Remembering the Insurrection

Save it from the Memory Hole

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want." ~Hannah Arendt

I’m not gonna pretend: today’s anniversary of the 2021 Capitol insurrection is thick with despair. The November election signaled the final success of Trump’s coup attempt and the lasting power of the Big Lie. While most of his fellow Republicans were horrified in the immediate aftermath of the bloody violence on that day, they failed utterly to eradicate his influence and were soon goose-stepping behind him, leaving millions of Americans without courageous leadership and subject to grifting right-wing influencers and a menacing MAGA army that besieged doubters of the Big Lie and flooded the zone with bullshit about FBI plants and Antifa.

Today, Trump celebrates it as “A Day of Love.”

The goal of this column when I started was to remind people that MAGA is not normal. It is a corrupt, racist, sexist movement, barnacled with con men and grifters, ultimately serving a borderless, nationless oligarchy that only pretends to care about the welfare of the people of the United States.

Today, every sign and signal coming out of Washington is that MAGA is being normalized. Journalists are fawningly interviewing the Trump players like they always do incoming administrations (see the political site Axios this morning treating chief of staff Susie Wiles like a hero general). The media barons continue to bend the knee. Over the weekend, the Washington Post refused to run a satirical cartoon showing its owner among other American billionaires and corporate chiefs supplicant to the Fat Man, prompting the cartoonist to quit. New York Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi spoke for what I am sure are many potential collaborationists when he urged his fellow Democrats to work with Trump for the good of the country because Americans are tired of “endless finger-pointing, nit-picking and daily battling” - a tactic that, has he not noticed, actually worked rather well for the Republicans!

We will get back to who we are one day, but we can’t if we forget what’s actually happened. The zone may be flooded with Bannon’s shit, but that doesn’t mean we must reject the evidence of our memories and our own eyes and ears, the totalitarian party’s final and most essential edict in Orwell’s 1984.

With that goal in mind, here are a few important links to preserve.

First: The Final Report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, here. It runs more than 800 pages and is a damning, fact-based record that reveals the scope and breadth of the coup. Download it because you never know what records might slip away in the tsunami of MAGA whitewash about to flood our collective information ecosystem.

A massive database linking to all the court cases, depositions, hearings, and discussions is preserved at the NYU Law School-affiliated online forum on security, democracy, and rights, Just Security, here. The organization has also preserved the testimony of almost 300 witnesses, lined up from A to Z, that the House committee managed to subpoena here.

These testimonies are no longer on the Republican-controlled House website - an ominous indicator of how Trump 2.0 will surely deep-six records of not only whatever he did in the first term, but the burgeoning kleptocracy of the next four years. But you can browse the actual words of quivering if ultimately unrepentant coup plotters and witnesses from Ali Alexander to a White House aide named Ziegler, who pleaded the Fifth throughout. Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka, the White House staff, female fascist auxiliary like Caroline Wren (one of the pearl and cashmere disguised Trojan Horses of the coup attempt, whose activities I covered for The New Republic here)… they’re all in there.

Finally, I recommend a film by Nick Quested who spent months before and on January 6 embedded with the fascist paramilitary Proud Boys, recording significant evidence that the coup was planned for months in advance with the involvement of the White House. (His material was so revealing and so damning that he was called to testify before the House committee.)

The documentary, 64 Days: The Insurrection Playbook, like most of the January 6 films, didn’t get wide release and isn’t being promoted by the big streamers. But you can watch it here and read my review of it here. At the premiere in Manhattan that I attended in the summer, Quested spoke of how the experience of January 6, 2021, left him so shaken that he was ill for weeks after. “Most shocking to me was that these groups said exactly what they would do, and then they did it,” Quested concluded.

I also recommend some of the writing published today: John Ganz here on the decisiveness of Trump’s success and David Frum here on the silencing and memory hole into which the Washington establishment wants to drop the coup now that it must do business with Trump 2.0.

I know it’s a bit of a dark Monday, what with the Arctic vortex bearing down and getting back to business after the long holiday, and the imminent approach to the event horizon of January 22, with a Pandora’s Box of hideous surprises and known vile plans to be released when the short-fingered hand comes off the Bible.

Hang onto your hats, wear your mittens, and get your flu and Covid shots! And keep the faith.

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