Trump Defends Jan. 6 Rioters After Pressure From Kanye, Fuentes

good evening from New York I'm Chris Hayes the three faces of the modern conservative movement and the Republican party are increasingly dragging themselves in a downward spiral Two months ago the official Twitter account of the Republicans of the House of Representatives of the Judiciary published a simple message, an endorsement, a proclamation, a Manifesto in tweet form, if you will, that if you were here with us last night, I maintain, defined and defines the current Republican Party better than Jim Jordan probably ever intended for Kanye Elon Trump , they were eventually forced to remove that. tweet yesterday after Kanye West's months-long anti-Semitic meltdown reached a fever pitch on Alex Jones' far-right streaming show, where West, wearing a black hoodie similar to the ones he has worn periodically in public for years , ignored repeated opportunities to distance itself from extremist movements rather than doing so explicitly. praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis on multiple occasions was disgusting.

He's been doing this for a while as he sat down for a fawning softball interview with Tucker Carlson two months ago. Tucker praised the rapper as if he were a conservative thought leader why good because Kanye showed up at Paris Fashion Week wearing a White Lives Matter t-shirt. Now Kanye West also spewed a bunch of anti-Semitic stuff in that same interview, but no one knew about it at the time because Tucker Carlson edited out Kanye West's anti-Jewish comments. the final product hides that side of this conservative thought leader from the Fox News audience, now some Republicans and conservative groups, not Tucker in particular, are basically tripping over themselves to condemn the guy who was talking about how much he did the good Hitler and we can't.

Look at the only bad parts about Hitler, the guy who two months ago was heralded as the future of his movement. Now this put Kanye's friend and fellow Republican hero, Elon Musk, in a difficult position. You see, Musk recently bought Twitter and has been making a big public show of committing to a form of free speech absolutism which in this case mainly means restoring the accounts of trolls and bigots and just today a literal neo-Nazi, but Kanye decided to see how far he could take it and called Elon. Bluff, it's like watching two stoned people argue in a bedroom late at night, so last night he posted a frankly shocking image he apparently created in Photoshop depicting a swastika inside a Star of David and then Musk was forced to suspend Kanye in response for spreading hate. speech to his 32 million followers to let them know we found the line.

I guess now that decision was harshly criticized by Must's Fanboys, who saw it as a betrayal of his supposed principles of freedom of expression. If you're not Musk, he'll surely be back in the thanks to the Maga crowd, a stunt he pulled today claiming to have reported him, you guessed it, the most pressing issue in America, hunter censorship, Biden laptop story on Twitter in the run-up to the 2020 election, okay, but the fallout from the Kanye catastrophe doesn't even end there with two of the three heroes of the modern conservative movement; in fact, you could argue that it's been even worse for the third guy on that list, of course, the one running for president, the one who was President Donald Trump, you might remember that the last news cycle about Kanye actually started last week when it was revealed that the rapper dined at Mar-A-Lago with Trump and brought with him Nick Fuentes and a Holocaust denier white supremacist who, as the Jan. 6 committee recalled.

We were an organizer and a key actor in the January 6 insurrection. We are not going to reject any fraudulent election to vote that is correct. He has betrayed the United States of America. They betrayed the country that Mike Pence's life was under threat and they were chanting "hang Mike Pence now" the reasons for that dinner that Nick Fuentes and Kanye were at was at Mar-A-Lago apparently it was to criticize Trump for being Insufficiently loyal to the seditionists who have been accused of crimes related to January 6 was the fact that I came in with intelligence, which is why Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes and Nick Fuentes, unlike many of the lawyers and so many people he stayed with. in his 2020 campaign, he actually he is a loyalist and my question would be why when you had the opportunity you didn't release the January Sixers.

This is a common theme in some of the more extremist circles of the global manga right. Trump has abandoned the insurrections that Fuentes himself has had. I have been very critical of the start of Trump's 2024 campaign for fear that he is going soft, calling the former president's speech a total disappointment and we know that Trump takes this type of criticism seriously when people tell him that is losing his base and that he will do anything because he needs people like Kanye and Fuentes and the people who listen to them and, more importantly, his fans on his side if he wants to win the Republican primary and wouldn't you know it?

Trump relented, it seems he followed the advice of the anti-Semitic anti-Semites. Last night he dined with a far-right group that held a fundraiser for the January 6 insurrectionists that featured none other than Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green. She has made the release of this issue a pet political project of hers for the past two years. The event had testimonies. from people like Steve Bannon currently facing possible prison time, as well as the wife of Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell, who this week was convicted by a jury of obstructing an official proceeding for his role in the attack on the Capitol.

Caldwell was one of five people charged with seditious conspiracy but one of three who was acquitted but two of his fellow Oath Keepers were convicted of that very, very serious crime and after all, the event closed with a personal message from no less that Donald Trump Patriot freedom is what it is all about and that is not happening in our country, what they have done to torment people and persecute people like never before. I don't think something like this has happened before in our country, certainly not to this point, it's a very unfair situation and we.

As you know, we're going to be, as you know, looking at this and talking very, very strongly about it in the coming weeks, months and over the next year and a half period during the campaign, in my opinion, people have been treated unconstitutionally and very, very unfairly and Let's get to the bottom of it and you know what I said. I take it very seriously. I've never seen anything like it. Say what you want about the guy. He clearly did his homework before giving that address, so let me. Let's recap here because there's so much strangeness it's hard to follow, so here's what happens.

Kanye goes to Mar-A-Lago to challenge Trump a little. Kinda well, he thinks he's lost. He says he told Trump he was. not being loyal enough the insurrectionists are not loyal enough to the base to their most diehard and extremist fans and then just a few days later Trump sends a message of support to a group trying to paint the insurrectionists as political prisoners and seeking release them and that is The most important problem here is not only the fact that Republican voters and celebrities are adopting a fundamentally antisocial and authoritarian political theory that seeks above all to punish those they perceive as enemies, but that Republican politicians are trying to wield power for that very purpose because in a month the Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives, which means the minority staffer on the House Judiciary Committee who tweeted that will be in the majority with subpoena power and we are about to see exactly what this looks like in practice.

Marjorie Taylor Green reportedly

pressure

d Kevin McCarthy to press forward with investigations into the treatment of the January 6 defendants. There has already been talk of removing Attorney General Merrick Garland over the Justice Department's investigation into Trump's potentially criminal conduct and the same Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who sent Kanye. Elon Trump's tweet will lead the charge abroad