January 6

The best comedies always begin on a note of solemnity. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid opens with an unwed mother driven to abandon her newborn. Buster Keaton’s The General opens with news arriving in Marietta, Georgia, that the South has fired on Fort Sumner and the Civil War is on. Thus did Congressman Bennie Thompson open Thursday's January 6 Pageant with a solemn story about the "conspiracy to thwart the will of the people," in which an insurrection "put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk." He was followed by the even more solemn Liz Cheney, who promised a thrilling line-up of testimony that will prove beyond the shadow of a sunspot that Donald Trump planned the whole thing. Well, maybe so.

One of my kids is studying law, and I've read a bit over her shoulder as she preps for exams. Two critical things stand out. First, unlike in literature, words in the law have very specific meanings (lie, fraud, possess, assault). And second, intent matters quite a bit. That latter part is very important because people say things all the time they do not mean, such as "If Joe in Sales misses that deadline, I'm gonna kill him." No one's life is actually in danger, we all understand. Misunderstanding words when you pull them out of a conversation and try to bring them to court, and determining intent based on what you "believe," are at the root of the ever-growing string of failed legal actions against Donald Trump (there are some 19 still pending).

Recently, money was extracted from the taxpayers at gunpoint to create a PBS puff piece about Nancy Pelosi. Called "Pelosi's Power," the documentary is more or less what you'd expect: Pelosi comes off as a strong if sphinxlike figure surrounded by idiot men who can't seem to stop slipping on banana peels and starting riots. Her infamous 2009 lies about waterboarding, her bizarre slandering of her own hair stylist — all of it gets overlooked in favor of the usual "you go, girl!" narrative reductionism. Yet there is one thing about the piece that holds up well: its title. Whatever else can be said about Nancy Pelosi, she knows how to wield power. And little wonder, given that she grew up in Baltimore's Little Italy neighborhood where her father was a political broker.

In February 2021 the FBI indicted L. Brent Bozell IV for crimes committed during the Capitol riot. The significance of Bozell’s presence in the rabble that broke into the Senate chamber was not lost on the media. “Mr. Bozell’s father is a high-profile right-wing activist known for infusing his politics with Christian values,” the New York Times mentioned in its write-up of the arrest. And Bozell’s grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., had been William F. Buckley Jr.’s debate partner, Joseph McCarthy’s and Barry Goldwater’s ghostwriter, the founder of Triumph and organizer of the first anti-abortion protest in the United States. Liberal critics traced the arc of the American right from Bozell Jr.

For a party that claims it wants to move on, the Republicans are doing a remarkable job of turning the national spotlight back onto one of the worst days in their history. Last week, the GOP returned to its circular firing squad, issuing a statement that censured Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, the only two Republicans serving on the House January 6 Committee. At the same time, it suggested that the actions of rioters who stormed into the Capitol constituted “legitimate political discourse.” Such a statement from a national political party is unusual. Almost as unusual as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issuing a rebuke of his own party apparatus.

The latest improbable Democratic champion, Representative Liz Cheney, just about said the quiet part out loud: her January 6 Committee has the singular goal of pre-defeating Trump ahead of any voting in 2024. As it becomes clearer that the Committee is failing in its propaganda campaign to get Republican power brokers to dump Trump, and as it is near crystalline that the Committee will not find evidence leading to formal prosecution of Trump for sedition, treason, or insurrection, they are getting desperate. The latest? Purposefully misinterpreting an obscure phrase from a post-Civil War constitutional amendment.

I hate these people. I hate them for who they are and for what they are doing. And most of all I hate them for the larger thing they are a part of. The people I hate call themselves sedition hunters. They give themselves war names glorified by a liberal press, like Deep State Dogs and Capitol Terrorists Exposers. What they do, as a sort of Orwellian hobby, is identify people who participated in the January 6 Capitol riot. They spend their days slithering around the internet looking for evidence that can put a name to a press photo and then turn over what they find to the FBI in the hope that the feds will play Sturmtruppen to their Gestapo and kick some doors down. They turn neighbors in to law enforcement as a hobby.

Despite the best efforts of the media, the Democrats, and Liz Cheney, the Capitol protests of January 6 refuse to lodge themselves in the public consciousness as a nightmarish enormity. According to The Narrative, it was an “insurrection” that was worse than 9/11, worse than Pearl Harbor, the worst attack on “our democracy” since the Civil War. Yet almost no one believes that. Why? Because at the end of the day, the rambunctious events of January 6 were nine tenths theater, one tenth tragedy. Tucker Carlson was right. It was a protest that “got out of hand.” That fact is slowly crystalizing as the official narrative begins to crumble. The other day, I wrote a column lamenting Ted Cruz’s comments at the Senate hearings on the January 6 protest at the Capitol.

