Given the participants in the events of January 6, I thought it noteworthy that today is the 57th anniversary of a pivotal oration in American history. On January 14, 1963, George Corley Wallace was sworn in as the governor of Alabama, and he led off his inaugural address with the following passage:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom- loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

Read the whole speech and tell me there aren't parts of it that you could see Louie Gohmert or Matt Gaetz delivering in Congress. Tell me it doesn't echo in that seditious rally last week that touched off the whole thing. Tell me you would have been surprised to hear some of this from any podium groaning under the president*'s weight over the past six years.

The federal troops in Mississippi could be better used guarding the safety of the citizens of Washington, D.C., where it is even unsafe to walk or go to a ballgame–and that is the nation’s capitol. I was safer in a B-29 bomber over Japan during the war in an air raid, than the people of Washington are walking to the White House neighborhood.

Find me a prominent Republican anywhere who hasn't at least toyed with these sentiments.

...the international racism of the liberals seek to persecute the international white minority to the whim of the international colored majority . . . so that we are footballed about according to the favor of the Afro-Asian bloc. But the Belgian survivors of the Congo cannot present their case to a war crimes commission . . . nor the Portuguese of Angola . . . nor the survivors of Castro . . . nor the citizens of Oxford, Mississippi.

I am aware that, late in life, Wallace expressed regret for these words, and for the politics that lay behind them, and for the poisonous effect they had on politics going forward. But, as far as I'm concerned, that was between him and his conscience and whatever he perceived to be his god, and they were welcome to it. His regret is not what lived on after him. We saw the immortal monster on January 6 of this year. It hasn't changed. It doesn't even bother with camouflage any more.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.