Who’s running Texas while Republicans wage culture wars?

Late one Saturday afternoon in July, several hundred residents in the tree-shaded, mostly Anglo, comfortably Republican suburb of Woodway and the surrounding area lost power – and only weeks after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proclaimed amid widespread anxieties over reliability of the state-run power grid that, yes, "everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas" during the spring legislative session. Then he lustily returned to incendiary cultural battles further dividing Texans, all to better position himself for a growing list of heady primary election challengers in 2022.

This must have left at least a few of his supporters conflicted that sweltering Saturday, including an aged white couple, one with a cane – Republicans, judging from past yard signs – sitting on a neighbor’s sun-shaded porch three doors down, waiting for the power to return. They got locked out of their own home when the electric garage door gave up the ghost. An African-American Democrat and retired federal employee, also without air conditioning, told me that she didn’t care if Texas leadership was Republican or Democrat. Main question for her: Are Texas leaders taking care of day-to-day basics?

From what some of us could see and feel for about an hour and a half that Saturday in Woodway, the answer was far from certain.

Meanwhile, Republican legislators were down at the State Capitol at Abbott’s command, not taking care of basics such as keeping our homes cooled but ignoring hundreds of Texans who came from across the state, overwhelmingly to protest legislation making it harder to vote. Other legislators have been tackling such “crises” as snuffing access to school sports teams for transgendered students and snuffing the teaching of institutional racism in American history. Senate Bill 3, for instance, would strip out a provision from another bill passed in May to at least teach that white supremacy is "morally wrong."

All this comes from a party that once claimed to believe in smaller government and less regulation, a party long ago founded on racial equality that righted – guess what? – more than two centuries of American institutional racism.

The mania to confirm our former president’s widely disproven claims of election fraud is clearly driving the “Election Integrity Protection Act” and symbolizes the recklessness of a state taking its eye off the ball during the high-stakes game of managing a bustling economy and strong residential growth and instead pursuing trumped-up crises. For instance, the election bill seems more intent on punishing the moms and pops who work polling places as well as county election officials who, dutifully working with the Texas secretary of state (a figure appointed by Abbott), by all accounts did their jobs well in 2020.

“In spite of all the circumstances, Texas had an election that was smooth and secure,” Keith Ingram, director of elections for the Republican-run Texas Secretary of State’s Office, reported to the Texas House Elections Committee way back on March 4. “Texans can be justifiably proud of the hard work and creativity shown by local county election officials.” Ingram went on to praise his own local elections administrator in Williamson County who, in an effort to make voting safe in the middle of a pandemic, reorganized polling places to keep citizens from bunching up and spreading COVID-19.

And Republican leaders’ thanks for a job well done by those who braved the coronavirus and worked in the trenches of democracy? Unleash newly empowered partisan poll watchers into the sanctity of the polling place (though, thankfully, without the video-making liberties state legislation this spring would have permitted) and threatening penalties for embattled polling-place workers and election officials who run afoul of increasingly complicated state laws. Oh, and Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughs has resigned amid a lack of legislative support, possibly for doing her job too damn well.

Irony in all this: With the exception of the 2020 election, Texas remains one of the worst states for voter turnout.

Away from the distracting culture wars and efforts to complicate voting, some of us are now easing into a torrid summer that across the American West finds reservoir levels at near-record lows, mountain snowpack nearly gone and the risk of wildfires high. I won’t bring up climate change for fear of spurring apoplectic fits among any epiphany-averse readership, but all of our population growth and all of our business growth for which our state’s political leaders have long clamored is now here and daily testing our independently run power grid in ways unimagined.

And we're arguably not taking care to ensure it and we thrive in increasingly extreme weather events such as last February’s week-long freeze that plunged millions of Texans into darkness and bitter cold.

A June 3 Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation report co-written by five former Texas public utility commissioners warns that success or failure in future weather calamities pivot on diligent follow-ups, enforced deadlines and plugging worrisome regulatory gaps in the newly signed legislation supposedly addressing the winter power outrage that left twice as many dead as Hurricane Harvey’s flooding did in 2017. These regulatory gaps include recognizing "the true interconnectedness of the entire natural gas delivery infrastructure" to a degree the new law misses. The report recommends critical facilities have two days of backup power and that outages that are supposed to rotate in a crisis actually do so.

Titled “Never Again: How to Prevent Another Major Texas Electricity Failure,” the report suggests that, amidst Texas’ ongoing building boom (even with home prices now testing consumer limits), the state must pursue other ways to get ahead of the next extreme weather event: “Between leaky buildings, lack of electricity and poor public communications, over 100 Texans died of hypothermia or carbon monoxide poisoning during the February blackout. Texas must fix this by improving the energy efficiency of our buildings. Over half of Texas homes were built before the state adopted building energy codes with insulation requirements in 2001.”

No less than Republican state Sen. Bob Hall, among the most conservative members of the Legislature, was quoted in June as concluding that the grid's operating problems have not been fixed: "If I were a business right now, as desirable as Texas is, if I'm dependent on a steady supply of electricity, I'd be very concerned about coming here right now." Indeed, when Texas heat that month surprised many of us by reaching the triple digits of late summer, the oft-vilified Electric Reliability Council of Texas – reeling from unanticipated demand and scores of outages – pressed customers hard to up their thermostats to 82 degrees while sleeping. All of which understandably sparked cynicism in Texans of all political stripes after last winter’s massive power failure and Abbott’s springtime claims all was now well.

In the wake of June outages and ERCOT calls for conservation amid extreme temperatures and numerous plant maintenance emergencies in what one official called “an aging fleet” of energy infrastructure, ERCOT last week announced further steps to ensure power reliability, including purchasing more reserve power during uncertain weather and requiring power generators to provide more operational updates. And if ERCOT interim president Brad Jones’ 60 cited objectives (a third reportedly already met) seem a bit overwhelming, they at least convey the complexity involved in managing an efficient, cost-effective state power grid up to both daily demands and extreme weather events.

A just-issued report by the Austin-based University of Texas Energy Institute on the February freeze acknowledges this complexity: “The failure of the electricity and natural gas systems serving Texas before and during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 had no single cause. While the 2021 storm did not set records for the lowest recorded temperatures in many parts of the state, it caused generation outages and a loss of electricity service to Texas customers several times more severe than winter events leading to electric service disruptions in December 1989 and February 2011.”

This in-depth, heavily footnoted report stresses that, despite political enemies of renewable power using the freeze crisis to gleefully pummel sources other than fossil fuel, power plants within each category of technologies – natural gas-fired power plants, coal-fired power plants, nuclear reactors, wind generation and solar generation facilities – failed to operate at expected electricity generation output levels. It also notes that power demand forecasts were too low and that failures specifically within the natural gas system – including the freezing of gas production, storage and distribution facilities – exacerbated overall electricity problems. It also highlights absolutely bewildering marketplace dynamics that yield what newly appointed Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, last week described as a “crisis-based business model” that yields only real financial rewards “the closer you get to a crisis, which is obviously not good for our consumers.”

All of this is lost in the din of culture wars. Republicans’ bullying of Democrats, led by a governor striving to project toughness for political purposes, has backfired, obscuring far more urgent matters. Right or wrong (and I personally think wrong), House Democrats have again broken quorum, this time fleeing the state, leaving Republicans with the prospect of another failed election bill and another dashed legislative session. Abbott says Democrats should be blamed if they don’t return to address business such as property tax relief, but to a degree he bears significant blame for needlessly aggravating bad feelings to the point of yet another crisis. He clearly learned nothing from the springtime exodus of Democrats, including one rule in politics which sorts out political charlatans dedicated to their own ends from genuine leaders intent more often than not on producing definitive solutions addressing complicated societal and economic problems: Every stupid action begs an equally stupid reaction.

