Seven months ago thousands of MAGAts staged an assault on our Capitol with the intent of preventing the new President from taking office. For a time - they succeeded. Let's be clear about that — they forced Congress to suspend their proceeding and take shelter. If they had gotten ahold of a Congressmember or one of their staffers they would likely have killed them. They would have tried to kill Vice President Mike Pence.
We are already far, far past the rubicon — beyond the point of any reasonable, rational return.
Yesterday was the first set of testimony by Capitol and Metropolitan police on what they experienced that day. It was powerful, it was heartfelt.
And it was completely, utterly wasted on the MAGAts.
To most of us who unlike the MAGAts are not suffering from terminal empathy deficit disorder — this testimony was devastating.
By most public reports neither Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnel nor most Republicans in congress watched any of the testimony.
Y’see -- they were busy.
Yeah, busy.
They didn’t see or hear the crowd screaming “Kill him with his own gun.” They didn't see or hear the poles, sticks, bats, hockey sticks and flags that were used to batter the police, the pepper and bear spray used to blind them. Officer Fanone suffered a concussion and a heart attack. Officer Hodges was crushed in a door. Officer Dunne and other black officers were repeatedly called the N— word. They treated Officer Gonell like he didn't belong in the country even though he's a citizen and a veteran as he thought "This is how I'm going to die.”
That’s not what Tucker Carlson saw.
First was Officer Harry Dunn, who began the proceedings asking for a moment of silence for his fellow officer Brian Sicknick. Dunn said that Sicknick died as a result of what he experienced that day, something Carlson disputes.
Sicknick, who served in the New Jersey Air National Guard before joining the Capitol police in 2008, experienced a stroke in conjunction with the Capitol attack.
Carlson then attacked Officer Brian Fanone, implying that he was lying about his PTSD. Fanone testified that he had trauma from the Capitol incident. According to Carlson, Fanone should have experienced trauma during the Black Lives Matter protests the year previously.
The Fox News host went on to claim that the attack at the Capitol wasn't all that bad compared to Black Lives Matter, but he didn't show a video of the attackers breaking through the doors, beating police officers, squeezing cops in doors, or spraying chemicals.
Instead, he showed a clip of them milling about on the lower floor of the building in a clear attempt to downplay the seriousness of the attack.
He thinks Fanone is “lying" about having PTSD, and that Sicknick just happened to fall over and die without it having anything to do with the attack he just suffered through.
Ok, well, "thinks” is being generous.
Then we have Laura Ingraham who mocked the officers for their “performances.”
The host who "purports to back the blue" tore them down and beat them with her unique style of cruel mockery. Ingraham, who has never served in uniform, fought in a war, been beaten and tased, or even reported from a war zone, gave the top award to Officer Michael Fanone, who she accused of giving a "performance" when addressing Congress.
It isn't surprising that Ingraham hasn't seen previous interviews with Fanone that have appeared on CNN. His descriptions are consistent and his anxiety has been on full display from the beginning. Over time, things appear to have gotten better, with Fanone making it through videos and descriptions without breaking down. That wasn't always the case.
Still, Ingraham thought the right decision was to mock the men.
I've been watching Fanone for months, in his first set of interviews he broke down. He has suffered a trauma.
But frankly, Carlson and Ingraham are the light-weights. OAN spent the entire time during the hearing with distractions and nonsense.
Writing for CNN.com, media analyst Brian Stelter noted that "One America News viewers witnessed the whitewashing first-hand."He noted that as the hearings were beginning, OAN ran a segment on crime in Chicago. It was as if Tuesday's hearing "barely happened at all."
In typical OAN style, Stelter said "the channel's poorly-produced programs avoided the substance of the hearing; slipped in several factual mistakes; and promoted the GOP's counter-programming instead."
[...]
OAN, by contrast, perpetuated the conspiracy that Jan. 6 was nothing more than a tourist visit at the Capitol. They criticized Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for being willing to participate in the committee to ensure it was bipartisan. They continued to spout the conspiracy that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had a death wish and wanted Trump's supporters to come into the Capitol and kill Democratic members. The logic doesn't hold up, but that's the only argument the GOP has left and OAN is running with it.
By the time lunch came, OAN was reading another old statement released the previous day from Trump about Pelosi, claiming she's spending too much money on the hearing.
And then you had Newsmax who actually did cover the hearing, kinda. Almost.
