Sean Casten4 years ago, I was locked down in the Capitol. When the majority of the Republicans voted to overturn the election AFTER the attack, something broke in Congress that still hasn’t healed. Truth is truth. And while it should never be partisan to defend democracy, we can’t pretend it isn’t.
All of us who were there had partial views in real time. What was happening near us, texts from colleagues, snapshots of TV coverage outside, alerts from USCP. One of the many virtues of the J6 committee was compiling those fragments to explain the totality of what happened.
Memory is an unreliable narrator. Our stories, years later may weave in things we learned about later. And set against that is the continued, willful efforts by Trump & his goons to misrepresent history. Know only that one does not lie about things you’re proud of.
There are a lot of people who work on the hill. Fewer that day because of COVID restrictions, but there are still a lot of (current and former) members, staff, capitol police and other staff with easily-triggered trauma.
With a few individual exceptions, the GOP as a party has still not acknowledged their complicity in the attack and the attempted cover up. That keeps the threat of more violence alive. The best lack all conviction, as Yeats said. But it is the opposite of the oath they took.
Brent Guernsey, Artrocity StudioThe only other time I've felt so angry was the *other* big attack on the U.S. and our democratic way of life in my lifetime, 9/11.