January 6 Hearings Quotes

This is the week, the primetime hearings on insurrection and sedition, our last chance to make known and believed the ugly truth of our last president, the nefarious doings of his cohorts, the insanity we all witnessed and went through, the coup we just barely avoided. It's now or never. The jury is out, the jury of public opinion. The jury is us.

The insults didn't faze me. It did piss me off to hear them call Jimmy a traitor. The man had earned a Purple Heart for wounds sustained in Afghanistan while serving his country. He'd returned for multiple tours of duty. He was already a certified American patriot, a hero. Jimmy brushed off the taunts with sarcasm. "That's hurtful." My body-worn camera caught him smiling as he said it. It was the last time either of us would smile for a really fucking long time.

agreed? I would later hear that Congress and staff spent the next month utterly terrified that a protester hid inside the building during the confusion, and in every supply closet, just beside the extra toner, a lunatic with a pitchfork was waiting to murder them. If you ask me, that mentality explains a lot of my government’s behavior over the next few months.

Trump’s own lawyer finds the courage to cut him off, but by that time he’s laid out so many accusations that it’s impossible to even remember them, much less respond. So Raffensperger ignores 95% of Trump’s accusations and mostly just says that his numbers are all wrong. Which hey, they probably are, but I wanna hear WHY they’re wrong! How is an engaged citizen in a decaying republic supposed to analyze who’s the bigger liar if this is all they give me?

he’s the President of the United States; would he really give all these numbers “proving” the election had been stolen if he didn’t believe them? More importantly, does he understand the impact hearing this will have on this crowd that literally loves him?

One woman in a pink MAGA shirt yelled, “You hear that, guys? This nigger voted for Joe Biden!” Then the whole crowd, I’m guessing there were about twenty of them, joined in, screaming, “Boo! Fucking nigger!” No one had ever—ever—called me a nigger while I was wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police officer. I was stunned for a moment, but I didn’t dwell on it. I couldn’t.

As Judge J. Michael Luttig explained at our June 16 hearing, I believe that had Vice President Pence obeyed the orders from… the President of the United States of America during the joint session of the Congress of the United States on January 6, 2021, and declared Donald Trump the next President of the United States… that declaration of Donald Trump as the next President would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a Constitutional crisis in America. At the close of our June 16 hearing, Judge Luttig described the prevailing state of affairs this way: “Donald Trump and his allies… are a clear and present danger to American democracy.

I’m really tired of this talk about how these poor people don’t trust anything anymore. Oh no—you trust. You just trust all the wrong stuff. You trust awful people, with awful intentions, for no good reason other than they tell you what you want to hear,” French seethed. “You come home after work, put on Fox News, and leave it on until you go to bed. You trust Fox News—despite the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, the election bullcrap, all the revisionist history on January 6. You sit there for hours, listening to this garbage, rotting your soul. And then you turn around and say, ‘Why would I trust the New York Times?’ Really? Why would you trust Tucker Carlson?

Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized; George Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal; Evan Osnos’s Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury; Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure; Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman’s Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die; Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart; and Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. I also suggest you read the January/February 2022 issue of the Atlantic. For contrast, and decidedly more upbeat, is Robert Putnam’s The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. The public hearings held by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol should be required viewing and are readily available online.