When people of my generation were in college, the bedeviling question, asked in myriad different ways, had to do with defining the difference between fact and opinion. The general rule of thumb was that a fact could be verified as being true. If a fact couldn’t be verified, it couldn’t be true. The question came down to what is “verifiability?” The answer was emphatically that it was not a subjective opinion or an assertion of bias. It was something substantiated by evidence, which could itself be verified.
These thorny matters came to mind again watching the hearings of U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capital. From my point of view here in New Mexico, the committee’s revelations displayed a range of evidence-based, undeniable facts that the rioters, President Trump and much of his White House staff had broken laws that forbid any attempt to overthrow the government of the United States.
Watching the hearings, it also became clear to me that I hold the opinion that if Trump and his cohorts had behaved as they did in the McCarthy era, they would have been carted away by federal marshals for committing acts of treason, “seditious conspiracy” and attacking the rule of law that undergirds the government of the United States. And I share another opinion with many people — that if the January 6 rioters were advocating for Black Lives Matter, economic justice for Latino farm workers, equality under the law for people in the LGBTQ+ community, the preservation of Roe v. Wade, or other liberal and environmental causes — the powers that be today would have carted them off and punished them mercilessly.
Could it be true that Trump and his supporters have so far sidestepped meaningful punishments because they belong to our nation’s dominant culture and gender class? Of course it could. Could it be that federal authorities are so intimidated by the conservative propaganda machine that they fear courts of law will somehow turn their carefully compiled evidence into useless trash? Is it possible that Trumpian appointees still hold sway in the Department of Justice? Could it be that inequality in our country is so ordinary and ingrained that a rich white male who suffered a clear electoral defeat could incite a riot, conspire to create illegal schemes to keep himself in office and get away with it?
Despite such possibilities, what seems to me to be an irrefutable fact, and not an opinion, is that the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 broke the law outlined in the US Criminal Code, Chapter 115 pertaining to Treason, Sedition and Subversive Activities.
Those are four words I hate to use. They have been aimed maliciously for decades by conservatives at liberals and progressives to bully and intimidate them for holding their political views. Teachers, poets, actors, dramatists, directors and environmentalists of all races and genders who were accused of disloyalty suffered terribly in the 1950s and 1960s in the McCarthy era. They were denied jobs, blackballed from industries and threatened with charges of contempt of Congress if they didn’t “name names” and become accomplices of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Senator Joe McCarthy and other conservatives who were indignant that their status and privilege was under attack by those with liberal political views.
A member of my family was gray listed in the McCarthy Era, for making a Christmas record that was sold to raise money for Russian war relief before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. He was called a “premature anti-Nazi sympathizer.” He was banished from his profession and didn’t work for three years. His morale was crushed and his reputation tarnished. These miseries were brought upon him, and his family, by powerful people who purposely confused their bias and opinion with the illusion of facts. In truth, he had done nothing disloyal at all. He’d just tried to help in some small way a war-weary people who were soon to become our allies.
The fact is that none of the people hounded in the 1950s by HUAC or McCarthy ever stormed the Capitol Building. They never threatened to lynch the Vice President of the United States, never brought loaded weapons into the halls of Congress, never beat police officers to death or instigated any kind of violence whatsoever. But HUAC and McCarthy treated them like people guilty of treason and charged them with harboring intentions to violently overthrow the government of the United States. None of those liberals, it goes almost without saying, ever conspired with the leader of our Cold War adversary to fix an American election, like President Trump has done with Vladimir Putin.
The January 6 rioters gave us a picture of what a violent overthrow of our government might actually look like, complete with legal shams, phony claims of constitutionality and propagandistic maneuvering to make violence seem like protected political speech. We all saw it with our own eyes the very moment it was happening. We verified it with our experience. Now, because of the hearings, we know the President of the United States was willing to give his Vice President over to the mob when the VP refused to take unconstitutional actions and overturn the Electoral College vote that verified Joe Biden’s election victory. If Pence hadn’t resisted pressure from Trump, some 78 million Americans who voted for Biden and not for Trump would have been blatantly disenfranchised.
The January 6 hearings are making it completely clear that President Trump and his people had planned a violent coup, plain and simple.
