The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection on Tuesday held its seventh public hearing into former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, culminating with a violent mob attacking the Capitol building itself and trying to halt the proceedings of Congress.
Central to the argument Tuesday was the behavior of Trump supporters before and after the president sent a tweet in the early morning hours of Dec. 19, summoning his followers to meet for a “big protest in D.C.” on Jan. 6.
“Be there,” he wrote, “will be wild!”
Immediately after, the far-right media ecosystem, boosted by social media and right-wing YouTube bloggers, dutifully spread Trump’s message. The committee played a clip Tuesday of various pro-Trump personalities hyping the rally to millions of followers using increasingly violent rhetoric:
At one point in the clip, pro-Trump YouTuber “Salty Cracker” ― who currently has 776,000 subscribers ― told his followers: “You better understand something, son. Red wave, bitch! There’s gonna be a red wedding going down Jan. 6.”
“Mother fucker, you better look outside,” he continued. “You better look out Jan. 6, kick that fucking door open and look down the street. There’s going to be a million-plus geeked-up, armed Americans.”
“Red Wedding” is a clear reference to an extremely violent “Game of Thrones” scene of the same name, in which attendees at what was intended to be a celebratory feast are instead betrayed, trapped inside a venue and murdered.
Coincidentally, that wasn’t the only “Game of Thrones”-inspired call for violence in the leadup to Jan. 6: In his address to the crowd that morning, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, urged attendees to embrace “trial by combat” before marching on the Capitol.