Arkansas Online

Insurrectionists are nothing new for U.S.

By Colbert I. King

Rest assured, our nation’s capital will not be occupied wall to wall with protesters attending Saturday’s “Justice for J6” rally. The sponsors will be lucky to draw enough warm bodies to fill a State Department auditorium. But it’s the thought that counts.

The mere idea of people coming to town to hail insurrectionists charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol invasion as “patriots” is as profane as it is insane. But this is where America finds itself at this stage in the “big lie” campaign, which holds that twice-impeached, soundly defeated former president Donald Trump was cheated out of re-election.

It is, however, the pernicious and sinister intent of the liars — not their staged protests — that poses the real threat, which is no less than a slur on democracy.

That makes the work of the House select committee charged with investigating the Jan. 6 attack of paramount importance. The peaceful transfer of power was threatened by the Trump-inspired rampage. His “big lie,” as CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale reports, has spawned nationwide Republican efforts to change election laws to make it more difficult to vote, spurred Republican crackdowns on election officials who are doing their jobs, and provided ammunition to conspiracy theorists inclined to take matters in their own hands.

Which calls to mind Floyd Ray Roseberry of Grover, N.C.

He showed up last month in a truck parked near the Capitol threatening to set off an explosive device and airing grievances against President Joe Biden and other Democrats. No bomb was found in his vehicle.

Roseberry was followed by Donald Craighead, 44, of Oceanside, Calif., who was arrested on Monday with multiple knives, a bayonet and a machete in his truck adorned with a swastika and other white supremacist symbols, according to Capitol Police. He said he was “on patrol” and was spewing white supremacist ideology, police said.

Craighead’s father said Craighead has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and Roseberry reportedly has also been diagnosed with a mental health disorder.

Both, however, had the presence of mind to find their way to Washington.

Recalling scenes from that dreadful Jan. 6 day on Capitol Hill, and accounts of Republicans passing suppressive state voting laws and pushing “audits” to overturn the 2020 election results, conjures up another group of aggrieved Americans.

They thought of themselves as “Redeemers.”

Humiliated and angered by post-Civil War Reconstruction, they saw their Southern social order in ruins. .

All that followed — from the voting booth to the schoolhouse to land ownership to the means of feeding a family — were Southern state actions devoted to rolling back whatever progress Blacks had made, and to making sure it never happened again.

Clearly, the vengeful spirit of the Redeemers never died.

It is in the context of the Redeemers movement, and all that it stood for, that Trump and his Republican Party acolytes should be viewed. Watch what they are doing in Congress and statehouses across the country.

It pays for Democratic leaders not to be distracted by the ephemerals — job titles, ego-strokes, press notices and campaign checks — and lose sight of what’s at stake.

Today’s redeemers, just as with the Old South, hope to “rise again.” They are unlikely to rise very high this weekend in Washington. But their Donald Trump is no Jefferson Davis. Trump firmly controls what he has unleashed.

“Justice for J6” is junior varsity. Defeating Trumpism, in all its ugly forms, is what should matter most. All else, politically speaking, comes in second.

Opinion

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2021-09-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://edition.arkansasonline.com/article/282544431439576

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