Once an ordinary citizen stumbles into the culture war, it can be hard to get back out. Just ask Michael Fanone.
Michael Fanone seemed very out of place. It was the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and CNN was commemorating the occasion with blanket coverage. A year earlier, Fanone was a 40-year-old Metropolitan Police Department (M.P.D.) officer trying to hold off an angry mob outside the United States Capitol. The rioters pulled him from a tunnel and down a set of steps, pummeled him with their fists and their feet and even the staff of an American flag and tased him numerous times; in the melee, he suffered both a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury. Now Fanone was outside the Capitol again, on the set of CNN’s “New Day” morning show, sitting next to its hosts, John Berman and Brianna Keilar. He wore faded jeans and a red-and-black plaid parka, in stark contrast to Berman’s and Keilar’s news-anchor attire. With his heavy beard and a turtleneck of tattoos peeking out from underneath his collar, he looked like some sort of punk lumberjack. He sounded like one too. When Keilar asked him to share some of the conversations he was having with police officers as the anniversary approached, Fanone acidly noted that the U.S. Capitol Police “have to walk the same halls as some of these insurrectionist members of Congress,” before adding, “I couldn’t imagine sharing a work space with those jackasses.”
The good news for Fanone is he doesn’t have to. Despite the incongruity of his wardrobe and words, the cable-news set was now his work space, Berman and Keilar his colleagues. In late December, Fanone resigned from the M.P.D., after nearly 20 years on the force, and took a job as an on-air commentator on law-enforcement issues at CNN. In a way, the move only formalized a pre-existing relationship. A week after the storming of the Capitol, while still recovering from his injuries, Fanone gave interviews to CNN and a host of other news outlets, recounting the horrors of the event in vivid terms that spared no detail or person. (Addressing the handful of people in the mob who came to his aid that day, he told CNN, “Thank you, but [expletive] you for being there.”) He became a media star and, inevitably, a political star as well. In July, Fanone testified in front of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. “The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful,” he shouted, slamming his hand on the table. That evening, he appeared on Don Lemon’s CNN show to play a racist and homophobic voice mail message a Trump supporter left him. “This is what happens to people that tell the truth in Trump’s America,” he said. That Fanone himself was a self-described “redneck American” who voted for Trump in 2016 gave his words an added weight.
They didn’t switch sides in the political battle so much as they simply stumbled into it.
Apostates are rarely lonely in American politics. When a political figure switches sides — Whittaker Chambers naming Communist names and becoming a celebrated conservative intellectual, David Brock renouncing the vast right-wing conspiracy and starting liberal nonprofits — the drama of the act itself can earn more attention, and more followers, than if the person had started on that side to begin with. But in recent years, the act of apostasy has been defined down. Alexander Vindman, a by-the-book U.S. Army lieutenant colonel serving on Trump’s National Security Council, became a blue-state hero for having the temerity to suggest that it was improper of Trump to threaten to withhold U.S. military assistance to Ukraine unless it investigated Joe Biden. Nicholas Sandmann, a Kentucky teenager on a high-school field trip to Washington, became a conservative cause célèbre when a video of his encounter with a Native American political activist on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was misconstrued, in initial press reports, as a racist confrontation. Unlike Chambers or Brock, Vindman and Sandmann didn’t switch sides in the political battle so much as they simply stumbled into it — noncombatants who were drafted into the culture war.
Once conscripted, though, each capitalized on his new status by parlaying it into political and media work. Sandmann landed a job with Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign and was given a prime-time speaking spot at the Republican National Convention. He’s now a frequent guest on Fox News, most recently showing up on Sean Hannity’s show to offer advice to Kyle Rittenhouse after his acquittal on murder charges in November. Vindman, meanwhile, wrote a book, “Here, Right Matters” — the title comes from a line in his testimony at Trump’s impeachment hearings — and even made a cameo on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
It’s not surprising that Fanone would follow the same path. He may have had little alternative. The flip side of apostasy, of course, is the enmity it earns you from your old comrades. Fanone’s outspokenness rapidly made him a target for conservative media figures: Greg Kelly of Newsmax dubbed him “that drama queen of a cop,” while Laura Ingraham of Fox mockingly awarded him a “best performance in an action role” trophy for his House testimony. Even worse, he became a target for his fellow law-enforcement officers. When he had recovered enough to return to the force in September, he has said, officers in his old district greeted him with taunts or simply shunned him; he now counts only two current Washington police officers as friends. “I had convinced myself, Mike, you’re vocalizing the opinions of thousands and thousands of police officers,” he later lamented to the Time correspondent Molly Ball. “But I’m starting to think I’m vocalizing the beliefs of just one.” In joining CNN, Fanone is merely going where he is wanted.
Fanone has said that one reason he is so outspoken is he does not want anyone to whitewash, or to forget, what happened on Jan. 6. But that has trapped him in a “Groundhog Day”-like existence. In another appearance during CNN’s anniversary coverage, Fanone stood with Don Lemon in the Capitol tunnel from which rioters pulled him one year earlier. In an “exclusive” interview, he haltingly recalled how “it was like a war zone.” He went on: “It was just littered with weapons and debris, CS gas, residual gas just kind of floating in the air created this mist or haze. It was surreal.” Left unsaid was the surreality of Fanone’s having to relive the worst day of his life, yet again, for CNN’s cameras.
Key Figures in the Jan. 6 Inquiry
The House investigation. A select committee is scrutinizing the causes of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, which occurred as Congress met to formalize Joe Biden’s election victory amid various efforts to overturn the results. Here are some key figures in the inquiry:
But those are the realities of Fanone’s formal entry into the Resistance Industrial Complex as a CNN talking head. Besides, so much of cable news now consists of cable commentators commenting on one another — CNN’s Brian Stelter slamming Fox’s Sean Hannity, Fox’s Jesse Watters attacking MSNBC’s Chris Hayes — that Fanone’s new job makes his role in the back-and-forth even tidier. The revolution may not be televised, but the civil war will be, one cable news hit at a time.
Source photographs: Screen grabs from YouTube; Win McNamee/Getty Images.
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