January 6 Defendant Blames Fox News for Selling Lies

January 6 defendant David Brian Howard claims that Fox News played a significant role in his radicalization and eventual participation in the January 6 Capitol riot.

Howard was arrested on charges of breaching the Capitol and is set to face sentencing on Friday. According to court documents shared by CBS’s congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, Howard is “seeking mercy at sentencing” by noting that he was influenced by Fox News’s lies about the 2020 election.

The defendant “is/was simply a small-town man who between the years of 2014 and 2020 followed the media and news which much of his small community seemed to follow—Fox News,” the document read. While Howard “bought the lies sold to him and millions of others for many years and especially in the wake of the 2020 election,” the defense noted he has since had a change of heart, and is now “horrified by their ongoing misinformation, influence and affect and veers away from any of that.”

“Mr. Howard had no intention, ever, of engaging in the actions which led to his arrest. He came to Washington, DC, from Dallas (via Miami), on January 6th alone because he was led to believe—from his local media and large swaths of the community around him at home—that his vote for Mr. Trump in 2020 had been stolen; that the election had been stolen.”

Howard’s argument echoes that of critics who have placed some of the blame for the events of January 6 on Fox.

Media journalist Brian Stelter, for example, has argued that the Capitol riot was the culmination of “something that actually built up for months and months,” fed in no small part by the Big Lie narratives peddled by the conservative network. “We know that some rioters bought plane tickets and flew to Washington because of what they were being told on television, because of the lies that were being spread on television. I think it’s an underappreciated part of the story,” Stelter said on MSNBC in January.

Donald Trump was losing it over the “lunatics” behind Project 2025 long before the right-wing policy program’s director, Paul Dans, stepped down amid the backlash created by Trump himself.

Before issuing his first unconvincing attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 in July, Trump privately railed about the “lunatics” linked to Project 2025, who pushed for unpopular, sweeping abortion bans, two sources familiar told Rolling Stone.

Since Project 2025’s debut, Trump has attempted to appear more moderate on abortion, inspiring a huge shift in the Republican Party’s platform away from a federal abortion ban (and toward embracing the dozens of cruel state-level ones). The 900-plus plan document, which had been tailor-made for a Trump presidency, couldn’t follow the whims of the decidedly fluid Republican candidate.

Project 2025’s policy roadmap suggests a slate of horrifying hard-line rules on abortion, including withholding federal approval for abortion pills, restricting access to emergency contraception, using federal agencies to expand “abortion surveillance,” and of course, resuscitating the right-wing dream of a federal abortion ban.

Trump has been having a prolonged meltdown over the potential damage this plan could cause to his campaign for weeks. But he couldn’t help but get in his own way: During the RNC in late July, Trump tapped J.D. Vance to be his running mate.

For Trump, the Ohio senator was a chance to shore up support among white male voters. Instead, it seems Vance is a one-two punch of campaign destruction. Vance previously advocated for a federal abortion ban, not to mention he has his own shocking links to Project 2025.

Vance wrote a particularly violent foreword to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025. Roberts was fawning over Vance as soon as he was picked.

The swirling clouds of internet mayhem have parted, and the user behind the rumor that J.D. Vance once got sexual with a sectional has finally broken his silence.

In an interview with Business Insider, “Rick,” or @rickrudescalves (he’s since changed his username for privacy), explained why exactly he was inspired to invent a semi-believable lie that Donald Trump’s running mate had made love to a loveseat.

The day that Trump announced that Vance would be joining his ticket, Rick tweeted, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

The story? A work of fiction by a disappointed guy from a working-class background. Rick, a desk worker who said he had a similar upbringing to that which Vance described in his bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, said he regarded the Ohio senator from “a place of irreverence if not outright disrespect.”

The page numbers? Plucked from thin air. Rick was referring to authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles, who cooked up phony citations to lend literary credibility to their fictional works. “It’s something I’ve found funny my entire life,” Rick said.

Rick’s reasoning for this particular fabrication? He was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s anecdote in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 about former President Lyndon Johnson starting a rumor that his opponent had sex with his livestock.

“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

When the rumor took off, Rick was surprised and a little overwhelmed. He hid the post within a week, but by then, the idea had already spread like wildfire, with news organizations rushing to fact-check and then subsequently backing off.

Rick pointed to director Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” which Herzog describes as “a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual.” During an interview on Late Night With Seth Meyers in 2022, Herzog admitted that in capturing his protagonist he “would invent a few things to make the essence of the man visible.”

By inventing a story about Vance having sex with a couch, this anonymous internet user had made the vice presidential nominee’s essence as a “couch-fucker” all the more visible.

