Four Years After January 6th: Did We Learn A Damn Thing?
Last night, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing posted on Facebook about how glad he was to not be vaccinated. I asked if he was aware that hideous diseases like smallpox and polio were, in fact, eliminated by mass, mandatory vaccinations, and if he was excited for Mr. Trump to return to office so we could bring back those diseases, too. That’s not what he meant, he said!
This, of course, quickly devolved into him telling me that I was “sucking CNN’s dick” and that I was a “main stream liberal.” I don’t think either of those things are remotely true, of course! He later apologized for “getting so heated” but in the same sentence told me he feels bad for me for “how uninformed” I am. But it highlights an important part about where we’re at in the year of our lord 2025.The thing that’s fucked up is that I’ve hung out with this guy in person. He seemed like a nice guy. A decent guy, I might even say. A normal Michigan guy. A member of the working class that continues to be hosed– certainly by both parties, but certainly far more wantonly, openly, aggressively, by the Republican party, with its affinity for dismantling regulation, workers protections, and disincentives for greed, exploitation, and wage theft. But I digress.
The exchange overall highlights how far we’ve come since, well, once upon a time, we might have been universally horrified by what happened on January 6th, 2021: a terrorist insurrection against the American government.
I recall that we watched in horror as a house– via what was then a vaguely functional Twitter- the events of January 6th, 2021 unfold. My wife had work meetings all day and everyone was truly at a loss for words, somewhere between shaking their heads at the absurdity of it and being genuinely shook. I remember saying, “dang, they are gonna catch every single one of these people.” This turned out to be mostly true, a rare prediction W for me! But there are still unresolved threads. We still don’t know who placed all of those IEDs. Republicans– who fought the labeling of the event as a terrorist attack and largely sided with the terrorists– are evidently big mad about that.
Never mind that, you know, a number of Trump’s own cabinet and administration resigned in protest. Symbolically, since they had all of about 45 minutes before the changing of the guard. But a lot of those people were vilified by the GOP for challenging the King.
Even worse than the failure of law enforcement to catch the IED terrorists of January 6th, though, though? The fact that the orchestra conductors of the insurrection, ranging from Trump himself to associates like convicted criminals Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and should-have-been-convicted-in-a-functional-democracy Michael Flynn, not to mention accessories to stochastic terrorism like co-president Musk– are all, completely and positively, free as birds. Sure, the pawns in the event have spent, in some cases, years in prison– as many Americans feel they should. Also worse than this, arguably, is the fact that the mainstream media and even many Democrats seem to be acceding to the fascist agenda. John fucking Fetterman? Even Bernie Sanders? Et tu, bro?
Truly a strange timeline, and one that is inevitably going to get stranger.
But in the meanwhiles, some of us aren’t going to forget what happened on January 6th.
