I urge you to read this entire essay about January 6th by TPM’s Hunter Walker who was on the scene at the Capitol that day. An excerpt:
In the immediate aftermath, I found it hard to capture the scope of the thing. As an eyewitness and a journalist, I felt a distinct burden. I had to convey not just how far we’d strayed from any notion of law and order but also the horror of how much more violent it very easily could have been.
That urgency became a dull weight as it quickly began to seem that so much of the country was eager to move on or ignore the harsh truths of the day. The tendency of many to look away and pass into the ultimately interstitial, liminal moment of Joe Biden’s presidency was exacerbated by the fact there was a full-on campaign dedicated to rewriting and reversing the basic facts of what happened. The attack on our government was quickly paired with an assault on our collective memory that painted the day as, alternately, harmless, a set up, or even heroic. The task of these propagandists was made even easier because so much of Official Washington demonstrated an unwillingness to identify and punish the members of Congress, assorted grifters, and dark money groups that formed the political arm of the January 6 movement.
Like so many other investigators, attorneys, and whistleblowers, I swam against this tide for years. Along with other journalists, including here at TPM, I dutifully tried to fact check the most egregious lies, to expose the many direct lines between the rioters on the ground and President Trump, and even to release evidence that the official probes failed to publicly present. On other dark anniversaries, I also tried to counter the blatantly, ridiculously false narrative that this was some kind of peaceful and positive protest by recounting the terror I felt in that crowd. Ultimately, those efforts failed. The narrative, at least for now, has been fully and dramatically rewritten with Trump’s pardon pen.
[…]
January 6 was, for me, the moment we lost the plot. It was a milestone in the erosion of our core values. It left Trump’s violent authoritarian movement emboldened and able to continue onward. The gates were forced open.
Many observers have looked at Trump’s actions in Venezuela and argued they are simply a more blatant version of an age-old American imperialism. They’re not wrong. Yet, somehow, Trump manages to take our country’s worst tendencies and magnify them to an absurd degree.
[…]
Trump and his gilded, misshapen White House are monuments to the fevered night sweats that have shaken us from the American dream. He is our monument — and January 6 is his national holiday.
And now we have thugs marauding through the streets, armed to the teeth threatening and shooting civilians. The re-election and the pardons made it inevitable.