Rejecting Pardon: Pam Hemphill’s Stand Against Rewrite of History

The first (two so far) of more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants to refuse a presidential pardon and admit her guilt is a 71-year-old retired grandmother from Idaho, recovering from breast cancer. She is also a recovering addict with 45 years sober to her credit.

All of which makes Pam Hemphill a hero to me.

She says she refuses to stay quiet and let others, including Donald Trump, rewrite history. “Accepting the pardon would be an insult to the Capitol Police officers, to the rule of law, to our nation,” she told reporters. “The J6 criminals are trying to rewrite history by saying that it was not a riot, it wasn’t an insurrection. I don’t want to be a part of their trying to rewrite what happened that day.”

She’s right on. It WAS a riot. It WAS an insurrection. I KNOW what I saw on television. But it’s NOT 1984, and no one’s going to convince me to live in an Orwellian universe where history changes at the whim of a deluded politician and his mucked-up cronies who think that if they repeat lies long enough they can make it come out truth.

Hemphill says many J6ers continue to spread misinformation and outright lies but, “We are not victims,” she emphasizes. “We were volunteers. Nobody went up to them with a gun to their head and said, ‘You’re going to go break a window. You’re going to go destroy property. You’re going to push an officer.’ They had a choice.”

Her stance and her willingness to speak out on X and other platforms has brought her shunning from the top (see above right image) and verbal attacks. But she doesn’t care. She believes one voice can make a difference.

I believe that, too. I hope she keeps talking. Already what she did is gaining traction. A second J6er came forward a few days after Hemphill, admitted his guilt and turned down his pardon. He is also a recovering addict.

The neglected heroes: Police

Hemphill made it clear that it’s the law enforcement officers with the U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department who are most on her mind in lieu of last week’s pardons. As rioters surged up the Capitol steps to get inside that fateful day, they quickly overwhelmed Hemphill, a slight woman harboring fresh wounds from recent removal of breast tissue. She reported being knocked down and walked on by other rioters, her glasses broken (and at one point she couldn’t breathe), but helped, picked up and shielded from the angry crowd by police.

Insurrectionists also injured about 140 Capitol police officers during the attack, according to the U. S. Attorney’s Office, and five more died. “The pardon is a slap in their face,” Hemphill contends. “It’s like the country let them down.”

The country HAS let those policemen down. Trump has let them down. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has let them down. A law passed in 2022 said that a plaque honoring the police officers’ stand was to be created and placed on the west front of the Capitol by March 2023. But so far, nothing. Speaker Mike Johnson, when asked about the plaque, casually blew it off.

Trump and Congress have let the American people down as well by thumbing their noses at jurors who took their time to listen and deliberate and voted to convict and at judges who presided over trials and deliberated over sentencing.

What sucked Hemphill in?

After recovering from addiction 45 years ago, Hemphill was inspired to become a drug and alcohol counselor and enjoyed a full career of counseling others and keeping updated on addiction research. Then after retirement in 2011 she found herself without much direction for the first time in decades. She got interested in politics and connected with a far-right organization.

“It was like a community,” Hemphill said. “It starts becoming like a little family, people you can talk to about the government and the policies and the new laws they want to bring in. We were standing up for the nation…” And according to experts that’s how political addiction typically starts.

Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute says lonely people are seven times more likely to say they’re active in politics, and recovering addicts will continue to battle addictive behaviors throughout their lives. “For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. Politics seems to offer a comprehensible moral landscape. We, the children of light, are facing off against them, the children of darkness. Politics seems to offer a sense of belonging. I am on the barricades with the other members of my tribe. Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action.”

But it doesn’t deliver. People may join partisan “tribes,” Streeter continues, but they’re not in fact familial in any functional way. Politics is about outer agitation, not inner formation. “It doesn’t humanize…It will do nothing more than land you in a world marked by a sadistic striving for domination.”

Hemphill said after her conviction and as she served her 60 days in the California Womens Prison (she is still on probation), she began researching the 2020 election for the first time and concluded it had NOT been stolen. She now thinks of her association with far-right politics as cult-like.

“I got my critical thinking back and started doing my own research, which I’m guilty of not doing back then because they gaslight you so much,” Hemphill said. “It’s really weird when you come out of a cult. It’s like you look back and you go, what was I thinking? I’m laughing now. I mean, it’s ridiculous. But it also scares me.”

Hemphill didn’t tout her addiction recovery in her decision to refuse the pardon; I just connected the dots from what I read about her. Recovery is a lifelong process, and 45 years later, she’s still recovering and still working the 12 steps. She’s acting on step 10: “Continue to take personal inventory and when wrong promptly admit it.” That’s how addicts stay sober. I know this because my daughter is an addict 12+ years into recovery who insists that falling off the wagon comes from failing to follow the steps, one day at a time.

Which leaves only this left to say…

Congress, come out from under your desks and PUT UP THE PLAQUE ALREADY! And while you’re at it, add one for Pam Hemphill. Perhaps it could be embedded in the spot where your fearful leader stood in the Capitol Rotunda Jan. 20 and pledged to protect the Constitution with his hand NOT on the Bible.

And maybe, since the law of averages says anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of you also have substance abuse issues, pass out copies of the 12 steps. Because if you can’t stand up for the rule of law in this country, it looks like you’re going to need them.