Five years ago, Republicans tried to overthrow the government

As historian Kevin Leman says, some day in the future, 1/6 will be a historical footnote. But not yet. We need to remember.

The Necrotic Toddler lost the 2020 election. He then attempted to overthrow the legally elected president and failed. Almost immediately, Republicans and right-wing pundits started lying: there’d been no violence, it was a left-wing false flag, etc. etc. They’ve been lying ever since.

It happened. And despite all the lies and the refusal to put up the plaque to the officers who did their duty that day defending the country, it still happened five years later. The Felon lost. And then turned on this country. While the Republican propaganda machine has done its best to present the 1/6 insurrectionists as martyrs, they were no angels.

But why wouldn’t they turn on it? As W used to say about America’s enemies, Republicans hate us for our freedoms. They are the enemies they pretend they’re fighting. They hate America because it gives women legal equality. It gives POC legal equality. It gives LGBTQ people legal equality. It gives Jews and Muslims legal equality. They can’t stand that. They don’t want to exist without the hierarchy that assures them being white, male, straight, Christian makes you better than the people who aren’t. As I put it a few months back, “Equal rights movements can imagine what the oppressor does not: an end to oppression.” A lot of them like being the oppressor; others of them can’t imagine they won’t be oppressed in turn. Equality is the future they don’t want. Or dissent or opposition, hence their constant threat to lock up political opponents or cancel the elections. That they back off in the face of opposition and protest doesn’t mean the threat isn’t there.

As we saw this week, they only course-correct for the worse. As Fred Clark puts it, “we have the spectacle of vocal Trump supporters who just a short time ago were celebrating the president as a champion of Lindberg-style isolationism and non-intervention pulling a 180 and now celebrating him as a champion of McKinley-style imperialism and expansionism. They quickly and utterly reversed themselves without blinking, without hesitating or adjusting. Seemingly without even noticing that they were doing so.”

Like a hive mind, they’ve embraced the idea international law does not exist (see here, here, and here) as if it was their fundamental belief. Suddenly that matters is power: if we have the will and the armed force to do X, then X is justified.

This is bullshit: law is not based on “might makes right.” The powerful frequently get to break laws and get away with it but that doesn’t mean there is no law or that only power matters. But while many of them seem willing to push against the Felon over the Epstein files, on this one they give up whatever they believed before the invasion. Though I’m quite sure Stephen Miller’s rant about how the West lettingthe mongrel hordes of our former colonies achieve independence. I bet he’d be horrified if I pointed out Britain could have made a similar argument about the US: states where a majority of the population were slaves, a devastating, bloody civil war fought almost a century after independence … Miller’s principles are white supremacy and fascism, not facts.

The Toddler has already bungled this with a lot of bullshit assumptions. He wants to turn some of Venezuela’s oil into a personal slush fund (one of many). And it’s a payoff to one of his political allies. The Toddler, obsessed with the petromasculinity of manly men drilling for oil, isn’t aware that Venezuela’s vast oil wealth is largely a mirage.

Nevertheless, various members of his administration are talking about taking Cuba, Greenland (yes, that again) and Colombia. Part of this may be bullshit — see who folds out of fear, like so many American institutions — as Marco Rubio claims. Or that may be a desperate attempt to deflect the criticism they’re getting. Either way, I’m glad Colombia’s president pushed back (““Come get me, coward. I’m waiting for you here. Don’t threaten me, I’ll wait for you right here if you want to. I don’t accept invasions, missiles, or assassinations, only intel.”).

I think one of the great failures of Biden’s presidency — and he accomplished some very good stuff — was that we should have prosecuted the Felon for his actions, never mind any concerns about whether it would be unseemly, politicized, etc. That doesn’t mean America’s fascist slide is irreversible but it’s a lot more work now.

I’ll close with this quote from LawDork’s post on 1/6: “Allow me to close on this anniversary with The Washington Post editorial board’s five-year old editorial calling on Pence to “immediately” invoke the 25th Amendment.

“Mr. Trump is a menace, and as long as he remains in the White House, the country will be in danger,” the board wrote. They were right, and January 6, 2026 has — like so many days in the past year — only proven just how right they were.”