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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol to slam Democrats and their media allies for fixating on the one-day event and comparing it to devastating incidents like the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The governor offered the stern assessment after being questioned during a COVID press briefing in West Palm Beach on Thursday about the left’s Jan. 6 festivities.
“Today is going to be — honestly, I’m not going to watch any of it — but you’re going to see the D.C., New York media — this is their Christmas. They are going to take this and milk this for anything they could to try to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong. Every single establishment media outlet in America obsessed over the riot on Thursday. According to Newsbusters, CBS and NBC alone “gave it over 80 percent of their total airtime” during the evening hours.
DeSantis continued by comparing the media’s coverage of the Jan. 6th riot to their disinterested, apathetic coverage of the 2017 congressional baseball shooting that almost took the life of Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise.
“I actually was on the field. This guy who was a big Bernie Sanders guy — it was definitely a politically motivated attack — came up, pulled his van and we didn’t think anything of it. We walked out to go to the car, and we came in contact with him. He wanted to know if it was Republicans out there,” the governor said.
“We get in the car, leave and then we find out he shoots up a bunch of people. And if you do not have the Capitol Police there, you probably would have had a dozen people assassinated. That was like a one-day, two-day story. That was not something that the capital-based press wanted to talk about. Why? Because it totally undercut their preferred narratives.”
One of these narratives is that Trump supporters — and only Trump supporters, never “peaceful” Black Lives Matter rioters, “mythical” Antifa extremists or unhinged Bernie Sanders’ supporters — are violent monsters.
And therein, DeSantis explained, lies the explanation for why Democrats and their media allies have such a vested interest in keeping the public’s attention on Jan. 6th.
“Jan. 6th allows them to create narratives that are negative about those who supported Donald Trump,” he said.
This isn’t to say the Jan. 6th rioters shouldn’t be held accountable. They should and are in fact being held to account, DeSantis argued.
“But let’s just be clear here: When they try to act like this is something akin to the Sept. 11 attacks, that is an insult to the people that were going into those buildings,” he continued.
He was likely referencing Vice President Kamala Harris, who delivered an ill-advised Jan. 6th anniversary speech Thursday likening the Jan. 6th riot (or “insurrection,” as she called it) to both Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 attacks.
“And it’s an insult to people when you say it’s an insurrection, and then a year later, nobody has been charged with that. People are being charged with disrupting proceedings or that. I think it’s very important, the fact that, if this is what you said it was, then why aren’t you charging people?” the governor added.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald has also raised this point. In a SubStack post published Thursday, he noted that “the total number of Americans who … have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago … is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election.”
DeSantis concluded his remarks by predicting that very few, if any, of his constituents even care about the Jan. 6th riot anymore.
“I think it’s going to end up being a politicized ‘Charlie Foxtrot’ today. I don’t expect anything good to come out of anything that Pelosi and the gang are doing. I think it’s going to be nauseating, quite frankly, and I’m not going to do it,” he said.
“It’s not something that I’ve been concerned about in my job here, because, quite frankly, it’s not something that most Floridians have been concerned about. They’re concerned about their jobs, education, inflation, gas prices, all those things.”
His remarks predictably triggered rage from the Jan. 6th-obsessed media. Over on CNN, for instance, Alyssa Farah, a supposed conservative, called the governor a coward for not obsessing over something that nobody but the ruling elite care about:
Here’s CNN’s Alyssa Farah trashing Ron DeSantis w/Jake Tapper as some sort of coward b/c he hasn’t decided to make January 6 an idol in his life.
I’ve said previously how I respect her, but if this is all she’s going to tweet about and talk about on CNN, she’s not a conservative pic.twitter.com/dzQEEzT3W1
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 7, 2022
Meanwhile, a local Miami-area “journalist” complained that the governor was downplaying what so-called “journalists” had endured on the 6th.
DeSantis, who has been seeking take on the Trump mantle, downplays significance of Jan. 6 anniversary with a swipe at DC media (many of whom were put at risk that day along with other people who work in the Capitol) https://t.co/bVXQhwtqU3
— Bryan Lowry (@BryanLowry3) January 6, 2022
The governor’s conservative supporters responded to the criticism by drawing the media’s attention to the “insurrection” that THEY had downplayed:
On point by DeSantis.
The US has 260 million adults. Would be historic if 10% of this watch Jan 6th TV all day.
I am watching reruns of the 2020 insurrection at the WH which forced POTUS into the bunker; wounded 60 USSS staff.
cc @ChristinaPushaw pic.twitter.com/iyI9PmiICF
— Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) January 6, 2022
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