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The twists and turns of American politics are unpredictable, but the tone is a troubling given. It’s one of grievance. More and more Americans are convinced that they’re losing because somebody else is winning. More and more tally their slights, measure their misfortune, and assign particular people responsibility for it.
The strange and terrible tale of the far right’s long war on American democracy from a smattering of ominous right-wing compounds in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, to the shocking January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, America has seen the culmination of a long-building war on democracy .
Bruni, Frank. The Age of Grievance (p. 7). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
Let me tell you how I’ve been wronged when I think about who we’ve become and where it leaves us, of the prism through which so many Americans insist on seeing the world and how it perverts their views, I flash back not to any of the biggest, strangest, and most menacing events and developments from the past few years—not to the bedlam in the halls and the blood on the floor of the US Capitol; not to Paul Pelosi, in his own home and in a pajama top and boxers, bracing for the blow from an assailant’s hammer; not to a former president essentially crowing about his unprecedented indictments in four criminal cases, comprising ninety-one felonies, and treating them as a badge of honor—but to a brief and perfectly emblematic sequence of reports on Fox News in May 2022. The United States was then suffering a shortage of baby formula, and Fox had uncovered something scandalous. Something rotten. A photo told the story. “Look at that,” Sean Hannity instructed his viewers as he put the image on the screen, his voice spiked with disdain. What it showed, he said, were “pallets and pallets of baby formula for illegal immigrants and their families.” The Biden administration was supposedly rerouting this precious commodity to detention centers at the country’s southern border and thereby depriving “hardworking American families” elsewhere. But the photo told a fable. To anyone who cared to notice and decipher the labels on the boxes in those pallets, they identified the contents as powdered milk, not the formula in short supply. It was for children well beyond their first months of life.
Neiwert, David. The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy (pp. 3-4). Melville House. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
The Road to Sedition ON JANUARY 10, 49 B.C.E., Gaius Julius Caesar, governor of Cisalpine Gaul but on the cusp of being stripped of all power, ordered one of his legions to cross the Rubicon River, explicitly in defiance of the Roman Senate, which had ordered him to disband his army, which by law was not permitted within the borders of the Roman Republic. His action set off four years of civil war in Italy, culminating with the demise of the republic as Caesar assumed complete dictatorial control of the empire. On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump—on the verge of being officially unseated from the presidency—heeded the urgings of his most rabid supporters and crossed his own Rubicon. Speaking that day to a crowd of tens of thousands of supporters who had turned out to “Stop the Steal” of the 2020 presidential election, he falsely claimed that he had been cheated out of the presidency and urged them to march to the Capitol to protest the outcome. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down… Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
Riggleman, Denver. The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th (pp. xi-xii). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
This book is not the January 6th committee report. While I played a part in the investigation, I was not aware of every aspect of the committee’s work. I do not mean to present this book as a complete account of that day. Instead, I hope to build on the public’s knowledge of what happened when the Capitol was attacked. I also hope to add to the conversation about January 6th. It’s something we can’t look away from. While this is just one man’s story, I do believe my time advising the committee and my own life experience, including decades of military intelligence work and two years spent as a Republican member of Congress, give me a unique vantage point and insight into how our country went down this dark road—and how we might prevent something like January 6th from happening ever again. I had to pick and choose how to explain complex topics in a way that’s understandable to anyone reading this book. It was impossible to include every person and contingency. I also left out sensitive data that could affect the January 6th committee. I ask all open-source intelligence researchers and others who are studying January 6th extensively to please forgive me for excluding certain individuals and events. This book makes a simple case. There is a growing militant, far-right, Christian nationalist movement that is being fueled by online disinformation. That movement now constitutes an extremist wing of the Republican Party—the party that I once belonged to—and it poses a serious danger to our democracy.