Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Friday night suggested that the “goofy” pro-Trump mob who stormed the Capitol in January were a much less dangerous than what she called “Biden’s insurrectionists.”
In a bizarre comparison during her Friday night program, the conservative news host took aim at President Joe Biden — calling him “the real threat” — while dismissing notions that a mob of former President Donald’ Trump’s supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 posed much danger.
“America’s most dangerous insurrectionists aren’t the goofy QAnon people in fur and face paint,” Ingraham said. “The real threat to our future is Biden and the well-heeled powerful forces who want us to lose sight of what made America great in the first place. It’s not our diversity. It’s our freedom.”
Ingraham’s effort to reimagine Capitol rioters as nonthreatening, while painting Biden and unnamed “powerful forces” as the true danger, reinforces the narratives advanced by Republican lawmakers who have sought to recast the events of Jan. 6.
In an effort to divert attention from the aftermath of the Capitol attack, some GOP lawmakers have insisted that they had not feared for their safety while their congressional colleagues hid under desks as rioters stormed the Capitol earlier this year.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), for example, has said that he held little fear on Jan. 6, as Capitol rioters invaded the complex– but would have felt imperiled had those entering the Capitol on that day been supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said of the thousands that gathered on Jan. 6, which included many of the rioters who later stormed the Capitol.
The comparison of racial justice protestors with the group that stormed the Capitol has been seized on by conservative news hosts, particularly after a jury on Tuesday found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd.
The verdict generated anger from some Republican lawmakers and conservative news personalities who have claimed that Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, was found guilty of murder primarily because jurors were afraid of violence and intimidation from racial justice protestors.
“We don’t want terrified jurors,” Ingraham said Friday, suggesting that it was hard to imagine that a sense of fear hadn’t impacted their ability to examine the facts in the case.
Responding to the news earlier in the week, Ingraham had accused “leftwing media and activists” of using Floyd’s death as “a stepping stone to tearing down America.”
“They have to convince all Black Americans that police hate them and will never be fair to them,” she said.
Fox News host took similar tact on his program.
“The jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial came to a unanimous and unequivocal verdict this afternoon: ‘Please don’t hurt us,’” Carlson said hours after the jury reached its decision on Tuesday.
Carlson added: “Everyone understood perfectly well the consequences of an acquittal in this case. After nearly a year of burning and looting and murder by BLM, that was never in doubt.”
