Philip Bump of the Washington Post reports, The worrisome pro-Capitol-riot activism isn’t a rally. It’s in right-wing media. (excerpt):
The government has spent months trying to track down those involved in the January 6 insurrection, arresting them and — usually — then releasing them until trial. A Guardian analysis in May found that 70 percent of those who’d been arrested at that point were released from detention.
The idea that people are languishing unfairly in grim detention facilities, though, fits neatly with a broad narrative that the Biden administration is rounding up and jailing political opponents. This weekend’s rally is called “Justice for J6,” implying that those still held are being detained unjustly for punitive reasons. This is a common argument on the right, one that has been treated as near-fact on Fox News.
In August, host [of White Power Hour] Tucker Carlson told his viewers that “the ringleaders of the riots go free, especially if they were working for the FBI” — a reference to his unsubstantiated claim that the violence that day was fomented by federal agents — “but the people who offend Joe Biden’s friends, they are in jail.” The prior month, he’d complained about a Black Lives Matter protester who did not have to “rot in solitary in the D.C. jail for six months and counting for a nonviolent offense like so many of the Trump voters on Jan. 6.”
Host Mark Levin has focused on the issue repeatedly. In June, he told his audience that “we’re hearing that they’re in some of the worst jails, and some are being put in solitary confinement where they only have an hour where they can go outside if that. That they’re being fed poor food. They’re being treated like they’re terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, where they’d be treated actually better!” He added that the events that day were “not an insurrection.” [Bullshit!]
It is obviously true that Americans should be tried quickly to minimize unnecessary detention and that those detentions should be humane. But it’s important to remember that law enforcement didn’t make many arrests on Jan. 6. So most arrests came later, meaning that it wasn’t true in July that most of those in detention had been there for six months. One would also be justified in thinking that Levin is perhaps not expressing concerns about political prosecutions uniformly; in May 2020, he went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to insist that officials from the Obama administration should be thrown in jail. [He promotes jailing Democrats as political prisoners.]
If the goal of the rally this weekend is to elevate a sympathetic view of the rioters, it doesn’t really matter if it fails. After all, that elevation is already happening in the attention-seeking right-wing media ecosystem.
New research shows the extent to which consumption of right-wing media overlaps with views of Jan. 6 and the election. PRRI, for example, released new data Thursday measuring who Americans believe is accountable for the day’s violence. A majority believe that Trump and conservative media that spread misinformation bear a lot of responsibility. Among Republicans, though, only 15 percent think Trump bears a lot of responsibility (despite his encouraging people to come to D.C. and misleading them about the results of the election) and only about a quarter blame conservative media.
Among Republicans who said they most trust Fox News or far-right networks like Newsmax, only 3 percent think Trump bears a lot of responsibility. (It was an interview on Newsmax, incidentally, that helped elevate questions about Jan. 6 detainees into the right-wing conversation.) Asked if left-wing activists like antifa bear a lot of responsibility, though, two-thirds of Republicans who most trust Fox News said that was the case, as did more than three-quarters of those who most trust further-right sources.
Fact Check: No evidence U.S. Capitol rioters belong to antifa movement, FBI chief Wray testifies: “We have not to date seen any evidence of any anarchist violent extremists or people subscribing to antifa in connection with the 6th,” Wray testified, referring to the loosely organized anti-fascist movement. To be clear, Fox News viewers believe absolute lies.
It’s worth noting that a quarter of Republicans said they trusted Fox News the most and another 10 percent identified the far-right sources. That’s equivalent to 6 percent and 3 percent of respondents overall.
It can be tricky to separate out causality here. Are Fox News Republicans more likely to assume that it’s left-wing activists and not White conservative Christian groups that were involved because they watch Fox News? Or do they watch Fox News for the same reason that they hold that belief? There’s certainly little reason that a viewer of Fox News’s prime-time shows would be inclined to reject the idea that Jan. 6 is overblown or falsely blamed on the right.
We see this same pattern at play in another new bit of polling, this time from CNN and its partners at SSRS. It found that only about a fifth of Republicans think President Biden was legitimately elected — and that half erroneously believe that there’s solid evidence that he wasn’t.
This isn’t new, mind you, but it is remarkable that even 10 months after the election and with precisely zero hard evidence of fraud that could shift the election outcome having emerged, most Republicans still say it happened. Newsmax eagerly embraced these conspiracy theories from the outset, using Fox News’s pronouncement that Biden had won in an effort to steal away viewers.
But Fox also amplified false claims about the election, hundreds of times in the weeks after the election. It has repeatedly hosted Trump for interviews in which he makes false claims about the election results. In the weeks after the election, as the then-president continued to amplify false claims about fraud, only about a third of Americans told Pew Research Center that they believed Trump was offering the right message to the country. Among Fox News viewers, nearly 80 percent did. In PRRI’s polling, three-quarters of those who most trusted Fox or far-right sources said they thought the election was stolen.
To a large extent, this is just supply-and-demand capitalism. Telling a base of voters that fervently believes fraud occurred that it didn’t is a good way to get them to tune out or change the channel.
Telling them that many or most of those in jail for participation in the riots are alleged to have been part of a violent attack on law enforcement is likely to be met with, “Well, what about antifa?!” The path of least resistance is the one that keeps sliding downward into a darker place.
Who needs a rally of a few hundred people in D.C. to reframe those who were detained after the riot when there’s an entire media ecosystem that will be rewarded for doing so?
