Paul Waldman is on the staff of the Washington Post. In this excerpt of his column, he says that Trump zealots will refuse to believe what the police officers said about the events of January 6. Nor will Trump devotees in the Congress be moved. The police officers saved their lives on that day, but they won’t heed what they testified. The Republican members of Congress were there as rioters plundered the U.S. Capitol and threatened the lives of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence. Only a thin blue line separated the mob and the esteemed members of Congress, who were only a few feet apart as they scurried to their hiding places. Yet still they say things like, “It was a normal tourist crowd,” or “it was a peaceful protest.” And they have response when Trump expresses his admiration and love for the mob that beat up police officers, shattered windows, and broke down doors in their absurd effort to reverse the election results.
Waldman writes:
There are people who believe that the moon landing never happened, that the astronauts in the footage all the world saw were actually bouncing around on a soundstage hidden away somewhere. But they aren’t making our laws, they aren’t invited on TV to discuss their perspective, and they don’t have the ability to influence millions.
Yet there are people who deny the truth of what happened in Washington on Jan. 6, despite all the video, all the contemporaneous reports, all the guilty pleas, and all the testimony. And they have a lot more power.
Tuesday’s first hearing of the select House committee investigating the insurrection, with vivid testimony from four police officers who stood against a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters overrunning the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a presidential election, should put at least some questions about that day to rest.
Still recovering from their physical and mental injuries, the officers seemed particularly incensed that the truth of what happened that day is denied by so many on the right, from Trump himself on down.
“To me, it’s insulting, just demoralizing because of everything that we did to prevent everyone in the Capitol from getting hurt,” said Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell about the effort to minimize what happened that day, including by Trump. (“It was a loving crowd,” the former president told Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, “There was a lot of love. I’ve heard that from everybody.”)
Gonnell also addressed the various conspiracy theories propagated by some very high-profile figures on the right, claiming that the insurrection might have been a false-flag operation. “It was not antifa,” he said. “It was not Black Lives Matter. It was not the FBI. It was his supporters that he sent them over to the Capitol that day.”
“The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful,” said D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, slamming his fist on the table. “Nothing, truly nothing, has prepared me to address those elected members of our government who continue to deny the events of that day.”
That denial takes various forms. Some, like Trump, assert that the riot was no big deal (“By and large it was peaceful protest,” said Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin). Others say that, while it was certainly bad, it doesn’t have anything to do with any larger political forces and should be put behind us.
But the truth is that there was nothing isolated about the event. Those rioters came to Washington at Trump’s behest. They assaulted the seat of our government in an effort to prevent the final certification of an American presidential election. And to this day, most of the GOP continues to stoke the fires of racial resentment and contempt for the democracy that made it possible.
One of the few exceptions in the Republican Party, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) dispatched the bad-faith argument so many in his party made that any investigation of Jan. 6 should also spend time talking about protests last summer against police misconduct, during which violence broke out:
“Some have concocted a counternarrative to discredit this process on the grounds that we didn’t launch a similar investigation into the urban riots and looting last summer. Mr. Chairman, I was called on to serve during the summer riots as an Air National Guardsman. I condemn those riots and the destruction of property that resulted. But not once did I ever feel that the future of self-governance was threatened like I did on January 6. There is a difference between breaking the law and rejecting the rule of law, between a crime, even grave crimes, and a coup.”
That is the heart of what made January 6 so threatening: Not just the physical violence, but the assault on the American system.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t want to hear, ever again, “How do we reach these Trump voters?”
You can’t. You can’t. You freaking CANNOT.
You can’t talk an alcoholic out of drinking until he or she hits bottom. You can’t convince cultists that their Enlightened Master is a charlatan. You can’t talk sense to people who will rationalize their Glorious Leader Who Shines More Orange Than Does the Sun suggesting that people inject disinfectant or telling a mob that the election was stolen and then calling on them to march down to the Capitol Building and take back their country.
People who can look on this kind of stuff–on Donnie Dummy calling for babies to be taken from their parents, on his screaming that border agents should SHOOT unarmed asylum seekers ARE NOT REACHABLE. They are cultists, and they won’t change until it really comes home to them–until they catch Covid19 and are put on a ventilator, until they are brought up on charges for breaking into a federal building and assaulting police officers.
