The Coup Attempt Was Launched By Highly Privileged People

At this point, we shouldn’t have to say that the people who can take time off from work and travel to Washington in order to overthrow a democratically elected government are not the Working Man of America. But we do because these myths are deeply held by both the right and people who think Josh Hawley is a True Populist unlike Neoliberal Sellout Joe Biden. Charles Davis has a good essay on this:

It is fast becoming orthodoxy among both lefty contrarians and conservative apologists that, from the online cult of QAnon to the men and women who stormed the US Capitol in real life, the problem of the far-right stems mainly from disenfranchisement — from bottled up resentment, provided no outlet by the effete snobs in publishing, exploding with righteous albeit delusional fury.

“These people know they are scorned and looked down upon,” one right-wing blogger recently told a left-wing podcaster, “and the more you humiliate and make them feel powerless, the more you take away their ability to organize and express that rage, it’s gonna find an outlet in more destructive ways.”

Megyn Kelly, a former on-air personality at Fox News and NBC News, likewise blamed the media — “the enemy of the people,” in a former president’s phrasing — for spurring domestic right-wing terrorism. “Part of the reason we saw what happened at the Capitol here two weeks ago is because there has been a complete lack of trust, a destruction of trust in the media, and people don’t know where to turn for true information,” she maintained.

The problem is that this has not been the problem at all.

…

Amid cries of censorship, reactionary content overperforms on Facebook, a site where the reactionary tabloid Breitbart, formerly run by Steve Bannon, was formally considered a “trustworthy” news entity in 2019 by the social media giant, part of an explicit appeal to the far right of the political spectrum. One cable news network has been devoted solely to airing their grievances, and at least two others have sprung up to air them even harder. There was a presidency and, for a time, two echo-chambers of Congress dedicated to “triggering the libs” on behalf of this constituency.

Right-wing extremism did not fester in dark corners. It all happened out in the open with followers led down a rabbit hole by the world’s most powerful man — the TV billionaire who started out promoting conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s place of birth — and a cast of faux-populist millionaires willing to entertain falsehoods, on television, about everything from COVID-19 to the 2020 election.

Sedition was plotted and streamed on Facebook and Parler. While the events of January 6 were shocking, there really wasn’t an element of surprise.

I mean sure, other than the president of the United States, an entire propaganda network that has been moving toward this for 25 years, most of the major technology platforms, talk radio, and well-funded groups from the wingnut welfare circle, who really gave these people a voice?????

But this is what you get from people who can look at the Supreme Court and say that Catholics are oppressed in this nation because someone dares ask whether Amy Coney Barrett should be on the Court or people who claim that whites are the race that is discriminated against despite hundreds of years of evidence to the contrary.