‘So, So Angry’: Reporters Who Survived the Capitol Riot Are Still Struggling

I weep for these patriotic, reasonable, sensibly-dressed citizens whose tourist visit to the Capitol has been labeled a “riot” and an “insurrection” by the lying America-hating fake news media.

As tear gas still wafted through parts of the Capitol, with broken glass and blood staining the building, the House reconvened to certify President Biden’s Electoral College victory—and a majority of House Republicans voted against confirming his wins in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

“That was the thing that surprised me most of the entire day: They’d just gone through this, and they were still fucking objecting,” Bresnahan told VICE News. “I was shocked at that vote. I was shocked that they did that. I was shocked, after everything that just happened.”

[…]

Desjardins instead stayed on the third floor, just behind the House gallery, posting up behind a desk to have some physical space between her and the rioters who had now flooded the area. Many yelled at her, asking who she was. Her response to defuse tension was to yell back “PBS—Sesame Street! Big Bird!”

It mostly worked—rioters laughed and moved on. But one man, who appeared to be drunk, lunged and grabbed her by the shoulder as he tried to take her phone camera. Luckily, another rioter pulled him away.

“When I saw his eyes, that was one of the only times I recognized I was scared,” she said.

[…]

“We’re so used to it, the wink-and-nod lie, you’re talking to a member and they lie to you and we just move on,” said Bresnahan. “Now it’s all changed. And I do think January 6 was the zenith of that. We cannot fail to call it what it was: It was an insurrection. They tried to destroy democracy.”

He still works hard to treat lawmakers fairly, but that doesn’t mean letting them off the hook.

“I’m not here to judge these people. That’s not my mission in life. But I also can’t ignore what happened. That would be foolish as well,” added Bresnahan. “It is important to describe exactly what’s going on, and you can’t hide behind euphemism and soften what’s happened.”

He says looking back on it, he should have covered events like the early days of the Tea Party movement differently. At one early Tea Party rally he heard a protestor use the N word, but he decided against writing about it because he didn’t think it represented the broader crowd.

“We used a lot of euphemisms. That was white rage and we should have covered it as white rage, and we didn’t, we covered it as conservative backlash. They were booing John Lewis, for god’s sake,” he said. —Vice