I get that we should prosecute the people who stormed the capital. But many of these people are so delusional and locked in the throws of a cult that we should really be focused on how they got here.
The Republicans and Fox News have been cultivating this base for decades. They didn’t care when many of them went down the rabbit hole as long as they could generate enough hate and fear in their minds to keep them agitated. Any conspiracy theory they could attach to their enemies was fine with them.
Well their chickens have come home to roost. They lost control of the base they’ve spent so much time working into a frenzy. Trump stole it 4 years ago and they’ve been placating him ever since in a desperate and futile attempt to get it back and stay in control. So yesterday the mob they created, on Trump’s direction, turned on them and infiltrated their castle ready to kill Mike Pence as much as Nancy Pelosi.
Many Republicans are still in denial. The base is gone. They have nothing to hold onto. Some Republicans seem to be waking up to this reality realizing this is over. A lot of people are saying this is the start of an even darker chapter. I’m not so sure.
Trump looked weak yesterday. He called for his mob to attack the capital but then he blinked. By mid-day he told everyone to go home. Not because he wasn’t fine with the violence, but because he was afraid, something in his warped mind told him he needed to stop this to somehow save himself. If he believed what he had been feeding his base he would have fought. He would have gotten on TV or whatever he had access to and called for the whole country to rise up. But he didn’t.
Revolutionaries aren’t remembered for backing down. George Washington didn’t say halfway across the Potomac “hey everyone, this is getting crazy, everyone should just go back home”. I think Trump lost many of the right wing extremists. And he definitely lost many of the purely delusional. Maybe not a ton, but more than we could have hoped for. His appeal is emotional and Trump looked weak, he felt weak, something was different. So now the base is up for grabs and the scramble to get them unified behind something or someone is on.
After the Bush disaster the mob went silent for a short while before they galvanized around the tea party. So we have a window to shut these guys down as well as Fox News and all of these peddlers of conspiracy and nonsense. I think we know what they can do know. How many Iraq wars? How many Trumps? How many of these costly schemes do we have to be subjected to before saying You know what Jim Jordan, and Mitch Mcconnell, and Sean Hannity, and all of you freaks. Fuck You and the horse you rode in on and get the fuck out of here. Seriously. The game is known and it’s time to end it. The last thing we need is them picking up the pieces, figuring out how to continue to delude all of these people and putting us right back here in just a few years.
I know, nobody thinks trials or commissions or tribunals or something can happen. I don’t know. People seem to be coming around to these ideas and these people are defeated today but they won’t stay down if there aren’t enough consequences to keep them down.