Depending on your partisan political affiliation, today is either the anniversary of an honest to goodness insurrection against the United States government, or fake news designed to entrap over 1,500 patriots now hoping for a Trump pardon to alter the facts of history. It wasn’t always like this, and it’s easy to forget now that we are inundated with endless lies and distortions from Republicans of what really happened on January 6th, but the fact of the matter is that on January 7th, there was a pretty large consensus centered around the idea that what had just unfolded was beyond the pale, even on the far right with reactionary conservatives like Erick Erickson who once wrote a truly horrible blog arguing in favor of secession.
At the time, everyone, including Republicans, understood how bad it was. Then, brick by brick, they built a foundation of lies to justify doing what they know, deep down, to be wrong. Trump betrayed the country. And so do they.
— Sarah Longwell (@sarahlongwell25.bsky.social) January 6, 2025 at 6:21 AM
But like many things that are broken in politics these days, it began with the complete and utter fecklessness of the Democratic gerontocracy. In Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, reporters Karoun Demirjian from The Washington Post and Rachel Bade of Politico wrote that many Democrats were pushing hard to impeach Trump the day of the insurrection, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided against it. This was a classic example of Democratic leadership being afraid of exercising power and creating controversy, even though it was a total misreading of the room at the time. There was real Republican support for Trump’s impeachment on January 7th that was not there a month later when the Democrats finally got around to impeaching him.
In This Will Not Pass, a book from New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, they wrote that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called White House counsel Pat Cipollone during the Capitol attack and said “we’ll be asking for the 25th Amendment” if Trump did not call off the mob. They reported that Graham went on to say that “People will say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with that’ … There will be a rallying effect for a while, the country says: We’re better than this.”
We are in fact, not better than this, and Lindsey Graham and his party have conclusively proved that to be true. So have the Democrats, as their delayed reaction to the insurrection betrayed all their desperate fundraising pleas talking about how harrowing and important it was. If they really thought this, they would have impeached Trump as soon as possible, not a month later after giving Republicans time to close ranks and begin pushing a new lie as they acquitted Trump’s impeachment yet again.
January 6th proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the elite gerontocracy which runs the Democratic Party simply does not believe what they say when they tell their voters that Trump is an existential threat to America. Doing nothing in the immediate face of January 6th demonstrated that Pelosi was closer to the Oath Keepers’ belief that this was a peaceful protest than her fundraising e-mails asking you to help stop Trump from becoming King. She had a chance to get Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment and she passed it up. The January 6th saga was one of the best demonstrations you will ever see of how the Democratic Party is constitutionally afraid of a fight.
But the gerontocratic Democrats only have so much blame to go their way. Their lack of a response to the insurrection is par for the course on how they see everything, but the takeover of the Capitol and the subsequent whitewashing of it in every corner of American life, including the Supreme Court, is emblematic of how broken our informational ecosystem is and how much of that is a deliberate ploy by the GOP and its allies in the media and Silicon Valley.
Google runs on right-wing disinformation, as YouTube is objectively a Fox News-style propaganda outlet at this point. The Republican Party could not distort what happened on January 6th without the help of our fundamentally broken social media that monetizes misinformation. Lies and propaganda get elevated far above truths, and we live in a world where ProPublica can publish 500 videos taken by January 6th insurrectionists demonstrating how incredibly violent the “protests” were, but video proof of what unfolded now gets a fraction of attention that the lies elevated by Trump do.
Vice President Kamala Harris will certify Trump’s 2024 election victory today, marking January 6th as a date synonymous with Democratic defeat. In 2021, Democratic elites bucked the party’s wishes in favor of their eternal posture of cowering in a corner and hoping that someone else will punish the Republican Party for their sins, setting the table for Harris’s public humiliation today. The lack of a response to January 6th helped normalize Trump and paved the way to paint it as a Capitol tour and not an assault on people like former U.S. Capitol Police Sargent Aquilino Gonell, who wrote today in The Bulwark that “In Iraq, I had the expectation that at any moment I could be killed by the enemy. But on January 6th, that feeling was constant. It was the longest day of my life, with more than forty people assaulting me—individually and in concert with others—over the course of exhausting, harrowing hours, all because the person who had incited the mob and had the authority to send the reinforcements chose to watch the siege on TV.”
America has long been awash in right-wing disinformation and subtle coups to undo the New Deal coalition established nearly a century ago, but January 6th made those efforts to distort reality and overthrow democracy more overt than they have been in most people’s lifetimes. It revealed American “democracy” as a fundamentally broken system, where one party is led by people perpetually terrified to do their jobs, and the other is led by craven, corrupt autocrats willing to destroy anything their billionaire donors tell them to, and there is no democratic mechanism to punish one without rewarding the other. The Supreme Court, an unelected super legislature who awarded itself anti-democratic power that was not given to it in the constitution, demonstrated its fealty to GOP partisan hackery over the law by violating the 14th Amendment and declaring that a man who led an insurrection against the United States government was fit to lead it. America’s last chance to become a democracy may have come on this date four years ago, and everyone in power willingly passed it up so they could bend the knee to Donald Trump.
This post was originally published on here
