Lies and Liars

Senator Ron Johnson, during a Senate hearing on the Capitol riots, reading from a single eyewitness account published by the Federalist claims that “the mood among the demonstrators on January 6 was largely ‘positive,’ but there were ‘agents provocateurs’ and ‘fake Trump protesters’ in the crowd.” The essay was written by J. Michael Waller of the Center for Security Policy, which Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement.”  In doing this Johnson, whose reaction to the assault on the Capitol has consistently tended toward downplaying its insurrectionist character and blaming it on everybody but the Trump supporters who were sent to the Capitol in a MAGA frenzy by the 45th president himself continued to propagate lies and misinformation. For this he should be called to account.  Johnson has long been an aficionado of the kind of beliefs found most often in the more sequestered avenues of right-wing social media. He clung, for example, to the hydroxychloroquine “cure” for COVID-19 even after Trump stopped promoting it.  It is not only Johnson who, in reality, shares some of the blame for the attack on the Capital on January 6^th. Over 110 members of the House of Representatives and a number of Senators continued to question the 2020 election and refused to declare Biden the winner.  Their role along with that of Trump needs to be the subject of the Congressional hearings and there needs to be penalties for members of Congress and other government employees that promote lies and misinformation.  For too long politicians have lied with impunity and have paid no price for misleading the public.  The time has come for this to stop.  This is not about censorship but truth.  The lawyers who brought cases into court claiming fraudulent elections need to be fined and disbarred.  Again, not censorship but the waste of peoples’ time and money and they all show be made to pay.  For too long the media has been able to get away with further propagating lies and they, too shold be held responsible.  Any claim unsupported by actual fact and evidence needs to be discounted and denied and failure n the part of media should leave them open to al action.  Rid the political spectrum of all of the lies and liars before the damage to the democracy is irreparable.