The Heroes of Jan 6

Trump pardoned his accomplices but we cannot allow him to erase the truth

This is the plaque that is supposed to hang in the US Capitol commemorating the bravery of the Capitol police in the face of a murderous mob of traitors.

It marks the day Donald Trump urged that mob to attack the U.S. Capitol to overturn an election. They beat Capitol Police, hunted members of Congress, erected gallows, and openly talked about killing the Vice President. The video exists. You can watch officers being crushed in doorways and beaten with flagpoles. You can hear the screams.

If not for the quick thinking and courage of the Capitol Police, this would have ended very differently. The building wasn’t just defaced. People came close to being murdered on live streams by those violent traitors. Members of Congress from both parties were hiding, and some elected veterans were huddled, planning how to defend themselves if the doors were breached.

A plaque honoring the officers who defended the Capitol, including those who later died from physical or psychological injuries tied to that day, was approved with bipartisan support. Republicans supported it too, because those officers protected their lives.

That plaque is missing.

What isn’t missing are the pardons. Trump was reelected, and he pardoned more than 1,500 people involved in the January 6 attack. Some of them violent. Some of them repeat offenders. One of them is now running for office in Florida, complete with Nazi salutes and rhetoric. Several others have already gone on to commit more violence.

Think about what that means for the officers who stood the line. Or for the people who risked their safety to report violent participants. The attackers are freed and celebrated. The memorial to the people who stopped them quietly disappears.

Don the Redactor does not limit his pen to protecting pedophiles or pretending to alter the path of hurricanes. He deploys it to eliminate all manner of inconvenient truths.

But we are obligated to remember what we saw with our own eyes. We will not pretend this was normal or acceptable. January 6 happened. It was an attack on democracy, encouraged by a sitting president, and now rewritten by the same man after regaining power.

We remember. And we’re not going to be talked out of that.

Congress ordered the production and display of a plaque to honor the police officers who saved the US Capitol complex on January 6, 2021. The plaque was mandated as part of the sweeping $1.5 trillion government funding law approved by the Senate on March 10, 2022.

The law required the plaque be produced within a year, leaving March 11, 2023, as the deadline Congress required the “listing the names of all of the officers of the United States Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, and other Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies and protective entities who responded to the violence that occurred at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

The law requires that the plaque be placed on the west front of the U.S. Capitol complex. This was the side of the Capitol that saw the fiercest, largest, and most violent attacks by the rioters, including vicious hand-to-hand combat in a closed tunnel.

Post this plaque everywhere today. We will remember, and one day there will be an accounting.