Here’s what the U.S. criminal code has to say about trying to overthrow the government. I don’t consider this an opinion. You can verify the fact by reading Section 2381 of the code. It says, in part, that whoever “owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them, or gives comfort and aid to its enemies, shall be guilty of treason,” suffer death or imprisonment or fines, and “shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”
President Trump took a vow to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Instead of doing that on January 6, he spurred on those who were, in effect, levying war against the Congress of the United States, admonishing them to overturn a constitutionally sanctioned and certified election after having, himself, consorted with Vladimir Putin to undermine through misinformation the electoral chances of Joe Biden, Putin having at is disposal thousands of nuclear missiles still aimed at this country. None of Trump’s actions can be construed as preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution. He should never be allowed to hold high public office again. And yet there is every indication that he is running for the presidency in 2024.
The criminal code also forbids “seditious conspiracy.” It reads, “If two or more persons in any State or Territory … conspire to overthrow, put down, to destroy by force the Government of the United States … or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, delay the execution of any laws of the United States” they have committed a federal crime. That is a direct description of what Trump, many of his staff, and the insurrectionists did January 6. The same holds true for “whoever incites … assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States.” They’ve committed a federal crime. Section 2385 of the federal criminal code says “whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States” has committed a federal crime.
The violence on January 6 was committed by those who attempted to overthrow our government by attacking its most fundamental constitutional practice and custom — the orderly transition of presidential power. I don’t see how there could be any other viable interpretation of what they did that day. For me it is a verifiable fact, not a mere political opinion. Imagine what would have happened to such conspirators in the Watergate Era. They’d still be rotting in jail.
Something dangerously scofflaw, enormously arrogant and dismissive has overtaken the political culture of the United States and along with it the thinking processes of millions of Americans who with malice and vitriol embrace opinion as fact and disregard fact, claiming it is mere opinion. Granted, Americans have always been deeply polarized politically. Conservatives still think Roosevelt was “a traitor to his class.” Liberals still think Nixon was an anti-Semitic, witch hunting crook hiding behind the great seal of the President of the United States. Those opinions will change only as the generations advance.
But now one has to wonder if the country is suffering some kind of political and moral derangement where truth, reality, decency and civility have been tipped over like so many jars full of marbles that are bouncing all over the floor. It is entirely possible that our consumer culture with its ubiquitous system of commercial propaganda, emotional manipulation and intellectual sleight of hand has polluted our already polarized political culture in such a way that all considerations of what is fact and what is opinion have been obscured beyond the capacity of critical analysis and the various processes of validation and verification that most of us rely on. And yet establishing fact over opinion is the only hope for us as a country with a realistic promise of a democratic, anti-fascist future.
To overcome the malice of the moment, we are required to constantly engage in the exploration of the difference between fact and opinion, in hopes of “peeling off” more and more people who have come to their senses, conservatives and liberals alike, who refuse to be intellectually hog tied by propaganda and are willing and increasingly capable of thinking clearly for themselves. This truly is a time when nullius in verba must become a primary operating principle of all thinking people who believe in the rule of law. We all have to do the research for ourselves.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image from ABC World News Tonight and edited by Rob Olivera)
Everything you say here, V.B., is true. And the implications are not only terrifying, but represent a shift in US political culture that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. We have relinquished the important separation of Church and State that was long our signature politic. We have allowed mafia-type politicians to make the unthinkable acceptable. When Nixon organized the Watergate break-in and then lied about it, it cost him the presidency. As Congress presents an airtight case of Trump’s organization about the January 6th attack on the Capitol, the mastermind is no longer president. He cannot be forced to resign. But his power and influence remain frighteningly intact. A large part of the electorate still looks to him for voting instruction. Last week’s outrageous Supreme Court decision that turns 64 million women into “handmaidens” is a result of his impact on the Supreme Court. The great tragedy of these hearings–and others–is that, despite the overwhelming accumulation of evidence presented against the perpetrators, those perpetrators will not be punished. A political system that has long been a model of democratic justice is broken. We who care about the future of our nation must find other ways to organize and stop the descent into fascism. I am not advocating for violence, which would only mimic our enemy’s modus operandi, but for new and creative directions of struggle. If we let them win, our children and grandchildren will find themselves in a country where tyranny is the norm.
I liked the country I thought I grew up in – I wonder if it ever existed.