For his part, Vance hasn’t exactly dodged the baseless rumors and appears to be making absolutely no effort to avoid the gaffe. At a rally on Tuesday, Vance made an awkward joke about getting in trouble with his wife, Usha, and being banished to the couch for the night.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Tuesday veered into a bizarre exchange on gender pronouns, in a moment that’s now making the rounds online.

“Kamala Harris, in her Twitter bio, which I’ve never noticed until this morning, states her pronouns as she/her,” Ingraham said. “What are your pronouns?”

“I have no—I don’t want pronouns,” the former president replied. “I don’t want pronouns, I saw that.”

“So you’re fluid?” Igraham joked.

“Nobody even knows what that means,” Trump replied.

The clip is circulating widely online, with some embracing the reactionary Fox News host as an “accidental ally,” and others jokingly interpreting Trump’s response as a brave rejection of gender conformity. One X user posted, “This is the first time Laura Ingraham has been funny and I applaud her for it.”

The exchange shows that right-wing figures are committed to their yearslong performative bafflement about the existence of gender pronouns. Ingraham asked, “What is that? Why are people doing that?” but her question and admittedly quick-witted follow-up about gender fluidity betray the act. And Ingraham’s claim that she hadn’t noticed Harris’s bio on X (formerly Twitter) previously shows just how unnewsworthy the subject is.

The exchange may be best understood, then, as an attempt on Ingraham’s part to offer a riposte to Democrats’ latest line of attack against Trump, J.D. Vance, and Republicans’ off-putting social agenda—calling them “weird”—which was the subject of the interviewer’s next question. To that point, Vance used a clip of Harris saying her pronouns at a 2019 CNN town hall to deflect from the “weird” charge on X Sunday.

In an interview on Fox News Tuesday, Donald Trump tried to respond to the criticisms coming from Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris that he and the GOP are “weird.”

He didn’t succeed, instead responding by simply calling Harris “weird” back.

“The whole thing is a con job. ‘Just plain weird.’ You know who’s plain weird? She’s plain weird. She’s a weird person. Look at her past, look at what she does, and look at what she used to say about herself,” Trump said in the long, meandering interview with Laura Ingraham.

“I won’t get into it, what she used to say and who she was compared to what she said starting at about 2016,” Trump added.

Trump is probably referring to when Harris ran for the Senate in California in 2016, but what he’s saying about “what she used to say” is unclear. Perhaps he’s referring to her past as a district attorney and California attorney general prior to then, making a racist attack on her record on crime. Or perhaps he’s drawing on the “Jezebel” attacks on her from other Republicans, who are trying to use her previous relationships against her.

Either way, “I’m not weird, you are” doesn’t work on school playgrounds and it’s not likely to work as a reply to Democrats. Senator Marco Rubio tried using it Tuesday, and was mocked online. Republicans can’t seem to come up with an answer to what surprisingly has been one of the Democrats’ most effective attack lines in years, trying and failing each time. It’s surprising that Democrats didn’t try it out years ago, considering the weird turn that conservatives have taken. Democratic momentum just keeps growing, and the more the right tries to deny their weirdness, the more people make the association.

Donald Trump lashed out at Vice President Kamala Harris after she held a star-studded rally Tuesday in Atlanta.

At the campaign’s largest rally to date, 10,000 people gathered at Georgia State University to hear Harris speak, alongside former Georgia state Representative Stacey Abrams and Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

The rally also featured a performance from rapper Megan Thee Stallion and a surprise appearance from rapper Quavo. The response from the crowd was enthusiastic. Apparently, Trump wasn’t too happy.

“Crazy Kamala Harris, voted the WORST Vice President in American history, needed a concert to bring people into the Atlanta arena, and they started leaving 5 minutes into her speech. I don’t need concerts or entertainers, I just have to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.

Big words from the guy who brought out Kid Rock at the Republican National Convention. Not to mention Hulk Hogan, or right-wing country star Jason Aldean, who was sitting right next to Trump before his big speech.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegieg called those RNC appearances out for what they are: hollow attempts to appear populist. And, sadly for the celebrity-obsessed Trump, Republicans just don’t seem to have the roster of big names in entertainment that the Democrats have at their fingertips.

Meanwhile, Harris’s decision to tap Megan Thee Stallion and Quavo was strategic too. Democrats are hopeful that Harris can right the party’s ship in Atlanta by capturing the support of young, nonwhite, and college-educated voters to close the gap in Georgia, according to The Washington Post.

If the huge turnout to Harris’s rally is any indication, she seems to be motivating a lot of excitement in the state that delivered President Joe Biden his narrowest victory in 2020.

A false rumor has been circulating online that claims Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance once performed a sexual act with a couch. Why, then, did the Ohio senator make a couch joke at a rally in Nevada?

