A Letter to Republican Squishes in the Senate

From a fellow Republican squish.

Dear Senators Romney, Collins, Murkowski, et. al.:

Like you, I was deeply disturbed by the events of January 6. Like you, I believe any demonstrator who is proven to have been involved in criminal acts of assault and/or vandalism should be brought to justice. Like you, I have consistently decried the use of violence and intimidation as a tool of political persuasion regardless of the parties involved or the supposed "nobility" of the cause. 

Unlike you, however, I do not believe President Trump can be held legally liable for what happened at the Capitol. Unlike you, I do not believe that those events justify either Trump's second impeachment or the other sweeping actions many have proposed to push Trump supporters out of public life. Indeed, I believe another impeachment trial will be a waste of your valuable time and should not be treated as anything but an attempt by the left to promulgate a divisive - and false - narrative about the Trump presidency and the 2020 election aftermath. And I believe that the threatened unpersoning of American citizens for backing Trump is a far, far greater threat to democracy than anything Trump himself has ever said or done and will likely lead to more violence and radicalization, not less.

On the matter of Trump's legal liability, the facts are crystal clear: he is not responsible for inciting violence according to any recognized precedent. If merely questioning the validity of an election result were incitement by definition, then prominent leftwing activists, who've repeatedly declared various presidential elections illegitimate since my very first (the narrow, controversial election of George W. Bush in 2000), would have to be found guilty of the exact same charge. Luckily for those activists - and for Trump - our First Amendment jurisprudence already provides an applicable standard that is their safe haven: that put forward by the Supreme Court's majority decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which states that inflammatory speech cannot be punished unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

Remember: your constitutional responsibility here is not to decide whether Trump is right about the 2020 election or whether he's a sore loser throwing an unbecoming tantrum. (As a fellow Republican squish, I am agnostic on this question.) Nor is it your constitutional responsibility to decide whether Trump is an admirable public figure or an embarrassment. (Again, as a fellow Republican squish, my feelings here are mixed -- though I think the reality falls somewhere between those two poles.) Your sole responsibility is to decide whether Trump incited a riot. According to the Brandenburg test, he did not. On the contrary, Trump's remarks immediately prior to the events on January 6 explicitly urged his listeners to march on the Capitol to peacefully and patriotically demand that the results of the 2020 election be investigated before they are certified by the Congress. And he was also captured on video telling protestors to go home once it became clear that some at the Capitol were not being peaceful -- video that, as I watched in real time, was actively suppressed by social media platforms for reasons that truly defy logic. 

The actions by Buffalo Man and the others, in short, were not endorsed by President Trump and therefore cannot be used to justify Trump's punishment. Though those individuals may cite Trump's claims about the election among the reasons for their actions, that - once again - is not enough on which to hang a case for impeachment. Crazy people cite inspiration from all kinds of sources. Recall, for example, that fellow Republican Steve Scalise was shot by a declared supporter of Bernie Sanders. Are we holding Senator Sanders responsible for the actions of James Hodgkinson? No, of course we aren't -- because if we were to hold public political figures responsible for the activities of their worst followers, what would result would be draconian restrictions on speech and expression of the most unconscionable kind.

Since Trump's arrival on the political stage, the left has been busy trying to weave a story about the man that is exaggerated at best and absolutely false at worst. The opposition has claimed for years, for example, that Trump is a stooge of Vladimir Putin and consciously worked with said world leader to win the 2016 election -- despite the fact that they can point to no action by the Trump administration that has served the interests of Russia while hurting our own and that their lengthy, expensive investigation failed to produce any evidence of collusion. The opposition has also claimed that Trump is a fascist who threatens to upend all our democratic norms. On this too, they have no leg to stand on. Granted, Trump has occasionally said some things off the cuff that bely an admiration of strong men and of vaguely dictatorial action. But what matters more, I think, is what he has done as a leader -- and on this score, no one but the most deluded, fanatical hater of Trump could possibly conclude that he is an aspiring Hitler. An aspiring Hitler would not have allowed the press to lambast him 24/7 without serious consequences. He would not have allowed the Mueller investigation to proceed. And he certainly wouldn't have bothered with the constitutional procedures that enabled the ridiculous, disgusting character assassination of one of his Supreme Court appointments. No: what prominent Democrats and their allies in the media have concocted here is what commentator James Lindsay calls a pseudoreality. And now, perhaps realizing that they have nothing else with which to convict Trump, they are attempting to use the criminal actions of those few hundred radical agitators at the Capitol to prop up their faltering self-flattering narrative that Trump represents all of America's darkest impulses and that only the swift intervention of the left and their allies in the tech oligopoly can possibly save us from disaster. 

