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Cesar Sayoc pleaded guilty in March to mailing improvised explosive devices to 13 people, including many prominent Democratic figures, among them former president Barack Obama, former vice president Joe Biden, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), as well as CNN. He drove around in a van festooned with political stickers and rants, one of them targeting CNN.
And now his lawyers have filed a sentencing memo citing one of the sources of his radicalization: Fox News. “Mr. Sayoc was an ardent Trump fan and, when Trump announced he was running for President, Mr. Sayoc enthusiastically supported him,” write assistant federal defenders Sarah Baumgartel, Amy Gallicchio and Ian Marcus Amelkin in a submission requesting a lenient sentence of no more than 121 months in prison. “He began watching Fox News religiously at the gym, planning his morning workout to coincide with Fox and Friends and his evenings to dovetail with Hannity.”
Cable-news watching wasn’t a lifetime activity for the 57-year-old Sayoc. By the account of his lawyers, he’d spent most of his life free from politics. Then came Donald Trump. Sayoc knew the New York real estate mogul from his motivational tapes. “Mr. Sayoc viewed Donald Trump as everything he wanted to be: self-made, successful, and a ‘playboy,’” reads the submission. “He listened to titles such as Think like a Billionaire: Everything You Need to Know about Success, Real Estate, and Life and Trump: How to Get Rich. The tapes helped Mr. Sayoc dream of a better life and motivated him to keep going. He pushed himself to work multiple jobs at once to get back on his feet....He followed Donald Trump’s career, watched his television shows, purchased Trump-branded products, and attended a Trump-sponsored career coaching event in South Florida. He was a Donald Trump super-fan.”
The sentencing submission suggests that Sayoc’s affinity for motivational material was his way of coping with a traumatic childhood that included abandonment by his father, plus sexual abuse at a Mississippi boarding school. Whatever the case, his boosterism fed right into the message coming out of Fox News, especially in the early-morning hours — “Fox & Friends” time — and prime time, when host Sean Hannity soothes the president’s most dedicated fans, including top fan President Trump himself.
Ever since the 2016 presidential election, journalists, academics and hobbyists have studied how traditional media, nontraditional media and social media teamed up to pipe false and dangerous ideas onto Americans’ computer monitors and TV screens. Much is still blurry, but the broad outlines consist of motivated political actors — including Russian actors identified in Vol. I of the Mueller report — posting nonsense on websites, Facebook and Twitter. Once thus platformed, the nonsense spread.
This passage from the Sayoc sentencing memo affirms that the man who terrorized an entire country in the fall of 2018 was a participant in this ecosystem. From the memo:
To contextualize that moment from “Hannity,” the host was discussing remarks by Eric H. Holder Jr., who served as attorney general in the Obama administration. Rooting for a more pugnacious style of Democratic politics, Holder commented that he dissented from the lofty ideology of Michelle Obama, who said, "“When they go low, we go high.” Holder’s variation, as articulated on a campaign stop in Georgia before the 2018 midterms: “‘When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.”
Read the rest here - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...sayoc-say-his-lawyers/?utm_term=.9f9a2594cdfa
And now his lawyers have filed a sentencing memo citing one of the sources of his radicalization: Fox News. “Mr. Sayoc was an ardent Trump fan and, when Trump announced he was running for President, Mr. Sayoc enthusiastically supported him,” write assistant federal defenders Sarah Baumgartel, Amy Gallicchio and Ian Marcus Amelkin in a submission requesting a lenient sentence of no more than 121 months in prison. “He began watching Fox News religiously at the gym, planning his morning workout to coincide with Fox and Friends and his evenings to dovetail with Hannity.”
Cable-news watching wasn’t a lifetime activity for the 57-year-old Sayoc. By the account of his lawyers, he’d spent most of his life free from politics. Then came Donald Trump. Sayoc knew the New York real estate mogul from his motivational tapes. “Mr. Sayoc viewed Donald Trump as everything he wanted to be: self-made, successful, and a ‘playboy,’” reads the submission. “He listened to titles such as Think like a Billionaire: Everything You Need to Know about Success, Real Estate, and Life and Trump: How to Get Rich. The tapes helped Mr. Sayoc dream of a better life and motivated him to keep going. He pushed himself to work multiple jobs at once to get back on his feet....He followed Donald Trump’s career, watched his television shows, purchased Trump-branded products, and attended a Trump-sponsored career coaching event in South Florida. He was a Donald Trump super-fan.”
The sentencing submission suggests that Sayoc’s affinity for motivational material was his way of coping with a traumatic childhood that included abandonment by his father, plus sexual abuse at a Mississippi boarding school. Whatever the case, his boosterism fed right into the message coming out of Fox News, especially in the early-morning hours — “Fox & Friends” time — and prime time, when host Sean Hannity soothes the president’s most dedicated fans, including top fan President Trump himself.
Ever since the 2016 presidential election, journalists, academics and hobbyists have studied how traditional media, nontraditional media and social media teamed up to pipe false and dangerous ideas onto Americans’ computer monitors and TV screens. Much is still blurry, but the broad outlines consist of motivated political actors — including Russian actors identified in Vol. I of the Mueller report — posting nonsense on websites, Facebook and Twitter. Once thus platformed, the nonsense spread.
This passage from the Sayoc sentencing memo affirms that the man who terrorized an entire country in the fall of 2018 was a participant in this ecosystem. From the memo:
Mr. Sayoc began watching Fox News religiously and following Trump supporters on social media. He became a vocal political participant on Facebook, something he had not done previously. He was not discerning of the pro-Trump information he received, and by the time of his arrest, he was “connected” to hundreds of right-wing Facebook groups. Many of these groups promoted various conspiracy theories and, more generally, the idea that Trump’s critics were dangerous, unpatriotic, and evil....They deployed provocative language to depict Democrats as murderous, terroristic, and violent.....Fox News furthered these arguments. For example, just days before Mr. Sayoc mailed his packages, Sean Hannity said on his program that a large “number of Democratic leaders [were] encouraging mob violence against their political opponents.” Hannity Transcript, FOX NEWS (Oct. 11, 2018).
To contextualize that moment from “Hannity,” the host was discussing remarks by Eric H. Holder Jr., who served as attorney general in the Obama administration. Rooting for a more pugnacious style of Democratic politics, Holder commented that he dissented from the lofty ideology of Michelle Obama, who said, "“When they go low, we go high.” Holder’s variation, as articulated on a campaign stop in Georgia before the 2018 midterms: “‘When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.”
Read the rest here - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...sayoc-say-his-lawyers/?utm_term=.9f9a2594cdfa
