Greenwald: "The Histrionics and Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, but They Serve Several Key Purposes" [extended]

I posted this before, but it was truncated.

As I may have noted a time or two over the past coupla years: when you've lost Glenn Greenwald...

Anyway, this:

   As usual, the prime beneficiaries of all of this, and the most dangerous one, is the U.S. security state. They need, above all else, an existential threat to justify their endless growth and unchecked power. All of the old villains are largely vanquished and stale (Communism, Al Qaeda, ISIS), while the proposed stand-ins never really panned out (Americans never woke up thinking about Putin). That is when they began claiming that the most serious threat was a domestic one: fellow American citizens who harbor “extremist” ideologies. Though they claim that it is right-wing extremists who pose the greatest threat — white supremacist extremists to be exact — the lists they disseminate of who falls under this rubric encompass essentially anyone — left, right or in between — who sees the world differently than Wolf Blitzer, Joe Scarborough and Chris Hayes see it: meaning dissidents, those who distrust the decrees of authority and wish to subvert rather than submit to establishment power. Claiming that the U.S. is facing an Insurrection and barely survived a "coup” is a script that could not be better suited to their interests.
   There are unresolved questions surrounding the 1/6 riot that are genuinely important and merit scrutiny. It is, for instance, confirmed that the FBI had at least two informants on the ground with whom it was communicating as the protest unfolded, but the full extent of the FBI's role — whether it replicated what it repeatedly did during the first War on Terror and then again in engineering the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — remains unknown. That is because the only bodies capable of discovering the answers — the DOJ and the Congressional 1/6 Committee — have no interest in finding out. The contrary is true: they have a strong interest in suppressing those facts because it undermines rather than advances their fear narrative.
   Fear is a powerful human drive — arguably the most powerful one. Humans need it to survive; without it, they would have died off thousands of years ago. It is embedded in our psyches. And any demagogue worth their salt knows how to stimulate and manipulate it. Fear — as we have seen throughout the last two years of the COVID pandemic — breeds acquiescence, subservience and conformity. It fosters not just a willingness, but an eagerness to submit to any authority promising to keep you safe from the threat and to banish and silence anyone dissenting from their decrees, on the ground that dissent is not just wrong but dangerous.
   What happened on January 6 was ugly and disturbing. But it was nowhere near an insurrection, a coup, or anything threatening American democracy (to the extent it can be said to exist) in a fundamental or sustained way. That core truth — that it was merely an angry protest that, like so many of its kind, organically turned into a three-hour riot killing nobody except four of the protesters — destroys its value. Only the false narrative that has been constructed over the last year and consecrated by today's inane festivities can convert this banal episode into some world-historic event that at once makes heroes out of those who were there to oppose it and justifies everything and anything done in the name of preventing its repetition. [emphasis mine]