‘This Violent Piece of Insurrection Was Planned Openly on Unencrypted Channels’

The December 3, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview with Dorothee Benz about the January 6 insurrection.  Janine Jackson originally interviewed Benz for the January 8, 2021, show. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: People saw for themselves the boggling scenes: crowds of Trump supporters storming the halls of Congress, busting into offices, yelling for lawmakers to come out, trying—minimally—to disrupt the ceremonial electoral count declaring Joe Biden president.

But the story will be, is being, shaped by news media, in subtle and unsubtle ways. Will media act, to report and investigate and challenge and demand, as though they really understood those connections?

Confronted with such boundary-breaking, in multiple senses, many people will want to hear that it was just a small fringe group of zealots, abetted by a few law enforcement bad apples, in service to an aberrational individual president, who’s anyway on his way out. Will corporate media sell the story that things got scary for a minute, but belief in the system is the way to safety?

Joining us now is political scientist Dorothee Benz.  A writer, organizer and strategist, she has many years of work in frontline struggles here in the US. She joins us by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dorothee Benz.

Dorothee Benz: It’s great to be here.

JJ: My brain at first went to language, you know: Is “protester” the best label when the target is the democratic process?  Is “chaos” the most evocative description for a planned and predicted action with some measure of evident official sanction? Now I’m reading “unprepared”; everyone was “unprepared.”

But there are deeper questions about corporate media’s role here. Just to throw a dart: While they’ve recently begun to qualify it, elite media spent years referring matter of factly to “voter fraud,” despite its virtual nonexistence, because they simply had to suggest a Democratic equivalent to evidence of Republican voter suppression, lest they be accused of bias. So the idea that you can just declare fraud without evidence has been well-established by the press itself.

That’s one of the things I’m thinking of. What are some of the things that are coming to your mind as you look at this early-stages coverage?

New York Review of Books (11/10/16)

DB: The first thing that comes to my mind is Masha Gessen’s warning four years ago, after Trump was elected, when they said, “Believe the autocrat.” And in the intervening four-plus eternal years, as the left, and as Black Lives Matter activists and immigrant rights advocates, have raised the alarm over and over again about rising political violence, about the profoundly anti-democratic, racist policies of the administration, we have been called alarmists, we have been told it’s not that bad. We have been told, basically, to calm down.

And we could see this coming, as could anybody, actually, who’s been on social media for the last three or four weeks. This violent piece of insurrection was planned openly on unencrypted channels. I saw yesterday on Twitter, there was merch, there were people in T-shirts that said “Civil War January 6, 2021.” So “unprepared and surprised” is the last thing that anyone should have been, whether that’s the Capitol Police or the media covering this story.

JJ: Absolutely. Many people have noted—refused to deny, you could say—that everything would have been different yesterday, from beginning to end, including before yesterday, as you’re noting, if these people were Black, or were brown, or were disabled, really anything but what they were. I would add that that would extend beyond the day; had these been Black people, there would be real-world, lasting repercussions for all Black people, right? And if you complained, all anyone would need to say would be like, “1/6/21, man.” The point is, talking about how differently they would have been treated if they were Black, say, it’s not a rhetorical exercise; it’s not a game of “what if?” That contrast is really the story, right?

DB: It is. And it goes well beyond the obvious—I mean, so obvious that even some of the mainstream media has noted it—that Black Lives Matter activists would have been treated differently; that Native Americans, defending their land and their legal rights, who were waterhosed in subfreezing temperatures at Standing Rock, were treated differently; that activists who were just begging their senators not to kill them by eliminating their healthcare, were ripped out of wheelchairs and thrown in handcuffs. Yes, those are the obvious differences, as opposed to the kid glove treatment that the white nationalists got yesterday.

But the deeper problem is really the entire white nationalist project that, as you alluded to in the introduction, this whole venture rests on. The fact that the police were so-called “unprepared”—I saw that word several times in the media coverage—it’s not that they were unprepared, it’s that they were prepared for white nationalists, which to them is not a crisis in the same way that Black people demanding rights is, or people insisting that public healthcare and national healthcare should be a thing.

The problem goes much deeper there. And it is both a problem of how we have governed, and a problem of how the police and the military have been central to white supremacy. Structurally, foundationally, ideologically, the function of the police has always been to defend the system as it exists, and the system is a white supremacist system. The ruling power started 500 years ago with settler colonizers; it went on to include genocide, slavery, strikebreaking in the more modern capitalist era. It has never included defending democracy. That is a central understanding of how the police work. They weren’t overwhelmed. They knew; they just didn’t think it was a problem.

JJ: I can’t keep playing that “imagine if” game, because I’m really thinking, every Black candidate forever would be side-eyed by the media: “So if you don’t win, are your people going to riot? We know that you all don’t really believe in democracy.” I don’t think media, as “Oh my gosh” as they are right now,  I don’t think they’re really taking on board the counterfactual that they’re sort of thinking about.

And then, more cynically, I think, in contrast, there won’t be the same kind of repercussions for people who, not just look like the insurrectionists from yesterday, but who think like them, except that maybe media might seek them out to say: “You’re the good Trump deadender; what makes you tick? Why didn’t you storm the Capitol?”

Twitter (1/7/21)

DB: Yeah, I saw a comment this morning from Ben Ehrenreich, who was talking about the media label of a “mob,” reaching for sort of a classist term, instead of calling them “‘fascists” or “neo-Nazi” or “racist” or “white supremacists”—and not calling them just “protesters,” because, rightly, they were trying to differentiate between, let’s say, Black Lives Matter or healthcare protesters—but not going for the term that’s really there.

JJ:  It is difficult to grapple with the language around here; we’re in kind of new territory. But what we do see is an unwillingness to use the terms “white nationalist,” to use “white supremacist” in connection with this kind of thing. And I think it is part of media’s desire to splinter people off, to say, “This really is a fringe,” and discourage the connections between these people and, in fact, the mainstream of the Republican Party, and of many US institutions.

DB: I think that that is absolutely right. There’s two things going on there, in that I would call it a soothing effort to make this not a bigger problem, right? The larger problem is not contextualizing it in white supremacy, the larger problem is not admitting that the entire American project is a white supremacist project.

You know, the media did point some fingers at Donald Trump yesterday, rightly, but they seem to exempt almost wholly the entire rest of the Republican Party. This morning, on the New York Times’ homepage, at least on the app, they had a bunch of quotes, and they were all from Republicans making them look really principled: [senators Lindsey] Graham, [Mitch] McConnell and [Kelly] Loeffler saying, well, this isn’t the right thing to do. As if these people hadn’t been feeding the same right-wing monster for the last four years, not to mention the last four weeks.

JJ: Right.

DB: So that’s one way in which the media is trying to create a respectable-looking set of Republicans in the middle of what is not…that.

The other is not talking about the larger shift here, which is the assault on democratic norms and the assault on democracy itself, which has moved from sort of a cloaked phase—you know, voter ID laws that we pretend are just about voter fraud, or that are somehow facially neutral or whatever; mass incarceration, which disenfranchises and creates second-class citizenship for millions and millions of people. Moving away from that cloaked phase to this really overt phase and testing what works, like, “Well, let’s throw some lawsuits at it, let’s try that. Let’s try to directly shake down some officials and threaten them. OK, let’s try that.”

In October, Rep. Mike Lee floated the term “rank democracy,” as if there is such a thing as too much democracy, like, “Don’t let the unwashed actually vote.” And that’s exactly what it is.

And that is actually both a point of continuity and discontinuity with the entire American project. It has never been a country that is a democracy, a true democracy, in the sense of a universal franchise, let alone economic and social democracy. But it has pretended for a long time that it is. And what the right is doing now is testing even that pretense, to see how they can proceed. And that is a genuine fascist threat.

JJ: And that’s the danger of portraying this as marginal or fringe or failed, right, portraying it as a “failed attempt,” because, as you and others have said, that failure doesn’t mean the end of it.

Dorothee Benz: “It’s not that they failed at overturning the election; it’s that they succeeded in mainstreaming fascism and fascist tactics.” (photo: Mike DuBose, UMNS)

DB: Absolutely not. I mean, yes, I’ve seen a couple of headlines about like, “Well, Trump’s on his way out anyway.” And this morning, as I was listening to NPR, the reporter or the anchor said, “Well, what did [they] think they would accomplish?” You know, like they were talking about some kids on a playground. And it’s not that they failed at overturning the election; it’s that they succeeded in mainstreaming fascism and fascist tactics. That’s really the point. And I haven’t seen that anywhere in the mainstream media coverage.

Similarly, on NY1, or in a NY1 tweet, I should say, to be exact, somebody was talking about how the property damage this morning was actually quite minimal. Yeah, it might be minimal, although when property damage happens at a Black Lives Matter protest, you would think it was a matter of national security. But I responded to that tweet by saying, “That’s beside the point. The assault isn’t on Capitol Hill property, it’s on democracy itself.” And that really has not been enough of the focus.

As a matter of fact, in a general kind of a way, this is a continuity from the entire Trump era, where media have gone out of their way to normalize fascist tactics and try to squeeze them, “square peg in a round hole” style, into the box of normal political imagery, where they describe something like—they had a headline yesterday, before all this went down, “With Objection to Election Results, Hawley Puts His Party in a Bind.” So they’ve turned this overt anti-democratic effort to overturn an election into an intra-party political quandary, thus normalizing what is not normal, or what should not be normal in an allegedly democratic society.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally: In a real way, corporate media’s deepest role here is as champions of the capitalist neoliberal system that creates the real grievances that are weaponized and combined with white supremacist ideology—doesn’t create the white supremacy, but it drives those grievances that then become so combustible.

And for the lesson, therefore, from yesterday to be, “Don’t push for real social change, because that’s fighting, and that leads to violence,” for the lesson to be, “Now, both sides: both people who bust into the Capitol and Black Lives Matter and AOC,” that balancing. “Let’s have civility, let’s have color blindness, let’s look forward and not back.” If media come out of the gate and that’s the message, I feel like that’s almost the most dangerous thing that could happen.

DB: It is the most dangerous thing that could happen. If you just shift the language a little bit, and you imagine them saying, “Antifascists really need to reach across the aisle and be in a spirit of bipartisanship with the fascists,” well, then you would get the problem.

And that is exactly the problem. Part of it is the media habit, the very bad habit, of pretend objectivity, that puts everything in a “he said, he said” frame, even when one set of claims is factually demonstrable and the other side is demonstrably untrue, and pretending that those things are equivalent. But also, just on the surface, pretending that being neutral in the face of a fascist threat is an acceptable journalistic value. It’s not.

JJ:  We’ve been speaking with writer, organizer and strategist Dorothee Benz. You can follow her on Twitter @DrBenz3. Dorothee Benz, thank you for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DB: It’s my pleasure.