They Knew – Walter S.Topp

There is no shortage of articles, posts, tweets, and rants regarding the events of the last week. Many are thoughtful, informative, well-researched, and highly accurate. And some are available on Fox News.

So, I am well aware that no one needs to hear from me about the events in Washington. But I have this page, and I feel like I am supposed to write something every now and then, and writing about anything else right now seems disrespectful to the nation and, especially, to the family of Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who was killed defending Congress.

So here are four observations from the windswept shores of Lake Erie …

1. The Capitol Police were sold out by the incompetence of their own superiors.

While I am no fan of American law enforcement – having served as a police officer for nine years, I know a little about the field – I am especially no fan of American police management. The Capitol Police were unprofessionally deployed, insufficiently equipped, and vastly outnumbered. From comments by officers and from video and audio recordings of the riot, it is obvious that there was no real plan for managing the widely-anticipated protests and no effective arrangements for back-up by other agencies. While incompetent leadership is the norm in American law enforcement, the failures at the Capitol were so egregious that an observer might plausibly wonder if the Capitol Police Department’s effort was intentionally sabotaged. Well, in a year or so we may find out. As for the rank-and-file officers who were abandoned by their so-called leaders, they mostly performed heroically, and though they were forced to surrender the building, they did protect the legislators and staff members trapped inside. Of course, not all officers performed well – ‘selfies, anyone?’ – and a handful of officers are being investigated. But in the total absence of effective leadership, discipline and professionalism will sometimes succumb.

2. We Are Just Getting Started

We are in a terrible place now, and the path back is unclear. While most of the country is aghast at what we have become, a frightening percentage believes that mob action to subvert democracy is OK. Extremists right now are planning a campaign of armed confrontations at statehouses and in Washington DC. There is nothing anyone can do in the short term to discourage these people and prevent further violence. They have been catered to, emboldened, and lied to for years.

In the meantime, we need to look carefully how we got here to understand how we can get out. Every disaster is the culminating point of a chain of errors, misjudgments, malfeasance, incompetence, bad luck, and malign intent. We need to investigate this disaster the way we would investigate a plane crash. It’s not enough to find out what happened that morning, or that week to precipitate the riot. We need a detailed understanding of the root causes of this incident.

3. They Knew

The most discouraging aspect of this entire disaster was the unspeakable cowardice and deep cynicism displayed by 147 legislators who endorsed the action of the mob, validated Trump’s shameless campaign of lies and distortions, and violated their own oaths of office by voting to reject lawful electoral votes with no evidence whatsoever that anything improper had occurred.

Unlike Trump – who is deeply damaged and mentally unfit for any position of responsibility – these legislators are mostly functioning adults. Mere hours after a violent mob had driven them from the floor of the legislative chamber, forced them and their staffs to take shelter in safe rooms behind barricaded doors, and fatally injured a police officer, they voted to reject the electoral votes of several states that Trump had lost, even though they knew that there was no evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election.

They knew that in early November the Trump administration’s own Department of Homeland Security had determined that there was no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. They knew that DHS Under Secretary Chris Krebs, who had led a review of the election, had called the 2020 election, “the most secure in the nation’s history.”

They knew this and yet, because it was politically expedient, they persisted for months in encouraging the baseless fiction that the election had been “stolen.” Of course, they were careful not to describe in any detail how that theft had been accomplished, since every crackpot conspiracy theory had been debunked and no actual evidence of fraud had been introduced in any of the dozens and dozens of frivolous lawsuits the Trump campaign had filed and lost. Instead, they made fact-free allegations and when people responded to those allegations by wondering if they might be true, they pointed to that response as proof that their allegations were valid. In effect, they entered a crowded theater and yelled “Fire, fire,” and when the crowd surged towards the exits, they pointed to the pandemonium and said, “There must be a problem here if all these people think there is.”

They saw short-term political gain in questioning the results of an election they knew to be free and fair, and ignored the obvious destructive long-term consequences of their actions. Even when short-term political gain was replaced by immediate in-your-face danger – the mob that had surged through the halls of the Capitol had come equipped with flex-cuffs, metal pipes, bombs, and materials to erect a scaffold, complete with noose – they turned their back on their responsibilities to the nation and sided with the rioters.

In a resignation letter from his position on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Jason Schmid wrote:

“The sad, incontrovertible truth is that the people who laid siege to the Capitol were and continue to be domestic enemies of the Constitution of the United States. A poisonous lie that the election was illegitimate and should be overturned inspired so called “patriots” to share common cause with white supremacists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists to attack the seat of American government. Anyone who watched those horrible hours unfold should have been galvanized to rebuke these insurrectionists in the strongest terms. Instead, some members whom I believed to be leaders in the defense of the nation chose to put political theater ahead of the defense of the Constitution and the Republic.”

4. The Way Back

There isn’t any chance of “healing” or nationwide “unity” until Republican officeholders – and their enablers in the media and elsewhere – come out and publicly refute the unsubstantiated, fraudulent, irresponsible, and highly inflammatory claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” and condemn all attempts to use violence or the threat of violence to achieve political aims. (Which is the textbook definition of terrorism.)

Of course, the poison that is now coursing through our political system will not be drawn out by Republicans admitting that they have been lying to people all along. The damage is too deep, the infection too widespread. By this point, hardly any of the hard-core Trump supporters will accept any actual facts or evidence.

Still, it is a necessary start. “Healing” requires that the perpetrators of the injustice or crime acknowledge their responsibility. You can’t ask to be forgiven if you are unwilling to admit that you did anything wrong.

Distressingly, some Republicans even now are doubling down on their dishonesty. Republicans in several states have already announced their intent to impose additional restrictions on voting because some voters now doubt the security of our elections. Of course, those voter attitudes are not in response to any actual; election insecurity, but are due entirely to Republican efforts to sow distrust and discord.

January 12, 2021