It has been three years since a would-be revolution was televised and simultaneously uploaded to myriad social sites as insurrectionists performed for their audience. It’s still hard to wrap my head around it. It’s hard, too, to contemplate what the year ahead holds for the nation.
When I was looking for something else, I bumped into a blog post I wrote that January, pointing to the racism underlying the MAGA movement. Three years ago was just months after we watched George Floyd’s murder, captured by a witness and shown repeatedly on television. Today, the urgency of reading all the books and completing all the anti-racism checklists has dissipated. Instead the backlash against the international reaction to that murder is in full force. And the Republican front runner unashamedly apes fascist tropes, promising retribution.
Karen Tumulty recently urged us to stop pretending “this is not who we are,” just as I did in my post. Racism is an American tradition. But it’s also wise to bear in mind Jamelle Bouie’s point that it’s not who all of us are. Assuming Trump represents the majority, or that Trump supporters are the “real” Americans, is to give up on the motivating idea of the Declaration of Independence, that we are all equal. Let’s not forget how outraged and appalled we were on that day.
Our system has several flaws that give disproportionate power to a minority, but even so the dude lost! The majority voted against him. We did it before, and we can do it again.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In honor of the 
It’s been a moment. About five exhausting years of moments. A telescoping sequence of “oh my god” moments, from Muslim bans and kids in cages and Charlottesville and Pizzagate–ha ha, remember that goofiness? ha ha, so weird–to ever more urgent signs of imminent climate catastrophe, to a mishandled pandemic to gamified delusional bonding online to a mass uprising against state violence against black folks to open insurrection by a flag-waving white supremacist alliance. The attack on the Capitol seemed like a bizarre season finale, broadcast live, that got more and more real as the media created by the insurrectionists to memorialize their moment was scraped and assembled. It was 
What a bittersweet 
It seems as if Charlottesville was several years ago. It was a shock, seeing Nazis and white supremacists carrying torches on the campus of the University of Virginia campus, then invading the town carrying guns and the kind of gear that you’d think belonged to an angry offshoot of the Society for Creative Anachronism, unleashing threats, violence, beatings, and even murder. There was outrage, but since then there has been a strange drift toward accepting white supremacy. It’s fueling 