There is that famous line in the film A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessup tells Tom Cruise’s JAG lawyer “You can’t handle the truth!” Whatever passes for the truth these days seems hard for many people to handle; here we see Sen. Josh Hawley running for his life from it:
In the matter of the January 6 insurrection investigation, there has been plenty of evidence introduced that Donald Trump and others instigated and encouraged the activities of the insurrectionists, and that Trump sat mesmerized by the scene in a private room for three hours watching it unfold on television and refused to do anything to try to stop it. This indicates that he not only approved what was happening, but he hoped that they would do something thing like this; it massaged his ego to see that the power of his cult of personality drive people to such extremes. There is no doubt in my mind that the insurrectionists were in their minds doing the bidding of Trump. Did Trump give an actual “order”? Does it matter that if he gave one or not?
Now, the January 6 insurrection would simply have been unimaginable if there was not someone or someones in power who “told” the insurrectionists that what they were doing was not only “proper” but “legal.” I mean, didn’t both Trump and Richard Nixon tell us that if the president “does it”—whatever “it” happens to be—then it is not “illegal”? If the president tells a mob that he spent months inciting with election fraud conspiracies and itching for a fight to go the Capitol and do what is “necessary” to change the election result, what kind of people do you really expect to respond to this call? People who are willing to respond lawlessly and violently if they are given the impression that it is an “order.” Another person will tell us that the Constitution gives such people the right to act violently to overturn an election, and we’ll get to that individual shortly.
It is easy enough to see someone like Trump responding vicariously to the violence he was watching on television. That he refused to do anything about it immediately (and apparently the feeling was not “unanimous” among Trump’s inner circle about the need to intervene in the violence), says as much. But then there is that “gray” area where people want to quibble about what “advising” or promoting an action means, or how an “order” is done. But quibbling allows one to believe that the persons involved in the actual act of insurrection are merely crazed fanatics who cannot be controlled.
On the other hand, we have seen in the aftermath of the insurrection the people involved in it being “defended” for merely being the “victims” of a liberal “witch hunt,” which would also imply that those who promoted the wild conspiracies that instigated the violence didn’t do anything “wrong” either. That would include people like Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Thus it is no “surprise” to learn that two judges in Georgia have now ruled that Greene should not be disqualified for running for office merely for aiding and abetting the January 6 insurrection with election fraud conspiracies, which she repeated during her disqualification hearing in May; she didn’t technically “order” anyone to do it, and this is just another example of the cowardice to do what is needed to preserve democracy in this country: "The evidence in this matter is insufficient to establish that Rep. Greene ... 'engaged in insurrection or rebellion' under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution." Why “insufficient”? Because under oath Greene didn’t “recall” or “remember” anything of what she did leading up to and during the insurrection. Her violent rhetoric leading up to the insurrection had absolutely nothing to do with the violence that occurred that day.
It is thus easy to get away with inflaming people to violent action and deny that was ever their “intention.” What were people like Trump and Greene expecting these people to do but put “pressure” on Mike Pence and “yellow” Republicans in Congress? How do you think the insurrectionists defined “pressure”? On a far-right conservative outlet called Real America’s Voice, Greene all but explicitly endorsed the violence, proclaiming that BLM protests were much “worse” than the Jan. 6 “riot”—her word. She went on “And if you think about what our Declaration of Independence says, it says to overthrow tyrants.” How do you overthrow “tyrants”? If the law isn’t on your side, then how to do it? By “rioting”? And what is “rioting” if not a violent act? The intention of this violent act of rioting was an insurrection to the overthrow of the election, right?
Today, Greene is defending herself from being labeled a Nazi: "I am being attacked by the godless left because I said I'm a proud Christian Nationalist,” which of course is just a way to conceal what she really means, that she is a white nationalist. Back in the day, after the war most former Nazis involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity fell back on the claim that they were only “obeying orders,” and it is interesting to note that many January 6 insurrectionists defend their actions by insinuating that they were only acting on what they believed to be “orders.” But whose’ “orders”? I mean somebody had to be giving these people the idea that what they were doing was as “legal” as it was “necessary.” And who was that? It had to be somebody.
We know who those “somebodies” are, don’t we? Unlike in 1974 with the release of conclusive evidence from the Oval Office tapes that Nixon was directing the Watergate cover up, when Republicans with any sense of ethics and the law knew that it was over and Nixon had to go, it is entirely about partisan politics. In the divisive hyper-partisan environment that Republicans deliberately stoked over the past several decades, only 20 in all of the Senate and House thought that Trump bore any responsible for the insurrection. After all, he didn’t say “I order you to engage in a violent insurrection”—he just said “You know what I want you to do, so just do it with my blessings.”
Despite what some people are arguing, there really isn’t any real difference in the meaning of those two appeals, just as it didn’t matter if King Henry II gave a direct “order” to those knights to kill Thomas Becket or not; they knew that is what he wanted done at that moment. In many ways, the people who gave the “order” are much worse than those who obeyed it, and yet they are the ones who expect to get away with their crimes, unless the January 6 committee findings actually lead to criminal charges. The Wall Street Journal among other conservative newspapers are now editorializing that Trump is unfit to run for president again, but it may take an orange jumpsuit to insure that doesn’t happen again.
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