On Tuesday night, Vance decided to bring up sofas while speaking about his wife, Usha.

“Now, I would call her up here to come and speak, but then I think I’d have to sleep on the couch tonight, so I’ll leave her alone,” Vance said.

The joke only got some tepid laughter, and plenty of mockery online.

This is not likely to help Vance and Republicans fight the assertion that they’re weird, as the Democrats keep saying. The attack line is working, and driving the GOP insane. Republicans still haven’t come up with a good comeback for it, and right-wing media can’t handle it either. Trump can’t really explain why he chose the Ohio senator as his running mate (it was reportedly to shore up his white male base), and some Republicans are starting to regret the choice. If Vance wants the “weird” attacks to go away and improve his standing, he can’t make slipups like this.

Senator Marco Rubio tried to come up with a comeback to Democrats’ criticisms of Donald Trump and the Republican Party as “weird,” and it’s rather lame.

“They called us weird so I’ll call them weirder. That’s what I used to do back in high school,” Rubio told HuffPost’s Igor Bobic on Tuesday.

Naturally, this immediately drew mockery online.

It’s not really a surprise that Rubio’s attempt to respond was lackluster. He had no answer when Trump called him “Little Marco” during the 2016 presidential campaign. In fact, Rubio tried to land an insult about Trump’s small hands back then, only for it to go nowhere.

Rubio, like other Republicans, can’t seem to come up with an answer to what surprisingly has been one of the Democrats’ most effective attack lines in years, trying and failing each time. It’s one that’s been a long time coming, considering the weird turn that conservatives such as Trump and J.D. Vance have taken in the last few years.

And every day, Republicans say something new to strengthen the argument, whether it’s getting triggered by the Olympics or complaining about “childless cat ladies.” Basically, they can’t stop owning themselves.

It looks like Donald Trump may be heading back to court before the polls open in November, and he’ll once again be going head-to-head with author E. Jean Carroll.

A federal appeals court has scheduled oral arguments for September 6, as part of Trump’s appeal of the May 2023 verdict in his first trial against Carroll. At the time, a jury unanimously found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse, and ordered him to pay her $5 million.

Lawyers for Carroll had filed a motion to a federal appeals court in May this year to expedite Trump’s appeal, arguing that Trump would use his campaign as an excuse not to sit in court.

“Donald J. Trump has demonstrated a clear pattern of dilatory, obstructionist, and bad faith conduct throughout these proceedings,” the motion said. “With the pendency of the general presidential election campaign (which will intensify in the fall), not to mention several active state and federal criminal proceedings, Mr. Trump may well contend that any oral argument scheduled for later in 2024 must be deferred until early 2025—at which point he could be preparing for an inauguration or awaiting another criminal trial.”

While Trump will likely try to worm his way out of the very proceedings he requested, it seems like some people are very much looking forward to it.

“I AM READY!!!!” Carroll wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

In January, Trump paid a hefty bond and filed to appeal the verdict in his other case against Carroll, after a jury ordered that he fork out a whopping $83 million to the author for repeatedly defaming her.

If oral arguments proceed as planned, they will take place less than two weeks before the former president is scheduled to attend a sentencing hearing for his 34-count criminal conviction in his hush-money case.

However, the judge in that case, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, suggested that Trump’s sentencing may not come to pass due to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to grant Trump presidential immunity for “official acts,” which may have potentially rendered some evidence inadmissible.

As expected, the Senate hearing on Donald Trump’s assassination attempt got heated.

Secret Service acting Director Ronald Rowe testified Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees about security failures at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Senator Ted Cruz, of course, attempted to escalate the hearing and make it a partisan affair, yelling and interrupting Rowe as he spoke.

“Hold on, you are using ‘president’ in a way that’s not clear,” Cruz interjected. “Is it your testimony that in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump had the same number of agents protecting him that Joe Biden has at a comparable event?”

Someone should probably remind Cruz that Trump is not the sitting president, and therefore does not receive the same number of agents. Rowe stepped up to be that someone.

“Senator, there is a difference between the sitting president of the United States,” an exasperated Rowe began before a screaming Cruz interrupted again.

“What’s the difference?” Cruz asked.

“National command authority to launch a nuclear strike,” answered Rowe. The exchange only escalated further until the two men were yelling over each other.

“Stop interrupting me,” Cruz ironically responded at one point. “You are refusing to answer clear and direct questions.”

Cruz was not the only Republican politician to raise his voice at the hearing. “Fire somebody,” Senator Josh Hawley shouted, to which Rowe replied: “We have to be able to have a proper investigation into this.”

Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned following the July 13 shooting.