To examine the "facts and causes" of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a commission like that which investigated the 9/11 attacks. House members on the left and right have already drawn up separate bills prescribing who would choose commission members. Skeptics wonder how non-partisan members can possibly be found in today's polarized climate.

There is already disagreement. Democrats want to stack the deck with seven of their own on the commission against four Republicans, with
only the Democrats granted subpoena power. "Partisan by design" said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, correctly. If the Democrats' design were to go forward, the commission's findings would be written off as rigged.

Republicans want to restrict the inquiry to just the events of January 6th. Democrats want to probe domestic extremism at large. In turn, Republicans will insist on the right to investigate left-wing violent groups. Missing from either draft is a provision requiring that none of the commission panelists be current politicians, that all should be several years removed from government to maximally purge today's toxic partisanship. Imagine a commission disrupted by gaslighters like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley.

Learning what went wrong on that January day — the dysfunction in the security services that caused the Capitol to be poorly defended, the threat posed by white supremacist terror groups, their planning and coordination in the days leading up to the assault — all is of fundamental importance. But much is already known. After all, the insurrection was televised, its slogans and banners for all to see. In our selfie age the rioters filmed their own attack, handing the FBI footage to identify perpetrators and evidence to open some 400 cases against… Read More »

Consider this: Donald Trump's insistence that the election was rigged, his claim of millions of fraudulent ballots, his re-election campaign filing some 60 lawsuits to overturn the election in key states, his suborning of state legislators to choose a slate of electors voting the opposite of how the people of their state voted, his attempt to lure Electoral College appointees to do the same,

his tweeting "Big project in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!", The Washington Post reporting that "The Proud Boys, members of armed right-wing groups, conspiracy theorists and white supremacists all have pledged to attend" and "far-right demonstrators workshopping ways to smuggle guns into the District", and now asking Georgia's secretary of state "to find 11,780… Read More »

One could hardly imagine a greater dichotomy than Donald Trump setting up a commission to espouse "patriotic education" to restore American reverence of the nation's fundamental mores, versus same Donald Trump a few months later inciting an insurrection to overthrow the newly elected president so he could retain power.

The president announced in September the formation of the "1776 Commission" charged with developing a "pro-American curriculum"
that would put an end to the "twisted web of lies" taught in our schools about slavery, racism, the sordid episodes of our history, saying that "teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse".

Trump demanded that the commission turn in its report before he left office, which it did with no moments to spare, despite its members having been named only a month earlier. None were historians.

The commission's title gives away that the motive was to counteract the New York Times' "1619 Project", born in a special August 2019 issue of the newspaper's Sunday magazine and filled with essays to make the case that the nation's founding was really in that year, when the first slaves were landed on these shores in Virginia. First, a look at that.

"The 1619 Project" starts out aggressively, opening with

"Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle America would have no democracy at all."

Slaves on the plantations growing rice and cotton at world competitive prices were the foundation of American capitalism. The "strenuous… Read More »