Media bias is something I once thought didn’t exist. I was a horribly misguided liberal at the time and since everything lined up, more or less, with what I thought, it was easy to think they were being neutral. And, back then, they at least pretended to be.

But what was actually surprising, what we can’t quite get over even now, is how they responded when they were caught lying. They didn’t seem embarrassed. They didn’t apologize. They weren’t even curious to learn more about what actually happened on January 6. Let’s see the tape. No, they don’t want to see it. They exploded in rage. And then as liars tend to do, they doubled down.  

The MSM is starting to have yet another meltdown as we close in on the Nov 5, 2024 US election and they’re staring at polls showing Trump likely to win, mainly because they reveal that he’s in much better shape across-the-board than in 2016 when he won and 2020 when he barely lost (barely meaning 44,000 votes across three key swing states, not the stupid “5 million voter” gap of the national vote). The meltdown is as much about their own failure to stop Trump over the last few years as the election itself, but more on that in a separate post.

This failure really should not have come as much of surprise to these people as it has (but then a lack of self-awareness is one of their problems), because there has been another big MSM meltdown in recent times, and funnily enough it’s connected to Trump as well, the Great Insurrection of Jan 6, 2021. If it had been led by Che Guevara or Hone Heke it would already be worshipped by the global Left as the oppressed rising up against the oppressors.

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Making The Myth

It was quite extraordinary, far beyond things like the MSM effort in 1963 to convert the Communist assassin of JFK into a Far Right fanatic:

Kennedy was killed by a wacko communist radical sent round the bend by America’s vendetta against Castro. Within days, Oswald, the lone communist, had been replaced or transformed into a dispensable persona of a mythic “far-Right.” Piereson quotes Drew Pearson, another influential  columnist (for The Washington Post*), who argued that American presidents who had been assassinated were killed not by “the fanaticism of one man” but by “powerful influence molders”

In 2021 the Democrat Party and their Media Operatives With Bylines tried this again, pinning J6 not just on Trump, not even just on the GOP, but on the entire American Right:

Here we can witness in real time the effort to enact another myth—the myth that the events at the Capitol on January 6, constituted an “insurrection” as deadly as Oklahoma City, as 9/11, as Pearl Harbor, even (if you are to believe Joe Biden) the “Civil War.” You could see that narrative, that process of mythopoeia, begin to take place even before the protestors withdrew from the Capitol.

That was written in late 2021 and also tracked how it was turning into follow-on waves involving thinks tanks, then academics, and finally back to the politicians like Nancy Pelosi and her J6 committee. They likely figured that since the Trump-Russia hoax had worked so well, this hoax would also.

The incredible thing is that they failed, right from the start, and it’s important for the 2024 election that we understand the MSM garbage on this issue in detail:

The Media Has Been Lying About The Capitol Protests (Feb 2021) :

  • Only one person is known to have been killed inside the building. She was a protester who was shot at close range by a police officer. Two others died of “medical emergencies” while they happened to be on the Capitol grounds
  • Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was not killed by being beaten with a fire extinguisher or anything else. As Glenn Greenwald, a left-wing reporter who used to be a hero among journalists, notes: “The problem with this story is that:
    “it is false in all respects. Nobody saw video of it. No photographs depicted it. To this day, no autopsy report has been released. No details from any official source have been provided….Without Sicknick having his skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher, there were no deaths that day that could be attributed to deliberate violence by pro-Trump protesters.”
  • That guy who supposedly “carried Zip Ties into the Capitol” (suggesting he intended to take hostages)? Turns out he found them on a table inside the building and grabbed them to keep the police from using them on the protesters.
  • The report that protesters planned to “capture and assassinate” officials? The Department of Justice itself says “there is no direct evidence at this point of kill-capture teams and assassinations.”

Trump knew, in the moments before he took to the podium to give his rambunctious Ellipse speech, that the mob was armed to the teeth, including with firearms.

That “armed mob”was simply another of the multi-faceted aspects of bullshit from the MSM (Junior White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson at the centre of it all in that link):

  • “The idea of armed marauders freely roaming downtown D.C. with impunity is absurd; the place was crawling with both undercover and uniformed agents from multiple law enforcement agencies.“
  • A total of 13 people have been arrested for firearms violations related to the events of January 6. Only six face charges: none entered the building; one was a DEA agent; the other two never tried to use their weapons anywhere on January 6, and one, Lonnie Coffman, was found with two loaded pistols in his car parked “near” the Capitol. He was sent to prison for 46 months. He’s 70 years old. The average illegal gun holder in a city like Chicago or Baltimore is out on the street on bail within hours and the gun charges are often dropped.
  • According to the Justice Department, about 80 Capitol protesters have been charged with possessing a “dangerous or deadly weapon.” Examples of those weapons include pepper spray, flags, walking sticks or batons, a helmet, a taser, and a fire extinguisher. Scary!

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Command and Control “Failures”?

