GOP propaganda, lies and secrecy tactics

Context

CNN: 

House Speaker Johnson wants to blur January 6 footage to protect Capitol rioters

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that before publicly releasing footage of the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, the faces of the mob will be blurred to protect them from the Justice Department.

“We’re going through a methodical process of releasing them as quickly as we can,” Johnson said. “As you know, we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.”

That is an example of the ARRRP (authoritarian radical right Republican Party) openly manipulating evidence to try to protect the criminals and traitors who participated in DJT’s 1/6 coup attempt.

Propaganda and secrecy tactics

A WaPo analysis discussed tactics that ARRRP politicians are using to deceive the American people while trying to hide their attacks on democracy and political opposition: 

Giuliani had handed over to the New York Post material purportedly obtained from a laptop that had belonged to Joe Biden’s son Hunter and was asked about doing so by the New York Times.

He turned to the right-wing tabloid because he didn’t want the information in his possession to be vetted for authenticity or offered in a broader context. He wanted it presented in a way that would do the most damage to Joe Biden. As he put it to a radio interviewer in the same period, “even if it isn’t accurate, the American people are entitled to know it.” [this is the crux of the analysis here, i.e., the American people are “entitled” to hear lies presented as truths]

For years — and particularly since Trump reshaped the standard of acceptability for unfounded allegations — the right-wing media has operated as a bubble, a self-contained universe of argument and evidence where claims are reinforced far more often than they are undercut. (One of the central rhetorical tenets of that universe, of course, is that it’s traditional media outlets that have a blinkered, limited understanding of the world — which is true, in the sense that we are constrained by the boundaries of reality.)

Consider House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) announcement Tuesday that the release of footage captured by security cameras at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, would blur the faces of those shown. This wasn’t a new declaration; he’d made this point previously. But this time, Johnson framed the move as being centered on ensuring that those inside the Capitol wouldn’t be “retaliated against and be charged” by the Justice Department.

This doesn’t make much sense. The Justice Department’s had the video for years and used it to charge various actors. Instead, as Johnson spokesman (and former White House communications staffer and former Fox News executive) Raj Shah clarified, the real goal was to “prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any nongovernmental actors.” In other words, to prevent groups like Sedition Hunters from developing new leads on participants in the riot that occurred that day and which has, on multiple occasions, helped the Justice Department build cases against rioters.  

Johnson seemingly wants to release the footage because the Republican base has called for it, believing that the footage will allow them to construct an argument that the riot was a function not of Trump supporters but government actors or leftists. It will allow them to do that, of course, since the bar for “proving” this untrue thing is so low. (We’ve already seen them try it.) But Johnson wants the evidence this footage constitutes to be used only in a context that’s helpful to his base, not harmful. So it gets blurred.

A different lens on this effort to control evidence and rhetoric comes from Johnson’s allies who are leading the Republican effort to build a case for impeaching President Biden. As with the Capitol riot, there is already a broadly accepted belief on the right: namely, that Biden is a corrupt actor who benefited from his son’s business deals. .... people like House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) are trying to backfill evidence in support of that belief. At a news conference Tuesday, Comer again tried to present this debunked argument as though it was still viable.

“This week, we revealed how Hunter Biden’s corporate entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden,” Comer said. “Owasco PC is under investigation by the Justice Department for tax evasion and other serious crimes. Chinese and other foreign entities funneled millions of dollars into Hunter’s Owasco PC, and some of this money landed in Joe Biden’s bank account.”

By extension, if a criminal has a subscription to this newspaper, I am culpable for his activity when The Post pays me my salary.

“These direct monthly payments to Joe Biden,” Comer continued, “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s shady business schemes.”

Again, the “benefit” was “being repaid money he was owed.” The “knew about” and “participated in” claims, meanwhile, remain unproven. But they are treated as factual by Comer and by the right-wing media ecosystem, because they are the tenets of the conclusion to which they’ve all seemingly already agreed.

The news conference ended with Comer and his colleagues taking no questions. Comer would not be forced to defend his exaggerations and misinformation. Instead, he joined right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast where he simply reiterated those same claims. 

Johnson and his colleagues are rapidly approaching a difficult point in their impeachment push, though. At some point, they will need to decide whether to file articles of impeachment against Biden. It’s clear that a lot of Republicans are worried about what happens with the unstoppable force of demand for impeachment reaches the immovable object of reality. I guess we’ll see.

Meanwhile, the New York Post continues to do what Giuliani had hoped for back in 2020, presenting right-wing claims without doing anything to try to contradict them. The paper’s front page on Tuesday morning, after Comer’s claims about the payments to Biden had been debunked, declared that “[a]fter being paid by foreign companies, Hunter’s law firm gave Joe Biden monthly fees.”

Reality kept out of the bubble for another 24 hours, at least.

The lengths that the ARRRP will go to “prove” their lies and slanders are truths has crossed into the realm of fabricating evidence and protecting traitors. There’s no rational doubt about that. That has been the case for some time now, at least a few years. This kind of lying to the public by manipulating evidence is now a standard authoritarian radical right and ARRRP dark free speech tactic. The tactic, along with everything else morally and otherwise rotten in the ARRRP, arguably crosses a line from some ill-defined authoritarianism and makes the authoritarian radicals a modern American version of old-fashioned fascism.

Note added: 

Daily Beast reports that Johnson changed his initial reason for blurring the 1/6 traitor’s faces and now says he did it for the reason the WaPo analysis asserts: 

Mike Johnson’s Office Walks Back Reason 

For Blurring Insurrectionists' Faces 

After saying faces were blurred in security footage to shield alleged Jan. 6 rioters from prosecution, a spokesperson confirmed the DOJ already has access to the unedited clips.

Raj Shah, a spokesperson for Johnson, wrote in a statement that his boss was mistaken on the reasoning for the blurred faces, insisting that the decision to conceal identities was to protect rioters from harassment by the public—not from prosecution by the DOJ, who already has the raw footage.

“Faces are to be blurred from public viewing room footage to prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors,” he said.