Monday on CNN’s Don Lemon Tonight, House Majority Whip James Clyburn declared hysterically that Republicans who deny the serious nature of the January 6 Capitol breach are “absolutely a threat to the future of this great country.”
“People need to come to grips with something happened on January 6th that never happened before. Never have we seen this kind of violent insurrection brought on by fellow Americans,” Clyburn hyperventilated. “We all know what happened. We all know where it happened. We all know that something and somebody is behind all of this. To see four lives lost, that to me, is just unacceptable. For my Republican colleagues to continue to obfuscate continue to obstruct, refusing to take part in trying to get to the bottom of this is beyond me.”
There is so much falsehood in this statement that it’s difficult to know where to begin deconstructing it. Let’s start with the fact that there was no violent “insurrection.” Next, the only life lost because of January 6 was that of unarmed protester Ashli Babbitt, shot by a Capitol Hill police officer. As for the “somebody behind all of this,” Clyburn wants to suggest that it was former President Donald Trump, when in fact facts are coming to light that the Capitol breach was planned and instigated by the anti-Trump, Deep State FBI.
“I don’t quite understand that,” he continued. “It makes me have a great appreciation of what Thomas Paine was writing about back when this country was trying to give birth to itself when he talked about summer soldiers and sometimes patriots. People that will stand for the country so long as the weather is right, people that are patriotic in the sunshine but when the storms come, when the challenges come, they’re nowhere to be found and that’s what is happening to our Republican colleagues. They are sunshine soldiers, and they are just absolutely a threat to the future of this great country.”
The notion that a Democrat has anything insightful to tell conservatives about patriotism would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive. What Clyburn is trying to do here with this hyperbolic language is promote his party’s Big Lie that Trump supporters are traitors and domestic terrorists.