I'm not going to belabor this because I think it's obvious. With the hard right we are not dealing with justifiable grievance. Are there real, understandable grievances driving them? Yes. Must the underlying causes be addressed? Yes. But if the establishment, and that's now the Democrats and principled conservatives, don't crack down on the hard right with the full force of the law, it is only going to get worse.
It starts with Trump, of course. If you can't remove him, do everything you can to keep him tied up in lawsuits and to prevent him from ever running for office again. If it turns out that Hawley, Cruz or members of the house worked with Capitol police to let the rioters in, they should be thrown out of office and into jail. If you can't remove Hawley, Cruz, et al., you should censure them in the most severe language possible.
You are not at war with the majority of voters who supported Trump, most of whom are ignorant and gullibly naive. But you are at war with this militant, far-right fringe. There is no reaching out to them. They cannot be appeased. They must be jailed or otherwise pushed to the farthest reaches of the fringe. You must do this with the powers and within the constraints the law and the constitution give you, but you must also realize how these snakes hide behind the law and the constitution to subvert the law and the constitution. These are people who take advantage of the freedoms of an open society to achieve their primary mission, which is to close it down.
Free speech is sacred, but there should be strict enforcement of existing law or enactment of new legislation that makes media vulnerable to criminal prosecution if they purvey lies and propaganda that are in any way complicit in inciting, enabling, or coordinating insurrection. We can all see now that freedom of speech does not include yelling "Fire" in the public square when there is no fire. The legitimacy of this kind of speech has to be reckoned with in a new way after the events on Wednesday. It's one thing for a satirist like Limbaugh to get a laugh; it's quite another to say things that incite and then seek to legitimate what happened the other day.
There are risks, of course, of making martyrs of these traitors, but the risks of not acting decisively against them are far worse because such inaction will reinforce their perception of you as weak, feckless, and unprincipled wimps who can be counted on to take the path of least resistance. They will see you as people who make a good speech but who will offer no real substantive resistance to future better organized and more violent attacks.
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