January Sixth at Three (Part I)
A day when terrorists struck at the very heart of American Freedom & Democracy
“A day when terrorists struck at the very heart of the world’s most powerful nation.”
Viewing episode 8 of the sixth season of “The Crown” a few evenings ago, I heard the above words in a BBC radio news report on September 11, 2001. I was immediately struck by how perfectly the depiction fits the attack by domestic terrorists on January 6 two decades later.
In the wake of the horror of the 9/11 external attack on the United States by foreign terrorists, Americans came together, as they had in the wake of the horror of the 12/7 external attack on the United States by a foreign nation sixty years before. Yet, in the wake of the horror of the 1/6 internal attack by Americans instigated by the man who was then in the White House three years ago, millions of Americans sided with the enemy.
Indeed, this large minority of our fellow citizens are prepared to put that enemy of the United States back in the presidency. That would be akin to voting to make Hideki Tojo president in the 1944 election or voting to make Osama bin Laden president in the 2004 election.
It is mindboggling.
The terrible twos of Donald Trump’s plot to overturn his election loss and replace the American Republic with an authoritarian regime end today.
The label “terrible twos” refers to the fact that children at that age often have limited “communication skills, which sometimes feel inadequate to their needs. So when kids this age are mad or frustrated, which is often, they throw a tantrum.”
That’s a good description of Trump. He is now and always has been in the terrible twos. He still throws frequent tantrums.
What happened in Washington three years ago today was a domestic terrorist attack on the United States Capitol, on the United States of America, and the nation’s constitutional republic with the purpose of stealing an election to keep the loser of that election in power. It was planned at the direction of the defeated president and came very close to succeeding in ending the truly revolutionary American Experiment in democracy and government from below, not above. It was shocking and one of the worst days in our nation’s history.
We all saw it and at the time and for some time thereafter, most of us, including leading Republicans in Congress, saw it for what it was.
Yet, within a week or so of the insurrection, several prominent Republican officeholders, including Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham, who had unequivocally condemned the attack and Trump when it happened were making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ample posterior of the “215-pound” wannabe dictator and support him in his effort to replace the American Republic with an authoritarian regime.
January 6th wasn’t tourists peacefully walking through the Capitol.
It wasn’t a peaceful protest.
It wasn’t a plot by the FBI.
It wasn’t “Antifa” people in disguise.
It wasn’t Black Lives Matter people wearing whiteface.
They weren’t heroic people trying to stop the theft of an election; they were anti-democracy, anti-American thugs and people who had fallen for the boldfaced lies of the Loser of the 2020 Election trying to carry out the theft of an election.
Not only did we all see with our own eyes what happened on January 6th three years ago, but we also have an exhaustive House investigation of Trump’s multi-pronged plot to overturn the election and the televised hearings in the summer of 2022 that showed beyond any doubt what happened. Almost all the damning testimony came from Republicans who had been loyal to Trump. There have also been trials of others involved in Trump’s seditious conspiracy against the United States that have seen about 900 of those involved convicted by juries or pled guilty.
Trump, an article yesterday in the Washington Post says, “has increasingly cast the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol as a heroic action to upend an unfair election, a viewpoint that is not based in reality.” That is a much too-polite way of saying it is outrageous bullshit.
Yet huge numbers of Americans choose instead of believing their own eyes, ears, Republicans around Trump who witnessed what he was doing, and the unanimous findings of juries of their fellow citizens to believe a lifelong conman who lies almost every time he opens his mouth and is bluntly saying he will be a dictator, has called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” said he will shut down media that oppose him, arrest political opponents, and execute some Americans he doesn’t like.
All patriotic, freedom-loving American need to come together to oppose Trump and prevent him from ending the American Experiment in government by the people.
{Part 2 will be published within the next day or two. It will be available to paid subscribers.}