The incredible shrinking insurrection
By: Renee Graham (Boston Globe)
White washing or Black washing? Conflating the 'insurrection' with the Tulsa Race riot (er, Massacre) seems a rather bizarre stretch when the political leadership of the United States is mighty white. Doesn't matter how much blackface is smeared on that pig; white politicians are still in charge of everything. So, what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 really wasn't about race.
Are Republicans trying to downplay what happened? Yes, they are. And Democrats are trying to turn what happened into more than it was. Pay attention to the fact that the game playing is really about the all-too-white political leadership of the United States fighting with each other to gain political advantage.
I'm not sure what comparing the Jan. 6 'insurrection' to the Tulsa Race Massacre accomplishes. Especially when the political leadership is all-too-white. The white supremacist narrative doesn't justify the white Democratic leadership's ascension to Great White Saviors. And the Tulsa Race Massacre is transformed into nothing more than a political protest. Conflating the two only gives all-too-white political leaders something to argue about. After the dust settles that political leadership continues to be controlled by white politicians.
The politics surrounding what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was described long ago by W. C. Fields: “If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
It's a White thang.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
On the same day that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell denounced the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly Capitol insurrection, Viola Fletcher testified before a House subcommittee about another horrific act of white supremacist violence nearly 100 years ago.
"I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street," said Fletcher, who at 107 is the oldest known survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre. On May 31, 1921, an armed white mob in Tulsa, Okla., destroyed businesses, homes, and lives in the all-Black Greenwood district, known as "Black Wall Street." After two days, at least 300 Black people had been murdered and thousands were left homeless.
"I have lived through the massacre every day," Fletcher said. "Our country may forget this history, but I cannot."
For most of her life, Fletcher heard no official mention of what happened to her community when she was 7. What she endured was the deliberate erasure of what she witnessed: one of this nation's worst acts of racial terrorism. Instead of accountability, there was a cover-up.
That's what's happening again, this time with the attempted coup on Jan. 6.
Although on Wednesday the Democrat-led House approved a bill to establish a 9/11-style commission to investigate the insurrection, it's unlikely to survive in the Senate. Like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, McConnell would rather appease Donald Trump than illuminate the truth about the violent attack on the Capitol.
Both McCarthy and McConnell, who once called Trump "practically and morally responsible for provoking" the riot, fear that any full accounting will tar some of their fellow Republicans as well as the former president on whom they've staked their political ambitions. So now the Kentucky senator will try to do what the California congressman could not — bury any bipartisan attempt to investigate what happened on Jan. 6.
It's part of the GOP's anti-facts continuum. Ever since the violent attempt to overthrow a fair election won by President Biden, some Republican legislators have been whitewashing what really happened and the peril many of them faced. Security footage shows that insurrectionists came within 100 feet of Vice President Mike Pence, his family, and others. In the chaos, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah inadvertently ran toward the mob until he was redirected by Capitol Police hero Eugene Goodman, who also lured rioters away from the Senate chamber.
Now GOP lawmakers claim it really wasn't that bad.
Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin claimed the riot "didn't seem like an armed insurrection to me," which is probably news to the more than 140 police officers injured when they were assaulted with pipes, sticks, and "Blue Lives Matter" flags. Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina questioned whether the mob clad in Trump-branded gear were Trump supporters, and Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who helped barricade a House gallery door after the Capitol was breached, now calls what happened that day a "normal tourist visit."
Because every "tourist" packs a noose, gallows, and plastic flex cuffs on a "normal" visit to the Capitol.
Republicans want to hide the facts of Jan. 6 behind history's back. It's very on-brand in a nation that prefers to ignore the shameful truths that sustain white supremacy rather than address its repercussions and fortify democracy.
That's what is fueling the racist right-wing branding of critical race theory as "un-American." I'm sure it's why the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's conservative board of governors, despite recommendations from the school's chancellor and faculty, denied tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones. She is the educator and New York Times journalist who conceived the Pulitzer Prize-winning "1619 Project," which reframes this nation's epochal year to the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on the stolen land that would become America.