Greg Sargent at The Post adds, The right-wing media is helping Trump destroy democracy. A new poll shows how.
A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute demonstrates in a fresh way just how responsible those bad-faith media actors are for what we’re seeing right now. And this raises anew the question of how much damage they will do over the long haul.
The poll’s big finding is that people who rely heavily on Fox News and other right-wing media are overwhelmingly more likely to believe the election was stolen from Trump — and are overwhelmingly less likely to blame Trump for the insurrection — than those who do not.
In one sense, that’s a no-brainer. But taken together, those views add up to something truly toxic: The “belief” that the election was stolen, and the simultaneous refusal to assign accountability for an effort to violently overthrow our constitutional order, suggest right-wing propaganda may be softening the ground for a more concerted abandonment of democracy going forward.
The PRRI poll finds that 69 percent of Americans do not believe the election was stolen, while only 29 percent do believe this. That latter number largely reflects Republicans, among whom 71 percent believe it. Only very small minorities of independents and Democrats do.
The poll also finds that 56 percent of Americans say Trump does bear much of the blame for the Jan. 6 violence, that 59 percent say this about white supremacist groups, and that 41 percent say this about GOP leaders.
If anything, those numbers are too low. Trump did incite the violence, far-right groups did organize the “Stop the Steal” rally around lurid lies about the stolen election destroying American freedom, and GOP elites did extensively humor or even validate those lies.
Regardless, the poll also broke down these numbers through the prism of which media sources people trust, including Fox News and far-right sources such as One America News and conventional broadcast networks such as ABC, CBS and NBC.
At my request, PRRI cut the data and provided me with these findings:
-
-
- Among Americans who most trust Fox News or those far-right news sources, a stunning 76 percent believe the election was stolen. By contrast, of those who most trust those other sources, only 21 percent believe this.
- Among Americans who most trust Fox News or those far-right news sources, only 12 percent say Trump gets a lot of blame for the Jan. 6 riot. And 64 percent blame liberal or left-wing activists, such as antifa.
-
It’s likely there’s a good deal of overlap between those two groups, says Natalie Jackson, the director of research at PRRI.
UPDATE: A new Annenberg survey finds that 49% of Americans said it was accurate to say that arresting those who entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to disrupt the certification of the presidential election violated the Constitution because they were exercising their constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Just to be clear, this is NOT what the First Amendment means by the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
The Brandenburg v. Ohio Supreme Court decision maintains that seditious speech—including speech that constitutes an incitement to violence—is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, as long as it does not indicate an “imminent” threat. Trump told his mob to march on the Capitol and they did, chanting “hang Mike Pence!” The clearest example of the “imminent threat” standard.
Applying this same logic, Republicans could just as easily justify the Confederacy seceding from the U.S. and engaging in a Civil War. Oh wait, they do!
Two-thirds of Southern Republicans want to secede: “A new YouGov survey conducted on behalf of a democracy watchdog group finds that 66 percent of Republicans living in the South say they’d support seceding from the United States to join a union with other Southern states. [Been there, done that, suffered a humiliating defeat and unconditional surrender.] Secession is actually gaining support among Southern Republicans: back in January and February, 50 percent said they’d support such a proposal.”
Don’t tell me this is not all about white supremacy.
“Those beliefs go hand in hand, where you believe the election was stolen, and you also believe the leftists are the ones responsible for what happened,” Jackson told me. She added that “the data’s pretty clear” that Fox and right-wing media “are very responsible for this type of thinking.”
“Even if you look at Republicans who trust different news sources — not Fox or right-wing news — they hold very different views,” Jackson said.
It’s important to stress that both these narratives — the stolen-election lie, and the effort to absolve Trump of blame for Jan. 6 — are mainstays of right-wing media [Big Lie fascist] propaganda. As Matt Gertz demonstrates, these sources relentlessly sowed doubts about the election in the run-up to Jan. 6, and then even after, continued pushing the idea that legitimate questions about it lingered.
In short, right-wing media widely sowed the lies that inspired the effort to violently overthrow U.S. democracy. They then retroactively papered over what had happened, by suggesting in numerous ways that there might have been some legitimacy undergirding that effort’s goals.
Since then, right-wing personalities and media outlets have gone to great lengths to rewrite that whole history, downgrading Trump’s role and instead falsely blaming antifa for the violence. And in many other cases they have alternatively blamed the left or rewrote the story to erase the truly insurrectionist goal of the rioters.
Fact Check: Debunking the Pro-Trump Right’s Claims About the Jan. 6 Riot: A rally scheduled for Saturday in Washington is intended to continue a Republican effort to rewrite the narrative of the assault on the Capitol. The facts undercut their assertions.
[It’s] true that many Republicans — and even sometimes Trump himself — are careful to stress that the rioters should be held accountable for the violence and for whatever laws they broke.
But at the same time, they are advancing a broader set of subterranean deceptions. Taken together, they posit that in some fundamental sense, Trump and his movement continue to be victimized by any efforts at accountability for Jan. 6, and that the underlying cause driving those events, if not the violence itself, was righteous and just.
As long as this set of grievances continues to metastasize, it’s hard to be sanguine about the future consequences for U.S. democracy. But we should be clear on which bad actors are to blame for it.
Everyone at Fox News, from Rupert Murdoch down the from desk clerk, should be charged with inciting insurrection and sedition against the United States. 18 U.S.C. § 2383. Shut it down, make it go dark with dead air.