One thing’s sure: The 2021 legislative sessions stand in stark contrast to the 2019 session, during which all put aside petty politics and got down to the nuts and bolts of running the state of Texas, including bipartisan efforts to overhaul school finance. But the complexities of refiguring school finance and mounting fixes in energy generation don’t fire up the rank-and-file party activists that office-holders encounter at local party luncheons and state conventions. What sends activists’ blood pumping is a latter-day quasi-religious crusade against an unholy enemy, compromises be damned.

And pumped-up activists are what Abbott will need against a political flame-thrower such as Allen West, a rousing Christian nationalist and political challenger who last year seemed to take delight in bedeviling the governor over the latter’s pandemic measures. West not only blames Abbott and House Speaker Dade Phelan for actions he sees as precipitating two Democratic walkouts (including Phelan’s giving Democrats leadership positions) but also suggests Abbott has failed to protect the electric grid. To quote West’s pointed tweet Monday: “Have you forgotten those who died during the winter storm? I have not.”

Before Democrats fled Texas, testimony in the House Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies involving former Harris County prosecutor and Democratic Rep. Ann Johnson and Jonathan White, chief of election integrity in the Texas Attorney General’s Office, suggested that since 2005 there have been 534 successful prosecutions targeting 155 individuals for election fraud. Johnson calculated that of the more than 80 million ballots cast in Texas during that period, the number of prosecutions of specific offenses is .000622 percent – and, she charged for good effect, “you have a .002 percent chance of being struck by lightning.”

Meanwhile, June has broken heat records kept since 1895, yielding the hottest June in the United States. Nearly half of the country is experiencing some form of drought, though most of Texas has thus far been spared. A March 2020 report by the state climatologist at Texas A&M University forecasts warmer temperatures over longer periods of time in Texas. Interestingly, it also notes that trends in extreme cold are “much larger than trends in extreme heat.” No wonder we saw dour and discouraged looks on the faces of state senators, Republican and Democrat, interviewing ERCOT and PUCT officials last week.

“The concern I have here is that we seem to be trying to drive reliability with money as opposed to engineering in the process,” Sen. Hall worried at the close of the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce hearing, drawing on experience as an Air Force engineer employed in the Minuteman Missile System and later as a systems engineer in the aerospace industry. “When you say we have a reliable system, are you talking about operating in a benign environment? Or if you’re not talking about just reliability in a benign environment, what threats are you considering [to a reliable system]? Just like a tire blowing out, it could be just because it got old or it ran over something, and along the way there are lots of road hazards that we have to encounter. If all we’re talking about is money that operates in a benign environment, I don’t think we are on the right road there, that what we have to be looking at are the threats. We’ve got natural threats, we’ve got man-made threats, we’ve got things that will interrupt our power reliability – we have physical threats, we have cyber threats, we have solar, and we even have the possibility of nuclear [threats].”

Aware of the embarrassment summer can bring with a still hobbled, creaky power grid and criticism he failed to include further power grid reliability on the agenda of the 30-day special session now underway (apparently rendered moot by Democrats’ fleeing town), Abbott sought cover by dispatching a highly publicized, astonishingly short-sighted July 6 letter to the Public Utility Commission directing it and ERCOT to take “immediate actions to increase power generation capacity and ensure reliability of the Texas power grid” while penalizing renewable energy as part of the vibrant mix the power grid must draw upon. Sadly, Abbott appears to be mostly taking his strategies from Texas Republicans’ playbook of 2011, after another winter freeze crippled the state power grid. Legislators patched it up – insufficiently, we now know – while Republican legislators pursued red-meat issues such as voter ID to satisfy rank-and-file bloodlust. Abbott’s strategy now: Hope that Texas skirts the record drought baking the American West (so far so good) and that whatever rubber bands and bubblegum presently bind the power grid will hold long enough for Abbott to vanquish his three very determined right-wing primary foes come March 2022.

It’s a roll of the dice. If Abbott comes up short, he opens himself up to charges of incompetence and dereliction of duty from not only Citizen West but former state Rep. Don Huffines and right-wing political commentator Chad Prather. All seek to unseat Abbott as the party’s gubernatorial candidate in 2022. The problem in Abbott’s obvious gamble over power grid reliability is that if the dice come up wrong and power begins to go out across Texas this summer or even this winter, many of us will lose right along with the governor, even as some of us pay a steeper price. It’s also not so terrific for the so-called “Texas Miracle.” Continued success in maintaining this economic miracle means paying attention to sometimes mundane but critically important issues such as transportation, water, health care, education and, yes, energy reliability in weather of all kinds. Texas old-timers admittedly skeptical of such confounding concepts as climate change will nonetheless tell you that weather of all kinds comes pretty close to defining Texas past and present. 

Yet corporate sensibilities are gradually showing other expectations, and not only to strike a more positive and compassionate business profile but to demonstrate meaningful regard for the increasing diversity and challenging predicaments of employees and their families whose destiny is, after all, tied to economic success or failure. This means focusing on not only the quality of life that individual states offer but their respect for fundamental human rights — priorities that understandably relegated Texas to a very humbling fourth place in CNBC’s 2021 study of state competitiveness, released just last week. CNBC said Texas’ ebbing ranking reflected the study’s sharper focus on everything from inclusiveness to equity to health care. “While none of us should put too much stock in one media company’s analysis of our economic competitiveness, it’s hard to disagree with this assessment,” former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus wrote in a July 15 column for the Houston Chronicle. “Unfortunately, partisan political rancor and state government gridlock are starting to define Texas more and more to the rest of the world. With Democratic state legislators pledging to spend the next few weeks outside Texas in order to stop election reform legislation, and with Republican leaders talking about arresting the Democrats when they return, all sides seem to be digging in. It’s not clear how any of this ends, but it is clear that this state’s proud tradition of bipartisan governance is eroding. Ultimately, it’s the people of our state who suffer.” Straus, of course, symbolizes the politically tolerant, pro-business road not taken by Texas Republicans under the strong pull of the former president and a base enraptured by his demagoguery and deceit.

I’m reminded of a small billboard on Sun Valley Boulevard leading to a stretch of western McLennan County marked by an explosion in home-building presently testing city and county traffic strategies, building incentives and zoning standards: “Why Did You Move to Texas?” The sign reflects the paranoia and fear that long-established Texas conservatives have about California liberals, Colorado environmentalists and Southern Arizona naturalists moving in and bringing their subversive brand of politics with them and turning the state blue, even though my limited encounters with such newly settled residents (usually as a newspaperman during zoning battles involving ambitious developers here in Central Texas) finds most of them thus far prioritizing only two things: cost-per-square-footage here in Texas and similarly pulling up the drawbridge once they themselves are properly rooted and ensconced.

One thing’s sure: Power outages have a way of cutting down to size frivolous culture wars and stressing what’s really important in Texas: Comfortably surviving the elements.

When revolutionaries and insurrectionists hold Fourth

Two days before the Fourth of July 2021, 71-year-old Waco attorney David Bass, dressed in an all-white suit, sought to repeat a patriotic ritual conducted at the steps of the McLennan County Courthouse over the past decade or so in which criminal defense attorneys read aloud the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. As Bass said two years ago, the words of the Founding Fathers need annual review at the very least because "we live in unusual times." But this year, because of the stifling noon-day heat, post-pandemic holiday getaways or perhaps the widespread malaise that has left some Americans feeling less than patriotic, not many defense attorneys showed up for public reading duties.

And so attorneys and non-attorneys ranging from a young woman in a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt, to a community organizer with Waco Immigrants Alliance, to a former county court-at-law judge, to an attorney wearing an oversized Fourth of July party hat and whose most infamous case involved a Williamson County man who sent a chocolate candy bar in the shape of a penis to a McLennan County Sheriff's employee each stepped forward to share in the public readings. Witnessing this edifying bit of patriotism and civics in the crowd of a dozen or so: two bearded, middle-aged men, one distinguished by his red, white and blue Waco Tea Party gimme cap, the other by a red T-shirt with the sketch of a tree and the inscription: “Thomas Jefferson: Tree of Liberty Refreshment, Inc. The Blood of Patriots and Tyrants, 1776, est.”

