Representative Jayapal recounted the terror she felt that day — and then asked supporters for three dollars.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we dissect Democrats’ pseudo celebration of the anniversary of January 6, recap Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s very bad week, and hit more media misses.
Three Dollars to Save Democracy
While Democrats have spent much of the past year attempting to use the horror of the January 6 Capitol riot for political gain, they still managed to raise the bar for distasteful behavior in marking the one-year anniversary of the insurrection last week.
At least 13 Democratic elected officials or candidates used the anniversary as an occasion to fundraise, including Representative Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), who described being trapped in the House gallery as insurrectionists invaded the Capitol and recalled “fearing for my life and preparing for a fight as they pounded on the door.” She then asked for donations.
“I am grateful that I reached safety later that day, but our democracy is far from safe,” she wrote. “Trump and his Republican allies continue to peddle dangerous misinformation about our elections. They continue to attack our democracy. And they continue to introduce anti-voting bills — including more than 400 nationwide last year. We must respond with the urgency necessary. That’s why I’m continuing my call for the Senate to immediately reform the filibuster, pass voting rights legislation, and protect our democracy.”
She asks readers to “join me in the fight to pass historic voting rights legislation through the Senate with a $3 contribution,” warning that “our democracy is on the line.”
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak, Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Representative Val Demings of Florida all sent similar missives using the anniversary of the riot to fundraise, as did at least six Democratic groups, including the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
However, for all of their concern about the chance of a Capitol-riot repeat, Democrats have largely been unwilling to review the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which lays out the process for certifying the results of presidential elections. Some Republicans have proposed getting Congress out of election certification entirely by altering or eliminating the ECA, thereby reducing the danger that a majority party could disregard the will of the American people in favor of its preferred candidate. Liberal Democrats have refused to engage with those Republicans on what appears to be common ground, insisting instead that Congress must pass their more expansive voting legislation, which would federalize elections and override state laws.
Aside from using the anniversary as a chance to fundraise and to push their voting legislation, Democrats also made the cringe-worthy decision to invite the cast of the Broadway hit Hamilton to perform at a ceremony marking the anniversary. The cast performed Dear Theodosia, which is sung in the show by Aaron Burr to his infant daughter.
“We’re all stewards of the American experiment, working to pass down to our children and our grandchildren a more perfect union that treats all its citizens with fairness and equity,” playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda said before the performance at the January 6 event. “We should never take our rights and liberties for granted . . . we must remain committed to finding a way forward together. That’s what I wrote about in the song ‘Dear Theodosia’ from Hamilton. I believe no challenge is worth abandoning our efforts to unite as Americans. We will keep working generation after generation until we reach that someday.”
“Having a real hard time coming to grips with the deadly riot being commemorated by ‘Dear Theodosia,’” the New York Times’ Evan Hill tweeted in response.
“Makes sense. Both are political theater,” former U.S. diplomat Alberto Miguel Fernandez wrote.
Covid-19 Questions? Google it, Biden says
While Americans are desperate for transparency around the future of the country’s anti-Covid regime, President Biden has gone 69 days since his last press conference. Before a meeting with his Covid response team last week, Biden suggested that Americans who are frantically searching for Covid-19 tests should just ask Google where to find a test near them.
“In the last two weeks, we’ve stood up federal testing sites all over the country, and we’re adding more each and every day,” Biden said. “Google ‘COVID test near me’ — go there. Google — excuse me — ‘COVID test near me’ on Google to find the nearest site where you can get a test most often and free.”
He later added that “state and local governments and healthcare providers are passing out free at-home tests that you can pick up,” but offered no advice on how to obtain the tests other than “just find out where they are.”
Biden ignored questions by reporters after he gave remarks about the recent surge in Covid-19 cases driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant, including questions asking when Americans will receive free Covid tests.
