Here’s what I’ve found interesting recently: I decide to go all Cato the Elder about attempts to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021, insurrection; 10 corporations that have kept their promise not to donate to election deniers; why does the January 6, 2021, Capitol pipe bomb case remain unsolved; remembering the 2024 election day bomb threats, and Cory Doctorow’s novella about health insurance and murder.
Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.
#1
Remembering the Insurrection (Nina Burleigh, The American Freakshow, Link to Article)
I’m not gonna pretend: today’s anniversary of the 2021 Capitol insurrection is thick with despair. The November election signaled the final success of Trump’s coup attempt and the lasting power of the Big Lie. While most of his fellow Republicans were horrified in the immediate aftermath of the bloody violence on that day, they failed utterly to eradicate his influence and were soon goose-stepping behind him, leaving millions of Americans without courageous leadership and subject to grifting right-wing influencers and a menacing MAGA army that besieged doubters of the Big Lie and flooded the zone with bullshit about FBI plants and Antifa.
Today, Trump celebrates it as “A Day of Love.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
No, we must not allow Trump to get away with rewriting the history of his insurrection against the government of the United States. Yes, he just won an election. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that Trump’s election win also represents the successful conclusion of the insurrection he initiated after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
It wasn’t just his mob storming the Capitol. It was also the fake electors, calls to Georgia demanding just enough votes to win, lies about voting systems, attacks against innocent election volunteers, betrayals of our Constitutional order by lawyers seeking to justify overturning the election, and Trump’s tweet calling for supporters to come to D.C. because January 6 “will be wild.”
Trump’s election also represents the failure of our institutions to deal with a coup attempt against the United States government. Republicans who spoke so clearly about what happened that day almost immediately backtracked to bend the knee to Trump. President Biden prioritized making our politics normal again. Attorney General Merrick Garland waited too long to act for reasons known only to him. Reporters and editors insisted on treating Trump as a normal politician despite his ending our nation’s streak of peaceful transfers of power.
Trump will be president. He won the election. But I will make it a priority not to forget what happened on January 6, 2021.
Before the Third Punic War, Cato the Elder was famous for ending every speech he gave in the Roman Senate, regardless of subject, with a demand that “Carthage must be destroyed.” I plan to end my newsletters with a reminder that on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump instigated a violent insurrection against the United States government. Succeeding in our long, twilight struggle requires not allowing the erasure of this history.
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#2
Jan. 6 and the path not taken (Don Moynihan, Can We Still Govern, Link to Article)
Four years on, Trump is not a disgraced footnote in American history, but about to retake the Presidency. The long-term effects of his second term cannot be fully known at this point, but if we are to take him at his word, it will embed a series of anti-democratic practices.
The distance between the aftermath of Jan. 6 and today could not be more vast. Then, Trump was pushed off social media. Now, Trump has his own social media. Elon Musk has turned X into a pro-Trump site and is part of the Trump administration. Mark Zuckerberg visits Mar-A-Lago and listens to the national anthem being sung by the January 6th Prison Choir which is, yes, a choir made up of people accused of crimes related to the riot. Trump lent his voice to a fundraising recording for the choir. The song has been a staple of Trump’s rallies, along with his invocation of the attackers as “patriots.” This was a reversion to form: immediately after the attack, he spoke sympathetically of the attackers. Chastened by near-universal condemnation, he quickly called the attack “heinous”. As Trump would go on to rewrite history, many of those who previously denounced him stayed silent.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Don Moynihan does an excellent job of reminding us just how we got to this point despite the near-universal condemnations Donald Trump received after the insurrection attempt.
From Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to let judges handle the punishment, to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s prioritization of his personal ambition over the national interest, to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s failure to act quickly, to a Supreme Court of self-proclaimed originalists deciding the plan words of the 14th Amendment don’t actually mean anything, to Democrats refusal to keep making an issue of the insurrection even after the work of the January 6th Commission, our democracy was failed by a multitude of leaders and institutions.
So we need to remember how all this happened, because part of the effort to make us forget is to ensure even history doesn’t hold these responsible accountable for their failures.
