Hyperreality, or the Power of Media.
After the events of 2020, where the American election system was altered in strange and unusual ways, voters- and particularly strongly partisan voters- could be forgiven for getting worked up. Protesting was expected, and even rioting- all of the storefronts in Washington DC were boarded up in anticipation of President Donald J. Trump’s reelection. When that failed to materialize, the boards came down. We now know they were bracing for riots from the other side of the political spectrum- and this is partly why the events that occurred two months later were so shocking for those in DC.
The weeks that followed the 2020 election were confusing, polarizing, and combative. The Trump side alleged fraud. Ballot counts were inexplicably stopped in the middle of the night, in multiple states. In the months before November, Democratic activists and elected officials had sought “friendly consent judgments”, or altered regulatory rules to lower signature matching requirements, essentially removing oversight of potential ballot harvesting, allowed “mail-in” voting, and other substantive, significant changes to the way elections were conducted in many of the most vital swing states. Regardless of whether the reader believes there was fraud or not, what is indisputable is that these changes fundamentally altered the way campaigns needed to be conducted, and the Trump people were behind the 8-ball.
These stories of changed voting procedures, ballot dumps, destroyed records, and so forth, while disturbing before a winner was announced, became incendiary after the media declared Joseph R. Biden to be the winner of the election. Many rumors, conspiracy theories, and videos of alleged improprieties circulated on the internet. Grifters of all varieties latched onto absurd theories. As all trust in the media had been eroded, there was no way for the mainstream media to reign in any of this, and they did not try to. Instead, there was mostly name-calling and ‘debunking’.
On January 6, 2021, President Trump addressed a rally and drove back to the White House. A crowd of people made their way to the capital building, and the protest turned into a riot. One Trump partisan, a young woman, was shot to death by security. There were other injuries, but no other fatalities as a result of the rioting.
At this point, what might simply be considered a political riot- akin to the other political riots that took place in the summer of 2020- was given a different narrative by the US mainstream media. The riot was labelled an “insurrection”. Congress attempted to impeach Donald Trump yet again over it. A nationwide search for suspects was conducted, with the FBI and liberal sadists posting pictures of faces and urging people to turn in the suspected “insurrectionists”. Family members snitched on each other under this media pressure. Many right-wing partisans were held without bail, or with very high bail, in DC prisons for months, and sometimes years, before trial, often in poor conditions. Some were held on misdemeanors. Juries drawn from the citizens of Washington, DC, are 9 to 1 Democratic. Hundred and hundreds of people have been charged and hundreds imprisoned.
Recently Tucker Carlson, the Republican opinion presenter, obtained 41,000 hours of video footage of the incident. He released selected clips, which showed protestors following velvet guide ropes in a foyer, and even the man dressed in a Viking costume being calmly led about by policemen, who show him around the building. Other clips show calm interactions; the protestors look like tourists, looking at paintings. The perspective of the January 6 incident conveyed is very different from what we have seen so far. Carlson’s opponents, of course, claim deceptive editing.
This too is a narrative; one we are all too familiar with now. In the summer of 2020, the media created political riots by amplifying statistically insignificant local crime stories into totems of national outrage. Billions and billions in property damage and dozens of dead resulted, along with a boom in violent crime, particularly murder, as police scaled back patrols out of fear of legal and political restrictions. Yet, the narrative on these events was one of “mostly peaceful protests”, “social justice”, and so forth. Major politicians raised money to bail rioters out of jail. Every major corporation supported these attacks on law and order. On May 31, 2020, a riot outside the White House grew so severe that 50 Secret Service agents were injured as the mob stormed the president’s residence. As the outside fences of the White House were breached, Trump had to be evacuated to a secure bunker beneath the property. Yet this incident- and the many other deaths, beatings and arsons of the 2020 electoral season, have no place in the public consciousness any longer. As Jacques Ellul says, one fact has been immediately replaced by another in the public mind by mere repetition.
We can imagine an alternate world where the media did the reverse- emphasized the violence of the summer of 2020 and downplayed the riot of January 6. We can imagine a world where the events of May 31, 2020, were framed as an attempted lynching of the president. We can imagine the nationwide crackdown, manhunts, federal law enforcement perp walking the accused. We can imagine media personalities discussing the conspiracy theories held by defendants, their bizarre ideologies; we can imagine this attack called a second Pearl Harbor.
We do not live in that world, however.
This is all to say that we do not condone breaking the law. But we must admit that facts are strange things. There are so many facts, so many moving parts in any situation that the selective emphasis on one or two facts over a few others may give the viewer or reader an entirely different impression of the event than another curation. The truth is, as always, in the context.
The edification provided by the release of the January 6 footage is not that it “proves” anything about the event itself. It emphasizes to us, once again, that with the power to report true facts- and select the facts to be presented- our media grants itself the right to completely shape culture, government, and even law enforcement in this country. This power is completely unaccountable to the public, and immune from any liability for damage to the public mind or the social fabric.
Reforming or otherwise taming this system- the system of selective narration, private culture creation, which is held in tight oligarchy, must be a primary objective of any true attempt at a State. Without control over this formidable power, any government essentially only serves at its pleasure. This is intolerable.