“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Jamie Raskin wants to tell you a story. It’s one that has tumbled around in his brain for years now. It’s also one he hopes to make his name on. Jamie Raskin: hero at long last.
All he had to do was stand before the American people and pretend that President Trump planned an “insurrection,” an overthrow of the United States government. How hard could that be? He’d already tried to impeach him twice, along with Democrats and a handful of Never-Trumpers. All of this worked so beautifully in the midterms to scare voters away from MAGA. Let’s keep it going, they think.
It’s a sad story. It paints a picture of an insulated, isolated ruling class elite so hellbent on power they are willing to sell out the American people to get it. And keep it. The only reason they’re getting away with this Dr. Strangelove-esque absurd circus is that they have a willing, compliant, obedient puppet press that will go along with Raskin’s fantasy and every other huckster con-man who wants to sell it.
Believe us, they say, because we’re “important.” We care about the marginalized groups. We care about DEMOCRACY! We care about justice. We care about the truth.
How sad to see the media, with their blue-check army on Twitter, the thought-robots for the State parroting the talking points all to win this game of “Catch Trump if you Can.”
Look there, the puppet media dismissing the Twitter Files as a “nothing burger.” Look there, MSNBC praising Liz Cheney and Jamie Raskin for a job well done. They got him!
The real story, of course, is the Twitter Files, which expose intense FBI involvement, payments (follow the money), and manipulation to fool the media, Twitter, and ultimately the American people that only one side of the story was true. Of course, the media have no choice but to call it a “nothing burger.” What are they going to do, real journalism? Not a chance.
When you step back and you look at the big picture, you’ll see the real story.
Let’s start with the “mistake” of Donald Trump winning in 2016. A “mistake” the government, FBI especially, had to rectify to please Queen Hillary and King Obama. A “mistake” that let in the people they had demonized as “racist White Supremacists.” A “mistake” that now launched the biggest protests in American history, up to and including a genuine revolution in the Summer of 2020.
Right away, the FBI set about finding something on Trump. Congress helped. The media took a different front . Everything he did or said was mocked. He was discredited at every turn.
Heading into the election, what ho! It’s the FBI again, this time seducing and potentially entrapping the very kind of people Trump attracted - disaffected, marginalized white men who had no jobs, no future, and no hope. Let’s help them find a target, they probably thought. One journalist got the story and saw exactly that. These were not criminal masterminds. They were sad, lonely depressed men easily exploited.
They needed to find extremists, you see. They needed to make their melodrama seem real enough to win in 2020. Whitmer did her part, playing the damsel in distress. The public shrank back in horror. What have we done?
But that wouldn’t be enough. They would need something bigger. Much much bigger. That was all done in text messages and behind closed doors. They needed video. They needed a powerful piece of propaganda to prove everything they were saying was true. They needed …an “insurrection.”
Trump’s predictable objections to the 2020 election, which was the first election I’ve ever seen that was rigged from the top down, gave them the opportunity. Everyone in Trump circles knew there was going to be a “lit” protest in DC on January 6th. But to them, that meant dancing around to the Village People, not hanging Mike Pence.
But someone somewhere was starting a fire. It would turn into a full-blown riot that could not be controlled. The FBI knew. The Mayor knew. Plenty of people knew it was coming, yet they left the Capitol Police vulnerable. You know the rest of the story.
While reading the latest Spectator piece on the conclusions by the January 6th committee, I was struck by the first paragraph:
The Capitol Riots on January 6 deserved a serious public investigation because the events were so important. The rioters who entered the Capitol building tried to use violence and intimidation to prevent the peaceful transfer of power by normal, constitutional procedures. That’s as serious as it gets in our democracy.
Never in any of this is a conversation about why they were there in the first place. The 2020 election. That our government and their puppet press want to pretend that was a perfectly ordinary election is frustrating enough that millions of people in this country still believe it was an unfair, unbalanced, bought, and paid for election. They had every right to protest.
