As Amanda Carpenter points out at The Bulwark, the mighty right-wing media wurlitzer was playing a tune on the one-year anniversary of the January 6 coup attempt. The lyrics said that the media was lying about the seriousness of the riot, and the evidence for this was that no one had been indicted for insurrection or sedition.

It was a point emphasized by Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Brit Hume, as well as Steve Bannon. Former Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Scott Shapiro wrote an opinion piece to this effect for the Wall Street Journal, arguing that we should not refer to January 6 as an “insurrection.” We were urged to consider the coup attempt as nothing more than a protest that got out of hand.

That’s why it’s important that the Department of Justice charged 11 people with sedition on Wednesday. It wiped out a potent talking point.

It establishes that January 6 was an act of sedition punishable by potentially decades in prison for those who were part of the conspiracy. What could be more serious than that?

A lot depends on what we call things, and the right was trying to get us to stop calling January 6 something that sounded very bad. They wanted us to think of those being prosecuted as victims of overzealous prosecutors. They wanted to make it seem like Donald Trump wasn’t silently abetting a coup attempt but rather simply failing to realize that his protest had grown into a deadly riot.

When the South seceded from the Union in 1861, it wasn’t possible to spin it as a protest gone awry, and it certainly wasn’t going to be treated that way in 1865 after hundreds of thousands of Americans had died in the Civil War. But supporters of the Union and the Constitution need to be every bit as unremitting and uncompromising now in dealing with those who sought to destroy our country. The law being used to charge January 6 plotters with sedition was created in response to the Confederate rebellion. It’s fitting that it’s being used now. It’s a strong response to this efforts to minimize what happened.

But the key here is that the victors of January 6 have to stay in power long enough to exact justice and prevent a recurrence. And that appears to be highly doubtful at the moment. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to take forceful action, and that begins by defining January 6 for the American people as the most serious crime. It will require relentless messaging as well as a continual flow of prosecutions, including for some of the heavyweights who were behind the plot.

This is even more vital precisely because the Democrats can’t overcome the political resistance to their legislative agenda, and this is weakening them for the midterms. If the Republicans regain power, beginning in January 2023, then the destruction of our country may ultimately succeed, so the only way to preserve the Constitution is to be very, very aggressive in insisting that January 6 was a terrible crime and acting appropriately in response.

This isn’t a matter for bringing the country together or governing from the center. This isn’t an ordinary election that’s coming up, and until this week it seemed like only the Republicans realized this. I now have at least some small sliver of hope.