Every once in a while, I'm damned to click on a clip from Fox "news" to see what one of their cabal of vile, brainwashing, pillow-hawking psychopaths has on their nightly snuff programs. Last night, Sean Hannity, who is desperately trying to show that he's still as racist and cruel as new network slime king Tucker Carlson, talked to Missouri Senator Josh "Future Supplement-Selling Talk Radio Douche" Hawley about Hawley being silenced by "big tech" and "the mob" in the media and the left because, as Hannity put it, "you happen to have a view that you want to audit an election."
Then Hawley and Hannity jerked each other off for a few minutes about how all those entities are engaged in an effort "to try to censor all dissent, to try to shut down all opposition to try to silence half of America," as Hawley hawed to millions of viewers non-silently. Hannity scoffed hannitily, "Not only did they want your book cancelled, but they also wanted you removed." And Hawley hawed, "I'm not going to be intimidated by the liberal mob" before they both ejaculated when Hannity brought up Hunter Biden and the segment was over.
You notice what was missing there? Yeah, the fact that shit was happening to Hawley because he helped inspire a riot at the Capitol where 5 people lost their lives and over 100 cops were injured. No one gave a happy monkey fuck about Josh Hawley and his yammering ultra-Christian bullshit until people fucking died. That's why he lost his book deal (although he got another). That's why he should be kicked out of the Senate. Not because he "happens to have a view," but because he cheered on an insurrection and then was a syphilitic cock about it after. And it's fucking rich to see Hawley talk about a "liberal mob" when it was a real mob, some with actual pitchforks, that stormed the joint where he works.
Sometimes this refusal to acknowledge violence reaches completely deranged denialism, like those who believe that school shootings are false flags or simply didn't happen. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from a particularly batshit district of Georgia (no, seriously, it's the area that inspired James Dickey to write the book Deliverance) happens to have agreed with other crazies that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was a false flag "planned" event in order to, I suppose, allow the government to take away guns, even though Florida and the U.S. were totally run by Republicans then.
One of the survivors of that shooting was David Hogg, who has since become a political activist, especially on gun control legislation, something that doesn't really seem to be that hard to comprehend. But in 2020, Greene posted a video of herself stalking Hogg through the streets of DC near the Capitol to hector him about his support of red flag laws, which say that authorities can take firearms away from people "who are deemed by a judge to be a danger to themselves or to others."
Greene repeatedly badgers Hogg, who walks on ignoring her, until she finally gives up to face the camera and say, with all outrage, that Hogg had meetings with 30 senators while she couldn't meet with any. "This guy, with his George Soros funding and his major liberal funding, has got everything," she really says while whining that she "got zero." Then she says of Hogg, "He's a coward. He can't say one word because he can't defend his stance."
Putting aside that no one owes someone who harangues them in the middle of the street while filming a single fucking second of their time, there is one major goddamn thing that Greene leaves out. That, of course, would be the fact that, less than two years before Marjorie Taylor Greene went all Karen at him, David Hogg had to hide in a fucking closet with his classmates while a motherfucking gunman was shooting his fellow students to death at his school. The fact that Greene either willfully ignores this or is too fucking stupid with bullshit conspiracy theories to grasp it speaks to the way in which the right has found it necessary to simply act as if horrific violence has not occurred. It's the only fucking way in which anything they believe can make sense: Ignore the unpleasant shit that shows how fucked their beliefs are.
Last week, also on Hannity's dumb show, Rep. Jim "Wow, I Look Exactly Like the Kind of Guy Who Would Cover Up Sexual Assault" Jordan described the impeachment of Donald Trump after the Capitol riot as "this obsession with going after the president even after he's now left office." In the same hour, which is all about licking Hannity's dinky scrote, Rep. Matt "Twelvehead" Gaetz mocked the idea that Republicans encouraged violence: "I guess they've got caught us. Lauren Boebert is giving recon tours for insurrectionists, I abducted the Lindbergh baby, Jim Jordan knows what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, and Devin Nunes was on the grassy knoll." That's hilarious because I'd totally believe that creepy-ass Matt Gaetz would kidnap a baby.
And speaking of babies, this is not even to get into the most deceitful whore on Fox, Tucker Carlson, calling opposition to QAnon fucknuttery the government's "attempt to control what you believe." You could say the same fucking thing about Osama bin Laden.
This erasure of violence by the insurrectionist right is legitimately enraging, and it's of a piece with their whole effort to simply deny reality. It's not "a view" that the election was fraudulent. It's a lie, a clear lie, in that the facts demonstrate that it's not true. You can't have an opinion that's a lie unless you're a fucking idiot or a con artist. So it's a deliberate, manipulative attempt to sow discord in the population.
If that leads to violence, if your intentional effort to rile people up to the point where they take action ends up in violence, then fucking own that shit. Either embrace it and say it's what you wanted or be a fucking adult and say your were wrong. But ignoring it or pretending it didn't happen or wasn't a big deal is cowardly and cruel and very Republican.
(Note: Of course, the flip side of this is the way in which conservatives will unrelentingly bring up violence that they can manipulate for their benefit. See: any crimes they can use to scare people or the violence at the mostly peaceful Black Lives Matters protests, which was condemned by nearly all Democrats. Of course, to flip it back, the denial of systemic violence against Black people is an article of faith for conservatives.)
