THE GOP AND JANUARY 6
I think we can all agree that Marjorie Traitor Goon belongs in locked padded cell in a secure mental facility. With her public performances over the past several days, it’s clear that her padded cell should be in the prison ward of the facility.
For those trying to avoid the news, Greene spoke this weekend at the Turning Points Action political conference as the introduction to Trump’s appearance. What she said needs to be seen as truly alarming.
Greene began her speech by saying, “Anyone that wants to continue shame us for January 6th can go to hell.” The raucous crowd responded with loud applause.
She continued on, bragging about her role on Jan. 6, based on her belief that Trump had won her home state of Georgia, despite no evidence to that effect.
She ended the speech by saying she was the one who organized the attempt to overturn the peaceful transfer of power - again to loud applause. As usual, she overstating her role; at most, she was a relatively minor character in the plot, though she was indeed involved in the planning. But the fact that she could make this claim to praise and applause is what is terrifying.
Note her initial line there: A civil war started on Election Day 2020 when Democrats stole the presidency from Trump.
The fact is, Greene is merely the most obvious of the GOP traitors, due to her essential stupidity. Just remember, however, that many of the Nazis were stupid people who were considered “clowns” prior to 1933. The entire Republican Party is now completely under the thrall of Trump. With his appearance last week at the scene of his greatest act of treason, where he was applauded by Republican office holders who were among those hiding in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in fear for their lives from the murderous mob of insurrectionists Trump summoned and launched at the seat of the government he had taken an oath to defend “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” where his arrival was met by applause, it should be clear to anyone that the two political parties in the United States are The Party of Government and the Party of Insurrectionary Treason.
As David Kurtz put it at TPM, “A lot about the last four years can be encapsulated by the notion that one side in American politics is fighting a cold civil war, and the other side is totally bewildered by it. That’s not what war fighters mean when they refer to an asymmetric battlefield, but the asymmetry is stark as hell.”
Unfortunately, too many Democrats seem to either be unable to see this or, if they do see it, they choose to deny the truth before their eyes.
In fact, there are too many Democrats who will attack anyone who points out the utter and complete evil of MAGA now, and the fact that the Democratic Party needs to have a stronger response, by claiming the speaker is “no better than” whatever MAGA traitor was mentioned.
For anyone who has studied the political history of the 1930s, there are two groups of people in Germany who were responsible for the Nazi takeover: the enablers - the German industrialists who gave money to the Nazis, the politicians who believed they could “manage” Hitler - and the fools who said people like Billy Wilder were “cranks” for their warnings about the true nature of the Nazis, who they claimed were nothing more than “clowns.”
Our new political normal is one in which far right populism is - and will be for the foreseeable future, regrdless of the November election - a consistent competitor for power. In past timesm a political realignment usually involved a change of view about the role of government, or the ends of foreign policy. What we are seeing those from the Republican Party is a revolutionary recreation of government as a tool for minority rule and a rejection of the rule of law.
There’s a name for this problem: Motivated ignorance. The term refers to a person willfully blinding themself to facts and choosing not to know something. For many people, knowing the truth is simply too psychologically painful, too costly, too threatening to their core identity.
In greater numbers, people can be incentivized to adopt motivated ignorance and actively decide to remain in a state of disbelief. When presented with a strong argument against a position they hold, or being presented with compelling evidence disproving their personal narrative, that information will be rejected. Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others. Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it, and it is found equally among the Democrats who refuse the admit the nature of the threat, and the true believers who refuse to even listen to anyone attempting to discredit their cult leader.
In the case of MAGA true believers, the lies they believe as Trump supporters, or say they believe, are all obviously untrue and obviously destructive. But as can be seen in the 2025 Project book, the Trump true believers who will be in a position - should he win - to make and carry out policy, those policy decisions are being made on the belief that the lies are the truth. Over the past eight years, each succeeding conspiracy theory has been ratcheted up, being more preposterous and more malicious in order to keep the believers ready to act on their beliefs, no matter how deranged.
Unfortunately, the fact that these are all demonstrable lies allows the motivated ignorant in the Democratic Party to discount them, to denigrate those who say “when someone tells you what they want to do, believe them” as “cranks,” the term used by the disbelievers Billy Wilder knew.
Anti-anti-Trump is not confined to conservatives unwilling to become Never Trumpers and possibly lose their social position by so doing.
It happened to Wilder’s friends in Berlin with their belief that the Nazis were “clowns” no
matter the information received that the “clowns” were actually a direct personal threat to their continued well-being. A Wilder said, “When I returned twelve years later, all of my friends who told me the Nazis were clowns, were dead. Killed by the clowns.”
Things aren’t that dire here (yet), but the willingness of some Democrats to take a the statement of exasperation made by a strongly anti-Trump person, and then claim that statement is equally dangerous to whatever threat made by a ranking Trumper about what they intend to do when they take power, is to not only shut one’s eyes to what is happening in favor of a belief that we still live in a civilized society where one argues “properly,” but to actively oppose anyone presenting evidence to the contrary.
The question is, how complicit are people who live in a hall of mirrors inside a bubble, that nothing consequential has changed or threatened to change and have convinced themselves they represent the “proper response” and want to police the word and actions of those who threaten their belief those people are the real “threat” with their “incivility”?
The truth is that the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party, or even a radical party. The statements of intent over what will happen when the MAGA movement takes power are revolutionary in their desire to overturn everything. Just in the past 30 days there hasn’t been a MAGA Republican who hasn’t either made a direct threat against democracy, or tried to cover up such a statement by a fellow MAGA Republican when questioned in the media. They are now all complicit. The ones who say nothing but vote in favor of MAGA positions and policies are no different from the Marjorie Traitor Goons shouting it from the rooftops.
However, as Jonathan Last pointed out, “The Trumpist revolution’s weakness is that it has no ideas. It has goals, but these are motivated by nothing more than will-to-power. There is no logic—not even a faulty logic—behind them.”
While we - on the side that would like to preserve liberal democracy - are becoming exhausted, the people who want to destroy the Constitution are energized. The system has allowed and will allow without radical changes, for the MAGA “revolutionaries” to make their charge of the capitol a many times as they want to. And they only have to win once.
As the Old Gunnery Sergeant said to the Marines at Guadalcanal, “Of your dead asses and onto your dying feet. There’s work to be done!”
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(PS - for those who were concerned, it seems I have “turned the corner” on the medical problem)
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I spent half my life up to the age of 13 in post WW II Germany as an Army brat with the Allied Army of Occupation during the 1950s and 60s. As a result, I spoke passable German. As a shy child, I listened a lot. I heard people in Germany struggling with reconciling the effects of that motivated ignorance, that wilful blindness. We lived next door to a man who was a devoted Nazi, and had discussions with the other neighbors about him when he vandalized our possessions (he trashed our bicycles after seeing my dad in his uniform). When I came back to the USA and watched all those interminable newsreel class movies in history and social studies classes, I was often the only person in the class who could understand what Hitler was saying in those films. And I was usually the only one who believed that it COULD happen here, because I could see, had seen, the power of someone like Hitler telling people what they want to hear.
This column is quite brilliant and horrifying at the same time. You are right that Biden’s win in November will not stop them because the similarity with the Nazis is unmistakeable. It’s hard to imagine that kind of evil exists in the world but the lovefest the repubs put on for tffg proves it’s real and dangerous. Hitler could have been stopped and so can MAGats but can they be taken down before they start WWIII?
It’s great to know you are feeling better medically. It shows.