Scott Lemieux, over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, notes that some in the media have now started to both sides the insurrection. The headline of the piece to which he links reads:
One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry.
The text he excerpts from the article, as he says, renders the headline “a fair summary of the content”. If this becomes widespread, we can expect the media’s tune to solidify into a determined both siderism, because after all, who are they to say that attempting to overthrow the government is a bad thing or even was actually a thing. After all, some people say the rioters were just a bunch of tourists taking a look at the Capitol. Of course, other people say they were actually Antifa with one breath, while with the other breath they will assert that they were patriots trying to save the nation. After all, if you’re a Republican, the facts depend on who you happen to be lying to. Rewriting history to suit is hardly unprecedented in this country. The alternate histories of the Civil War and Reconstruction propounded by Southern historians like Claude Bowers held sway for years. If we do succumb to the fascism that Republicans are pushing, their alternate history of the Trump insurrection will hold sway for the foreseeable future.
It might be interesting if someone were to ask the other Republicans running for the presidency a question along the lines of that someone asked Nikki Haley about the Civil War. Quite obviously, no member of the press will ask such a question, or if they did, they would let the candidate in question get away with a word salad response. My guess is that just as Haley consciously avoided saying that the Civil War was about slavery, so she would, as would all of them but Christie, go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging that it was a insurrection intended to overthrow the government of the United States, an insurrection incited by the person who held the office of president of the United States.
In my diary from this date a year ago I noted that there were folks joking that if the Republicans could ever pick a Speaker of the House (the multiple votes that finally landed McCarthy his disastrous Speakership were taking place) their first order of business would be to make January 6th a national holiday. Mind you, these were jokes, but the day may not be far off when the joke will be on the rest of us.
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