Brave and weirdly intellectually honest of you to try to mount a substantive defense of these bozos, when most Republicans would rather just look the other way.
However, it’s impossible. They sacked the nation’s Capitol. They went on a manhunt for our vice-President and other politicians. They intimidated news crews. They maimed and injured dozens of police officers.
And the plain truth of it is they did all of this because of one man: Donald Trump, and his fragile ego that refused to permit him to admit an election defeat. Throughout 2020 Trump foregrounded his refusal to accept the results of the upcoming election that was predicted to hand him a defeat in many ways; the voter fraud allegations were principally rooted in nothing but Trump’s own imagination.
This insurrection was haphazard, unsuccessful, and mercifully less violent than it very well could have been, but that doesn’t change its essential character. It was a coup attempt, plain and simple.
This violent convulsion defies every tradition of American history that we know of, except for one: the Civil War.
It defies reason that anyone could continue to be a Trump supporter after this event, yet many are.
Tl;dr white supremacy is a hell of a drug