To the Editor:
George Floyd was murdered on video for everyone to see and people united in their indignation took to the streets in anger. There were violent riots that I haven’t seen the likes of since the 1960s. Like the 1960’s, there were also many large peaceful protests.
After the November 2020 election, the votes were counted. Then, after 54 lawsuits were dismissed, overturned, or dropped due to lack of evidence, lawsuits described by judges and lawyers as frivolous and without merit, in cases overseen by Democratic and Republican judges, some appointed by Trump; after Georgia had one machine count and two hand counts of their millions of ballots, despite the Republican governors and secretaries of state certifying their counts and loudly and publicly denouncing voter fraud claims — after all this, and more, the President of the United States held a rally on the day the Electoral College votes were to be counted by Congress.
The following are direct Trump quotes:
“I’m honest.”
“Hundreds of thousands of American patriots are committed to the honesty of our elections and the integrity of our glorious Republic. All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they’re doing and stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”
“There’s never been anything like this. We will not let them silence your voices. We’re not going to let it happen. Not going to let it happen.”
“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
“Make no mistake, this election stolen from you, from me, and from the country. And not a single swing state has conducted a comprehensive audit to remove the illegal ballots. This should absolutely occur in every single contestant state before the election is certified.”
Then, after almost an hour of a provably false narrative of grievances about the election, he said:
“’And again, most people would stand there at 9:00 in the evening and say, I want to thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said, ‘Something’s wrong here. Something’s really wrong. Can’t have happened.’ And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
Then a crowd of angry “patriots” assaulted police and stormed the Capitol. Five people died.
More information will, no doubt, come out in the trial, like the reports of the ex-president gleefully watching as the Capitol was assaulted. But the claim that the public outcries against police brutality are somehow equivalent to the outrage over provably false accusations of a stolen election is without merit.
Ron Day
Milford