If you had asked me on the evening of Jan. 6 whether the Capitol riot was the last gasp of a dying regime or the start of a new, horrifying normal, I would’ve guessed wrong.

The follow-up protests, both during Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend and during inauguration day, simply didn’t happen — not really, anyway. Yes, sure, maybe a dozen or two people showed up to kayfabe and wave a “Stop the Steal” sign for appearance’s sake, but the energy was just gone.

It was over.

It was as if millions of Americans went to bed after watching the riots on Jan. 6 and, upon waking up the following morning, realized exactly what happened. Realized what they had tried to do. Realized exactly what they almost did. Realized exactly who they were really enabling. They saw the photos of the gallows, the man with the zip ties, heard the shouts of “Hang Mike Pence,” and realized… it wasn’t just talk. 

It’s one thing when you, say, handwave away some violent behavior as, perhaps, something that very bad people on both sides do, as Trump famously did after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Sure, one side had swastikas and tiki torches and a Dodge Charger and were chanting “Jews will not replace us” while protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a traitor whose army killed 50 times more Americans than Osama Bin Laden. But the other side, well — they were dressed and equipped like the sort of people who expected to face angry Nazis, which meant they weren’t wearing their Sunday best and they weren’t unarmed. 

Same with handwaving away some violent behavior as perhaps a regional thing or the actions of a few lone wolves. Sure, a few violent idiots tried to kidnap Michigan’s governor. And yes, several state capitols were stormed by armed protesters over the past several months. And sure, there were armed protesters outside of our Governor’s Mansion a few months back. But look, it’s not like last year’s Black Lives Matter protests were uniformly peaceful, either.

Apparently, the way to get around William F. Buckley’s dictum on false moral equivalence, “of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around,” is by arguing over which direction the bus was actually going while the old lady bleeds out in the middle of the street. 

The raid on our nation’s capitol, however — well, say what you might about how peaceful Antifa and BLM protesters were or weren't, but they never did that. 

For generations now, a certain class of conservative commentators have consciously pitched a tough guy act. The reason for that, as Radical Classical Liberals pointed out recently, can be quite entertaining if you have the right mindset:

The idea is that for some of us, the churn of life becomes tedious. Pleasure and enjoyment are not doing it for you. It becomes clear that your life is not one that involves the high stakes you want to envision: danger and threat at every turn. So you try to rule over others, and this becomes dull, too (as they too easily comply, and the thrill dissipates). What next? You get into a little freelance violence as philosophy. Maybe it is just talk of all of your guns. Maybe it’s actually stockpiling guns as the radio hosts brag about. Maybe it’s wearing patches that say “I am just here for the violence” like we saw at the Capitol raid. Maybe it is leaving scathing and bizarrely cruel comments under local news stories on Facebook like moms in my area do.  

We work ourselves up until we see enemies and get terrified. Burke describes the moral psychology so that in this mode your sense of self gets enlarged and vacated: “The mind is hurried out of the self.” We imagine ourselves as exalted heroes in a great cause but it’s all in our minds, imaginary.

The tricky part is balancing the audience’s need to feel like they’re exalted heroes in a great cause with the need to connect commentary to, well, actual reality. On the comparatively sane end of the spectrum, you end up with something not entirely dissimilar from what Matt Bors recently lampooned, where reality is acknowledged but filtered through a nakedly hypocritical lens for partisan purposes. On the deeper end of the spectrum is something not entirely dissimilar from fanfic, where people like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood use the canonical events of reality as creative writing prompts for county GOP chairmen to consume. 

Trouble is, as I pointed out a couple weeks ago, far too many Americans didn’t realize they were being entertained. They thought they were being told the complete, unvarnished truth, in no small part because the people entertaining them were swearing up, down and sideways they were telling the whole truth, including the parts the establishment, cultural Marxists, the deep state, and so on didn’t want you to see. 

They were told their side always protested peacefully while the other side was breaking windows and burning buildings. They were told their president won the election in a landslide. They were told there was rampant voter fraud. They were told there were legal, constitutional remedies to ensure the correct outcome of the election. They were told Republicans, from the now-former vice president to every Republican in Congress, were ready to perform those remedies. 

Then, on Jan. 6, reality struck — and it wasn’t entertaining at all. 

One problem for the audience was it didn’t work. As the Niskanen Center pointed out, the Jan. 6 protest was at least as much an internecine dispute between pro-Trump loyalists and those in the Republican Party who were considerably more lukewarm about him. The protesters weren’t chanting “Hang Nancy Pelosi” or “Hang Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” — they were chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” Who expected Mike Pence, of all people, to win that fight? 

Then the videos from the protests and the breach of the Capitol came out — the woman getting shot, the police officer nearly getting crushed to death, vandals sacking congressional offices and chambers. Then the arrests started. 

And Trump was both silenced and silent. That wasn’t supposed to happen, either. 

It’s hard to view yourself and your side as exalted heroes in a great cause when your cause has clearly lost. It’s especially difficult to do so, as John L. Smith recently pointed out in this very publication, when “backing the blue” is ostensibly part of the cause and your allies were just caught on camera assaulting and killing police officers. And it’s absolutely impossible to do so when your supposed allies include a person waving a Confederate flag and another person wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirt in the middle of the capital of a nation that lost hundreds of thousands of lives defeating Confederates and Nazis. 

Which, in retrospect, is why the spell was broken — for most, anyway. For more than enough.

If you asked me whether that would happen as recently as last week, or even as recently as Inauguration Day, I would have been wrong. I would have pessimistically told you that I expected protesters to sack Carson City. I would have told you I expected protesters to attempt to stop the inauguration. I would have told you I expected the worst.

I have rarely been happier to be wrong about something. But I’m thankful I was.

Thank you, Nevadans, and thank you Americans for pulling back from the brink. Here’s to the future, flawed as it will undoubtedly be. May we get through it together.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].