Fox News Suggests Sec Austin's Failure to Inform White House Empowered America's Enemies
But Trump's leading insurrection on January 6th was just a walk in the park
Let’s say the obvious: Llyod Austin should have informed the White House of his hospitalization. Everyone agrees. Secretary Austin agrees it was a mistake. From the human side of things, the guy just found out he has cancer, and maybe he was less focused on proper procedures. Nonetheless, he is the Secretary of Defense and one of the most important people in the president’s cabinet.
The White House was not pleased with this and has expressed this opinion repeatedly. I am sure the president was angry as hell, but unlike his predecessor, Biden doesn’t feel the need to use social media to bully people. Secretary Austin knows he messed up. Fox News anchors recently attacked an ABC report about Trump’s involvement on January 6th as political theater and straight-out propaganda. As we say in New Jersey, “Can you get a load of the balls on these people?”
It’s a genuinely ridiculous accusation if there ever was one. Fox transitioned into Trump, Inc. in 2015, and while it has sometimes criticized the former president since 2023, it is always willing to do the dictator-want-to-be’s bidding.
Spies know that the most vulnerable time for them and world peace is when a president from one party is transitioning in to replace a sitting president from another party. A lot of communication breaks down when people are getting settled and reviewing the previous administration’s policies. 9/11 most likely would not have happened had the vote counting in Florida continued and Al Gore was declared the victor.
The Bush team, guided by the neo-conservative views of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, was instructed to disregard the Clinton administration’s warnings about Al Qaeda and their “danger number one for American security” status. Richard Clarke, Clinton’s terrorism czar, was told by the incoming national security team that no one in the Bush White House believed that some cave-living fanatics from the mountains were organized enough to harm the United States. Richard Clark, denied meetings with the new president, finally met Bush after 9/11!
9/11 was one of the darkest days in our nation’s history, and even though only a handful of people died on January 6th, the day, too, is as dark for the long-term health of the nation. From the moment the chaos, which commenced on election night while the polls in California were still open, was launched by Trump’s lies about voter fraud, and up until the insurrection, the country was completely without leadership. The rats of the Trump administration were jumping ship at a rate that rats at sea would have found impressive. On January 6th, when Trump gleefully sat and watched as his “people” stormed the Capitol Building, the White House was filled with political appointees and interns. The few “adults,” the ones with any sense of history and respect for the Constitution, were long gone.
How do you think our nation’s enemies were reacting at the moment? With just as much side-splitting glee as Trump displayed as he sat in the executive dining room downing cokes and shouting, “Will you look at that? They’re gonna get our country back for me!” China, our enemy but a rational one, urgently reached out to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and asked him, “What the hell is going on? Do we need to be worried?” Trump’s insurrection was so alarming to our enemies that their militaries were contemplating the possibility of being attacked by us. Raising alert levels is dangerous because it increases the chances of human error leading to an accidental incident.
Here is how China regarded January 6th:
When America’s institutions blunder, its competitors and adversaries not only take notice of the situation, they take advantage of it. Indeed, for China, the United States — with its open and at times messy democratic system — offers a target-rich environment. But in the case of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, China’s response has been surprisingly measured.
As critics were quick to point out, the Capitol insurrection fed perfectly into the Chinese government’s narrative that democracy doesn’t work and that its authoritarian model functions much better. But due to concerns over its own political and social stability, China has not exploited this narrative for propaganda purposes anywhere near as much as one might expect. At the same time, how American institutions handle the aftermath of the Capitol riot will help determine Chinese perceptions and propaganda going forward. And make no mistake — China is still closely watching how everything unfolds (Insurrection Through the Lens of Chinese Propaganda).
Trump’s continued presence in our political life and leadership of the Republican Party continues to weaken our nation in ways that half of the country refuses to accept. Right-wing media refuses to accept any adverse side effects of Trump’s fascist revolution and their continued support of his lies. The coverage of the day’s events was so grotesquely appalling and lie-filled that it became part of the record lawsuit against Fox by Dominion. Fox eventually lost and had to pay $787 million to Dominion for its lies and misinformation about the 2020 election. Laura Ingraham, as she sat watching people beating the Capitol police, suggested that those people were not Trumpists but “Antifa.”
Not one Fox representative then or since uttered a word about how all of Trump’s lies and fascist yearnings weaken our nation and empower our enemies. A two-day hospital stay by Secretary Austin, however, seems to be signaling some great dysfunction in U.S. leadership:
First, Xi and Putin will be wondering if American nuclear command and control was ever compromised. The standard procedure is to swap in a replacement for the Secretary of Defense in the chain of command if the SecDef is briefly unavailable. You can understand why the Joint Staff and the Pentagon dislike going into detail.
Even if nuclear command and control remained intact during Austin’s secret hospitalization, Xi and Putin saw that U.S. national security decision-making can choke. According to the Global Times, “due to the suddenness, fast pace, and high intensity of modern warfare, the efficiency of command and control directly affects the operation of war.” Wordy, but accurate (3 Things China, Russia Learned).
Without going further into the lack of sincerity of these concerns by America’s “conservatives,” let me point out the most glaring, if not ridiculous, statement here: Russia is incapable of effectively working in a modern war setting. All of its daily blunders in Ukraine prove that command and communication operations are as foreign to the Russian psyche as chopsticks are to the average Foxified American.
The Biden presidency has been an effective one void of scandal. Biden has reminded the world and the Fox News liars what a U.S. presidency should look like. What a president in a world sickened by Trumpism is capable of?
Even if Biden wins in November, and we survive the post-election violence that Trump’s fascist followers seem certain to launch, we still have the lies and insincerity of Fox News and its contributors. I understand that a democracy stands for the right to have any opinion you desire. Nonetheless, there should be some accountability for the effect of these lies on the core audience.
For the sake of our country, it’s time to educate Americans and not mislead them.