- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Just because Republicans choose unreality doesn’t mean the media should ignore the facts of January 6.
On January 6, 2021, I watched CNN as thousands of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. As someone well-versed in watching tragedy on television, I was struck by just how indisputable the facts were at the time: violent, red-hat-clad MAGA rioters, followed by Republicans in Congress, tried to stop democracy in its tracks. Trump had told his followers that the protest in Washington, DC, “will be wild,” and in the assault that followed his speech, some rioters smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol. Hundreds of them have since been convicted on charges ranging from assault on federal officers to seditious conspiracy. These are stubborn facts, the kind that do not care about your feelings. These facts include the inalienable truth that Trump is the first president in American history to reject the peaceful transfer of power.
It never occurred to me that these facts could somehow be perverted by partisanship. But three years later, we are seeing just that, as Republicans cling to the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Joe Biden and are poised to make Trump their 2024 nominee. And perhaps even more dangerous than the GOP ditching reality is the news media’s inability to cover Trumpism as the threat to democracy that it very much is.
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But the problem is, when all you have is conventional political framing, everything looks like politics as usual. One candidate makes a claim; the other disputes it. Two sides are divided, etc. This framing only works if both parties operate within the frameworks of a shared reality. But Trumpism doesn’t allow for the reality the rest of us inhabit. Trump’s supporters believe their leader’s reality and not, say, the reality the rest of us see with our eyes. As Trump once told a crowd: “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Journalists may be well-intentioned in trying to be “objective,” or they’re simply afraid of being labeled partisan. Either way, coverage of January 6 that gives equal weight to both sides—one based in reality, one not—is helping pave the road for authoritarianism.
There’s so much gerrymandering, vote caging, and deliberate disenfranchisement in the US that “roughly half” is heavily overstating it. Elections are decided by closer to 15% of eligible voters, as everyone else is packed or cracked or screened out of the process so as to be functionally irrelevant to the declared victor.
And this sentiment does go both ways. I can’t count how many times I’ve been told that I deserve whatever dogshit policy Ken Paxton and Greg Abbot are heaping on me today because I’ve committed the crime of living in a Red State.
This sentiment isn’t just confined to hotheads on social media either. When you’ve got guys like DeSantis and Paxton and Jay Ashcroft and Christie Noam flagrantly breaking state and national laws with zero response from the Biden DOJ, wtf do people expect some simple civvy like myself to do?
Leftists think they need a revolution to succeed, because reforms don’t work when the Right has the police on their side. And when you consider how many scalps J. Edgar Hoover had on his wall by the time he left office, you begin to see why.
The country is already deeply fascist. We have people living in relative (abet deteriorating) comfort who think we can just politely ask the next crop of politicos to fix problems for us. We have people living in far more dire circumstances who are scrambling to take direct action before they suffer irreparable harm. And then we have a large, heavily armed contingent of mercenaries who were taking selfies with the Jan 6th rioters not that long ago because they thought the Q-Shaman was making a lot of good points.
The Right doesn’t need to do a Revolution because they’re already the ones in control. The only real question is whether they decide Biden gets to keep his seat or Trump needs to be put back in charge come this November.