Fox News during the past two days could be mistaken for an anti-police network with how they’ve been treating the Capitol cops who testified for the House committee investigating the assault on the Capitol on January 6, and people have noticed.
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Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, in particular, spent their segments mocking the officers, denying that they could have possibly suffered any lasting trauma from that day, and accusing them of lying and acting for the political benefit of Democrats.
Ingraham went so far as to put on a whole fake awards show giving “best performance” trophies to the men who testified in various “categories” in something that brings to mind the claim that massively deadly school shootings were put on by “crisis actors” to attack gun rights.
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“The theatrics were intended to produce an emotional reaction, logic and facts be damned,” said the host. “It is with that knowledge that we will unveil the Angle Awards for today’s best performances.”
Ingraham gave the “best performance in an action role” to Officer Michael Fanone, who became angry and slammed the table with his fist at one moment during his testimony in which he described being attacked by people with multiple weapons and tasering him until he had a heart attack. She offered Officer Harry Dunn the award for “blatant use of partisan politics when facts fail” after he told the story about how a crowd of Trump supporters called him the n-word when he told them he had voted for Joe Biden.
The “award for best use of an exaggeration in a supporting role” went to Sergeant Aquilino Gonell, who testified that the pro-Trump mob used baseball bats, hockey sticks, rebar, and flagpoles to attack officers, noting that “[n]o matter if it is a pen, the way they were using these items, it was to hurt officers.” Ingraham zeroed in on this remark, claiming that Gonell “thinks the pen is literally mightier than the sword.”
All of this has been jaw-dropping for activists fighting for police accountability and justice in the U.S., who have seen Fox News hosts like Ingraham defend police time and time again when they kill people of color or mentally ill individuals because they had anything in their hands. This includes the time that 20-year-old Tommy Le was shot and killed by officers from the King County Sheriff’s Office in Washington State, claiming he had something sharp in his hand, and it turned out to be a literal pen.
Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, had derisive laughter for Fanone after a clip of the officer stating that he had “been left with psychological trauma and emotional anxiety of having survived such a horrific event.”
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Carlson went on to the usual far-right talking point whenever the topic of the attempted coup comes up, which is to engage in whataboutism regarding the Black Lives Matter uprising during the summer of 2020. In his usual style, he offered up a question he didn’t ever answer about why Fanone never complained about being traumatized while working during those protests — possibly because the obvious answer is that those events were not traumatizing.
In spite of a section of the protesters against police brutality being explicitly anti-police and pushing for the abolition of the policing system in the U.S. in favor of something that addresses the issues that cause crime rather than throwing the poor behind bars, zero cops working those protests reported anything they would describe as “torture.” Even entirely abolishing and replacing our policing system is also not as extreme as overthrowing an entire presidential election, effectively installing a dictator in a nation that wants to be famous for its democracy.
These and other points are currently being repeated in comments all over Twitter.
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Laura Ingraham, Brit Hume, and Tucker Carlson were on TV whitewashing 1/6 and mocking the brave officers like Michael Fanone who testified yesterday. It’s time to DO something about Fox.
— Duty To Warn
(@duty2warn) July 28, 2021
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*First Published: July 28, 2021, 1:00 pm
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