The rats are starting to desert the ship.
Mike Pence at long last told the truth on Wednesday about the crime Trump ordered him to commit on January 6, 2021. He dropped the mealy-mouthed, self-protective lying-by-omission that he has been doing since the insurrection
Mark Meadows has gone silent. All indications are he has copped a plea with the Feds.
The six unnamed and as yet uncharged Trump co-conspirators, from Rudy Giuliani down to Boris Epshteyn, are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
So maybe we will finally get around to punishing Trump and his top-level capos for whipping up the nastiest and scummiest Americans to attack Congress.
In addition, hundreds of the actual attackers are getting well deserved jail time.
But is that enough? When millions of “conservatives” still stand four-square behind Trump and his autocratic criminal enterprises? When each Republican who continues to support Trump by that very choice aligns himself or herself with criminality and—what is even worse—sedition? They are all accomplices before, during, and after the fact.
Trump commands the fealty of about 74 million complicit and intransigent “conservative” criminals. Law enforcement can’t put all of them in jail.
But we decent Americans can punish all of them. And they deserve it richly for aiding and abetting a monster. They deserve it more and more for each day that passes while they refuse to abandon him.
How do we do that? How do we make “conservatives” pay for their complicity?
We take them down at the polls.
The most just punishment we could mete out to “conservatives” is to shut them out from government for several decades.
We can do it by turning a deaf ear to everything “conservatives” say—all their whining, what-about-ism, conspiracy theories, victim-posturing, distracting attacks on innocent people, and even violent threats. We simply pay it no attention at all. We organize among ourselves, convince every last decent person we know to vote against all Republicans at every possible opportunity, and we get ready to squash the criminal Republicans in 2024. At this point, nothing that any “conservative” has to say—not even the “normal” ones—should matter any longer.
My book Conservative Estimate shows that even relatively normal “conservatives” have nothing whatsoever to add to the national conversation. They have been pumping self-serving poison into the nation’s bloodstream for eighty years. They must be stopped now before they take the world over the cliff—and they must be kept from power indefinitely.
Trump and Trumpism is only the end result of their deeply disturbed souls, distorted by imaginary fears and lashing out day after day against the whole society for not capitulating to their delusional demands. They have been “standing athwart history,” as William F. Buckley said in the 1950s, for far too long. It’s time for history to steamroll over them.
Decent Americans need to take the reins of history now and leave “conservatism” behind in the dust.
We have 80 years of progress to catch up on.