It’s often said that memory is a fickle thing. Today, that fickleness has become a danger to the republic. If you turned on any of the major news networks over the past week, with the possible exception of Fox News, you’d have seen wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol building. What’s concerning about this is all the misplaced lamentations. The travesty of the day was not the riot itself, though the assault was obviously horrific and a symbol of America’s democratic backsliding into an illiberal abyss. But the rampage was never an actual existential threat to the United States government and calling the attack an “insurrection” isn't accurate.

The one-year anniversary of the January 6 riots unfolded in a manner as dramatic as it was predictable. The Pearl Harbor and 9/11 comparisons were uttered before noon — not by some media hack on MSNBC, but by our own vice president. Democrats, led by Speaker Pelosi, stood on the steps of the Capitol adorned with face masks and holding fake candles to hold a prayer vigil. At one particularly bizarre point during the day’s ceremonies, Pelosi introduced playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, who in turn introduced cast members from his hit musical Hamilton to sing a virtual rendition of "Dear Theodosia.” If that last sentence confuses you, don't worry: I’m also not sure exactly what I just wrote.

Cockburn realized this January 6 commemoration stuff was serious when he saw that even Lin-Manuel Miranda found time in his schedule to put in an appearance at the Capitol today. Actually, who knows if he was free? Miranda, the creator of Hamilton and high priest of Obama-era cringe, delivered a pre-recorded message to the American people and performed, with other cast members from the show that made him famous, the song “Dear Theodosia.” You might be wondering whether this struck the right tone for what was Cockburn was told was going to be a somber commemoration of one of the darkest days in American history.

The thing about an annus horribilis is that eventually it's supposed to end. Yet this has not been the case with 2020, which incidentally, according to the Chinese calendar, was a Year of the Rat, proving that the universe can be just a bit too literal sometimes. Dashed were the hopes that 2021 would be a fresh start, that the endless problems of 2020 would dissolve into the ether like so much smoke at a mostly peaceful protest. Instead this year began like it was going to be even more 2020 than 2020 was. Six days into 2021 and we'd already suffered an event so jarring that it's now denoted by just a date.

Cockburn is eagerly anticipating a number of clashes in the 2022 midterm elections in under a year's time. Chief among them is the battle Congresswoman Liz Cheney faces with Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman to hold onto Wyoming's sole seat in the House of Representatives. So how is the incumbent presenting herself to her voters? Cheney has sought to bolster her reputation as "the Last Honest Republican in Washington," by periodically challenging former president Donald Trump in TV appearances with NBC, CBS and Fox News's friendlier faces — Bret Baier and freshly departed Sunday host Chris Wallace. But most significantly, she has raised her national profile through her role as vice chair of the January 6 committee, upon which she and Adam Kinzinger are the only two Republicans.

The idea that what happened at the Capitol of January 6 was an “insurrection” was always a ridiculous and malevolent exaggeration. The passage of time has exposed that politically motivated lie and sent the rats scurrying for alternative explanations. Right on cue, we find a hobbyhorse leftist taking to the pages of the Washington Post — Jeff Bezos’s onshore publicity organ for the Democratic Party — to warn us against calling the protest at the Capitol an “insurrection.” The memo to Scribes and Pharisees has gone out. It’s no longer an “insurrection.” It’s been rebaptized a “sinister” act of “vigilantism.

Last night was Liz Cheney’s breakout moment. As Cheney read the various text messages from various Fox News luminaries and Donald Trump Jr. to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, she milked the moment, lingering over memorable phrases such as "he’s got to condemn this shit ASAP." And yet Sonny boy's plea was ignored. The old man reveled in the feculent mayhem. Once seen as a neoconservative ogress, Cheney has now achieved full redemption, morphing into the darling of the mainstream media for her refusal to dismiss the mob on January 6 as a bunch of tourists who had accidentally strayed into the Capitol. This is Cheney’s High Noon.

John Eastman, a former member of Donald Trump’s legal team, has just declined, through his attorney, to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the events of January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. I think he was right to do so, for several reasons. In the first place, the congressional inquiry would be better named a congressional vendetta. Its composition is heavily weighted towards Democrats. The committee includes no “ranking members” of the opposition as the rules stipulate, hence the frequent invocation of the “Star Chamber” in descriptions of the inquiry. It is less an investigation than an inquisition.