While airing D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone's emotional testimony at the first House committee hearing to investigate the Capitol insurrection this Tuesday, the right-wing pro-Trump network Newsmax cut away to a guest who disparaged Fanone's testimony, claiming that the attack on the U.S. Capitol was actually carried out by left-wing factions.
Fanone, who was tased, beaten and stripped of his badge, said lawmakers who deny the violence of Jan. 6 are "betray[ing] their oath of office."
But as Fanone spoke, Newsmax cut to former Texas state legislator Rick Green, who said that it's nice to "finally hear Democrats say nice things about police officers."
"If this was a real investigation, we'd be asking ... who gave the stand down order? Why were there not enough police officers there? And, I gotta say, one of the officers said, you know, 'Donald Trump was egging [the mob] on instead of sending help' -- Donald Trump wanted more military presence there and more police officers there, and it was turned down, so why did Nancy Pelosi allow this situation to happen in the first place?"
"And why are we not asking the questions about all the video that we've seen of the Capitol police officers literally removing the barricades and inviting people into the Capitol?" he continued. "What they're after here is to take the ones that should be in jail for the violence and attacking police officers, taking those few, and trying to make it look like anybody that supported Donald Trump was a part of that. In fact, that was FBI informants, antifa, BLM, very radical anti-Trump people, we already know that, who were involved in this."
Another Newsmax host went to Twitter to call the officers “Crisis Actors.”
Newsmax host Greg Kelly has largely been at the helm of the online brigade, suggesting that the officers may have been "used" as "pawns" to push a left-wing agenda.
Referring to Capitol Officer Michael Fanone, who personally described his own assault by a horde of rioters, Kelly asked his Twitter followers: "Is it possible FANONE was mistaken for ANTIFA? He often, for media appearances, has worn all Black but no insignia, police patches, rank etc."
"Did they pick THESE cops because they're so Emotional?" Kelly followed up, later asking: "Do these guys know who shot ASHLI BABBITT? Ask them!"
[...]
Raheem J. Kassam, the former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News London, also took aim at what he saw as the officers being overly emotional, despite them being nearly killed. "Is there really a Capitol Hill Police Officer crying about hurty words live on national television right now?" Kassam tweeted: "Fucking whole world is laughing at this shit."
So we have not just mocking and pretending that this is a "performance" of "Crisis Acting" we're back to falsely claiming that BLM and antifa had something to do with the attack on the Capitol and also that somehow -- even though Nancy Pelosi isn't responsible for the Capitol Police or the National Guard it was all her fault, but not at all the fault of Mitch McConnel who was Senate Majority Leader at the time.
The genius idea here is that implemented a "stand down" order for the Police and the Guard with the intent, apparently, of helping the crazed secretly BLM/antifa crowd with their plan of killing her. That’s the plan?
Apparently, that really was the great plan according to Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik.
As the first hearing of the January 6th committee kicked off in the House, with harrowing testimony from police officers and newly released footage of violent pro-Trump rioters, House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) gathered with attendants outside the U.S. Capitol and sought to deliver a counternarrative.
"The American people deserve to know the truth," said Stefanik. "That Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility, as speaker of the House, for the tragedy that occurred on Jan. 6."
Republicans have repeatedly claimed that Pelosi was in charge of security of the Capitol. Pelosi appointed the House sergeant at arms, who was on the Capitol Police Board that oversees the U.S. Capitol Police during the Jan. 6 insurrection, but she "does not oversee day-to-day operations of the Capitol Police," according to the Associated Press.
Because D.C. isn't a state the request for the National Guard has to be approved either by the President or the Secretary of Defense. The Mayor of D.C. had previously requested that the Guard be deployed for traffic duty without weapons. Hindsight obviously says that was a mistake, and it may have been prompted by the overzealous use of the Guard during the previous protest at Lafayette Park earlier in the year.
The Committee will have an opportunity to discuss this with the Mayor and also discuss with the Acting SecDef why he sat on the subsequent requests to deploy the Guard for over two hours until he received a desperate call from inside the Capitol from Mike Pence.
Where, exactly, was Donald Trump during all that time?
All this misdirection has members of their cult up in arms, they’re enraged - so enraged that one of them perpetrated a Hate Crime against Officer Fanone while he was testifying by leaving an expletive riddled homophobic racist message on his answering service.
