How January 6th Got Written Out of History
Winners write history, but only after the dust settles
Welcome to a semi-premium Thursday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
It’s still technically January 6th, so in tonight’s newsletter, I want to share a perspective on the Capitol insurrection and its aftermath that I think has gone very under-explored by the national news media. Given the seriousness of the subject and the urgency of this moment, I’m making that part available for all subscribers.
In the second half of the newsletter, available only to premium members, we’ll go through some key headlines from legislatures and local governments across the country.
I spend a lot of my late nights half-watching old TV shows and skimming through news, keeping one half of my media-addled ADHD brain comfortably numb as the other consumes what are inevitably mostly dismal updates. Last night, I had an episode of Seinfeld on in the background while reading stories on voting rights legislation and the January 6th insurrection.
It was a third season episode of Seinfeld set largely on the NYC subway system, which provided a perfect platform for Kramer’s slapstick spazoid jitteriness. As I watched him skitter in and around a moving train car, I thought about how Michael Richards has just about disappeared since his racist bellowing outburst at a heckler during a stand-up set years and years ago. While I won’t complain about Richards’ effective ban from showbiz, it got me thinking about how the political terrorists that incited the coup attempt last January have suffered zero consequences, and have in many ways even flourished since.
In the days that followed the attack on the Capitol, Americans were largely united in their shock and disgust with the insurrectionists and the Republicans that goaded them on. Nearly 80% of voters, including 67% of Republicans and independents that voted for Trump, told Reuters/Ipsos that they saw the rioters as “criminals” or “fools,” and nearly 70% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s open incitement of the attack.
Now, Trump’s unfavorability rating amongst Americans has dropped from the 63% it hit in the wake of the attack to just 51%, according to a new Morning Consult poll. Worse, just 47% of Americans say that the insurrection will have any bearing on how they vote in the midterm elections, which is about the size of the vote share that Democrats should expect to get nationally. Two other recent polls found that just 40% of Republicans believe the insurrection was a violent event, while only 29% believe it was an attack on the government.
If Democrats are counting on broad disgust with the riot to help them beat the midterm odds, they’re going to be very disappointed. And if it sounds absurd that a party that encouraged and continues to celebrate an extremist mob’s violent attempt to overthrow a government will continue to exist and even win elections in a healthy democracy, you’re not mistaken. The catch is that the United States is simply no longer a healthy democracy.
Most Republicans, as I’ve been saying for years, are now terrorists. Some are more openly ghoulish and vile, some wear a veneer of public civility, but they are all committed to eradicating what remains of a free American society. They were edged out of federal power in the 2020 election, but with control of most states and the Supreme Court, the only thing that could stop them from achieving their goal in the long term was a swift and fierce response from the Democratic Party.
Hey, did you hear that Congressional Democrats watched a special message from Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and then lined up to shake hands with Dick Cheney on the floor of the House today?
The Democratic Party’s decrepit and disconnected leadership was never going to stand a chance against the modern, take-no-prisoners GOP, but the extent to which they’ve legitimized Republicans has been breathtaking. Democrats tried to include Republicans in the January 6th investigation, allowed them to filibuster legislation around it, and wasted months and months of precious narrative-shaping time before getting on with the work.
The details of the commission’s findings are still just leaking out, to little fanfare beyond Twitter. I get far more press releases from the party extolling the virtue of the bipartisan infrastructure package, which pulls the double trick of being an overhyped piece of legislation and portraying Republicans as rational actors worth trusting.
The DC political media has been even worse, normalizing treasonous Republicans at every turn, no matter how directly involved they were with the insurrection or how shameless they’ve been in defending and celebrating it.
Between Congress and the Senate, there were 147 Republicans that voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election victory, even after the insurrection that trashed the Capitol and nearly killed some of their colleagues. Many of the most outspoken and brazen of those Republicans have been invited on national news broadcasts and Sunday talk shows over and over again, and given friendly coverage in prominent newspapers. Some of the most prominent national outlets even turned over their space to those Republicans, giving them a seal of approval for tens of millions of Americans.
So many producers, reporters, and hosts that pride themselves on their fierce independence and savvy insights into Washington have in reality been indoctrinated into unblinking impartiality, trained to believe that they are duty-bound to transcribe whatever is presented to them, drunk on the legacy of media that stood up to autocrats while providing a glide path to the ones seizing power right in front of their eyes.
All year, Republicans were portrayed as good faith participants in legislative debates and political races. It began soon after the insurrection, when Jon Karl interviewed Rep. Steve Scalise on ABC News, a sad, softball exchange that got pilloried by online pundits who make no editorial decisions. Too often, a Republican’s vote against certifying the election, spreading of the Big Lie, or open support for the insurrection was either glossed over or flat out ignored in interviews.
In April, CBS brought on enormously rich Medicare cheat Rick Scott to opine on President Biden’s speech to Congress about infrastructure, which he took as an opportunity to spout lies about government spending. Scott never got asked about his vote against certifying Biden’s electoral victory.
In May, The Washington Post provided Josh Hawley a half-an-hour infomercial for his new book about taking on Big Tech, which the paper’s own critic called laden with hypocrisies and thin arguments that run counter to both his persona and political voting record.
The New York Times offered Hawley a large swath of its op-ed page to publish countless lies ostensibly about the subject of free trade. This positioned him as a serious and studied legislator instead of an ideologue who pumped his fist as he watched feral conservatives storm the Capitol.
NBC’s Chuck Todd regularly invites Republicans on Meet The Press to spread unfettered falsehoods, including an interview last month with Mississippi’s Roger Marshall. Todd hardly pushed back against his mealy-mouthed promotion of the Big Lie, and the headline of the video on the show’s website only serves to further legitimize them.
There has been perhaps no better example of this dismal failure than a November interview between CBS’s Margaret Brennan and Ted Cruz. After allowing the sniveling Texas senator to ramble on disingenuously for ten minutes about China, Brennan asked Cruz about his ongoing support for the Big Lie. She danced around calling Cruz a liar for a few minutes, then pivoted to the question she really wanted to ask: Was he considering running for president in 2024?
They may understand intellectually that politics and government have a profound impact on many people’s lives, but after spending years insulated from the consequences of elections beyond how the results might change which comms directors they need to befriend and which set of questions they have to ask, these gatekeepers begin to treat our democracy as more like a game or form of theater.
Sporting events require two participants, and most shows have protagonists and antagonists. They all serve a purpose, counterweights that propel the narrative and drive the action. But in politics, when one side is openly fascist, it shouldn’t be so even-handed.
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