Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis mocked the corporate media’s “nauseating” coverage of the Jan. 6 Commemoration at the Capitol Thursday, calling it “Christmas” for Democrats, and a “politicized Charlie Foxtrot,” using military slang for a poorly-managed operation, or “clusterf-ck.”
”This is their Christmas,” DeSantis said, meaning Washington and New York-based media outlets. “They are going to take this and milk this for anything they can to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump,” he added. DeSantis made the remarks during a news conference about COVID-19 testing in West Palm Beach. The governor took a number of questions from reporters on COVID-related issues. The last question related to the Jan. 6 anniversary of the Capitol Hill riot.
The likely 2024 presidential contender told reporters that “obviously” he would not be watching any of the media’s histrionic coverage.
“I don’t expect anything good to come out of anything that [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the gang are doing,” he said. “I don’t expect anything from the corporate press to be enlightening. I think it’s going to be nauseating, quite frankly, and I’m not going to do it.”
DeSantis compared the media’s obsessive nonstop coverage of the Jan. 6 riot to their light coverage of the congressional baseball shooting in 2017, when a left-wing activist opened fire on Republican lawmakers as they were practicing for the next day’s Congressional Baseball Game for Charity.
On June 14, 2017, Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson came to the park with a GOP kill list, and shot U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, U.S. Capitol police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika.
DeSantis, who was one of the 24 Republicans who was in the park that day, said that the Capitol Police protected them and saved lives.
But the media, he noted, turned the attempted slaughter into “a one-day, two-day story” because “that’s not something that the Capitol-based press wanted to talk about.”
The governor said the reason for the media’s disinterest was “because it totally undercuts their preferred narratives. Jan. 6 allows them to create narratives that are negative about people who supported Donald Trump.”
“I just look back and compare when I was in Congress, what event that we faced was the attempted assassination of Republican members of Congress on the baseball game,” DeSantis exclaimed.
“I was actually on the field, this guy, who was a big Bernie Sanders guy, it definitely was a politically motivated attack, came up and pulled his van in…we walked out to go to the car and we came in contact with him. He wanted to know if it was Republicans out there.”
The governor went on to blast Democrats who have compared the Jan 6 riot to the al Qaeda terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, and questioned the widespread use of the term, “insurrection” to describe a protest that got out of control.
“But let’s just be clear here, when they try to act like this is something akin to the September 11 attacks,” he said. “That is an insult to the people who were going into those buildings and it’s an insult to people when you say it’s an insurrection and a year later nobody has been charged with that. People are being charged with disrupting proceedings,” he noted. “I think it’s very important in fact that if this is what you said it was, why are you not charging people?”
DeSantis also questioned why a year later we still don’t know— if this was a planned “insurrection”—who was behind the planning of it. He pointed out that some individuals [like Ray Epps] were actually pulled off the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
“I think that this is something that is being used for political narrative and posturing purposes,” he added.
Ultimately, according to DeSantis, Florida residents have more pressing concerns than Jan. 6, such as inflation, gas prices and rising crime rates.
“There is an obsession with this among the DC-New York journalist class, and I think it’s because it allows them to spin a narrative that they want to spin,” he said.