Somewhere amidst neighborhood parades, backyard barbecues and evening fireworks, the Fourth of July should demand of all meaningful meditations on what our nation has gone through recently and how it stacks up alongside what the Founders expected of subsequent generations. Example: For years in Waco, every Fourth of July I pondered the 2001 Independence Day brawl on the east end of the iconic Waco Suspension Bridge in which a self-acknowledged white supremacist (complete with tattoos of Adolf Hitler and the phrase "white power" on his legs) stabbed four black teens in what he later claimed was a mob attack (though he walked into the situation with three friends of his own, begging the question: Who constituted the mob that evening?) All of this occurred one bridge south of the Washington Avenue Bridge where Sank Majors, a 20-year-old black man accused of assaulting a white woman, was lynched less than a century earlier. One newspaper headline about the 1905 hanging: "Judge Lynch on the Bench: Texas mob, 800 strong, executes summary judgment on prisoner." The 2001 violence, erupting by rockets’ red glare, eventually sent the white supremacist away for life (thanks to prior felony convictions for burglary and cocaine possession) but also contributed to greater awareness of local racial disparities and fueled broader efforts by city leaders to encourage and invest in the redevelopment of East Waco, heavily populated by African Americans and not surprisingly often left behind amid the growing revitalization of downtown Waco just across the Brazos. The 1870 Waco Suspension Bridge and the 1901 Washington Avenue Bridge link the two.

And certainly the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on our nation's bustling symbols of commerce and military might was on many minds during Fourth of July 2002 celebrations, the first in which foreign enemies threatened to disrupt America's anniversary of national independence. To quote a July 4, 2002, editorial in the Waco Tribune-Herald: "Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Americans have become familiar, although not comfortable, with the contradictions of the new reality. The United States is the world's oldest representative democracy. It has survived to enjoy 226 Independence Day celebrations due to the firm foundation laid down by the nation's founders: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' The stirring words in the Declaration of Independence launched a bold experiment in self-governance that has proven capable of withstanding wars, economic depression and internal strife. America, a nation governed by generous people, is not perfect. People are not perfect. But with a unified commitment to continue to live up to the principles spelled out in the nation's birth certificate, the United States will prevail over terrorist enemies who do not believe in nations that derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." President George W. Bush, by then viewed as a fellow McLennan Countian by virtue of his nearby ranch, set a similar tone during a Fourth of July 2002 ceremony in West Virginia honoring veterans: "Unlike any other country, America came into the world with a message for mankind – that all are created equal, and all are meant to be free. There is no America race; there's only an American creed: We believe in the dignity and rights of every person. We believe in equal justice, limited government and in the rule of law. We believe in personal responsibility and tolerance toward others. This creed of freedom and equality has lifted the lives of millions of Americans, of citizens by birth and citizens by choice. This creed draws our friends to us. It sets our enemies against us, and always inspires the best that is within us. In this 226th year of our independence, we have seen that American patriotism is still a living faith. We love our country; only more when she's threatened."

So for anyone who loves our country and is versed on foundational principles ranging from the peaceful transfer of power set in 1801 (and after a knock-down, drag-out presidential campaign) to the rigorously informed citizenry Thomas Jefferson insisted democratic governance demanded to be its very best, a dilemma naturally arises on the Fourth of July 2021: How does one commemorate and celebrate founding principles overshadowed by a riot or insurrection or tourist frenzy or what-have-you that just six months ago overwhelmed the U.S. Capitol, sent elected lawmakers fleeing for their lives and impeded, if only for a few hours, the constitutional certification of our nation’s presidential election? Ignore it and set off a few more firecrackers?

We can’t even agree what we all saw on TV on Jan. 6. Some of us saw a justifiable citizen protest exploding in rage over what QAnon disciples, Republican “patriots” and MAGA apologists tell us was a presidential election stolen from a long-awaited political messiah who put Americans first and sought to “make America great again.” Others of us saw a spectacle grounded in white grievance, paranoia and hatred whipped into a mad frenzy by a demagogue desperate enough to unleash a mob to do what state and federal courts and his own otherwise subservient vice president and attorney general refused to do – overturn enough election returns so this president could remain in power.

Therein lies a clear and present danger. When the president of the United States doesn’t respect election returns compiled through the extraordinary efforts of thousands of moms and pops staffing polling places, and in the middle of a deadly pandemic, when he won’t bow to an orderly transition of power after what the president’s own Department of Justice insisted were free and fair elections, when he presses self-styled patriots from all over the nation to head for the U.S. Capitol where election results are to be formally recognized, and to "fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore" – well, then American patriotism has been prostituted for despotic ends.

One is reminded of English essayist, lexicographer and wit Samuel Johnson’s 1775 truism: Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. When a president literally wraps himself in the U.S. flag, some of us simply see an American unabashedly demonstrating his patriotism. Others of us see a charlatan successfully playing naïve souls for selfish ends. Some of us wax eloquent in our adoration of the flag, even as we utter hollow or unthinking allegiances to what that flag represents. Others of us see something disgraceful in those who during the 2020 election lowered their U.S. flags at home and ran up Trump flags in their place. Some kept those royal blue Trump flags flying well after the election was done, indicating how they felt not only about the outcome but our country.

A relevant question any day, not just on the Fourth of July: Is the burning of the U.S. flag –

something — lately identified, fairly or not, with nationwide Black Lives Matter protests over the death of former Texan George Floyd at the hands of police and the continuing scourge of racial injustice across America – anymore profane than protesters enraged over a supposedly stolen election using poles with U.S. flags attached to beat into submission police officers trying to defend what some of us regard as the citadel of democracy? Can patriots reasonably claim to respect the rule of law and the thin blue line when they practice, cheer or condone what erupted on Jan. 6? Some 140 police officers were injured in the unrest. And does the Declaration of Independence at the heart of Fourth of July celebrations vindicate or condemn those forces storming the Capitol? Does the “American Scripture” of 1776 affirm them as idealistic and enlightened revolutionaries in the Jeffersonian mold or stamp them as mindless rabble dispatched by a manipulative, conniving rabble-rouser-in-chief?

The pride and the passion

The cries of "1776" amid the spray-choked, flag-waving unrest; President Trump's tweet hours into the violence proclaiming ominously that "These are the things and events that happen when sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long"; and, then, in ordering his supporters home, his exhortation that they cherish the experiences at hand: "Remember this day forever!" – all these beg to move the Sixth of January into the same liberty-loving sphere as the Fourth of July. And yet one comes up short if seeking definitive, thought-out, long-term principles behind the rebellion, given that the party of this president on occasion of the 2020 national convention nominating him for re-election voted to forego any timely and updated political platform beyond a general commitment to “continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda” – and that any effort to amend the 2016 platform “will be ruled out of order.” In short, leave all such niceties to the man. Nor does one easily glean high insurrectionary ideals from court documents and social media posts, the latter often posted amid the near-orgasmic glee of the Jan. 6 havoc. Much of what surfaces is pent-up rage over President Trump’s electoral loss and various forms of white grievance and maniacal patriotism, perhaps best summed up in the rush of invincibility 57-year-old Stacy Hager of Gatesville, 40 miles west of Waco, acknowledged upon scaling Capitol walls amid what he described as flash bombs bursting during the Trump-roused attack. To this euphoric feeling Patriot Hager added online, according to a subsequent arrest warrant affidavit: “We waited twice to regroup before reaching the second wall designated with a third bullhorn guy yelling a steady drone of ‘Patriots move forward.’ This was the wall that divides sane and insane, civil and disobedient, frantic and mayhem, relative safety and imminent danger.” Charges now facing Hager include disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building as well as violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol Grounds. Flip-flopping alt-right media personality Anthime Gionet, 33, alias “Baked Alaska,” later arrested in Houston, displayed similar gung-ho confidence amid the violence, conducting a 27-minute livestream video while urging some 800 others onward. At one point, he declares: “We are in the Capitol building, 1776 will commence again.” Later: “America First is inevitable. F--- globalists, let’s go!” Still later, in accusing a police officer of shoving him: “You’re a f--king oath-breaker, you piece of s--t” and “You broke your oath to the Constitution.”