Silly them, they thought our government actually listened to protests. They are the voices of the unheard! Not these protesters. They’d been systematically dehumanized for six years. They just had to wear a red hat or show up with a Trump flag to be called an “extremist.”
Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley had agreed to debate the regulations in some states. That was happening. The riot simply shut it down and handed absolute power to the Democrats, who then proceeded to create the kind of political theater normally reserved for dictators like Putin.
A six-year-long dehumanization campaign drove the assumption Trump supporters are violent by nature, a psy-op to shut down a working-class populist movement. The media simply did as they were told.
They sell the lie that they’re all white, that they’re racists, that they’re “white supremacists,” qanon conspiracy theorists. Most people I know cling to this delusion because otherwise, what does that make them? It makes them the monsters.
There’s just one problem. It isn’t true. Trump supporters tend to be outsiders who lack representation culturally or politically. Some of them just hate the corrupt government establishment. Some of them are frustrated that our country has become so punitive, so censorious, so politically correct.
Trump supporters pride themselves on being non-violent. Even Alex Jones, speaking in DC that day, Jan 6, was preaching peaceful protesting. No one, not Trump, not his supporters, was planning on violence.
If the embarrassing, soul-crushing, one-sided show trial foisted upon Americans had been anything like a real investigation, that part of the story would have been told.
The government tosses the ball gently down the center plate, the media hits it out of the park, and everyone pretends they played a fair game. But they didn’t. They’re crooks and liars.
The game is rigged against many people in this country. Trump supporters, the “Black and Brown” people the Left supposedly cares about, those who spend their days driving trucks, or sitting behind counters, or delivering mail. Drive through North Hollywood if you want to see how those “Black and Brown” people Democrats use to justify everything they do actually live. They’re forgotten too, abandoned, invisible.
I am staying at a motel in Fruita, Colorado, at a Motel 6. It is freezing cold. The woman working the front desk lives in this town and works this job, which can’t pay much. What does she do every day? Does she watch the January 6th Show Trial and feel like justice was done because the Bad Man was stopped? And does that make her sleep better at night? Maybe.
I am a city girl at heart. I love the hum and energy of New York, New Orleans, Chicago, or even Rome or Paris. People's collective energy can be easily recognized, especially when you watch someone die and you watch that energy slip away.
But out in the middle of the country, there is a different kind of energy. In Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, one of my favorite films, he chooses not to use a musical score.
Just a handful of movies do this, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds being one of them. These are choices made because sometimes the place is the score. The silence of it. The wind tumbling through the canyon, feet crunching on snow.
Next door to me is a Vietnam memorial called Field of Dreams. It’s sandwiched between a Motel 6 and I-70. All of the names of the dead on the wall. Did they come from Fruita? I think about the war our government seems to be chomping at the bit to start. I think about the people they’ll be sending over there. Do you suppose they’ll be the children of those in DC? Or will they be the only people who love this country enough to die for it?
They played out their little drama, helping Trump’s candidates win primaries, giving all of the MAGA faithful hope that their movement was powerful enough to make our government listen to them and care about their lives and families. They believed they could participate in our people-run government.
But they were walking into a trap set by very cynical people who knew that all they had to do was lure them into it, and they could find a way to extinguish their enthusiasm with one loss after another in the mid-terms.
That’s how you get to the bubble-dwelling Jonah Goldberg and his ilk condemning so-called “authoritarianism” while not recognizing the machine he himself defends, even while pretending to be an outsider. Baby, you’re right up in it. You’re the guy holding the fan keeping the elites cool. You didn’t stop “authoritarianism.” You aided and abetted it.
Maybe that isn’t entirely fair. The Never Trumpers are still burned that there are working-class voters who can’t stand them anymore. I just wish we had a press core that cared about a story as important as the Twitter Files. They don’t.
The Twitter files have shamed the government, the FBI, the Democratic Party, and most of all, the puppet press that keeps insisting there is nothing to see here, move along, move along.
—Fruita, Colorado, 7:34 AM
The Shameful Jan 6 Show Trial and the Puppet Press