It has been a year since the unwarranted and thoroughly evil insurrection against the Capitol occurred.
“A mob breaking windows, kicking in doors, breaching the Capitol. American flags on poles being used as weapons, as spears. Fire extinguishers being thrown at the heads of police officers.
A crowd that professes their love for law enforcement assaulted those police officers, dragged them, sprayed them, stomped on them.“
“This wasn’t a group of tourists. This was an armed insurrection.
They weren’t looking to uphold the will of the people. They were looking to deny the will of the people.
They were looking to uphold — they weren’t looking to uphold a free and fair election. They were looking to overturn one.
They weren’t looking to save the cause of America. They were looking to subvert the Constitution.
This isn’t about being bogged down in the past. This is about making sure the past isn’t buried.“
From the text of President Biden’s speech today.
Like all Trump supporters, these were not decent people – they were, like the man they admire – worthless scum who have a terrible vision for this country. And the man who incited them to riot – and then sat laughing and did nothing while a coup took place in America – has to be made to suffer for his many despicable crimes. I’ve been clear about that since 2015. Donald Trump is evil and must be destroyed if we are to save the United States.
I get that there are people who are conservative. But no decent, “conservative” person can ever support Trump. He is the anthesis of what conservatism is supposed to be. And there were plenty of other people in 2016 who would have been far better.
No, it’s a free and conscious choice to embrace evil.
In one of the finest bits of writing I have seen him do to date, Jim Wright laid out for us the path of how we got here and what happened to the supposedly decent people who perpetrated this abomination upon the United States. This is because of the disappointment of watching people you used to respect slide down the path to anarchy.
And by and by, given the nature of social media, I reconnected to old friends, those very men I had once so admired, the ones who trained me in honor, duty, professionalism, and the skills to see the truth through chaos.
And I was horrified. …….
How did we get here? To this moment?
That’s how.
President Barack Obama.
Because the election of a young, dynamic, smart, educated, articulate, kind, compassionate, and funny liberal black man galvanized the foul racist mean underbelly of this country like nothing else ever had.
Those who attacked the Capitol a year ago today. They are in almost every regard, the antithesis of Barack Obama, mean, crude, uneducated, ill spoken, filled with rage and blind ignorant loud blustering false patriotism.
And those men I had admired? Those veterans I respected?
Like me, they were trained to be objective. To put aside their own bias. To demand proof. To require evidence. To check and doublecheck the information.
And they threw all of that away, all of it, when a black man took office.
They forgot everything they ever knew.
They forgot who they had been.
They watched Fox News all day and they lost their humanity. They lost their objectivity. Without the supporting structure of the military and the purpose it gave them and the impartiality our profession had imposed upon their worldview, they lost their very identity.
They became, literally became, different people.
It was horrifying. Like watching a loved one eaten alive by Alzheimers.
The entire post is a must-read because he lays out clearly how Trump capitalized on a symptom of the American sickness and exploited it. He did not create it, but he did harness it for evil. And those supposedly ‘moral’ men who mock others for their flaws and mistakes stood allied with the most flawed and evil man ever to surface in American society. They are, as Wright puts it, “Those who warp reality to fit their ideology [who] can never ever be trusted to tell the truth, or ever see it. ”
Like me and so many others, Wright has had the misfortune of watching this drama build over the last 16 years ever since the worthless slime calling themselves the Tea Party burst forth on the American scene.
The insurrection at the Capitol should never have occurred. It is a mark of Trump’s fundamental unfitness to be in American society, much less be President. Even now, with 700 of his followers arrested and clear cut evidence that the coup was more than a spontaneous event, he will not understand that.
His response to the President’s statement today showed how worthless he is.
Just go the fuck away.
What’s truly scary, however, is that he still – even after so many of his crimes and incompetence have been exposed – spouts The Big Lie. Unfortunately, so many of my fellow citizens cling to a twisted allegiance to him. One has only to look at the statements of prominent Republicans on this day to know the danger is still here. Perhaps greater than before. Because these people have abandoned any pretense of wanting to have a democracy.
We know this because rather than recognize how terrible Trump’s actions were before and during that day and work to make sure it never happens again, the GOP are gaslighting the rest of us with a fantasy version of what they think happened on January 6th. But, more importantly, they are working hard to build an apparatus to ensure that a future coup will succeed.
Despite blaring sirens and flashing lights, despite ever more visible signs of the fragility of American democracy, envisioning what America will become if we fail to prevent the next coup attempt is strangely, terrifyingly difficult. As my colleague George Packer argued recently, only by correcting this failure of imagination will we have a shot at crawling our way out of catastrophe. Those who seek to trample democracy in America have a coherent plan and are resolute in carrying it out. “They will certainly try again,” Barton Gellman wrote in his essential cover story about the coup attempt. “An unpunished plot is practice for the next.”
These worthless souls, these new Afrikaners, cannot be allowed to succeed in their efforts to build a one-party, apartheid-style state. In the post, Jim Wright clarifies that the time to be bold is now.
There is no compromise with those who would murder us for their own profit………If Merrick Garland can’t step up now and do what is necessary to defend democracy and the Republic, he needs to be fired with alacrity and we need to find us someone who isn’t afraid do what needs be done.
This is the moment, right here, right now.
This is the moment where history turns on a single sharp pivot and the very fate of civilization hangs in the balance.
And rarely — if ever — is that moment so clear while it’s happening as it is right now. THIS is history, this moment right here, and what we do in this moment is how history will remember us.
A century ago, Germany could not stop its slide to destruction and those people, the craven cowards and the innocent and the monsters alike, had to ride the horror all the way down.
But we have their terrible example before us and we don’t have to suffer the same fate.
We can stop it.
We can restore democracy and save The Republic.
But the time for half measures is long, long past. It is time now for bold action. This is our nation. This is our democracy. It’s worth fighting for and it’s time we take it back from these miserable sons of bitches and send them back to the fringe where their rotten ideology belongs.
He’s right.
“We can either be loyal to Donald Trump, or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both,“- Liz Cheney.