Hearing delivers brutal reminders of why Republicans want you to forget Jan. 6

January 6, 2021 is a day seared in the minds of most Americans, but as time passes and memories fade, not everyone will recall just how horrific it actually was.

On Thursday evening, we got a sobering reminder.

The U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection held its first of several public hearings Thursday, in which it began to present a narrative of what happened on the day the U.S. Capitol was breached, and in the weeks and months leading up to it.

We were shown depositions of former President Donald Trump’s advisers, who said they knew the 2020 presidential election was not stolen — and they tried to tell Trump exactly that.

We watched chilling footage of demonstrators shoving their way past barricades, breaking windows and streaming into the building chanting, “Stop the steal.” As the violence unfolded, one rioter read Trump’s tweets through a megaphone in real time.

We heard about how rioters wanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence — even setting up a noose on makeshift gallows outside the Capitol — and that Trump remarked that maybe they had “the right idea,” because Pence “deserves it.”

We heard from a Capitol Police officer who described the carnage and chaos she witnessed that day. She testified that she was “slipping in people’s blood” throughout “hours of hand-to-hand combat.”

Republicans, in North Carolina and across the country, are desperately trying to divert your attention from the hearings. They’re scrambling to discredit the committee and its work. Fox News didn’t even air Thursday’s hearing, which Tucker Carlson called “propaganda,” at all.

“This is a sick kind of a show. It is un-American in its nature … I’ve never seen such a betrayal of the Constitution as that show trial that we saw slickly produced by ABC,” U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, a North Carolina Republican, said Thursday night in an appearance on Newsmax.

On Twitter, Bishop also attempted to redirect focus to “real” problems, such as inflation and President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

But we needed the reminder of what happened that day, because Republicans have hoped we’d forgotten. They have, after all, been downplaying it ever since — U.S. Rep. Ted Budd, the Republican nominee for North Carolina’s open Senate seat, said on a podcast last year that “it was nothing. It was just patriots standing up.”

(Budd, who is proudly endorsed by Trump, was notably quiet on social media Thursday night. The North Carolina Republican Party said little about the hearings, but did share tweets reminding people of Democrats’ “repeated crises and failures.”)

The other thing largely missing last night, however, were the kind of bombshell revelations that Democrats and committee members have teased in the days leading up to the first hearing. That’s a risky choice for a committee that wants Americans to stay tuned for several upcoming hearings.

Perhaps sensing that, committee members did more of that teasing after the hearing, with Republican Adam Kinzinger tweeting late in the night that Thursday was “just a taste” and committee chair Bennie Thompson promising that there would be evidence of links between protesters and people in the Trump orbit. Good. Americans need to not only be reminded about Jan. 6, but also told what brought our country to the brink of a coup.

Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chair of the committee who has been exiled by her party for taking on Trump, had a message for her fellow Republicans, who she said are “defending the indefensible.”

“There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone,” Cheney said, “but your dishonor will remain.”

North Carolinians know that dishonor all too well. After all, seven members of our state’s congressional delegation joined in objecting to the certification of the 2020 election results. Even today, we see how members of our state legislature still threaten democracy through their false claims about a lack of “election integrity,” through their idolatry of a president who, even now, lies about a legitimate election.

Republicans don’t want you to think too hard about all that, lest you remember how they enabled it from the start. They want you to look away. Don’t.

This story was originally published June 10, 2022 at 9:14 AM with the headline "Hearing delivers brutal reminders of why Republicans want you to forget Jan. 6."