The Jan. 6 committee has shown numerous videos of rioters breaking in. One captured a member of the Proud Boys, Dominic Pezzola, using a police shield to smash through a window, allowing dozens of rioters to storm the building.
On Tucker Carlson’s Friday program on Fox News he mocked the testimony of an anonymous former White House security official who said that Secret Service agents had called their families to say goodbye in case they were killed. Then Mr. Carlson played video in which Capitol Police officers, vastly outnumbered, stand by passively as rioters stream through barricades.
“We can’t know why police are on video letting people into the Capitol complex,” he said, calling the hearings a “show trial” and saying he was proud of his network for not broadcasting them in prime time.
As Capitol Police officers are portrayed as something less than heroic, new heroes emerge. One story that went viral on the right in the last week was about a 69-year-old woman, Pam Hemphill, who recently began a 60-day prison sentence after pleading guilty to trespassing in the Capitol on Jan. 6. The way Ms. Hemphill was portrayed on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, which replaced Rush Limbaugh’s program in many markets, was typical of the sympathetic messages conservatives heard about her. The hosts described her as a victim — a grandmother and a cancer patient who was given an unreasonably harsh sentence.
“Think about months of B.L.M. protests all over this country,” said Clay Travis, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement. “How many of those actual rioters are doing 60 days in prison for what they caused? This is absolutely indefensible.”
Even the biggest revelations from the committee have fallen flat in right-wing media. When Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, described Mr. Trump’s violent reaction after the Secret Service agents refused to escort him to the Capitol, some right-wing commentators insisted that the former president’s fans would be heartened to hear that he was enraged about not being able to go.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/business/media/trump-conservative-media.html
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