Editorial Note: The Washington, DC Police Officer Who Was Injured in the January 6 US Capitol riot: Why Americans don’t seem to care

Editor’s Note: Michael Fanone, a former Washington, DC police officer who was injured during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, is the author of a memoir, “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul.” He is an analyst for CNN. The opinions expressed here are his own. CNN has more opinion.

When I speak to fellow officers who defended the US Capitol, they often talk about why Americans don’t like insurrections. In other words, most Americans just don’t seem to care. An attempt to end our democracy? It’s not good.

One officer said, “Maybe if we hadn’t done such a good job against such overwhelming forces, people would care more.” Maybe, if a congressman or a senator had been injured, dragged through the halls to the makeshift gallows or killed, people would give a damn.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/opinions/voter-apathy-january-6-pelosi-election-vote-fanone/index.html

Why did Paul Pelosi lose his job in February 2016? What do we really want to know about voting rights? Why should we celebrate the anniversary of the November 26 attack?

If the future of democracy was at stake, then people would be motivated to vote on Tuesday. They will understand if we don’t preserve one-person, one-vote, we’ll lose control of every other issue.

Until last week’s brutal assault against Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, political candidates, including many Democrats, avoided talking about January 6. Apparently, polls show that swing voters care more about gas prices and abortion.

I believe that the attack on Paul Pelosi will be a turning point, but I don’t think so. I’m afraid that politically-inspired violence is only going to escalate. It has already been normalized.

Our leaders have universal condemnation of violence and are no longer referring to isolated incidents. The husband of the third in line to the US presidency was beaten in his own house for political reasons, and the right-wing media and some Republicans were happy about it.

People used to say that it’s fun until someone gets hurt. Well, people are getting hurt and some Republicans, including the former president’s obnoxious son, still think it’s all fun and games, condoning and – potentially encouraging – more violence.

I get where Junior is coming from. He knows that the violence and threats are working. The election workers are abandoning the polling stations in droves.

A Republican member of Congress believes insurrectionists should have won the election in favor of them and they should have been thrown out, which shows just how dangerous they are.

Voting Rights are not all about access to the ballot, but Republicans think that protecting the ballot from the opposition vote actually means protecting it.

Republicans are making it hard to vote by creating rules to restrict turnout and posting masked guards at the ballot box in Arizona, similar to the way the Ku Klux Klan did after the Civil War in order to intimidate people of color. In the 19th century, the GOP used racism to amass power.

I have received death threats for speaking the truth about January 6, so I carry a weapon on a regular basis. But if I lived in Arizona, even I would vote elsewhere, rather than confront an armed individual posted in a lawn chair beside a ballot drop box.

I wrote a chapter in my book about my transformation from a 2016 Trump voter to a 2020 Biden voter. I’d been a single-issue voter for law enforcement. But early in Trump’s term, my views evolved, as I realized I’d been duped by a carnival barker. It is my belief that people can change and that we need to do everything we can to help them as they vote on Tuesday.

It won’t be easy. I’ve found that it’s easier to fool the American people than to get them to realize they’ve been fooled. I don’t believe that the vast majority of Americans support Trump, but I do believe this majority is indifferent to the pain and suffering that he has caused so many Americans.

There are many reasons to be afraid of Trump. I believe that indifference will be the downfall of our nation, the biggest threat to democracy. We don’t seem to care enough to pay attention to what’s happening to our country.

What Have I Done About the January 6, 2001 Insurrectionist Reaction? The Opinion of a New York Democrat and the First Chance to Reject Fascism

I know that people are busy. There are a million distractions. Elon Musk bought Twitter. Tom and Giselle are getting divorced. A Kardashian shared pictures of her new baby! This World Series is a barn burner.

But Americans need to understand why this election is so different: It is our first chance since January 6, to reject fascism. It is perhaps the last chance to preserve democracy.

Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on the micro-blogging site. Her own opinions are expressed here. CNN has more opinions on it.

What should a political party do when one of their elected members is making comments that sound traitorous? The Republican Party should be asking itself, “what if there had been a January 6, 2001 riot?” after the Georgia Republican Representative said this weekend that insurrectionists would have won.

“I gotta tell you something: If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won,” she reportedly told the New York Young Republican Club. Not to mention, it would have been armed.

This is offensive and scary, to say the least. In her statement to CNN, which was posted on Monday, she said she was sarcastic and denied any involvement in the January 6 riot.

In my lifetime, the most anti-american comments ever uttered by an elected official have been made by Greene. They are nothing less than someone happy to foment insurrection and undermine this country’s most basic democratic traditions in an effort to install the losing candidate just because she shares his ideology.

The President of the January 6 Insurrection and the War on the Warfront: Paula Greene, Secretary of State to the House Judiciary, Rep. Mike Pence, John Wise

The January 6 insurrection was an attempt to violently overthrow the government and overturn the results of a free and fair American election. Over a thousand the participants have been indicted and many have been convicted of serious crimes. Five officers and four people died that day, as well as 100 law enforcement officers who were injured in the following weeks.

Members of Congress — Greene’s colleagues — wound up running for their lives, hiding from the mobbing criminals who broke into the Capitol and explicitly threatened the lives of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Removing a member of Congress from office is not a decision that a party should take lightly. She was, after all, duly elected by her constituents. But a requirement of serving in elected office is defending the Constitution of the United States.

In a few weeks, Greene will even lay her hand on a Bible and pledge to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”

This is not the first time the United States has been forced to grapple with enemies from within. Tellingly, some of the January 6 rioters flew not just the US flag but also the traitorous Confederate banner — the flag of earlier enemies of the nation, who were, thankfully, defeated. No sane person would want another war in this country. But unfortunately, too many people on the political right want just that.

At the Young Republican event, the president said that the audience wanted to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. They were in the streets.

The party must now get its act together. Republicans have long flirted with right-wing extremism, and former President Donald Trump opened up the floodgates, helping to reshape a portion of the GOP into a party of conspiracy theorists, racists, antisemites, gun nuts and election deniers.

Many members of the party, at best, held their noses and, at worst, embraced these deplorables because the election wins were coming in. But now they’re reaping what they sowed: a party that, up to the highest levels, is populated by people who put power over country —- and who are now straightforwardly saying that they wouldn’t just be happy to see American democracy burn, they’d be on the front lines.

This is not a matter of simple political disagreement, such as a debate over appropriate taxation rates or how best to structure our immigration laws. It’s not even a deep divide in values and morals, such as whether abortion should be legal or how to balance anti-discrimination laws with religious freedoms. This is the kind of fundamental question that transcends partisanship. It’s one of fidelity to the nation itself, and to the once-radical idea of America as a representative and pluralistic democracy.

If the Republican Party has any shred of dignity left, and any vanishing claim to patriotism and devotion to the United States, it needs to act and make Greene the pariah any enemy of the state should be.