Blatant Propaganda from the White House
The ongoing attempt to venerate the J6 insurrectionists.
I don’t have time to do a proper run-down of the utterly grotesque insanity that is the official January 6th commemoration (so to speak) of January 6, 2021. But let me note a couple of things.
I would note that while it seeks to blame Democrats for the whole affair, it focuses primarily on the grace afforded to the insurrectionists by Trump, rather than on the breaking, entering, and violence of the mob, not to mention the attempt to disrupt a constitutional process. All emphases are in the original.
President Trump took decisive action to pardon January 6 defendants who were unfairly targeted, overcharged, and used as political examples. They were not protected by the leaders who failed them. They were punished to cover incompetence.
On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, President Trump issued sweeping blanket pardons and commutations for nearly 1,600 patriotic Americans prosecuted for their presence at the Capitol—many mere trespassers or peaceful protesters treated as insurrectionists by a weaponized Biden DOJ. He fully pardoned most, commuted sentences, and ordered immediate release of those still imprisoned, ending years of harsh solitary confinement, denied due process, and family separation for exercising their First Amendment rights.
Apparently, it needs to be said that the reason those individuals were treated as insurrectionists is that they were involved in an insurrection.
Also, let’s not forget the kinds of people who were given pardons or commutations (via CNN): Trump commutes sentences of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders as he pardons over 1,000 January 6 US Capitol rioters.
The commutations cover the sentences for 14 far-right extremists from the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who were convicted or charged with seditious conspiracy.
With the pardons, Trump has granted full clemency to hundreds of people already convicted of felony crimes like assaulting police and destroying property as part of the effort to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
[…]
That group includes individuals like Julian Khater, who assaulted US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick and later pled guilty to assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon; Devlyn Thompson, who hit a police officer with a metal baton; and Robert Palmer, a Florida man who attacked police with a fire extinguisher, a wooden plank and a pole.
For all the talk about “law and order” and making us “safe,” we all need to remember that if you do violence that Trump thinks is to his advantage, or on his behalf, he is perfectly fine with it, even if directed at law enforcement.
For anyone who needs a refresher of that day, NPR has a visual recollection: ‘This is not a peaceful protest!’ The piece also details Trump’s participation in the lead-up to, and during, the events in question.
Back to the White House link–it includes a timeline that contains the following:
So, we have the assertion that someone who violently broke into the US Capitol was a martyr, that Mike Pence was the villain of the day for not disrupting the process in Trump’s favor, and that the election was stolen. And for added flavor, the most powerful man in the world was “silenced” because they took his Twitter away (and that is made all the more ironic by his silence that day as his supporters rampaged through the US Capitol). Furthermore, people who engaged in violence, vandalism, and attempted to disrupt the election process are to be understood as patriots.
I know none of this is new. But it is still a new level to post it in an official way on a government website. It is, simply put, a Soviet-style attempt at literally rewriting history to serve the needs of the regime (and specifically the needs of Dear Leader).
The statement seeks to make further martyrs of other protestors who died at or after J6 and to make Nancy Pelosi the real villain of that day (alongside Pence).
I would note that trying to pin security breaches on Pelosi while at the same time stating that the insurrectionists were just peaceful protesters requires pretzel logic of epic proportions.
For example,
The House Administration Subcommittee’s Interim Report, released in December 2024 under Chairman Barry Loudermilk, exposes critical security failures on January 6, 2021, that were largely due to politicized decisions by Democratic leadership and the Pentagon.
[…]
Overall, the findings portray January 6 not as a Trump-orchestrated insurrection, but as a tragedy enabled by leadership failures under Pelosi’s watch.
And yet,
These Americans, many guilty of nothing more than peacefully protesting a disputed election, were finally freed from years of cruel imprisonment, restored to their families, and exonerated. In one bold stroke, Trump ended the nightmare of weaponized justice and delivered long-overdue vindication to those betrayed by the very leaders sworn to protect them.
I mean, which is it? Some massive, partisan-fueled security breach or just “nothing more than peacefully protesting a disputed election”? It can’t be both.
I could go on, but I don’t have time. I just thought this needed to be noted. It is plainly and nakedly authoritarian propaganda designed to whitewash, at least for the gullible, one of the darkest days in American democracy. It is shameful, yet on brand for Trump and his followers.
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How #ucking dumb do you have to be to believe any of this crap? It is so ridiculous. I just sit here and shake my head. I feel like Jake Tapper in his interview with Miller…like, what the #uck Universe am I living in?
@Jc:
As dumb as to believe El Taco could bring down prices at once?
People will very readily believe what they want to hear, be it true or not.
A lot of propaganda is crude and contradictory. Russia provides abundant examples. In czarist times, the Japanese were portrayed as a grave existential danger and an easy enemy to beat. Cropped and otherwise modified photos from the stalinist era look cropped or tampered with.
Part of the purpose is to get people to believe what the regime wants them to believe. But another part is to force people, usually those already on your side, to accept blatant falsehoods as true, in order to assert your power over them. Ergo things like what Steven notes in his post, or the blatantly doctored photos under stalin.
IMHO, every OTB post tagged as In Front of Our Noses or about official some official Trump authoritarian propaganda should be topped with a photo of the demolished East Wing of the White House, so we are reminded that the alternate facts are hollow while the damage is real.
It’s interesting that Trump didn’t exonerate these fools instead of pardoning them or commuting their sentences.
He knows they’re guilty, not that it bothers him. He got exactly what he wanted that day.
This is all because a Republican Congress refused to do what was necessary.
Although there is a long history of not punishing former administrations the events of J6 are of a different scale.
Now Newsom is talking about letting them off again.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/latest-news-trump-maduro_n_695bb603e4b0d6beb5fd9469/liveblog_695e882fe4b05bed6f974982
@Daryl:
I say to Mr. Newsom: Not only no, but hell no.
We tried “turning the page” with Biden. How did that work out?
What we need is for the next Democratic president, assuming elections mean anything past 2026, to 1) fire Kash Patel, and 2) appoint passionate, red-blooded, committed, dedicated, liberals as FBI director and attorney general. People who understand the first priority of any administration is to prosecute and punish the bad behavior, corruption, and law-breaking so enthusiastically embraced by El Taco and his minions.
@Daryl: Sounds like fracking Merrick Garland.
@Jc:
I make it a point to read some conservative sources. Dumb helps, but it’s mostly motivated reasoning. They have no difficulty at all with the blatant contradictions Dr. Taylor points out. Hanna Arendt had it right.
The White House page of lies doesn’t even mention Antifa. What nonsense is this?
It’s Antifa FBI plants, infiltrating the crowd of peaceful protesters, that causes the situation to escalate to the very mild levels of disorder we all saw, which the Pelosi police were either unable or unwilling to handle.
Even my brother knows this, and he’s an idiot. It’s why Antifa has been declared a domestic terrorist organization.
Has Mike Pence been airbrushed out of any official photos yet?
OF COURSE it can be both:
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.”
@gVOR10:
I agree that Garland is culpable as well.
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22