Where are the Republicans?
Every day, I think it will change. Surely some Republican will mention that the storming of the Capitol came in reaction to a stolen election.
But silence reigns. It's as if the January 6 uprising occurred in a vacuum. As if nothing precipitated it.
Democrats keep on declaring that never again can this country see its Capitol overtaken by a mob. Well, there's an easy solution for that. Don't steal elections in plain sight, and maybe ordinarily law-abiding citizens won't snap.
I don't blame Democrats for not mentioning this obvious point. But where are the Republicans? Do they not understand what caused the events of January 6? Do they not understand that the hundred thousand people who traveled to Washington, D.C. on that day did so because they believed with all their heart and soul that their country was being stolen from them by a group of vicious leftists?
Liberals have so little regard for truth that they say with a straight face that no evidence of election fraud exists. Yet even a cursory internet search reveals so much evidence that one can hardly wrap one's mind around it all. Ballot dumps in the middle of the night, numerous statistical anomalies; dead people voting, a rejection rate of invalid ballots that pales in comparison to that of the last election, missing USB drives, hostile ballot-counting centers, hundreds of thousands of ballots counted with no meaningful oversight — the list goes on and on. It's infuriating.
In a normal country, such claims would be debated in the media. But we're no longer a normal country. The mainstream media decided to treat any claim of election fraud as prima facie loony and refused to even debate it. "Biden won, end of story," they told us.
So Republicans went to court, but they couldn't get a single hearing on the evidence. Judges, after all, read newspapers and watch TV, too. And if the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN all state that claims of election fraud are not respectable enough to even be debated, surely they must be right. Surely so many highly educated men with smart clothing and impressive diction can't be lying. So they declined to take up the case.
In truth, looking to judges for salvation was ill advised from the start. The Constitution gives the states the power to elect the president, and states are represented most directly by their legislatures. Unfortunately, though, state legislatures are not accustomed to standing up for themselves, and they, too, read newspapers and watch TV. So they stayed largely silent as well.
Every single day — from November 3 to January 6 — Trump-supporters learned from alternative media outlets that something extremely fishy occurred on Election Day. But no one in the Republican establishment class was willing to stand up for them. They felt utterly powerless.
Instead of being taken seriously, they were essentially told, "The Democrats may have broken the law and stolen the election, but it's time to move on. We'll win in 2024."
Will we? How? Why won't the Democrats cheat again? What's to stop them? If they got away with such audacious violations of the law this time, why won't they go for a repeat performance in 2024? Wouldn't you if you were they?
Trump supporters were simmering with anger when they got to Washington on January 6. And some of them snapped when they arrived at the Capitol that afternoon. It's become a pious ritual to condemn these people as dangerous terrorists, but if Republicans really care about the country, they must focus on the mass election fraud that made these people snap in the first place.
If they don't, good luck getting the grassroots to vote in 2024.
Elliot Resnick is the editor of The Jewish Press and the author, most recently, of Movers & Shakers, Vol. 2: Sixty More Interviews on Everything From Judaism and Terrorism to Politics and Science.
Graphic credit: Croppped from an 1879 Thomas Nast cartoon via CNN.