And consider the video evidence indicting 30-year-old Ryan Nichols of Converse, Texas, who climbed the Capitol steps with a bullhorn and declared, “If you have a weapon, you need to get your weapon!” In another video, he yells: “This is the second revolution right here, folks! […] This is not a peaceful protest!” And there’s Troy Smocks, 58, of Dallas, who posted on Parler, the social media platform of Trumpers: “Today, January 6th, 2021, We Patriots by the millions have arrived in Washington, DC, carrying banners of support for the greatest President the World has ever known. But if we must… Many of us will return on January 19th, 2021, carrying our weapons in support of Our nation’s resolve, to which the world will never forget. We will come in numbers that no standing army or police agency can match.” (Jan. 19 was the day before Inauguration Day.) And there’s this spirited day-after reflection by Mark Middleton, 52, a Republican Party precinct chairman who along with wife Jalise lives in North Texas but may soon take up new quarters for allegedly assaulting Capitol police officers: “Afterwards [the rally at which President Trump and other Republican leaders pumped the crowd], patriots marched all the way to the Capitol, chanting and singing the national anthem. The atmosphere makes you feel proud to be an American, ask anyone that was there, I guarantee you that’s what every single person will tell you. As we approached and gathered at the back of the Capitol, even after people occupied the high and low grounds, national anthem, Pledge of Allegiance, chantings for Trump, USA and singing of patriotic songs, singing hymns and praying are all that you hear. Then came the tear gas.”

Later Middleton adds defiantly, betraying the same logic President Trump employed about elections and the size of his campaign rallies: “You CAN’T convince me there was no voter fraud found when I stood on the street for 20 mins and still couldn’t see the end of the crowd!”

Further confounding messaging of the Sixth of January that may be revolutionary or insurrectionary or anarchic or something else entirely is the religion factor, particularly white evangelicals' overwhelming and unquestioning faith in President Trump who, for all his personal failings and obvious ignorance of Christianity, is perceived as a divinely anointed savior and strongman who can press for a long-awaited return to a more wholesome, less conflicted America. In a newly released survey of 1,248 adults from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., conducted in the wake of the Jan. 6 unrest, Baylor University researchers gleaned findings indicating “that religious belief, religious identity and religious participation are all positively and strongly correlated with believing in popular contemporary falsehoods," said Paul Froese, director of Baylor Religion Surveys and a professor of sociology. "The link between religiosity and conspiratorial beliefs is in part correlated with political partisanship." The Baylor findings suggest biblical literalists, self-identified “very religious” people and weekly church attenders are significantly more likely to believe the 2020 election was rigged, COVID-19 vaccines are untrustworthy and top Democrats are involved in sex-trafficking rings — this last-mentioned one of the most notorious and foundational of QAnon conspiratorial themes. Indeed, the mixing of QAnon conspiracy theories and religion should be a wakeup call for religious leaders of the work ahead. Consider ever-provocative North Texas real estate Jenna (or Jennifer) Ryan's tweet after flying to Washington, D.C., on a private jet and participating in the Capitol attack: “The truth of the matter is that Q was correct. Evil people will have their day. God's timing is perfect.” During an interview with my Trib colleague Carl Hoover, Froese added one further damning insight that no longer seems hard to believe: "Biblical literalists often don't read the Bible."

Some of these findings materialized in the Jan. 6 rally, including a protester’s makeshift sign that showed an image of Jesus peeking around its edge along with the quote, “I saw what you did with those ballots,” and other demonstrators’ flags reading: “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.” One protester wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the latter slogan carried a sign that read, "Every legal vote counted, every illegal vote removed." Another: "In God We Trust, Stop the Steal!" Nor is all this politicization of the Christian faith strictly limited to white evangelicalism: Engaging, Waco-based Christ the King Baptist Church televangelist Ramiro Pena, a former Baylor University regent who famously supported Trump in 2016 (citing abortion and border issues as reasons in his interviews with me), served in the Trump White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative headed by prominent prosperity pastor and white televangelist Paula White. Rev. Pena was present at the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally that ultimately dispatched Trump supporters to the U.S. Capitol. The night before the rally, the reverend posted a video of himself near Trump Hotel on the streets of Washington beseeching supporter prayers ahead of the rally and insisting that he felt “the angels of the Lord around us right now.” A few days after the insurrection, he somberly offered online sentiments from home about Isaiah 9:6 and "the government of Jesus" taking hold in people's lives. And less than a month afterward Rev. Pena was offering worshipers discounts of up to 66 percent on pillows marketed by beleaguered My Pillow founder, diehard Trump supporter and election fraud conspiracist Mike Lindell "when so many in the cancel culture have chosen not to sell his products anymore in their big box stores." Later this year Rev. Pena is to share the stage at a Pena Ministries event with prominent white evangelical author Lance Wallnau, who has long viewed Trump as an "Isaiah 45 Cyrus," a king envisioned as doing God's work – a theme Rev. Pena has stressed as well, notwithstanding inconsistencies in a constitutional democracy supposedly done with kings and tyrants.

Anyone perusing autumnal letters between Jefferson and John Adams, long after they put

behind them bad feelings over the rowdy 1800 election, knows that for a revolution to take root requires not only a commitment to vetted principles but “virtue” in the people. Otherwise, anarchy and tyranny result. One wonders then what revolution of liberty is rooted in severely restricting voter rights – a manifestation of the Jan. 6 mobocracy and Trump’s months of destructive lies – instead of seeking ways to efficiently expand voting rights as befits a healthy, proud democracy. One wonders what revolution of liberty is rooted in smothering greater awareness of critical race theory, which in its fundamental form highlights past American atrocities of inequality and racial injustice lest we forget and repeat them. Indeed, to the degree principles and ideals exist in the Trump revolution, they show little fealty to the Constitution. Fervor for the Second and Tenth amendments and a strong chief executive (assuming it’s Trump or a sycophant) eclipses the constitutionally set Article I powers of Congress and even an independent federal judiciary. This suggests making America “great again” might resemble Jacksonian democracy brimming with guns and states’ rights. President Trump has even compared himself to President Andrew Jackson, though this arguably sells short even Jackson – yes, a onetime hot-tempered backwoodsman who nonetheless had been a senator, a judge and a general before he was elected president in 1828. Two years before his death, Jefferson, contemplating Jackson in the White House, described him as “one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.” Yet even President Jackson rallied at one point, defying a movement in South Carolina encouraged by his own vice president to nullify federal laws over which it simply disagreed. Jackson issued a terse, constitutionally based proclamation in response in December 1832: “I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” This proved Jackson’s finest moment as president, something of which he seemed well aware, judging from a letter of May 1833 to his cousin Andrew J. Crawford: “I have had a laborious task here, but nullification is dead and its actors and exciters will only be remembered by the people to be execrated for their wicked designs to sever and destroy the only good government on the globe and that prosperity and happiness we enjoy over every other portion of the world.”

Given the enduring influence of our most recent former president, one could argue that what we have witnessed in Texas this year highlights Trumpian ideals (and Texas remains one of the top states generating Jan. 6 insurrectionists and rioters thus far formally charged). In a likely bid to run for president as Trump’s Republican successor, the governor of Texas is now crowdfunding to build the former president's border wall (despite the U.S. Constitution’s reserving such matters to the federal government); defying federal gun laws as a “Second Amendment sanctuary state”; demanding voter rights be rigorously restricted in the name of election integrity (despite the Republican Texas Secretary of State’s insistence that Texas had “smooth and secure” elections in 2020); and pressing for more ways to circumscribe the teaching of critical race theory when a bill doing just that (and which the governor signed on June 15) didn’t go far enough for him. Race indeed surfaces as a factor in much of this apparent idealism, reflected even beyond the updated stats analyzed by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats showing that of the 532 Capitol arrests thus far, 93 percent are white and 86 percent are male. Some of the specific voting initiatives under attack by Trump-supporting Texas legislators in 2021 were those favored by pandemic-wary Texas minorities in the 2020 general election, including drive-through voting in heavily populated Harris County as well as early voting hours on Sundays popular among churchgoers in African-American communities who after services travel to the polls. 

