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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the effectiveness of the first hearing the January 6th Committee held last night. and whether it will do enough to change the media narrative. They break down the structure of the presentation and if it could possibly be compelling to people who don't consider it an insurrection.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Monkering Podcast.
I'm Jared D. H. Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Halsman.
This is maybe...
The latest podcast we've ever recorded.
Is that correct?
I think without question.
Right?
This is the latest that you and I have done.
This is gonna be a muckrake after dark.
It is a muckrake after dark production.
We are here recording live after the January 6th special committee has adjourned from their first primetime hearing.
They went for just a smidge over two hours just a little bit over two hours.
Oh, well, you know if you want to do CNN time it was a smidge under two hours, but you know who's counting that's right They made the late Elvis Presley entrance.
They made us wait a couple seconds and Tonight, just to get everybody up to speed, we heard from Benny Thompson, the chair of the committee, as well as Liz Cheney, the lead Republican on the committee.
We saw new footage.
We got a glimpse of the opening statement, more or less, of a prosecutorial board that isn't a prosecutor.
We got an idea of where this thing is going.
I've got my thoughts.
Nick has his.
Nick, you want to start?
I have terrible language.
Do you want to start us off?
What are your initial thoughts?
Well, I don't know.
Do we really have to have Jason Miller be the guy we see first in a video?
What is that by the way?
The first thing that we see is Jason Miller.
Yeah so I don't know but anyway um you know it wasn't here's the problem they talked about this on TV beforehand I didn't really want to listen to too much of it to be influenced but you know they're promising a lot of explosive stuff Raskin is out there saying you're not going to believe it and so is like Kinzinger yeah and so You know, this was not that, right?
This is not any kind of explosive, you know, reveal.
Now, they, in my mind, they should have, you know, done something.
If they have 15 things that are going to be explosive, drop one on the first night.
You know, give us something to talk about.
Now, but I will say that the video edit of the insurrection itself, I thought was good and it was powerful.
Really compelling.
Yeah, that was the most compelling thing I saw.
And we talked on Tuesday's episode that they were bringing this Goldstein guy from ABC News.
You felt that.
I mean, like really, this was a very professionally done video.
I want to break that down a little bit more later.
But it was, I think, one of the – easily one of the most compelling parts of the entire night.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, at least everything worked properly, right?
Like, when they wanted to play something, it played and the audio was on.
I mean, like, you know, we've seen that get completely screwed up in the past.
So that was also really nice.
It was important because you don't want to be distracted by anything else.
So yeah I mean I thought it didn't feel like two hours right it didn't seem like it was going dragging on you know they had a nice pace to it at least but again like it doesn't necessarily matter in that sense because the people who are going to complain that it's too long or it's boring ain't watching this thing.
Yeah so here's the thing I had my problems with what happened tonight I think that there's some Yeah.
kind of troubling parts of tonight.
But we'll get that for a second.
Are you ready to hear something that you don't hear from me regularly? - Yeah. - This was a nice piece of messaging from the Democrats.
- Oh, wow. - It actually truly was.
These hearings for any of us sickos who pay attention to this stuff, they are usually just brutal slogs.
They're really, really tough.
I thought they were incredibly smart to leave the testimony to the end of the proceedings.
And in fact, you got a very good sense that Thompson and Cheney had a conversation about not only how the questioning would proceed, but how the pace of it should be.
I think Thompson has some trouble in terms of presenting this to people.
He has some sort of verbal tics that take over during the time, but during the questioning, which could have been the most boring part of all of this, that people could have walked away, I thought it handled itself really well.
The opening, and we'll get into the rhetoric of that in just a second, I thought was excellent.
I thought that the video was excellent.
I thought that the pace of this thing was really well done.
But yeah, a really good piece of messaging from the Democrats, which I'm as shocked as you, Nick.
I never expected myself to be saying that tonight.
Yeah.
No, the structure was good and that they paced it properly with a mix of the video.
And, you know, and again, you're right.
This is a professional, you know, TV producer involved with this who clearly had control over how this would go because...
I mean, you and I, as film freaks, Nick, I'm sure that both of us were like, what a great job showing Trump's tweet, right?
Talking about going to the Capitol and what Mike Pence was doing, and then having one of the insurrectionists actually read it out loud.
That was an incredible piece.
