is a matter for debate. “Reappropriating” is a rather banal term for Trump’s continued lies about the attack, for which he’s facing prison time.

And this brain melter from the AP: One Attack, Two Interpretations: Biden and Trump Both Make the Jan. 6 Riot a Political Rallying Cry.

The AP’s subhed reads “Donald Trump plans to spend the third anniversary of the Capitol riot by campaigning in Iowa as he tries win back the White House.” This ignores how Trump’s chiefly responsible for the riot itself. There’s no recognition of the actual stakes in this election because that would mean promoting Biden’s “interpretation” of the attack.

Last Friday, the Times published columnist Ross Douthat’s op-ed, “Why January 6 Wasn’t An Insurrection.” This is repulsive revisionist history without legal or constitutional merit. Its sole goal is to obfuscate. If no one can agree that an insurrection occurred, then there was no insurrection.

“Meet the Press” host Kristin Welker was roundly criticized for her weak showing against Stefanik’s preening mendacity. In fairness, she’d just confronted Stefanik with her own words in a video clip from January 6 where she denounced both the attack and the rioters she now calls “hostages.”

“This has been a truly tragic day for America,” Stefanik said on the House floor. “Americans will always have the freedom of speech and the constitutional right to protest, but violence in any form is absolutely unacceptable. It is anti-American and must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Of course, three years later, Stefanik deflected the inconvenient reality before her with shocking ease: She accused NBC of “bias” before declaring that she was “proud” to stand with Trump and fight for “election integrity.”

The mainstream media prides itself on a perceived journalistic “impartiality” and folds quickly whenever Republicans accuse them of political bias. They don’t want to effectively become The New Republic, Mother Jones, or even MSNBC, so they are maddeningly reluctant to directly challenge Republicans, no matter how much they lie in their faces.

We’ve all paid a price for this passivity: A recent Washington Post poll showed that Republican support for Trump and sympathy for the January 6 insurrectionists has only grown over the past three years. Republicans have even become less likely to believe Biden’s election was legitimate. Thus, shameless opportunists like Stefanik will only continue pandering to voters who are eager to buy the brand of authoritarianism Trump is selling.

We can blame Fox News and right-wing media. We can blame Republicans for not trying to marginalize Trump when they had a chance. However, mainstream media outlets have chosen to surrender to the MAGA assault on truth: As recently as May 2023, CNN was actively seeking to book more Republicans for a desired “political diversity.”

“Our view is there's advocacy networks on either side," Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav said at the SVB MoffettNathanson Technology, Media and Telecom Conference. "We have the best journalists in the world. We need to show both sides of every issue.”

“Both sides have a point” is still an ideological position, and a flawed one when one side traffics in lies, conspiracy theories, and stochastic terrorism. Such “neutrality” only benefits Republicans, who’ve rejected any shared objective reality. They can rewrite history while crafting a bleak future for us all.

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