Anthony Antonio has been charged with five crimes related to his participation in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, including violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. His attorney, Joseph Hurley, does not deny Antonio engaged in illegal and violent actions on that day but claims that his client suffers from “Foxitis.” As Hurley tells it, after Antonio lost his job he sat at home and watched Fox News endlessly “and started believing what was being fed to him.” Other defense attorneys have made similar claims about their clients. In an expletive-riddled interview, attorney Albert Watkins said of the insurrectionists, “Fuck, they were subjected to four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the world has not seen since fucking Hitler.”
Blaming powerful political figures or the press for insurrection has a long American history. For those of us who study the era of the American Revolution, this construction is all too familiar. The language was different, of course, but the sentiment was the same. Eighteenth-century men and women held the belief that a few designing men could convince otherwise-innocent people to act irrationally. There was no Fox News, of course, but there were newspapers and pamphlets, town meetings and tavern toasts, all of which had the potential to delude the multitudes and open the doors to violence and insurrection.
We can see this in the events leading up to the American Revolution. If General Thomas Gage were keen on coining new words, he might have come up with “Hancockitis” or “Adamsitis” to explain the growing rebellion of North American colonists in early 1775. In the aftermath of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Gage vainly attempted to restore obedience to the British government in the Massachusetts Bay colony. He believed that in their hearts the majority of the colonists preferred law and order to the growing rebellion but that their minds had been deluded by powerful and conniving men, chiefly John Hancock and Samuel Adams.