Follow-up to 'It Was All a Lie'

Journalism and social media professor Meredith D. Clark was recently asked about her reactions to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. She replied: If people are allowed to assault the Capitol, and if they are not adequately investigated and punished after the fact, it reveals that something isn't true "in the way that we talk about American democracy." Schoolchildren are taught that there is something "almost holy" about democratic institutions in the United States. Yet, on January 6, these institutions were revealed as cheaply valued.

Especially perplexing, Clark said, are the demographics of the people who participated in the attack. "These are people who, by virtue of racial hierarchy in this country, should have every opportunity that can be afforded to someone along racial lines. These are the people for whom American democracy was essentially created," she said — yet, rather than benefiting from the system, "they are willing to turn it on its head to bend the government and the way that we think about democracy to their will..." The observation here (if I interpret it correctly) is that if marginalized groups had stormed the Capitol, it might have been a way of manifesting their grievances against a governing system that has historically excluded their democratic participation, but when white Americans storm the Capitol (or choose not to thoroughly investigate or prosecute those who did), they more pointedly reveal that even they who have been personally well served by the system never really believed it to be sacred.

Former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said something similar in his book It Was All a Lie. He said that he believed, all through his career, that Republican leaders genuinely stood for values like lowering taxes and avoiding unplanned pregnancies. However, when they nominated Trump in 2016, they revealed that this party platform had always been a lie to drum up votes. They never cared about preserving Constitutional rights, or they wouldn't have nominated a man who was ignorant of American political theory. Clearly, they care about gaining raw power for themselves. Stevens now believes, as I described in an article on Medium last year: "They never genuinely held those values, or else they never could have yielded them up so swiftly."

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Update:

In January 2023, former U.S. Representative Adam Kinzinger was quoted in HuffPost ("Adam Kinzinger Is Stuck Wondering What The Republican Party 'Believes Anymore'"):

"I don’t know what my party believes anymore. I don’t hear them talking about smaller government, I don’t hear them talking about a strong national defense. I hear some of them supporting Vladimir Putin over the freedom-loving people of Ukraine and it’s not a party I recognize."

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"Donald Trump Vows To Abolish A Part Of The Constitution On ‘Day One’ If He Wins" Lee Moran, HuffPost, May 31, 2023

I sort of don't care WHY they like Trump - life's too short to get into these people's heads more than you have to - but I really think the racism thing is very dominant over like, "I want tax cuts" as an explanation for why people in the media who like him like him bsky.app/profile/ronh...

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— Michael Tae Sweeney (@mtsw.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 10:54 AM

Four years later:

"Tom Joscelyn, a counterterrorism expert who served on the staff of the House Jan. 6 committee and was a co-author of its report, said he still finds it hard to believe that people could watch what happened that day unfold on television and then still accept Trump’s version of it. Unlike children growing up in the South in the 1940s and 1950s, for whom the Civil War was generations in the past, Trump’s followers and allies are rejecting readily available evidence of contemporary violence.

'All you need is the images and the videos from that day, his own words, and what you saw with your own eyes, and it was clear that he had crossed some bright lines,' he said. 'All of that should have been disqualifying, and it wasn’t.'"

— S.V. Date, Trump’s Propaganda Victory: The Rewriting Of Jan. 6: You can believe your own eyes or Donald Trump's words — and many Americans are choosing to believe him. HuffPost, Jan 5, 2025

This is a good article, despite the rage-baitey headlines. I do think there's something missing from this story, and if I had to name it I would call it Ashli Babbitt. www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/...

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— Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof (@evanbernick.bsky.social) June 19, 2025 at 1:00 PM

Ashli Babbitt, as summarized in this article by Robyn Marasco, in no way resembles the "young women of the modern right" described in the WaPo piece. You could not get further from her. What does any of this have to with "traditional femininity?" And yet, she's a MAGA martyr. Make it make sense?

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— Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof (@evanbernick.bsky.social) June 19, 2025 at 1:00 PM

Dig a bit deeper, though, and I think it's pretty easy to see. This is a coalition united not so much by a set of shared ideological convictions as by shared hatred for the right enemies. That's the essential element here. It can wash away any other perceived sins.

