By Chris Satullo
I hope that Jack Del Rio switched it up and watched the Jan. 6 hearing on Thursday night.
Del Rio is an NFL coach, though not a particularly adept one. On Wednesday, after a practice with the Washington Commanders – whose defense he coached to a rank of 25th out of 32 teams last year – Del Rio felt the need to unburden himself of some thoughts about Jan. 6 and the riots that ensued after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
His words exemplified what a steady diet of Fox News and right-wing talk radio can do to one’s brain. There it was, in a few sentences, the full pupu platter of logical fallacies and rhetorical dodges:
“I see the images on TV. People’s livelihoods are being destroyed, businesses being burned down. No problem. And then we have a dust-up at the Capitol. Nothing burned down…We’re going to make that a major deal. I just think it’s kind of two standards.
“I’m just expressing myself. And I think we as Americans have the right to express ourselves, especially if you’re being respectful. I just asked a simple question…Why are we not looking into those things if we’re going to talk (Jan. 6)? Why are we not looking into those things?”
Boy, all the dance moves are there, aren’t they?
- The what-about-ism, the Sean Hannity two-step. If your side or one of its heroes does something bad, dredge up some past misdeed (or alleged misdeed) by the other side and act as though that somehow cancels the need to discuss the more recent outrage.
- The Tucker Carlson “I’m just asking questions” pirouette, that passive-aggressive standby of the cowardly provocateur. One of Del Rio’s Tuckeresque questions really got me: “Why are we not looking into those things?” Coach was invoking a regular trope on the Twitter right, the claim that no one got arrested for the post-Floyd violence and looting in the summer of 2020. Yeah, close: At least 10,000 people nationwide were detained and charged.
- The baseless generalization gavotte – “No problem” – which cherry-picks the dumbest thing anyone on the left ever said about something and asserts falsely that it represents the universal opinion of everyone anywhere to the left of your infinitely wise position. (More on the dumb things that were said on the left in a moment. I promise.)
- Then there’s the false-equivalence foxtrot. If I can find any deed by the other team that has any surface similarities to some bad behavior by my guys, then I will insist, without any regard to scope, causes or context, that they are exactly equal and must be treated exactly the same way.
- And, finally, ah yes, the First Amendment fandango: How dare you challenge anything I say because I’m entitled to my opinion (no matter how fact-free or obnoxious it might be)?
When and how, I wonder, did the First Amendment become, in some minds, an all-purpose magic shield to protect people from suffering any consequences for the rot that comes out of their mouths?
What the amendment does, among several vital things, is protect us from having the federal government either prevent us from expressing our political views or punish us once we’ve done so. It does not protect us from other people telling us we’re wrong, obnoxious or an idiot. It does not protect us from an employer saying, “Hey, if that’s what you believe, we don’t need you here.”
So, Coach, I do hope, for your personal improvement, you watched CNN a little bit Thursday evening – or any of the other TV channels that, unlike Fox, chose to air Thursday’s House select committee hearing about the Jan. 6 coup attempt.
I hope you heard Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who was beaten, concussed, pepper sprayed and tear-gassed by the insurrectionists, describe the Capitol’s West Portico that day not as a “dust-up,” but as a “scene of war,” “carnage” and “chaos.” I hope you took in the evidence that a contingent of Proud Boys, hungry for confrontation and violence, bugged out on Donald Trump’s speech on the Ellipse in favor of an early tour of the Capitol, doing reconnaissance to choose a weak point to attack first. Casing the joint, in other words.
I hope you looked, eyes open, brain turned on, at the video of the mob – some of them cops themselves, some of them, in a sick irony, waving “Back the Blue” flags – attacking Capitol and D.C. Metro Police with fists, flagpoles, bicycle racks and bear spray. Did you notice the gallows prepared outside the Capitol – or the video that indicated some of the insurrectionists surging into the Capitol didn’t view that noose as merely symbolic, but as actually waiting to be fitted around the neck of the vice president of the United States, or perhaps the Speaker of the House?
Coach, hear me say this: The riots and looting after George Floyd’s murder were wrong. I have no patience with those who excuse them as a legitimate expression of righteous rage at police brutality. (By the way, in my life, I have myself been prone to fits of righteous rage; I can testify that the deeds I did while in the grips of such rages were never helpful, and often profoundly self-defeating and wrong.)
I used to love John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight show, but I haven’t been able to watch it since summer 2020, when he emphatically excused the rioting with a “case closed” tone of self-righteous finality.
By the way, Coach, one thing Fox and right Twitter have no doubt told you – that no liberal politicians ever condemned the looting and burning – well, it’s absolutely untrue. A roster of Democratic politicians, topped by Joe Biden and James Clyburn, immediately condemned the violence.
Two standards, Coach? Maybe that’s because huge differences exist between the George Floyd protests and the attempted coup of Jan. 6:
- Even though some of the early riots were devastating to businesses and properties, a majority of the protests over the summer of 2020 were peaceful – or were, until angry cops lost their cool. There’s also evidence that extremists on both the right and the anarchic left did their best to provoke violence at some otherwise peaceful gatherings. By contrast, a significant percentage of those who marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6 were hungry for confrontation and violence. The “1776” memes in social media and discussion groups beforehand showed that a considerable number of people had armed revolt in mind. In this case, the police were not the ones provoking the violence; in fact, they were underprepared, outgunned and reduced to desperate defense and tactical retreat.
- The rage that drew people to the Floyd protests, however badly some people chose to express it, was indeed righteous and well-founded in fact. America’s police forces were – are – infected with racism and prone to brutality. Something must change, and protest is a time-honored, constitutionally sanctioned way to seek that change. The rage that drew the mob to the Capitol steps was based on claims by Trump and his lackeys that were – wait, let me to try to find the precise legal term to describe them…oh, thank you, former Attorney General Barr – “bullshit … nonsense … crazy stuff.” The insurrectionists may have thought they were defending the Constitution, but they were in fact trashing it. Don’t know about you, Coach, but that seems like a pretty big difference. Maybe it’s just me, but when a violent mob tries to overturn the just results of a presidential election and imperil the future of the American experiment, I view that as kind of a “major deal.” It might justify an urgent response. Like, maybe even, a prime-time U.S. House hearing held 17 months later.
- Again, burning buildings and stealing from business owners in your own community is bad. Very bad. (And, while I’m at it, I’ll say it again: “Defund the police” is one of the dumbest political slogans in the annals of dumb political slogans. It’s a chief reason why what should have been a total Biden landslide in 2020 ended up being close enough to enable this Stop the Steal nonsense.) But still, Coach, if you do your video study on this one (and I know how football coaches love to study video), surely you’ll see that trying to block a lawfully elected president from taking office and installing an egomaniacal dictator in his place is a threat to the Republic on a whole different scale. Like, the biggest one since those cannon balls got lobbed at Fort Sumter in 1861.
So, Coach, I do hope you watched a bit on Thursday night. If you did, you’ll realize your words last Wednesday were as off as some of the defensive coverages you called last season in that second Dallas game (Cowboys 56, your guys, 14).
If not, let me respectfully suggest that, going forward, you restrict your public comments to things like the merits of the Cover-2 defense and the wonders of Chase Young’s swim move.
Leave the observations on Jan. 6 to those of us who’ve actually studied the video.