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.
The “gEnOcIDe JoE” clowns see a Republican fascist and a Democrat skirting our political system to fund fascists, backed by a party doing nothing to stop fascists from taking over every system in the country cause all the broken shit being used is broken shit the dems use too.
As long as dems tell anyone left of Biden to eat shit regardless of what their “voters” say, voting blue “no matter who” doesn’t stop the march to fascism, it just delays it by 4 years.
As a trans person, another four years is probably another four years of being allowed to be alive. I fucking hate dems but I love being not being murdered. It sucks that my options are vote for the folks who will let brown kids die, or vote for the folks who will let brown kids die AND kill me. My vote doesn’t actually matter because my state will be redder than Zhang Yufang’s tampons, admittedly.
If every person who cries about how the two options sucked voted for a third party we’d have a viable flourishing third party. Maybe a fourth by now.
You keep furiously masturbating to this quick easy textual “sound bite” but nobody can actually refute the point that a vote for dems is just a vote for fascists to continue amassing power in the background to do the thing next time.
It’s weird how y’all want the fascism but just harp about democrats in a bid to avoid the label. Any vote for either established party is a vote for Trump or the next faschie, full stop.