Perfect example of all this spilling into hypocrisy: Conroe-based attorney Brandon Creighton, Republican author of a 2021 bill in the Texas Senate discouraging the teaching of critical race theory in schools, authored in the 2019 legislative session a bill making it harder to remove old statues and monuments commemorating the “Lost Cause” of the slave-holding Confederacy – statues and monuments erected generations ago to reinforce Jim Crow laws marginalizing African Americans after the Civil War was lost and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments supposedly became the law of the land. However else one considers these two Creighton bills, they offer conflicting stands in supposed Republican grievance over "cancel culture" and jointly seek to appease the white paranoia now driving the Republican Party. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than a March Twitter dustup in which North Texas real estate agent Jenna Ryan, responding to someone’s Oprah Winfrey meme showing the talk show host pointing and exclaiming, “You goin’ to jail,” returned fire: “Definitely not going to jail. Sorry I have blonde hair white skin a great job a great future and I'm not going to jail. Sorry to rain on your hater parade. I did nothing wrong.” (The arrest warrant affidavit based on a Facebook live video shows Ryan chanting, at the front of the Capitol, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and “Here we are in the name of Jesus!” and, once inside the building, joining in a chant, “Fight for freedom! Fight for freedom!” and yelling, “This is our house!” At one point, she pauses to tout her real estate business.) One of the few intensely radioactive right-wing causes left to die by the Texas Legislature in the wake of all this: a movement to put on the ballot the question of whether Texas should again secede from the nation – a proposition that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott very likely (and correctly) considered unworthy of anyone seriously contemplating the White House and leading the country one day. That said, I can confirm an observation that African-American historian and Harvard University professor Annette Gordon-Reed offered during a Fourth of July 2021 C-SPAN interview about a recent visit to her native Texas: "When I was growing up, I recall seeing the Confederate battle flag only occasionally. In the past few years [when] I was in Texas, and I was going around in the country, riding around and visiting, I saw more Confederate flags on that trip than I'd probably seen in my entire childhood growing up in Texas. I mean, something has happened where the Confederate identity – it may mean something different now because it's attached to current-day political things. Maybe that's what it is.”

Revelations at the QAnon altar

As the world marvels at our impotence and self-delusion, Americans grapple daily with an information age corrupted to the point that both ends of the political spectrum employ “cancel culture.” Right-wing media in particular such as talk radio and renegade "news" networks long on opinions and short on news deliver misinformation confirming the biases of many whites unwilling to experience epiphanies about themselves and their place in a changing society – epiphanies that might guide and reassure and benefit them about the steep challenges ahead for all Americans. (Not that right-wing media alone are guilty; defenders of critical race theory are now under siege largely because of the New York Times’ 1619 Project and its wrong-headed claim that slavery was “one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution.”) To quote celebrated American-born journalist Anne Applebaum, the situation is perilous for democracies precisely because democracies depend on constituents who are more discriminating than their sometimes fickle and deceptive political leaders: "Thanks to a global epidemic of nihilistic trolling, manipulative disinformation and addictive outrage, modern democracies are facing an existential challenge: It’s not merely that their citizens don't agree on politics, they don't agree on the nature of truth itself." Applebaum's insight – offered here in endorsement of another writer's book, Jonathan Rauch’s “The Constitution of Knowledge” – holds special relevance: She obviously understands how the embrace of such concepts as human rights and civil liberties and equal and just application of the law are integral parts of our complicated national DNA, reinforced through serious media publications and history classes and political campaigns and even on such occasions as the Fourth of July — and thus can easily be taken for granted in certain situations warranting vigilance and discernment. As one who has spent much of her career in Eastern Europe, she also understands the perils that face budding democracies anything but certain in the long term, including how some media dynamics can contribute to their downfall. Her own take on the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, expressed in a tweet posted just before the Fourth of July: "No doubt about intentions and motivations. They wanted to stop the vote count and believed that Trump had told them to do so."

There's no denying the addictive qualities of latter-day media confections. Some of my own acquaintances now follow the mystical QAnon oracle supposedly originating from a deeply placed, well-informed source in Trump circles. It offers ambiguous reassurances and preposterous alarms, including crazy and crazier predictions and claims. One: that President Trump, with U.S. military backing, would not only be sworn into a second term on Jan. 20 despite his November electoral loss but that he would have senior Democrats arrested and executed. In the wake of this obviously failed prediction, the oracle then claimed Trump would be sworn back into office with military backing on March 4, the original swearing-in date of presidents till passage of the 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In the wake of that obviously failed prediction, Trump now will be reinstated as president come August. One wonders how many failures QAnon must serve its followers before it rates the same contempt serious news media rate among this crowd of true believers and willing dupes. After a retired Texas sportscaster of my decades-long acquaintance succumbed to such falsehoods and began reveling with others in Trump's sure return to power despite the 2020 election (along with warnings to fellow believers to stock up on food and fuel for the brief period of Trump’s transition to power), I asked how on earth a journalist such as himself could fall for such claims, to which he replied: "Oh, I'm no journalist. I was a sportscaster!"

Recently I reviewed editorials and columns published through the years by the Waco Tribune-Herald on occasion of the Fourth. They included this editorial, insightfully written by former Trib colleague John Young and published in 2008 when President George W. Bush was still president and spent summers at his Prairie Chapel ranch 20 miles beyond Waco: “Today's birthday celebration is steeped in patriotism, which should not be measured simply by waving the flag or setting off fireworks. It also should be measured by getting involved in community affairs, participating in local government, staying informed and voting. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, warned, ‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’” Yet, as Mitch Daniels, president of Perdue University and former Republican governor of Indiana, recently remarked, “Liberty, of course, requires constant vigilance, but who would have thought until recently that the idea of truth needed defending?” As we contend with what some call an insurrection, others call a peaceful protest, the seeming impossibility of shared truth justifies societal anxiety. This is especially so as we consider all that our nation has gone through and where we are today as a people divided not only over culture, politics and race but what constitutes a constitutionally ordered democratic republic. How hopeful can we be on the Fourth of July when we remain so conflicted about the Sixth of January?

Shortly before the Fourth, 49-year-old Trump supporter Anna Morgan-Lloyd wept before a Reagan-appointed federal judge for briefly mixing amidst the chaos and conspiracy in the Capitol. Like many protesters, her own words on social media had indicted her. She beamed on Facebook the afternoon of Jan. 6 that it was the “Best day ever.” At another point she noted: “I’m so glad we were there. For the experience and memory but most of all we can spread the truth about what happened and open the eyes of some of our friends.” A couple of weeks later she was recognized while applying for a firearm permit back home in Bloomfield, Indiana, where 96 percent of the residents are white.

“I would just like to apologize to the court, the American people and my family,” Morgan-Lloyd said in court during the June 23 sentencing. “I went there to show support for President Trump peacefully, and I’m ashamed that it became a savage display of violence.” Her attorney added: “Once Mrs. Lloyd understood the destruction and lawlessness of many who entered the U.S. Capitol, she was upset, contrite and remorseful. Though she did not defile or destroy any property, she acknowledges that her presence may have given comfort to those who committed acts of violence and acts of destruction.”

“I felt ashamed that something meant to show support for the president had turned violent,” Morgan-Lloyd elaborated in a remarkable confessional letter to the judge. “This is not the way to prove any point. At first, it didn’t dawn on me, but later I realized that if every person like me who wasn’t violent was removed from that crowd, the ones who were violent may have lost the nerve to do what they did. For that, I am sorry and take responsibility. It was never my intent to help empower people to act violently. I take responsibility for my actions on January 6th. I will do what the court requires of me to try to set things right. I will cooperate with my probation officer fully.”

