Madison Cawthorn already called for “bloodshed” about so-called election security this week, and the other half of his Big Lie balancing act has now arrived: Downplaying an actual deadly coup attempt that directly meddled with election security in America.
The January 6 insurrection attempt that tried to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election was a shocking display of MAGA violence that left five dead and has seen several Capitol Police officers take their own lives in the aftermath of the chaos in Washington. The scenes of violence and threats against politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even vice president Mike Pence are well-documented, and if not for the quick thinking of several officers working in the U.S. Capitol it’s thought the incident could have been much worse.
But on Thursday, Cawthorn, a U.S. representative from North Carolina and a staunch Trump ally adored by the far-right, continued to argue that everyone who stormed and smashed barriers, windows, and doors to illegally enter the building was just joshing. As Business Insider detailed, Cawthorn told the Smoky Mountain News that rioters were “normal people” just “kind of wandering in” despite the hundreds of arrests stemming from that day.
“I believe a group of people within the January 6 protestors, a small minority who literally were the ones that endangered people’s lives, ones who got very aggressive, who were the ones busting down the doors, were going bare-knuckle fisticuffs with the Capitol Police. Those people, I believe are dangerous individuals,” Cawthorn said in the interview.
“But the overwhelming majority of the people of the January 6 thing were just normal people, there for a normal protest to redress their government. And then they saw an open door at the top of the Capitol, and they were just kind of wandering in,” Cawthorn said.
Giving this any sort of critical thought at all makes it pretty easy to dismiss the claims that mostly “normal” people were responsible for the MAGA riot. For every Qanon Shaman there were hundreds of far-right Trump supporters of a more anonymous variety, but dangerous and law-breaking nonetheless. Each arrested rioter has their own internet paper trail of crazy conspiracies and methods of radicalization, but none of them are exactly “normal.”
In the larger picture, though, this kind of revisionism about the deadly insurrection is entirely predictable. Trump did it after counter-protests against white supremacists in Charlottesville turned deadly, so it was really only a matter of time before a sitting politician tried to argue that a conspiracy-addled lunatic in Viking horns was a normal dude just milling about Washington DC like an ordinary tourist. Nothing to see here at all, I’m sure.
[via Business Insider]