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They told us to move on.
They looked into cameras after January 6 and said, in one form or another: we’ve got to focus on the future. Heal. Turn the page. Stop re-litigating. Don’t live in the past. Sometimes they dressed it up as national unity. Sometimes it was framed as “the people’s business.” Sometimes it was just exhaustion—an insistence that accountability itself was the problem. I had many Republican members that approached me during the committee and said “I agree, I just think it’s time to move on.” After the election of 2024, I also agreed, we had given the American people the truth and they still made their decision. Ok, fine…I did what I could.
But here’s what I can’t shake, five years later: “move on” was never a principle. It was a tactic. Because the same people who pleaded for the country to stop talking about January 6 are now obsessed with it again—only now the obsession isn’t about protecting democracy. It’s about protecting Donald Trump from history.
Let’s start with what they said when the smoke was still in the air.
House Oversight Chair James Comer condemned the violence as “completely unacceptable,” “not who we are,” and “mob violence is wrong regardless of political affiliation.” Good. That was the minimum. That was reality.
Nancy Mace called it “un-American,” “anarchy,” and reminded everyone Republicans claim to be the party of law and order. Also true. Also real.
Virginia Foxx called the violence “unacceptable,” and said there was “absolutely no reason” for destruction. Again: reality.
William Timmons went even further. He called what happened “the very definition of domestic terrorism,” and said the act of insurrection “cannot go unpunished.”
That language mattered. Because those weren’t Democrats talking. Those were Republicans—people who, at least for a moment, saw the same thing we all saw: a mob trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
Then came the pivot.
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In 2023, Comer told Axios the renewed focus on January 6 was “a distraction,” in the context of dragging the topic back into the spotlight.
Nancy Mace, in 2024, was summarized as saying her constituents have “moved beyond January 6.”
“Moved beyond.” “Distraction.” Rearview mirror. Future.
Here’s the problem: moving on is what you do after you tell the truth. Moving on is what you do after accountability, after consequences, after you’ve reinforced the guardrails so it doesn’t happen again. Moving on is not what you do while you quietly saw at the guardrails—then act shocked when the country starts sliding.
And this is the part they don’t want said out loud: they didn’t want to move on for the good of the country. They wanted to move on for the good of their careers.
Because “move on” didn’t mean “let’s heal.” It meant “let’s not talk about who lit the match.”
It meant: don’t make us choose between our oath and our party.
It meant: don’t make us say the obvious thing—that Donald Trump was the engine of that day, and that the people who enabled him own a piece of it.
But time passed. Fear set in. Primaries came. Trump stayed. And the Republican Party—especially the slice of it that lives in constant dread of his next social-media tantrum—decided the only way to survive was to pretend the past didn’t happen.
Or better: to rewrite it.
That’s why yesterday’s Oversight circus with Jack Smith matters. Because it isn’t just hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is cheap. Washington runs on it.
This is something darker: a coordinated effort to sand down January 6 into something manageable, something debatable, something you can “both sides” into irrelevance. And they’re doing it at the behest of a man who is obsessed with one thing: his place in the history books.
Donald Trump knows what January 6 is. He knows it’s the defining moral verdict of his political life. He knows history will remember that he tried to hold power after losing an election—by pressuring state officials, leaning on the Justice Department, turning the Vice President into a target, and finally aiming a mob at the Capitol.
He knows that’s what his chapter will be.
So he’s doing what insecure strongmen always do: he’s trying to rewrite the past. He wants January 6 to become “a protest.” He wants rioters to become “patriots.” He wants violence to become “tourism.” He wants the country to forget the terror, the blood, the smashed windows, the hunted lawmakers, the officers who were beaten and dragged and crushed.
And he needs willing accomplices to make that rewrite feel official.
That’s where these committee members come in.
The same crowd who once used words like “un-American,” “mob violence,” “domestic terrorism,” and “insurrection” now acts like the real scandal is… investigating January 6 in the first place.
Or they act like the real victims are the people who did the investigation.
Or they act like the nation’s urgent business is to re-litigate it until the facts get bent.
It’s like watching someone set a house on fire, call 911, and then spend the next five years insisting the real crime was the fire report.
And here’s the part that should haunt every decent person who has served: you can’t keep applying salve to your soul while doing the same harm. At some point, you either admit your time in service was acidic to the country—or you keep numbing yourself until you don’t feel anything at all.
This is what happens when loyalty to one man becomes the organizing principle of a party. You don’t just abandon truth—you learn to resent it. You don’t just ignore accountability—you start treating accountability as persecution.
And that’s the trap. Because once you convince yourself that consequences are unfair, you will do anything to avoid them, including rewriting the story of an attack on your own democracy.
So here’s my challenge, and it’s simple.
If you said January 6 was wrong when it happened, act like it now.
If you called it violence, don’t downgrade it because your leader is embarrassed by it.
If you used the words “law and order,” don’t turn around and worship lawlessness when it wears a red hat.
And to the rest of us—the people who watched in horror, who still remember what it felt like to realize our Capitol could be breached by Americans—don’t let their boredom become your surrender.
That’s the whole strategy: exhaust you. Make you roll your eyes. Make you tired. Make you say, “Ugh, January 6 again?”
Yes. January 6 again.
Because if we can get bored with an attack on the peaceful transfer of power, then we can get bored with anything.
We don’t need to live in the past. But we do need to defend the future.
And the future is defended the same way it always is: by refusing to let lies become normal. And shaming evil.
Yes. THIS!! Was so frustrating watching this. Every complicit Republican on the committee needs to be voted out of office! 😤
Well said, “We don’t need to live in the past. But we do need to defend the future.” Thank you, Adam!