On January 6th, 2021, thousands of Trump supporters violently stormed the US Capitol building with the intent to disrupt a democratically determined succession of power and murder the vice president and various other congresspeople. They failed, but their impotent rage nevertheless caused at least five deaths, including of Capitol police.
Fast forward to June 28th. Hundreds of young people held a sit-in around the White House, blocking entrances to demand the infrastructure bill fully fund the Civilian Climate Corps to create jobs addressing the climate crisis. Some protestors were arrested, but unlike Jan 6, no police officers were beaten by protesters, no windows were smashed, and no one was brandishing a Confederate or Nazi flag.
But to climate deniers – to whom the events in January were defensible, even necessary – the youths’ peaceful protest was basically a dangerous riot . “Sounds like an insurrection!” blared a headline on Marc Morano’s Climate Depot, where he didn’t even attempt to make an argument that the two events were actually similar in any way. (Maybe Marc meant this to be praise? After all, he strongly supported the violence at the Capitol as it unfolded, and called for similar events across the country.)
Over at Watts Up With That, apparently Willie Soon, disgraced denier who writes climate denial reports for fossil fuel money, wondered if it’s “only an ‘insurrection’ when the protestors support [one-term, twice-impeached former] President Trump?”
No, Willie, January 6 was an insurrection because people violently attacked Congress with the explicit aim of overthrowing democracy to keep an electoral loser in power. Peacefully sitting around the outside of the White House to demand funding be included as part of a legislative package isn’t an insurrection – it’s in the Constitution. But we understand if you have trouble grasping that, given that no one is paying you a million dollars to believe it.
And then there’s that racist hate machine, Breitbart, where a headline claimed in full war-time tenor, that “leftists siege Biden White House.” A siege! Because the same word Breitbart published to describe the violence of the Taliban, ISIS, and domestic terrorists is definitely the right one to describe a group of youth climate activists staging a sit-in.
And then it did it again, with an essentially identical piece a day later, changing basically nothing but the headline: “Secret Service arrests ‘dozens’ of climate protestors during White House ‘siege’”.
With quotes around “siege,” you may be wondering who the headline of Hannah Bleau’s story is quoting in calling the sit-in a siege. But the quoted word never appears in the actual story, so it doesn’t come from a source, even anonymous or on background. In fact, the only other place it’s referred to as a siege is the headline for Blaeu’s first story about the protest, which also only uses the word “siege” in the headline.
It appears Breitbart’s ‘siege’ headline on Tuesday is quoting Breitbart’s own siege headline from Monday. Bleau didn’t talk to one of their regular ridiculous sources to get a quote with the word they want to push. Heck, she didn’t even bother finding some random tweet using the phrase! Breitbart knows its readers aren’t there for factual reporting, but for whatever reason they still wanted it to give “siege” the authority of someone else’s characterization, because why else would it be in quotes in the headline?
It’s understandable, though. When you’re manufacturing controversy to equate one of the gravest attacks on democracy that killed at least five people with a youth-led sit-in demanding funding for a specific program to be part of a larger legislative agenda, who’s got time to actually do any “reporting”?
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