Democrats on the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6 claim their public hearings, starting this week, are meant to “tell the story about what happened” that day.
But millions of Americans watched the violence unfold on television, and there’s been breathless news coverage in the months since. The events of Jan. 6, 2021 have been investigated by Senate committees, federal inspectors general, and a phalanx of Washington reporters. Prosecutions are still ongoing in open court.
With so much information already public about Jan. 6, what is the real purpose of these prime-time hearings? And why has the committee so aggressively stretched its investigative powers beyond the limits, including by subpoenaing me and four other Republican colleagues?
Behind the committee’s storytelling, there’s a more sinister aim: convincing Americans that conservatives are to blame for the events of that day. In fact, Democrats have already done just that—asserting last year that President Trump was “unmistakably responsible” for the violence and even calling Republicans “traitors” for their Electoral College objections. Never mind the fact that Democrats made the very same objections to every Republican president in this century, or that Democrats spent most of 2020 condoning left-wing violent riots across the country.
The committee’s real goal, and what it hopes to achieve with its unprecedented subpoenas and its bright-light hearings, is a repudiation of conservatism and all those who hold conservative values. Democrats want to use the violence of Jan. 6 to stigmatize conservative voices and delegitimize conservative ideals. They’ve even talked—condescendingly, of course—about treating conservatives as “cult” members who need to be deprogrammed.
There’s long been an arrogance among those on the left that has compelled them to try to delegitimize conservatives. President Obama famously predicted the grassroots Tea Party “fever” would break following his 2012 re-election. Four years later, Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed millions of Americans as “deplorables” who were hopelessly misguided and irredeemable.
But in the wake of Jan. 6, Democrats are amplifying their attacks against conservatives.
You hold a sincere belief that state election integrity measures help to make elections more accurate and more secure? Democrats call you a racist. And President Biden says you’re part of “Jim Crow 2.0” and as bad as 1960s segregationist Bull Connor.
You exercise your right to speak up at a school board meeting to say that boys shouldn’t be allowed to use the girls’ restroom in elementary school? Democrats say you’re transphobic, and you may even get a visit from President Biden’s FBI.
These attacks are intentional. Their design is to make you feel embarrassed and ostracized. And it goes hand in hand with the left’s Orwellian effort to tell you what to think.
The Biden White House has called on Big Tech companies to fight “disinformation,” and the Department of Homeland Security stood up a so-called Disinformation Board for the same purpose. Of course, the “disinformation” only runs one way, and always against conservatives. Prominent Democrat politicians have posted demonstrably false information online and there is no broad outcry to take it down. But when a conservative voices an opinion that conflicts with the left’s woke ideology, her account is shut down unless and until she bends a knee to the left.
Each of these heavy-handed tactics, including the Select Committee subpoenas and hearings, has at its core the same goal: delegitimize conservative views so that they don’t need to be debated or even addressed in polite society.
Today’s Democrat Party is a party of coastal elites who believe they are smarter and more enlightened than their fellow Americans. They set up fact-checkers and disinformation boards because they think Americans are too stupid or too busy to make up their own minds. And when their radical, top-down policies still prove to be unpopular, they move to delegitimize dissenting ideas.
That is why the Select Committee will spend dozens of hours of prime-time television coverage to lecture Americans about an event they saw for themselves less than 18 months ago. That is why the Select Committee is targeting their Republican colleagues with ridiculous charges of insurrection and treason. Make no mistake, the violence of Jan. 6 was as wrong as wrong can be. But Americans watching the hearings should have no illusions about the Democrats’ true objectives.
