“Stop trying to make “fetch” happen, it’s not going to happen” is one of the best put-downs from the Tina Fey movie Mean Girls. “That’s not a thing!” is a Ross and Rachel classic quote from Friends. The Urban Dictionary defines “that’s not a thing” as a “phrase used to denote frustration with or to dismiss a concept or notion that either A.) Makes no sense B.) Is not widely known C.) Does not exist.”
Anyone reading the Washington Post for the past year, or the New York Times, or listening to any media personalities not on Fox News or further to the right, has seen an endless, increasingly desperate attempt to make January 6th ‘a,’ if not ‘the,’ “thing” for American politics.
First, let’s stipulate that the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, followed by the illegal entry, trespassing, vandalism, and general menace by a disparate mob, was very bad. Crimes were committed by various individuals, many of whom have had the book thrown at them so hard it cracked a spine. Shamefully, President Trump did much to encourage their behaviour, and that he did far less than he could have to stop the mob once their intention to go beyond peaceful protest was manifest. There is absolutely no excuse for that. The failure by federal and local authorities to secure the Capitol, and capital, from the rioters was shameful and a shocking professional dereliction of duty. To put it mildly, history will not judge any of them at all kindly.
However, anyone with a modest grasp of U.S. history can put January 6th in context. In 1786, Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays raised thousands of men in rebellion against high taxes. The rebels were put down by over 3,000 Massachusetts state militia, with lives lost and many injured. In 1794, another anti-tax uprising in Pennsylvania, the Whiskey Rebellion, was so fraught that it brought George Washington back into the field with over 10,000 militia ready to put it down. Then there was the ultimate insurrection, the Civil War, with over 600,000 killed to end slavery and save the Union. Since then, our history is replete with riots, bombings, and civil disturbances of all kinds, as well as daily tolls of civilian-on-civilian crime and shootings that no other country can match.
As a riot, January 6th didn’t rate high in terms of death and destruction. A variety of crimes were committed, by a range of perpetrators with differing motives and mental states. One person was killed, Ashli Babbitt, a sadly deluded young woman shot when trying to breach a closed door behind which the Capitol police were protecting others. Despite claims by Democrat politicians that four or more policemen were killed on the day, in fact none were. Officer Brian Sicknick died on January 7th after suffering two strokes. Four other officers died by suicide in the weeks after the riots. Sicknick’s death could reasonably be tied to January 6th, and perhaps one or more of the suicides were influenced by the experience, but to claim they all died in the riots is nothing less than lying for political gain. Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that the “terror attack” on the Capitol left “almost 10 dead.” Maybe, as in the Princess Bride, they were just mostly dead.
Meanwhile, the Major Cities [Police] Chiefs Association reported over 2,000 injuries to law enforcement in the summer of violent protests following George Floyd’s death in May 2020. At least twenty people, civilian and law enforcement, died as a result of violence related to riots that spring and summer. Small business owners all over American cities had their premises and stocks burned, looted, or vandalized. Estimates of insurance payouts exceed a billion dollars for property damage. Or as CNN called ludicrously it, “mostly peaceful protests.”
This past month, a man attempted to assassinate a supreme court justice, and more than 25 facilities run by people who oppose abortion and want to help pregnant mothers were vandalised, with hardly any coverage from the media outlets running January 6th stories all day.
Despite what the remnants of elite media are saying, conservatives understand that January 6th was bad. There is a small percentage of people on the fringe-right who believe that Trump won the election and that it was stolen from him by fraud, but the vast majority of Republicans understand the process and, if grudgingly, know that he lost. At the same time, they see flaws in the current election security setup in many states and want to fix them by requiring voter identification and drawing back some of the exceptional measures to make voting physically easier that were only brought in due to the Covid emergency.
Yet to Democrats and Joe Biden, any attempt at increasing election security, however well-founded, is “Jim Crow 2.0” and by definition racist. In the recent Georgia primary elections, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (yes, that guy) called the state’s 168% increase in early voting turnout “a testament to the security of the voting system” which “demonstrates once and for all that Georgia’s Election Integrity Act struck a good balance between the guardrails of access and security.” Meanwhile, perpetual sore loser Stacey Abrams decried a "narrative … congealing … that because lots of people turned out … that means that there is no voter suppression in Georgia." In other words, don’t believe evidence, if it doesn’t fit my worldview.
American politics is increasingly polarized today, but it always was an ugly game. January 6th was bad, not because of death or damage, but because the possibility was raised, for the first time in two centuries, that a free and fair election in the US might not lead to a peaceful transfer of power as the Constitution and our laws dictate. Frankly, for those of us with some geographical perspective, it felt a little Third World, and it might mark the start of a slow slide into something other than the more perfect union towards which we always thought we were progressing.
The George Floyd Spring of riots and violence in 2020 was also bad, not only because of the death and massive property damage, but because of the breakdown of law and order in some of our largest cities, and the open hatred of authority and law enforcement evinced by the rioters and their political allies. The lack of condemnation of the violence that occurred along with the peaceful protests, and the virtual media blackout compared to blanket coverage of January 6th, has made many people cynical and less likely to trust the preferred narrative of the currently dominant party and elites.
Last week on the Washington Post’s online front page were only headlines about January 6th, plus a video titled ‘Living in Delusion’ – referring to Trump’s state of mind during the events of January 6th, as described by witnesses. Way below all this were articles about gasoline being more than $5 a gallon and inflation being the highest in over forty years, both of interest to readers even of the Post. There was nothing, of course, about the record 239,000 illegal aliens caught at the border last month alone and then almost all released into the country as de facto new residents. Yesterday, Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote that “those ignoring the Jan. 6 revelations are guaranteeing more violence.” He blames Fox News for downplaying January 6th, although his own outlet has talked about nothing else for the past year. Meanwhile, his fellow Post writer Courtland Milloy writes about the daily shootings in Washington, a topic of more concern to readers than incessant coverage of congressional hearings.
Message to Democrats: stop trying to make January 6th happen. People have already made up their minds. You are not going to de-program the QAnon, Pizzagate crowd by browbeating and repetition. Mainstream conservatives, meanwhile, know what took place. They certainly don’t like it, they don’t want to see it again, and they might tell you that in private. Most of them respect men like Vice President Pence, Raffensberger, and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who despite being Republicans, bravely did their jobs and upheld the Constitution against attempts to strong-arm them into breaking the law. But telling Republicans about it incessantly isn’t going to make them either like you or vote for you. Endless hearings that end without criminal prosecutions - particularly of Trump on top of two failed attempts at impeachment - are crying “wolf” yet again and further alienating ordinary Americans from their political elite. If you shoot at a king, you can’t miss. And they did.
January 6th is a “thing” for Democrat party apparatchiks and leftist elites. For the rest of us, it’s Groundhog Day, but not a cool winter one in small town PA, but a hot, miserable one on a dirty city street somewhere in Washington in the summer.