January 6 was about ending democracy. Republicans told us as much.
GOP gaslighting can’t change what we all saw.
As we neared today’s first anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, I began seeing a number of tweets resurface from that day and the days preceding it; some of them genuinely shocked me, though I vaguely remember posting them. We all knew: Trump-supporting members of Congress publicly declared that they would try to overturn his defeat at the polls — and were willing to go to desperate lengths to do it.
Those facts were abundantly clear at the time, but they’ve become foggier thanks to 12 months of gaslighting. We’ve been told Republicans couldn’t possibly have foreseen that Trump’s “Save America Rally” would spiral out of control, that the whole point of January 6 was to address nebulous concerns about “election security,” and that the former president bears no responsibility for the violent mayhem that unfolded. It can be hard to remember that the truth is actually quite simple.
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Seeing some year-old tweets helped to clear things up. On Tuesday, for instance, a number of people reposted a Fox News interview with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) from January 4, 2021, in which Hawley made it clear that Republican members of Congress wanted to disenfranchise Democratic voters and select the president themselves.
“I want to pin you down on what you're trying to do. Are you trying to say that as of January 20, that President Trump will be president?” host Bret Baier asked him.
“Well Bret, that depends on what happens on Wednesday,” Hawley said, alluding to the upcoming congressional certification of the electoral results and prompting Baier to jump in and say, “No, it doesn’t.”
Two days later, Hawley was photographed pumping his fist at rallygoers outside the Capitol, shortly before their attack on Congress began. Then, when Congress reconvened that evening, Hawley joined 146 Republicans in voting against certification. The goal, as Hawley had already proclaimed on national television, was to deny Biden the presidency and keep Trump in office.
By February, Hawley was putting a completely different gloss on these events. To a standing ovation at CPAC he claimed his intention on January 6 was merely to have “a debate about election integrity” — ignoring that there was no evidence of fraud, and that debate doesn’t usually begin with refusing to certify the results of a presidential election.
Trump loves to skirt the borders of the indefensible, but even he pushed his luck on January 6. In his own speech just before the insurrection, he used the words “fight” or “fighting” at least 20 times and said things like, “we’re going to have to fight much harder and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us.”
His underlinings were even more explicit. As I was also reminded this week, on January 2, 2021, Rep. Louie Gohmert went on Newsmax and more or less said he expected street violence from Trump supporters on January 6.
"But if bottom line is, the court is saying, 'We're not going to touch this. You have no remedy' — basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM,” Gohmert said, referring to a federal judge’s decision to reject his lawsuit seeking to empower then-VP Pence to throw out the electoral results.
Violent rhetoric of that sort was commonplace in the days and hours leading up to the attack on the Capitol. During a rally in downtown Washington, DC on January 5, where White House economics adviser Peter Navarro and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones both gave speeches, Jones yelled, “I don’t know how all this is gonna end, but if they want a fight, they better believe they’ve got one!”
Hours later, the rally outside the White House that preceded the attack on the Capitol featured a speech from Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), who said, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!” and another from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
“Let’s have trial by combat!” Giuliani crowed.
But after Pence didn’t “come through” — and after the attack on the Capitol left five dead and 140 officers injured — Trump spent the last year trying to rewrite history with absurd claims like “there was such love at that rally ... the love in the air, I've never seen anything like it.”
I’ve also been reminded this week of what Trump was up to in the days leading in to January 6, 2020. On January 3, you might recall, Trump was recorded trying to bully Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes he needed to beat Joe Biden in the state.
In the days that followed, Trump posted a number of tweets encouraging the MAGA mob he had summoned to DC, and proclaimed that “they won’t stand for a landslide election victory to be stolen.”
So when Trump and/or his supporters inevitably try to downplay today’s anniversary, keep in mind what the Hawleys, Gohmerts, and Trumps of the world were saying in the days leading up to January 6. It wasn’t about “election security” and it wasn’t about “love.” It was a coup attempt inspired by a defeated president, with help from Republican members of Congress who weren’t even trying to hide their willingness to end US democracy if it meant Trump could serve another term.
Biden delivers memorable January 6 speech
As I was putting the finishing touches on this newsletter Thursday morning, President Biden delivered a remarkable speech at the Capitol commemorating the first anniversary of January 6 and calling out former President Trump, even though he didn’t mention him by name.
"We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie. And here's the truth. The former president created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He's done so because he values power over principle ... he can't accept he lost,” Biden said.
