Anti-elite elites who want to thwart a Jan. 6 commission

If I understand correctly, elites are so evil that even elites are anti-elite. And no one is more anti-elite than the uber-elite Donald Trump.

How do we know this? For starters, people with private planes and heliports atop buildings named for themselves are not very interested in schmoozing with the so-called common man. A common woman is something else, clearly. Donald Trump would no more seek out the company of most MAGA-hatwearing followers than Melania would make her own clothes.

I mention Trump against my best intentions because the former president seems to be everywhere. Not him personally, but his surrogates. The freshest to his stable is none other than the elite, anti-elitist Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Yale- and Harvard-educated lawyer who recently signed a bill to restrict “Silicon Valley elites” from indefinitely blocking political figures’ speech. This bit of overreach toward Twitter and Facebook coincides nicely with Trump’s sustained whine since being shut down by the two social media giants, who determined that his incendiary rhetoric warranted permanent eviction.

I don’t disagree with that reasoning, even though it looks like censorship in what’s supposed to be an open marketplace of ideas and expression. Trump is a scowling hatemonger whose pathological lies have been to varying degrees flagged and tagged by both sites. No one can force a private company to admit people who abuse community standards. That said, shutting out a president of the United States is a mind-boggling precedent that serves mostly to fuel conspiracy theorists.

As I’ve argued previously, it seems better to let everyone talk and draw one’s own conclusions. Social media’s operating assumption in denying some people a soapbox in the virtual public square is that people in the audience are generally too witless to distinguish between truth and falsehood. This may well be true, but still, isn’t it better for all of us to know what liars, thieves and fools are thinking?

I’ll leave the legal arguments to others, but not necessarily to DeSantis, who surely understands that private companies can do as they please if clients -- or whatever Twitter people call themselves -- fail to adhere to rules (even if they are just recently promulgated). DeSantis’s attack on the tech Goliaths was a brilliant tactic -- so long as he doesn’t mind seeming kind of dumb.

Today’s riddle: If everybody is an elite -- and elites are all populists -- does Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., still have to be a socialist?

Plainly, DeSantis either is running for president in 2024 or hopes to be Trump’s running mate, should the former president seek another term. One shudders to consider the latter, especially in light of Senate Republicans’ blocking of the Jan. 6 commission. Their resistance to an investigation raises an obvious question: What are they so afraid will be discovered?

To argue that this is politics as usual is to say that insurrections are as ordinary as, well, Trump rallies. But Americans know better. We all watched in shock as fatigue-clad and costumed “warriors” breached the Capitol and stalked the hallways chanting threats to public officials who were in hiding.

Make no mistake: Jan. 6 is a date that will live in infamy.

When President Franklin Roosevelt famously said the same about Dec. 7, 1941, he was referring to the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Though that was an attack by a foreign power that led to war at incalculable human cost, the domestic attack by our fellow Americans was similarly jarring. The attackers raised the threat of accomplishing outcomes our enemies have always sought -- the ruin of our democracy and the potential for civil war.

That Republicans would thwart an investigation into the events of that day suggests that the GOP has abandoned the union and sided with a former president whose words on Jan. 6 bordered on treasonous. There is no excuse to not pursue an investigation while there’s still time to save this fragile republic. Besides, it’s the anti-elite, populist thing to do.