The Banality of the Insurrectionists

Slate tries to explain:

What We Still Refuse to Accept About the Insurrectionists A year later, we are still trying to understand what drove the individuals to the Capitol, and still ignoring what we already know about how they got there. ...

Hannah Arendt coined the term—banality of evil—after watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who had shuttled millions of Jews to their deaths during World War II ...

The insurrectionists are depicted in a similar light. ...

A subset of Americans, mostly white, vehemently believes the country is being stolen from them by liberal elites and people of color. ...

What do we do about the people, like Howley’s protagonists, who have been so whipped up by the right and its conspiracy theories, and the millions of others who have yet to act? The fallout from the insurrection is still working its way through our democracy.

It is not that complicated.

The USA really has imported millions of foreigners. More than any other nation in history.

Our leaders really have shifted sharply to the Left.

Pres. Trump really did win a clear majority of the votes cast and counted on Election Day.

The Jan. 6 protesters were not carrying out a coup. They were merely pushing for constitutional election processes. They were trying to make their voices heard in the Capitol and influence a Congressional vote.

Most of the conspiracy theories I hear are from the Left. They spent about four years pursuing conspiracy theories about Trump being a Russian agent. There was more evidence of Clinton and Biden being Russian agents. And they keep reciting Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, but we have now had one of the biggest US DoJ investigations in history, and no conspiracies at all have been found, except for some chatter among FBI informants.

Here is Ted Cruz admitting that it was a mistake to call the Jan. 6 protest a terrorist attack. Terrorism usually means organized violence against civilians for political aims. The J6 protesters were merely trying to get into the Capitol building, and did not use any extra violence. Trespassing is more accurate.

Update: Pat Buchanan writes:

The left cannot let go of Jan. 6. Indeed, it has fixated upon, exploited and exaggerated the riot to discredit and destroy the Trump presidency in the history books and to prevent Donald Trump from ever running or being elected president again.

Though Trump was exonerated by the Senate ...

There are other reasons the left cannot let go of Jan. 6.

Democrats have no other issue on which to run this November.

The Biden presidency has produced an uninterrupted string of disasters: the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, the Texas border crisis, inflation, an explosion of gun violence and murders setting records in Democrat-run cities, failure to produce an adequate federal response to the delta and omicron waves of COVID-19. ...

Was Jan. 6 really comparable to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, during each of which 3,000 Americans went to their deaths in an hour’s time and major wars followed — as Vice President Kamala Harris said yesterday?

If so, why, a year after Jan. 6, 2021, has no one been charged with inciting a rebellion, sedition, treason, armed insurrection, plotting a coup, or a takeover of the government of the United States? ...

Another reason for the left to paint up the horror of that day is that the perpetrators of Jan. 6 were not the radical left who battled cops and burned and looted Seattle, Portland, Milwaukee and scores of other cities in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing.

They were the “deplorables” of Trump, the populists of the American right, against whom any slander is justified.