Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack has yet to schedule public hearings
For months the question of when and if the Jan. 6 committee would hold public hearings on its findings has gone unanswered. There is no answer on that this morning. But the teasing is becoming tedious. Multiple stories on Sunday explored whether the committee would make a criminal referral against Donald J. Trump to the Department of Justice if it has the guts to.
Standing out among the panelists is Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a 20-year U.S. Navy veteran who spent her military career serving on combat ships and rising to the rank of commander. Duty is in her blood.
Ben Jacobs (New York Magazine) interviewed Luria on how she believes the committee’s work product will be received:
“We can’t continue that indefinitely, just each witness leading to more people,” Luria said. “So we really are sensitive to the timeframe that the American people want to hear the body of our work and want to understand the facts surrounding January 6th. It’s our focus now to get to that point where we’re ready to present the information that has been collected through the course of the investigation.”
Luria predicted the hearings will change minds when the public is presented with the scheme “in its entirety, and understood how much of a concerted, deliberate effort there was and how many people at high levels of government were involved in trying to implement a plot that was going to change the outcome of the election.” She thought that if the committee laid out what it found, “it will have a very far reach,” like what happened during the congressional hearings into Watergate.
While the Virginia Democrat wouldn’t go into details about what the committee has found, Luria said it’s been jarring to learn how near the plotters came to success. “The most concerning part to me is to know how close we were to a different outcome,” she said. “If a few people had not been in the right place and done the right thing, like the former vice-president, for example.” Especially surprising to her was the brazen “public display” of the scheme, such as coming up with fake pro-Trump electors. “There are things that are shocking, sort of the extent to which people went to carry out this plan, although good judgment and logic would tell any average person that there was no legal basis to overturn the election,” she said.
Except the Trump cult does not attract average people whose minds are open to being changed. Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Mike Lindell the pillow guy, and Ashli Babbitt. It attracts people fed steady diets of grievance by right-wing media, people who would spend thousands to follow Trump around the country. It attracts people susceptible to believing conspiracy theories who, accustomed to privilege, think equality feels like oppression. It attracts people who would fight for hours with police and break into the U.S. Capitol shouting “1776!” Others would come with a plan, tactical gear and weapons. Their minds will not be changed.
“So there were people that were pushing this conspiracy and this big lie, but there were lots of people enabling that,” Luria says. “There were lots of people who could have stood up earlier and spoken against it.” They did not. Even until today.
Since retirement, there has been time for many things I never got to. One is “reading” (audiobook) Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (first published 1951). In light of Jan. 6, consider:
“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Trump simply knew in his gut what authoritarian followers wanted to hear. They lapped it up like mother’s milk. Their minds won’t be changed.
I still want to see public hearings.
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