- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
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.
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Try telling this to the “gEnOciDE jOe” clowns, because they are the ones that need to understand this- not the trumpers. Trumpers are too far gone. They won’t listen to reason.
But these ‘single issue’ kids that are grassrooting the ideology that not voting is better than a vote for “genocide” are going to fuck around and find out the hard way when they get Trump installed as a permanent fixture in the White House.
Ok, let me preface this by OF COURSE Biden is by far the lesser evil compared to Trump, OF COURSE single issue voting is some Republican style bullshit and OF COURSE Trump would be even more supportive of a fascist government committing genocide, being a fascist war crime fanboy himself.
That being said, people who are outraged by Biden’s continued support of and thus enabling of genocide DO have a point. He’s supposed to represent the interests of every American who’s not a fascist, not those of a fascist apartheid regime currently committing the worst genocide since the Balkan wars in the 90s.
Just because the other guy is a much greater evil doesn’t mean that you can’t hold your own guy accountable for supporting evil. With Trump the only alternative, voting for him is a given, but giving him a free pass shouldn’t be.
Uh, what we are talking about is people who are already saying they won’t vote for Biden. I run into this a lot. It’s terrifying to know a significant part of the electorate are so myopic they would install Trump forever to “make a point”.
It truly doesn’t matter if they have a point, if the only end result is not voting or throwing their vote away on a third party. If Trump wins, they will be a big part of how.
“voting is the only way to create change” is the mentality that got us here.
You know why George Floyd’s murderer was the only one who got the sentence he deserved? Because the people demanded it by threatening capital.
So what are you suggesting?
These guys all want violent revolution, right up until it’s their time to pick up a rifle.
I think what the morons want is trump. I’m really worried about how common this braindead opinion is. They’re actually going to vote against Biden because of Israel. We’re fucked.
If you’re that worried that reaction to our government enabling a genocide is risking the election or whatever, maybe blame the people doing the enabling rather than the people disgusted by them.
I would rather not vote than vote for someone whose first response to a genocide is rushing as many American military assets and weapons as possible to enable it.
You do realize that not everyone in your country has fully assimilated to your extremely chauvinist worldview right?
What’s chauvinist about not wanting to make a bad situation worse?
It’s the orientation that enabling a genocide is somehow excusable when it’s “your guy”, combined with the implicit understanding that something to do with foreign policy (itself a chauvinist term) shouldn’t affect how people vote when bad things at home are at stake. Like it’s sports or something.
I’m sensitive to this because I just don’t have the luxury of disregarding what happens to brown and brown-adjacent people as a result of US “foreign policy”. The bad situation we’re in is directly the result of decisions made (and being refused to get made) by our harm reduction president and his administration.
It’s not a both sides thing. In my opinion, everyone needs to stop thinking this is a knowledge or coverage problem. It’s not a media influence problem.
It’s a fuck you problem. And the worse they are, the more appalling their actions, the bigger the fuck you. You can’t argue your way out of this.
People need to deal with the fact that roughly half of all voters in this country don’t give a fuck about you, and every time you get upset about a new rule broken, a new law violated, or a new constitutional principle ignored, the fun is in the fact that you get upset about it.
That’s the fun. You’re mad. They like to make you mad. Because this isn’t about political discourse.
They’re way more mad, they’re way more organized, they’re way more revolutionary, and they are way more armed. You can be as smart and knowledgeable as you want. They will put you up against a very smart and knowledgeable wall and put a very smart and knowledgeable bullet into your very smart and knowledgeable head.
You ever wonder how, during revolutions of the past, the people that were overthrown always seemed to have been surprised? This is how. Arrogance and a belief in a system that the others aren’t playing by or within. Revolution exceeds the system. Leftists think they have a monopoly on revolution, but they don’t.
You don’t have to agree with it. Your agreement or disagreement Does. Not. Matter. It’s watching worms on a hook trying to explain how soil works. Who cares?
People need to deal with the fact that roughly half of all voters in this country don’t give a fuck about you
There’s so much gerrymandering, vote caging, and deliberate disenfranchisement in the US that “roughly half” is heavily overstating it. Elections are decided by closer to 15% of eligible voters, as everyone else is packed or cracked or screened out of the process so as to be functionally irrelevant to the declared victor.
And this sentiment does go both ways. I can’t count how many times I’ve been told that I deserve whatever dogshit policy Ken Paxton and Greg Abbot are heaping on me today because I’ve committed the crime of living in a Red State.
This sentiment isn’t just confined to hotheads on social media either. When you’ve got guys like DeSantis and Paxton and Jay Ashcroft and Christie Noam flagrantly breaking state and national laws with zero response from the Biden DOJ, wtf do people expect some simple civvy like myself to do?
Leftists think they have a monopoly on revolution, but they don’t.
Leftists think they need a revolution to succeed, because reforms don’t work when the Right has the police on their side. And when you consider how many scalps J. Edgar Hoover had on his wall by the time he left office, you begin to see why.
The country is already deeply fascist. We have people living in relative (abet deteriorating) comfort who think we can just politely ask the next crop of politicos to fix problems for us. We have people living in far more dire circumstances who are scrambling to take direct action before they suffer irreparable harm. And then we have a large, heavily armed contingent of mercenaries who were taking selfies with the Jan 6th rioters not that long ago because they thought the Q-Shaman was making a lot of good points.
The Right doesn’t need to do a Revolution because they’re already the ones in control. The only real question is whether they decide Biden gets to keep his seat or Trump needs to be put back in charge come this November.
