A few words on Shaye Moss and Lady Ruby, heroes of the Republic

Wow.

Yesterday's hearing was one for the books. It was, in my humble estimation, the most impactful of those televised so far. 

We heard in minute detail, through testimony and audio recordings, of how Trump and his minions tried to shake down state officials all across the country to illegally and corruptly turn the election in his favor. From the secretary of state of Georgia to the speaker of the Arizona House, the amount of pressure exerted one normally finds only in a mob film. But that's not surprising; Donald Trump is a mobster. We may as well have elected John Gotti to the Oval Office; the result would have been the same.

It's inconceivable that elected officials were pressured in such a way. But, one can say, they're in the political game, and politics can get rough. (This doesn't excuse sedition and treason, and I think most politicians hope they never have to face either of those events, but they always exist, in the background hum, even if up until recently they weren't given real, serious consideration of ever occurring.)

But now I turn to two people who most certainly are not politicians. They didn't traverse the world of bare-knuckled politics. They were civil servants, unelected, doing their duties, just doing their jobs:

Former Georgia election worker Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss testified before the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday, detailing her and her family’s experience with violent threats and harassment following unfounded allegations made against her by President Trump, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and other Trump campaign allies.

Before the committee Moss discussed the cataclysmic effects the conspiracy theories Trump leveraged against her had on her life. “It has turned my life upside down.” Moss testified, “I don’t want anyone knowing my name […] I just don’t do nothing anymore, I don’t want to go anywhere. I second guess everything that I do. It’s affected my life in a major way, in every way. All because of lies.”

In my mind's eye, I can already hear the derisive, racist mocking of her name. She is just the sort of person to fuel the wildest imaginings of Trump's radical, ill-educated, evil goons.

This lady is the unlikeliest of heroes. But she's a hero. She did the job she was assigned to do, without favor to anyone. And for her dedication? This happened:

Moss recounted the chilling threats made against her by Trump supporters galvanized by the Trump campaign’s false claims against her. One harasser told Moss that she and her mother should “hang for committing treason.” Another told her to “be glad [it’s] 2020 and not 1920.” According to Moss, people went to her grandmother’s home and attempted to “burst down the door and conduct a citizen’s arrest of my mom and me.” According to Reuters, in December of 2020 Freedman made a series of panicked phone calls to police after Trump supporters repeatedly harassed her in her home.

This is the violence unleashed by a group of fascists irate that their Führer was denied a second term. These are the fetid, treasonous actions of people egged on by their orange messiah: intimidation, harassment, the threat of violence. There was no "citizen's arrest" going to be made; Ms. Moss and her mother would have been lynched had police not intervened.

Her mother, Ruby Freeman, "Lady Ruby," had this to say:

"Now I won't even introduce myself by my name anymore. I get nervous when I bump into someone I know in the grocery store who says my name. I'm worried about who is listening. I get nervous when I have to give my name for food orders .... I've lost my name and I've lost my reputation."

"I've lost my name and I've lost my reputation." Lady Ruby and her daughter have been condemned by the descendants of those who had enslaved their ancestors, and have yet to reconcile themselves with that historical fact. Terrorizing them, making them fear for their lives for the rest of their lives was the point. They were to be punished for the sin of being civil servants, doing their jobs with impartiality. They will live in fear for the rest of their lives, chased out of their home, a target on their back.

This is the world that the New Republican Party wants. One of political violence. One of coups. One of power maintained at the barrel of a gun. We defeated the external Nazis in 1945; but we've never dealt with our internal ones, the ones who thought Hitler was a fine man, and that his program is just what this country needed.

Make no mistake: These are Nazis. These are the same people you see soiling politics across Europe. These are the same people who think Hitler didn't go far enough. These are the people we're fighting. The Second World War ended in a truce; much has not been resolved. Nazism was defeated in Germany; but its infestation persisted, both there and across the Continent, and here in the New World.

We are in a civilizational moment. The peace which obtained after the war was a fraught one. It immediately devolved into more conflict, with many of the criminals either not punished, or ensconced in government due to the new realities of superpower confrontation. And their ideology wasn't extinguished. Far from it. What we do over the next decade will determine if humanity's future is one of a boot, pressed down on a face, forever.