We Refuse To Reject The Evidence Of Our Own Eyes

They’re rewriting the truth of January 6th. Now these bastards want US to write the check.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

The world is inside out, upside down and on fire, and it is genuinely impossible to keep pace with all the ways this Trump regime keeps trying to drag reality behind a moving car. Every day another obscenity. Another act of vandalism against truth. Another self-serious little catastrophe wrapped in patriotic language and sanctimonious bureaucratic bullshit, arriving before the last outrage has even settled into memory.

It is exhausting by design.

Exhaustion is useful.

Confusion is useful.

If everything feels urgent, eventually nothing does.

But this one matters.

This one matters because it reaches backward and forward at once, into the wound of January 6th and into the country this fascist little regime is trying to build from its ashes.

They are not merely pardoning the people who attacked the Capitol.

They are revising them.

Rehabilitating them.

Sanding down violence until blood disappears, screaming softens, shattered glass becomes scenery and the people who beat cops bloody and hunted lawmakers begin reemerging from the fog as patriots, victims, martyrs, misunderstood men burdened by everyone else’s inability to stop remembering what happened.

And WE remember.

We remember because we lived it.

We watched Capitol Police beaten in the halls of the Capitol of the United States while lawmakers ran and terrified staff barricaded doors and men wrapped in conspiracy, spite and tactical gear screamed for Mike Pence’s head as though democracy itself had personally offended them. We watched television anchors lose the polished steadiness television anchors almost never lose. Phones exploded with messages. Dinner went cold in kitchens. Children overheard things children should never have to overhear.

That night my kids asked me whether those bad men were coming to our house next.

I remember their voices, thin and frightened, already bracing. I pulled them close and told them no. Told them they were safe. Told them what parents tell children because love reaches for reassurance even after certainty has left the room.

Then the house went quiet and I lay awake staring into darkness realizing I had lied.

Something sacred had been breached in broad daylight.

And for 187 minutes, while officers were beaten, sprayed, crushed and overwhelmed, while lawmakers hid and fear ricocheted through marble corridors, Donald Trump sat somewhere safe and did absolutely fucking nothing.

WE watched him do nothing.

Which is why what is happening now feels so grotesque.

I have a friend who survived years of abuse. In the beginning, her husband at least admitted what he had done, briefly, strategically, always with blame braided into the confession. You see what you made me do. Violence acknowledged just long enough to rearrange responsibility.

Then, little by little, the story changed.

The punch became an overreaction.

The screaming became stress.

The terror became misunderstanding.

Conversations she could still hear in perfect, awful detail dissolved into denial. Memories she knew were real blurred at the edges. What she had lived through, what she could still feel in her body, was calmly, casually denied until certainty itself began slipping through her fingers.

Somebody looked her straight in the face and told her the thing she survived never happened.

That is what January 6th feels like now.

Not forgetting.

Gaslighting.

The history-erasing ex with federal power.

The same yam-tinted, resentment-glutted vandal of democratic norms who summoned the mob and watched the violence now wants the country to participate in its own destabilization of memory, and he has brought along Todd Blanche, his slick, simpering legal errand boy carrying himself with the grave solemnity of a mob lawyer three bourbons deep into a moral collapse, to help rewrite the record.

One of the most documented crimes in modern American history, filmed obsessively from every imaginable angle, including proudly by the rioters themselves, is now being treated as though reality itself simply became inconvenient.

Thousands of hours of footage exist.

Police body cameras.

Surveillance footage.

Self-recorded videos uploaded by people so certain history would congratulate them they narrated their own crimes.

And yet the Department of Justice has begun scrubbing January 6th prosecution material from public view, publicly dismissing material documenting prosecutions as partisan excess rather than the historical record of a violent assault on the peaceful transfer of power. The same institution that prosecuted the attack now behaves as though memory itself has become embarrassing.

History handled this way becomes something eerie.

Not shattered all at once.

Pared down.

Fussed over.

Filed smooth.

The rough edges removed until horror itself begins looking negotiable.

Stewart Rhodes. Proud Boys. Oath Keepers. Men convicted after evidence, testimony, deliberation and due process now inching toward legal absolution through efforts to vacate convictions with prejudice, legal language for buried, shut, done, as though terror itself can be administratively laundered if enough solemn little filings pile high enough to obscure what happened.

And spare me the pious procedural garbage pretending this is justice. Spare me the smug, self-serious little chorus of official explanations attempting to convince the rest of us that terror merely suffered a paperwork problem.

January 6th was not a regular tourist visit.

It was not legitimate political discourse.

It wasn’t peaceful or patriotic.

