Government

Right-Wingers Mocking The Jan. 6 Hearings Reveal Their Own Responsibility

The bigger question is why.

By Alaric DeArment  
on

(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Upon seeing someone in emotional distress, a normal human being naturally responds with empathy. That was the case during Tuesday’s congressional hearing on the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, with committee members such as Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois visibly affected as Capitol and Washington police officers recounted horrors like Michael Fanone suffering a heart attack after insurrectionists beat him, or Harry Dunn saying it marked the first time he was called the n-word while in uniform.

Nevertheless, not everyone is a normal being, especially right-wing media and political figures who responded to the hearing with mockery and derision. By downplaying and denying the Jan. 6 attack for months and dismissing Tuesday’s hearing, these people revealed their true goal: to exculpate themselves after years of carefully stirring the toxic stew of bigotry and illiberal populist rage that made the attack inevitable.

I’ll leave it up to the commission to decide who knew what, and who among elected officials may have been in on the attack. But for now, a selection of right-wing public figures’ reactions to the hearing – which followed Senate Republicans blocking the creation of a 9/11-style independent bipartisan commission – is revealing.

Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted, “What’s the difference between Democrats and Never Trumpers?” He has since sought to deflect and draw attention to Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020, while disingenuously highlighting insufficient Capitol security.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham gave a mock trophy for the officers’ “performance” on her show, while her colleague Tucker Carlson employed his usual just-asking-questions rhetorical tactic in an attempt to discredit the whole thing.

And Glenn Greenwald attempted sarcasm, tweeting “Harris/Liz-Cheney 2024,” before writing on his Substack that the hearing’s real purpose was “exploiting police emotions for partisan gain and security state power.” Greenwald had already spent months sowing doubt about the connection between the insurrection and the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and has lately been pandering to anti-vaxxers.

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The indifference, the opportunism, the callousness, the mendacity of these people – it’s all equal parts infuriating and disturbing because no honest person could watch the horrifying footage and conclude that the Jan. 6 attack was anything but an attempted coup by white supremacist terrorists who got their marching orders from Donald Trump and whose fascistic movement poses an ongoing threat to this country’s democracy, and indeed its very future.

But while shocking, their flippancy is not surprising.

After all, it was Jordan who went out of his way to derail every congressional hearing about Trump’s abuses of power. It was Ingraham and Carlson who blew dog whistle after deafening dog whistle to appeal to white nationalist sentiments among their viewers. And it was Greenwald who claimed to oppose Trump while courting his cult and bending the horseshoe’s far-right and far-left poles together by relentlessly attacking Trump’s critics, purportedly from the left, often during creepily amicable appearances on Carlson and Ingraham’s shows.

Yet, the officers’ testimony laid bare the perfidiousness of Jordan, Ingraham, Carlson, Greenwald and everyone else who would have you believe it wasn’t an organized coup attempt or was somehow not as serious as it was and that its implications are anything less than terrifying for anyone who values liberal democracy.

So caught with their proverbial pants down, it’s unsurprising that the people who laid the cobblestones on which the insurrection marched have mounted a disinformation and whitewashing campaign, presenting the terrorists as “tourists” or suggesting it was just a minor incident, and not an organized attempt to thwart the democratic process. The bigger question is why they are so intent on pretending the attack wasn’t what anyone who saw it could readily tell it was.

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A likely explanation is that they know of their guilt and are desperate to absolve themselves, albeit for self-serving reasons rather than genuine remorse. But they’re part of a far deeper pathology within the conservative movement.

Fascism has been slowly taking over the movement, like a cordyceps fungus consumes the tissue of a caterpillar while leaving its overall shape intact, ever since the Southern Strategy, when Republican Party sought the votes of racist white people embittered at the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. Trump’s 2016 election and the attack on the Capitol were the mushrooms finally bursting from the caterpillar’s head from mycelia that had spread for decades.
It turns out the party of Lincoln had made a pact with the devil, seeking power via an American right whose support for democracy was always conditioned on democratic processes’ support for white, Christian, male supremacy. That might explain why today, self-described conservatives who don’t even pretend to uphold liberal democracy thrive under their movement’s imprimatur as they envision an America resembling Hungary under autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, or worse. Just look at newly elected House members like out-and-proud white supremacist Marjorie Taylor Greene and far-right terrorist ally Lauren Boebert. Or Republican-led state legislatures’ shameless assaults on Black and Latino voting rights. Or the insidious utterings of erudite intellectual Nazgul like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule. Or “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance calling for abolishing childless liberals’ right to vote and “Fox & Friends” calling that idea “interesting.”

But however advanced the GOP’s fungal infestation was by the time Trump contaminated the White House with its spores in 2017, he was the one who truly weaponized it. More than anyone, he made the party safe for unvarnished bigotry and authoritarianism. He exacerbated polarization and division whenever possible, even to the extent of deliberately hobbling the nation’s ability to address the COVID-19 pandemic, including racist attacks on Asian people.

Along the way, right-wing media and political figures have aggravated that division and kept the fascist cordyceps watered and fed. Greenwald, for example, showed an aptitude for attacking government institutions and especially journalists who tried to hold Trump to account while steadfastly denying he was a Trump supporter. Carlson peddled white resentment and conspiracy theories, disingenuously claiming he was “just asking questions.”
I’m between believing on the one hand that the right’s ridicule and dismissal of the hearings is just a cynical attempt to dodge blame, and on the other that it’s meant to derail serious inquiries into the Jan. 6 attack in the hopes that it will happen again. The intent probably depends on the individual, but the latter case is certainly plausible: In a July 23 interview with CNN, new Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger said based on extremist chatter online, they’re planning another action in August. It’s not hard to imagine that many public figures showing disregard for the continued threat in fact sympathize with it.
Regardless, it’s clear that they don’t want the American people to know who laid the groundwork for the Jan. 6 attack and seek to thwart efforts to address its underlying causes. But if we don’t address them, the growing organized fascistic movement that has taken root in this country could very well try to overthrow democracy again, and next time it might even succeed.

Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @biotechvisigoth.

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