America This Week: January 2, 2022

Luella Schmidt
7 min readJan 3, 2022

The First Anniversary of January 6th | Where’s the Middle? | Free Stuff

Reflections on the Anniversary of January 6th

These pricks really did try to overthrow the government of the United States of America, y’all. Every damn day there are more people cooperating and there is more color on the sedition-paint-by-number and it’s really fucking scary. And it is ongoing. This coming week we will observe the one-year anniversary. I love spy thrillers and political thrillers but can we keep it in my fiction going forward ffs.

Author’s screenshot, movie poster for the classic Watergate thriller, “All The President’s Men”

It feels weak to compare the two historical events, but we’ve never experienced something this horrific before so there’s going to be a lot of grasping toward comparatives.

  • Watergate: 13 months to pubic hearings; 21 months to indictments; 69 people indicted.
  • January 6th: over 300 witnesses interviewed by the committee; public hearings starting soon; 800+ people charged (only the foot soldiers so far, but several members of the fascist militia appear to be cooperating); committee is reviewing the funders’ bank data; three GOP Members of Congress have been named as having relevant information to the case.
January 7th 2021 Headlines from around the US, from @SCETV

Let me tell you a story about a group of people, feverishly watching time run out, trying everything they can think of to maintain their desperate grip on power.

PLAN A: Department of Justice. We know that first, Trump pressured the Department of Justice. He asked them to open investigations, file lawsuits, and make a public announcement that the election was corrupt. They refused because their own extensive investigations failed to provide any evidence. They refused because Trump’s own lawyers lost over 50 court cases — 50 opportunities to present evidence of widespread fraud and they provided none.

PLAN B: Individual States. We know that, as the effort at the DOJ was failing, Trump pushed individual states to overturn the election results. Over and over, Trump and his…

Luella Schmidt

Writer ✱ Creator ✱ Entrepreneur. I write fiction and essays about art, history, politics, and justice. Read more at luellaschmidt.com.