Was the Insurrection a Distraction? by Douglas Green

Douglas Green is a client of MindBuck Media Book Publicity for his title, A Dog of Many Names, and is a psychotherapist living in Los Angeles, CA. See more at www.AuthorDouglasGreen.com.

January 6, 2021 will live in infamy, no doubt. But I will always care more about the day that followed it.

Correctly, law forces are arresting participants in the Capitol attack, while a Congressional committee seeks information about who set it up. And especially, they’re asking if this truly was an insurrection to wrest power from the duly-elected government.

I would like to offer another theory, though: Was January 6 actually intended as a distraction?

Bear with me here. Donald Trump had shown, before and during his presidency, his mastery in distracting the public and media from his malfeasances to something, anything, else. When evidence arosethat he’d covered up Russian support of his election, he consistently chanted “No Collusion!” — although no official source had accused him of colluding. When he was discovered trying to bribe the Ukranian president into helping his next campaign, he yammered nonstop about his opponent’s son being hired onto a board there. For both crimes, he was impeached, but artful distraction kept him in office.

But what would Trump gain from a rally-turned-riot after having lost reelection? Three answers might quickly come to mind:

First, his brand would suffer from being seen as a loser. The more he could motivate people into angrily believing he’d won, the better for his future media projects.

Second, for years, he and his party had been changing voting laws and redistricting nationwide, and were now beginning a strategy of installing lackeys onto election boards. Insisting that the Democrats had cheated took focus away from questions of how exactly he and other Republicans won millions more votes than any poll had predicted.

And third, the proud author of The Art of the Deal had just negotiated the worst surrender in our history. In “return” for his setting a date to leave Afghanistan, we immediately released 5000 of the Taliban’s most dangerous members? We can only thank heaven the disastrous exit didn’t go worse.

But I argue he had a greater reason to want the January 6 chaos: his responsibility for countless COVID-19 deaths.

Remember, in 2018, Trump eliminated the Pandemic Response Team that President Bush had started and President Obama had enlarged, which had helped stem multiple diseases. Then, over the next months, he notoriously dismissed the virus as a “Democratic Hoax” which would miraculously disappear, giving it extra time to fester.

Make no mistake, President Bush or Obama, or for that matter a President McCain, Romney, or Clinton, would have, upon learning of the Wuhan outbreak, created an international coalition to slow the Coronavirus worldwide by that January.

Yet even this inexcusable neglect pales in comparison to what came next.

By May, 2020, the world knew all about the coronavirus. Pharmaceutical companies were rushing vaccines, while scientists everywhere reiterated how to stop its transmission: by handwashing, distancing, and, especially, wearing face masks. If everyone complied, the spread could be stopped.

But only about half of us believed in doing so. Even the President showed indecision about masking. He’d recommend masks, but then insult them, and didn’t wear one in public for months — actions which altered the world.

Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx has already told a House Subcommittee that his advocating masks would likely have saved over a hundred thousand lives. But could that be an undercount?

Picture the possibilities: If he had urged the public to patriotically wear masks starting that May, millions more of his supporters would have done so proudly, reducing the virus’ spread at once. Wouldn’t that mean countless lives spared, schools reopening in person, the economy rebounding, other countries following suit… and, yes, Mr. Trump definitely coasting to re-election?

So what could have led all these people, including the failing President, to ignore lifesaving (and job-saving) advice?

One possibility is that most of them listened to the same commentators. Trump famously spent hours daily ingesting Fox News and websites like Alex Jones’ Info Wars. Sources who regularly were questioning masks — suggesting that they didn’t block Coronavirus particles, or that they held in dangerous bacteria, or some other nonsense.

No radio or TV station, regardless of political leanings, would tell Californians to stand under windows in an earthquake, Northeasterners to drive with summer tires in blizzards, or Midwesterners to shelter in attics during tornadoes. So why did these personalities transmit equally false advice about the virus?

Did Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson decide on their own to cast these doubts? Or did their bosses order them to do so?

Did Trump act on his own egoistic volition? Or was he manipulated by this media? Or was he following orders?

Was this just a contagious idiocy of unprecedented reach? Or an actual conspiracy to mass murder?

I don’t know the answer. So far, no one does. Why haven’t the Murdochs, Jones, Steve Bannon, etc. been forced to explain the continuing spread — and their knowingly exacerbating it? And, of course, why hasn’t Trump had to answer for the greatest scandal of our age?

So far, distractions seem to have kept the question from being asked. No hearing, or class-action lawsuit, has investigated these lies, which have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of others worldwide.

One of those killed was my father. In November, 2020, he was in perfect health, playing tennis three times a week while following all the safety protocols. In December, though, he caught Covid from an unmasked spreader. On January 7, 2021, his lungs frozen into fibrous scar tissue, he suffocated to death. Suffocated because so many had gone maskless — because they’d been told masks were unnecessary, or a hoax, or that it showed rebellious pride to refuse them.

If, on January 20th of last year, the public had been focused on this travesty of lies, the new Biden administration would certainly have been mandated to investigate it at once. Instead, their focus lay on a moronic, guaranteed-to-fail insurrection attempt.

If it was a distraction, it worked.

Of course, I urge our government to get to the bottom of January 6th. But I beg them, also, to examine what I experienced on January 7th. And the similar horrors millions of others witnessed on the worst days of their lives.

Because whoever was behind that spread is still out there, freely planning their next crimes.