No matter how predictable these people get, they somehow never stop shocking me. If you had asked me whether a Trumpian mob would, at their first opportunity, plunder our nation’s Capitol, I’d have said, “Sure, that seems in-character”. And still, I’m shocked into disorientation by today’s events.
Today (January 6) is the birthday of Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Senator from Maine who was beaten nearly to death by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks for having stated, correctly, that slavers tended to sexually assault their female “chattel”.
So it’s an auspicious day for sedition within the Capitol. Still, no enemy, foreign or domestic, had violently breached the Capitol since 1814. Until now.
The portrait on the left in that picture, by the way, is of Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, one of the direst enemies America has ever had. He, more than anyone else, laid the ideological foundations for the Slavers’ Rebellion and hence the white supremacy of today. That’s why I say that no enemy had breached the Capitol violently. The enemy has always been within the gates.
The nitwits who think that we need to keep Confederate monuments “because we need to learn from our history” are the precise people who were cheering on today’s insane sedition. And when I say “insane”, I mean the douchey losers who die in the middle of a Mad Max movie:
This death cultist was apparently screeching “Freedom!” at the moment that the picture was taken, as if losing an election is sort of the same as jus primae noctis. He hasn’t the foggiest notion what freedom is. (His name, by the way, is Jake Angeli. He’s from Arizona, he’s known as “the QAnon shaman”, and he should be hounded out of decent society. If you see him, make his life a living Hell. I’m not saying to disembowel him — that would be pointless, since, unlike William Wallace, he’s gutless to start with. But he should never have a moment’s peace.)
Anyone who can read can tell why the Confederacy seceded. Also, anyone able to read knows that hundreds of thousands of people have died of the Covid-19 virus, that there is no global child murder cult, and that Biden won the election. The fact that people who refuse to know why the Confederacy seceded and who also refuse to know those other facts are mostly the same people is not a coincidence. As Hannah Arendt said, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi… but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” The irrationalist crusade, marked by scepticism about inconvenient facts and dogmatism about bizarre notions, cynicism about committed truth-tellers and gullibility about obvious con artists, that has brought us Trump didn’t begin in 1861, but the Slavers’ Rebellion had been its high-water mark — until today. We are repeating our history, and the people repeating it are the same idiots who think that we need to keep praising the Confederacy “or else we’ll repeat our history”.
Texas Reconstruction Project 