When the January 6th Committee started laying out its case against Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and stage a coup, there is one thing that is at the center of this dangerous time in our history, truth. It’s something Trump couldn’t handle and he convinced millions of Americans his twisted view of reality were the real facts. In her devastating opening statement at the hearing Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney said it in clear terms, “…you will see that Donald Trump and his advisors knew that he had, in fact, lost the election. But, despite this, President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information-to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election from him. This was not true.” We all know Trump had his own term for truth he didn’t like “Fake News”. But, history tells us of a warning we never heard.
We would have heard it on November 22, 1963. But bullets from the Texas Book Depository changed everything. Jeff Nussbaum has been a senior speechwriter for President Biden. He has written a book, “Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches that Would Have Rewritten History”. It’s excerpted in Politico. Nussbaum examines the speech President Kennedy was going to give that day in Dallas. There were radical right wing factions back then that were twisting the truth to spew their message of hate and discrimination. Kennedy warned, “American leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” Kennedy was hopeful. “We cannot expect that everyone will ‘talk sense to the American people,’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen”.
The country never got to hear those words almost sixty years ago. But that dark day changed the country forever. There were radical changes in society, culture, race relations, equal rights some for the better and some for the worse. But one thing never changes, truth. We’ve been through turbulent times since that speech was not delivered. Civil rights protests, Vietnam, Watergate, many political scandals, 9/11 to name just a few. Our understanding and solutions to those challenges has always started with the search for the truth. Sometimes it takes courage to stand up for the truth, no matter the consequences.
The January 6th attack was the culmination of years of denying or twisting the truth by one man who put his own self interest and thirst for power ahead of everything else. He convinced millions of us to believe what he said was true no matter the obvious facts to the contrary. The first hearing by the January 6th Committee laid out a frightening story that should jolt us into understanding the danger we faced. There are still millions, including leaders of the Republican Party, who want this to just go away crying this is just political grandstanding and partisan politics. They believe this at their peril. If the truth is denied, the country will be lost. We must accept the truth and hope our echoes will be heard in the future.
Again, well written. Every generation, past & present needs to stand up. Listening and accepting the truth is the only answer. Still dangerous times – important to continue paying attention.