The right-wing mob was just a
few feet away from massacring the Congresswomen and -men who were about to
certify Biden’s and Harris’s defeat of Trump. But that was three weeks ago, and
Republicans have returned to their pre-insurrection politics, as if nothing
happened. The hypocrites are now shouting “Hypocrisy!”
Last week, my own
Congressman, Darin LaHood, expressed
his concerns about the Domestic
Terrorism Prevention Act, which had already been passed by the House in
September, but then not even taken up in McConnell’s Senate. It has been brought
again by Democrats in the wake of the Capitol attack, and would create offices
in the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, and in the FBI to monitor,
investigate, and prosecute domestic terrorism. LaHood opposes it: “I have some
real constitutional concerns ... I think there are real concerns about the way
that the double standard, and the hypocrisy of how the protests last summer by
Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and the violence and the anarchy and criminal
activity that went on, that that’s not treated the same as what happened at the
Capitol.”
Here is why the broad
protests this summer involving millions of Americans concerned about racism,
that included some isolated local incidents of violence, are not the same as
the attempted overthrow of our government this month. Much of the violence,
including murders, was the work
of far-right extremists. None of those protests threatened to overthrow the
federal government or murder elected officials. The Washington Post estimated
that of over 7000 protests before the end of June, 96%
involved no injuries and no property damage. But Black people’s protests
make good Republican campaign slogans.
The agencies in our
government designated to protect us against terrorism don’t see the
equivalence. They say that the greatest danger comes from right-wing
extremists. In September, Christopher
Wray, head of the FBI appointed by Trump, told a House
Homeland Security Committee hearing that “racially motivated violent
extremism,” mainly from white supremacists and anti-government groups, was the
greatest domestic terrorist threat.
Republican politicians like
LaHood wanted Wray to say that leftist groups, like Black Lives Matter and
Antifa, were equally threatening. William Barr, Attorney General at the time,
had called Antifa “the ramrod for the violence”. Before the hearing, a
whistle-blower in the Homeland
Security Department revealed that the Trump-appointed leadership had
blocked release of an August report that labeled white supremacist extremists
as “the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland through 2021.” After
the September hearing, Trump tweeted his complaint about how his own FBI treats
leftist protesters: “I look at them as a bunch of well funded ANARCHISTS &
THUGS who are protected because the Comey/Mueller inspired FBI is simply
unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source, and allows them to get away
with ‘murder’”. The Trump reelection campaign, and many Republican local
campaigns, insisted that the scattered incidents of violence against property
during the protests this summer represented the influence of the Democratic
Party. No Democratic politician urged crowds to commit violence, as did Trump
and his fellow speakers just before the Capitol riot.
That riot was the culmination
of months of claims by leading Republicans that the November election had been
rigged. Darin LaHood was a full participant in those lies. He was among the 106
Congressional Republicans who supported the December lawsuit brought by 17
Republican Attorneys General challenging election results in Pennsylvania,
Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, that had already been carefully confirmed by
recounts and dozens of court cases. He signed on to the statement that “unconstitutional
irregularities” “cast doubt” on “the integrity of the American system of
elections.” After the Supreme Court rejected the suit, Hood wrote an editorial
for the Peoria Journal Star that “we now have some resolution that brings
finality to the election results and pending disputes.” But he wasn’t done. On
January 5, LaHood told the Springfield State Journal-Register that he
was still undecided about whether he would object the next day to the
certification of electoral votes from states where urban Black communities had
voted overwhelmingly for Biden-Harris.
LaHood and his colleagues
convinced millions of Republican voters over two months that the election had
been rigged. The extremist fire was already out of control on January 6, when
Trump, his son, Rudy Giuliani, and Rep. Mo Brooks poured on the gasoline. Even
that horrific insurrection did little to stop Republican claims about the
election. On January 8, LaHood spoke out of both sides of his mouth with a
local Illinois TV station: “After the elections are over, we need to come
together, we need to govern, we need to work on behalf of the people, and that’s
what I’ve tried to stress.” He still asserted that there are “election fraud”
issues in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan: “We have to have confidence that our
election system is working the right way.” He put a video of this interview on his website.
If LaHood wanted Republican
voters to have confidence in our election system, he would simply repeat what
Republican election experts, even including former Attorney General Barr and
election security official Christopher Krebs, said about the
absence of election fraud. He would say that Trump’s claims of fraud were
not true. He would say that Republicans should believe that the 2020 elections
were exactly as Krebs said: “This was a secure election.
That is a success story. That is something everyone in the administration
should be proud of. That’s the story I feel we should be telling now.”
By equating an exaggerated
portrait of Antifa with the Capitol riot, Republicans are trying to divert
attention from the attempt by their own supporters to overthrow our government,
which resulted in the murder of a police officer. The hypocrisy of LaHood and
his colleagues about both the threat of right-wing violence and lack of
Republican faith in American elections is notable, if not surprising. I wish
the normal double standard of Republican politics was the only thing to worry
about.
My Congressman, Darin LaHood,
whose victory I helped tally in November, joined his fellow Republicans in
unleashing a beast which they cannot control. He and they are now afraid of
bogeymen they invented: Democrats who will turn the US into a socialist
dictatorship; the violent right wing whom they encouraged but who shouted “Hang
Mike Pence”; the majority of Republican voters whom they convinced to shout “Stop
the Steal” who might desert them if they admitted that nothing had ever been
stolen. LaHood faces the classic liar’s dilemma: if I tell the truth now, I’ll
have to explain why I lied before. He hopes the beast doesn’t come for him, so
he wiggles and squirms about national security.
He pointed the beast at every
Democrat in the land, at Black communities in big cities, at his own colleagues
who couldn’t stomach the lies. He pointed the beast at me, a small part of the
national web of child-abusing election-stealing liberal-socialist-communist
traitors, who threaten the American way of life.
Neither of us knows what violent
act will develop in the extremist underground. Maybe if he were as concerned as
I am, he would stop lying about it.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
January 26, 2021
