1/ So many saw this coming years ago, but what's worse is that it's all been centuries in the making because this country has never completely lived up to its creed or as a body been willing to look itself in the eye and answer the call to make systemic, durable change.

2/ Why? Because there are always people who profit in wealth and power from oppression and misdirection and division.

3/ And no, it's not some authoritarian socialist cabal. There have been and are authoritarians in the world who misappropriate socialist ideologies just as there are those who misappropriate patriotric principle and devotion.

4/ But in THIS country, socialism has always been a red herring exploited by big business, white nationalists, and others to perpetuate their own power and wealth at the expense of everyone else.

5/ They have used it to squash labor, white labor, black labor, brown labor, all labor. They have used it to oppress women. They have used it to slaughter and oppress and silence Native Americans, the original Americans whose stolen lands we all live on.

6/ They have used it to malign and scapegoat immigrants of various ethnicities nationalities religions from the Chinese to the Japanese to the Polish to the Irish to the Italians to the Jews to the Muslims ...

7/ to Arabs Iranians Turks etc. who might not even be Muslim but come from Muslim majority countries to Mexicans and the many other peoples of the many diverse countries and backgrounds through Latin America and so on.

8/ They have used it over and over to sow hatred because the richest and most powerful among us are always the true minority and there are always opportunists (including some among the most oppressed or targeted groups) who see ways to get a piece of the pie by riding coattails.

9/ It's the same principle at work in folks like Graham and Cruz who reviled Trump before becoming ardent supporters and who will now try to assume some shred of a mantle of moral authority by disavowing events at the Capitol while spinning their actions to avoid owning them.