In their ongoing quest to recast January 6th as anything but what it was, the right is trying a “look over here” strategy to cast doubt on the fairness of he prosecutions. It’s a doozy:
It remains wild that there is still, to this day, a concerted effort to suggest that the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was somehow not directly a function of President Donald Trump and his supporters. It’s not as though there were four guys wearing generic street clothes who snuck into the Capitol. There were hundreds from a sea of thousands, people bedecked in gear with Trump’s name and slogans all over it. Those subsequently arrested for their involvement in the violence have repeatedly identified Trump’s rhetoric as the impetus, in case anyone might somehow not have connected the then-president’s false claims about the election and his exhortations to show up in Washington that day to what followed.
Yet Trump and his allies still try. They still lift up small pieces of the day and declare them to be suspicious, from unidentified individuals mentioned in court filings to people later revealed to be exactly who they appeared to be. The idea isn’t to inform but to mislead and to distract. The idea is to distance Trump from the violence by suggesting that it had some non-obvious catalyst, like trying to argue that it was the metal used in the mooring tower that caused the Hindenburg to explode and not the combination of location and hydrogen.
In the past week or two, Trumpworld has coalesced around a different element of the day’s events as a way to blame outside influence for what followed: the pipe bombs left outside of the Democratic and Republican Party headquarters the night before.
There was Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show last week, suggesting that the House select committee investigating the violence that day was somehow avoiding looking at the attempting bombing, insisting that they — “They” — had “stopped talking about this person.”
There was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), tweeting something similar on Wednesday evening.
“A person placing pipe bombs at the RNC and the DNC was targeting both political parties the night before the J6 Capitol riot,” she wrote, elevating a tweet from right-wing activist Jack Posobiec echoing Carlson’s claim. “Those should be the phone records subpoenaed. Why don’t they care about the pipe bomber?”
And then there was Trump himself, speaking to right-wing media personality Candace Owens. She began the interview by raising the same idea.
“Everybody talks about January 6th,” Owens said. “I actually want to talk about January 5th.” She claimed that the FBI “has showed us a couple of stills of those individuals” and that Carlson and podcast host Joe Rogan had proven that the FBI was involved in encouraging violence on Jan. 6, which is not true both in the senses that no such thing was proven and that there’s no evidence that it’s provable.
But Trump, obviously understanding the utility of having others be blamed for the violence, took the bait.
“This pipe bomber or bomber — who knows if it was a pipe, who knows what it was — they never found him?” Trump said. “I’ve seen pictures of them, and very clear pictures. And you know that they do have cameras — not just a camera, they have many cameras on every corner. And I would imagine they probably know who he was, and I guarantee he wasn’t one of the people that were at that protest for the right reason.”
“Why aren’t they finding this pipe bomber and how come other people haven’t been revealed?” he added later. “Because I think that were more than just — let’s call them MAGA people. … You have BLM and you had antifa people, I had very little doubt about that, and they were antagonizing and they were agitating.”
What nonsense. There have been numerous alerts on this case with videos and graphics. And not there weren’t numerous BLM and Antifa people anywhere near that insurrectionist mess.
The tactic being used here is to suggest that the lack of an arrest is evidence that the FBI doesn’t want the individual to be found, or, more nefariously, that it knows who he is because the Bureau was somehow involved in the incident. Greene and Owens appear to be arguing that it’s suspicious in particular because so many other suspects from the Capitol riot have already been rolled up thanks to the government’s ability to track their movements.
This isn’t suspicious; it’s a logical fallacy. There were thousands of people at the Capitol and hundreds have been arrested. But many haven’t been arrested, despite video of their actions and, presumably in some cases, digital evidence of their actions and locations. Go to the FBI’s page focused on the Capitol riot and you’ll see literally hundreds of photos of other people the government is trying to track down. Those are the people to whom the pipe-bomb suspect should be compared, not those who have already been tracked down and charged with crimes. In that context, there’s nothing suspicious about the lack of an arrest at all.
But we should not make the mistake of assuming that these questions are being raised in good faith. None of these individuals — Greene, Trump, Carlson or Owens — should be presumed to be assessing the situation with critical objectivity, only raising questions after carefully considering the evidence and the weight of their assertions. Instead, each is interested in promoting some aspect of the Trump good-government bad duality. If defending Trump or undercutting the government means elevating unfounded doubt about the role of government actors in violence, so be it.
It’s actually a feature, not a bug. They love to cast themselves as anti-government rebels who are being persecuted by the government — even as they exhort the government to persecute others.
I swear they are living out their own warped counter-culture Woodstock fantasies. Instead of long hair and bell-bottoms they drape themselves in Trump flags and gatish red-white and blue costumes. If they weren’t so violent, it would be amusing. Unfortunately, it’s anything but funny.
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