It's All About the White Supremacy

Dan Froomkin notes something about the January 6 Committee report missed, and has also been missed by the mainstream media, that the Capitol Police basically enabled the occupation of Congress that day.

I think that Froomkin has a good description of what happened, but only obliquely refers to the underlying issue when he says that Capitol Police leadership, "Were unable to imagine white Trump supporters as a clear and present danger."

I believe that what we are dealing with here is that police in the America are inherently supportive of white supremacists.  We see this when police bend over backwards to accommodate white supremacists in places like  Minneapolis, Minnesota, Portland, Oregon, Washington, DC, Charlottesville, VA, New York, New York, etc. (FWIW, Froomkin approved of my sentiment, or at least he liked my Tweet saying this)

The news media’s continuing failure to explore why the U.S. Capitol was so scantily defended against an angry horde of white Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, has now been compounded by the House select committee’s refusal to connect the most obvious dots or ask the most vital questions.

It’s true that there were countless law enforcement failures that day — indeed, far too many to be a coincidence.

But the singular point of failure — the one thing that could have prevented all of it from happening — was that Capitol Police leaders brushed off ample warnings that an armed mob was headed their way.

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Exploring why Capitol Police leaders chose not to prepare for combat, despite mounds of intelligence pointing directly toward such a scenario, should have been a key goal of the Jan. 6 committee.

That Capitol Police leaders — like so many others in law enforcement — were unable to imagine white Trump supporters as a clear and present danger remains one of the most tragically under-addressed elements of that day’s legacy, leaving crucially important lessons entirely unlearned.

As is noted in the article, the January 6 Committee ignored these lessons because Liz Cheney demanded that they be ignored.

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Then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund was the single person most responsible for the failure to protect the Capitol. But no one even asked him (or anyone else) to address how and why the lackadaisical preparations for Jan. 6 compared to the overenthusiastic deployments for Black Lives Matter protests that never posed any danger to the Capitol, and that weren’t even on the Capitol grounds.

Nobody asked any law enforcement officials if they viewed the Jan. 6 insurrectionists sympathetically, or if they were under political pressure not to upset Trump, or if they feared for their jobs.

And certainly nobody asked Sund or anyone else to consider whether the white privilege they shared with the Jan. 6 mob had made it seem unthreatening to them.

It’s no secret why none of these issues were brought up. Committee vice chair Liz Cheney is why.

As multiple committee staffers have told the Washington Post, Cheney’s leadership on the committee came with strings attached. She insisted that the focus of the hearings and the committee’s final report be exclusively on Trump, rather than on any other lessons learned — especially those that might not reflect well on law enforcement.

Not really surprised by Cheney's behavior, like the story of the frog and the scorpion, it's in her nature.

And here is the mic drop:

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It would have made some obvious, yet desperately needed, recommendations for law enforcement agencies going forward, including: Don’t discount the threat posed by white people.

• Don’t assume that right-wingers are law-abiding.
• Don’t let political pressure affect your decisions.
• Do become acutely aware of the enormous threat posed to the rule of law, its institutions and the general public by violence from supporters of right-wing extremism, Christian nationalism and white supremacy.

It's not surprising that Liz Cheney did not want any of this to be covered by the committee.

While I grudgingly accept the idea that her role on the committee was driven, at least in part, by a desire to hang Donald Trump out to dry for creating an occupation of the Capitol, she also did not want to antagonize potential allies in the conservative movement.

I do not know if Cheney will run for President in 2024, but it is clear to me that the possibility of her running for President in 2024 was a part of her calculus regarding how she addressed the issues of right wing terrorism and law enforcement misconduct.