This confession Morgan-Lloyd wrote at her attorney’s urging suggests an awareness that the riot was at least partially grounded in white and Christian victimhood. She cites books and movies recently consumed, including “Just Mercy,” “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” and “Schindler’s List” – again at her attorney’s suggestion – to demonstrate her improved perspective on America. “I’ve learned that even though we live in a wonderful country, things still need to improve. People of all colors should feel as safe as I do to walk down the street. As an American I feel very lucky to have been born in this country. As someone who is part-Native American, I feel my roots strongly. I would never want to live anywhere else. It’s not perfect, but I believe it can and will get better for all people.”

Impressed by Morgan-Lloyd’s remorse and guilty plea to a single charge of unlawfully entering the Capitol (winnowed down from several charges), U.S. District Judge, Texas native and Army veteran Royce Lamberth granted her three years of probation, 40 hours of community service and a requirement she pay $500 in restitution. "This wasn’t a peaceful demonstration,” he declared. “It was not an accident that it turned violent. I also think some of these defendants in these cases are not going to do what you did. Some of them are not going to say they did anything wrong." The judge was especially rankled by some federal lawmakers comparing the riot to a "day of tourists walking through the Capitol."

A day later Morgan-Lloyd, the very first person sentenced over the Jan. 6 unrest, cheapened her apologia by appearing on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s TV show, claiming not only that she did nothing wrong on Jan. 6 but that during her brief time in the Capitol she saw no violence “and I don’t believe it.” While Morgan-Lloyd struck me as exceedingly guarded in what she said on air – her stated disbelief possibly refers to her astonishment at the violence, not denial of its happening – her decision to nonetheless play unwitting victim on a show famous for inflaming right-wing sensibilities may have thrown under the bus other Capitol-storming patriots now also seeking mercy and judicial understanding. Indeed, at one point Ingraham claimed Morgan-Lloyd was "forced to deliver that Soviet-style confession at the behest of her attorney" and acknowledge before Judge Lamberth her "white privilege" as well as her guilt. Other federal judges will surely take notice of this post-legal charade and be more reluctant to play patsy to defendants who express remorse in court and contemplate victimhood in right-wing venues and insurrectionary echo chambers.

Fake news & fake Elvis

Among those playing this same game are alleged law-and-order lawmakers who voted against

the bipartisan commission to investigate the violence and follow-up legislation to beef up Capitol security and pay for damages incurred by rioters. Among them: Recently elected Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Waco, who wisely cleansed his Facebook page of a photo of his merrily welcoming “Stop the Steal” protesters to the Capitol shortly before the riot. To confound matters, he later launched a series of attack spots targeting Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for maintaining protective fencing around the Capitol complex, even as reports of additional possible attacks by domestic terrorists streamed in. Maybe what’s left of his Boy Scout scruples to “tell the truth” prompted Sessions to balk at vindicating the Jan. 6 rioters, even as he ridiculed a bipartisan commission producing anything but tainted findings “before we know the real truth” through courtroom testimony and judgments. Fair enough. But can Sessions and his colleagues even handle real truth anymore? Can their supporters? Any citizen who knows our nation’s tumultuous history and founding documents knows the storming of the Capitol is not an event to be dismissed and ignored, even if a Republican colleague from Georgia incredibly likened the violence to “a normal tourist visit.” Photos by a Roll Call photographer show this same lawmaker frantically barricading House chamber doors on Jan. 6.

Congressman Andrew Clyde has indeed gained infamy for likening Capitol Hill rioters to tourists during a recent House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing; far more telling is his contention that what we all saw on Jan. 6 was not a proper insurrection: “The only insurrection I have witnessed in my lifetime was the one conducted by members of the FBI with participants from the DOJ and other agencies under the banner ‘Russia, Russia, Russia.’ High-ranking employees from these federal agencies and members from an independent counsel coordinated and fed a false narrative for over two years that the 2016 election was stolen and illegitimate. Democrats were on the news almost every night saying the evidence is there, and the mainstream media amplified the fake news. This was indeed a very coordinated and well-funded effort by a determined group of people to overthrow our duly elected president, Donald J. Trump.”

Between Congressman Sessions’ let’s-not-rush-into-this rationale and Congressman Clyde’s dismissal of the Jan. 6 violence as a proper insurrection, one finds those who would rather file the whole business under “Much Ado About Nothing” and return to normality, if that’s even possible. Arguably among them: Chris Grider, 39, owner of a nearby Eddy vineyard and now facing a seven-count federal indictment for his role in the unrest. Recently, court documents suggested he wasn’t content to be grateful for his hard-won Feb. 22 release from detention pending trial. To pursue family vacation travel, he pressed an already lenient federal judge to further relax court restrictions, including the wearing of an ankle monitor while out on bond.

U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson stressed how fortunate Grider is to be back home with his wife, children and winery till trial: “As the court explained during the detention appeal hearing in this case, the decision to release Grider pending trial was an extremely ‘close call’ given the nature and circumstances of the alleged offense and the weight of the evidence against him. And although the court ultimately determined that Grider’s detention was not required, that decision was contingent upon the court’s imposition of conditions of release that would reasonably assure the safety of the community while Grider awaited trial – conditions that included GPS monitoring and a curfew.” Considering pivotal actions by Grider unwittingly leading to the death of determined QAnon follower and fellow Trump devotee Ashli Babbitt – shot dead trying to climb through a smashed-out window to the Speaker’s Lobby, a window smashed out with a helmet Grider had been carrying and reportedly lent to another protester – Grider would be wise to spend more time back home in rural Central Texas pondering his legal defense than contemplating family outings. (Incidentally, Grider and his family have recently revived some of their winery’s festive weekend gatherings in Eddy with headliners such as Elvis impersonator John E. Cobb.)

Meanwhile, Republican Congressman Paul Gosar, a zealous Trump loyalist and former dentist, has taken to using congressional hearings and other opportunities to pointedly ask who “executed” Ashli Babbitt, which should prompt this equally pointed question: Who climbs through a smashed-out window while peacefully protesting? In pressing this inquiry, Gosar and others picking up on this theme arouse and inspire perennial misfits and malcontents who now see Babbitt as a revolutionary martyr – a notion that has gained sufficient currency that Kmart markets a T-shirt emblazoned with the jarring image of a black and white U.S. flag and the words: “Ashli Babbitt: American patriot.” Such marketing, rhetoric and fact-free spinning is sure to only outrage federal law enforcement, including prosecutors, possibly even judges. It’s not good, either, for Chris Grider, who appears to mirror most protesters loose in the Capitol that day – unaffiliated with self-styled militias such as the Oath Keepers or right-wing street-fighting gangs such as the Proud Boys and, rather, just a white guy from Central Texas loyal to President Trump and unthinkingly swept up in forces he may not have fully understood. That said, some scholars steeped in the psychology of riots such as Matthew Radburn and Clifford Stott now reject the popular “mad-mob theory” of riots as inadequate and claim that “when people riot, their collective behavior is never mindless.”

Nor is continuing rhetoric by the former president alleging a stolen election helping his most devoted insurrectionary supporters, none of whom seem to attract his attention, let alone his sympathy, during his rants and raves of personal victimhood, such as at last week’s rally in Wellington, Ohio, which happens to boast two residents now facing possible trials and prison time for Jan. 6 unrest. “You’re seeing judges going out of their way to reference these concerns about Donald Trump, the ongoing baseless claims about the election,” says Washington-based NBC reporter Scott MacFarlane, almost single-handedly covering the legal milestones of alleged rioters and insurrectionists on a one-by-one basis. “These are the judges who will be sentencing Jan. 6 defendants or officiating jury trials.” MacFarlane also reported last week that attorneys for alleged Jan. 6 conspirator Thomas Caldwell, 65, sought a change of venue for his case well away from Washington, D.C., for reasons including “yellow journalism” and fans at a Washington Nationals game booing President Trump.

