Morning Briefing: January 6th Committee Hearing Paints Picture of Trump as Nero
Morning Briefing: January 6th Committee Hearing Paints Picture of Trump as Nero
The U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack hearing in prime time focused on the former President's actions during the January 6th Insurrection, watching the violent rioters on television.
Morning Briefing: Former President Donald Trump spent 187 minutes watching Fox News in the White House dinning room as violent rioters overtake the U.S. Capitol building.
During that time period, the former President was calling Republican senators and asking them to delay the certification of the election, and ignoring the pleas of Republican members of Congress, White House staffers, and even members of his own family to make a public statement ordering the violent rioters to leave the U.S. Capitol building.
The U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack presented “damning evidence that Donald Trump’s failure to halt the assault on the Capitol was itself a vital part of the coup plot.”
After the Committee’s previous hearings had presented evidence of how the former President plotted to overturn the results of the election and committed possible criminal acts, during “the committee spent this last hearing focused on what the former president didn’t do – and framed it as a moral failing.”
The Committee presented witness testimony from multiple former administration officials that claimed the former President “never reached out to the heads of any law enforcement or national security department or agency in the government to seek help in responding to quell the violence.”
The violence at the U.S. Capitol building was so intense that U.S. Secret Service agents were reportedly “starting to fear for their own lives,” and an anonymous former administration official described “disturbing” radio communications between agents: “There were calls to say goodbye to family members.”
During his closing statement, Rep. Bennie Thompson said that Committee’s investigation is ongoing, that new information is being gathered and additional witnesses are being pursued, and that the Committee will hold another hearing in September.
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Nick Robins Early, Alexander Nabert, and Christina Brause write that as “far-right extremism has grown over the past decade, so too has the notoriety of various groups and their leaders. Far-right gangs such as the Proud Boys as well as suit-and-tie-wearing white nationalists like Richard Spencer regularly make headlines. But there are also lesser-known groups with more directly violent aims that follow an ideology called accelerationism — the belief that carrying out bombings, mass shootings, and other attacks is necessary to hasten the collapse of society and allow a white ethnostate to rise in its place. Countries including the United Kingdom and Canada have designated accelerationist groups such as Atomwaffen Division, Feuerkrieg Division and The Base as terrorist organizations. Atomwaffen, which is now largely defunct, was linked to at least five murders in the US alone. The Base's leader was sentenced in May to four years in prison after plotting to kill minorities and instigate a race war.” [Insider]
Amanda Marcotte writes that the “secularization of misogyny and homophobia as ideologies is an underreported phenomenon, especially in light of how dangerous it is. As the explosive growth of the Proud Boys since the Capitol insurrection suggests, there are a lot of white men who are bitter about gender equality and racial diversity but aren't exactly keen on having to get up for church on Sunday mornings to justify themselves. Defeating Trumpism means grappling directly with the rise of misogyny and homophobia, especially the secular flavors of it, and rebutting those views forcefully.” [Salon]
Samuel Catlin writes that the “right’s rhetorical attachment to ‘theory’ and ‘critical theory’ is clarified when we take a longer view of the culture wars, a historicizing move that requires us to pay attention to a different set of rhetorical bundles: not ‘wokeness,’ ‘cancel culture,’ and ‘CRT,’ but ‘theory,’ ‘critical theory,’ ‘postmodernism,’ ‘deconstruction.’ If we look at the recent media frenzy around CRT from this slant, we can better understand how it fits into a storied American tradition of anti-intellectualism whose favorite target has for decades been something called ‘theory.’” [Gawker]
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