Who controls the past?

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Make me smarter …

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Turn on your television

To get a true and honest sense of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, you could do what President Donald Trump did that day while sitting in the White House: turn on your TV, sit back — for hours — and watch rioters battle police as they storm the U.S. Capitol.

When Democrats controlled the House, they put together a special committee to investigate all that happened the day that Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell” so he could remain in power after losing an election. Police testified about the brutality they faced; former Trump staffers testified about the president’s indifference, at best, to seeing his supporters break into Congress and hunt for Mike Pence.

But you don’t need all that, really, to understand what happened that day. It’s one of the rare times that watching cable news could be edifying: the images broadcast 4 ½ years ago, and the fact that the president watched them too and refused to say “stop” until the riot had already been pretty much quelled, tell the story.

That’s why House Republicans’ efforts to rewrite history are bound to fail. As Salon’s Heather Digby Parton writes, “we all saw what happened in real time on live television.” So, as she details, the GOP can go ahead and investigate the investigators ― try to flip the script and insist the real villains are Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney — but they will never be able to sell their counter-narrative to anyone who hasn’t already drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid.

Think about it: If the perpetrators of the worst violence that day were already pardoned by Donald Trump — if the rioter shot dead trying to break through Congress’ last line of defense is getting full military honors, courtesy the president — how can you turn around and insist that the FBI (led then, as now, by a Trump appointee) was behind it all, and that this was bad? The official narrative, today, is that the violence either wasn’t all that bad, exaggerated as it was by Antifa/Capitol police, or it was basically good because democracy was being overturned by Joe Biden. Help us out here: What?

Trump and his allies can attempt to rewrite history, but comfort can be taken in the fact that they have never been able to construct a coherent version of their own.

What do you think will come of Republican efforts to rewrite the history of Jan. 6? Sound off in the comments.

Before you go …

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