The first hearing of the House Select Committee on the January 6 terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol ran the way every hearing on a national tragedy should run. It was emotional, informative, and unifying (yes, unifying - I'll get to that at the end). By refusing to allow the participation of Rep. Jim Jordan, who is one of the most ardent carriers of every drop of water Donald Trump dribbles and someone who looks like he smells like sweaty, unwashed polyester, Nancy Pelosi assured the committee that it wouldn't be interrupted by constant bullshit objections and constant questions about Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Instead, we got real.
What we were able to hear was the raw hurt and mostly muted rage of the four police officers who were testifying. Capitol police officers Aquilino Gonell and Harry Dunn and DC Metro officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges offered vivid details of the violence when the mob of fucknuts, tripping balls on Trumpism, rampaged into the Capitol. The four men were compassionate to their fellow officers and righteously pissed off at the rioters and their enablers and supporters in the media and in the federal government. They all had the greatest contempt for the revisionists and denialists in Congress, whose lives the men defended, and elsewhere for saying that January 6 wasn't an insurrection, that the rally before the attack was a "love fest," as Fucko the Former President called it. And they all got choked up talking about their near-murders, the worry of their families, and the utter betrayal of any sense of nation by the rampaging fucknuts.
So, of course, right-wing dickscabs had to immediately attack them for either being pussies, being mentally ill, or just pretending. Some of the dickscabs I'm gonna mention here might make you say, "Who the fuck cares?" but the point is that a shit-ton of people do care what these dickscabs say. So while we may look at, for example, disgraced former NYPD commissioner and convicted felon Bernard Kerik and think, "Fuck that guy," the asshole's treated like a hero in conservative corners.
Speaking of that asshole, he tweeted an image Gonell crying and wrote, "Having commanded the NYPD on 9/11 and been stabbed and shot at; and witnessed numerous colleagues shot and killed in the 80s - 90s in the line of duty, I am shocked at the cowardice. They should be fired - not fit for duty." It's pure emasculation and it's pure backwards ass delusion, hearkening back to a time when the (almost entirely male) police were supposed to just suck up the traumas of their work and take it out on the next perp or their wives or the bottle, abuse being better than dealing with their shit.
Also going straight for the emasculation angle is another conservative criminal and vile propagandist, Dinesh D'Souza, whose sole purpose seems to be trying to out-whore every other nutzoid on the right for that filthy rube lucre, tweeted, "If the #CapitolPolice were this discombulated [his misspelling] by a boisterous walk-through—much tamer than an Antifa assault on a public building and on par with what we’ve seen at innumerable campus occupations—I wonder how they’d hold up in the event of a real insurrection." You got that? It was "a boisterous walk-through," like a frat going to the Louvre, and not a dangerous assault on democracy. And if that wasn't shitty enough, he also tweeted, "I’m reliably informed that the rumor is untrue: The #CapitolPolice have NOT decided to change their official name to the Capitol Pussies." Nothing like a bitch-faced troll calling cops who were nearly killed "pussies" to show how much blue lives really don't matter to you.
On his Fox "news" entertainment program, Tucker Carlson, who always looks like he's wondering if it's wrong to have the dog lick peanut butter off his balls while the dog is licking peanut butter off his balls, played a clip of Fanone saying, "I’ve been left with the psychological trauma and the emotional anxiety of having survived such a horrific event." Carlson, who should be called "the worst human being" to his stupid face every fucking time he steps foot in public, snickered at Fanone's pain and then asked why Fanone didn't say he was traumatized by BLM protests in DC, as if Carlson gets to decide what is traumatic and what isn't. I'm guessing that Fanone wasn't dragged on the ground, beaten unconscious, tasered multiple times in his neck, and threatened to be killed with his own gun by the BLM marchers as he was by the savage incels at the Capitol. Tuckfuck went on to accuse Dunn and Gonell of lying about what happened to them, which I assume is what Carlson would do if any non-white people accused white people of crimes.
Carlson's Fox "news" co-conspirator and noxious doom weasel, Laura Ingraham, merely laughed at the officers' pain and accused them of being actors, and she gave them awards for their "performances." Ingraham smeared and sneered, "Now the award for best use of an exaggeration in a supporting role, the winner is Aquilino Gonell, who thinks the pen is literally mightier than the sword." She then played a clip of Gonell saying, "He had all these items and things that were thrown at us and attack and use to attack us. Those are weapons, no matter if it is a pen." But she didn't include exactly what Gonell had said were the weapons he saw: "a baseball bat, a hockey stick, a rebar, a flagpole, including the American flag, pepper spray, bear spray." Yeah, those things can kill you or ruin your fucking day, if not your entire life.
(By the way, lemme pause here to say how fucked up it is that one of the big defenses conservatives are using about January 6 is that there were "no guns." Putting aside that the statement is a factual lie and that baseball bats are also murder weapons, those who say it are implying that no one was really in any danger because of the lack of guns. You got that? In other words, they are declaring that guns kill people. The only logical conclusion to this is that guns should be banned in general, just as they are on the Capitol grounds, because conservatives say we're safer without them.)
This could easily go on with mention of grifting motherfuckers like Greg Kelly over on Newsmax (motto: "Democracy dies in darkness because that's where we strangled it"), who tweeted that "None of these cops can be trusted with weapons. Resign" and "Put HODGES on 'desk duty' right away. He's not equipped to be a cop" (Hodges was the cop who was screaming out while being crushed in a doorway), as well as, pithily, "What a bunch of BABIES." Or Fox "news" regular Julie Kelly, who declared the officers "crisis actors" and mocked Dunn for describing being called the n-word with "Oh, the drama!" Shockingly, both Kellys aren't married to each other. They're both just incredibly shitty humans with the same last name.
Almost the entirety of the GOP and the right, especially the right-wing media slime corps, is deeply invested in tearing down any sense that something extraordinary happened on January 6. Every attempt to invest it with greater weight, like calling it the coup attempt or the terrorist attack that it clearly was, has to be cut off at the knees, and it doesn't matter who has to be denigrated in order to minimize the events. Because, see, if you buy the truth of January 6, the one that every video has shown us, the one that every witness has told us, the one your own eyes and ears have seen and heard, then you have to acknowledge the other truth, which all four officers want to be acknowledged: that this was aided and abetted by some of the politicians screaming for this hearing to be silenced and by the White House. And, goddamnit, if they can't convince you everyone is just lying, then they'll degrade the supposedly brave man, emasculate them, cut off their balls, and hope you think they're pussies, too, because who wants to side with cowards?
In other words, it's better to divide the country more than to acknowledge that the hearing should be a unifying moment, one where we recognize the enemy within and all fight to get rid of it. That would have been so simple, just like it could have been with Covid. But Republicans have met the enemy and it is them and, clearly, they like it.
