Staring into the January 6th Abyss

The start of nationally televised hearings into the criminal conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election could be a turning point, but only if we push to make it one.

This Thursday night at 8:00pm Eastern time, the January 6th Select Committee will hold the first of what are expected to be six hearings this month on its investigation into the 2021 attack on the Capitol as well as the broader efforts by President Donald Trump to deny and overturn the results of the 2020 election. I have one piece of advice about these hearings: do not watch them alone. Find a group you can be together with, throw together a Zoom room, or get on a group text chain with friends, family or coworkers. Here’s why.

First, because the hearings are going to hurt. By necessity, they are going to remind us of traumatic events. Whether it’s footage from the violent storming of the Capitol or replays of Trump bellowing about the supposedly stolen election, this content is deeply disturbing. We are going to be staring back into the furious maw of our country’s near-breakdown. I’ve noticed from close observation over the past year how hard it is for many people to take in these scenes. Journalistic reconstructions of January 6th itself, like this stunning montage made by the New York Times interactive news team, drawn from hundreds of videos, in particular have a weird effect: while they may demonstrate just how close things came to catastrophe, they also make the insurrectionists seem larger than life and thus more intimidating. The real heroes of January 6th, the cops who held the line (and later, who even said that it was their pleasure “to crush a white nationalist insurrection” and that they’d be happy to do it again) do not get their brave images replayed as much. So, understandably, those of us who are repulsed and disgusted by the election deniers don’t want to look hard at them.

Watching together means being able to process these reactions with others. It’s hard to face a bully by yourself. A friend of mine who is a veteran community organizer likes to say, “What’s the first thing you need to do in order to confront a bully? Get your friends to join you.” So don’t try to watch the hearings alone. (I’m hosting a virtual watch event in tandem with my NYCD16-Indivisible group—email me if you’d like to register. Or find an event near you from this site.)

The second reason to watch together is a little more intellectual. When you watch a political event like a candidate debate and then listen to the post-debate commentary on TV, your opinions are more likely to be shaped by what the talking heads say then your own initial impressions. Watching with other people, and then discussing your impressions with each other, is a far better way to make up your own mind.

These hearings are going to be a political event. The cable news shows are going to have a field day with them. Both sides will be spinning them like crazy, with Trumpist Republicans in particular trying to play down their importance. And unfortunately, gaslighting works, especially when only one side works at it. Back in January, polling by the Economist/YouGov on public attitudes toward the January 6th insurrectionists showed that the percentage of Americans who disapproved of them taking over the Capitol had dropped from 81% a year earlier to 73%. Even among Democrats, the number had drooped, from 94% to 86%. Not only that, more Democrats were falling for the Trumpist spin that the election had been marked by fraud, with the percentage saying they believed there had been “some fraud” rising from 19% to 37%. In February, Pew found a similar trend, with the number of Americans who said that Trump bore “a lot of responsibility” for the violence and destruction of January 6th dropped from 52% in the immediate wake of the attack to 43%.

Still, an April poll by the Washington Post-ABC News found that by 52% to 42%, a slender majority of Americans believe Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the January 6th events. The upcoming hearings are expected to show not only his central role in whipping up the mob, but a broader pattern of criminal behavior in how he and his associates planned and promoted the false idea that the election was fraudulent and then sought to obstruct the certification of the election in Congress. The criminal conspiracy is going to be the central issue.

The gaslighting has been working because Democrats in the national spotlight, like President Biden and congressional leaders, don’t talk much about January 6th or Trump’s crimes in general. Republicans, meanwhile, delight in making up Democratic crimes and turning them into catchphrases, like “Benghazi” or Hunter Biden’s laptop, and flail at them obsessively even when they aren’t in a position to hold congressional hearings or White House press conferences. (According to a 2014 Media Matters report, "Fox News' evening lineup ran nearly 1,100 segments on the Benghazi attacks and their aftermath in the first 20 months following the attacks.” There is no network doing anything like this for the other side.) So the January 6th committee hearings are starting on a playing field tilted against their success. Don’t look away; this may be our last chance in a while to push back hard on Trumpism.

Unfortunately, some Democrats have  already come to the conclusion that these hearings won’t have any effect. Reportedly, that’s what Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi believes. According to the Washington Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell and Theodoric Meyer, Pelosi recently told her fellow House Democrats at a private meeting that voters aren’t going to cast their ballots this fall based what they think of January 6th. Voters will judge them instead on what they do about inflation and the cost of living. (This is the same Nancy Pelosi who also imagines that Republicans might still take their party back from the MAGA faction.) Once again, Democratic leaders believe they have to adapt to the political weather and not make any of their own.

