As the Democrats in Congress wrap up their anemic and pointless attempt to expose the crimes that culminated in the January 6th attempted coup, the right-wing mediasphere tumbles forward, undeterred, with a completely coherent and unchallenged narrative. They’re even gaining steam. They can say now that the traitorous January 6th commission is yet another “nothingburger,” much like the “Russia collusion hoax”; they can remind all of their followers of high gas prices, of an emboldened Russia and China, of untold numbers of migrants pouring across our Southern border, of a spoiled generation of lazy, “woke” kids who don’t want to work and have all been groomed by pedophile teachers into being trans or gay, and of Democrats who want to continue to abuse children by injecting them with infertility-causing hormones as part of their master plan to sissify a generation of men, replacing them with feminized, woke, nonwhite Welfare Queens who reject the entire cultural history that made Christian Europe and then America Great. And if you really think that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney have done anything to upset that narrative, you are actually as stupid as the Democrats in Congress.
But all is not lost! Five leaders of the Proud Boys, no one you’ve ever heard of, have been charged with “Seditious Conspiracy,” and will probably go to prison eventually. And there are hundreds of redneck morons under arrest. Some of them have pleaded guilty already; many are on house arrest; and hundreds of them are in pretrial detention, having spent over a year in jail without having been convicted of any crime. Surely, these legal actions will close the chapter on the attempted coup, right?
This is the same stupid playbook that these same stupid neoliberals and neocons used for fighting “Terrorism.” Detain a bunch of people, throw them in Gitmo forever, and since they’re off the battlefield, it’s impossible that anyone will simply rise to replace them. We know it works, too; after we killed the leader of the Taliban in 2013, the Taliban ceased to exist. Oh wait, that’s wrong: Actually they fought against America in the longest war in American history and they won. But somehow it would have been worse if we’d let a few dozen people out of Gitmo and back onto the battlefield, right?
Beyond the stupidity of this approach, the length of time that many of them have been held is actually really fucking inhumane and I don’t get why we’re all not more upset about it. For one, as many of us know, the United States criminal justice system is, arguably, the least fair and most punitive system on Earth (here is where I remind you that every other country, including North Korea, has a far, far smaller per-capita prison population than us; I stand by the superlatives above). Elizabeth Warren, one of the few non-stupid Democratic politicians, has actually voiced concern about how they’re being treated, over a year ago. Many of us, myself included, have stood up for the rights of prisoners, even if those prisoners are drug dealers, murderers, rapists, or members of Al-Qaeda. We know that no matter the crime, people deserve humane treatment, and years of confinement without a trial is not humane. Surely the Proud Boys are not actually less deserving of fairness than terrorists or gang members?
In fact there are a lot of similarities between the hapless would-be insurrectionists on January 6th and your average gangbanger or terrorist. They are footsoldiers, after all, and we should be able to understand they came to their lives of crime most likely not out of opportunism or a desire to do evil, but out of poverty, exclusion, ignorance, and the manipulation of truly evil people around and above them.
With that in mind, I’d invite you to consider the following hypothetical timeline:
November 5th, 2024 — After over a year of brutal and unpleasant campaigning, with Biden trying to defend the flailing economy and Trump playing the same old song over and over, the rematch finally comes to a conclusion on Guy Fawkes Day (Remember, remember? He tried to blow up Parliament in 1605). Polls show a tight race and exit polls confirm it. Trump, again, claims victory on Election Night; Biden waits.
November 7th, 2024 — The electoral map depicted above is the reality. Three states are undecided: Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Biden needs any one of those states to win; Trump needs all three. Citing irregularities, the Republican-controlled governments of these three states have ordered a stop to the vote-counting. The security of the ballots, they say, is unclear; they’re going to pause the counting so as not to sully the process. Democrats sue, but the precedent of Bush v. Gore holds that states are allowed to stop counting. Thomas writes a decision affirming this, and goes further, setting down in writing the Independent Legislature Doctrine, a hairbrained piece of Republican nonsense that claims that only State Legislatures have the authority to run elections. This decision thus goes beyond reaffirming Bush v. Gore; it strikes down every State Supreme Court decision affecting voting in every State.
December 16th, 2024 — The Electoral College meets. Having never decided which votes to count and which to throw away as fraudulent, the legislatures of Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have all appointed Republican slates of Electors.
Protests around the country ensue. The Right mocks the Left for “hypocrisy,” because now we’re the ones chanting “Stop The Steal!”. Neoliberal (old, rich, and white) pundits on mainstream media debate silly nuances or strategies. Should all three states be thrown out, so that Biden wins 263–235, a majority of the valid Electors? Should all three states be thrown out, so that no one gets a majority, and the decision passes to the House (most likely handing Trump the win)? Should new federal laws be passed preventing this from happening in the future? None of these debates are relevant and none of these things are going to happen.
January 6th, 2025 — Congress meets to certify Trump’s victory. Kamala Harris is tasked with reading into the record the 40 Electoral Votes from three states where no one is even pretending that a majority of the populations chose their Electors. However, no laws have been broken. There is no guarantee in the U.S. Constitution that the people have any say in choosing the President; the Supreme Court has ruled that State Legislatures have absolute authority to choose Electors however they see fit, and they have seen fit to ignore the democratic process and make Trump the President again.
I know that you know that this scenario is horrifically possible — I would even venture to say that it is more likely than not to happen pretty much exactly this way. So let me ask you, when the time comes: What do we do?
