January 6 was not an insurrection. It was not a coup. It was not sedition. It was not another 9/11. It was not like the Rwandan Genocide, as CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently suggested.
It was trespassing.
Save your crocodile tears.
Perhaps it was “traumatic” for some of our elite ruling class. They finally came face-to-face with the dirty underclass they’re supposed to be serving. If it was indeed “traumatic,” maybe those members of the ruling class should reconsider their chosen career paths. If you’re traumatized by the public, maybe public service isn’t for you. Maybe learn to code.
I haven’t bothered to watch a single second of the latest impeachment circus, because frankly, the performance art is low quality and cringe-inducing. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to make me believe that Baby Boomers taking selfies in the Rotunda scarred her for life, she’s going to need to be more convincing.
The very real part of the Great Capitol Trespass—and I suspect the part that invokes actual fear into the hearts of our political elites—is that the trespassers were angry.
If those political elites cared, they might ask themselves, “why?”
Why are Americans so angry? And not just the Americans who trespassed at the Capitol, but Americans on both sides of the political aisle. After all, the Left has been smashing, looting, and otherwise terrorizing cities for a while now.
Something is obviously amiss here, and our political elites are entirely unwilling to confront it.
The proper response in our constitutional republic, where the implicit agreement is that Americans have consented to be governed by these buffoons, would have been for the buffoons to seriously consider this question. They could have done it publicly. They could have returned to their congressional districts and held open forums or town halls. They could have asked the simplest of questions to their constituents. They could have at least tried to give us the impression that they cared. But they don’t.
“What are we doing that makes you so upset?” is a good example of a question they might ask.
“What are we not doing that makes you so upset?” is another.
“Do you really think we’re buffoons?” would be a third, and would probably bruise some egos.
Instead, they blamed Donald Trump.
And after blaming Trump, they dug in their heels. They started calling the angry people “domestic terrorists.” They started likening them to al-Qaeda, who I might remind you, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars and almost as many years attempting to kill. They are still laying the groundwork to hunt you down like they do foreign terrorists, for the crime of supporting a president they didn’t like. (Please don’t drone strike my house, John Brennan!)
Maybe I’m the crazy one, but I don’t believe any of this is lowering the temperature inside the pressure cooker that is American politics.
Since none of our highly-regarded lawmakers have deigned to ask why the Great Capitol Trespass occurred in the first place, I’ll do my best to explain it to them here.
Over the past year, you have continued to label anyone who dared to defy the neoliberal establishment and support Trump a racist, sexist, misogynist, backward Bible-thumping, subhuman, illiterate bigot. This might come as a surprise, but your nonstop assault on the more than 74 million Americans who voted for Trump, in which you have gladly participated with your friends in the media, did not exactly endear us to you.
And let’s not forget the lockdowns.
That was when you said, “Gee, nice livelihood you have there. It would be a shame if we destroyed it over a cold that has a 98 percent survival rate. Good luck in your newfound poverty. Here’s 600 bucks, that should tide you over, right?”
And that’s exactly what you did. You ruined the lives of millions of people and their families. You crippled the communities into which they poured blood, sweat, tears, and toil over many decades.
Worse, you degraded us by ordering us to wear slivers of cloth over our faces, only after you said those cloth slivers were not effective in stopping us from catching the cold. Then you maligned anyone who might have trouble reconciling how The Science™ magically did a 180, calling them “science deniers.” Worse still, you empowered scumbag adult hall monitors to act as a self-appointed mask police force at Costco and elsewhere, and made them feel virtuous for behaving in a manner that would certainly, in less civilized times, have led to a punch in the nose.
After that, you used The Science™ to justify a complete upheaval of the voting laws. You implemented the constitutionally questionable “no-excuse” absentee voting and accused anyone who suggested we should stick with the tried-and-true voting method of wanting to murder grandma.
You could never excite voters to turn out in person for senile Joe Biden, and you knew it. So you changed the rules of the game, and then called people with perfectly reasonable questions about the process “conspiracy theorists,” or “dangerous” to Our Democracy™.
That’s only the brief version of what led to the Great Capitol Trespass, and what it boils down to is simple: utter disregard for the opinions of the regular people you are supposed to represent.
We elect you to office, and you immediately assume that you know better than us. You patronize us by treating us like confused children. Nothing you do makes our lives better, or easier, or more enjoyable. You treat us like cattle that need herding, and you do it on purpose. If your behavior was unintentional, you might accidentally do something that helps us once in a while, in the same way that a broken clock is correct twice every day.
You never do, and we won’t hold our breath waiting for you to start.