Ahh, January 6, what was it? What’s in a name? What’s anything really but an opportunity to rewrite history? January 6 is an excellent case study of how effective the right-wing disinformation apparatus is and how well the elected Republicans throughout our nation know how to wield it.
Now don’t get me wrong, misinformation and rewriting history is not new. Manifest Destiny anyone? But let’s bring it to this century because I find it fascinating that the beginnings of the disinformation apparatus we are living with today mostly got its legs helping the Bush administration lie us into invading Iraq. And then it perpetrated one of the greatest bits of revisionist history that we now take for granted today. And that is the idea that the Iraq war was a result of the greatest intelligence failure in American history. You hear that all the time. Only it wasn’t and just consider the ramifications of this purposely created construct. The reality is that the inner circle of the Bush administration conspired to invade Iraq and cherry-picked information to make it look like our best intelligence analysis viewed Saddam Hussein as a national security threat. It didn’t, the general assessment at the time, and you can look it up at least until all of history is scrubbed by the AI bots, was that Saddam posed no real threat to us and did not have weapons of mass destruction. So basically they got it right but for all of the past 22 years, the people who did their jobs had to listen to this bullshit about how they got it wrong. And the perpetrators that lied us into Iraq got to just walk away. Think of how demoralizing that has been but also think of all of the structural changes put in place to ensure that a failure that never occurred would never happen again, even though it never happened in the first place. Talk about mind games.
But what’s also interesting to me is that the disinformation apparatus that the Bush team expertly wielded at the time to invade Iraq has now turned its sights on our Democracy. Back then it was just in its infancy with a rag-tag group of talk radio hosts and a scrappy new cable station called Fox News, with its perfectly disingenuous tagline of “Fair and Balanced.” It’s kind of like why Kraft American Singles(™) used to say Food on the label, just to try to prove that it was actually food, it’s not of course, and now they say cheese product. I kind of love that about these corporations, all the people sitting in rooms wordsmithing this bullshit, consulting with lawyers just to try to fool people and make a buck. Think of what would happen if we could harness all of that energy and creativity for the good of all mankind. Yeah, I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. See the Lennon kick I’m on today?
But I digress. Let’s get back to Jan 6. I’ll keep this brief because anyone on the side of reality already understands this and anyone who isn’t won’t be persuaded that what they saw with their own eyes is actually the reality they’re being told to disregard. So Trump incited a riot at the capital that was meant to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes allowing Republicans the opportunity to enter alternative electors that Mike Pence would then certify. You can split hairs on the legal jargon, if you want to muck things up, but that was their plan. It only broke down because a) Trump blinked and he told everyone to go home instead of doubling down in the moment. And b) Mike Pence refused to go along, for whatever reason, we’ll probably never know why. He might have just been afraid.
If those two things hadn’t happened it’s very likely the election would have been decided by the courts. Would they have succeeded? I don’t know. Does it matter? It’s what they did, it’s what happened, and it’s clearly illegal and should disqualify every conspirator from holding elected office ever again. And for a very short period of about 24 hours, the right-wing disinformation apparatus, and those who wield it, stumbled around while they figured out how to best proceed. But within a day the seeds of rewriting history were cast out, that’s how the whole thing functions. People who know how it works wait for someone to say something that will stick and then they all start to latch on as winning ideas take hold. People started saying it was Antifa, then the FBI, that it wasn’t really a protest, there was a flood, a terrible earthquake, you gotta believe me! Oh, wait I fell into paraphrasing the tunnel scene of the Blues Brothers there for a moment.
Well, the House laid out its case and it was undeniable—by reality standards that is—in overwhelmingly proving that Trump was guilty. Mitch McConnell could have ended it the next day by calling for a vote in the Senate to convict him. But he didn’t, the votes were there to convict him, but McConnell chose to let Trump live another day.
In any case, we all watched what happened next. This one took a while, but a year later in 2021, a Quinnipiac poll showed that only 56% of Americans thought Trump was guilty of anything surrounding January 6. 78% of Republicans thought he should run for office again. Still, they had to spend the next two years calling into question what really happened that day. And by early 2024 it was clear they had convinced the majority of Americans that it was no big deal. It only took endless hours of podcasts, Cable News, Blogs and constant denials by elected Republicans, but they succeeded. Oh, and also the millions or billions of dollars of dark money funding that pays for all of these outlets. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of right-wing programming does pretty well, but there’s a reason why there’s so much of it. It’s very well-funded.
So today, at the capital where the crime took place 4 years ago, they will certify the electoral college vote and announce that the man responsible for directing a mob to disrupt the very thing that will happen today peacefully will be the next President of the United States of America. And with his election the largest criminal investigation in the history of the US will also end. Not only will Trump get away with it but he plans on pardoning people who were convicted. What will that do to the morale of the men and women in the DOJ who worked on those cases or the police who fought to protect the capital four years ago? Once again the Republicans and their disinformation apparatus will undermine the very institutions meant to keep us safe and our democracy healthy.
And once again, the bastards will have won, but don’t let them take reality away from you as well. Donald Trump incited a mob to try to steal an election and the entirety of the Republican party has colluded to cover it up. That happened, just because millions of your fellow citizens can’t see that anymore doesn’t change the fact that it really happened.