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 a five-year effort to crush a dangerous movement.
Long before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault, Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, had thrown himself into stamping out the rise of white nationalism and domestic extremism in America. He trained his focus on the issue after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., five years ago. Since then, he has held teach-ins, led a multipart House investigation that exposed the lackluster federal effort to confront the threat, released intelligence assessments indicating that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement and strategized about ways to crack down on paramilitary groups.
Now, with millions of Americans expected to tune in, Mr. Raskin -- along with Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida -- is set to take a leading role in a hearing that promises to dig deeply into how far-right groups helped to orchestrate and carry out the Jan. 6 assault at the Capitol -- and how they were brought together, incited and empowered by President 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 let Raskin take readers through the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the QAnon network, etc., before piling 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.
This was rich to have come from the paper that made a point to avoid talking about black-on-Asian hate crimes.
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.
As Tim Graham pointed out in January, Raskin has been a liberal media darling since his son's suicide, using that tragedy to serve as the lead manager for President Trump's second impeachment trial, write a book, and partner with MSNBC for a documentary.