To put it quite simply, the left wants to say that their current and upcoming attacks on our human rights are really designed to "rescue" America from the consequences of an attempted "Nazi coup" led by President Trump and his supporters. Do not feed into this narrative by dignifying their impeachment or their accompanying rhetoric. It is wrong. As bad as that devolution into violence was, it didn't rise to any of the hysterical labels the Democrats are trying to pin to it. Prosecute those involved in criminal behavior, yes. Denounce them in the strongest terms that conform to truth. But let's not pretend they were a serious "insurrection" or that their infiltration of the Capitol approaches the 9/11 attacks or the depredations of Kristallnacht. 

Further, do not accept the frame that Trump represents some upwelling of "white supremacist" sentiment that must be vigorously crushed. In my 20's, I participated in a number of rallies countering ANSWER and other communist front groups in the early days of our response to 9/11. I also attended several Tea Party events early in the Obama Administration and made phone calls for the Romney campaign in 2012. Suffice it to say that I have a history in conservative activism and am therefore at least somewhat qualified to comment upon the evolution of your base over the years -- not to mention what we've faced from the left during that same time frame. Based on my observations as a lifelong Republican who interacts with Trump supporters from all walks of life on a daily basis, the truth is this: everything about Trump - including the 2020 election skepticism we're seeing now - is an expression of a profound loss of trust in the establishment -- a loss of trust I fundamentally share even though my own Trump vote this year was based more on a calculation of risks than on an enthusiastic embrace of Trump himself.

The true story of Donald Trump, I think, begins with Sarah Palin. Actually, it might begin even earlier than that, but Palin is the first anti-establishment right-leaning politician I most clearly remember. Though she was unpolished and had a funny accent, Palin had real appeal. I distinctly recall her electrifying an entire ballroom at CPAC just by sipping from a Big Gulp. And her suspicion of oil industry lobbyists (among other corporate elites) anticipated Trumpism by many years. But no one, to my recollection, sought to examine the roots of her rise with any modicum of intellectual honesty. Instead, she was endlessly mocked in the press in the most salacious - and personal - terms. Sadly, even the McCain campaign treated her with disrespect. After watching all of that unfold, I certainly wouldn't blame any ordinary American for wondering if that's what the folks at the top really think of him.

Then came the Tea Party (which Palin promoted after her vice presidential run). The Tea Party was focused on preventing the government takeover of health care via the Affordable Care Act. But like Palin herself, it also hit some populist notes that in some sense mirrored the complaints of the leftwing Occupy Wall Street movement. Big business is getting too cozy with government. Government shouldn't be picking winners and losers. We should elevate small business. We should elevate Joe the Plumber. Those themes were consistently repeated at Tea Party events I experienced -- events that, please note, were preternaturally polite and always left their venues cleaner than the organizers found them. If you're looking for a working man's conservatism that doesn't make you cringe, the Tea Party could have been that movement. But no: it was attacked as SIXHIRB (sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, and bigoted) too, and the Republican establishment did nothing to defend it.

Throughout the Obama administration, anyone with conservative-leaning opinions was subjected to never-ending, defamatory abuse by the left. It didn't matter who you were. It didn't matter where you were. I am also an active fan of literary science fiction, and in 2015, several mainstream media outlets scurrilously attacked me and mine as SIXHIRB because we complained about the predictability and political uniformity of the Hugo Awards and decided to get together and vote in order to do something about it. 'Twas a tempest in a very tiny teacup to be sure, but similar conflicts were happening all over. There was literally no escape. And what did the Republican Party do to help us fight the nonsense we were encountering on our college campuses, in our hobby groups, and on our streets? Nothing. Zip. Diddly-squat.