"Yeah, this is for Michael Fanone, Metropolitan Police officer. You're on trial right now, lying and not. You want an Emmy? An Oscar? What are you trying to go for here? You're so full of s---, you little f----- f---er. You're a little p----, man. I could slap you up the side of your head with a backhand and knock you out, you little f-----.
"You're a punk f-----. You're a lying f---. How about all that scummy Black f---ing scum for two years destroying our cities and burning 'em and stealing all that s--- out of the stores and everything? How about that? Assaulting cops and killing people? How about that, you f---er?
"That was s--- on the goddamn Capitol. I wish they would have killed all you scumbags, 'cause you people are scum. They stole the election from Trump and you know that, you scumbag. And you, f---ing too bad they didn't beat the s--- out of you more. You're a piece of s---. You're a little f--, you f---ing scumbag."
While Officer Fanone was testifying before the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack on Tuesday, he suffered yet another attack: via voicemail.
A MAGA cult member spewed homophobic, racist, disgusting profanities and lies for one minute into Fanone's voicemail. Some of the lies sound plucked straight out of Fox News and other far right wing media outlets. In fact, at one point the anonymous caller says, "you want an Emmy, an Oscar, what are you trying to go for?" Tuesday night, after the voicemail was left, Fox News' Laura Ingraham ran a segment giving the four officers who testified "awards."
But never mind facts or reality. The MAGAs have given all that up long ago. What they have is just endless self-aggrandizing fantasy. It’s nothing but delusion spoon fed to them by FOX, OAN and Newsmax. It has 50% of the nation thinking that the Covid-19 vaccine is a bio-weapon intended to manipulate their DNA. It has them thinking that Donald Trump isn’t a lowlife drifting fuckwit who is currently stealing their donations to "Stop the Steal” and putting the money in his own back pocket. It has people all over the nation storming their local school boards screaming that they don't want their white children taught to hate themselves by actually learning true American history.
They don't realize, this is all a scam.
The mantra, "America is not a racist country," has been used by nearly all of the 2024 Republican hopefuls, Politico reports, as they attempt to harness the wedge issues of critical race theory and "defund the police."
"By forcing Democrats to defend the rhetoric of the left, Republicans hope to tap into a vein of discontent that is already surfacing in suburbs where debates over racial equity initiatives in schools and the focus on systemic racism are roiling parents," Politico reports.
The new mantra was unveiled by Black GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina during his official Republican response to President Joe Biden's first joint session of Congress. And it's been discussed privately by GOP strategists during recent events hosted by the Republican National Committee and the Republican Governors Association, with their polls showing that "white Americans are inherently racist" is deeply unpopular, including with independents.
Ed Rogers, a veteran Republican lobbyist and strategist, told Politico that if "you take middle-of-the-road, sort of marginally involved voters, they don't want to be told they're a racist."
Therefore, "it may be reassuring for a presidential contender to tell them that they aren't," Politico reports.
Another Republican strategist said the mantra works because it's "part of what (former president Donald) Trump's counter was when he was on the rise. It was simple — Make America Great Again, proud to be an American. It's not approaching every problem in America as if we did something wrong, we're awful."
Proud to be an American. Proud to be a White American. Arrogant. Haughty. Violent. Just like the mob that attacked the Capitol.
America actually did do something wrong. It's done a lot of things wrong. It's happened in our history, it's happening in our present. It happened on January 6th. Admitting this isn't hard, it's not an embarrassment and it's only through the humility of admitting that there have been mistakes that you can make corrections. It's only by admitting a mistake that you can learn and grow. it's only by admitting a mistake that you can stop from repeating that mistake. These people - these MAGAts — refuse to face it, any of it. They refuse to acknowledge any weakness, any mistake. They take no responsibility for anything, they point fingers and blame others for everything that they think is wrong in the nation.
They are being strategically manipulated, they are being deceived, they are being used. Because of that manipulation, these MAGAts attacked the foundation of our democracy — and they did it thinking that they were in the right, that they were the "heroes” - the "good guys."
There is no one and nothing more dangerous than someone who thinks what they're doing is justified.
These people are a problem. We need to start putting together a solution.
Most of the posts from the diary came from my activist Facebook group Army For Truth - where we fight the lies and delusions by collecting and shareing the best available versions of facts and the truth.