While we’ve been citing the New York Times Editorial Board’s headline from New Years Day of late on The BradCast, declaring that “Every Day is Jan. 6 Now”, today it quite literally was, as the nation marked the grim first anniversary of Donald Trump’s final, deadly and failed attempt to steal the 2020 election. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]
We’ll let you tune in for details of our special coverage today, in which we discuss some difficult realities in the ongoing fight to save American democracy. Trump’s attempted coup might have failed on January 6, but his evidence-free lies about the election have succeeded in duping nearly 80% of Republicans into believing that Joe Biden’s victory was not legitimate. That, despite the lack of any evidence, more than one year later, that the election results were fraudulent in any state.
As noted on today’s program, authoritarianism and fascism, it seems, have had far greater success over the centuries for a reason. They are much easier than democracy, which requires truth, facts, transparency, public oversight and public participation in its defense. But, if you are lied to, if you don’t know what is actually going on in our country, in your government, if you don’t know the facts, it is difficult to defend them or democracy itself.
But we will keep striving to do so, by bringing you independently verifiable facts every day for as long as we can — in a way that doesn’t require you to simply trust us — in hopes of somehow, someday, someway, restoring a sense of a shared reality from which we can all take action.
Toward that end, both Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden offered remarks today from inside the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, one year after it was attacked by a duped MAGA Mob ginned up by Donald Trump to believe that his lies about the election had any relation to reality. On that day, and those that followed, some his supporters, as well as several U.S. Capitol and D.C. law enforcement officers, paid the price with their lives, along with nearly 150 officers who were injured in the unprecedented assault.
We share both Harris’ and Biden’s words today, each of whom underscored yet again the necessity of federal legislation to shore up voting rights to counter the GOP’s newly enacted schemes to subvert elections and overthrow democracy itself.
For his part, Biden forcefully called out the failed former President in blistering remarks in which he accused Trump and his supporters of holding a “dagger at the throat of democracy” in an “armed insurrection” one year ago.
“We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie,” Biden urged. “The former President of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interests as more important than his country’s interests and America’s interests, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”
“Right now, in state after state, new laws are being written — not to protect the vote, but to deny it; not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert it; not to strengthen or protect our democracy, but because the former president lost,” he continued. “It’s wrong. It’s undemocratic. And frankly, it’s un-American.”
“It’s up to all of us — to ‘We the People’ — to stand for the rule of law, to preserve the flame of democracy, to keep the promise of America alive. That promise is at risk, targeted by the forces that value brute strength over the sanctity of democracy, fear over hope, personal gain over public good.
“Make no mistake about it: We’re living at an inflection point in history,” Biden said. “As we stand here today — one year since January 6th, 2021 — the lies that drove the anger and madness we saw in this place, they have not abated. So, we have to be firm, resolute, and unyielding in our defense of the right to vote and to have that vote counted.”
“We are in a battle for the soul of America,” he charged, reiterating the argument with which he kicked off his 2020 campaign as he concluded his remarks. “I did not seek this fight brought to this Capitol one year ago today, but I will not shrink from it either. I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”
He finished by offering a blessing for “those who stand watch over our democracy.”
Finally today, at the end of somewhat dark program, some light. Just a bit. We close with a spoken word poem of some hope from Amanda Gorman, our National Youth Poet Laureate, called New Day’s Lyric…
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