{"id":18547,"date":"2021-01-07T17:38:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-07T17:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inthesetimes.com\/article\/trump-biden-antifa-left-black-lives-matter-capitol-right-wing-violence"},"modified":"2021-01-07T17:38:00","modified_gmt":"2021-01-07T17:38:00","slug":"equating-white-nationalists-and-left-radicals-is-what-got-us-here-in-the-first-place-media-outlets-and-politicians-are-baselessly-claiming-the-pro-trump-crowd-was-made-up-of-socialists-an","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/07\/equating-white-nationalists-and-left-radicals-is-what-got-us-here-in-the-first-place-media-outlets-and-politicians-are-baselessly-claiming-the-pro-trump-crowd-was-made-up-of-socialists-an\/","title":{"rendered":"Equating White Nationalists and “Left Radicals” Is What Got Us Here in the First Place – Media outlets and politicians are baselessly claiming the pro-Trump crowd was made up of “socialists,” “anarchists,” and “antifa.” Here’s why that’s so dangerous."},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t\t\t\t

The January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol was the culmination of a far-right effort to delegitimize the 2020 election, directly cheered and incited by President Donald Trump, who has been falsely claiming for weeks that the election was stolen from him, and who directly urged<\/a> his supporters on with a speech on Wednesday. Yet, before the events of the day had fully unfolded, conservative media outlets and politicians were already circulating baseless claims that left-wing movements were responsible for the events that unfolded\u2014blaming \u201csocialists,\u201d \u201canarchists\u201d and \u201cantifa\u201d for an action that was clearly fomented and carried out by the Right.
<\/p>\n

This false narrative is the product of a right wing that has shaped its identity around violent incitement and false accusations against the Left. But the Right alone is not responsible for creating an atmosphere where such rumors can spread so quickly: Politicians and media outlets across the political spectrum have spent the Trump years fear-mongering about the supposed dangers posed by the Left. This has not only contributed to a tinderbox of anti-left violence, but has also undermined efforts to identify the political dangers posed by the far right.<\/p>\n

In a January 6 article<\/a> from KSTP TV, a Twin Cities media outlet owned by Hubbard Broadcasting, it\u2019s suggested\u2014with no evidence\u2014that \u201cantifa\u201d was behind the storming of the Capitol, not Trump supporters. The article is titled, \u201cMinneapolis security expert says protection of U.S. Capitol surprisingly weak.\u201d The expert, it turns out, is Michael Rozin, the head of Rozin Security Consulting whose clients include the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the RAND Corporation. \u201cRozin said there were some rioters inside the U.S. Capitol who used symbols and had tattoos which seem to be aligned with the ANTIFA movement, which is made up of decentralized groups across the country who promote dismantling the federal government,\u201d the article states.<\/p>\n

This false claim was reiterated repeatedly on the floor of the U.S. House early on the morning of January 7. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) proclaimed, \u201csome of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters. They were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.\u201d In making this assertion, Gaetz cited an unverified Washington Times<\/em> report<\/a> based on the dubious assertions<\/a> of a facial recognition company whose leader authors a right-wing blog. <\/p>\n

The baseless claim that the storming of the Capitol was a \u201cfalse flag operation\u201d orchestrated by the Left was echoed by Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The right-wing press outlet Fox News quickly became a mouthpiece for such unverified assertions. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) told<\/a> Fox Business \u201cthere is some indication that fascist antifa elements were involved, that they embedded themselves in the Trump protests.\u201d (In fact, antifa is a tactic employed against fascism, not in support of it.) Brooks baselessly pointed his finger at \u201cany other number of groups, anarchists or what have you,\u201d that he said \u201ccould have taken advantage of this opportunity to try to vandalize the United States Capitol.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in a January 6 appearance<\/a> on Fox News, Laura Ingraham tried to equate the storming of the Capitol with Black Lives Matter protests over the summer when she criticized people who \"were markedly silent when there was widespread violence and pushing back on police and National Guard troops and attempts to breach that fence right outside the White House perimeter.\"<\/p>\n

