By: KEVIN JOLLY
Staff Writer
The attack on the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, shouldn’t be understated. At least 919 participants have been charged with criminal acts, at least 138 police officers were hospitalized, and an unknown number of rioters were hospitalized. Costs for repairs and security were estimated at 30 million. President Donald Trump’s involvement in the attack was deemed so relevant that it warranted a second impeachment, the only time in US history a President has been impeached twice. US House Representatives and Senators along with other important US politicians’ lives were put in direct danger and only barely escaped safely. The attack symbolized a growing threat of extremism and populism coming into the mainstream. At least seven deaths can be directly linked to the attack itself, some directly and some indirectly, consisting of four police officer suicides in the weeks and months after have been linked to trauma caused by the attack. Despite all this, there’s a very concerning amount of rhetoric that is dismissive of the attack, claims it was a ‘mostly peaceful visit’, or will deny Trump’s direct involvement in the attack, and it all contributes to the normalization of undermining our Democracy.
What makes the revisions so concerning is that a lot of it’s coming from mainstream Republicans themselves. A poll from Quinnipiac University reported that 66% of Republicans believed the attack was in fact not an attack on our government. The reason this is concerning is that for the most part, the attack was coordinated and instigated by far-right extremist groups and people with radical beliefs, like Q-Anon, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Oath Keepers, etc… So when mainstream Republicans, who are assumed to be less extremist and more moderate, begin defending extremist groups which they don’t have to, it makes someone wonder just how normalized extremism is becoming on the right side of the aisle. Not to mention the current spiritual leader of the Republican Party and former US President’s direct encouragement and cheer-leading of these extremists in their attack. This isn’t to say the entire Republican party has become extremist, but when a sizeable portion of one of only two important parties in our country is going out of their way to defend extremist attacks, and the fact their current leader essentially created the attack, you can’t blame anyone for believing the right side of the aisle in America is becoming more polarized and radical.
One of the biggest revisionist talking points is denying President Donald Trump’s involvement. Trump just before the election dramatically ramped up his rhetoric of a stolen election. He claimed hundreds of times in speeches and over social media that Republican ballots had been lost, destroyed, and uncounted, and that Democrat ballots had been forged, or found. Almost all of Trump’s closest allies and to be fair, a large portion of Republican politicians all began pushing the same rhetoric hard. Some of the highlights of this include Trump’s remarks about mail-in ballots, his claims that the election could be fraudulent, and claiming on election night that he had won. Trump supporters, specifically the extremists, all heard these talking points and this rhetoric for months, building a false reality that Democrats had overridden the Republican party’s rightful victory. Mind you, this is an inarguable and explicitly hardline anti-establishment view as well as a calling card of populist movements similar to that of fascism or communism. It should be noted that over 50 lawsuits filed mostly by Trump’s allies and his own personal choices for office positions, were dismissed. A joint statement from the EIGCC and the EISCEC (Committees filled with officials Trump himself chose for the sole purpose of finding election fraud) claimed, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” and, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history”. Today, the majority of Republican officials, even those who initially promoted the conspiracy theory, have gone back and confirmed confidence in election security. Furthermore, due to the horde of fraudulent claims, the election has been studied vigorously, and yet, out of literally hundreds of federal, university, independent, and journalistic research, there haven’t been any serious reports of any significant voter fraud on a measurable scale. So, there just plain and simple isn’t any evidence to suggest the election was fraudulent in any way shape, or form, and most officials have concurred. Yet Trump without any basis made sure to mention how rigged the election was in almost every public statement he made over the months covering the election, and many Republicans believed it. Regardless of the incredible lack of evidence, CEIR and Echelon Insights found in a joint poll that less than one-third of Republicans trusted the 2020 election accuracy. This is all vital information because it tells us that Trump’s claims about the election were empirically false, and yet still convinced the majority of Republicans. This gives us an idea of how the reasoning behind the Capitol Building attack was indeed a consequence of Trump’s lies.
Another one of the biggest points as I said was that the events of January 6 were, “mostly peaceful.” It’s a rhetorical claim which promotes the false narrative that the attack wasn’t of any importance or is over-exaggerated by the left. But it doesn’t make sense in any reasonable way. Sure, the attack consisted of thousands of people, and most of them weren’t directly responsible for the damage, injuries, or deaths, but that’s not how descriptions of singular events work. If there’s an event where only a few people are injured or killed, but the majority of the people were unaffected, congratulations, you’ve described almost every single riot, battle, terrorist attack, or massacre in history (None of which are peaceful). You can’t call an event peaceful or ‘for the most part peaceful’, because even though most people involved were fine, the attack still resulted in violence and death. If an event results in excess violence that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise, it’s not a peaceful event in any sensible interpretation. To call Jan 6 a ‘mostly peaceful event’ is to disregard the injuries and deaths.
What is probably the most common revision is the denial that Jan 6 was important at all. This often comes in either or both forms of the two previous revisionist methods, but also dismissal of any significance the attack might’ve had. This is not a constructive way of thinking about Jan 6 because the attack can tell us about rising acceptance of extremism within Trump’s support. It could’ve been a freak incident of extremists enacting revenge for what they saw as a fake election, but what makes this attack so significant is that despite indeed being acted out by far-right extremists, It was spearheaded by the former US President and has a majority of Republican support. It shows that while again, maybe the Republican Party itself isn’t extremist, there is certainly increasing support and acceptance of extremist action in the party. In all fairness, a poll from NRGSG showed only one-third of Republicans fully supported the actions of Jan 6, but nevertheless, rewriting history doesn’t require full acceptance, support, or denial; just the muddying of reality and suggestive rhetoric is enough to cause harm.