Oh yeah I mean also I would like to point out when they had the investigator talking and they did a little timeline that was also important as well and that was that was you know really great to you know first of all to remind us having it now be so long ago of the I it was I was getting a little anxiety when I'm watching the videos and watching the timeline and starting to piece a few things together which is great because it's like You know, what do they say in Hollywood?
They always want you, you know, wanting, leave them wanting more.
And so, they've definitely done that, right?
They've laid some things out and they've, you know, hinted at other things they're going to talk about later.
And that's great.
Well, I just want to say, so we spend, I mean, part of our job is to cover this stuff.
And not just to cover it, not to go minute by minute or second by second.
Part of what we do is to talk about the ideology behind it, the mindset behind it, the forces that lead to this type of stuff.
When you do that for so long, you start to look at an event like January 6th from like a 30,000 foot perspective.
Do you know what I mean?
Because like we can get into how this occurred and what different forces were taking place here, but being in the body camp, of the police.
I am always shocked by how visceral that is.
Because like really what you end up watching, it's not just police getting attacked, which this was a little bit of that bipartisan, third way idea in terms of police and law enforcement and bending the knee to them.
But in all of this, Nick, it reminds you what it's like to be a human being who's being overwhelmed by violent people.
And it looks, I don't know how you feel about it, it looks at times almost like a zombie movie.
It brings out these evolutionary sort of feelings.
I thought that that was incredibly well done in terms of reminding us not only was the government nearly overthrown, but human beings were in the middle of it.
I thought that was pretty fantastic.
Right and you can't overlook that they chose a woman to be the officer just to speak young and you know and give voice to you know because clearly they didn't want to have the guys who I'm now forgetting their names who were on CNN all the time was one guy's now a CNN correspondent.
You know what I mean?
I feel like those male officers that had been outspoken in the last year are probably triggering to some degree.
And they wanted someone else who could give a heartfelt testimony.
And I hadn't heard her story before.
I think I'd probably seen the video of her getting knocked down.
Maybe I wasn't even sure in the very beginning that I was a woman when I saw that footage originally.
But I thought that was good.
It probably wasn't as powerful as I would have liked it to have been.
But again, we're talking about reality.
We're talking about people's lives.
We're talking about experiences versus like what a Hollywood version of this would be.
And that's to be careful, right?
Because it's like, gosh, you'd love to have seen her cry a little bit more and like that would have been the thing.
But like that's not how life works.
And that's not what she was about.
She told us what she went through.
It was awful.
You know, blood and slipping in people's blood and choking on tear gas and all of these things.
It really did bring it into a... It helped me picture myself in that situation where I'm just a police officer.
I'm not trained in, you know, combat like she said.
That was really powerful.
Yeah, it was and I thought that whole thing was really well handled in terms of bringing us in through the video and then of course Through the testimony of what it was like to live through that day.
And, you know, it does a little bit of what it needs to do.
And we need to talk this entire time about what this is.
And I've brought this up on the show and sometimes people rankle up and they don't like that.
This is propaganda.
I mean, it really, truly is.
We are watching propaganda play out and we can talk about the rhetorical nature of what it's trying to do.
It's saying, look here, there's a problem in the body politic.
And my problem, by the way, with all of it is that this did not go deep enough.
It did not talk about the total conspiracy.
It didn't get into the parts of it.
And we'll talk more about that.
Uh, but that this is a four alarm fire.
It has to be taken care of.
And on top of that, it says, Hey, you know how they keep saying these were tourists, that these were just simple protesters.
That's horseshit.
And then it gets into everything else.
Um, it, in terms of a narrative, it's an effective narrative.
Uh, we talked on Tuesday about how this was trying to get the attention of the media to get, you know, change the story, make them actually care about it.
I know the media class pretty well.
I have to tell you that these are some pretty checked out callous people.
I don't know if it got there in terms of changing the narrative, but giving them a political story that keeps churning.
We're going to have multiple hearings at this point.
It gives them something to write about, something to focus on.
It's a live event!
Do you know what I mean?
Like, it's at a premium.
People are going to be watching.
People are going to be paying attention.
It's a ready-made political product.
The question is whether or not it's going to hold sway and whether or not it's going to change people's perceptions of January 6th.
Right.
Well, I mean, you're really asking what the ratings are going to be.
And will the ratings be such that it'll force Fox to have to carry it because they didn't carry it tonight?
There's no chance Fox is going to carry it.
No chance.
Well, you know, the cynical version is that, and by the way, I don't blame Fox for not carrying it because their viewers do not want to watch it.
