We must destroy democracy in order to save it

Above: a little on the nose, don’t you think?

The Trump cult has settled on the idea that January 6 was an affirmatively good defense of democracy in America:

This was how freshman Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison took the stage on Sunday, to a crowd that had shrunk and quieted down since Donald Trump’s keynote. He got a roar of applause anyway, for promising legislation that would “rescind the subpoenas and withdraw the recommendations of the bogus January 6 select committee.” Jailed or soon-to-be-jailed former Trump aides Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro; people who the movement called “political prisoners” could be freed, before Trump took back the presidency.

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” said Burlison, quoting philosopher Edmund Burke.

What did Burke say about evil people doing evil things?

It was one of numerous onstage references to Jan. 6 and its aftermath, a topic that cleaved Trump from many of his fellow Republicans at the time, but has increasingly become an applause line up and down the party. The re-nomination of Trump, who takes the stage at rallies to a tape of the national anthem he recorded with Jan. 6 defendants, has cemented its place.

“Anyone that wants to continue to shame us for January 6 can go to hell,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told the crowd on Friday.

The intervening years have given conservative activists time to build a new folk mythology around the 2020 election and Capitol riot and develop them into a unified message at events like these.

[…]

Biden campaign ads, which ran in Michigan during the conference, remind voters of Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election based on false claims of fraud, warning that the president of Jan. 6 wants to be a dictator.

The conservative movement has flipped that script. In this one, the 2020 election was clearly stolen, and citizens are being unfairly jailed for saying so. Jan. 6 was a trap for Trump supporters — a “fedsurrection” that Nancy Pelosi could have stopped. The Trump campaign will restore democracy; the prosecutions of Jan. 6 participants, like the conviction of Trump, are attempts to smother it.

“Let’s look at what [Biden] is doing to our democracy right here at home — tearing it apart, trying to take away our right to vote for the candidate of our choosing,” former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard told the convention on Saturday, before Trump spoke.

Whoa, whoa, who was that particular autogolpe apologist again?

former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard

If you ever need some easy money, I’d try to assemble a list of “people on the ostensible left who did not know what the shot was on Tulsi Gabbard.”