The Patriot Post® · The Reckoning
Yes, I agree — we should be looking ahead, not back.
In fact, this post-election season has been refreshingly forward-looking. President-elect Donald Trump — notorious for grousing about his mistreatment by political opponents — has been working overtime on staffing, planning, and preparing for his new administration.
But the unfortunate reality is that the years of Trump defamation by the Left have surely taken root and will continue to spawn active resistance to every aspect of his presidency. The endless assertions that Trump is a fascist and wannabe Hitler poised to steal democracy and cancel the Constitution are not erased by his decisive election victory last month. Our nation is still sharply divided, and many Americans believe the predictions of doom primarily because they’ve heard it repeatedly from people they should be able to trust (including President Joe Biden himself).
The Trump-haters’ narrative, in a nutshell: In 2020, then-President Trump, with full knowledge that he’d lost a fair election, tried frantically to overturn it. Failing that, on 6 January 2021 (J6), he incited a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by his followers in an unsuccessful attempt to block the election certification and thus position himself to retain power indefinitely. We’re told that the Capitol incursion that day was, in effect, an insurrection against the US government and the greatest internal threat to our country since the Civil War.
Like most effective lies, there are elements of truth woven into the Left’s distortions. Trump’s behavior following his 2020 election loss was inexcusable. We all know that. On balance, however, the Left’s gross mischaracterization of Trump’s actions is more harmful than anything he did or did not do four years ago. Going forward, if Democrats continue to build public distrust in our president, the entire nation will pay the price.
Somehow, we must set the record straight. Call it a reckoning. Here’s my take, item by item:
2020 election: Trump did not try to “overturn” a free and fair election. Instead, he challenged the results of a deeply flawed COVID-era election that produced a highly questionable outcome. Four years later, the questions still linger.
Last week, for example, CNN published an analysis of this year’s election, pointing out that Kamala Harris received 6.8 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020 while Donald Trump received 2.8 million more than in 2020 — a net difference of four million. The dramatic drop in Democrat votes explains why Harris lost, but what happened to those other four million voters?
CNN offered no explanation but read between the lines: hard data from recent elections suggest that in 2020, roughly four million fervent Democrat voters came out of the woodwork to support Biden, their uninspiring, basement-dwelling candidate. But those four million never showed up before or since. They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, or even Barack Obama in 2012, or Harris this year. Were they real? We’ll never know for sure, but let’s not demonize Trump or anyone else (myself included) for skepticism.
January 6th: First of all, let’s dismiss once and for all the myth that the J6 riot by a disorganized, unarmed mob was an insurrection. Its net effect was delaying the certification vote by several hours that day. At no point was our government in jeopardy. As senseless, misguided, and violent as that riot was, comparing it to a Civil War that tore our country apart for five years and cost over 600,000 lives is utterly nonsensical.
On the question of how that ugly riot came about, was there not a comprehensive congressional investigation?
Yes, there was. It was conducted by a select committee of the Democrat-led Congress, with GOP participation limited to those allowed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The committee’s two years of largely closed-door hearings and debate were summarized to the public via a series of prime-time TV presentations, packaged and scripted with Hollywood help — an emotionally impactful but one-sided picture.
As painful as a do-over may seem, I believe that’s exactly what we need: a truly bipartisan examination that corrects the biases of the previous one and addresses key factors that the select committee conveniently ignored. In particular:
Who planted the pipe bombs found at DNC and RNC headquarters on January 6th? The placement of bombs in a public area is an act of terrorism, nothing less. One would expect finding the perpetrators to be a top priority. The FBI has at its disposal both security video of both locations and the actual bombs themselves. Why can the agency that combed the entire USA to identify, find, and bring to “justice” thousands of J6 Capitol intruders unable to unravel straightforward physical evidence on the bomb placement?
Did the supposed rioters actually plan to lynch VP Mike Pence and others? If so, that would certainly constitute a criminal conspiracy. The widely accepted answer is, “Yes! they built a gallows in place on-site for use that day!” This, too, should have been a top investigative priority. Early this year, the FBI released video of individuals carrying prefabricated sections of the gallows onto the Capitol grounds before dawn on January 6th. But again, the FBI remains curiously unable to identify them.
What was the FBI’s role and participation in the J6 Capitol assault? Evidently, FBI agents had infiltrated the right-wing groups that were involved — but did they actively plan, encourage, and lead the Capitol breach (as they had done in facilitating plans to assassinate Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer)? Is it possible that the FBI’s inaction and/or the select committee’s seeming disinterest in the above two critical J6 elements is due to discomfort with the FBI’s role?
Department of Justice’s post-January 6 actions: The new attorney general should order a comprehensive review of the FBI’s four-year, nationwide dragnet and subsequent arrests and prosecution of about 1,500 (and still increasing) J6 participants. Lives have been ruined, and hundreds have been jailed, in many cases, for nothing more serious than brief unauthorized entry into the Capitol. It seems clear that the heavy-handed measures by AG Merrick Garland’s DOJ were designed to secure as many prosecutions as possible and thus reinforce the administration’s insurrection narrative.
The president-elect has promised several times to review each and every J6 prosecution and to exercise his pardon authority as appropriate. We can all be sure that when he does so, spokespersons on the Left will be howling indignantly that our new “dictator” is “rewarding insurrection.”
Setting the J6 record straight and communicating it to the American public will be a painstaking and difficult — but essential — task. It’s not about settling old scores; it’s a preemptive strike against future disruption of the newly elected administration, rooted in disinformation.