Although I agree it would probably be tactically unsound, wouldn’t it be a completely justifiable act, under the circumstances outlined above, to storm the fucking Capitol and do anything you can to stop the overthrow of Democracy?
Exactly 100% of the January 6th defendants believed that they were doing exactly this. They had been told, by powerful members of the United States Government and media figures, people they trusted who were and are part of the mainstream, that the election had been stolen. If that were true — if the election is, in fact, stolen — then what they did on January 6th was the right thing to do. It was noble, and brave, and it was defending America from takeover by antidemocratic and extremely dangerous autocrats. We may soon be called upon to do the same.
The real crime is not that of scared, ignorant, gullible soldiers marching to the Capitol and told to defend Democracy. I am wholly uninterested in years of prosecution of these footsoldiers. The criminals are, as of today, completely free. The crime is the Lie. The real criminals include media figures such as Hannity and Carlson, off-their-meds morons such as Giuliani, Powell, and Lindell, and political leaders such as Trump and his lieutenants including Eastman and Flynn. Others, such as Bill Barr, who knew that the stolen election theory was “bullshit” but who resigned and then sat quietly while Trump tried to overthrow America, probably can’t be put in prison, but he can be at least disbarred, or otherwise targeted for punishment. If I want to go deeper, it’s not the January 6th rioters; it’s people such as Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two election officials in Wayne County, Michigan, who for a day refused to certify their county’s results (but then changed their tune after pressure). These are the criminals; these are the people who need to go to jail. Yet exactly zero of them have been indicted for anything related to their attempted coup.
What does it say about a nation that, when actual treason occurs and evil men raise a small army to attempt to violently overthrow that nation, these men are allowed to go free with no penalty? It happened in 1865, when Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee inexplicably kept their heads on their bodies, despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans as a direct result of their actions. It happened in 1974, when Ford pardoned Nixon. It’s happening again, now; it is at this point an American precedent. The United States, the country with the world’s largest and cruelest criminal justice system, doesn’t actually have any criminal penalty for insurrection.
This is the part where I’m supposed to provide a prescription, right? But it’s important to stay at least somewhat realistic. I have repeatedly called the Democratic members of Congress “stupid,” by which I really mean, either embarrassingly naive or criminally incompetent. They will not help. They have proven themselves too clueless, too corrupted, too willfully impotent to help. So what, then? Federal lawmakers won’t help us. The courts won’t help us. The outdated, ass-backwards drivel that is the U.S. Constitution won’t help us. And I’m not actually foolish enough to believe that symbolic direct action will help. So what? What can we do to prevent fascists from taking control of the most powerful military in world history and using it to brutalize tens of millions of its own citizens, be they people of color, or queer people, or immigrants, or pregnant women?
I do not know what to do personally besides write, and agitate. I am far from the only one. And to all the Centrists and Boomers and Optimists among you: How many alarms will you ignore? My childhood was marked by dire warnings of “Global Warming” and irrevocable climate change, unless we took steps to stop it. Well, we didn’t, and now it’s no longer a prediction: The climate has changed and is continuing to change. Alarms were not heeded. We did not stop it. In my young adulthood, there were loud voices warning that Roe v. Wade was under attack. Mostly, this was treated as a paranoid delusion. You, you who were adults when I was a child, you acted as though “business-as-usual” was the correct approach. How many women have already died, will die over the next decade or more, as a result of your cowardice? And, in the midst of writing this piece, I’ve learned that SCOTUS has ruled that public funds must go to religious schools if they go to any private schools, clearing the way for publicly-funded American Madrasas. We are way, way past warning signs. The Cassandras of the past 50 years have been right, over and over and over. We’re still right now. Sound every alarm, believe every worst-case scenario. The nightmare is here, it is today, it is now.
We cannot govern alongside leaders or citizens who do not want to stand alongside us. If the above chain of events comes to pass, it is important that Democratic leaders, especially at the State level, do not acquiesce to the takeover. If Trump is not re-elected but is sworn in as President in January of 2025, it is important that our “blue states” do not recognize this, and move to nullify any actions taken by a fraudulent Federal government.
As long as the Republicans are the only ones willing to abuse our institutions and processes, they will always win. If we agree to abide by every Supreme Court decision, even after that Court has been stacked by partisan manipulations right in front of our eyes; if we agree to abide by every quirk of outdated Constitutional election procedures, even when the Republican Party has openly and proudly announced that they would be willing to do anything to circumvent and exploit those procedures; if we agree to neuter ourselves in this way behind some quaint doctrine of Legalism, hiding behind the sanctity of a Constitution written three centuries ago by a group of rich, white, slave-raping men, then we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem.
It is folly to attack the Capitol Building, but it is not folly to take steps to secure our own State Constitutions against interference from Washington. It is not folly to prepare, through our own media and legislative initiatives, for large states like New York and California to move towards self-sufficiency, and for smaller states like Connecticut and New Mexico to join in compacts with neighboring states to strengthen their ability to survive the coming onslaught. It is not folly to realize that the end of the United States is coming, soon, and that our job — as States, as communities, and as individuals — is to survive that, to care for our neighbors, and to refuse to accept criminals as leaders, even if by some quirk of the Electoral College their elections are “legal.”
The day is coming, soon, when we will need to either lead our own Insurrection, or bow down as collaborators. Will Blue State America become Vichy France, or will we show even the tiniest bit of backbone? Or will we sit here in denial, waiting until it’s too late to organize a resistance, hoping that somehow, these American Nazis aren’t really as evil as they, themselves, say they are?