6/19/21
Just because Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar voted against establishing a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol doesn’t mean he’s not ready to use the power of his office to stage an inquiry into the topic by other means. Along with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Gosar is one of the leading proponents of a brand of Jan. 6 revisionism that seeks to unsettle the consensus view that frames the Capitol disturbances as a dangerous uprising. Some theorists of this ilk go so far as to insist the riot was as peaceful as a pasture of lambkins and that it was actually Antifa or “fake Trump protesters” that hammered and bear-sprayed the United States Capitol Police. Gosar says the riots were conducted by “peaceful patriots“ and that “outright propaganda and lies” about the day have been deployed against “law-abiding U.S. citizens, especially Trump voters” to paint them as political criminals. Senator Ron Johnson has advanced the theory that “agents provocateurs” were behind the violence. This week, Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson joined them in Jan. 6 trutherdom with a tangled commentary that proposed that the FBI itself helped perpetrate the riots. How long must we suffer?
The short answer is “forever.” The human appetite for alternative, and usually hare-brained, explanations for why events blossomed the way they did can never be sated. So journalists like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, CNN’s Marshall Cohen, and HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias and Ryan J. Reilly, have done the right and necessary thing by providing a rapid-response this week to knock down Carlson’s FBI allegation that an “unindicted co-conspirator” described in Jan. 6 criminal charges was an FBI informant who helped plan the assault. One unfortunate thing about these rebuttals is that they will “amplify,” as some of the lefty press critics might say, the original Carlson rubbish. But how catastrophic is that compared to letting the Carlson chicanery go uncontested? Unless Republicans change their stripes—fat chance of that—we can never expect the current Congress to answer our questions definitively. That leaves it to the press to sort the Jan. 6 sense from the nonsense wherever and whenever it appears. It can be as grimy and odious as emptying a septic tank an ounce at a time, but this is the life we journalists have chosen. Ladies and gentlemen, deploy your teaspoons!
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