As time passed it became clear that while there might be more involved than a simple riot that got out of control – but “more” meaning from the government side than any shadowy domestic Right-Wing groups. The signs of this were many, as described by a former Police detective, who proposes two options as to what happened:

  1. [T]he total failure and or incompetence by the decision-makers and politicians involved influenced by the optics of the presence of law enforcement.  Common sense would dictate a rally of this magnitude would be likely infiltrated by radical groups for their political agendas.  Democrat operatives have done so before.
    One non-Trump protestor who was clearly identified was Antifa activist John Sullivan, videoed before and during the attack inciting people to burn the Capital down, and right at the scene of Babbit’s killing.
  2. [T]he top decision-makers, including politicians, knew that an attack was likely. They intentionally understaffed and watered down the rules of engagement to facilitate this attack for their political agenda.  The Capitol Police Chief’s request for the National Guard before the event was denied.

That last is hardly a surprise because the person who stopped that deployment was Nancy Pelosi – who then reversed herself by putting them around the Capitol for weeks, complete with security fencing, until she finally had to admit in a Dear Colleague letter that:

The U.S. Capitol Police, working with federal, state and local intelligence partners, has concluded that “there does not exist a known, credible threat against Congress or the Capitol Complex that warrants the temporary security fencing.”  Therefore, alterations to the temporary fencing around the Capitol will soon be made, and the National Guard presence will also begin to draw down.”

The Democrat-Left freakout continued when Tucker Carlson, then still with Fox News, put out a three-part documentary in October 2021, as described here by Julie Kelly, whose own reporting on J6 has been invaluable:

And therein lies the real controversy about Carlson’s documentary. The original narrative about January 6—it was an armed insurrection carried out by white supremacist militias at the behest of Donald Trump over the “Big Lie” of election fraud leading to the deaths of police officers while nearly toppling our democracy—is not to be disturbed no matter how many facets of that original narrative have been shattered.

Further, any suggestion that the FBI, a corrupt, partisan agency with a proven track record of acting at the behest of Democratic Party interests, was at all instrumental in what happened that day, or instigating the violence ahead of time, is strictly verboten. Never mind that even the New York Times reported that FBI informants were working with members of the Proud Boys before and during January 6 or the numerous questions raised by Beattie or the jaw-dropping revelations of the FBI’s key role in the plot to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer last year—no questions allowed

As she notes, the MSM and all the usual suspects like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who would join Pelosi’s farcical J6 committee as “Republican” cover, exploded about Carlson’s documentary, having never watched it.

As a result of all this, even by October 2021, Americans were not buying the Insurrection Narrative:

  • The Center for Security Policy commissioned the polls with TIPP in May and September… more Americans identify the mayhem as a “riot” or as “protests” rather than an “insurrection,” armed or otherwise, according to polls published in June and October.
  • More Americans describe January 6 events as “unlawful entry” and “vandalism” than Pelosi’s favored term “insurrection.” In June, a survey of 1,308 adults showed that only 13 percent identified with the “insurrection” term, and 14 percent with “armed insurrection.” Those views decreased to 10 and 12 percent respectively by early October.
  • Respondents, when given a broad set of choices, overwhelmingly did not agree with the dominant narrative of “insurrection” or even “domestic terrorism,” even though those terms, plus “armed insurrection,” made up three of the six most popular responses

Even corporates like Pfizer and Chevron, plus the big law firms, that had initially bowed to the Left’s demands to stop contributing to the campaign funds of House and Senate Republicans who had voted against certifying Biden’s election, found themselves drifting back to normal as Biden’s economy worsened and the J6 and 2020 election-was-safest-ever narratives began to break down:

  • The Hill – “Six months after the Capitol attack, only a small number of powerful corporations have made good on their pledge to suspend PAC donations to the 147 Republican lawmakers who voted against certifying the 2020 election results.“
  • Rolling Stone – “Big Law Firms Promised to Punish Republicans Who Voted to Overthrow Democracy. Now They’re Donating to Their Campaigns.“
  • The Lincoln Project – “Major law firms in Washington have resumed donations to those Republicans whose support for election-fraud theories and refusal to certify posed a grave threat to American democracy.”

Like major corporations, Big Law can see what is coming. They can either remain true to their wokeness and find themselves totally shut out when a new Congress takes the reins, or they can quietly renege on their virtue signaling and move on. It is increasingly apparent that sane people don’t consider January 6 an “insurrection,” and they don’t care about the silly little “commission” pretending to investigate that event. Voters aren’t going to cast their vote based on a senator or member of Congress having the foresight to try to keep Joey SoftServe out of the White House, and there is no downside to stop play-acting like the Republic was in danger on January 6.

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The Narrative Death Knell (2022-2023)

By late 2022 the tide against the J6 Insurrection narrative was really in trouble as millions of Americans saw for themselves the shiftiness of the FBI as it was revealed that they’d had many informants buried in J6 groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys:

Even the NY Times snuck in the obvious question here: If the FBI had all these contacts and they’re claiming it was some prior plot, why wasn’t it stopped beforehand, if it was a “seditious conspiracy” and not a spontaneous riot?