In an age when, to quote disgraced Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, “truth isn’t truth,” maybe Pete Sessions is right. Maybe we don’t need a bipartisan commission to dig deeper into what some call a revolution or protest, others brand sedition or treason. I was raised in a staunchly conservative household to trust what I see and hear and know about — and on Jan. 6 I saw and heard the president incite a crowd of disciples to “fight like hell” on his behalf. Shortly thereafter I saw people wearing the same red Trump gimme caps and waving the same blue Trump flags that I saw at the Trump “Save America” rally storming the Capitol, clearly spurred by Trump’s anger at his vice president’s refusal to overstep his constitutionally set authority on his boss’ behalf. One rallying cry at the Capitol that day, egged on by an inflammatory tweet from the president during all the violence: “Hang Mike Pence!” Yet only hours afterward political spinsmiths were peddling the claim that the Capitol riot was the cunning work of antifa leftists dressed up as law-abiding, Constitution-loving Trump supporters, right down to the red gimme caps and blue Trump flags, and that the effort was engineered to reflect badly on President Trump – a claim that reportedly outraged some of the insurrectionists at the Capitol sincere in their beliefs they were fighting on behalf of democracy as well as Trump. A Fox News personality now suggests the riot was engineered by the FBI – a rumor supposedly concocted by a former Trump official not only fired for links to white nationalists but apparently hindered by an inability to read and understand court documents and legal terminology.

In a nation lost to crazed partisanship and rampant misinformation, perhaps society is better off drawing conclusions from what scholars, security experts and real journalists uncover. The University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats tracks charges filed against the alleged rioters (now numbering more than 550). Among its findings: This is a violent mass movement rather than merely an insurrection concocted by right-wing organizations; 88 percent of those charged (presumably including winemaker, veteran and former teacher Chris Grider) are “unaffiliated with pre-existing militia/extremist organizations and groups.” Trump is seen as their leader. Many insist they were only following Trump’s call to action. So who’s really to blame if these defendants are to be believed? Trump or those who took him seriously and literally? As the University of Chicago study notes, a woman from Texas claimed she entered the Capitol Rotunda because “He said, ‘Be there,’ and so I went and answered the call of my president.” A business owner from California said she “felt called upon by President Donald Trump to travel to D.C. to change the outcome of the election,” which she believed was stolen. And the colorful Navy veteran and QAnon shaman who invaded the Capitol in horns, a bearskin headdress and war paint said he was there along with other patriots “at the request of President Trump.”

One suspects we’ll soon see some stunning transformations in court. Jacob Chansley, the aforementioned, attention-commanding QAnon shaman, gloated after the unrest: “The fact that we had a bunch of our traitors in office hunker down, put on their gas masks and retreat into their underground bunker, I consider that a win.” Last week his lawyer filed a brief noting examples of Chansley’s sterling citizenship and model behavior in the melee, including “the defendant attempting to thwart a theft from a breakroom in the Capitol; the defendant extolling everyone to be respectful and peaceful; the defendant saying a prayer; the defendant permitting selfies to be taken of him outside the Capitol while hundreds walk by and into the Capitol; the defendant helping law enforcement clear out the Capitol after then-President Trump finally publicly requested everyone to go home.”

Then again, Scott MacFarlane's reporting on cases suggests the hearts and minds of many other protesters haven't changed much – and that trials may well offer further insight into political impulses driving the Jan. 6 violence. "A lot of the recent arrests are people accused of damaging media equipment, trying to set it on fire, breaking it – tens of thousands of dollars of equipment," MacFarlane reports. "One case stood out in particular – Joshua Haynes of the Roanoke, Virginia, area. Reading through his court filing, the feds say he was interrogated by agents June 14, nearing the six-month anniversary of the insurrection, and prosecutors say Haynes told agents that those who assaulted police were heroes for trying to stop election fraud. In the court filing, they also allege Haynes bragged of breaking media equipment, of kicking the fake news' [ass], of running off some CNN reporter. It gives you some insight into what federal prosecutors say is the mindset of some defendants this many months after the insurrection." My own perusal of the Haynes court filing reveals another common thread in those participating in or sympathetic with the Jan. 6 riot: "Haynes stated that he was deeply upset with the contrast between how the events that occurred on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol were being handled and how the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots that occurred in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in 2020 were being handled. Haynes told the interviewing agents that he believes that those who participated in the unlawful events at the U.S. Capitol were being treated unfairly, and that those involved with the rioting and vandalism related to the BLM movement were not being held accountable." For the record, thousands of protesters and rioters were arrested early on in the summer 2020 demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd's death, and on a wide range of charges; by contrast, most of those invading the Capitol were allowed to leave the mayhem and rubble and return to their homes before their own social media posts and big mouths led to their questioning and arrests, again on a wide range of charges.

More to come?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Brian Hughes of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab in American University’s Center for University Excellence raise disturbing possibilities from the Jan. 6 violence – that its success in briefly forcing “a bunch of our traitors in office to hunker down” (to quote QAon shaman Chansley) and briefly halting certification of votes favoring President Trump’s challenger may well encourage radicalized but otherwise disparate forces to come together again. The researchers suggest “there are increasing indications that the typically fractious world of the extreme far right is becoming more unified toward an objective of overthrowing the country’s prevailing political and social order.” The Jan. 6 riot – complete with astonishing lapses in preparation by Capitol police leadership and smartly executed paramilitary tactics by such groups as the Oath Keepers – now qualifies as “an example of a victory that almost was and might still be. It has empowered and emboldened its admirers while offering an opportunity to exercise the common terrorist tactic of studying and learning from failed actions.” Defendant Joshua Haynes reportedly said much the same when federal law enforcement visited him on Flag Day about his role in the melee, noting that "if the country continues to go in the direction that it is now going, then what happened on January 6, 2021, would not be an isolated event."

In a letter from pre-revolutionary Paris to John Adams’ son-in-law in November 1787, Thomas Jefferson famously declared the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” What country, he asked, “can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” Granted, this is typical Jeffersonian man-of-the-people swagger, here alluding to Shays' Rebellion, the armed uprising in Massachusetts over taxes and debt, but offering solid evidence of why Jefferson later looked so fondly upon the French Revolution even after its descent into chaos, madness, violence and political retribution left Washington and other Founders horrified. Indeed, the French Revolution highlights what can befall even a cultured society whose masses have little or no tradition in representative government or, through manipulation and brain-washing, conclude they’re living under tyranny and come to see force as a more convenient alternative – in short, a mobocracy embracing assumptions and digesting rumors and employing violence in the absence of justice and regular elections and an orderly government rooted in an informed citizenry. While Jefferson's animus toward Mother England remained strong well after the American Revolution, while he continually excused blood-stained excesses in a far-off revolution that he concluded was born of the principles championed in the Declaration of Independence, he surely sold short some of the representative framework and traditions that the British did invest in the colonies, limited though those might have been. These traditions at least offered a starting point for the new republic to build upon – not only in its daily laws and court traditions but in the Articles of Confederation, then in the U,S. Constitution. France lacked these traditions and spiraled into dictatorship. And even Jefferson expressed concern over rebellions mired in thickness and myopia and delusion – certainly not the case with the enlightened elites who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 but arguably the case with Shay’s Rebellion, which Jefferson acknowledged was “founded in ignorance” (though it spurred the Founders in the crafting of the Constitution during the summer of 1787). Of rebels rooted in ignorance and misinformation, Jefferson declared mercifully in his letter to Adams' son-in-law: “The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them.”

