March 14, 2023
A couple of years ago Republicans found a few of their party doing and saying things that were out of line with the party’s general way of thinking. Folks like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger held a strongly unsupportive position against former President Donald Trump.
Cheney and Kinzinger were so much in agreement with Congressional Democrats that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, selected them to serve on the committee investigating the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol, not as representatives of the minority party, but as additional Trump prosecutors.
Needless to say, their positions alienated them from most Congressional Republicans, and most likely played a role in each of them no longer serving in the House.
Cheney and Kinzinger would likely describe their position as resulting from having “seen the light.”
Last week came news of another person who has “seen the light.” But this person was moved in the opposite direction.
This person is a liberal progressive feminist author, journalist and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton. In her “Outspoken” column on substack.com she wrote, “I made mistakes in judgment.” She is Dr. Naomi Wolf, and the column was an apology for her mistakes.
Often when people make apologies, they really are non-apologies. They sort of skirt the meaning of the word. Wolf did not do that; she truly apologized.
These mistakes, she said, “multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.”
By “you all,” to whom she was apologizing, she meant, “Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA.”
Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson began playing video from the Capitol riot that had not previously been available. That video was part of some 40,000 hours of video, most of which was withheld from the public. It was provided to Carlson by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-CA, despite howls of protest from Congressional Democrats.
Apparently, seeing some of the scenes Carlson presented helped to move Wolf from her previous position. Here is some of what she found in the videos.
Despite the numerous fact-checkers’ claims of being “misinformation,” the fact is that then-Speaker Pelosi actually was in charge of the Capitol Police, but did not respond to alerts and prepare for the coming problems of January 6.
She criticized the January 6 Committee’s labeling former President Trump as a terrorist, and Republicans, by virtue of supporting Trump, “as insurrectionists, or as insurrectionists’ sympathizers and fellow-travelers.”
Regarding the allegation that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died at the hands of the rioters that day, in fact Sicknick died of natural causes two days after the riot. “There is no way to unsee Officer Brian Sicknick … alive in at least one section of the newly released video,” she wrote.
The person widely known as “Q-Anon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, is seen on the newly released videos being escorted in the Capitol Building by Capitol Police. She commented that “the barbaric nature of his appearance was so illustrative of exactly the message that Democrats in leadership wished to send about the event that I am not surprised to see that his path to the center of events was not blocked, but was apparently facilitated by Capitol Police.”
She also commented on what former Capitol Police officer Tarik Johnson told Carlson about how he felt when things started to get crazy, and that he had received no direction when he contacted his superiors to find out what to do. She wrote that you cannot “un-hear” what Johnson said.
“There is always a security chain of command in the Capitol, at the Rayburn Building, at the White House, of course, and so on,” she wrote, “which is part of a rock-solid ‘security plan.’”
“The fact that so much confusion in security practice took place on January 6 is hard to understand,” she wrote, noting that Washington’s security protocols mean an incursion like what occurred “can never happen.” That, of course, is only true if the powers that be are trying to prevent it.
“But you don’t have to agree with Mr. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to believe, as I do, that he engaged in valuable journalism simply by airing the footage that was leaked to him,” Wolf wrote.
“And remember, by law that footage belongs to us – it is a public record, and all public records literally belong to the American people. ‘In a democracy, records belong to the people,’ explains the National Archives,” she wrote.
“You don’t have to agree with Mr. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos,” Wolf wrote, “to conclude that the Democrats in leadership, for their own part, have cherry-picked, hyped, spun, and in some ways appear to have lied about, aspects of January 6, turning a tragedy for the nation into a politicized talking point aimed at discrediting half of our electorate.”
While what occurred at the Capitol was not justified, and while illegal and sometimes-violent actions were taken, her perspective clearly supports the opinion of many Americans that applying the term “insurrection” to the January 6 riot is a gross exaggeration.
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