It was reported Monday that Fox won’t air the J6 committee’s first public hearing Thursday of its investigation into the J6 insurrection. This is, of course, the same network that covered approximately 10 blazillion hearings of the investigation of the 2012 Benghazi tragedy.
You’ll notice I don’t use the word news. Fox is not news. It is lies. It is propaganda – even when, or especially when, it has the look and feel of news. This fact is so blindingly obvious, I was a little surprised this morning to see outrage from the Twitterati over Fox’s hypocrisy.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
After all, those most likely to be incensed by hypocrisy are those least likely to be on the receiving end of it. That is, white people.
When it comes to Fox, white liberals.
“Fox won’t televise the hearings of the greatest crime in presidential history,” Rob Reiner, the filmmaker and quintessential white liberal, wrote today on Twitter. “Our democracy is hanging by a thread.”
“Fox ‘news’ ran 1,098 prime-time segments on Benghazi from the attack until the committee hearings,” Laurence Tribe, the legal scholar and another quintessential white liberal, wrote. “Today the network announced it won’t cover the hearings on the January 6th insurrection.
“Conclusive proof that Fox isn’t news at all.”
Been knew, the choir sings.
Choose to see
Of course Fox isn’t covering the J6 hearings. Why would a television network pivotal to the overthrow of the US government incriminate itself by covering its pivotal role in overthrowing the US government?
Why would the chief organ of an armed rightwing insurgency lend credence to the forces of liberal democracy that remain so far strong enough to resist an armed rightwing insurgency that Fox speaks for?
Nonwhite people experience hypocrisy quite differently, because white power is America’s political reality. We live in it. We are its inhabitants. Being subject to it, rather than benefitting from it, means nonwhite people have no choice. But they see politics with clear eyes.
Outrage over Fox’s hypocrisy? Feh.
But white people, including white liberals, do have a choice. And with that they can choose to be blind to the surrounding political habitat.
The entire country was built to favor them that right and privilege. They can choose to believe America was founded on equality and equal treatment without once experiencing evidence to the contrary.
(Indeed, when a nonwhite person points out, with proper outrage, the reality staring us in the face, a white person, even a white liberal, will demand proof, as if proof of being wet were needed when drowning.)
That white liberals got huffy over unfair Fox isn’t surprising.
But it is disheartening.
Do your damn job
It suggests that white liberals are not paying sufficient attention to the immediate dangers we face, the literal threats to liberty, life and limb.
It suggests that they do not see the J6 insurrection as ongoing, as part of a violent revolt against liberal democracy begun a decade ago by first hitting “soft targets,” like schools, then developing into a failed coup d’etat and now continuing in the form of laws banning certain voters while outsourcing police power to any white man with a gun.
It suggests that they feel secure enough, as beneficiaries of white power, that they don’t sense disaster coming, and the urgency to act.
White liberals, even now, after a preponderance of the evidence to the contrary, still believe that it’s up to the leaders of the Democratic Party to give Democratic voters a reason to vote in November. If they lose, white liberals say, the Democrats will only have themselves to blame.
What does enthusiasm have to do with self-preservation?
I don’t know about you, but when someone’s drowning, I don’t want the lifeguard asking beachgoers to inspire him to do his damn job.
Illusions of freedom
The next death wave from COVID-19 will be the poor, rural and white
White liberals like the Post’s EJ Dionne hope the J6 committee will show the majority of Americans this week that Donald Trump, while he was president, incited an attempt to defy the will of the people.
“It was a coup attempt, plain and simple,” Dionne wrote today.
“We cannot thrive as a free society if public authorities refuse to bring to justice a man who sought to use the power of the presidency and a savage mob to destroy our democratic republic,” Dionne wrote.
That’s what I want from the hearings.
White liberals are not free.
But they are protected by white power.
I want the hearings to pull the scales from the eyes of white liberals. I want the evidence to show that they cannot thrive, no matter how white they are, when the democratic will of the people is optional to a political party with a highly armed paramilitary wing that has been terrorizing the public while demanding the public just live with it.
There is no definition of freedom that includes:
- A million Americans dead from preventable disease.
- More kids killed by guns than cops and soldiers.
- 44 percent of the GOP saying mass death is acceptable.
- Voters forgetting about the J6 insurrection, according to Bloomberg. Indeed, “they’ve been rewarding election deniers.”
I want white liberals to see they are not free – to see that the white power they inhabit, the one they have the power to ignore if they choose to, gives only the illusion of freedom. In that illusion, white liberals might not feel the urgency to vote. After all, they have the luxury of blaming the Democrats for being “bad at messaging.
Who needs an autocrat when white people, even white liberals, surrender their democratic advantage in exchange for the comfort and security of white power. White liberals will always have a choice.
I hope they choose freedom.