OUR PICKS: JANUARY 6 – ONE YEAR ONJan. 6: Meaning, Significance, Ramifications

Published 6 January 2022

·  Anniversary of a Disgrace

 

·  The Real Tragedy of Jan. 6 Is That It’s Still Not Over

·  The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists Aren’t Who You Think They Are

·  How Did We Not See It Coming?

·  America, One Year On

·  The Assault on Trust in Our Elections

·  How Extremism Went Mainstream

·  ‘How Civil Wars Start,’ a Warning About the State of the Union

·  Why the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready for Civil War

·  Beware Prophecies of Civil War

·  The Military Stayed Out of the Insurrection, but It Isn’t Over Yet

·  What Happened on January 6

·  One Year Later: Examining Trump’s Role in the Capitol Riot

·  Present at the Destruction

·  One Single Day. That’s All It Took for the World to Look away From Us

·  Assessing the Right-Wing Terror Threat in the United States a Year after the January 6 Insurrection

·  America’s Most Urgent Threat Now Comes from Within

·  January 6 and the Consequences of Disinformation

·  The Next Big Lies: Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal, or a Left-Wing Plot

·  Republicans’ Jan. 6 Responsibility

·  Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies

·  Why Protecting Liberalism Will Require a Dose of Populism

·  What I Got Wrong About Fascism

·  To Stabilize Democracy, Congress Must Reform the Way It Counts Electoral Votes

·  A Year after Jan. 6, Are the Guardrails That Protect Democracy Real or Illusory?

·  America Divided

·  How Does This End?

Anniversary of a Disgrace  (The Editors, National Review)
On January 6, 2021, Mike Pence presided over a constitutionally mandated joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes. The Trump-Pence campaign disputed the 2020 results in election contests and in court, but by January 6, the legal options were exhausted. Each state government sent only a single slate of electors to be counted.
Under our Constitution and laws, nothing remained but to count the votes. Instead, an angry mob descended upon the Capitol to prevent that from happening. This will, and should, be remembered as a stain on the nation’s history.
There is no defense for what the mob did that day. None….. There is also no defense of what Donald Trump did to summon the crowd, tell it that there remained any option but counting Biden’s electoral victory, and urge the assemblage to march on the Capitol because “if we allow this group of people to illegally take over our country … you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump’s recklessness disgraced the office of the presidency.
….
For that matter, there is no defense of Trump’s prolonging the election contest far beyond the point of plausibility, spreading blatant lies about the election, and pressuring state legislators and governors to usurp their states’ popular votes and certify electors not chosen by the people.
What happened at the Capitol that day is best understood as a riot that was particularly dangerous because of its setting and context. It was not a purely peaceful protest, or a cartoonish costume party with a little bit of trespassing. The Secret Service had to rush Pence to safety. Members of Congress emptied the chamber and fled for cover. The vote-counting process was interrupted for five and a half hours. The Capitol itself was wreathed in smoke. This is the stuff of a banana republic.