There's nothing to compare January 6th to

It’s January 6, 2025, and my head is fucked. I cannot get a thought to stick. I keep dipping into emotional wormholes.

You probably feel the same way. Though, I hope not. Maybe not. You probably didn’t spend the last week buried (emotionally) in video footage about the insurrection for Ball of Thread’s episode on the attack above. If you did, I’m sorry, both for you and to you. You don’t deserve this. No one who believes in the best of America does.

I spent the last year trying to stop exactly today from happening. Obviously, I blew it. Sorry about that. Yes, I’m narcissistic enough to think it’s at least a little bit my fault that this is happening. But honestly, it’s the fault of nobody who wanted to prevent this. Yet it’s all of our fault. Isn’t it?

Nope. Screw that. It’s Trump’s fault.

And Mike Pence, for letting the fantasy of Trump swiping the presidency kindle Trump’s charcoal for months. And Mitch McConnell and John Roberts, in retrospect, for excusing Trump and making sure he’d get a second swipe at dictatorship. And I realize now that Roger Stone and Alex Jones—two hate demons who have been trying to start a race war since either of them was old enough to jerk off to a picture of Ronald Reagan cutting funding for housing and urban development—deserve far more credit for stoking the mass psychosis that made this possible. But McConnell is probably most to blame. He opened Pandora’s Box when he went out of his way to make sure that Trump would not only win but also that Trump would be the consequential president of the century.

I was shocked as I grabbed the footage to illustrate Marcy’s narrative by my capacity to be surprised and upset by this event. This thing that happened in America. I am saying that after spending much of my time since the election buried (emotionally) in recent authoritarianism around the globe, which is inextricable with mass horrors, often against civilians. This requires me to think deeply about the Holocaust, something I’ve been doing since I had a survivor as a teacher in my first year of Hebrew School. I’ve also been learning about Gulags, which I’ve avoided, besides Solzhenitsyn, which you can’t avoid. And there’s what’s happening today to the Uyghurs. All of it fucks you up.

But for some reason, the words of Shaye Moss describing what MAGA did to her and her mother and grandmother won’t let me go. I don’t know if I can recommend you watch this or whether it will hit you as hard as it did me. But I think every American needs to be prepared for how Trump creates the illusion of revenge to justify horrors that no one—except Donald Trump, perhaps—needs or deserves.

If you feel the need to witness the events of four years ago today, you may want to check out this WSJ report on the Proud Boys role in the attack, which can never be forgotten given Trump’s 2020 “Russia, if you’re listening” moment at the debate in which he told the Proud Boys to await an order he then sent on December 19.

And you probably know The New York Times “Day of Rage,” which should have been on the front page of their site for the last year instead of the tripe rehabilitating Trump we were served.

But I guess I can understand my fellow Americans for either supporting or excusing what Trump did on January 6, 2021. I know American history and understand this is as American as America gets (derogatory). We are a country united by unholy matrimony from the first kiss. Political violence has always been with us. The Civil War could be seen as our second revolution or the counterrevolution that the Confederacy still intends to reverse, eventually—maybe sooner rather than later.

But I harbored the pretension that if the deal got too bad, we could vote the other bastard out. And if we couldn’t vote him out, he at least couldn’t rule like a king who gets to break the law with impunity while enforcing it on others without any mercy.

This fantasy sounds a lot like privilege when I read it back. I could buy into the fantasy of American exceptionalism because of my whiteness, maleness, and middle-classness. And I was and am Jewish in some of the best places to be Jewish in human history. Now I know all of that is conditional. It’s conditional for anyone who isn’t willing to bend to a culture where dominance and hierarchy never relent much power—and generally delight in abusing it, especially when they feel their status threatened. Maybe it’s better not to live in a fantasy.

In this short-feeling yet long life, I’ve seen Republicans toy with hostages, swipe the presidency through the Supreme Court (which they had effectively swiped in 1968), and align with one of the worst dictators of this century in a project to end our democracy.

But January 6th stands apart from even all that, at least in its obviousness, its honesty. We know they want a dictator. Or they’ll take one as long as it’s one of their own. And we know that we have not yet figured out how to stop them.