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Interview excerpt from "The Backstory with Lee Stranahan" @stranahan 1/11/2020
JARED:
The first thing that I would say about ("Jan. 6th") - I think it's a deficit of today's society, is that we try to obtain instant historical meaning whenever events happen.
JARED:
The first thing that I would say about ("Jan. 6th") - I think it's a deficit of today's society, is that we try to obtain instant historical meaning whenever events happen.
We live in this media-crazed age, and we have this expectation that we understand the totality of an event in real-time, even though in my opinion the events on Capitol Hill were part of a very complex event in and of itself,
it's not something that I think can be fully digested in one swoop, certainly not the day of, or even within days of the event, but something we'll only fully understand with the passage of history, just like all other events in American history, going back to the Boston Massacre
I'm not saying it's the equivalent to the Boston Massacre, I'm just saying that if you go back to the Boston Massacre, in the wake of that event, which many people see as a foundational moment in the birth of America,
there was a huge propaganda war that lasted for months, with people trying to understand the event.
So back to Capitol Hill, I watched and I tried to get as much information in real time as possible. And the day of - when I was tuning in to this livestream from a fellow that was close to the Capitol door as people were trying to bust it open -
there were a lot of questions that I had in my mind as to what was going on, and it was really only a day later with the release of the longer form video, raw video, especially at the Alex Jones site,
showing how this was really a tactical, military-style assault going on against the Capitol police, that I really started to get a sense of what was really going on.
I'll just say this - it seems to me that what we saw with the Capitol Hill event, is more in the nature of a flash mob than in the nature of a movement.
And that's what really concerns me. These folks - I have a lot of sympathy for these folks, they've reached their wits end with this country and its corruption and they have nothing else, they really can't see any other strategy,
and I think Trump and Giuliani were certainly giving them a license to go to what they did, and in many ways they were following orders.
The problem is from my perspective, is that once they got into the Capitol, into the hallowed chamber, there was no plan of action.
I mean, that was the (time) for these people to seize the moment, and perhaps make some declaration or political platform or something...in this...overtaking of the Capitol,
and instead, what you had was this spectacle of people sitting around in the chamber, sitting in the chairs, this idiot with the horns walking around, taking pictures, and it wasn't a political movement in any sense of the word, it was a flash mob,
and that's what really concerns me, is that we don't have the tools in this country to make a genuine political movement. All we have are flash mobs. And if this continues, we're headed down the road to civil war very quickly, to a hot, hot civil war very quickly.
(following comments by @stranahan re: BLM, Benjamin Crump, patriot movement and mutual feeling of these groups of powerlessness and hopelessness)
JARED:
Whether you're talking about BLM or what happened this weekend, it's really the media that creates truth in the county.
JARED:
Whether you're talking about BLM or what happened this weekend, it's really the media that creates truth in the county.
And that's why as a lawyer, I have to be hyper, hyper alert about how the media reports our cases because it's the media that determines the trajectory of those cases.
Whether you like this as a lawyer, that's the way that it is. And that's why you have people like Benjamin Crump who are very, very successful at what they do, but they are extraordinarily media savvy, because they know this.
This is part of I think the huge frustration with the Trump legal effort was that is was so media un-savvy, that it almost looked like it was made to self-destruct.
There was a way of playing the legal side to this from Trump's end that could have been a lot more compelling.
If he had teamed up with the State of Texas and the State of Florida, which filed this amazing petition in the Supreme Court that actually got the attention of the Justices, and got them to write something - which is actually a big feat in Supreme Court, even if you lose -
he could have teamed up with them, and made this into an issue of the States' rights to have fair national elections in this county.