It wasn’t perpetrated by the deep state, the FBI, Antifa, drag queens or furries.

Those who attacked the Capitol are not heroes, patriots or warriors.

It was a violent domestic terror attack fueled by lies and conspiratorial propaganda meant to stop certification of an election.

Which.

He.

Lost.

One hundred and forty law enforcement officers suffered injuries. Broken bones. Brain trauma. Chemical exposure. Bodies altered. Sleep interrupted. Lives divided into before and after. Officers absorbing the bruising force of a conspiracy-fed crowd while holding the line against bedlam.

And now comes the next indecency.

A cop-beater slush fund.

OUR money.

Mortgage money.

Co-pay money.

School-clothes money.

The humiliating arithmetic of ordinary adulthood quietly redirected toward people who assaulted cops while the officers they attacked continue living with surgeries, startled sleep, hair-trigger nerves and memories that surface sharp and unwelcome in otherwise ordinary afternoons.

Trump and the slick little courtroom courier he dispatched want to reward the people who assaulted cops instead of the cops who were assaulted. Capitol Police officers put their bodies between democracy and chaos. They absorbed blows, chemical spray, panic and permanent trauma protecting lawmakers, staff and the very institution these men attacked, and now the repayment for that sacrifice is watching politicians mumble through gutless obedience while the people who bloodied them stretch out their hands for compensation.

And the horror does not stop there. Because cruelty, once rewarded, rarely stays still.

Dozens of pardoned January 6 defendants have already gone on to face new criminal allegations, including violent crimes and child sex offenses.

Children.

New victims.

Fresh ruin spilling outward from people who should still be behind bars.

People who were behind bars.

Men this country watched storm the Capitol, assault cops and terrorize lawmakers before walking back into the world carrying conspiratorial poison, persecution fantasies and the appetite for menace that put them there in the first place.

And now here we are, watching some of the same people leave fresh scars behind them while Trump and his rotten regime attempt to turn punishment into payment, consequence into compensation, criminality into victimhood.

The people who attacked them now waiting to be rewarded.

Tell me what the hell kind of country rewards the people who broke the window while handing the people who bled protecting the house another bill.

And still, feckless Republican cucks stand in front of cameras defending this depravity. Tommy Tuberville and the trembling little congregation of spineless, sniveling careerists nodding solemnly through political sewage, mouthing pieties about “fairness” while the Capitol Police officers who protected their frightened asses stagger home carrying fractures, flashbacks and fear.

It is obscene. Spiritually rotten. Morally rancid. The kind of public cowardice so craven, so crawling, so catastrophically small-hearted that courage took one horrified look around, burst into flames from sheer humiliation and launched itself out a fucking window while these groveling little power pilgrims stood beneath the wreckage, smoothing their ties beneath the fallout, swallowing what little dignity remained, bowing and scraping before power with the sweaty, trembling devotion of men so politically petrified they would sell out what little remained of themselves for a pat on the head and a seat a little closer to the throne.

This is how mob bosses work.

Loyalty is rewarded.

Protect the boss and the boss protects you.

Threaten democracy for him. Beat cops for him. Carry out violence in service of his resentments and eventually the story bends around your conduct until the country you attacked is told you are the victim and everyone else simply remembers too loudly.

He is not merely pardoning people.

He is buying loyalty.

Ensuring devotion.

Protecting the people willing to fight for him, hurt for him, threaten democracy for him, a private army subsidized by the country they battered.

Shattered glass.

Panic.

Frightened voices.

Bloodied uniforms and children asking impossible questions in dark bedrooms while parents reached for answers they did not actually possess.

WE still have what we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears.

And no rewritten record, no legal laundering, no institutional whitewash, no smug little pile of procedural nonsense polished into patriotic language is going to separate us from what happened or from what they are trying to do now.

Because memory is not theirs to confiscate.

And neither is the truth.

And as long as WE cling to it with both hands, white-knuckled if we have to, refusing surrender and refusing the soft seduction of lies, we are never going to stop demanding justice for what happened that day.

This Orwellian shit shall not stand.

Not on our watch.

There will be a reckoning on the other side of this.

A motherfucking reckoning.

“If you could cling to the truth, even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Please stay safe out there, stay resolute and stay strong!

The bullies seem to be retreating now. Every time I write something about them, we get an email. So bracing for that today.

I’m not really sure what’s going on, but a lot of people have been unsubscribing. I know times are hard and I’m assuming that that’s what it is. This Substack is how I provide for my kids, but it’s also become this beautiful, wonderful community which provides much more than financial support for the three of us.

I’m really hopeful that people will come back when they can. My content will remain free, no matter what.