Hard to believe that a year has passed since we saw the Confederate flag carried into the US Capitol, and some loon in a fake shaman’s trappings singing over a bunch of muffins (when he wasn’t trying to further incite an already demented crowd), and some deranged woman getting shot as she tried to climb through a window her fellow insurrectionists smashed. But here we are. Here’s Michael Moore’s anniversary podcast, in which he and his friend, Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan, discuss the events and meaning of that day:
The part that still grabs ME the most is that Rep. Kildee protected his fellow congress members by telling them to take off their pins. Those pins were their IDs — the same that marked them as congress members, which would have made them instant targets for the whipped-up mob that Donnie Fucking Drumpf sent to overturn the results of the 2020 federal election (and, no doubt, kill whomever they could in the process).
Rep. Kildee may not be a lightning rod for the fascists like Ilhan Omar, or a glamorous up-and-comer that they love to hate, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but he’s a key figure nonetheless in what happened that day. Because what he did, and told his fellow representatives to do, undoubtedly saved a lot of lives. The Democratic representatives, even those whose faces were not as well known as those of the “Squad”, or speaker Nancy Pelosi, were in a world of danger because they were Democrats. They were the party that won the 2020 election, and since there was no legitimate way to strip them of that victory, the next best thing, in the eyes of the insurrectionists, was to take their lives. Mike Pence was, no doubt, NOT the only person the mob was hell-bent on hanging that day. The fact that some of them came armed with zip-ties and an objective of “arresting” representatives whose only “crime” was to be duly elected by their constituents, speaks of a sinister motive that came straight out of The Turner Diaries. Their lives were in danger from the thugs whose ultimate goal was to do away not only with capital-D Democrats, but with democracy itself. That’s why Rep. Kildee’s action proved to be a lifesaver that horrific day, exactly a year ago.
And what can we say about it all now?
I would say that not nearly enough thugs are behind bars, and those that are, aren’t doing nearly the time that their crimes would call for. Yes, the so-called “Q-Anon shaman” is now chanting inanities over his inorganic prison chow in the Big House, but he won’t be doing so nearly long enough for what he tried to do in the People’s House.
And while he’s not alone in there, he hasn’t got as much company as he should have, either. Lots of fascist thugs have yet to be caught and arrested, including this apparently Canadian one:
This is the Canadian participation that the RCMP claimed wasn’t happening on that day.
But it WAS happening. And it WAS fascism. And terrorism.
And until every last one of those cretins is caught and punished, and fascism definitively destroyed, it won’t be over.