The final death knell of this narrative probably came not with the incoming GOP majority wrapping up the J6 committee (and finding how many records they’d destroyed to cover themselves), but with the one major MSM source that had not gone completely with it in the first place: Fox News. Specifically, Tucker Carlson, with two revelations.

1. Releasing unedited video of the January 6 riot

That was in March 2023 with just part of the 41,000 hours of video that the J6 committee had kept to themselves but which was given to him by new GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (watch the videos at the link):

It was, at times, chaotic and violent, but we knew why Democrats didn’t want this footage released. It was mainly a tedious exercise. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people entered the Capitol Building only to sightsee, take local newspapers off tables, and walk around their building.
…
Carlson exposed falsehoods that bolster key animating aspects of January 6 including the movements of Jacob Chansley; the activity of still-uncharged agitator Ray Epps [since convicted with a slap on the wrist and no jail time]; the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick; alleged “reconnaissance tours” conducted by House Republicans the day before; the “escape” of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.); and the overall deceptiveness of the January 6 Select Committee.

One of the classic parts was watching the cops calmly escort the idiot “QAnon shaman” – who became the “epitome” of January 6 according to the judge who sentenced him, around the building. No violence, no vandalism, even trespass could be argued against given that the cops obviously weren’t trying to arrest him. And yet:

Chansely spent more than 300 days in solitary confinement conditions under court-ordered pretrial detention before finally accepting an offer to plead guilty to the nonviolent offense of obstruction of an official proceeding…. [He was sentenced] to a 41 month prison term [since released early].

Ace of Spades again:

Did the government hide this video from public defenders? Or did the public defenders have the video and choose to railroad their clients by never making an issue of it?. If that sounds unlikely, bear in mind, all of these public defenders are dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, often of the “defund the police” extreme variety.

In his extensive written commentary on these videos Carlson (you should read the whole thing), directly addressed the MSM hyteria directed at Chansely:

  • ABC: It was in his horned helmet, fur pelts and face paint, Jacob Chansley became known as the QAnon shaman, but prosecutors called him the most prominent symbol of a violent insurrection.
  • CNN: He’s been in jail since January and he’s trying to get out, but prosecutors say he is still too dangerous to release.  
  • MSNBC: Make no mistake, Chansley is a stone-cold thug. 
  • CBS: Oh, he kept saying, you know, “I’m not violent, I’m peaceful, I’m a shaman,” but then you put those images, what you were just talking about, you put those images together, and that isn’t an image of, you know, of peace. This is the new face of extremism.

As Carlson summarised:

This was not a domestic terrorist and that matters, but what matters even more is the videos that we showed you after 26 months were not shown to Jacob Chansley’s attorneys. That’s a violation of the Constitution. and he’s in jail because of it, because the liars on the January 6 Committee and the prosecutors who did their bidding and that means Bennie Thompson and that means Adam Schiff. It means Liz Cheney.
…
But what was actually surprising, what we can’t quite get over even now, is how they responded when they were caught lying. They didn’t seem embarrassed. They didn’t apologize. They weren’t even curious to learn more about what actually happened on January 6. Let’s see the tape. No, they don’t want to see it. They exploded in rage. And then as liars tend to do, they doubled down.  

2. The interview with Capitol Police Chief

Steven Sund was in charge on the day:

One of the biggest points Sund made was that it was revealed after Jan. 6 that other agencies had intelligence of how dangerous it might be but that wasn’t passed on to him. He said the intelligence he received indicated it would be like other MAGA rallies. But the FBI, the DHS, and even the military had intel suggesting more was afoot. But they didn’t tell Sund or put out any alerts as they might normally do, “But there were zero for Jan. 6,” Sund said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Oh but it does. Perhaps he’s just being polite. It makes perfect sense if Democrat politicians and their operatives in the FBI and company sniff a chance to finally destroy not just Trump but his movement. And this approach from his bosses continued on the day itself:

Sund said the law required him to go to the Capitol Police Board to get approval in advance for bringing in National Guard. He says he was denied twice before Jan. 6 because of “optics” by the House and Senate Sergeant at Arms… He said it was crazy that even when they were under attack he has to go to those two people to get permission to bring in help. He immediately contacted the House Sgt. at Arms Paul Irving at 12:58 on Jan. 6, asking to bring in the National Guard, telling him it was bad, and an emergency.

Nancy Pelosi was in that decision chain as the boss of the House Sgt. at Arms. Funny how the J6 committee had little interest in dragging either of them in to testify, with the Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) actually declaring that “Speaker Pelosi was off limits”.

Despite the best efforts of the J6 Committee, Pelosi, Cheney, Schumer and all their willing minions in the MSM, plus the liked of Google, YouTube and the rest, tens of millions of Americans have seen all this.

It’s why January 6 gained no traction in public opinion and has not stopped Trump, let alone destroyed him.

What it has done is make a major contribution to the destruction of the MSM – the link is to the 2024 update of the 2022 chart below but little has changed: