Just imagine if Fox News hosts were actually capable of news analysis that went beyond feeding into racist stereotypes. Well, The Daily Show, Comedy Central’s satirical news program, had some fun with just that scenario leading up to the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The show, hosted by comedian Trevor Noah, spliced together video footage of the rioters with sound bites from a few of the conservative network’s famed talking heads. So, instead of condemning Black Lives Matter activists as the Fox News hosts intended, the edited video made it look like the hosts were criticizing actual terrorists. 

Imagine phrases like “mob-like behavior” and violence that is “unacceptable in this country” applying to white people storming the Capitol.

At one point, host Tucker Carlson said: “It’s not a protest. These aren’t children. These are adults, and they’re destroying our country.” Carlson was speaking about a group of about 30 protesters outside the Portland, Oregon, home of Chad Wolf, former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security; the network claims the group terrorized Wolf and his family. In reality, they were rallying in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and those in Oregon had been protesting every day to demand justice after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, causing the Black father’s death outside of a convenience store on May 25, 2020.

It’s not that officer, Derek Chauvin, who Wolf criticized. It was those fighting for justice after Floyd’s death. Wolf said in September of 2020:

Even in a statement condemning violence at the U.S. Capitol the day after the insurrection, Wolf found a way to divert attention away from the actual insurrectionists. “While I have consistently condemned political violence on both sides of the aisle, specifically violence directed at law enforcement, we now see some supporters of the President using violence as a means to achieve political ends,” Wolf said. 

Rep. Cori Bush, of Missouri, said soon after being sworn in that if the rioters had been Black, they “would have been shot.”

“Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps,” Bush said. “We wouldn’t have made it to be able to get into the door and bust windows and go put our feet up on the desks of Congress members.”

Journalist Dan Froomkin tweeted on Wednesday: “Not anticipating 1/6 violence wasn’t an ‘intelligence failure’. It was racism. They couldn’t imagine white people as a threat. That’s what needs to change. Not more ‘intelligence sharing,’ AKA adding to the bureaucracy of surveillance.”

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