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Juggernaut to the Jugular: J6, Rolling Around Again [1]
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Date: 2023-12-29
Bloody-handed but unbowed, the relentless, ruthless party of the Roger Stone Age prepares to ring in the third anniversary of its win-or-coup-on-parade with still more self-aggrandizing, history-twisting pain in the neck. Lest we ‘forget,’ on 1/6/21, Trump-aligned militant Zach Rehl snarled “Civil war started.” Capitol raider Kevin Seefried brandished a Confederate battle flag. As if Dixie slave lords had thrown the Boston Tea Party, some Capitol-crashers styled themselves revolutionary ‘patriots’ (what a joke).
On we go. Year after year, the once-proud “Party of Lincoln” OFFICIALLY paints its savage, barely failed coup as “legitimate political discourse.” As if to cater to such ongoing sedition, even most “liberals” soft-pedal the GOP’s search-and-destroy foray as a “riot.” So, here we go again. Not unlike some drunkard’s Kenworth W900 shearing away “guardrails” that supposedly keep us safe, the party of Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Nick Fuentes now casts hard-right nation-wrecking as sacred, fine, and good.
Polls show widespread complacency (if not approval). Meanwhile, even long-time (now ex-) Fox stalwart Chris Wallace resolves the democracy-fragging, in-your-face, un-American sedition that Trumpism hath wrought. That is to say, even the former colleague of Tucker Carlson can make out the perfidy that pervades the pols and hacks who revel with the bison-horned bozo who dubs himself “Shaman.” The lunacy that smears police for having picked on poor, innocent domestic terrorists. And yes, the wickedness that wages the slow-moving blitz that Wallace makes bold to throw in the face of the now disgraced (and legally exposed) Ronna McDaniel (see “That IS What You Said!,” Mediaite 7/15/23).
As Wallace suggests, McDaniel prevaricates and obfuscates with Trumpian fluidity. What a shock. And here’s the thing. Where falsehood flies, numbers are the tip of the iceberg. For years, the Washington Post tallied what it called Trump’s “false statements” by the tens of thousands. But (as Stalin points out) big numbers tend to become dry stats. Rarely if ever has the Post conjured with the ramifications of Trump’s Mussolinian mendacity- for instance, in terms of psychiatrist/author M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie. (That 1983 bestseller finds that bigwigs who fib all day long aren’t just naughty-and-nice-and-Christmasy. Nope. Not to put too fine a point on it, they’re flat-out, fascistically EVIL.)
Who knew? Well, eight years and some months after pundit/professor/author Ruth Ben-Ghiat began to point out (based on mountains of evidence) that Trump was evincing “the strong man’s playbook,” Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan now divines that a Trump dictatorship has grown “inevitable.”
Wow. Who could have foreseen THAT?
Hmm. Come to think of it, 16 days BEFORE J6, the Post’s own Pulitzer laureate cartoonist Ann Telnaes showed no small prescience by drawing Big Blonder shouldering a parrot yawping “COUP! COUP! COUP!” Inexplicably (especially in terms of the meritocracy we plainly need to survive as a nation), Telnaes’ profile in WAPO’s print edition has not skied, but plunged. (Sad.)
As “Gaslit Nation” podcasters Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa have beaten their gums to a pulp pointing out, the prevailing paradigm of ‘see/hear/speak/write/draw/print/broadcast no evil’ has not served us well. For their part, on 1/5/21, they unveiled their right-on-the-money “Capitol Attack Preview Special.” Granted, disappearing our Cassandras may feel good. Trouble is, it gives free rein (if not reign) to impending hails of misinformation that look to conduce to what Mike Huckabee openly calls “bullets” not “ballots.”
As John Lennon used to say, “Happy New Now.” But let’s not kid ourselves. With J6 widely normalized (and with Trump’s channeling of Hitler playing well in Peoria), the culmination of years-if-not-decades of appease-not-oppose looms YUGE.
Just saying. While we still can.
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