New York Times reporter Luke Broadwater celebrated radical liberal Congressman and January 6 Committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) on Monday as a hero battling a dangerous right-wing movement, while also trying to gin up a disinterested public’s interest in the committee’s hearings with “Raskin Faces Major Moment in 5-Year Crusade Against Extremism.”
The online headline made the story’s ideological point plain: “Raskin Brings Expertise on Right-Wing Extremism to Jan. 6 Inquiry.”
Taking a divisive tone against tens of millions of non-liberals, Broadwater amped up and exaggerated to paranoid extent the threat from “right-wing extremism,” while posing the Democratic politician as a veteran trench warrior against white supremacy (click “expand”):
When Representative Jamie Raskin enters a Capitol Hill hearing room on Tuesday to lay out what the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has uncovered about the role of domestic extremists in the riot, it will be his latest — and potentially most important —Step in to a five year effort to stop a dangerous movement.
Before the attack on Jan. 6, 2021 Mr. Raskin was a Democrat from Maryland. He had been actively involved in fighting white nationalism, domestic extremism, and other forms of violence throughout America. After the untoward Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville (Va.) five years ago, Raskin shifted his focus to the topic. Since then, he held several teach-ins, led the multipart House investigation into the federal failure to address the threat and released intelligence assessments that indicated that white supremacists had infiltrated law enforcement. He also strategized on ways to clamp down upon paramilitary organizations.
With millions expected to tune-in, Mr. Raskin and Representative Stephanie Murphy (Democrat of Florida) will take a lead role in a hearing. The hearing promises to probe deeply into the involvement of far-right groups in the attack on the Capitol that took place Jan. 6. They were gathered, incited, and empowered by Donald J. Trump.
Incidentally, the supposedly boundary-respecting Raskin challenged the legitimacy of Trump’s victory in 2016 on the House floor on, um, January 6, 2017.
Broadwater allowed Raskin to take the readers through Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys before he poured on the partisan praise.
There are few members of Congress better equipped to lead such a hearing than Mr. Raskin, a third-term congressman and Harvard-educated former constitutional law professor who has spent many nights immersed in the cultural and ideological underpinnings of the extremist groups….
(….)
Shortly after the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally by white supremacists whom Mr. Trump described as “very fine people,” Mr. Raskin went for a hike in Washington’s Rock Creek Park with Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism….
Nevermind the fact that Trump did not call white supremacists “very fine people”:
Mr. Raskin began a series of hearings, and soon found that under the Trump administration, law enforcement was hardly paying attention to the problem of violent white supremacist movements, vastly undercounting hate crimes in the United States even as the problem worsened.
It was only after Mr. Trump left office that things changed; the Biden administration finally presented a strategy to combat white nationalism last fall.
It was a rich result from the newspaper that avoided discussing hate crimes against black-on–Asian people.
Broadwater invoked Raskin’s late son Tommy, “who died by suicide just days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol,” and his father Marcus, “a co-founder of the liberal think tank the Institute for Policy Studies.” “Liberal think tank” doesn’t really cover the hard-left nature of IPS.
Tim Graham noted in January that Raskin was a Liberal Media darling ever since his son’s death. He used this tragedy as a lead manager for President Trump’s second impeachment trial.
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