#3
157 Election Deniers Remain in Congress Four Years After Jan. 6 Insurrection (Prem Thakker, Zeteo, Link to Article)
This year’s Congress includes 137 members in the House and 20 in the Senate who fomented doubt or actively sought to overturn the 2020 election, per ElectionDeniers.org, a project of the nonpartisan pro-democracy organization States United Action. In other words, more than 38% of the Senate Republican caucus and over 62% of the House GOP caucus helped spread lies about the 2020 election results. The list includes the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, and the entire Republican House leadership (Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise, Tom Emmer, Lisa McClain, and Kevin Hern).
Outside of Washington, 10 of 27 Republican governors are election deniers, along with nine of 28 Republican attorneys general and four of 26 GOP secretaries of state. In essence, Republicans have hardly paid a price and have not retreated from what could have been a scarlet letter.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
This is the kind of result that happens when the Department of Justice and elected leaders prioritize restoring norms rather than holding the people who broke those norms accountable for their actions.
The way to restore norms is to make it clear that there will be a price paid for breaking them. I hope the next Democratic president will learn this lesson after the mistakes made by former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden.
#4
10 corporations that kept their promises after January 6, 2021 (Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims, Popular Information, Link to Article)
While most companies took the path of Amazon and AT&T, there are a few companies that have stood by their principles. Popular Information has identified 10 companies that pledged to stop donating to members of Congress that voted to overturn the election and, over the last four years, have not broken that promise.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Popular Information has done great work keeping track of the companies that have failed to keep their pledge not to support election deniers and other supporters of the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
In this article, they point out the companies that have broken their pledge while highlighting 10 companies that have not joined those who have downplayed what happened after the 2020 election.
I’ll be trying to support these companies more going forward.
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#5
‘Lingering mystery’: FBI releases new details on unsolved Capitol pipe bomb case linked to Jan. 6 (The Reid Out, Joy Reid interview with Hunter Walker, Link to YouTube Video)
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Speaking of events that have disappeared down our national memory hole, why don’t we know more about what happened with the January 6, 2021, pipe bombs? It’s been, after all, four years since they were discovered.
In this interview, Talking Points Memo’s Hunter Walker offers his perspective on the latest updates from the FBI and everything he’s learned covering the case over the past several years.
The potential pipe bomber walked within a block of the U.S. Capitol and near many local landmarks. There’s a lot of security recording going on in that area.
Yet we know very little more today than we did four years ago. Think about how quickly we learned about the United Health Care CEO’s assassin. What is law enforcement doing about this case? Is solving it even a priority?
I don’t expect Republicans to make oversight about this investigation a priority. I am forced to wonder, again, just what Democratic Senators were doing with their gavels the past two years.
#6
We can’t memory hole the Election Day bomb threats (Noah Berlatsky, Public Notice, Link to Article)
Though it’s largely already been forgotten, 2024 was not a completely peaceful election. Anonymous terrorists, probably working for Russia, sent bomb threats to numerous majority Black and Native American polling places in battleground states in an effort to disrupt voting and aid the Trump campaign.
The threats were widely reported on Election Day itself. However, in the aftermath of Trump’s narrow but definitive win, there has been little discussion of these egregious, deliberate attacks on democracy in general, and on the voting rights of Black and Native American people in particular. Analysts have instead focused on whether the Democrats and Kamala Harris should have run further to the left or further to the right or further in some other direction.
The bomb threats did not change the election outcome, so it’s perhaps understandable that they have not been a focus of the collective, apparently endless post-election autopsy. But the lack of interest in an egregious assault on American democracy is a mistake. The attacks demonstrate how fragile our democracy is. And they provide a blueprint for the MAGA regime to tamper in elections in the future.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Yeah, remember what we heard about these on election day? Seemed important.
It is outrageous that these incidents have been forgotten in the aftermath of the election. We cannot normalize these kinds of terrorist attacks against our election infrastructure.
If Democrats win the House or Senate in 2026, a public investigation of these bomb threats must be a priority. That’s the only way people will reckon with these incidents. And it may be the only way to prevent a larger number of them in 2028.