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), who filed a lawsuit to challenge the legitimacy of Joe Biden's presidential win, baselessly stated<\/a> to East Texas media outlet KLTV that a wide swath of left-wing protesters were responsible. The outlet says, \u201cGohmert said he hopes they find whoever started the assault on the Capitol. He mentioned several photos being shared widely online, referring to a few of them as \u2018socialists, skin heads, and climate change guys.\u2019\u201d KLTV notes that other outlets have found that the men Gohmert identified had, in fact, supported Trump. <\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just far-right demagogues. CNN twice asserted, live on air, that the violence was being carried out by \u201canarchists\u201d\u2014once by<\/a> long time left-basher<\/a> Erin Burnett and again<\/a> by reporter Dana Bash.<\/p>\n

These claims of left-wing responsibility are, of course, at odds with Trump\u2019s own pronouncements: The president has repeatedly declared his sympathy for the crowd that stormed the Capitol. \u201cI know your pain, I know you\u2019re hurt,\u201d he said in a video<\/a> released on Twitter (Twitter has since removed the video).<\/p>\n

But blame for feeding this climate of anti-left fear-mongering extends across the political spectrum. Throughout the past four years of the Trump administration, Democratic leaders and centrist media outlets have repeatedly equated antifascists determined to stop reactionary forces with these very reactionary forces themselves. In the month following the Charlottesville attack that left one antifascist, anti-racist protestor dead, one analysis<\/a> by FAIR found that commentary in the six top broadsheet newspapers\u2014the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, New York Times<\/em>, USA Today<\/em>, Los Angeles Times<\/em>, San Jose Mercury News<\/em> and Washington Post<\/em>\u2014condemned fascists and anti-fascist protesters equally. The analysis found that \u201cbetween August 12 and September 12, these papers ran 28 op-eds or editorials condemning the anti-fascist movement known as antifa, or calling on politicians to do so, and 27 condemning neo-Nazis and white supremacists, or calling on politicians\u2014namely Donald Trump\u2014to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the start of Trump\u2019s reign, the center-left instinct was to spend more time engaging in Condemnation Theater of \u201cfar-left radicals'' than to develop systems to meaningfully oppose white nationalist movements emboldened by the president. Form was far more important than substance, and \u201cviolence\u2019' committed to defend against white nationalists on the street was deemed just as bad as violence animated by racial hatred\u2014a violence fully systematized in \u201claw\u201d enforcement,<\/a> an overtly white nationalist<\/a> White House, and a sophisticated system of Amazon<\/a>- and Palantir<\/a>-backed ethnic cleansing at the border.<\/p>\n

Over the summer, justified Black anger at the routine killing and subjugation of Black lives, manifesting as property destruction, was equated with wide-scale police oppression and right-wing vigilantism hellbent on maintaining white dominance and protecting capital. This tendency was displayed by Joe Biden himself, who, in May 2020, when he was still a presidential candidate, condemned<\/a> the supposed \u201cviolence\u201d of Black Lives Matter protesters. As Eli Day noted<\/a> in June 2020, \u201cRather than indicting the racist police murder of George Floyd and other black Americans, our leaders are up in arms over protests and property destruction.\u201d The demands for justice were largely ignored, or placated with hollow post-George Floyd corporate branding and leading Democrats insisting that if Black Lives Matter protesters simply went home and pulled the lever for them in November, all would be okay. Ideology was flattened, and power and historical analysis thrown out the window in favor of performative denouncement of \u201cboth sides.\u201d<\/p>\n

The false equation of the Right and the Left erodes our ability to name and identify the dangerous forces that underlie Trumpism, casting political content itself as irrelevant. This is a problem because political content matters: The fact that a far-right movement sought to undemocratically seize power, cheered on by the president, should trouble us all. False equivalency between the Right and Left makes it difficult to actually interrogate the politics behind the events of January 6, and it also feed a key ideological tenet of the very Trumpist political current that the center-left claims to oppose. Anti-Left incitement has been an organizing principle of Trumpism from the beginning, intermingled with Trump\u2019s incitement against Black Lives Matter protesters, poor people, and immigrants. It is exactly this political current that the Left is trying to counter and defeat, with an urgency that has been repeatedly dismissed, denigrated and misrepresented.<\/p>\n

Media outlets and politicians have a responsibility to be accurate, and avoid feeding into this false equivalency, which gives ideological fuel and moral cover to a far-right political project.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n

This post was originally published on In These Times<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\tThe January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol was the culmination of a far-right effort to delegitimize the 2020 election, directly cheered and incited by President Donald Trump, who has been falsely claiming for weeks that the election was stolen fr…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18548,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18547\/revisions\/18548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}