Saturday, July 15, 2023

When is an insurrection not an insurrection? - Andrea Widburg

 

by Andrea Widburg

Things changed abruptly the other day when word emerged that Ray Epps had sued Fox News for its coverage accusing him of working with the FBI to incite and entrap people on January 6


Word emerged the other day that Ray Epps is finally about to be charged for events on January 6, 2021. Sharp-eyed media consumers instantly noticed that, with this news, the mainstream media moved in unison to redefine their previous characterization of events on that day.

Since the day Joe Biden took office, the administration has spent an inordinate amount of time, energy, and money to arrest and prosecute every random grandmother who took a picture inside the Capitol on January 6, ignoring the fact that Capitol police welcomed many into the building.

The administration has also savaged the constitutional rights of some of those arrested by locking them up without bail or trial for two-and-a-half years and it has been accused of major prosecutorial misconduct. Additionally, congressional Democrats staged a kangaroo court inquiry intended to destroy Donald Trump and whitewash any failures or complicity on the part of government actors.

Through it all, Ray Epps occupied an unusual position. Videos, especially the famous one below, showed him seemingly playing an active role (see, e.g., here and here):

 

Meanwhile, the FBI ignored Epps, and Democrats respected him. The House January 6 Committee liked him. The known facts were confusing.

Things changed abruptly the other day when word emerged that Ray Epps had sued Fox News for its coverage accusing him of working with the FBI to incite and entrap people on January 6:

Ray Epps, the man at the center of a widespread conspiracy theory about the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing Fox News and its former host Tucker Carlson of defamation for promoting a “fantastical story” that Mr. Epps was an undercover government agent who instigated the violence at the Capitol as a way to disparage then-President Trump and his supporters.

[snip]

“Just as Fox had focused on voting machine companies when falsely claiming a rigged election, Fox knew it needed a scapegoat for January 6th,” the complaint says. “It settled on Ray Epps and began promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol.”

In his lawsuit, Ray Epps denies that he ever worked for the government other than the time he spent in the Marine Corps. He says the theory about his working with the government has put him and his wife at risk and destroyed their finances.

The most interesting part of the complaint, though, is that Epps alleges that, because Fox focused on him so much, the DOJ finally plans to prosecute him:

Finally, in May 2023, the Department of Justice notified Epps that it would seek to charge him criminally for events on January 6, 2021—two-and-a-half years later. The relentless attacks by Fox and Mr. Carlson and the resulting political pressure likely resulted in the criminal charges.

The fact that Epps may finally be charged, despite his visible role on January 6 (as opposed to the enthusiastic arrests of those who had to be hunted down using bank records and cell phone towers), leads to several possible theories about what’s going on. Here are just three, although I’m sure you can imagine more:

1. Epps was working with the feds, but everyone had to deny that to maintain the narrative that the feds were not behind events on January 6. However, it was becoming impossible to maintain that denial given Epps’s continuing freedom. To lend an air of verisimilitude to an otherwise unconvincing narrative, Epps must be charged, too.

2. Epps is an ordinary citizen who, despite what was caught on tape on January 5 and 6, was fortunate enough to avoid arrest and to get special treatment from Congress. Now, though, his luck has finally run out.

3. Epps is an entirely innocent man who was neither a fed nor an “insurrectionist.”

What’s clear is that Epps’s pending indictment has thrown the media into a tizzy. As you recall, the day after January 6, 2021, every Democrat in America, both inside and outside of the media, insisted that what took place was an insurrection…that is, a revolutionary act intended to overthrow the American government. The fact that none of the people were armed, along with the fact that people got agitated only after the police, without warning, fired on them, has long been irrelevant.

By characterizing January 6 as an “insurrection,” the Biden administration could justify fencing off the Capitol and making Biden’s inauguration a private affair—something that provided a nice explanation for the lack of attendees. It could also launch the largest manhunt in American history, completely abandon constitutional rights, crack down on free speech, and commit other tyrannical acts.

But what’s the media to do when the person charged with wrongdoing on January 6 isn’t a crazy-eyed MAGA Republican but is, instead, someone you’ve steadfastly supported for two-and-a-half years? Well, in the case of Ray Epps, the media’s instantaneous response was to redefine events on January 6:

 

 

 

The American media are utterly and, I suspect, irredeemably corrupt. They have abandoned their constitutional function of holding the government to account—if it’s a government they support. When a Democrat is in power, media outlets are a unified leftist Borg plugged into a central narrative sold 100% of the time to maintain Democrat power and move the country permanently to the left. The saddest part is that, while ordinary Americans are fully aware that the press is ideologically and morally corrupt, they still allow its opinions to color theirs.

Image: YouTube screen grab.

 

Andrea Widburg

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/when_is_an_insurrection_not_an_insurrection.html

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