Like dastardly James Bond villains, Trump supporters continued last week to use their secret mind control weapon against President Joe Biden and Democrat leadership in Congress to further the January 6 “insurrection,” and no amount of razor fencing or tired, sleep-deprived, poorly-fed National Guard troops can stop them.
Guns? They don’t need no stinking guns.
That’s why of the untold thousands of better judgment-challenged election protestors who flooded the capitol on January 6, the FBI recovered not a single weapon according to recent congressional testimony. Capitol police and D.C. officers only found three guns in some 500 arrests so far.
That’s three; Roman Numeral III; as in “Three’s Company;” “The Three Amigos;” “The Three Stooges.”
Yes, it will go down as the least-armed insurrection in American history – but then again who needs guns to push some South American-style junta when you’re already this deep in your adversary’s head?
Famously, the only shot fired during the January 6 incident was from the sidearm of a still unidentified Capitol Policeman. Unlike Derek Chauvin or Darren Wilson, the capitol cop’s anonymous status is presumably yet preserved only because his now dead target was an unarmed white conservative female – in other words a person of little political importance.
But think of the mess that doesn’t have to be cleaned up when insurrectionists dispense with firearms and use only psychological warfare. If those Whiskey Rebellion tax protestors in Pittsburgh on July 16, 1794, had been as able to intimidate tax collector John Neville as deftly as Trump supporters have freaked out Joe Biden & friends, they might not have felt compelled to burn down Neville’s house. Rebellion leader Major James McFarlane might not have been killed in the ensuing firefight and might have instead lived to a ripe old, whiskey-sipping age.
If only business and property owners in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland, Boston, Chicago and other cities plagued by riots last summer could have faced foes committed to such levels of mind control – instead of Molotov cocktails.
Yet, here we are, two full months after the January 6 three-gun insurrection, and Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are still girding for a frontal assault at the capitol behind razor wire and National Guardsmen, who should have more rightly been dispersed across the country to transport Covid-19 vaccine and operate vaccination stations in every county. Of course, the concerns of a worldwide pandemic can wait – when an “insurrection” is at hand.
The second wave was coming March 4, top intelligence officials determined. March 4 came and went. No gunfire, no bombs detonated, no rampaging crowds. It was 55 degrees and sunny. The sound of joggers’ sneakers on the Capitol Mall was, however, deafening.
Now, crack investigative reporters at the Washington Post have it on really good authority from someone well-placed in the Qanon movement – a guy they call “Ken” – that Trump will be inaugurated as President in D.C. on March 20 and that the attack will happen then. Millions of dollars a day in security and the nation’s capitol looking like a prison? Well, okay. If “Ken” says so…
It’s unknown how long Biden and Pelosi think they can bolster their hair’s width political majority by presenting the capitol as an armed camp prepared for some onslaught of rabid Trumpites. What is certain is the longer it goes on and the more they try to fan the feeble embers of that January 6 dumbassery into a full-fledged national emergency worth the imagery, the sillier they look. Americans know a ruse when it’s being played, even behind razor wire.
Biden’s presidency is underway, but there’s no doubt Trump still casts a shadow in his head. Democrats are going to have to ask Ken what to do about that. ###
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan. His debut novel “A Whisper For Help” celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021.