Good morning and happy Epiphany from Timothy Noah!
A secular anniversary weighs more heavily on political minds, this being the first anniversary of the deadly 2021 insurrection on Capitol Hill. For 187 minutes, as Liz Cheney likes to say, not even Sean Hannity could persuade Donald Trump to tell his supporters to quit brutalizing cops, trashing the Capitol, threatening to lynch Nancy Pelosi and Mike Penceâand go home. For those who still insist on calling it a lark, more than 140 police were injured and five people died, including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick.
In The Washington Post, Ashley Parker, Amy Gardner, and Josh Dawsey report, âAt least 163 Republicans who have embraced Trumpâs false claims are running for statewide positions that would give them authority over the administration of elections.â Among them are 69 gubernatorial candidates in 30 states and 18 candidates for secretary of state in states where that position makes you the top election official. âThe lies that fueled the riot,â writes Chris Megerian in Los Angeles Times, âremain deeply embedded in American politics.â
According to federal prosecutors, a New Hampshire postal worker named Jason Riddle admitted to looting the Capitol last January 6 (he said he pinched a bottle of wine and a book bound in reddish-brown leather that he later sold for $40). Now, heâd like your vote for Congress. Seriously. Riddle is one of five people spotted among the mob at the Capitol that day who are now running for the House of Representatives. If sentenced, Riddle told the Post, heâll run from jail: âIt will give me something to do.â Politico estimates that over the past year at least 11 January 6âinsurrectionists âwere elected to offices ranging from state legislature to city council to school board.â
The best January 6 op-ed today is by the author and Columbia law professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy in The New York Times. âThe arcane scheme that Mr. Trumpâs lawyers hatched to disrupt congressional certification of the vote and perhaps persuade Republican state legislatures to overturn Joe Bidenâs victory in states like Pennsylvania,â Britton-Purdy writes, âwas conceivable only because the Electoral College splinters presidential elections into separate contests in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia[.]â If we selected presidents by popular vote, âBidenâs thumping margin of more than seven million votes would have been the last word.â Amen.
Russia sent paratroopers into Kazakhstan to restore order âafter the city hall in Almaty, the countryâs largest city, was set ablaze, and the airport was overrun by an angry mob,â reports The New York Times. The troops are part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO, Russiaâs answer to NATO. CSTO members include Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. CSTO has never before invoked its protection clause. The Guardian refers to it as a Moscow peacekeeping mission, with âpeacekeepingâ pointedly in quotes. âKazakhstan has never held an election judged as free and fair by international observers,â write The Guardianâs Shaun Walker and Naubet Bisenov. âWhile it is clear there is widespread discontent, the cleansing of the political playing field over many years means there are no high-profile opposition figures around which a protest movement could unite, and the protests appear largely directionless.â
At NewRepublic.com, Walter Shapiro writes that, growing up before Vietnam and the turmoil of the 1960s, âI never could have imagined that the struggle to preserve democracy would prove to be the transcendent cause of my lifetime.â Grace Segers, who was at the Capitol a year ago today, recalls being evacuated from the Senate chamber and running âlike mice scurrying through a mazeâ in the tunnels underneath the Capitol, trying âto stick with the senators, because they were certain to be protected.â And Kathryn Joyce reports on the conservative vogue for reactionary nationalism, which draws inspiration from Christian theocratic movements in Hungary and Poland and bears associations with 1930s fascism that its adherents just canât seem to shake.
Please make it stop,
âTimothy Noah, staff writer |
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