🔗 AP: Pelosi bars Trump allies from Jan. 6 probe; GOP vows boycott
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday rejected two Republicans tapped by House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy to sit on a committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, a decision the Republican denounced as “an egregious abuse of power.”
The GOP and their various minions and cultists were never going to consider any Jan. 6 investigation legitimate, no matter who sat on what commission. That’s just not going to happen.
Many of them were, themselves, complicit in the insurrection and still believe it was a correct thing to do. They will never believe otherwise. There is nothing you can do to convince them otherwise.
I don’t know how many ways there are to tell you this. These people do not inhabit reality. Whatever fantasy land they live in has such a grip on them that they will not ever be able to return to anything like reality.
Thirty-ish percent of the American population thinks the Jan. 6 insurrection was a glorious revolution intended to return the government to the hands of Trump, from whom the election was stolen. You can’t convince them any different. No amount of proof will ever change their minds.
Many GOP members of congress are among that 30ish percent. Many more are willing to pretend that they are in order to keep getting elected.
Look man, we’ve been warning about this for more than 20 years. I was warning people about this after 9/11, and there were plenty of people well before me beating this drum. Conservative powermongers need this false reality to achieve their ends.
Those ends include, among many other things, banning abortion, controlling women, dehumanizing the LGBTQ+ community, taking their rights away, blocking voter access, dehumanizing people of color, taking their rights away…
These people have comic book villain, Lex Luthor-type goals. They have money and power and they intend to keep what they have and gain more. In order to do that, they have to exploit the shit out of the rest of us and the planet.
Everything they do is in service to those goals. And in order to accomplish those goals, they have to generate a population who believes their bullshit and acts on it. That is specifically and explicitly what Fox News was built to do.
When this all started, conservatives with political power were enabling this idea, but it’s been like 30 years. Now we’re dealing with the conservatives who grew up drinking this Kool-Aid.
Our government is packed full of conservatives who aren’t just enabling or complicit in the bullshit, they believe it. This is what reality is to them.
And you cannot talk them out of it. There is no amount of gentleness or reason or proof that will pry them out of their fantasy world. There is no one you can appoint to the Jan. 6 commission that will make it seem legit to that 30ish percent.
I don’t know if there’s a solution to this problem. I haven’t been feeling very hopeful these days, so most of the time I think it’s probably too late.
I suppose if we work our asses off it’s just barely possible that we might still be able to vote them out of power and relegate them back to the powerless fringe where they belong, but like. We can’t even convince people to get a life-saving vaccine until it’s too fucking late, so.
Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about the conservative opinion of the Jan. 6 investigations. Since nothing we do will convince them it’s legit, it’s safe to write them off, ignore them, and continue on with what we were doing.
Work hard. Vote blue in 2022. I hope to fuck we keep the House and Senate because if we don’t…
Well, I don’t think we’ll get another opportunity to fix shit if we don’t. I think it’ll be all fucking over for American democracy if we lose in 2022.
Photo Credit: Insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, by Tyler Merbler (Source & License).
Notes & Thoughts 