January 6’s attempted coup was the totally predictable outcome of years of targeted misinformation by an entrenched minority of our population bent on maintaining power by any means necessary. They can’t hold it through honest democratic means, so they have increasingly resorted to promoting alternate realities through right-wing media and ethically bankrupt politicians. They were trying to harness the manufactured anger of a weak-minded mob, but — as it did in 1930s Europe, and in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s — it got away from them.
I hope they have finally learned a lesson, but I’m not holding my breath. The rest of us need to find the strength and courage to finally stand up and demand that it stop.
People have a right to speak their truths. They do not (or at least should not) have a right to spread untruths with deliberate intent to undermine the Constitution and democracy itself. This election was challenged at every level and those challenges failed at every level because they had zero merit.
They. Were. All. Lies.
At the very least, we as a society have a duty to enforce the social contract and shame these insurrectionist knuckle-draggers back into their hidey-holes. The days of legitimizing white nationalists and neo-fascists needs to be over, right now.
Dan Brett
Whiting