One of the most violent days in the history of Washington, was Jan. 6, 2021, and the instigator was then-outgoing US president Donald Trump, who, now back in office, has endeavored to seize control of the nation’s capital, after reports that a former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was assaulted in the city.
In a sense, last week’s event echoes the 2021 riot; both are illegitimate power grabs made on the basis of lies.
Four years ago, it was a lie about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election; last week, it was lies about crime levels.
Reliable sources — including the US Department of Justice in January, then under US president Joe Biden — have said that violent crime in Washington is at a 30-year low. Five people died as a result of the 2021 attack on the Capitol Building, and dozens of law enforcement officers were injured, some gravely, by the mob Trump incited.
On his first day back in office this year, Trump pardoned 1,500 of the convicted criminals who stormed the capital, some of whom went on to commit more crimes.
The hypocrisy is obvious, or it would be if most discourse about contemporary events was not so contemporary that events before last month get left out. Of course hypocrisy and double standards are a key element of the rightwing commitment to inequality, and their violence imposes their version of order, even when it breaks bones and the law.
As American composer Frank Wilhoit wrote in a comment that went viral in 2018 and became known as “Wilhoit’s Law”: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
The former DOGE employee who was attacked is 19-year-old Edward Coristine, also known as “Big Balls.”
On the topic of violence, this spring the medical journal The Lancet estimated that DOGE’s dismantling of United States Agency for International Development could result in more than 14 million deaths, one-third of them children, by 2030. When it comes to sheer numbers, that is like killing everyone in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, or if you prefer everyone in Denmark, Norway and Estonia, but the deaths from disease, malnutrition and hunger would be largely out of sight for most Americans.
Of course there has been a lot of direct violence by the Trump administration on display in the US this year, too, including mothers dragged away from their children by heavily armed men in masks and immigrants brutalized in gulags in El Salvador.
The attempt to take over the capital fits with rightwing and authoritarian agendas in so many ways. Modern conservatives love to hate cities because cities are places where diversity and inclusion thrive, where immigrants, people of many ethnicities, queer and trans people, nonconformists, bohemians, independent women and progressives tend to concentrate.
A political map of the US mostly shows an archipelago of blue islands in a sea of red, and those islands are blue because they are also Democratic strongholds.
They are threats to the right electorally and because they are hotbeds of tolerance and of cultural, religious, racial and sexual diversity, and most have high immigrant populations. By flourishing, they disprove the rightwing theory that if these things are permitted all hell would break loose.
However, it is more fun for the right to pretend that these cities are dangerous because they are cesspits of crime and depravity.
That notion that cities or ethnic neighborhoods or progressive movements are out of control justifies harsh law enforcement and violations of rights in the name of getting them under control. In other words, it justifies authoritarianism, which claims to be protecting some of us, while attacking lots of us.
Something that has also been part of rightwing discourse lately is able-bodied adult men claiming to be afraid to walk down the street in US cities.
All through the years when San Francisco was being demonized by rightwing and some mainstream media, conservative technology dudes would claim to be afraid to take a stroll here, which came across to normal city dwellers as astonishingly fragile and cowardly.
Most recently the professional provocateur and pundit Charlie Kirk wrote online: “Was just in NYC all weekend with our family. Never felt safe. So many people in the city who don’t belong. Praying for all involved.”
Who does not belong in a city? The answer would be Kirk, if he is unable to feel safe amid a diverse population.
New York has long been a great city of immigrants, the most linguistically diverse city on Earth with 800 languages, including many endangered ones, spoken there, and a city whose tourism and convention bureau estimates 68 million apparently unafraid visitors would visit New York this year.
Another rightwing pundit and social-media personality, Benny Johnson, made lurid allegations about crimes he witnessed and suffered (but apparently failed to report at the time) in Washington, including his house being set on fire. Not to be outdone US Senator Markwayne Mullin on Wednesday night declared on Fox News that he does not wear a seatbelt when driving through Washington so he can flee in a hurry if he is carjacked.
Authoritarians are at war with cities because they are at war with rights and diversity. It behooves everyone to defend them — cities, rights and diversity, including by fending off the lies and propaganda that are themselves weapons in this war.
Of course Trump is concocting a drama in Washington, with the US National Guard being turned into an army of extras, because, speaking of violent crime, he would like us to really stop talking about the Jeffrey Epstein files and his long and close association with the alleged child trafficker and rapist.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and coeditor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility.
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