BuzzFeed claims right’s rhetoric inspired Capitol riot
July 22, 2021
BuzzFeed News tries to demonize Trumpian right rhetoric in a new story. It attempts to do so by linking “fake news,” the “deep state,” the “swamp,” and a call to “take back our country” to the Capitol riot of January 6.
“Trump Gave Capitol Rioters The Language To Defend The Insurrection And Deny Reality,” BuzzFeed’s headline reads.
“By Jan. 6, Trump’s supporters had absorbed his full roster of reality-defying linguistic devices and used them to distort facts or justify their participation in the assault on the Capitol,” the article says.
The first such “reality-defying linguistic device” is the term “fake news.” Trump “deployed it countless times since 2016 in speeches and tweets to discredit critical or unflattering media coverage — particularly when it was not, in fact, fake,” the article claims, without a single example of news that Trump labeled fake that wasn’t so. Recently, for example, the news that the United States Park Police cleared Lafayette Park in June 2020 for a photo-op for then-President Trump was shown to be fake.
Next up is the “deep state,” which “became a staple of [Trump’s] linguistic toolbox to try to undermine the investigations that he and his administration faced and to attack law enforcement for not prosecuting his political foes,” says BuzzFeed. Even a New York Times columnist has admitted the deep state exists.
Again, the BuzzFeed “journalist” doesn’t disprove the existence of the deep state. Instead, she chalks it up to nothing more than another one of Trump’s linguistic weapons.
Then the author considers the phrase “drain the swamp.”
“Politicians from both parties have used it to pitch themselves as political outsiders, and Trump carried on that tradition during his 2016 campaign,” she writes. But unlike Democrats and other politicians, Trump is uniquely responsible for the actions of anyone who refers to the “swamp,” even Capitol rioters.
The story’s final section heading reads “Take back our country,” referring to a phrase Trump used before the Capitol riot. Since rioters used similar language, the writer holds Trump responsible for their actions.