Yet such remedies are challenged today by not only a vicious and unending whirlwind of beguiling misinformation eagerly consumed by a massive and undiscriminating segment of our population but a decided loss of virtue in the people that George Washington so deeply feared. If his landmark 1796 Farewell Address has any relevance today, it’s in remembering that it was crafted in the context of the Whiskey Rebellion that violently defied the first tax of the new federal government, one elected under the recently ratified Constitution and ironically addressing federal debt: “The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.” That’s a critical distinction to consider when reflecting on the rousing Jan. 6 cries of “1776!” and “America First!” and “Our house! Our country!” It's a distinction that refutes the inclination of Americans who believe free and fair elections driven by the will of the people are occasionally insufficient in a constitutional republic, that one must then resort to rebellion and violence utterly contrary to the republic, the very sort of flag-waving defiance mirrored in Central Texan Stacy Hager's identification with that long-ago anti-tax rebellion in western Pennsylvania that, to quote eminent American historian Gordon S. Wood in "Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic," reached the point where citizenry "hoisted their own flag, set up mock guillotines, erected their own extralegal courts and talked of marching on the federal garrison in Pittsburgh to seize weapons." As Hager himself put it on a Facebook site apparently launched after the Jan. 6 insurrection, a credo identifying with both rebellion and flag, "The Whiskey Rebellion Flag not only represents the fiery nature of the American people but it shows how the government can't be trusted with its power. The sparks that led to this rebellion were of the same flint as those that triggered the American Revolution. To this day, the Whiskey Rebellion flag is seen as a reminder that we must remain vigilant against an oppressive government." (For the record, historians remain divided as to whether the familiar Whiskey Rebellion flag sold in stores – the one featuring an eagle holding a ribbon in its beak with 13 six-pointed stars in the backdrop – is genuine as a rebellion flag or actually associated with the federal cause.)

The words on Hager's site are articulate, moving and ultimately errant: Foundational in the need for such vigilance is the ability to discriminate in news of the day and better differentiating between fact-following, truth-embracing journalism and genuine “enemies of the people” seeking to mislead fellow citizens. Foundational in the need for such vigilance is the willingness to sort out narrow partisan self-interest versus real policies and initiatives stressing the betterment of all. Foundational in the need for such vigilance is the ability of a people to see beyond political idolatry and personal passions and recognize the possibility of a country under an autocrat of the sort renounced by Jefferson and fellow patriots in the Declaration of Independence — recognition surely made easier by a bumbling, would-be despot’s ignorance of and contempt for the Constitution, the user’s manual for governance in America as agreed to by the founding generations. Foundational in the need for such vigilance is acceptance of the hard reality that elections never please all of the people all of the time, and that those of us who dispatch to centers of governance lawmakers, presidents and governors to fight for us and to never compromise lamentably fail to understand that, in contemporary America, others across our land also dispatch to centers of governance lawmakers, presidents and governors to fight for them and to never compromise – a point I stressed to Congressman Pete Sessions during a rollicking Waco Tribune-Herald conversation shortly after his 2020 election and, from what I can see, to absolutely no avail. Without some way forward in earnest consensus and painstaking compromise, our nation drifts further into stagnation and corruption rooted in that government chosen time and again by the very people themselves (and I refer here to both state and federal governance). We drift into absurd vilification of one another while our many global enemies appreciate new and easier ways to undermine us – a concern that Jefferson, for all his seeming acceptance of occasional citizen outbursts, also cited as gravely relevant. We drift into an unhealthy national hero worship that, for anyone familiar with the apocalyptic, armed-to-the-teeth religious cult east of Waco and its "sinful messiah," can only signal trouble ahead. Finally, whether one acknowledges an avalanche of court rulings scuttling allegations of fraud in the 2020 election, rulings from federal judges and justices appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents alike, including Trump; whether one accepts Trump’s hard-headed, dutiful attorney general labeling allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020 “all bulls--t” after investigations by his own prosecutors; whether one grimaces at sufficient numbers of elected lawmakers on Jan. 6 certifying election returns favoring the president’s challenger, these collectively constitute George Washington’s “established government.” It's also our established government, warts and all, and in a vibrant democracy we can improve matters through means other than insurrection and lawlessness and ignorance, willful or not. Such improvement counts on each of us engaging and even persuading our friends and neighbors and fellow citizens – and not through the easily disproven lies and careless exaggerations and knee-jerk name-calling that only undermine our own credibility, character and relevance with the passage of time. Our friends and neighbors and fellow citizens will forever remember where we stood at a time of national crisis. 

The question that should percolate in the minds of Americans proud of our high ideals and hard-earned rights this Fourth of July and ever afterward pivots on whether the fine distinctions and constitutional safeguards of an enlightened class of Americans generations ago can hold sway amid the din and misinformation and animosity and self-delusion driving a latter-day movement of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, conspiracy theorists and simple-minded human flotsam now that they collectively clinched a measure of success on the Sixth of January. The problem eclipses anything George Washington could have imagined, even in his visionary Farewell Address, yet this renders his parting words no less relevant today. Even Jefferson and James Madison – who, amid ideological rifts late in Washington's presidency, more often wound up at odds with the old man – acknowledged late in their own lives the absolute importance of Washington's admonitions and cautions to his fellow citizens and even encouraged their exposure to new generations at Jefferson's cherished University of Virginia. Madison, so-called “Father of the Constitution” who also shepherded to ratification the Bill of Rights, praised "the sound sentiments" characterizing Washington's Farewell Address and included it among other foundational guideposts that he recommended including the Declaration of Independence (obviously brimming with Jefferson's heaven-storming idealism); the so-called "Federalist Papers" (written for newspapers of the day by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, pressing for ratification of the Constitution); the resolution of the General Assembly of Virginia in 1799 (authored by Madison) condemning the Alien and Sedition laws as unconstitutional, given the First Amendment; and Washington's 1789 inaugural speech (bolstered through editorial suggestions by Madison).

Given Madison's reading list for the proper education of Americans about the young nation before them (to which I would add the later but vitally important "Democracy in America" by inquisitive and refreshingly frank Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville and some visionary writings by Thomas Paine), it's interesting to note that, of that august founding company of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and himself, Madison remained the most optimistic about the future, even seeing potential for good in the creation of political parties – yet another development that Washington feared and cited in his Farewell Address. Washington wrote that the consuming spirit of political parties "serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection." Indeed, in its longing for an America that never quite existed if one factors in segregation of blacks from whites as well as feverish paranoia about communists amongst us that extended to our neighbors in the post-war prosperity of the 1950s – a reborn America that would pivot on the marginalization of some and a denial of changing demographics and global dynamics – today's Republican Party under the malevolent spell of Donald Trump neatly represents just what the Father of Our Country predicted before wearily retiring to Mount Vernon. Washington warned that parties, for all their potential for good, "are likely in the course of time and things to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." And our idealized and often flawed memories of the past touted by a political party obviously bankrupt of real nuts-and-bolts ideas? To quote former New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporter (and onetime newsroom colleague) Jackie Calmes in her book, "Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court," published last month: "When one major party comes to believe the other is the threat to that mythic way of life – because that other party, the Democrats, includes minorities, immigrants, feminists, non-Christians – then democracy is too big a gamble, in adherents' views. So Republicans gerrymander political districts. They pass restrictive voting laws to limit turnout of that other party's supporters. And if Republicans still lose, they reject the result or, worse, turn to force or countenance those who do."

All of which possibly complements a point attorney David Bass made at the steps of the local courthouse the Friday before an overcast, humid Fourth of July weekend in Waco: The Declaration of Independence lists, and at length, offenses committed by the British crown against American subjects – and the Bill of Rights so vigorously demanded by the Anti-Federalists consequently arms citizens to a significant degree against overarching governance. Even so, I asked my friend how Americans should approach the Fourth of July a year after outraged protesters spilled into the streets over racial injustice that remains well out of reach for many persons of color and six months after the Capitol was stormed by the president’s mostly white supporters over what they maintain was a stolen election. “They should take heart in knowing where we came from and learn from our past and learn that this was a country that was built on laws that are shared by everyone,” Bass said. “And while people might say reckless things, say untrue things, and do reckless and illegal acts, that doesn’t change the bedrock principles of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence. It just shows that the country has to be resilient and it has to be educated and it has to be literate and well-read. It has to do those things, and that’s why we’re doing this today – to try and remind people of that because, as criminal defense lawyers, we’re always hopeful that will be the way people see this country and see themselves.”