Jan 6 hearings reveal dangerous echoes of Nazism and hate

DAN COLEMAN explores the implications of Trump’s January 6 insurrection for all who depend on the freedoms of liberal democracy

Jews tend to do well in liberal democracies. Historically, such societies are not the sites of pogroms, purges, or holocausts, and, at least in the post-war era, they rarely have formal structures of discrimination against Jews.

Thus, Donald Trump’s coup attempt after he lost the 2020 election and the current congressional hearings on the January 6 insurrection should have particular salience for the Jewish community. After all, while this would-be autocrat’s racism explicitly targeted Muslims and Hispanics rather than Jews, his white supremacist followers do not make such fine distinctions.

As Jews we understand that we are the scapegoats of first and last resort. It may be the job held by a person of colour that stokes a white American’s resentment, but he believes that ultimately it is the Jew who is to blame.

So far, the January 6 Committee has held five two-hour hearings detailing Trump’s certain knowledge that he lost the election and that his efforts to overturn the results had no basis in law. They have laid out his dogged pursuit of those efforts nonetheless and his use of his “stop the steal” campaign to bilk hundreds of millions of dollars from his followers.

The most harrowing day of the hearings may have been the first. In that day’s testimony, Trump himself was largely overshadowed by the white supremacists who had answered his call to violent insurrection. Democrat congresswoman Zoe Lofgren  took the lead in showing how the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers began organising well before January 6, focused on their role in preventing the counting of the electoral votes for president.

It was chilling to watch filmmaker Nick Quested’s previously unreleased footage of several hundred Proud Boys marching en masse toward the capital well in advance of the mob that was about to be riled up by Trump. Later, as video played of a riot swamping the Capitol police force, officers described a battle scene for which they were not trained, one that led to the injury and, in some cases, death of their colleagues.