So don’t even try.
Instead, work on this: teaching the children of such people to despise everything their parents “think” and do.
cx People who can look on this kind of stuff and be fine with it. . . .
A commenter at this blog described a segment of Trump supporters as religio-fascists. You and he are correct that they can’t be “reached”. They believe God’s law is man over woman and White over Black. They only listen to confirming and assuaging voices that promise them a return to a theocratic state.
No reasoning will reach them because they feel righteous, that their “intolerance is celestial purism”. They view pregnancy as punishment for and a way to control women. The “forced birth extremists” carried the Christian flags at the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Research found religion was the strongest factor in the voting of a significant portion of U.S. voters.
The slowness of Americans in accepting the threat that religion and power-driven men like Robert P. George, Paul Weyrich, and the signers of the Manhattan Declaration pose, impedes progress and democracy.
If conflict between right wing Catholics and evangelicals could be generated and exposed to the public, the progressive agenda of the majority of Americans could advance. Had that conflict been in evidence instead of the alliance between the two, IMO, 6 out of 9 conservative Catholic SCOTUS jurists wouldn’t have been confirmed.
The mindless MAGA minions that blindly support Traitor Trump’s big lie/s could easily replace the Nazis that planned and executed the ‘Final Solution’ and murdered 6 million Jews.
They are the same in too many ways.
“The Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the true nature of their crimes. They used the term ‘Final Solution’ to refer to their plan to annihilate the Jewish people. It is not known when the leaders of Nazi Germany definitively decided to implement the ‘Final Solution.’ The genocide, or mass destruction, of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of increasingly severe discriminatory measures.”
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/final-solution-overview
The term MAGA minions could easily swap places what the word Nazis in the above quote from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler could easily switch places and even though they do not look the same and Hitler was probably smarter than Trump, with the same sadistic, cruel minds and narcissistic personality disorders their actions will always lead to the same place.
On January 6, the US came very close to having its own Hitler with a different name, to carry out another ‘Final Solution’ targeting minorities and Democrats.
And our country isn’t out of that tangled trollish forest yet. Trump is still out there spreading his Big Lie in an attempt to profit off of his mindless MAGA minions and possibly stir them up to pull off a violent coup to reinstall Trump as president for life.
An instructional simulation used years ago teaching the Holocaust unfolded “how could this happen?” scenarios. Moving along the board, the moderator reads REAL events in German history chronologically. The players had a cards on what their action would be at each of the real events from the early 1930s forward. They ranged from “don’t attend the event” or “protest” all the way to “risk your life!”
From the one-party majority and arson attack of the Reichstag in 1933 (sound familiar) to the events we all know, players moved their way through history.
Most players held tightly to the “risk your life” cards taking minor actions and with modest protest or even acclimation early on.
You know the rest. By the time the only cards left in their hands were “risk your life” it was too late. The devastation, hiding, trains, camps, and 6 million who died was impossible to stop.
The point – RISK YOUR LIFE at the start. Take a stand, protest widely and wildly, demand officials speak, do not be silent, do not rationalize, keep the truth out front.
As far as I can tell, Major League Baseball moving the All-star game is the only economic-hit bold statement in the past six months – and Liz Cheney!
The obscene response of the GOP to these first testimonies is a gut punch and sick.
One person’s opinion: Don’t call your congressman or flood their offices with emails and voicemails they ignore. CALL and FLOOD YOUR TV AND NEWS STATION by the thousands and demand THEY hound the congressmen and make them talk.
I want to hear the NRA-owned, racist, pandering elected officials who want to rule, not govern, grilled on what they heard from the officers today. No dancing around Nancy Pelosi this or that or using their buzz words like hoax or whining “what about the BLM protests?”: WHAT DO THEY SAY TO THE STATEMENTS OF THESE OFFICERS.
It appears that in terms of success rates for Trump-endorsed female candidates after 2018, unless the women are incumbents, the Trump record is not stellar.
The information should suggest to women that Trump voters don’t want women representing them in D.C. Setting the standard for the absence of women in leadership over a long, long history is Georgetown University.