Related: Jan 6th committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wants to ensure that the hearings lead to a push not just for renewed voting rights legislation; he reportedly wants to call for the abolition of the Electoral College and elect the president simply by the national popular vote. What an excellent idea, and who could imagine that a Democrat whose been handed a big megaphone would actually use it to put a Daring Idea on the national agenda?

Also related: If you want a fast way to follow along, here’s a massive guide to all the key figures at the center of the committee’s investigation, courtesy of Brandi Buchman of the Daily Kos staff.

Good News, Department of

—Progressive Latina organizers Jess Morales Rocketto and Stephanie Valencia of Equis have raised $80 million to launch a new Hispanic media company called the Latino Media Network, acquiring 18 Hispanic radio stations across 10 markets (Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, Chicago, Dallas, San Antonio, McAllen, Fresno and Las Vegas.) from TelevisaUnivision. Peter Murray of Accelerating Change says “this is a turning point for the progressive movement's strategies for building deep, trusted media relationships with key audiences.“

—Bill McKibben is rightly celebrating the Biden Administration’s decision to invoke the Defense Production Act to spur the production of electric heat pumps, which will go to the American market rather than the European one, but it’s still a win for climate activism.

Odds and Ends:

—The American Prospect’s Alex Sammon did the leg work and discovered that the GOP’s network of local community centers devoted to building relationships with Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters is for real. You heard it here first!

—Coming out of 2020, one of the big strategic ideas for winning future elections touted by many Democratic organizers was to cultivate more “influencers,” the reasoning being that if you can’t afford to or won’t spend the time to build a trusted media brand you can at least ride off the trust others have built. Given how media consumption patterns vary, this seems like useful advice. But I don’t think that means surreptitiously paying popular TikTokers to promote liberal causes, which is what Anna Merlan reports on for Vice today. According to her report, Vocal Media, a media firm that says it “recruits, trains, and pays social media influencers to make videos on important policy topics like abortion, gun violence, etc., working with major progressive organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, is clearly skirting TikTok’s own rules against paid political advertising, and Joshua Karp, its spokesman, seems to think that paying people to hype causes is the same thing as actually working with authentic messengers.

—If you think watchdogging your local city council can’t ever make a difference, read this thread from Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, who almost singlehandedly blocked the Lafayette, Arkansas local power company from pushing through a $120 million rate increase to build an unneeded gas plant. A reader of The Connector flagged it for me, commenting that the same kind of “bigfooting” I reported on here last week in the gun safety world “is happening in climate as well.” He added, “Too much professionalization of climate science, not enough local activism and advocacy.” He pointed to this thread from Mahan as one example of a person doing the local work and having a bigger climate impact than “the endless reports being pumped out” by the climate lobby.

—David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy has some excellent advice for billionaire Mackenzie Scott. Here’s a snippet from his open letter to her and her husband Dan Jewett: “Even as I watch you bestow historic gifts on many important organizations, it’s hard to see how all this funding will add up to catalyze transformative change. To be more specific, I don’t see in your giving a theory of change or clear strategy for meaningfully reducing economic and political inequality in U.S. society.

—The good folks at Changing the Conversation Together are looking to hire some community organizers to continue their work in the Philadelphia area. If you want to become an expert in deep canvassing, this job is for you.

—The New Pluralists funding collaborative is looking to invest $10 million in “organizations and networks of, by, and for local communities, which are acting together to address divisive forces in a way that reflects the cultures, values, and desires of people who live there. These include initiatives that are: (a) supporting the leadership of people who are building trust across divides (including geographic, religious, racial/ethnic, political, economic, generational, etc.), and (b) supporting communities’ efforts to create and act together across differences.”

Deep Thoughts

—Make time for Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman’s long essay in N+1 Magazine on abortion politics, which looks at how both parties have become more polarized on the issue but also asks if Democrats could have taken a different route from the 1970s to present and championed a broader array of pro-woman policies that would address the needs of working people far more than the culturally liberal focus on abortion as a key litmus test. They write, in that vein,

“The kind of elite issue-checklist politics that EMILY’s List typifies has been supremely effective at making the party pro-choice. But how they’ve done so has set a trap. A bedrock national majority in the United States requires winning more often, and in more places, than is possible in a coalition that increasingly draws its support from the well-educated in and around big metro areas. A politics tightly oriented around culturally liberal donors’ priorities has helped motor the same forces of education polarization, geographic concentration, and failure to build durable cross-class majorities that have left the party too electorally crippled to effectively defend abortion rights. This is hardly what pro-choice activists wanted, but it was what happened as a consequence of taking the best available path given limited alternatives in the post–New Deal party. And that is the deep tragedy of our present predicament.”

Read the whole thing.