More than 24 hours after they’d been publicly exposed as the hacks they so plainly are, Fox News talkers Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity ended what appeared to be a Rupert Murdoch-imposed company-wide period of silence and talked publicly about the texts they’d sent privately to Mark Meadows on Jan. 6, begging the president to call off his attack dogs who were storming the capitol.
Spoiler alert: Instead of candor, self-reflection, or humility, the pair whined, deflected, and cried about “left-wing hacks” supposedly “smearing” them—by simply repeating their own words. Hannity also found time to somehow blame Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats for the insurrection we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he knew was Trump’s responsibility even as it was happening.
Hannity may be stupid, but no one is that stupid. Not even Ingraham, who on the night of Jan. 6 went on air to say she’d heard that antifa may have been behind the failed coup that left five people dead. This was after she’d texted Meadows that, “This is hurting all of us. [Trump] is destroying his legacy” by refusing to speak out and tell his followers to stop the violence and go home.
The coup attempt came, not so incidentally, after Fox News personalities—including those two— cast doubt on the election result 774 times in the two-week period after their own network called the 2020 election for Biden.
Fox hosts, like Republican elected officials, refuse to take any ownership or responsibility for their role in radicalizing a weaponized death cult, which includes a substantial minority of our fellow Americans fighting to supposedly protect their freedoms by raging against masks, vaccines, science, and Critical Race Theory. They seem perfectly fine with canceling books, elections, and voting rights.
In his opening monologue on Tuesday, Hannity—who’d simply outright ignored his own texts on Monday after they were read aloud by Rep. Liz Cheney as part of the treasure trove of self-incriminating evidence given to the House Select Committee by Mark Meadows—claimed his own words were a “weak attempt to smear” him, and insisted that “the texts were no different than anything I said on air that day.”
Hannity had texted Meadows on Jan. 6 to ask: “Can [Trump] make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.” He knew that Trump’s lie, which he’d helped promote, had gone too far. But instead of acknowledging that all these months later, Hannity whined about how his privacy was supposedly being violated and asked why there wasn’t “outrage in the media” over his private texts being released publicly.
Let me help you out, Sean: It’s because you’re a wealthy, privileged snowflake having a tantrum on air after your hypocrisy was publicly exposed. To defend the indefensible, Hannity invited right-wing gadfly Dan Bongino on to defend Trump, criticize the Jan. 6 committee, and push back against Geraldo Rivera—who should actively be looking for a new job after he ripped Trump on Fox News for having “abandoned democracy” and inciting the insurrection.
Geraldo also tried, and failed, to elicit some genuine humanity and decency from Hannity, by saying, “I beg you, Sean, to remember the frame of mind you were in when you read that text on January 6. And when Laura did. And when Brian did. And when Don Jr. did!”
But Hannity’s frame of mind always reverts to being Trump’s Pravda, and using his privileged space to create a fictional narrative for viewers in which the “deep state,” Democrats and the “MSM” are the threats to democracy rather than the insurrectionists, anti-government hate groups, and Republican hacks who write memos and Powerpoints about how to overturn an election in reality threatening our democracy.
In his handoff to Laura Ingraham, Hannity whined again about how “there’s part of this that does suck,” bemoaning how he’s had to give up email and not do social media. Ingraham eventually cut him off, but her take was the usual right-wing deflection and projection.
Earlier, Ingraham had tweeted, “Liz Cheney and the Lincoln project are proven losers, beaten over and over inside the GOP, yet the Regime Media and Dems are following their lead. Would Obama or Clinton have ever been so stupid? No.”
This is rich considering a majority of Republicans refuse to acknowledge Trump lost the election, and Fox personalities like Tucker Carlson are now following the lead of Hungary’s President Viktor Orban and parroting the talking points of white nationalists and racists, but I digress.
Ingraham ranted against “left wing media hacks” and the “regime media” for defaming her as a “hypocrite.” She defended herself by playing clips of her show from Jan. 6 along with tweets where she denounced the assault on the Capitol. She then asked, “Does that sound like I was downplaying it to you?” Moments later, and you can’t make this up, she stared dead in the camera and said, “But, it was not an insurrection. To say anything different is beyond dishonest and it ignores the facts of that day.”
She actually played one of the clips where she downplayed the right-wing’s role in the insurrection and used her show to blame antifa and leftists instead in a segment dedicated to denying that she’d done that. Ingraham—who earlier this year mocked and smeared a brave Capitol Hill police officer who’d risked his life to defend Republicans as a “crisis actor”—may not be stupid, but she sure seems to think that the viewers are.
Journalist Parker Molloy, writer of The Present Age newsletter, told me she wasn’t shocked at all by the hypocrisy of these Fox hosts, who sent texts acknowledging the danger of Jan. 6 but then used their shows to spread false conspiracy theories. “This is just what Fox News and others in the right-wing media space do,” she said.
Vaccinated Fox News hosts go on air to spread vaccine disinformation and doubt. They all complain about elitists, but they are wealthy elites. They are all about defending law and order when that comes down to demeaning “urban” voters, Muslims, and BLM, but are perfectly fine downplaying white supremacist terrorism.
“There’s a difference between spinning facts and outright inventing and amplifying politically convenient lies. Fox regularly engages in the latter,” Molloy said. “In the case of the Capitol attack… these texts provide hard evidence that they’re doing the same with the future of democracy.”
You’d know that if you listened for yourself as they were read. However, if you get all your information from Ingraham and Hannity and their ilk, you’d have no idea about any of that—and you probably believe a caravan was invading America in 2018 and Donald Trump won the election in 2020.
In 2021, Trump has propagandists like Ingraham and Hannity to do his bidding. Democracy, truth, and national security will be sacrificed along the way, but the ratings and the chaos will be spectacular.