The Media Research Center spent the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks whining that it was pointed out that the biggest terrorist threat today comes from the American right. Clay Waters huffed in a Sept. 10 post:
Respected economist turned partisan Democratic hack Paul Krugman marked the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks in his own inimitable fashion in his column Friday by playing his usual despicable partisan games: “Foreign Terrorists Have Never Been Our Biggest Threat.” The text box: “Before 9/11, domestic fanaticism was already on the rise.”
Instead of trying to rebut Krugman’s arguments — even as he insisted that Krugman “offensively suggested the real enemy to American democracy was within” — Waters simply rants: “Krugman is the last person on earth with the moral authority to lecture anyone on 9-11, given how shamelessly he’s abused the tragic anniversary in the past.”
Alex Christy had a meltdown over a similar point in a Sept. 11 post:
Never let the marking of a dark historical day go to waste, right? On Friday’s edition of The 11th Hour, MSNBC’s resident partisan hack historian Michael Beschloss declared that we should remember the heroes of 9/11 and honor their memory by fighting back against GOP efforts to suppress the vote and possible attempts to steal congressional seats.It all began with guest host Chris Jansing asking an appropriate enough question, “What’s the importance, Michael, of marking these moments of history, of preserving these stories? And frankly, bringing people together around them?”
Instead of giving the appropriate answer of never forgetting or hailing the values of selfless sacrifice, Beschloss went political, “Because all of us should be able to unite around the idea that we’re saving our democracy. That’s what those people were doing, those heroes were doing on Flight 93 and elsewhere 20 years ago tomorrow. Our democracy tonight is as much in danger, I think, as it was in 1860 before the Civil War and in 1940 before Pearl Harbor.”
Rather than any coherent response, Christy simply huffed: “The right to vote is not being taken away and Beschloss is among those undermining the legitimacy of elections by saying that it is.”
Tim Graham, meanwhile, used the 9/11 anniversary to downplay the violence at the Jan. 6 pro-Trump Capitol riot:
On the night before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the PBS NewsHour pundit team agreed on the proposition that Trump’s backers are a bigger terrorist threat than ISIS. Jonathan Capehart proclaimed “I think MAGA and the domestic terror threat is much more worrisome than any foreign threat we could face,” and David Brooks nodded in assent.
The liberal elites (including Brooks) love to commingle 9/11 and 1/6, and even sometimes insist 1/6 was worse. They can’t imagine beyond the horror of the riot at the Capitol that factually it’s not comparable to 3,000 Americans dying with jets being used as weapons. You can look at the people pleading guilty to charges that aren’t murder, but for the offense of taking videos for social media inside the Capitol:
[…]That’s not a violent offense. One man pleaded guilty after texting he wanted to put a bullet in Nancy Pelosi’s head. That’s at least an actual threat. But they’re all “domestic terrorists” in Capehart’s telling.
Apparently, it’s not a big deal to Graham that Americans looted and destroyed the seat of American government in an attempt to overturn an election. That’s not what he believed immediately after the riot; he’s apparently adopting the view of his boss, Brent Bozell, that the riot was justified.
Being offended that other things were compared to 9/11 (and downplaying Jan. 6) was a thing at the MRC. A Sept. 10 post by Gabriel Hays whined:
September 11, 2001 is the single worst day in U.S. history — other than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor perhaps. That day saw 2996 innocent Americans killed on U.S. soil by a foreign enemy. Serious people know and respect this. But many in corporate media aren’t serious people. They cheapen it with ridiculous comparisons meant to smear people and political movements they don’t like, i.e. President Donald Trump. Media have embraced the dismal trend of selling every new threat to their dominance as worse than the worst day in our history.
That should get Americans concerned.
[…]In order to get Americans to do the ruling class’ bidding on climate change, gun control, white supremacists and of course the bogeyman, Donald Trump himself, commentators for far left rags and for idiotic cable news talk shows have claimed that each one has presented as bad or worse a threat than 9/11.
Can you believe that? Climate change, white supremacist terrorists, and a duly elected American president are worse than that terrible day the towers fell and we lost 3000 Americans? Well if you love CNN, MSNBC or Huffington Post, maybe you do believe it.
Of course, Hays simply wants to shut down debate over the behavior of Trump and right-wing activists.He also discounted what happened on Jan. 6: “Sure, only one person, (a Trump supporter) died at the scene at the Capitol, not to mention that the FBI found scant evidence that the riot was organized by antigovernment groups, but according some, the 6th deserves to go down in history on par with 9/11.” The riot sure caused a lot of damage for being “unorganized,” eh, Gabe? Imagine what an “organized” right-wing attack on the Capitol would have accomplished.
Nicholas Fondacaro made it clear that he will make sure America never unites the way it did after 9/11 until another right-wing Republican is elected president, and that America must remain divided because his feelings were hurt about the best ways stop stop the spread of COVID:
The day after the country marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, NBC’s Sunday Today was brazen and callous enough to complain that the fight against the coronavirus wasn’t as unifying as that tragic day was; disingenuously ignoring how they weaponized COVID coverage to attack former President Trump. They also suggested that opposition to the Biden administration’s mask and vaccine mandates were akin to opposing the Civil Rights movement and not fighting the Nazis.
[…] [Host Chuck Todd] lamented that the “arc of American history” would show that opposition to COVID regulations and mandates would prove to be less like when we unified to fight the Nazis and more like when people (Democrats) tried to oppose the Civil Rights movement:And, you know, Willie, thinking about this all week, when you actually – sadly you look at the arc of American history, polarization in some ways is more common than us coming together. We came together to beat the Nazis, we came together at times during the Cold War, we came together after 9/11. But we also spent a lot of time fighting each other whether it’s dealing with race in America, or invisible fights.
He then issued an ominous warning about what such opposition would mean for fighting climate change. “Right now it is COVID, just wait until we try to deal with climate mitigation,” he said. “If you think COVID has been polarizing on the country, wait till some of the tough decisions that are going to have to be made regarding water and things like this.”
Again, no attempt was made to rebut the argument — just a lot of juvenile name-calling, which is apparently what Fondacaro believes qualifies as “media research.”