Will the January 6 Committee Fuel Civil War in America?

By Steven Yates

June 28, 2022

I’ve written frequently of narratives and of what has become one of the biggest fault lines in the American body-politic: the clash between those who firmly believe Election 2020 was stolen and those who call this “the big lie.”

The latter is the official narrative in Corporate Media, and it is the official narrative of the January 6 Select Committee. Both have refused from the start to consider any possibility that the election was stolen, however it was done and by whom. This included many of Trump’s own people, including his attorney general. One side is holding most of the cards right now while those they label “insurrectionists” sit in prison, their lives ruined.

Millions of people believe Election 2020 was stolen. Multiple polls show that almost 70 percent of Republicans think so, and some 28 percent of Independents agree. Forty percent of Americans doubt that Biden won legitimately. That is a substantial fraction of the population whom Corporate Media and the January 6 Committee are shutting out of the conversation and further alienating.

I’ve discussed my own evidence — which was available on the morning of November 4, 2020 to anyone with an Internet connection and able to read graphs. And as much hysteria as death threats against Adam Kinzinger (RINO—Ill.) generate, this cuts both ways: some who signed affidavits under penalty of perjury testifying to wrongdoing at polling places have dropped from sight because of such threats against them or family members — or the sort of campaigns of personal destruction today’s Corporate Media presstitutes specialize in. These people do not have a Congressman’s resources to protect themselves. Even a former Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, had his home raided early June 23. He was put out in the street still in his pajamas, while the thought police seized his electronic devices. Clark’s thought crime: he did not accept the official narrative and communicated to Georgia election officials that there was sufficient evidence of fraud in that state to warrant investigation.

Those who respond “there’s no proof of election fraud” misunderstand something, and it might be useful to sort it out, because proof and evidence are slippery concepts.

Absolute proof does not really exist outside pure mathematics and formal logic. I can’t prove that you exist or that the sun will come up tomorrow morning—although basic physics supplies very strong evidence of the latter, at least.

Evidence is not proof. Evidence can be reinterpreted, so that it seems to be something other than it is. Or it can be blacklisted (dropped down the memory hole) and its advocates labeled “conspiracy theorists” to discredit them so that whatever they claim is ignored. Or deemed a “lie.” Note that calling someone’s evidence-claim a “lie” is stronger than calling it “false.” People make innocent mistakes and get things wrong. Accusing them of promoting a “big lie” implies not mere wrongness but malicious intent.

Bottom line: no, we don’t have absolute proof of a stolen election. But we do have evidence, in the form of those hundreds of affidavits that have been memory-holed as well as the video evidence provided in Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules and in Mike Lindell’s films.

The fault line now appears uncrossable. Trump called on the January 6 Committee to urge consideration of “the irrefutable evidence of massive and totally pervasive election fraud….”

Response: Trump is calling for “the impossible” because “it never happened.”

That’s the denial.

A characteristic of clashing narratives is that those on one side, where sometimes an entire worldview is at stake — or a view of one’s country and how it really works — is that they literally cannot see or hear what has been made available by the other side. Exemplifying this is William Barr’s testimony before the committee trying to refute 2000 Mules. While observing the two million or so cellphones in use on any given day in a big city such as Atlanta and that hundreds are likely to have been in the vicinity of one of those mail-in ballot boxes, he utterly fails to see that the film was about what was happening at night, during wee hours of the morning, which is when the fraud would have taken place. This is when the vote spikes I’ve mentioned were recorded.

Such things seem literally invisible to those who believe the dominant narrative.

This is not mere hair-splitting. This fault line is tearing at the very fabric of the country, including the Republican Party itself which is fully divided between its Establishment (represented by Liz Cheney, Kinzinger, etc.) versus Trump and his supporters. The Establishment has a seat at the table of the center of power. The latter were kicked out of a militarized Washington on January 21, 2001.Caught in between are the Jan-6ers, the now more than 840 political prisoners who breached the Capitol on January 6.

What is bad is that there may be no “rational” resolution to this. Kitzinger has warned, and about this he may be right, that it presages a “messy” Election 2024, especially as among Republican candidates for this fall’s midterms are some who do not accept the dominant narrative. Stolen-election allegations are not going to go away.

What is worse is that the January 6 Committee (as I wrote a couple weeks ago) is laying out a path for Trump to be prosecuted for a crime, for having instigated the January 6 “insurrection” which is part of the dominant narrative. This would be something the Justice Department headed by Bidenista Attorney General Merrick Garland would pursue. The accusation would be that Trump tried to stage a coup to reverse the results of a democratic election.

The real Establishment motive, I am convinced, is to prevent a Trump candidacy and likely victory in 2024 (because the Democrats have no one), continuing the derailment of globalism we had begun to see by 2018-19. Recall that by all official measures the mid-2019 U.S. economy was roaring: the Dow was at an all-time high, unemployment was at record lows including for African-Americans, gas prices were under $2/gallon, and inflation was nearly nonexistent.

All now memory-holed….

Trump remains characteristically coy about his exact plans — but he just set about circumventing any conclusions or recommendations the January 6 Committee reaches/makes by declaring his candidacy for 2024 ahead of the 2022 midterms, unprecedented as this would be. And then simply refuse to withdraw his candidacy if/when the Justice Department tries to charge him with a crime, alleging politically-motivated persecution.

Then what?

Whatever Trump does, his base contains elements who will consider accusing Trump of a crime not mere persecution but an act of war. They will respond accordingly. Label them “extremists” all you want. That’s just another word (like “conspiracy theory”). They won’t care. We should all note that gun sales have gone through the roof. It seems clear that unlike Australia,the thought that red-blooded Americans will give up their guns are probably delusional. Millions are instead prepping for things to get ugly!

The January 6 Committee is widening this fault line, a process likely to continue until it is not merely uncrossable but with the right trigger(s), leads to open violence. What happened on January 6 will look like a school cafeteria food fight by comparison. Especially should Corporate Media go beyond demonizing those who are sure the election was stolen and the Bidenista Justice Department starts doing to them what the thought police did to Jeffrey Clark. Am I advocating a violent response? Of course not! But I can scold as much as I like that conservatives ought to set out to form autonomous communities and prepare to separate from the globalist-controlled regime, but I do not think many such people are reading — and will not, in any event, be in any mood to “be reasonable” if the man they consider a hero, who set out to reverse the direction the country has gone in since the 1970s, is prosecuted from inside the swamp he tried to drain in the manner of a banana republic.

It will be a civil war by any other name, and as many have argued persuasively, because of the lack of clear geographical divides — red states contain many blue enclaves and blue states contain red enclaves — such a war will be magnitudes messier than the war fought from 1860 to 1865 which conventionally goes by that name.

Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.

Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.

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E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com