Surging demand ahead of the holidays last month made it nearly impossible to receive a Covid-19 test in many parts of the country, as demand created by increased travel and a surge in cases outstripped testing supplies. It has become increasingly difficult for Americans to find over-the-counter antigen tests or to find an appointment for a rapid or PCR test.
Meanwhile, social media was filled with images of Americans lining up for hours to obtain tests:
That’s a pretty long line for a free COVID-19 test in Phoenix y’all. Damn. pic.twitter.com/JWDW81kdIX
— Kristen Mosbrucker (@k_mosbrucker) January 7, 2022
Extremely long lines to get a COVID-19 test on Hilton Head. The testing site is at fire station 4 on Squire Pope Rd. The line you’re seeing here goes well back through the roundabout near Cobia Ct. More tonight on @WJCLNews. pic.twitter.com/OCUbC418Qq
— Riley Miller (@RileyWJCL) January 10, 2022
About 100 vehicles still in line at 1am for COVID testing at a drive-up test site in my neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/jsltwMjWXE
— Roxanne Martinez (@RoxstarRoxanne) January 7, 2022
Headline Fail of the Week
Rolling Stone ran a piece from reporter Marisa Kabas with the headline “A Planned Parenthood Was Burned Down. This Is Just the Latest in Knoxville’s War Over Abortion.” It cites the fact that the fire that engulfed the clinic (fortunately, no one was hurt) was ruled to be an arson to implicate a nearby pro-life (she calls it “anti-abortion”) church that protests and holds services outside Planned Parenthood. “Did the rhetoric of Pastor Peters’s extreme anti-abortion church literally help stoke the flames?” Kabas asks provocatively.
The fire chief says there’s nothing to implicate Peters or his congregation, and the pastor himself reacted to the fire by declaring, “This is not gonna stop abortion. It’s the changing of hearts and minds, it’s the changing of laws. This might temporarily halt abortion, but this doesn’t stop it. We just pray that nobody was hurt and that whoever did this is caught and prosecuted.” But that didn’t stop Kabas from writing, or her editors from publishing the smear job.
Media Misses
• Politico was forced to issue a correction after its newsletter, Politico Playbook, claimed Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had been seen dining with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday despite not attending in-person oral arguments on Friday due to concerns over Covid-19. However, Politico later said a tipster who sent in a photo of the dinner had gotten it wrong — it was Schumer’s wife, Iris Weinshall, not Sotomayor seated at the table. “Our tipster got it wrong, but we should have double-checked,” the correction reads.
• While Sotomayor was not dining at Le Diplomate with her fellow Democrats, she did make headlines for an egregious claim during the oral arguments on the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for large private employers on Friday that earned her “four pinocchios” from the Washington Post’s fact checker — the paper’s worst rating. She exaggerated the number of children hospitalized with Covid by tens of thousands, claiming that there are over 100,000 children in serious condition and “many on ventilators.” The Post debunked the justice’s claim, reporting that HHS data show there were about 5,000 children with Covid hospitalized in pediatric beds as of January 8.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki refused to weigh in on Sotomayor’s false claim on Monday when asked during a briefing if the White House is concerned about Covid-19 misinformation that is so pervasive that even a Supreme Court justice has an inaccurate picture of the situation.
• CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy suggested that people who are not paying attention to cable-news reporting are “ignoring everything and living their lives and we’re not really getting the information that they need to them.”
CNN’s @oliverdarcy worries people will be directionless without the major media: “If people are tuning out what’s going on in cable news … they’re just, you know, ignoring everything and living their lives and we’re not really getting the information that they need to them." pic.twitter.com/h1dgECjS79
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 10, 2022
• MSNBC announced its hiring of Symone Sanders to anchor a new weekend program on its channel, just weeks after Sanders resigned as the chief spokeswoman for Vice President Kamala Harris. She also previously served as a senior adviser to the Biden campaign in 2019. Perhaps not the unbiased reporter Americans so desperately need to be listening to to be informed.