So why would you, you know, air something they don't want to watch?
Can we point out, by the way, and you've talked about this many, many times, the fact that Fox News was largely created in order to prevent another Watergate situation.
And I got to tell you, that's exactly what's happening.
I mean, they are just like, oh, what are you talking about?
This is ridiculous.
Don't worry about that.
I mean, it is.
It's trying to push away from that.
And this thing is tailor made for that.
I see.
I'm trying to get so cynical that I'm coming back around to like the patient.
You end up getting positive.
Which is like, if they realized they could actually make more money airing it, then they would do that, right?
But I guess maybe they simply... Well, they could air it, but with, like, commentators.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, it would immediately going to some sort of handpicked person who would just, you know, basically talk shit the entire time.
Yeah, and that's probably what they were doing over on Fox Business, whatever, because they were covering it on that.
I don't think they, I don't even know if they aired the actual live feed or not, but they were, I mean, there's like, did you see the numbers?
Like 100,000 people watch that channel at any one time during the night.
And then on the other, on the normal Fox News, it's, you know, millions and millions.
So clearly they didn't, they were not, they don't want this to get out very far.
Well, and you have to appreciate also, speaking of numbers, and we talked about this earlier, like, I hate the fact that we have to talk about this as a television show.
I hate the fact that we have to beg the American people to care.
I hate that we have to remind people that there was an attempted coup.
Thank God, by the way, they're using that language.
That that was like actually one of the best parts about all of this is that they came out and said it explicitly that this was an attempted coup.
I guess the rest of us who are yelling attempted coup were hysterical.
But now we're, you know, in this.
But I have to say, I I wonder who this is getting to.
I know that it's for the media.
I wonder if it's seeping into anybody else's homes.
I wonder if people are interested in the pageantry of it all.
I'm not convinced that they are, but I will be interested to see how the media reacts to it.
Yeah I mean I'm more worried I think at this point about episode two as we're going to call it because you know it was an overview and it was a bit surfacy like kind of get dip your toe get some people understanding mix a couple connections but if they don't start following like the JFK documentary on Showtime and start because that is very compelling I tell you the way they structured that and start to make connections and you like get deeper and deeper into this is they don't
nail that, and they don't do it sooner than later, then yeah, people are going to lose their focus on this.
Well, okay, so what this was, to go ahead and get people up to speed on this, it was the thesis statement.
It was the opening argument, which tells you, here's what we're going to be covering.
Here is how we're going to cover it.
Right?
Like, that's how you do the introduction.
I have to tell you, my main concern in all of it is that shying away from talking about donors, talking about right-wing powerhouses, moving people around, organizing them, transporting them, paying for all of this shit, even paying for the legal framework.
My problem, Nick, and I'd be interested to hear what you have to say, The story that they're telling right now is that Donald Trump was upset that he didn't win the election or believe that it had been stolen from him.
And a bunch of people just showed up in Washington, D.C.
And as things happened, they developed.
There's a missing framework there.
How did they get there?
What entities brought them there?
By the way, who put people in touch in order to do the legal work, all of that?
That was missing from tonight.
There was no mention of it.
It was, as we've discussed, basically saying Donald Trump was the problem.
And by the way, the cronies at this point, they've been named.
It's Giuliani, it's Powell, It's Mike Flynn.
It's Steve Bannon, right?
That's the crew that we're looking at.
Oh, and Eastman.
They're going to go after Eastman.
And I would not be shocked, by the way, if John Eastman served some jail time.
I would not be absolutely...or is disbarred at the very, very least.
Like, at this point, that is where the microscope is.
The Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, they were there.
They were looking for trouble.
Meanwhile, the connective tissue is missing.
It is the beginnings of a good case, but it's missing a lot of the important stuff.
Right.
Well, to react to that specifically, I do feel like what they're setting up is they are going to provide the framework of communications between Ari Alexander, all these people to... The people on the ground.
Yeah, so I think they're going to probably be able to somewhat, and by the way, most people probably squealed after they got arrested, so they probably gave them some good stuff.
I imagine they're going to be able to make a pretty compelling, you know, case to connect that they just didn't show up at the, you know, they were there with a purpose.
They did drop it in there.
We saw a couple of clips here of people in December and earlier saying, like, we are going to go down there.
They are telling us to go down there.
We know what's going to happen, you know, way ahead of time that they knew that that was going to happen, that they were going to storm the Capitol.
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