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political theatre that won't appear on fox…...But for the most part so far, if you’ve consumed any of the previous January 6–related content out there, you already know what you’re going to get. The hearings have been little more than a reminder that the Capitol riot happened and that it was bad, only this time with a narrower focus on Trump and his personal role in the incident. A much-hyped compilation of never-before-seen footage of the day offers not a whole lot new from the hours upon hours of footage you would’ve already seen. Probably the most interesting pieces are the bird’s-eye shots, starting around the three-minute mark, that make it abundantly clear how badly unprepared the police were, a handful of officers being the only thing standing between the Capitol and a tidal wave of marchers.
We still don’t have any clue why that security failure happened, by the way, or why the copious warnings about the crowd’s size and plans were ignored. This is despite a Capitol police whistleblower accusing two high-ranking officials of profound failures that enabled what happened and saying that “the truth of the leadership/intelligence failures of the 6th is purposefully not being delivered to the officers and the public,” because the congressional community has “purposefully failed” to provide the truth. It’s also in spite of knowing that at least one officer was sympathetic to the rioters and the fact that an after-action reportthe Capitol police produced identified serious intelligence failures, including a discrepancy between what the body’s hazardous response division was told — that there was the chance of violence and that protesters wanted to breach police lines — and what everyone else was told, which did not mention those possibilities. If the police had just prepared the same way they normally do for any other protest, the entire episode would likely have never happened, and yet this fundamental cause continues to go unexplored — deliberately, if you believe the whistleblower. We also still haven’t gotten a national inquiry into extremism among the police and armed forces, even though 13 percent of those charged over entering the Capitol have backgrounds in one or the other, active duty in some cases. Corporate media, cable news in particular, still hasn’t faced the kind of reckoning for its role in spreading election disinformation that Congress has visited on, for instance, tech companies. And the broken political economy that helped make it all possible, and the role of economic dislocation in fomenting election delusions, is still untouched as a subject. Even the extremely narrow focus of these particular hearings — holding Trump and his cronies to account — will come to nothing. Representative Bennie Thompson, the chair of the House select committee running these hearings, has explicitly said he won’t be making criminal referrals of anyone to the Justice Department. That’s because the point of these hearings isn’t to actually solve anything but to serve as political theater that Democrats hopewill give voters a reason to back them in this year’s midterms. There’s nothing wrong with political theater, of course. But the question is: is this actually useful political theater? The ratings for the hearings have been respectable, even without coverage from Fox, but they’re lower than Joe Biden’s State of the Union address and don’t come close to the numbers that tuned into the Watergate hearings. More importantly, apart from Democrats, the US public just doesn’t really care that much. Instead, poll after poll after poll show it’s the economy, above all inflation, that’s most on voters’ minds. The Democrats’ use of the hearings as an electoral tool shows that they’re well aware of the power of the bully pulpit they hold. Imagine if they had used it on something people cared about: hauling corporate profiteers before Congress and dressing them down over price gouging; calling in Amazon and other companies to testify about their union-busting efforts and worker mistreatment; summoning pharma executives to berate them about the extortionate prices they charge for drugs; or as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently suggested the president should do, “bring the major oil companies in and tell them we’re going to have a windfall profits tax on what they’re doing in order to stop them from ripping off the American people.” The Democrats have already held hearings like these in the recent past. Imagine if they were given the kind of blockbuster, prime-time attention right now that the January 6 hearings are getting, for which the party hired a TV executive to create the feel of a docuseries. Instead, the January 6 hearings are the worst of all worlds: they won’t lead to anyone facing any consequences, don’t touch any of the lingering questions and underlying causes of the Capitol riot, and probably won’t make a hell of a lot of difference to the impending midterm bloodbath, since it’s largely only Democratic voters who afford the event this kind of importance. Democrats are correct that American democracy is in peril. But they clearly have no idea how to save it.
READ MORE: https://jacobin.com/2022/06/capitol-riot-trump-gop-democrats-hearings
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fox news gave an alternate reality….
BY KEVIN BARRETT
Every mainstream media channel, with the sole exception of Fox, broadcast the live unfiltered feed of the first day of the January 6 hearings last Thursday. Just like on September 11, 2001, when you could endlessly flip channels and see nothing but the same images of planes-into-buildings-then-buildings-exploding-into-pyroclastic-monster-clouds-chasing-terrorized-citizens-through-the-streets-of-New-York while anchors and guests alternately chanted and insinuated “Bin Laden Bin Laden Bin Laden,” the near-unanimous decision by media moguls to broadcast exactly the same material was designed to guarantee a large audience and an even larger propaganda impact.
Unfortunately for the propagandizers, the January 6 hearings’ audience and impact were not in the same league as 9/11’s. In fact, the hearings drew only half the audience of Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address. As Politico lamented, “Total viewership of the Jan. 6 committee’s opening hearing was modest compared to other primetime political events…”Several MSM headlines angrily blamed Fox. The Washington Post: “Fox News didn’t just ignore the Jan. 6 hearing. It did something worse.” Rolling Stone: “Fox News Did Everything It Could to Keep Its Viewers From Learning the Truth About Jan. 6.” The Guardian: “As America watched Capitol attack testimony, Fox News gave an alternate reality.”
