Yesterday we saw Donald Trump
addressing what was essentially a white supremacist “convention”—exhorting them
to march on the Capitol building, and put the fear of the Devil into Democrats
and “courage” into the spines of Republicans, to aid in his quixotic quest to
remain in office. These people were not “patriots,” they were a vile mob of
domestic terrorists joyriding on Trump’s fascist bus. Perhaps it was only “coincidental”
that police “guarding” the Capitol were understaffed and unprepared, but that
doesn’t excuse the fact that they allowed the mob to just walk through the
police line outside the building—which suggested that some of them were in
“sympathy” with the mob.
Once the mob gained entry into the Capitol, they did not behave like mature adults with real concerns, but like frat boys in a beer-soaked party. If they were “serious” about their complaints, maybe they would have just gathered together in the rotunda and started chanting “stop the steal”; instead, they just rampaged the halls with Trump and Confederate flags, committed vandalism and theft, and posted pictures of themselves sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s desk. These people didn’t care about maintaining the rule of law and democracy; they just showed us what happens when the rule of law and democracy is undermined by a president who has never respected either—rather seeing both as the “enemy” in his ongoing battle against being viewed as a “loser” in business, politics, and as a human being.
Since then, we have seen some Trump supporters scurrying around like rats on Trump’s sinking ship, and others deciding to get out while the getting out is still good. After the mob had been cleared out, Sen. Lindsay Graham announced that he had tried to be friends with Trump and support him through thick-and-thin, but after the attempted insurrection, he exclaimed “Count me out. Enough is enough.” This is a man who had called Georgia’s secretary of state on Trump’s behalf to “persuade” him to criminally overturn the vote. But apparently it is true that a picture tells a story, or a thousand words. People try to hide behind their silence, or claim words are not the same as deeds, but the actual visual evidence that words do really mean something is a truism that even a sycophantic supporter like Graham could not face. Still, we must give “credit” where credit is due, since there were others, like Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and most of the Republicans in the House, who decided to go down with the ship instead of supporting democracy and the rule of law.
You have to know that William Barr is only too happy not having to be around to “explain” why he did nothing while the seat of the nation’s democracy (Trump’s White House certainly isn’t) was under siege by an attempted coup orchestrated by the “boss” he had for two years sought to make more dictatorial and more immune from accountability. Meanwhile, Chad Wolf suddenly remembered that immigrant children in cages were not his only area of “concern” as head of “Homeland Security,” and actually had the gonads to call on Trump to denounce the domestic terrorists he had personally sent out on a search and destroy mission. An hour after this unforgivable act of disloyalty, Trump withdrew Wolf’s nomination as permanent head of the DHS, which was just as well, since a Democratic-controlled Senate is not going to approve him anyways, and because he has been ruled to be illegally holding his position in the first place is the least of the reasons.
Meanwhile, Fox News doesn’t know what direction it wants to go on after the attempt to overthrow democracy by the very people it has provided sustenance to on a daily basis. On “Fox & Friends” MAGA fanatic Pete Hegseth defended the mobsters, claiming that their actions only exposed “what the left has done to this country”—and not, say, Trump. Brian Kilmeade, who the day before was still giving credence to election conspiracies, was today asserting that “Since November 3, or when we got the verdict by November 5, the president’s behavior has been terrible”; naturally he didn’t mention the fact that all of this could have ended very quickly had not he and most of the rest of the Fox News crew been sycophantedly supportive of his election fraud conspiracies for the past two months.
Fox News was also promoting human superspreader Rep. Matt Gaetz's conspiracy theory that antifa had "infiltrated" the rioters and were the real party responsible for the violence. But this was debunked by a facial recognition software company that stated that it had actually identified two neo-Nazis and a QAnon supporter, and by the right-wing newspaper The Washington Examiner, which quoted a right-wing journalist and "expert" on antifa and BLM, who said that antifa was not equipped to coordinate such a mass protest, and there had been no Internet "chatter" about any involvement in the protest.
An Examiner reporter at the scene also tweeted that “I didn’t see any BLM or antifa all day and I’ve walked through the crowd a few times.” But Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity kept peddling that conspiracy theory, and I know that I am going to be asked "what about that?" in the next letter from my Fox News addict family member.
Then there was Tucker Carlson, hypocritically trying to put a “human” face on the insurrection, putting the focus not on the action of rioters but on the woman who was shot and later died; Carlson didn’t mention that she had been in the military for 14 years, was identified by family members as a pro-Trump fanatic, and this happened because she refused police commands to stop trying to break through a door. If anyone was truly responsible for her death, it was the person who said the following:
Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. Today I will lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election, and we won it by a landslide. This was not a close election. I say sometimes jokingly, but there’s no joke about it, I’ve been in two elections. I won them both and the second one, I won much bigger than the first. By the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It’s a disgrace. There’s never been anything like that…Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun. My fellow Americans for our movement, for our children and for our beloved country and I say this, despite all that’s happened, the best is yet to come…So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give…But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
Unfortunately, even the “strong” Republicans were forced to flee this effort to instill “pride and boldness.” Yes, Trump did provide these thugs the “go-ahead” to create havoc, but it is also a fair question to ask in light of what did happen is did Trump unleash forces that even he cannot completely foresee or control. Thus the danger of Trumpism is not just the man himself and his completely irresponsible behavior, but the violent mob mentality that he nurtured and unleashed, and will likely survive him no matter if a prison cell is his next destination.
Another concern is if the “Trump media” has learned anything from this, and for the most part, the answer is probably a resounding “NO.” It will claim to oppose violence “in all its forms”—but mostly the “liberal” variety—and continue to irresponsibly promote the kind fake “socialist” and racist conspiracies that feed into ignorant fears and paranoia, and lead to actions by such elements as we have just witnessed, and may only be "grounded" for a day for not behaving like good little—what did the tone-deaf Ivanka Trump just call them? “American Patriots”?—but otherwise are still a loved part of the “family.”
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