For MAGA folks like Mike Johnson, Trump is the only reality | Opinion
The seditionist who is now the Speaker of the House announced that he intends to release the entirety of the Jan. 6 tapes, but that their release will not occur until the faces of the insurrectionists can be blurred to prevent “retaliation” by the Justice Department. In his deft reality-spinning, Johnson transforms the insurrectionists into patriots whom the government unfairly prosecutes.
Speaker Mike Johnson went on to say that he wanted to release these tapes to the public so that people would not have to depend on a “dictated” narrative but could make up their own minds about what happened on Jan. 6. As though the individual is perfectly capable of reaching an appropriate conclusion from weighing, on his own, the mountain of evidence contained in the tapes. As if everyone will take it all in. And reflect upon it. Much less that the solitary individual will be able to know all that took place on 1/6 without the countless interviews and reams of documents that the committee had to work with in establishing their findings. Talk about epistemic solipsism.
Johnson considers the compelling report of the Jan. 6 committee essentially worthless. That it is the product of months of painstaking investigation by skilled personnel impresses him not at all. The Republican talking point labels the committee as a partisan enterprise. Republicans Liz Chaney and Adam Kinzinger were really Democrats pretending to be Republicans. Both failed the party litmus test of unequivocal loyalty to Donald Trump.
In Johnson’s broader ideological realm, the truth can be validated, not from above, in the shape of an exhaustive, expert-produced report, but only from below, in the form of individual opinion, based on whatever instinctual prejudices and beliefs the person brings to the process, for most, mainly the interpretations they are fed by the media figures they uniquely trust as sources. This is what passes for reality in MAGA world. Under the guise of making your own truth, the influencers permeating the Radical Right media steer you to parrot the approved propaganda.
Moreover, by limiting the “narrative” to the events that took place among the mob at the Capitol, Johnson conveniently shields all those who conspired in the various plots to overturn the election, including himself and his congressional accomplices, as well as all those in Trump’s orbit who were coup participants. Not to mention that it also distracts the public’s attention from the multiple trials the former president is facing for his civil and criminal transgressions.
In the Republicans’ whitewashing of Jan. 6, Congressman Barry Loudermilk of Georgia proclaims members of the mob “innocent” because they did not enter the Capitol. If that be the criterion for establishing guilt or innocence, then the courts will have to reverse their convictions of the hundreds who committed violence in myriad ways in their frenzied attempts to break through the barricades of the fatally outnumbered police. As it happens, Loudermilk was the very Congressman who, on Jan. 5, led a group of visitors on an extensive tour of the Capitol, even though the Capitol was closed to all visitors, as part of the COVID protocol. At least one in the group was filmed the next day, on the Capitol grounds, making violent threats against Nancy Pelosi. Loudermilk, for his part, refused to speak to the committee about the tour. MAGA leaders owe no accountability to government, especially to their own branch.
Speaker Johnson’s tape gimmick is but the latest MAGA Republican attempt to rewrite history by inviting everyman/woman to be their own historian. Contriving such a history will go far to excise from public memory Donald Trump’s catastrophic record as president, especially his incitement of insurrection, and lull more voters into Trump’s autocratic camp.
R. E. Curran is a professor emeritus of history at Georgetown University.