The Democratic Party is predictably using the riot a year ago to blame Donald Trump and his supporters for attempting an “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol to protest the presidential election. While that is happening throughout the day, Media Research Center is witnessing the national media obediently echo that claim without any pushback to the narrative.
The hours-long riot and protest in and around the U.S. Capitol temporarily stopped the Senate from validating the Election Day electoral votes, hence the claims democracy was threatened. Some GOP senators, citing questions about a fair election, were also demanding debate before a vote but the trespassing Trump supporters upended that debate, too.
With the crowd pouring in, many elected leaders retreated and fled with Capitol Police protecting them from Trump supporters who are now referred to as "traitors" and "insurrectionists" by Democrats and much of the media.
Oliver Darcy, the media reporter for CNN, complained Tuesday in a Twitter post that Fox News correspondents had failed to use the word "insurrection" during their morning coverage of Jan. 6.
"That's because 'insurrection' is a political term," Sen. Ted Cruz replied in a tweet, "used by Democrats and the corporate media to try to falsely slander every Trump voter across America."
Last summer, American Family News reported the Dept. of Justice had backed away from its political promise to Democrats to charge the rioters with "mind blowing" charges such as murder and even "sedition," a conviction that carries a heavy prison term. The FBI also quietly backed away from "conspiracy" charges against two groups, Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
The riot ended about five hours later when Capitol Hill police cleared the Capitol. The half-day riot ended with five deaths but only one killing, unarmed trespasser Ashli Babbitt, who was shot dead by a Capitol Hill police officer while climbing through a Senate chamber door. Despite that fact, Vice President Kamala Harris began her remarks Thursday by comparing Jan. 6 to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in 2001.
All three dates, she said solemnly while speaking inside the U.S. Capitol, have a “place in our collective memory.”
Reacting to that comparison, Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families calls it "shocking and sickening" to witness the Vice President compare those life-changing events to what he calls a "mini-riot" at the Capitol that lasted four hours.
"I mean, those were both acts of war," he points out.
The speeches Thursday covered much more ground than Jan. 6 and Donald Trump. With polls predicting the Democratic Party will get slaughtered in the midterm elections, and hence lose power on Capitol Hill, they are now pushing for a “voting rights” bill in the U.S. Senate that must pass, they say, if democracy is to survive.
So the Jan. 6 speeches easily pivoted to that talking point. “We must pass voting rights bills that are now before the Senate,” Harris said in the same speech.
In his Jan. 6 speech, President Joe Biden warned Democratic voters that Donald Trump and the Republican Party want to “suppress your vote and subvert our elections. It’s wrong. It’s undemocratic.”
Summarizing the day-long political blitz, right-wing Blaze writer Matt Walsh tweeted unhappily that it is “smart politics” for Democrats to take advantage of Jan. 6. Republicans on Capitol Hill, he said, should take a lesson from today but probably won't.
Media 'in the tank' for Democrats
Beyond the naked politics of today, what concerns MRC spokesman Dan Gainor is the complicit national media. The media, he says, is acting like state-run propaganda that would normally -- under a ruthless dictatorship -- perform their jobs under threat of punishment while knowing it is wrong to do so.
“In this country,” Gainor says, “the American media are so thoroughly in the tank for one political party that they basically can't even cover the sun rising correctly."
The media’s political bias is so obvious that media watchdogs routinely document the media spinning bad news for Democrats. That practice even has a name. It is called the “Republicans pounce” headline in which an unfavorable topic for Democrats pivots to the media blaming those devious, hated Republicans.
In an Associated Press story this week, the wire service dropped a 1,700-word “Republicans pounce story” about...Ashley Babbitt. With the anniversary of her death days away, the AP reported Babbitt had been involved in a marital spat while involved in an extramarital affair with a co-worker. The AP assigned an investigative reporter, Michael Biesecker, to dig up a road-rage incident from July 2016 and then published its hit piece on the dead Trump supporter three days before the Jan. 6 anniversary and her own death.
Babbitt is called a “future insurrectionist” in Biesecker’s first sentence.
“Hey, shameless propagandist leftists: our republic certainly is in jeopardy,” columnist-author David Limbaugh said in a Twitter post today, “but it has nothing to do with January 6th, you deceitful demagogues.”
This story has been updated with comments from Gary Bauer.
