By Philalethes

A year ago tomorrow, the outgoing President Trump addressed a rally of his supporters. He believed, as many Americans did, that the elections in November 2020 had been rigged. He urged the crowd, who planned to march to the Capitol, to behave in an orderly and nonviolent fashion. That is not my opinion, it is a fact: all his words on the occasion were recorded. At the Capitol, a minority of the demonstrators rioted, clashing with police and entering the building. Once inside, most of them milled around the noble edifice like awed tourists, taking selfies and videos. Some broke through into the House chamber, where a cop remonstrated with them. They clowned around. Then they left. The only person killed that day was one of the demonstrators, an unarmed young woman, a veteran of the Armed Forces of the United States, who was outside the building and was carrying an American flag. Again, none of the foregoing is opinion: all of it is on film. A fortnight later, President Trump duly stepped down and Joe Biden was inaugurated. 

In the toney neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Manhattan, hipsters who had been toddlers in Midwestern hick towns in 2001 worried tearfully that the events in D.C. were as bad as 9/11, no, worse, since, they squeaked, American democracy itself was in danger. The media chimed in, calling the demonstration an “insurrection”, a “coup”. They blamed it all on President Trump, accusing him of incitement. The Democrat-controlled Congress, together with the new administration’s Attorney General, marshalling all the resources of the surveillance state this country has become, launched a vindictive inquisition against anyone and everyone who could be identified by photography as having been anywhere near Capitol Hill that day. People were rounded up and thrown in prison for months and months. (This in a country where a band of shoplifters can enter any San Francisco department store or pharmacy, take what they want, and waltz out the door without fear of so much as a parking ticket.) Compliant courts meted out draconian prison terms to demonstrators for trivial offenses. People known to have been present at the demonstration— standing blocks away from the building doing nothing— have lost their jobs. 

When in 1933 a lone, disturbed young man set fire to the building of the German parliament, the Reichstag, Hitler declared it a conspiracy, an insurrection, and used the incident as a pretext to declare a state of emergency and bring on the full Nazi reign of terror. Hitler had been duly elected, against a background of economic chaos and civil unrest caused partly by the Great Depression, partly by his own roving gangs of bully boys. January 6^th 2020 was America’s Reichstag Fire: a deplorable but hardly apocalyptic event lied about to create a pretext for tyranny.

In the spring and summer of 2020, the months running up to the American general elections, America suffered a real insurrection that was financed and directed by a genuine conspiracy. Groups of rioters were moved by plane to one city after another, housed in expensive hotels, wined and dined, and taken by bus to the center of town to burn down government buildings, destroy private property, loot businesses, and terrorize and kill hapless citizens. Wealthy donors who stayed in the shadows picked up the tab.

Democrat mayors prevented the police from intervening and restoring law and order, and hardly any arrests have ever been made. Democrat politicians virtue-signaled each other with statements justifying the violence and destruction wrought by the rioters. The press dutifully described the pre-planned, nationwide insurrection as “mostly peaceful demonstrations”. I recall a cartoon reprinted in an Orthodox Jewish paper at the time: it showed the Titanic going down, and the caption read, “Mostly floating ship”. This all went on during the first and most lethal wave of the Covid pandemic, and the mayor of New York had made it a crime for Orthodox Jewish men to assemble in a synagogue, or to take their children to a Brooklyn playground. But the rioters torching police precincts in Portland or daubing obscene anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls of Los Angeles synagogues were not even wearing masks. For the political manipulators of the pandemic, a prayer service, or children playing together, or a wedding, is a “superspreader”. Sedition is not.  

It will soon be a year since Joe Biden wandered into the White House for his extended afternoon nap. The economy has tanked, inflation has gone through the roof, and Biden’s cowardly, chaotic, ignominious abandonment of Afghanistan has shattered what was left of America’s credibility. China has crushed Hong Kong and is getting ready to take Taiwan, and could not care less what the US thinks of its genocide of the Uighurs— and anyhow, business is business and lo and behold, Tesla has just opened a showroom in Urumchi. The inventor Nikola Tesla, the freedom-loving Serb and freethinking maverick after whom the car company is named, must be spinning in his grave like a top. But Tesla— the corporation, not the human being— doesn’t care.

It doesn’t care and doesn’t have to. And with that we’ve reached the heart of the matter, the essence of the coup d’état, the threat to democracy. CNN, NPR, the New York Times, the various pundits of academia, and the rest of the rogues’ gallery are commemorating Jan. 6, 2021 and whipping up unrest about their fantasy version of the events, howling for new victims, wider inquisitions and witch hunts. They know Trump didn’t incite the riot, and they know the riot wasn’t an insurrection. But they are telling you he did and it was, and they don’t care whether you believe it or not, because they own this country and you don’t matter. 

They know that white supremacists were by no means the majority of the demonstrators that day, and they know that the racism and anti-Semitism that they peddle in the guise of political correctness, intersectionality, and so on is more divisive and harmful, over a much wider spectrum of American society, than the crazy fulminations of the far-right lunatic fringe. The latter is dangerous and evil indeed but is, thankfully, comparatively small. They know you know all that. 

They know you know that there is no such thing as “white privilege” or “toxic masculinity”, but they will force those lies down the throats of your children at school— and they will send the FBI after you if you dare to disagree at a meeting of your local school board. They know Trump was not in league with the Russians, Ukrainians, Rapanui, or Martians to steal the 2016 elections. Two phony impeachments turned up— nothing! They know all that, but will keep on repeating the big lie, just as their mentor, Adolf Hitler, taught them. 

These reprobate creatures, these homunculi of the power elite could not care less about the disadvantaged poor, Black people, Hispanics, gays, women, and Jews. But never mind all those categories that they manipulate to divide and isolate us. The truth is that there is only one race, the human race, and if you say that, they label you… a racist. 

They know their whole setup is a gigantic fraud, they know they are shameless hypocrites, and they know that everything they are telling you is a barefaced lie. And here is what stands fair to be the epitaph of your freedom and mine: THEY KNOW YOU KNOW. AND THEY DON’T CARE.