We’ve now learned that, on January 6, Fox news hosts were texting Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief-of-staff, urging him to beg Trump to take the riot seriously, hours before telling the public Antifa caused the violence.
During the MAGA invasion of the Capitol, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Brian Kilmeade pleaded with Meadows. “Mark, the President needs to tell those people to go home. This is hurting all of us. He’s destroying his legacy,” Ingraham wrote. Then on TV she called the rioters “people . . . antithetical to MAGA,” and suggested that Antifa was involved.
That’s 98 on a hypocrisy scale of 100. Kilmeade wrote, “Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you’ve accomplished.” Hannity wrote, “Can he make a statement? Tell people to leave the Capitol?” They all knew these were Trump’s people.
It’s sad that we’re not surprised. Fox personalities purported to be journalists, but were informal Trump advisors who used their platforms to mislead us. Had Fox existed in 1974, President Nixon might have finished his second term.
Meadows agreed Trump should stand up and dissuade his supporters – inspired by his lies about a stolen election – from further violence. Meadows responded he’d been trying. (So had Donald Trump, Jr. He knew who was responsible, and that Trump’s involvement was obvious.)
Now Meadows claims Trump was moving as fast as possible to minimize the violence. He hopes we’ve forgotten that even when Trump finally spoke, supposedly telling folks to go home, he emphasized that he loved them and that they should be angry about election fraud.
Meadows supposes we’ve forgotten Republican Senator Ben Sasse’s disgust that Trump, according to senior White House officials, was “delighted” by his supporters’ break-in, and confused by others on his team not sharing his excitement.
Jonah Goldberg, a recent Fox News refugee, shines some interesting light on the hypocrisy: “I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it. (‘Guess what so-and-so said during the commercial break?’”)
Goldberg says he’s “a conservative who passionately believes the conspiracy-mongering, demagogic, populist, personality cult nonsense that defines so much of prime time Trumpism is not conservatism rightly understood, or even conservative in any meaningful sense.” Conservatives believe in free-enterprise, national security, and limiting governmental social programs. Trump believes only in Trump. (For example: Trump was clearly pro-choice, until he was seeking the Republican nomination.)
Conservatives preach the Constitution. Trump tried an end-run around it. Trump’s vague “stolen election” claims were so silly they failed in every court, even with judges he’d appointed. Trump tried to steal the election right in front of us, and nearly succeeded.
Trump’s robbery attempt included the January 6 effort to stop the vote count and have Vice-President Mike Pence let Republican Legislatures decide the election – but also includes the rash of state voter-suppression laws aimed at a more successful effort to veto the voters in 2024.
Clearly January 6 ain’t over. And good people who listen to Fox “personalities” should know those “personalities” don’t believe their own words.
For example, most conservative pundits are vaccinated – but not recommending listeners get shots.
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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 19 December 2021, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]
[This stuff seems pretty basic. What amazes me is that folks are in such denial. I get why some top Republican politicians deny reality and kowtow to Mr. Trump: they want his support, they want his hard-core supporters’ support, and the changes putting swing states’ election processes in politicians’ hands could be the winning edge for some Republican who loses a close presidential election in 2024. More power is always worth foregoing a little truth or cutting away a bit of our constitution.
But why do others buy into the stuff Fox News personalities say, that even those personalities don’t believe? Are we that deeply immersed in a red vs. blue partisanship analogous to rooting for Ohio State or Michigan, Oklahoma or Texas, the Yankees versus the Red Sox? My team, right or wrong.
What’s most troubling is, the deeper we get into this division, as it gets more and more obvious to some of us that Mr. Trump is what he seemed at first, others get more and more certain that Mr. Trump is wonderful, unspecified folks in Italy were changing the voting machines through the Internet, and . . . whatever. We’re seeing increasing evidentiary support for one side; but the other has Fox News shills.]
[It was a bad week for Fox, although that likely won’t matter to its fans. Not only did its actual journalist leave for CNN, a judge let Dominion Voting Systems’s lawsuit go forward against Fox. Dominion sued for defamation. Fox aired a bunch of shows supporting the voter fraud idea, and even pillorying one guy at Dominion so badly that, like a lot of election officials in swing states, he had to start worrying about his and his family’s security. Fox moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it merely had discussions in which some panelists like Rudy Giuliani expressed such opinions. The judge not only denied the motion, which is pretty standard at this early stage, but went further to rebut Fox’s key argument that it had been airing differing views on a controversy, as journalists should do, fairly and impartially. Conventional wisdom suggests that Fox will now settle, paying Dominion a bunch of money, not only because it may well lose the lawsuit but because the intrusive discovery process, a bit part of all large lawsuits, would likely result in many more of the kinds of embarrassing evidence discussed in the column, though those came from the January 6 investigation by a congressional committee.
But I’d love a trial in the Dominion lawsuit. An increasingly important aspect of huge trials (and a specialty of mine before I left that world) is the use of visual support, including deposition videotape snippets. I’ve watched jurors’ faces watching trial openings spiced up by side-by-side pairings of a deposition witness saying he never advocated X with his “secret’ email instructing an associate to do X, or cross-examinations in which the witness who just told the jurors he never thought of Y is asked to explain his advocacy of Y in an email, with the email above him on-screen. With Fox, there’ll be lots of secret and damning emails to play with, and an abundance of footage of them saying passionately what their documents show they didn’t believe.]
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