The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Did you hear about the new poll finding that 1 in 4 people believe it was actually the FBI that started the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol?
It’s tempting to roll your eyes. Maybe it’s a bit like the slice of Americans who say 9/11 was an inside job. Or that Elvis is still alive. The truth is out there, and some so relish the intoxicating search that they’ll latch on to practically anything.
But this one is different. For starters, in 2024 we’ve got a slew of congressional candidates, including here in Washington, who are pushing this exact idea — that the riot was ginned up three years ago not by the right but by the left, as a way to “frame” Donald Trump (who is always, it seems, a victim).
“It was the absolute most beautiful heist in world history,” says Jerrod Sessler, a 2024 Republican candidate for Congress in the 4th District in Central Washington. By beautiful he means evil. Unnamed Democrats conceived of the riot at the Capitol to entrap Trump, he argues. He also at various times has blamed the violence on “costumed agitators,” on “antifa, riot-type people,” or on police who “were throwing small bombs and shooting rubber bullets into the crowd of peaceful elderly, children and all.”
“I was there,” Sessler reiterated on X this past week as the three-year anniversary of “J6” approached. “The whole thing was a set up.”
The poll, by the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, along with The Washington Post, found that 34 percent of Republicans now believe this — that the FBI organized and then sparked the overrunning of the Capitol.
Of those who use Fox News as their main news source, 39 percent now blame the government for that day.
I bring up Sessler not because he’s likely to win — he ran for this seat in 2022 and came in fourth. But last month the Prosser businessman was nevertheless endorsed over the incumbent Congress member, Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, by one of the county GOP organizations, in Douglas County.
Another GOP challenger, Joe Kent in the 3rd Congressional District of Southwest Washington, has also pushed this same line that government agents spurred Jan. 6. The riot looked “like an intelligence operation,” he said. He has pledged to convene a congressional committee to “disclose the government’s involvement.”
One of the marvels of the Jan. 6 inside job theory is that it doesn’t make a lick of sense. The liberals supposedly enlisted their best buddies (the FBI?) to expel innocent Trump from the White House by making it appear he fomented a democracy-blocking riot? He had already lost that election. Wouldn’t it have been a lot simpler to get rid of him by just … certifying that loss and moving on?
I know, I know — reason doesn’t have a thing to do with it. Much of Trump’s con artist power is his appeal to grievance, which is an enemy of logic.
One democracy advocate, the Brookings Institution’s Norm Eisen, argues that the use of “made-up frauds” to stoke doubt about elections is “probably the most dangerous movement of its kind within America since the end of Jim Crow.” The conspiracy theorists do keep losing, though. And other potent conspiracies, such as the 9/11 “truthers,” have endured without overly polluting politics.
Last week I was debating all this with a local Republican, a former state representative, when he deflected like this: “We are a representative republic, not a democracy. Trump is not a threat to either one. But we don’t need to dwell on that ridiculous assumption. That’s purely political drivel at this point.”
It’s clearly not drivel — as the poll, the campaigns, the fundraising all show. That’s the most concerning thing about all of this. It’s not that millions of Americans have been gulled by a con job. It’s that here we are, three years on, with a big part of the Republican Party still contorting its way through ever more fantastical stages of denial.
So yes, it’s tempting to roll your eyes; it’s all such nonsense, about events the whole nation witnessed. But in the world of politics, where reality is bendable, that would be its own form of denial.
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