"Day of Rage"

At the beginning, this woman stands up front of a bus full of patriots, people who obviously believe in this nation, want the best for their children's future, and are damned sure that some horrific American villany is afoot: Democrats, have conspired to rob Donald Trump, of the Presidency of these United States. The scam can be remedied only by overturning the lie those Democrats engineered, by stopping the steal. They're coming to Washington to make their concerns real, coming from every state in the union, at the behest of their fearless leader, the one who will, as one of them says just a few seconds farther into the video, help them save "our way of life."

Thus, they--and the filmmakers--begin with this patriotic moment when the entire bus full of patriots recite together, proudly and from the heart, the Pledge of Allegiance. These are Trump's people, flag-waving, loyal, peace-loving patriots. Have no doubt.

The New York Times has done us all a favor by painstakingly putting together footage from a thousand phones used to record the events of January 6. They collected information from hundreds of sources in an attempt to review exactly what did happen and how what happened happened. The result of devastating.

Day of Rage documents the madness Republicans would rather not see or remember. Day of Rage destroys the lie that what happened that day wasn't a whole lot different than any other day of tourists coming into the Capital building. Day of Rage does part of the job the congressional committees are and should be doing, collecting information, spreading it out on the table before them, and recreating what went on. Day of Rage is devastating. It should be required viewing in every high school civics class in the nation, my wife says, and she's right.

Most of the protestors truly believe that people like me, a Democrat, secretly want America to become Stalinist Russia. They believe that the political cabal who stole the election meets secretly to plot the destruction of American democracy, that people like me, "a lib," want big government to take over and take away the power of the people, "our rights." That's what Trump tells them.

Right now, as many as sixty percent of the Republican party believes "the big lie." And more lies have been born. In order to justify their faith, they need to follow the lead of dozens of their own, like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who maintains that nothing untoward happened on January 6. "The Big Lie," lo and behold, has bred a dozen others.

Day of Rage is forty minutes long. School board meetings would become even more cantankerous, I'm sure, should good high school teachers determine to show the video. Communities around the nation already suffer from a teacher shortage; new openings would proliferate as conservatives would seek more scalps. 

Still, I think everyone should watch it. Just so everyone knows, just so they understand the truth behind "the big lie."

Here it is. See for yourself.