The Consequences Of The Capitol Assault
Ben Domenech
By Ben Domenech
January 7, 2021
A little over a decade ago, I was tear-gassed for the first time. It was the first day of September in the Twin Cities, and the anti-globalist, anti-war protesters were milling about with giant papier-mache heads of the people they hated. Mark Hemingway was there. My future wife and mother of my child was inside. It was painful. Afterward, I left and set up my laptop at a nearby rooftop bar and had the best Guinness I’ve ever ordered in my life. The reports about the protesters were overwhelmingly sympathetic. These were justified because of the wars. The New York Times said so.
A few years later, I covered Occupy Wall Street, and the tone was similar. These people taking over public parks, shitting all over the place, yelling at each other in circles, and setting up occasional rape tents were to be accepted, because Wall Street exists and is a thing. The sympathy for them was even greater than for the war people because of a lot of guilt about how media is funded. Zephyr Teachout wrote a thing.
Around the same time, there was another form of protest, something very different, which emerged. It was called the Tea Party. It was, unlike the anti-war, anti-globalist, anti-Wall Street folks, a fundamentally dangerous and racist entity, bent on destruction and violence, that threatened the very foundations of representative government and only existed because people couldn’t accept a black president. They were basically the Klan. Alan Grayson said it.
It was odd. In all my years of covering the Tea Party, I never saw them be rude to a cop, even by accident. They were upper-middle-class people who drove up in SUVs. They had no designs on destruction or occupation. Their taxes paid for that park, so they would clean up after themselves. They took pride in it — that they weren’t like the dirty, filthy leftists who left graffiti and literal shit on the ground.
Of course, it was these people who were absolutely marauded by the media. Their shouting at politicians — confined of course to town halls — was an act of political sabotage that threatened everything we hold dear. They were basically terrorists. Mediocre politician Joe Biden literally called them “terrorists.†He can be a nice guy, but he’s also kind of an bleep that way. That’s Delaware for you.
Politics is interesting in America. There’s a repeated pattern that emerges when you look into it. Certain factors and elements rise up, and the media lies about them aggressively. They frame the new emerging development as something it is not — as the most extreme version of what it could be. And then the call engenders a response — the very thing the media frames this development as comes to fruition in a new and more virulent form.
This absolutely happened in response to the 2012 election. As I said a few years ago about Democratic attacks on the misogyny and heartlessness of Mitt Romney, if you cry wolf about extremism long enough, you lack the vocabulary when the actual beast shows up. The rise of Donald Trump is a piece of that — a takeover of the Republican Party by a politician who represents everything the media has framed a cliched view of the party as for decades: a rich, old, white racist who likes to fire people. Yeah? So suck on that. Go write a million pieces, they don’t care.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/07/the-consequences-of-the-capitol-assault/
