Today, our media market themselves as soldiers of a revolution with merchandise to match. But when faced with the prospect of one, they quickly recoil in fear for their own safety, demanding that norms of behavior be observed and opponents be silenced.
The date January 6, 2021 will forever now be enshrined in American history as a further strand snapped in the seam that is ripping America apart. Maybe it’s been forgotten, but I doubt that there has been a time in living memory when there has been such a gulf in the attitudes of American citizens between supporters of one party and the other.
When President Donald Trump contested the official results of the 2020 presidential election I, like many others who had supported him—in my case by knocking on doors for him—supported pursuing every legal process. Needless to say, those avenues were exhausted long before January 6. I no longer held out hope that there would be a reversal after the Supreme Court declined to hear the case concerning the constitutionality of the Pennsylvania election.
So when some rallygoers stormed the Capitol on Wednesday while throngs of others remained outside demonstrating legally, it was readily apparent that whatever they were doing would not alter the result of the election.
Most reactions that I’ve heard from personal friends have looked at the Capitol Hill riot as a ridiculous jaunt by a small faction of attention seekers that ultimately only delayed the failure of the electoral objection resolutions brought by Republican Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). