The January 6 mob riot at the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. was an attempt, in the words of the McCarthy era, “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.” It was the most destructive and unprecedented act of domestic terrorism in my memory and had a greater emotional impact even than the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 by government hater Tim McVeigh, which claimed the lives of 168 people.
The Capitol insurrection was the act of conservative domestic terrorists, spurred on by Republican elected officials, including members of Congress and the Republican President of the United States, a man recently impeached for a second time, charged with inciting insurrection. And it’s utterly shocking to many Americans that President Trump will most likely be acquitted in his impeachment trial next month in the U.S. Senate when elected terrorist-sympathizers of his own party will probably vote to exonerate him and, in so doing, condone an attempt to violently overthrow our government.
January 6 has draped the GOP, and its lunatic fellow travelers, in shame and infamy.
There’s never been anything like this invasion of Congress in the history of our country after the War of 1812. Not only did members of the conservative terrorist mob become cop killers, they threatened to hang Vice President Pence, shoot Speaker of the House Pelosi in the head, hunt down and kill congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and assassinate any Democrats they could lay their hands on. They vandalized and ransacked the Capitol itself, beat and injured some 140 people, including officers of the law, occupied the chambers of the House and the Senate, stole documents, defecated in congressional offices, were maskless in a lethal pandemic and were generally armed to the teeth, some even equipped with pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails, threatening the lives of everyone around them.
January 6 has had such an emotional impact on so many Americans largely because a sizable minority of our national elected leadership apparently not only condones the riot, but is proud that it happened.
For those of us who are old enough to remember, January 6 felt like a further extension, and hysterically violent embodiment, of the conservative terrorism of the late ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, when countless American citizens on the “left” – African Americans (including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), Native Americans, labor leaders, religious crusaders, liberal teachers, anti-war activists, environmentalists, actors, directors, writers, poets, film makers – were hounded by extremist conservatives in programs like COINTELPRO that accused them of plotting with the Soviet Union against our national interests (which our former president actually did, under the guise of the Russian state, during the election of 2016), and of scheming to “alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.” Unlike the armed assailants and monsters of the terrorist mob this month, oppressed liberals, brutalized by insidious secret police tactics in the McCarthy era, were rarely if ever overtly violent.
Conservative domestic extremism was investigated by the Church Committee (the United States Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975. It produced a six-volume report that concluded, in part, that “groups and individuals have been assaulted, repressed, harassed and disrupted because of their political views, social beliefs and their lifestyles. … Unsavory, harmful and vicious tactics have been employed – including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials. … Governmental officials — including those whose principal duty is to enforce the laws — have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.”
The victims of this oppression didn’t do anything other than talk and think and make public their ideas. They didn’t storm Congress, injure and terrify people, they didn’t advocate the riotous disruption of government, they weren’t preparing to assassinate elected representatives, they didn’t constitute mob hell bent on insurrection and they weren’t led by a president who incited their paranoia and rage. The insurrection mob of January 6, and its high-powered leadership, instead turned much of the nation into victims of terrorist oppression and anxiety. The universal question in their wake is what will they stoop to next? What outrage will most of them get away with? How much damage will they inflict? How much of everyone’s life will they disrupt and endanger? What hypocritical claptrap will they use to excuse the inexcusable?
Hypocrisy is the hardest political vice to stomach. It runs now through the entire GOP agenda. Tax haters and government haters, for instance, have been engaged for decades in an assault on public education in the United States. With Christian nationalist, and Michigan Republican, Betsy DeVos running the Trump Department of Education, we saw more blatantly than ever the GOP’s belligerent insistence on overriding the First Amendment and working to “establish” religious, “Christian” schools, often with white supremacist leanings, on the same financial basis as public schools, paid for, subsidized in other words, by the taxpayer that conservatives pretend to champion!
Republicans want Congress to break with the First Amendment and act unconstitutionally by making forbidden tax laws “respecting the establishment of religion.” And so it goes in a nation in which almost half of its elected leadership places a higher value on blood sport of party politics and ideological loyalty than it does on honorable fair-dealing and the rule of law.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image derived from photo by Tyler Merbler)
One might wish this column weren’t so necessary. While I hate every new instance of having to speak Trump’s name, I believe we cannot emphasize enough how much we need to name and convict those who attempted to overthrow our government by violent means, starting with the instigator-in-chief. No nation can heal as long as the collective memory of its worst acts is ignored or erased. Nuremberg was absolutely necessary to correcting Germany’s Nazi turn. South Africa would not have survived as a multi-racial state without putting apartheid on trial. Multiple truth and reconciliation commissions throughout Latin America have been vital to salvaging integrity and dignity on that continent. As long as we fail to acknowledge and punish those who were willing to shred our democracy out of their own self-serving vengeance, we will be unable to move forward with anything resembling unity. Sadly, I know this second impeachment will fail in the Senate. Columns like this one remind us why that failure is so dangerous.
Thank you for continuing to share your Beautiful Mind.