In “One of These Riots Is Not Like the Other,” National Review‘s Kevin Williamson points out the obvious.
Why make such a big deal about January 6?
Sean Hannity, radio host and off-the-books Donald Trump adviser, demands to know. After all, Hannity points out, there have been scores of riots, some of them deadly, over the past couple of years. Why fixate on that one?
Sean Hannity apparently believes that he has the dumbest audience in America.
Honestly, that’s a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. Even when he was posing as a garden variety conservative thirty years ago, when he was occasionally guest-hosting for Rush Limbaugh and hadn’t yet been paired with Alan Colmes, it was obvious that he was not particularly bright. Anyone voluntarily listening to him for hours on end, night after night, presumably isn’t sharp enough to pick up on that fact.
But I digress.
The sacking of the Capitol on January 6 by a gang of enraged Trump acolytes acting on the president’s complaint that the election had been stolen from him is different from other riots because of its particular political character. Stealing Nikes is one thing, and stealing the presidency is another. Hannity knows this. Most of you know this.
Again, I’m not absolutely sure that Hannity knows this. I’d put it at 50-50.
Consider: There were 21,570 homicides in the United States in 2020. If one of the victims had been the president of the United States, we would have made a pretty big deal about it. It would have been on the news. There might have been congressional hearings. Why? If we take Sean Hannity’s view, then we should treat such a murder as one murder among the thousands of murders the United States sees in a typical year.
But, of course, we do not treat the murders of political leaders that way. We even have a special word for such murders — assassination — because they are different from your average Saturday-night recreational shoot-’em-up in Chicago.
That’s a solid point that even Hannity would understand. Probably.
After some diversion, Williamson lands on another good point:
Even Sean Hannity knows this is a problem. That is why he — along with fellow Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade — texted Trump’s chief of staff to ask the president to try to put a stop to the riot. It is strange that these people, who today insist that Trump had nothing to do with the violent events in question, believed at the time that he was in a position to stop them.
[…]
What has been clear to some of us for a long time — and what is becoming more difficult to deny every day — is that the events of January 6 were part of an attempted coup d’état, one that proceeded on two fronts: As the rioters occupied the Capitol and disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College votes, Trump’s legal minions sought madly for some pretext upon which to nullify the election. Meanwhile, Trump allies occupying several points on the far-right tail of the bell curve of glue-sniffing madness hatched all kinds of supplementary schemes, some of them involving the military.
A riot that is part of a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of a coup de Target.
You would think.
Look, jokes about the dimness of Fox News hosts aside, most of them instinctively understood that the game had gone too far when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, threatening to kill Members of Congress and the Vice President of the United States in order to stop the counting of votes that Trump and Fox News had convinced them were illegitimate. But they are apparently so addicted to the grift that they can’t stop play-acting even after privately texting the White House Chief of Staff to end the madness. Hannity and his co-conspirators are therefore deliberately adding fuel to the fire, with predictable consequences.
