In the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a handful of Americans — well-known politicians, obscure local bureaucrats — stood up to block then-President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to overturn a free and fair vote of the American people.
“We have a large segment of the country that has opted out of reality and the numbers too high, and we have to deal with the problem and get as many of them back to the reality side of the line over time. But right now a majority of the country is in fact not insane and we watched it play out, we watched Trump incite it, we watched Trump lie about the results of the election, we watched Republicans after it– condemn it–before they forgot it, and before they became complicit in the white washing, I mean what you saw was a fascist mob replete with extremist groups– storm and murder in the Capital of the United States– defecating in the hallways of the temples of democracy–urinating on the walls, carrying the confederate flag through the rotunda, ending [this country’s history of] the peaceful transition of power — we now know that there was a plan, there is a memo, there were meetings in the oval office around that memo: for the American president to deny the result of the freest and fairest election in American history and try to become a dictator. That’s what happened. It couldn’t be more serious.”