You might be surprised to learn this, but the Capitol riot was actually all Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s fault. Yes, you might think this is completely insane, and that’s because it is. But despite its complete insanity, some Republican elected officials have decided that the real guilty party isn’t the ex-president who shopped the Big Lie, tweeted about violence, and gave an incendiary speech that morning at the “Stop the Steal” rally.
Lindsey Graham, perhaps inevitably, was one of the first to float the idea that perhaps this might be actually the Democratic speaker’s fault, asking on Twitter “whether Speaker Pelosi, due to optics, refused requests by the Capitol Hill Police for additional resources like the National Guard?” It’s like blaming Hillary for Bill’s affairs—not the first time a woman has been blamed for something a man did, and likely not the last.
On Jan. 6, Trump supporters invaded the Capitol in the hopes of stopping the certification of the 2020 election. It didn’t work, the election was certified, but it marked the first time that a peaceful transfer of power was disrupted in our history. Rioters in various cosplay outfits, carrying everything from bats to bear spray to actual guns, stormed the Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence.” Five people died during the insurrection, and the following weekend two police officers killed themselves.
ADVERTISEMENT
One of the chief targets of the violent insurrection was the Democratic leader of the House, 80-year-old Nancy Pelosi. Trump supporters broke into the Capitol and were hunting her, screaming things like “Where’s Nancy?” A note was left on her desk written on a manila folder saying, “WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN.”
A video played during Trump’s second impeachment trial showed a rioter bragging, “We broke into the Capitol... we got inside, we did our part. We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin' brain but we didn't find her.” That video of Dawn Bancroft was included in Bancroft’s arrest warrant. Richard Barnett of Gravette, Arkansas, was photographed sitting at Pelosi’s desk with his feet on the desk. And then there was Riley June Williams, who tried to sell Nancy Pelosi’s laptop to Russia.
You might think that Nancy Pelosi is a victim because of all the people trying to kill her, but according to a triumvirate of terrible Republican congressmen (which includes broken-brained Devin Nunes and the king of partisan hackery Jim Jordan) this is actually all Nancy Pelosi’s fault. Nunes and Jordan, along with two others, sent the speaker a letter on Feb. 15 which demanded answers about the riots where Nancy was targeted.
The letter accuses Pelosi of various actions (and inactions) Pelosi allegedly did (and didn’t) take and charges: “These decisions were made in a partisan manner without any consultation of House Republicans and therefore raise questions about the political motivations of your decisions.”
Coincidentally, on the same day that those four Republicans sent that letter, former GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz wrote an opinion piece on Fox.com titled “Nancy Pelosi, when will you answer these 13 security questions?” You might think that because she was the target of the riot it couldn’t possibly be her fault, but not according to these dumb Republicans.
My favorite of the “questions” is No. 13, which implies Nancy must in some way answer for her own home being vandalized. “Your own home was vandalized this year on January 1. Yet nobody was arrested. The San Francisco Police Department was quoted saying, “Unidentified suspect(s) had painted graffiti on the garage door and left a pig’s head on the sidewalk. How does this happen to the speaker of the House?” The implication here is that somehow Nancy Pelosi is covering up the vandalization of her own home.
Monday night, the “coincidences” continued as Sean Hannity did a segment on Pelosi, which included a picture of the speaker with the chyron, “What did you know and when did you know it?”
MAGA media knows that the Capitol riot wasn’t popular. It was in fact so unpopular that many corporate donors paused their donations to the 147 lawmakers who tried to overturn the election results. There’s no way to spin the armed insurrection; there’s no way to spin an event that led to the deaths of five people.
And so, the MAGA media complex is going to try and blame someone else, and who better to blame than a Democratic woman who’s been one of their top targets for nearly 20 years? On the face of it, this seems like it’s too stupid to work, but the truth is that it doesn’t have to work—it just has to muddy the waters, it just has to give the GOP the ability to play their standard game of “whatabout.” Why take responsibility when you can just blame a woman?
