3 years ago

The Next Big Lies... Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal or a Left-Wing Plot
How revisionist histories of Jan. 6 picked up where the “stop the steal” campaign left off, warping beliefs about what transpired at the Capitol.

It was mere hours after a mob spurred on by the “stop the steal” lies of President Donald J. Trump had attacked the United States Capitol, and already new lies were taking hold in the nearby streets.

The police had pushed the few dozen remaining protesters off the Capitol grounds, but some continued to hurl threats and obscenities at a line of officers in riot gear. “Traitors get the rope,” a man shouted. “Wait until we come back with rifles.”

Only yards away, though, others were spinning fictions about what they had just witnessed, even joined.

“They’re calling us violent Trump mobs,” bemoaned a woman shortly before 8 p.m.

“That’s because Antifa came here dressed as Trump supporters and started all this,” added one of the men she was speaking with.

Another man chimed in to say that he had been inside the Capitol and that it had been peaceful. “We didn’t do a thing,” he said. “We were there for the Constitution — to make sure democracy was followed.”

Soon, that instant rewriting of history coursed from the street to online chat rooms to social media and, in the case of the Antifa conspiracy theory, to Laura Ingraham’s primetime program on Fox News.

Over the last year, that same self-nourishing loop — connecting the extremely online Trumpian grassroots to close Trump allies with national soapboxes and finally to the former president himself, plotting his comeback from Palm Beach exile — has circulated a furious array of rumor, innuendo, partial facts and outright lies to fill the right-wing media with alternative narratives of the first interruption in the peaceful transfer of power in American history.

By Thursday’s anniversary of the violence that has been connected to at least seven deaths and left some 150 police officers injured, it was an article of faith among vast swaths of conservative Americans that the riot was just “one day in January,” in the words of former Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was directly threatened. For the half of Republicans who now believe the rioters were at the Capitol to “protect democracy,” according to the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll, any talk of Jan. 6 as a singularly violent episode in American democracy would likely be taken as liberal, mainstream-media claptrap.

“Jan. 6 barely rates as a footnote,” Tucker Carlson told his Fox News viewers Thursday night. “Really not a lot happened that day if you think about it.” He called the event “just a riot — maybe just barely.”

The reimagining of Jan. 6 has not so much evolved as it has splintered into rival, but often complementary, false narratives with a common goal — to shift blame away from Mr. Trump, his supporters, and a Republican Party maneuvering to win back control of the government. The riot was a “false flag” operation by Antifa, the loose left-wing collective; the F.B.I. planted agents to stir up the crowd; the protesters were mere “tourists” wrongfully accused by a Democratic-led Justice Department and vilified by a biased mainstream media; police officers recounting their injuries and trauma were “crisis actors.’”

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