#7
Cory Doctorow’s prescient novella about health insurance and murder: ‘They’re going to be afraid’ (Cecilia Nowell, The Guardian, Link to Article)
Five years ago, the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow published a short story whose plot might seem eerily similar to followers of the past few weeks’ news.
In Radicalized, one of four novellas comprising a science fiction novel of the same name, Doctorow charts the journey of a man who joins an online forum for fathers whose partners or children have been denied healthcare coverage by their insurers after his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer and denied coverage for an experimental treatment. Slowly, over the course of the story, the men of the forum become radicalized by their grief and begin plotting – and executing – murders of health insurance executives and politicians who vote against universal healthcare.
In the wake of the 4 December shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which unleashed a wave of outrage at the US health system, Doctorow’s novella has been called prescient. When the American Prospect magazine republished the story last week, it wrote: “It is being republished with permission for reasons that will become clear if you read it.” But Doctorow doesn’t think he was on to something that no one else in the US understood.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I am glad the American Prospect chose to reprint Doctorow’s novella in the wake of the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO last month.
The novella tells the story of the radicalization of people who have lost family members to insurance company denials of care. The reader is taken further and further into the harms insurance companies create when they decide a life is not worth saving.
My initial reaction to reading Doctorow’s novella a few years ago was to marvel that what he described remained in the realm of fiction. The health insurance industry has harmed so many people in the name of C-suite salaries and shareholder earnings.
History demonstrates what happens when leaders fail to fix these kinds of injustices. The self-preservation instinct should lead to reforms. Yes, CEOs are getting more security now. But it would be foolish to expect that band-aid to last.
Quick Hits
- Disneyland Reaches California Record $233 Million Wage Theft Settlement With Workers (Jeremy Fuster, The Wrap, Link to Article)
Wage theft is a much bigger problem in our nation than retail theft. But I doubt we’ll see any propositions placed on ballots to hold company leaders accountable. - Study retracted years after it set off an infamous COVID-19 treatment scandal (Eduardo Cuevas, USA Today, Link to Article)
Nope, hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help with COVID-19. But given our experience with the reaction to the Lancet’s retraction of the false study linking autism with vaccines, I doubt the incoming administration is going to be moved by such facts. - New Q&A Series, No. 1: Answering Some Extremely Easy Questions Asked By the Worst-Informed and Most Disingenuous Far-Right Billionaires on Earth (Seth Abramson, Proof, Link to Article)Bill Ackman asks, “How can someone with 53 prior arrests continue to be on the NYC streets?” It’s a stupid question, but it is important to understand how arrests aren’t convictions and how prosecutors overcharge defendants hoping to force a plea bargain. Don’t they teach anything about research and reasoning at Harvard? Or is he trying to say enough stupid things that we forget he lost $400 million on Netflix right before that stock took off to the stratosphere?
- As if Times Weren’t Unsettling Enough, Saturn Is Losing Its Rings (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, Link to Article)
For once we can actually blame it on the rain.
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“Tony Blair’s new book, *On Leadership*, includes a joke that “feels accidentally pertinent”, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Some people die, and the Devil appears and asks them, before they go to Heaven, to look at Hell, insisting it’s not as bad as they’ve heard. They see Hell – full of “drinking and debauchery” – and ask to be damned. When they then wake up in the real Hell, and it’s “cold, miserable and horrible”, they angrily ask the Devil why it’s nothing like what he showed them. Ah well, he replies, “back then I was campaigning”. (The Knowledge, The “Disgusting” Hypocrisy of the Grenfell Cladding Firms)”
The Reality of January 6, 2021
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Over a period of years prior to the Third Punic War, Cato the Elder tried to rally Rome to a threat by ending every speech he gave in the Roman Senate about the need to defeat Carthage. In that spirit, I plan to end my newsletter with what I believe is a vital message for today.
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump instigated a violent insurrection against the United States government.
People were hurt and police officers died protecting the Capitol. Vice President Pence and other elected officials just barely escaped danger. Our national streak of peaceful transfers of power ended.
It was not, as Trump claims, a “day of love.” And we must resist his efforts to rewrite the history of that dark day.
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