Trump’s Disgraceful Pardons of January 6 Offenders Keeps the “Big Lie” Chugging Along - Horowitz
Rób Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
Trump’s Disgraceful Pardons of January 6 Offenders Keeps the “Big Lie” Chugging Along - Horowitz
The pardons and dismissals included more than 600 rioters who were convicted or awaiting trial or sentencing “for assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers at the Capitol,” reported The New York Times. Nearly 175 of this group were found guilty of “doing so with deadly or dangerous weapons including baseball bats” or charged with doing so, The New York Times added.
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Mr. Trump also commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, including their respective leaders, Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes who were both serving long prison sentences for seditious conspiracy. Saying that January 6 should be remembered as “Patriots Day,” Mr. Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia and one of the chief architects of the attack on the Capitol, told the AP, I’m only guilty of opposing those who are destroying the country. We stood up for our country because we knew the election was stolen. Biden did not get 81 million votes.”
In both his words and actions, President Trump has demonstrated that when it comes to January 6, he and this far-right violent extremist are aligned. Mr. Trump repeatedly called the January 6 offenders behind bars for their crimes “hostages,” leading off some of his rallies with a song from the January 6 prison choir. Although he is back in the White House, President Trump refuses to let go of the “Big Lie.” This is despite failing to produce one shred of real evidence of election-altering fraud. The so-called ‘audits’ of the 2020 presidential election results he sponsored or supported in the intervening years did not yield any significant discrepancy in the outcomes.
Persuading his supporters to believe the “Big Lie” and go to the Capitol to protest the orderly and peaceful transfer of power was the original sin that led to the terrible events of that day. The fact that Mr. Trump spent several hours in the afternoon apparently gleefully watching the riot on TV without lifting a finger to stop it drives home the point that his sympathies were with the insurrectionists whose violent actions were on his behalf, not with his endangered vice president who refused to do his unconstitutional bidding, nor with the members of Congress under attack. In fact, the across-the-board get-out-of-jail-free cards the president just handed out further buttresses the conclusion that he appreciated the actions of the insurrectionists on that day. His indifference to the more than 140 police officers who were injured comes through loud and clear.
The several hours of disruption served a strategic purpose as well; it bought more time for Rudy Giuliani and others to lobby lawmakers to reject the certified election results. Mr. Trump was willing and eager to invalidate the votes of 81 million Americans by any and all means necessary.
The next component of Mr. Trump’s persistent propaganda campaign to whitewash and redefine January 6 is the new select committee established by Speaker Johnson at the president’s request to reinvestigate the work of the original January 6 committee. Taken together, the scope and shamelessness of Mr. Trump’s efforts to get people to not believe what they saw with their own eyes on January 6 and to believe that he won an election he plainly and convincingly lost would make the Soviet leaders who invented the firehose of falsehood method proud.
The indiscriminate January 6 pardons send another dangerous signal: if you are willing to act illegally and even violently on the president’s behalf, Mr. Trump has your back. Reflecting the views of a number of people who study violent extremism, “Barb McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Michigan, told AP, “she worries the pardons of even violent offenders send a signal that “political violence is acceptable when it’s committed in service of the leader.”
In contrast, Mr. Trump recently sent the opposite, chilling message to people who are willing to stand up and criticize him: withdrawing Secret Service protection from his former National Security Adviser and strong opponent, John Bolton, even though the threat to his personal safety from Iran is still very much present. During the first several days of his second term, the President has made it clear that retribution and getting even with his political enemies are very much at the top of his mind.
Unlike in the old Soviet days, when people did not have the freedoms or the resources to effectively push back on the dangerous lies told by their leaders, we Americans have the rights, power, and capacity to stand up for the truth and for our democratic values. President Trump’s across-the-board clemencies of the Jan. 6 offenders and the continuation of his “Big Lie” campaign in the first days of his administration are signs that he will challenge us to do so more than ever over the next 4 years.
That will be the work of true American patriots—not attacking our Capitol, injuring police officers, and blindly buying into and keeping alive Donald Trump’s dangerous “Big Lie.”
Trump’s Disgraceful Pardons of Jan. 6 Offenders Keeps “Big Lie” Chugging Along