By the 2016 campaign, we conservatives desperately craved a candidate who wasn't just going to roll over belly up for the left. We conservatives were tired - so, so tired - of being called every name in the book on the flimsiest of evidence. We conservatives were tired of leftists' kafkatraps, their motte-and-bailey tactics, and their language games. And many of us decided what we needed was a street fighter. So we got Donald Trump. Thus followed a disinformation campaign so extensive it absolutely takes your breath away -- not from Trump (though I'm not arguing here that Trump is a paragon of honesty) but from his detractors. To this very day, for instance, Democrats in the government and in the media are spreading the lie that Trump called the neo-Nazi tiki torch bearers in Charlottesville "very fine people" -- a lie that can be instantly debunked after a quick look at the full video. Over and over again, Trump's actions and words have been distorted by so-called "journalists" who have openly sacrificed professional standards and objectivity on the altar of their sacred pseudoreality. And as they have done this, they have also been caught on video sniggering over how stupid/racist/deplorable/etc. us common Americans are for doubting they have our best interests at heart.

And then, just to put a cherry on this toxic sundae, we have the events of the last year. 2020 was a year in which political leaders ordered the American public not to hold their weddings and their funerals -- while they themselves went to dinner at the French Laundry or enjoyed a night of dancing in an empty Times Square. 2020 was the year in which political leaders took it upon themselves to decide whose businesses mattered and whose businesses didn't -- decisions that resulted in a further concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few and the immiseration of millions of others who don't have lobbyists at their beck and call. (I know: as a conservative, your instinct is to flinch at this mention of class conflict. But as much as I hate to say it, in the time of COVID, class conflict has become something we can no longer ignore.) And 2020 was the year in which leftist political leaders in particular excused months of rioting that resulted in billions of dollars in damage and many more deaths than the recent disorder at the Capitol -- rioting that, once again, hit the American working class especially hard. 2020, more than any other year in recent memory, revealed the incompetency and hypocrisy of our supposed aristoi.

I'm not confused as to why so many people believe the 2020 election was rife with fraud that effectively robbed Trump of his deserved victory -- nor am I chalking it up to simple gullibility. The people I know tweeting #StopTheSteal are college-educated writers, artists, scientists, historians, and survivors of totalitarian regimes. Moreover, they are people who have spent the past several years watching the media and the political class lie - and lie routinely -  about countless things that are stupidly easy to verify if you know how to use Google and you're not a lazy simpleton. Honestly, while I wonder where the kraken is if it actually exists, I also join my Trump-supporting friends in their reluctance to believe anything the Jack Dorseys of the world have decided is beyond dispute. Heck, if our aspiring tech masters started obnoxiously tagging content that questions whether the sky is blue, I'd probably go outside to verify our atmosphere's hue with my own two eyes before deciding said content can be safely dismissed. This is the world the establishment has made through their own failure to be forthright and consistent in their pronouncements.

But as I noted above, your Democratic colleagues in the Congress don't want to face the actual reality I have just described. In lieu of genuine soul-searching, they would rather silence challenging voices to their right on the pretext that they are protecting democracy. This will not "save America"; it will kill it. And in the process, it will do absolutely nothing to dial down the thermostat when it comes to our national discourse. I can tell you right now from the heart of "Trump's America" that pushing Trump off social media on demonstrably false charges (see above) changed precisely no one's mind. Instead, it made him a martyr and further entrenched the conviction that Trump would not have been banned if the establishment didn't have something to hide. And I suspect that a sham impeachment trial that results in a sham conviction will have much the same effect. Driving people into the shadows - forcing them underground and treating them like criminals because the powerful have decided that they're "wrong" - is one of the best recipes for extremism you could possibly devise. And that's why, once upon a time, we allowed Nazis to march in Skokie.

Again, I ask you, for the sake of our republic, not to lend the Democratic Party's naked support for political discrimination any kind of legitimacy by cooperating with their railroading of our outgoing president, his close associates, and his peaceful supporters (who far outnumber those who chose to trash Speaker Pelosi's office). You are of course right to opine that rioting is un-American -- but so too is denying someone a voice, a job, or a bank account simply because he backed the "wrong" man. 

Sincerely,

[Name Redacted], American Citizen. 

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Bonus Content:

Want to hear a YouTube friend and I discuss the play "Heroes of the Fourth Turning" (plus some other tangential topics)? Click on the video below!