January 6th, 2021 and the capitalization of hate

On January 6th, 2021, a remote teaching day for me, I had finished teaching my lessons for the day, I was enjoying a late lunch, updating my grades, and keeping tabs on the Georgia senate runoff election when I saw a link to a livestream of the congressional proceedings leading up to the counting of the electoral votes for president. They were about to begin.

I’m embarrassed to say, I grabbed my personal laptop, set it next to my work laptop, and watched the proceedings while my phone updated me on the Georgia vote tally. I am expressly bad at multitasking, but I felt it was an historic occasion and I thought it might not be a bad idea to ease up on the workload. I was tired, and had endured a busy day thus far. Soon I’d turn off all three screens and head outside before dark for a de-stressing run with the dog anyway.

The first few speeches were quite engaging, in particular. Particularly satisfying to me were the speeches that came from Republicans acknowledging the danger and irresponsibility of opposing the will of the people and their representative electoral votes. My phone was still telling me Ossoff’s victory was not yet official. I caught sight of a headline and a startling image across one of the two screens to the right of my work laptop. It read, “Authorities Express Concern Over Large Pro-Trump Crowd,” and soon the running commentary on the Congressional livestream began updating me that Trump had told the large crowd to proceed to the capital.

This is when I got uncomfortable and stopped caring about Georgia for a while.

For the next hour, I sat in front of my now just one laptop, mesmerized, sickened and horrified at what was unfolding in real time in front of me.

The events of January 6th hit me very hard, at least as hard as those of September 11th, 2001, when I also sat sickened in front of a computer screen, distracted from work, watching a horror show unfold in real time.

A day later, I am still processing emotions. Many of us who went to sleep on election night in 2016 feeling utter dread at what was to come feel as though our worst fears from that night came true on January 6th, 2021– that our democracy would be threatened, that the very security of that democracy would be breached from within our own borders.

Comparisons to Hitler flew not long after Trump was elected, and they bothered me back then, because while the new president certainly came off as a narcissistic jerk, the historical set-up was simply not in place for anything like a Nazi uprising in the United States, nor a system of targeted mass human extermination. There was what seemed like a lot of bizarre enthusiasm for the vile, narcissistic, misogynist reality TV star, but comparing every political opponent to Hitler was becoming nauseating and lazy and less shocking to every generation. I remember people comparing Ronald Reagan, with his populism, to Hitler back in the 1980s. It was inappropriate then, and it remained so in 2016.

It occurred to me today that what made January 6th so hard to stomach, so sickening and disgusting, was not that I had feared such a culmination of frenzied ignorance and hate since 2016; it was that I had feared such a disaster since 2009.

Remember the Tea Party? I do. I remember it because it filled me with that same sense of sickness, of disdain for a culture of ignorance and gleeful, apolitical delusion. I remember the interviews at Tea Party “protests” with people who draped themselves in American flags and dawned sunglasses and sat in lawn chairs and could not, for the grace of all things good, explain what it was they were protesting. Yet, they held signs that depicted the newly elected black president with a Hitler mustache, and called for his impeachment. Some of them waved confederate flags and railed against “liberals,” claiming they were concerned about having their rights stolen from them, like the right to bear arms and the right to “be free.” Democrats and liberals, they said, were going to “take their freedoms away.”

But why then? Where was the Tea Party in the nineties, when liberals ran the country?

In 2009, the first black president, Barack Obama, had been elected president and Fox News was building a media empire entirely devoted to bringing him down. They derided him for wearing the wrong color suit, for not wearing a flag lapel pin, for saluting a military officer with a coffee cup in his hand, for taking selfies, for playing golf, for playing basketball, and not just once; each of these concocted faux pas was shown over and over, and treated as though they were scandalous and newsworthy. By 2011, the Tea Party was holding frequent, massive rallies celebrating little other than hatred for President Obama and all the liberals that supported him. Their pet issue? Obamacare, the first successful national healthcare initiative aimed at providing affordable health care to millions who previously did not have access to it. This was their outrage! Forcing Americans to have health care. This is what gave them license to depict Obama with a Hitler mustache, to depict him with big monkey ears, to depict him hanging from a noose, to fly their Confederate flags, to cry socialism, to convene on social media with baseless, racist, ignorant hateful rhetoric, all while claiming to “hate politics.”

I remember arguing with respected friends that the Tea Party was not, in fact, about disenfranchised voters who felt powerless, or about corruption in Washington, or about hating politics. It was about hate, period. The Tea Party built its numbers on the glory and camaraderie of hatred. It is fun to hate on people; and the orchestrators of the Tea Party capitalized on that. Don’t let the evil, socialist liberals take your rights away. Don’t let them take your privileges away. Don’t let them take your freedom away. It was an utterly bogus and deceitful message, but it worked. The Tea Party grew; Fox News grew; ignorance and hatred grew.

In 2016, that manifested in the presidency of Donald Trump. If the Russians helped him get elected, it was only by capitalizing on the already growing phenomenon of not just willful ignorance in America, but gleeful ignorance. It was fun to “hate politics.” It was fun to hate liberals, to hate Democrats, to hate Hillary, to hate muslims, to hate Mexicans, to hate immigrants, to hate journalists, to hate scientists, to hate “loser teachers” like me. Hate won the election in 2016.

On January 6th, 2021, we witnessed hate’s last putrid gasp on the political landscape in the United States, at least in the Trump era. On the same day that Democrats won back the Senate majority and thus the entire congressional majority, and on the same day a biracial Democratic ticket with a woman vice president was to be declared the official next administration, the hate movement, led by the most hateful man in the history of government and politics, had a major temper tantrum and kicked and screamed and had a fit before ultimately being sent to their bedroom without supper. The hate movement, led by Donald Trump, set off a smoke bomb in the boys room and spread excrement on its walls. The hate movement pulled the fire alarm.

Except, in this case, their tantrum left four people dead and an entire country, already in a state of fatigue and unrest during a raging pandemic, disgusted and embarrassed that its own people could behave so heinously at the direction of its elected president.

Donald Trump is partly to blame, and I do not feel he is owed the risk of running this country for another day, let alone two more weeks. But Fox News is also to blame, and the capitalization of hate, deception, and ignorance in America that has occurred for much too long.

Who are the sick souls who conduct such business? They are our enemies. Vote them out now, next year and forever.

James Tatum Gale

About James Tatum Gale

I have been a teacher in Maine schools for twelve years, and a writer and musician since childhood. I acquired a Master's degree in Teaching from USM, and a Certificate in Math Leadership from UMF. My undergraduate degree is in Philosophy with a concentration in Comparative Religion from the University of Maine (1994). I live with my wife, Erin, and my dog, Sally, in Bowdoinham.