Biden also spoke to how Trump’s threat to US democracy is an ongoing danger.
“We must decide what kind of nation are going to be. Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? Are we going to be a nation where we allow partisan election officials to overturn the legally expressed will of the people?" he said.
You can check out my video thread of highlights beginning here.
Trump, for his part, was originally planning to have a news conference today, but cancel culture intervened.
If Trump does respond to Biden sometime Thursday, I’ll have details in tomorrow’s edition of the newsletter.
Fox & Friends’ cesspool of Covid misinformation
Longtime followers of my work probably remember that during the Trump years, I covered Fox & Friends almost every morning. Sure, the show basically amounted to Trump White House propaganda and served as one of the starkest examples of how Fox News functioned as unofficial state media, but it reliably landed newsworthy interviews with important administration officials, including Trump himself and people like Kellyanne Conway.
Fox & Friends is less relevant now, and I dip in and out of it more than I used to. Since it can no longer serve as a mouthpiece of the administration, these days the show is more about ginning up manufactured outrage and making President Biden look as bad as possible. But hosts also spread a lot of deadly Covid misinformation — which is why a couple segments caught my eye on Wednesday.
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I still scan the show each day for interviews with elected officials, and Wednesday’s edition featured one with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that almost seemed like it was sponsored by Covid-19.
While making his now-familiar attacks on government public health experts, Paul argued against vaccination, claiming “the majority of the people in the hospital right now are vaccinated.”
This is a lie — as Kentucky-based reporter John Reecer pointed out, Covid patients in representative a hospital in Paul’s home county in Kentucky are actually 76 percent unvaccinated.
But Paul didn’t stop there. He went on to claim that the reason so many vaccinated people are in hospitals is “because almost everybody has been vaccinated.” This particularly lie is ironic, since Paul’s state of Kentucky ranks toward the bottom of states in vaccination rate, with just 54 percent of the population fully vaccinated.
"This is basically nature's vaccine that is running through the community,” Paul added, referring to the omicron variant. More than 2,000 Americans are dying each day, right now, from Covid, and the omicron variant is overwhelmingly the most prevalent strain of the disease.
None of these comments received any pushback from hosts, which isn’t surprising when you consider that they’re just as responsible for spreading Covid misinformation.
On the very same show, co-host Ainsley Earhardt packed so many lies and misleading statements about Biden’s Covid response into a single video clip that it serves as a perfect illustration of the Gish Gallop — a “debate technique when you cite so much ‘evidence’ that is misleading or wrong that your opponent can’t correct all of it and still make any of his or her own points,” as Vox described it.
Earhardt lied about how many people died from Covid under Trump (she said 200,000 did, underestimating by about 100 percent). She mischaracterized the purpose of vaccines (they’re also intended to prevent serious illness, not solely to prevent infection). She attacked Biden for not developing his own vaccines (the vaccines work fine and are in ready supply, the problem is people refusing to take them), and misrepresented a comment Biden recently made vowing that the federal government wouldn’t interfere in state-level efforts to solve testing shortages — all that and more in just 52 seconds.
As I noted in the above tweet, Fox & Friends averages over a million viewers at any given time, and unlike me, many of them presumably watch the show earnestly and have their views shaped by what they hear from the likes of Paul and Earhardt.
Consider what these viewers are being told — that vaccines don’t work, that getting Covid is the best way to protect yourself from Covid (“natural immunity”), and that public health experts associated with the Biden administration are incompetent and shouldn’t be listened to. It’s no wonder Republican voters these days are disproportionately refuse to get the vaccine and are disproportionately dying from Covid.
This is why I follow you and subscribe. Your breakdown is good. Your POV makes things very clear like you said in 12 months of lies and gaslighting that we are not frigging crazy. Your "roll the tap" recaps, with a really good sense of social media mixed with fox news, help remind folks that it's almost like a messaging war on Americans. It's like we are barraged with who do you believe. This me or your lying eyes thing over time dulls your senses but we have to constantly be reminded it's not our lying eyes and the truth IS the truth!
Excellent report. This shows the benefit, usefulness,payoff, of all the detailed tracking and quoting you do..no doubt hard to do, hard to stomach. People forget. People get gaslighted. The facts and quotes can’t be mothballed when the insurrection is still so alive.
I almost lost my breath on that line from Trump about January 6th being a lovefest like he’s never seen.