January 6th actually should matter. The incursion into the United States Capitol was wrong, bad for democracy, and has inspired a fringe set of conspiracists who deny anything bad happened and who made the villains the good guys.
But, a majority of Americans do not actually directly blame Donald Trump for it. Later this week, Congress is going to try to convince the American public not only that they should blame Donald Trump, but they should hold it against the Republicans in November.
The January 6th committee has gone so far as to work with the former president of ABC News to sculpt the hearing for maximum impact on television. It will be theater designed to capture the attention of the public.
Those who stormed the Capitol should be held accountable. But the public has bigger things to worry about.
The press and Democrats want the public to care about January 6th, abortion, and gun control. The public itself cares about ever increasing gas prices, inflation, grocery bills, declining income, and a rudderless President who seems too incompetent to care or correct. Just wait for the public backlash when the President bails his own staff out of their student loans and saddles the working class with the bill.
It’s hard to get Americans to care about the last President and his supporters when they weren’t starving, short of baby formula, and broke while that guy was in office.
The effort to make Americans care about January 6, 2021, runs head first into the reality of Summer 2022 when every day Americans are encountering ever higher prices. Now, with the economy slowing down and Joe Biden focused more on climate and telling Americans they just aren’t paying attention to how awesome the economy is, we should not except Americans to be anything other that frustrated with the press and Democrat attention on an event more than a year ago at the expense of the present.
The press and Democrats want the public to multitask and care about a plethora of things. The public wants the press and Democrats to do the same.
I know people for whom January 6th matters most. They are in the minority, mostly within 100 miles of Washington, and mostly in the press or pundit class.
Here in Middle Georgia, people are pissed off every day going to fill up their cars and buy groceries. Washington, DC is not a swing state. Georgia is.
A well orchestrated TV spectacle with the press in high dudgeon trying to make the American public care is probably the best way to ensure the public does not care. Then, the public and Republicans will be the villains for not caring and the public will vote for the GOP in November. We will all move on except the most entrenched voices of the punditocracy and press who will forever remember January 6th as the very worst thing. The public will move on.
Frankly, a nation that moves on from mass school shootings of elementary school students is not a nation that is going to linger on January 6th. The public is tired, hungry, and angry and it remains about the economy, stupid.
It matters. Trump planned it.
An attempted overthrow of the United States is a historical embarrassment. Try all you want, you will not be able to discount it’s significance. The more you try, the more you look complicit.
The fact that they've tapped a television executive to ensure it is perceived correctly is the clearest bit of evidence that they have no intention of seeking the truth on this subject. I have zero intention of listening to anyone who is "outraged" about January sixth when they weren't outraged about the riots leading up to the 2020 elections. January sixth was just a "mostly peaceful insurrection" after all, right?