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— Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof (@evanbernick.bsky.social) June 19, 2025 at 1:00 PM

Evan Bernick also shared:
"Reconsidering the Sexual Politics of Fascism," 25 June 2021

"The idea that Trump or MAGA is in any sense “anti-war” is something between an absurdity and a misunderstanding. Kate and I had a good discussion of it in this week’s podcast. At one level it’s a simple fraud. Trump claimed he’d ‘always been against the Iraq War’ at a time when the US had been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. It was a helpful attack line and it was completely false. Trump wasn’t in politics in 2002 or 2003 and to the extent he said anything, like a lot of people, he was for it when it was popular and against it when it wasn’t.

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But there’s not quite nothing to Trump’s claims of being ‘anti-war’. What he’s against is military commitments. ... violence and aggression are the essence of MAGA politics. As it is at home, Trump’s whole foreign policy is about force, bullying and aggression, even when it’s in ‘peaceful’ or non-kinetic domains like trade. The issue is military commitments. Because commitments by definition restrict freedom of action. And that is another centerpiece not just Trumpism but of Trump’s personality. He’s for things until they’re unpopular."

— Trump Has Never Been Anti-War; He’s Not Even Anti-War inside the USA, Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, June 19, 2025

'Joy Over Denmark' by Poul Martin Møller

Poul Martin Møller (1794-1838) is known for his poem "Joy Over Denmark." As I collect references to eunuchs, here, I point out the eunuch in the third-to-last stanza. The translator wrote "Listen to the eunuchs' voices whining," but Möller's original Danish is "Lytte paa den sorte Halvmands Triller" ("Listen to the black half-man's trilling"). The implication is that the eunuch is a harem guard, as he is physically near an Eastern lord and the women he has paid for ("Østens Drot blandt kjøbte Friller"). The poem's overall point is that, while other countries are imagined or known to be wealthy or exotic, the relatively modest Denmark remains beautiful to the poet. The exoticized treatment of other lands is unlovely to me, but it is typical of Western literature that mentions eunuchs.

Joy Over Denmark

Roses proudly glow in Dana's bowers;
Horses graze where sleep heroic dead;
Bees distill the sweetness from the flowers;
Starlings scatter notes in silver showers;
Children gather berries, ripe and red.

Here between the shadows of the shifting
Ocean never come the budding springs;
Only heavy whales go slowly drifting.
While the silent seagulls hover, lifting
Quarry from the waves, with moveless wings.

Friends afar in shining Danish summer,
Do you hail your comrade any more?
Here the tropic wind, a tireless drummer,
Beats against the sails, and this newcomer
Dreams of native fields by Dana's shore.

East or west, however far I wander,
I will think of you by Denmark's Sound;
Even where Constantia's vineyards squander
Splendid beauty, I imagine yonder
Bright Charlottë's beechwood, summer-crowned.

Monks in hovels of Manila grumble,
"Denmark is a little, beggar land."
Java's sons confirm it, even humble
Pedlars of Batavia scornfully mumble,
"Denmark is a little, beggar land."

Slaves of silk-clad Orientals hear them
Stir their fans in torrid discontent,
With their heartless, jeweled mates that fear them,
Gorgeous birds, but not a song to cheer them,
Gaudy tinsel flowers that have no scent.

Could you buy the faith of Northern maiden
With the promise of a golden boon?
Buy a gust of sea-waves fragrance-laden,
Clover fields for slumber, or a glade in
Denmark's fields to dream away the noon?

Poor men who have ploughed their Danish furrow
Shake the fruit from their own orchard trees;
Mind and body quick at work and thorough,
Corn and milk aplenty for to-morrow;
Heifers drowse in grass up to their knees.

Denmark's soil is rich, her sons laborious;
There are virtues in the Danish bread;
Wherefore Danish courage is so glorious,
Wherefore was the Northman's sword victorious,
Wherefore is the Danish cheek so red.

Let the Master of the East, reclining
With his purchased women, doze and nod,
Listen to the eunuchs' voices whining
Through the columns echoing and twining,
While he dozes, an exhausted god.

Underneath the beech, the Danish lover
To the loveliest repeats his vows.
Drifting moonlight showers white above her;
Mirrored swans on haunted waters hover;
Nightingales sing loudly in the boughs.

If such things be poverty's true measure,
Silk-clad eastern prince, I understand;
Then I break my Danish bread at leisure,
Thanking God, I too exclaim with pleasure,
'Denmark is a little, beggar land!'

— Poul Martin Møller, translated by Robert Silliman Hillyer

Images from A Book of Danish Verse translated to English by S. Foster Damon and Robert Silliman Hillyer. New York: The American Scandinavian Foundation, 1922. pp. 63-65. Retrieved from Archive.org.