But it isn’t Fox’s fault that the media has failed to convince most Americans that January 6 was, as Chuck Schumer claims, another Pearl Harbor. (Since 9/11 was already the New Pearl Harbor, Schumer’s version of January 6 would have to be a New New Pearl Harbor, which has too many News in it to become a catchy slogan.) So if the neocons and their neolib accomplices want to memorialize the January 6 protest and relatively mild riot as a “catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor,” they are going to have to find a time machine and set the dials for 1/6/21 and plant bombs in the Capitol and blow up thousands of people. Pyroclastic clouds chasing terrified politicians through the streets of DC while the Washington Monument loses its erection and tumbles to the ground would also be a nice touch.
The problem with the January 6 hearings, as “J-Mike” Springmann and I noted in the above video, is that they are demonizing the wrong people. If you are a neocon-neolib and want to bring people together in shared hatred of a scapegoat, as taught by Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, you need to find a villain out of central casting, preferably a foreigner with an iconic beard or mustache like Hitler or Bin Laden or Saddam. Unfortunately for the neocons, Q Shaman’s facial hair is overshadowed by his Buffalo headdress; and besides, he isn’t a foreign leader, but just some random crazy guy with odd but photogenic sartorial tastes.
The MSM lynch mob and their friends in the Justice Department are trying to sell the notion that the people who showed up in DC on 1/6/21 were treasonous “insurrectionists.” In reality, they were mainly just ordinary Americans who came to protest what they viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a stolen election. Even Trump and his aides who may have conspired to try to seat alterate slates of electors in hopes of getting the election thrown to the House were presumably sincere in their belief that the election was rigged. So their real crime is not believing in the unimpeachable integrity of American elections. That is hardly an indictable offense, since those who have investigated the claims of the election integrity movement, which is mainly made up of leftists and Democrats, know that anyone who believes in the unimpeachable integrity of American elections is either ignorant or insane.
In short, the Democrats and their lapdog media are trying to unite America in hatred of ordinary Main Street Americans who don’t trust the results of our extremely dubious elections. That isn’t going to work. No wonder most people are disobeying media orders and refusing to tune in to the “must-watch” January 6 hearings.
It’s obvious that the real aim of the January 6 hearings spectacle is to drive a stake through the heart of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. It’s equally obvious that the current approach isn’t working. And it is even more obvious—at least to the tiny fraction of us who know the score—that the Democrats are missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime to permanently discredit Donald Trump.
If the Democrats and the rest of the Establishment really want to take down Trump, all they need to do is cancel the January 6 festivities and instead hold hearings on a vastly more important issue: The question of where COVID-19 really came from. Those hearings should focus on the highly persuasive evidence, admirably compiled by Ron Unz in his free e-book, that COVID-19 emerged from a Trump Administration biological attack on China and Iran. And though Trump himself probably didn’t know about or approve the attack—the leading suspect is Mike Pompeo—the crime happened on Trump’s watch and was very likely committed by Trump’s appointees.
Imagine a congressional committee grilling Pompeo till he breaks down and confesses to reckless homicide in connection with the deaths of more than a million Americans and more than 15 million people worldwide! I guarantee that those hearings wouldn’t pull in a measly little audience half the size of the one that sits through Biden’s State of the Union speech.
For an explanation of why such hearings really ought to be held, check out my new interview with Ron Unz, publisher of the Unz Review, and author of two brand-new books, Our Covid-19 Catastrophe: Was the Epidemic the Result of Biowarfare Blowback? and Encountering American Pravda: Essays in a Historical Counter-Narrative.
Note: If you have already listened to my COVID-related interviews with Ron Unz, watched our video that is approaching 200,000 views, and are familiar with the evidence that COVID emerged from a US bio-attack on China and Iran, you may want to scroll down to “Part 2: The COVID Bio-Attack, the Ukraine War, and Other Neocon Debacles.”
READ MORE:
https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/january-6th-hearings-demonize-trump-but-miss-the-elephant-in-the-room/
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As long a Fox gave a "reality", alternative or not, we're safe..... The TRUTH about January 6th has been known since January 6th 2021... including the "agents provocateurs"....
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provocateurs.....
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may have had up to eight informants [agents provocateurs] in the right-wing ‘Proud Boys’ fraternity ahead of the Capitol Hill riot on January 6, 2021, the New York Times reported on Monday. Five members of the group are facing trial next month over their alleged involvement in the attack.
According to “heavily redacted” court filings cited by the outlet, the defense for those five members argued that some of the information the FBI’s sources had provided “was favorable to their efforts to defend their clients against sedition charges” and was “improperly withheld by prosecutors” until recently.
The NYT’s revelation came amid claims by some Republicans and conservative commentators that the Capitol riot was part of a false-flag plot by the FBI against then-President Donald Trump and his supporters.
Since the court filings are under a “highly restrictive protective order,” the NYT said it was not possible to know what details the informants shared with the FBI or how it could help the defendants.
The Proud Boys’ former leader Enrique Tarrio is facing sedition charges, along with Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola. The trial is set to begin on December 12.
According to the paper, prosecutors have been denying allegations that the government tried to hide the information. They also claim that the information in question was not directly relevant to the Proud Boys case.
The Times has previously reported that the FBI had informants both in the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia, another far-right group allegedly involved in the Capitol attack.
The paper said, however, that “no evidence has surfaced” suggesting that the FBI played any role in the Capitol riot.
READ MORE:
https://www.rt.com/news/566562-fbi-informants-capitol-riot/
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mis-justice......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFrmFGyG7_s
Tucker Carlson 12/16/23 | Tucker Carlson Tonight December 16, 2023READ FROM TOP.
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