Guilt for January 6 Belongs With Those Most Eager to Condemn It
George Will, Peggy Noonan, and other estimable friends bear a heavy responsibility in the disaster that has now been riveted on the backs of the American people and the world.
“…Trump did not incite anything, except a peaceful demonstration after a very questionable election result. None of the 18 lawsuits that directly challenged the constitutional or legal integrity of the vote or the vote-counting system were adjudicated. They were not heard for technical reasons. Neither was the case launched by the attorney general of Texas with the support of 18 other states alleging failure by several of the swing states to follow the constitutional requirement to ensure fair presidential election results.
There were no problems in 44 states, but in six swing states, there were extraordinary anomalies where voting or vote-counting had been altered with questionable constitutional legality, supposedly to accommodate voters inconvenienced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made a number of key results practically unverifiable. If 42,000 votes were switched in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin, it would have given Trump victory in the Electoral College.
The 2020 election, next to that of 1876 which was resolved by an agreement between the candidates after a partisan vote in a congressional commission, was the most dubious presidential result in American history. The real issue here is that the Trump-haters, like George Will, want to charge Trump falsely with seeking an insurrection after losing an unexceptionable election, when he was merely expressing the anger of his partisans over a dubious vote-counting process, aggravated by the abdication of the judiciary from its constitutional co-equal role with the legislative and executive branches.
On the same television program, Will said that on January 6 he urged his employees in Georgetown to go home, as if the malcontents at the Capitol would be trolling through Georgetown afterward and singling out George Will and his helpers for their five years of anti-Trump vitriol. A man of Will’s influence has an ethical and professional obligation to avoid the willful propagation of defamatory nonsense. He said on the same program that for the first time in American history many members of Congress are afraid of their own voters. They were elected because those same voters agreed with what they said: they all found Trump the preferable candidate.
The Biden Administration has been a disaster on every score and Donald Trump has not simply gone away like a dreadful meteor as Will and other Trump-haters predicted. Those who generally approved of Trump’s policies but couldn’t bear him now have to wear the odium of having helped elect Biden, as well as the cold terror that Trump will be back.
When I first knew George Will, he was a champion of the Reagan Revolution. I accept that Trump is much harder to warm to than Reagan, but in policy terms, he is Reagan’s continuator, after seven terms of indifferent or inept government. Trump’s revolution is just as necessary and just as worthy of support as Reagan’s, though his public persona is much less amiable. George Will, Peggy Noonan, and other estimable friends who are normally sensible bear heavy responsibility in the disaster that has now been riveted on the backs of the American people and the world. As Bill Clinton might say, I feel your guilt. As the ghastly current jargon goes, you own this debacle. Donald Trump isn’t the problem, you are.
A presidential election result that was highly questionable, despite the frenzied efforts of an air-tight media pretense that all the late drops of unverifiable heavy Biden votes in a few key states were squeaky clean, and which the judicial system at every level refuses to judge for process reasons (a divided Wisconsin Supreme Court said the challenge in that state had to start at the lower courts and work up—impossible given those deadlines), naturally leaves the 75 million voters who supported the ostensibly losing candidate upset. That they would demonstrate is understandable, and when the speaker of the House and mayor of Washington refused the capitol police chief’s request for reinforcements, some hooliganism was predictable.
If January 6 is to be memorialized, it should be as an event illustrative of the strength of American democracy—that it can endure such strains and continue quite normally.
I hope we’re still on speaking terms. Smashing hijacked civilian airliners into large and famous buildings is a more egregious and sanguinary act of war than was the attack on Pearl Harbor—or the events of January 6…”