What is the half life on truth? It turns out that the answer may be “about 100 days.” Amazingly, this seems to be the case even when talking about the truth behind something that played out on television screens across the nation while the population looked on in horror.
As Kerry Eleveld covered on Monday, efforts to conduct a bipartisan investigation into the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection have run into a big partisan roadblock in the form of Republicans refusing to sign on. In fact, it’s not clear that Republicans will sign on to any form of investigation. The reason is clear enough: They don’t want an investigation. Since Reuters polling shows that half of Republicans believe the deadly assault on the Capitol was either “mostly peaceful” or “staged by left-wing protestors,” the incentive of Republican legislators to simply quash any effort to stamp a bipartisan label on looking into the violent riot by right-wing insurgents is high.
That situation isn’t going to be helped by a new ruling from Washington, D.C.’s medical examiner. As The New York Times reports, the examiner ruled on Monday that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who passed away several hours after being battered by a pro-Trump mob, actually died from multiple strokes. The stress and beating that Sicknick took on the afternoon of Jan. 6 certainly played a role in his passing at the age of 42. However, the medical examiner found no sign of serious injury or an allergic reaction to the bear spray used by some of the Trump faithful. Instead, the ruling is that Sicknick died from “natural causes.” Already right-wing social media is boiling over at the idea that his death—and Sicknick being honored at the Capitol—was all “fake” and part of that ever expanding conspiracy against Trump and his followers.
The ruling on Sicknick’s death can be expected to expand the ranks of Republicans who are anxious to forget everything they saw or heard on Jan. 6 and embrace the idea that it was a “peaceful protest” being blown out of proportion by a Trump-hating media. And they’re unlikely to realize that they were, and still are, being manipulated by both China and Russia.
The nonprofit Soufan Center issued a report and briefing this week detailing how both Russia and China have acted to “amplify” QAnon-related conspiracy theories. While many Trump-supporters rail against the supposed connections between Biden and China, it’s actually China that has taken the lead in “perpetuation of QAnon conspiracies.” In fact, post-Jan. 6, China has accelerated their involvement in making connections to Q-believing Republicans.
Even as Republicans yell about the “Chinese communist” policies of Biden, blame the pandemic on “the China virus,” and play up the idea that Hunter Biden somehow made billions from China, it’s actually China that is helping to support and spread these ideas. Why would China help QAnon believers push ideas that on the surface seem inimical to China itself? Because China, like Russia, understands that fostering division within the U.S. weakens the nation. For decades, Russia has worked to stoke racial tensions in America, taking every opportunity to pry open the population along that persistent fault line. China, given evidence that the U.S. can be turned against itself with nonsensical, fact-free, hateful conspiracy theories, is more than happy to keep that hate pipe open. It doesn’t matter if those theories direct anger toward China. What matters is that they direct Americans against each other and diminish the ability of the U.S. to act effectively on the world stage.
A United States that can’t even get its act together long enough to convene an investigation into a deadly assault on its own Capitol by armed extremists is not a nation that is going to be stepping out in unity to protect the Uighurs. Or Taiwan. Or itself. China saw what Russia accomplished with a mixture of social media and support from Donald Trump in 2016. Now they’re also in the game. Because it’s quite clearly possible to break the U.S. wide open for the cost of a few Twitter bots.
But don’t expect to see big warnings about how social media is being used to divide the nation from the FBI. As NBC News reports, FBI officials continue to report that they can find “no credible intelligence” suggesting that the Jan. 6 assault was planned in advance. That’s despite the hundreds of posts turned up by the nonpartisan group Advance Democracy.
Among the posts that were published in the weeks leading up to the insurrection:
- "You know there will be riot police preventing us from getting in the capitol building. What if we created a stampede/crush situation? Start pushing from the back. Surely they will have to get out of the way or get crushed. They're not going to start shooting people."
- "If we occupy the Capitol building, there will be no vote."
- "GOTTA OVERWHELM THE BARRICADES AND COPS."
Some of those involved in posting the literally thousands of statements made in the open were among those who took part in the Capitol assault and photographed themselves engaged in an attempt to overthrow the government. And still, the FBI can’t seem to find that connection.
As Dave Neiwert has made clear, far-right extremists were deliberately ignored by the FBI and DOJ under Trump. Despite a stream of analysis that had for decades shown that white supremacist militias are the greatest internal threat to the nation, Trump not only failed to condemn, but openly courted support from these groups. The danger is being taken seriously by President Joe Biden … but it’s not clear that this change in leadership has sunk in at the FBI.
It could be that the FBI doesn’t want to own up to the massive failure of intelligence that overlooked public plotting of an attempted coup by known groups of armed extremists. Or, it could be that there is too much sympathy for the white supremacist cause within the FBI, as there seems to be in the military.
In any case, with the FBI seemingly unable to connect the dots between people planning to occupy the Capitol and those same people occupying the Capitol, and with the medical examiner ruling Sicknick died of natural causes, expect a rise in those poll numbers where Republicans think Jan. 6 was no big deal. And don’t expect any Republicans in the House to get in a hurry to sign on to an investigation.