People ask me if I feel “ashamed” about what Miranda Devine describes as “the clueless insurrection” in the Capitol on Wednesday. My response? I am about as ashamed as Joe Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Juan Williams of Fox News were about the riots and shootings that the Democratic Party subsidized and even justified last summer.
Unlike those violent riots, which the Democrats and national media attributed to white racism, and which came from Democratic voters, the turmoil in the Capitol on Wednesday did not result in burning and looting. There were no white or black policemen shot and the only shooting victim (which the media don’t seem to care about since white Republican lives don’t matter) was a female protestor, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, by a Capitol police officer.
I also heard our Democratic constitutional expert on Fox News, Jonathan Turley, telling us Wednesday evening that pro-Trump thugs had “lost their faith” in our constitutional system. It was for this reason that they “desecrated” our sacred space. I don’t recall similar talk about desecration when the “peaceful protesters” tried to burn down St. John’s Episcopal Church across from the White House last summer.
Of course, there was a storm of media abuse afterwards when President Trump spoke before the historical site that had been saved from “peaceful protestors.” Nor do I remember anything more than whispered protest, even on Fox News, when the Democratic Party got howling banshees to invade the Senate chamber to protest the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice and to hassle his supporters. It seems that there are big-time desecrations, for example, when people with MAGA hats commit them, and then there are the entirely excusable ones that transpire when feminist Democrats invade the sacred precinct.
No, I am not giving a stamp of approval to what occurred in the Capitol. On balance, the actions by pro-Trump forces were not particularly useful for our side, and the death of the lady veteran was nothing short of disastrous. But let’s not pretend, like Rod Dreher, John Podhoretz, George Will, Erick Erickson, and most of the usual suspects that Wednesday’s occupation of the Capitol after a very impulsive speech by the president was a horrible black mark on the Right.
According to these media celebrities, we should be impeaching Trump right now, less than two weeks before the presidency falls to a corrupt, senile political hack, on its way to being turned over to Kamala Harris. We have a duty to punish our side because unlike the other side, we should be especially virtuous and shun any conflict, except of course with the American Right. Erickson went so far as to call on the police to “shoot the protestors.”
I must also take exception with Miranda Devine, who asserts that Trump’s supporters and Trump himself have now given the Left “a free pass to persecute their ideological enemies while enacting their pet cultural Marxist projects and changing this country irrevocably for the worst.” This is inevitably just what the one-party Left will do, but not because of what happened Wednesday.
Devine also provides the real reason—namely, that the Senate is now “in Democratic control, thanks to Tuesday’s runoff debacle.” Because of the vote counting in that race, which looked every bit as suspect as what occurred in the same state in November, our wacky cultural Marxist Left will soon be able to do what it wants with the federal government. The media will cover for any outrage this Left unleashes, and Conservatism, Inc. will predictably do its part as gatekeeper for the politically correct Right.
What happened Wednesday is comparable to the way other would-be totalitarians take over. They manufacture crises that justify their unchecked power. The Nazi regime used the attempted burning of the Reichstag in March 1933 to marginalize opposition. If a Reichstag fire had not come along, some other pretext would have been devised to justify the Third Reich’s tightening grip. The Left, once in charge of the federal government, will unroll with media cooperation multiple examples of “prejudice” and “discrimination” that it will then proceed to address—e.g., imposed gender roles at birth, distinctions between citizens and illegal aliens (read: future Democratic voters), and the unsettling effects of gender-specific pronouns. There will also be more lockdowns, probably long after the COVID-19 infection rate plummets because of the vaccine, and green deals in abundance.
None of this will happen because of what overly combative Trump demonstrators did Wednesday. It will take place because the Left is maniacal and power-driven and those on the other side are led by wusses and nonstop apologists. But let’s stop fixating on Wednesday’s events. We can deplore them once the Left repents of its far, far greater sins.