Well, we know who wasn’t in on the Capitol riot. Fox News didn’t see it coming at all. When the mob broke in, panicked fascist-enabling spin doctors freaked the fuck out and begged Mark Meadows by text to put an end to the siege:
“The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Laura Ingraham texted to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “Please, get him on TV — [the riot is] destroying everything you accomplished,” Brian Kilmeade wrote to Meadows. “Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?” wrote Hannity in yet another Meadows text.
And yet, despite their concern, instead of reporting, they went on TV that night crafted alternate narratives for the riot. They may have been concerned, but they weren’t interested in throwing over Trump:
The texts, revealed during a Monday hearing of the House January 6 Commission, were at odds with the hosts’ on-air comments on the night of the attack. Ingraham suggested that “antifa supporters” may have been responsible for the violence. Kilmeade took a similar line: “I do not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence that I know of in a big situation.” Hannity, for his part, asserted that “the majority of them were peaceful.”
I mean, there’s no downside to lying to a Fox viewer. They eat all that programming up with a spoon.
But anyway, I find it interesting that if we are looking at a planned invasion of the Capitol that the movement’s mouth organ was caught unawares. Maybe if they did actual journalism at Fox, they might have discovered a breadcrumb trail. But they’re too busy inveighing night after night against this strawman of a left wing boogeyman they’ve created to bother.