Fox News personality Sean Hannity's efforts to downplay the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol were debunked by Kevin Williamson in the conservative National Review.
"Why make such a big deal about January 6? Sean Hannity, radio host and off-the-books Donald Trump adviser, demands to know. After all, Hannity points out, there have been scores of riots, some of them deadly, over the past couple of years. Why fixate on that one?" he asked. "Sean Hannity apparently believes that he has the dumbest audience in America. The sacking of the Capitol on January 6 by a gang of enraged Trump acolytes acting on the president’s complaint that the election had been stolen from him is different from other riots because of its particular political character. Stealing Nikes is one thing, and stealing the presidency is another. Hannity knows this. Most of you know this."
Williamson noted the difference between a murder and an assassination.
"There were 21,570 homicides in the United States in 2020. If one of the victims had been the president of the United States, we would have made a pretty big deal about it. It would have been on the news. There might have been congressional hearings. Why? If we take Sean Hannity’s view, then we should treat such a murder as one murder among the thousands of murders the United States sees in a typical year," he explained.
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Email messages sent by Fox News personalities to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows illustrate Williamson's point. The emails were released by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"Even Sean Hannity knows this is a problem. That is why he — along with fellow Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade — texted Trump’s chief of staff to ask the president to try to put a stop to the riot," he wrote. "It is strange that these people, who today insist that Trump had nothing to do with the violent events in question, believed at the time that he was in a position to stop them. (Incidentally, isn’t it at least a little improper for hosts on a so-called news network to be acting in such an advisory capacity? Didn’t CNN dump Chris Cuomo for precisely that — advising the New York governor?)"
Williamson argued that Hannity's position was not only unethical, but so absurd that it deserved mockery.
"What has been clear to some of us for a long time — and what is becoming more difficult to deny every day — is that the events of January 6 were part of an attempted coup d’état, one that proceeded on two fronts: As the rioters occupied the Capitol and disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College votes, Trump’s legal minions sought madly for some pretext upon which to nullify the election. Meanwhile, Trump allies occupying several points on the far-right tail of the bell curve of glue-sniffing madness hatched all kinds of supplementary schemes, some of them involving the military," he wrote. "A riot that is part of a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of a coup de Target."