I’m fully aware that today is Epiphany in Western Christianity, Theophany in Orthodox Christianity. But it’s also the 5th anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history, the attempted autogulpe of 2021.
In some ways, I think 1-6-21 is worse than 9-11: we did this to ourselves, and to this day there are tens of millions of Americans who will insist that it was a great patriotic outpouring of love rather than an attempt to overturn a Presidential election that ousted the incumbent.
Baloney!, say I to keep this post as family fare.
With friends like this …
What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys—believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.
After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection ….
Jeffrey Goldberg, MAGA’s Foundational Lie. Subtitle: “The movement claims to stand with the police. Trump’s decision to pardon the cop-beaters of January 6 exposed his movement for what it is.”
And what have we gotten from the incorrigible electorate’s insistence on re-electing Trump four years after his defeat?
Defining “sedition” down
One indicator of a polity’s health is whether a citizen can be punished merely for telling the truth about the law. The signs for American democracy are not good.
This morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he has begun the process to demote Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain and NASA astronaut, and reduce his pension pay. The operative facts here, naturally, are not Kelly’s past service but his current rank and service: a Democrat serving in the U.S. Senate and a political adversary of President Donald Trump.
“Six weeks ago, Senator Mark Kelly—and five other members of Congress—released a reckless and seditious video that was clearly intended to undermine good order and military discipline,” Hegseth wrote on X this morning. He cited two articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice; Kelly, unlike the other five, holds retired military status, which makes him subject to sanctions from the Defense Department.
What Hegseth did not cite was what Kelly and his colleagues actually said in the video, and for good reason. Doing so would expose the absurdity of the charge and the abuse of power involved in the attempt to demote him. “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” Kelly said. No one in the Trump administration has disputed that this is true. A more agile or even-keeled administration would have smoothly dismissed the video as irrelevant: This is true, but of course we would never issue an illegal order. (As Kelly and his lawyers have noted, Hegseth has cited the same law about disobeying illegal orders in the past.) Instead, Trump and his aides threw a fit, dubbing the Democrats the “Seditious Six.”
…
Members of the armed forces, and retirees like Kelly, are particularly susceptible to Hegseth’s abuse of power, because they can be punished by the Defense Department internally. But the chilling effect does not end with those who are serving or have served, or with the particular question of illegal orders. The administration has told the other five Democrats that it is investigating them as well. The core belief underlying all of this is as plain as it is dangerous: Criticizing Donald Trump and defending the rule of law is sedition.
David A. Graham, Hegseth’s Appalling Vengeance Campaign
Kelly responds tartly:
“My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife,” former Representative Gabby Giffords, “recovered from a gunshot wound to the head—all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder,” he said in a statement on X. “If Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in our country’s history, thinks he can intimidate me with a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me, he still doesn’t get it.”
Remember that Hegseth purports to be a devout Christian. He should bear in mind that “taking the name of the Lord in vain” has a deeper meaning than “don’t cuss.”
We are all gatekeepers now.
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 