PFAW Member,
Yesterday was a shameful day for our country. Since the election in November, Donald Trump and his far-right enablers in Congress have been pushing phony conspiracy theories about election fraud. This week they escalated their attacks on our free and fair elections, and the peaceful transfer of power that is the bedrock of our democracy, with last-ditch efforts to obstruct congressional certification of the Electoral College results. We now see the result.
The siege on the U.S. Capitol was insurrection, pure and simple – an attempted coup and an act of domestic terrorism that cannot be swept under the rug. Those responsible must be held to account.
There are the actors themselves – the mob of pro-Trump extremists who descended on Washington D.C. for yesterday’s rallies and ultimately stormed and occupied the U.S. Capitol, some of them with guns.
There are those who incited the incident – Trump, his allies in Congress, and the right-wing media figures and activist leaders making baseless claims against the legitimacy of the election.
There are the apologists – those who acknowledge the siege was wrong but minimize its severity and want to shield the actors from accountability.
While all of them should be held accountable and face justice in their own way, we must start with the insurrectionist members of the Trump mob who infiltrated the halls of Congress and threatened violence against our duly elected officials. Those people should be criminally prosecuted, to the fullest extent of the law, for their violation of any number of laws during yesterday’s incident in which one woman was shot and killed.
Add your name now to demand that those who stormed the U.S. Capitol be prosecuted!>>
I’m no stranger to violence by white supremacists – and, make no mistake, this was very much a racially charged incident … from the fraud allegations promoted by the inciters, to the Trump activists’ resistance to Kamala Harris, the first African American and South Asian woman elected to the office of Vice President, to the double standards on display in how the authorities handled the protesters (with kid gloves, as opposed to the many incidents we’ve seen of police shooting unarmed Black people).
I worked for years as an investigative journalist and then the managing editor at the nation’s most firebombed (by the Klan) newspaper – Mississippi’s oldest Black newspaper, the Jackson Advocate. I led the organization that has more martyrs among its ranks than any civil rights group, the NAACP.
The use of violence to silence and intimidate others, and to subvert our democratic processes and deny voters their voice, is nothing new, but that doesn’t make it any less abhorrent or unacceptable. When you do not prosecute the perpetrators, it gets worse. And that doesn’t change because an incident is stoked and incited by the President of the United States and members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
Shame on them. And shame on those who took part in the siege. No matter how misinformed, how manipulated, and how infected by conspiracy theories these pro-Trump activists are, they should be expected to know that what they did was both grossly wrong and illegal. And justice demands that they pay a price.
Sign now to demand that the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021 be arrested and prosecuted>>
We will get through this, together. Order will be restored. The House and Senate have certified the results of the election, confirming that Biden and Harris will be sworn in as our next president and vice president on January 20. We will celebrate the historic victories in Georgia that will give the Biden-Harris administration a Congress it can work with to tackle the urgent challenges we have ahead of us.
As we do, we will work to ensure that those who incited, enabled and/or participated in this insurrection are held to account.
Thank you for standing up for justice and defending our democracy.
-- Ben Jealous, President
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