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| Proud Boys making white power gestures last year on January 6th (Guardian) |
I will never forget it. A mob of radical supporters of outgoing (at the time) President Trump stormed that Capital building while congress was in session. There is not doubt in my mind that this attack was planned and coordinated by extremist militias consisting of disparate racists and antisemites in what would amount to a literal coup – taking over the government by force and restoring their ‘hero’ into office. Anyone that believes this was anything else is either blind of willfully ignorant.
That being said, the people that actually carried out this plan were a relatively small number of Trump supporters consisting of racist groups like ‘The Proud Boys’, and The Oath Keepers’. That has been pretty well established by now. That racists and antisemites consider themselves patriotic Americans that wave the American (and often the Confederate) flag is not news. But they are the opposite of patriots. They are seditionists that believe taking over the government is an act of patriotism.
There is, however, a lot more to the story. What troubles me is the the way Americans that are political conservatives and vote Republican are being smeared. People that saw the former President as carrying out their conservative agenda and therefore voted for him.
Most of the people that were in that January 6th mob were not radical extremists, nor were they racist or antisemtic. Most of them I am willing to bet never heard of ‘Proud Boys’ or ‘Oath Keepers’. Some of them were even Orthodox Jews. They were there to protest an election they had been convinced was rigged – and stolen from the man they voted for. A man that received more votes than any other candidate in history. Except for his opponent who received even more and won.
I don’t think there can be any dispute about who actually won. That would be our current President Joe Biden. Like him or not, he won fair and square according to anyone involved with that election on both sides of the political aisle. Including those that actually voted for the former President.
And yet the former President actually believes he won, the election was fraudulent, and the Presidency was stolen form him. He convinced many (most?) of his supporters of that too. Many of whom are mainstream Republicans that are ordinarily fine, upstanding, and productive citizens with conservative values.
To be honest I find it hard to believe that so many otherwise sane, rational people can be dragged into that fantasy by a man who is so egotistical that he can’t handle losing the election. Deluding himself and so many of his supporters into believing it.
I find it equally hard to believe that many of my own Orthodox Jewish coreligionists believe that. Shocked even! Although I understand why they supported him so much.
What troubles me is how Democrats and their mainstream media liberal sycophants characterize all the people there that day as insurrectionists. They never separate the wheat from the chaff. They always talk about Trump supporters being responsible for that day – painting everyone there with the same broad brush as the people who actually planned and violently executed the break-in. Even though most of the protestors there that day had no intention to be violent or break into the Capital building. Nevertheless stupidly following the insurrectionists in.
Republicans are not much better - minimizing what happened that day. Some even referred to the protestors as a bunch of tourists that broke a few laws by entering the building illegally. And then saying it is no big deal.
Well, it was a big deal. A VERY BIG deal. Something this country has not experienced since its founding. Those who planned and executed the attack are traitors that should be tried, convicted, and punished to the fullest extent of the law.
True - a lot of the people that attended that protest followed the insurrectionists into the Capital building. But they never planned it and never expected it. Mob mentality can sometimes make people do things they would never ordinarily do. They get caught up in the moment. This does not mean there should be no consequences to what they did. There should be. But insurrectionists they are not. And they surely regret what they did.
The $64,000 question is what part did the former President play in all this. Is he free of any responsibility? Or is it all his fault? The answer is complicated. But I will give it a try.
There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that if not for Trump, none of this would have happened. There would have been no protest and no break in. But Trump and his right wing media acolytes kept tooting the false horn of an illegitimate election result. Telling supporters to show up on the day the election was to be certified by congress and protest it like no other protest in history. And to prevent what they believed was the certification of illegitimate President.
The crowd was riled up like few political protests before it. To put it the way the fictional ‘Howard Beale’ did it in the movie Network: ‘They were mad as Hell and were not going to take it anymore!’
The country was by then more polarized than ever. Many conservatives finally saw a man in the White House that did not care what his opponents or even some of his own advisors thought and did what he wanted – what his voters wanted. They even liked his anti establishment approach to government. They wanted that to continue. And by ‘they’ I mean nearly half the country that voted for him.
That day Trump took advantage of the crowd’s heated anger over the elections. (Anger that he was responsible for) and egged on them on by praising them as good people while tepidly telling them to go home. They did not go home.
However, the idea that Trump planned the insurrection or in any way planned a coup is in my view ridiculous. He did not. He just wanted the crowd to stop the certification by expressing their anger in their firm belief that the election was rigged. And even after the fact, months later in condemning what they ultimately did, Trump still praised their ‘patriotic’ devotion to his ‘just cause’.
What about the House committee investigating the events of that day? In my view there absolutely should be a thorough investigation. We need to know what happened that day; who was responsible; and what part the President played in it. A just democracy demands it.
But not the committee that is doing it. Anyone with half a brain has to know how partisan the committee is. Every single member of that committee has already been convinced of Trump’s responsibility for this event. There is nothing objective about them. Although they pay lip service to it repeating their claim that all they want is the facts. They may actually have fooled themselves into believing that. But when not a single Trump supporter is on that committee, any conclusion they arrive at is tainted by their rather overt anti Trump bias.
Now it’s true that (Republicans (aside from Cheney and Kinzinger who have already convicted Trump in their minds) refused to serve on that committee. That was a terrible decision. They should have. That would have given balance and credibility to their eventual findings.
I understand why they refused. Their claim to simply want to move on – and that nothing will be learned from this investigation that we don’t already know. Seeing it as a ‘witch hunt’. But that is not the only reason. But they don’t want to hurt the leader of their party who will surely run for President again in 2024. In other words, it’s really all about politics. On both sides of the political aisle.
Finally, a word about how divided the country is now. Is Trump responsible for that? Well… yes and no.
The country has been divided for decades. Conservatives and liberals have little in common politically. Most of their values are quite different from each other. But in the past those values were only expressed privately among friends and family - and in the polling booth. For the most part we agreed to disagree amicably. We could even be close friends and leave our politics at home.
The idea of a protesting an election would have never occurred to them. But the former President has brought out the worst in us. Making it acceptable and even praiseworthy to speak our minds publically with anger- polarizing us even further. He capitalized on what right wing media personalities have been filling the minds of their listeners with. Trump is the political incarnation of the late Rush Limbaugh. Only not as talented. When I see and hear Trump, this is who I think of.
This is a terrible place for the country to be. Civility has gone out the window and replaced by angry voters who are too easily duped into joining violent mobs.
Will there be another January 6th?
I cannot predict the future, but I hope not. My hope is that the extremists behind January 6th will be put in prison for a long time and that the government does a much better job at monitoring activity by extremist groups on both the left and right.