It's also what brought Fletcher, with her 100-year-old brother, Hughes Van Ellis, and a third massacre survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, to the same building where an insurrectionist paraded a Confederate flag on Jan. 6.
"I'm here seeking justice, and I'm asking my country to acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921," Fletcher told a House Judiciary's subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties. No one was ever arrested or convicted for the slaughter of her neighbors or the brutal dispossession of those who survived.
For decades, Greenwood survivors waited to share the painful history excised from most textbooks and buried with bodies in a mass grave, recently excavated, in Tulsa. Both the Black Tulsa living and dead are reminders that white supremacists have always been America's most prevalent domestic threat.
Fletcher's elegiac testimony serves as a warning: If the GOP's concerted erasure of the insurrection prevails, it may be another 100 years before anyone knows the full story of what really happened before and on Jan. 6.
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Hasn't anyone noticed that the real white supremacists are the all-to-white political leadership of the United States? They're in charge. And the Great White Saviors ain't gonna give up power anytime soon.
It's a White thang.
I can't blame the leadership completely. I put the heft of the blame on the voters who are aware of their WS but continue to vote them in time after time.
Oddly, that's what our political leaders tell us, too. Those who did not vote for them are bad people. Partisan finger pointing justifies democracy for me but not for thee. They do have a mandate, after all.
Dems are just milking the incident for political gain, and to distract from Biden's incompetence.
The progressives have taken charge and have factionalized the Democrat party
BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yep...it's the Democrat's version of Benghazi
I am curious as to how the security situation got so fucked that a mob could enter the Capitol with the entire legislative branch present. Seems to me that definitely needs to be investigated and some serious changes made.
Pretty much the first thought I had as it was happening. My second thought was, "because someone intended to let it happen". I thought so because I found it hard to believe the security could be that incompetent at the nation's capital. My third thought, watching events unfold that day was that it would be hard to imagine a better gift to the Democratic party with which to use against the Republicans. My fourth thought was that I would not have been at all surprised if they had had to cart Pelosi out in an ambulance, having been overcome by euphoria over this gift (not a joke. I literally thought that).
I would actually welcome an investigation if I thought it had any hope of delivering the truth to the American public. I'm not in favor of a Congressional investigation. Surely there is/are government entities, say, the Justice Department or FBI or some other agency who's mandate for existence is to do those very investigations? Surely we need the clown car we call Congress to focus on politicizing or ignoring other issues for which they are paid to address.
I would prefer that a commission be formed and presented with the findings from various federal agencies such as the FBI and DoJ. The goal being to crate a blueprint for needed changes to policies/procedures to make sure this doesn't happen again. I do not know who is in charge of the security situation or makes those decisions, but what I do know is that we cannot have a repeat of that Jan 6 crap.
That is entirely my fear, that this has become so partisan that they won't be interested in finding the truth but more interested in finding their partisan truth as another weapon in the upcoming election cycle.
The original investigation was too short. And the results were fake!
(Fake NEWS, in fact)
I hereby call for a RECOUNT (of the Benghazi Investigation's findings).
Everyone?
Even the p[olice officers who kept trying to push them back...some even gave their lives attempting to preserve Democracy!
I could be wrong, but I think that at some point we will.
Kinda like the 911 Commission?
The problem is that the republicans admit that Jan. 6th was all on them and all their people, they just want to hide any investigations so it will not hurt them at the polls. That's absolute proof that they don't give a shit about law and order, or doing what's best for the country. All they want to do is stay in power, nothing else matters.
You are right. That will be the end goal of both Dems and Republicans. I think massive election funding reform would help the issue a lot, but as voters we need to be better at spotting self-aggrandizing assholes who are just looking for a cash grab. Shit... then who could we even vote for?
JK, some people do honestly want to serve the country.
I'm sorry. I'm not sure what you're asking.
Conspiracy theories.
Thanks needed a laugh this morning.
Well, the good news is that Republicans would never, ever do anything like that!
(Why?)