History is Rhyming Again

     If the Qanon/election vigilante faction had an official motto other than the idiotic, "Stop the steal," it would be, "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers."

     As I've said several times before. it would be so easy to laugh off these Bozos as just that. Clowns. They took the pains to hide their faces like the terrorists they are, yet bragged about their exploits on social media. They simultaneously said there was no insurrection then it was carried out by the police/FBI/antifa/BLM as a false flag. They screamed they wanted to hang Mike Pence and shoot Nancy Pelosi yet squealed with indignation when Ashli Babbitt got fatally shot.

     But they interrupted and delayed for several hours a pro forma yet still constitutional function of the federal government: The quadrennial joint session of Congress following a general election year in which the bicameral Congress certifies the electoral college results.

     The rioters somehow breached the Capitol building despite a large police presence of DC's two departments: The Capitol Police and the DC Metropolitan Police. They'd actually entered both the House and Senate chambers while police helplessly stood by and watched them do so. They came within 60 seconds of laying hands on Mike Pence. It was like watching a fight break out on a hockey rink while the referees merely watched it play out.

     They occupied the Capitol building for 45 minutes before order had even begun to be restored. And to think, just a decade ago, the right wing collectively lost its shit during the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite the fact that the trading floor wasn't occupied for a nanosecond, nor was any white shoe Wall Street firm nor was trading in the pit interrupted in the slightest. Not a drop of champagne was spilled.

     Yes, many of the rioters are fucking idiots, to judge by their ridiculous rationales for being there and their helpful attempts to incriminate themselves in a dizzying plethora of ways. But some of them meant business and they had help, some of it coming from right wing members of Congress.

     Jim Clyburn's office, very difficult to find even to veterans of the Hill, was raided. The Senate parliamentarian's office was destroued worse than any other office. That was where the electoral college results were stored in three mahogany boxes. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley's panic button system was ripped out from under all the desks before the riot had even begun.

     Mikie Sherrill, congresswoman from New Jersey-11, said on a Facebook Live one week after the insurrection that she knew which Republican members of Congress were giving guided tours the day before the riot. She said she would name names and we're still waiting to hear them but we can guess they would be of some of the usual suspects.

     We're also still waiting to see the security videos of the Capitol on January 5th so we can learn for ourselves which Republican Congressmen were helping the rioters do their recon.

     As the old saying goes, history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.

     We'd just gotten over a two year-long pandemic, the Spanish Flu that came and went in four waves, and then immediately after. we saw the rise of the KKK. We'd just emerged from a war and there were the first stirrings of dissatisfaction ranging from compensation to those veterans to jobs to racial unrest that had seen its hideous apotheosis in the Tulsa riots that saw the slaughter of hundreds of African Americans. A virulent racist, Woodrow Wilson, had just left the White House.

     Stop me if this starts to sound familiar.

 

     Just five years after Wilson left office on March 4, 1921, tens of thousands of Klansmen, in a wide column that stretched further than the eye could see, proudly marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, arrogantly taking full advantage of their constitutional right to freedom of speech. Just a decade later, we saw the rise of a frighteningly large American Nazi party that just as arrogantly held a rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939.

     In both DC and Manhattan, they had the full protection of the local police.

     Again, stop me if this starts to sound familiar.

     The most racist and anti Semitic factions had full police protection while we convicted Eugene V. Debs under the Sedition Act and sent him to federal prison for making an antiwar speech urging people to resist the draft. I guess his constitutional rights to free speech didn't matter very much. For good measure, Wilson the racist called Debs "a traitor to his country."

     Debs was sentenced to a decade in prison and disenfranchised for life. The Capitol rioters, not one of whom being charged with violating the Sedition Act, are getting slapped on the wrists with sentences or probation in terms of weeks and months. Their right to vote has not been threatened in the least. 90% of those arrested remain free.

     We are struggling to emerge from a pandemic that keeps coming after us like a relentless fever dream. We are emerging from the longest war in US history, Afghanistan. We're seeing a rise in fascism and racism and anti Semitism, anti Asian bigotry as well as seditious elements that had sought and are still seeking the overthrow of a government of a country they profess to love. And we have just bid farewell to a racist in the White House that empowered all this and more.

     If the Meadows Powerpoint presentation and the revelations about the War Room at the Willard Hotel just one block from the White House teach us anything, it's that high-ranking federal officials and their official stooges were neck-deep in the insurrection until the first window was broken out.

     And, as Barton Gellman warned us in the pages of the Atlantic not too long ago, it's that January 6th was just a dress rehearsal. So, as much as we'd like to believe that right wingers are idiots (and many of them are), we should still trust they will get it right the second time around.

     History is rhyming more loudly with each day. But is it for a cautionary tale or a lullaby that will put us to sleep just before the disappearance of an America whose existence we take for granted?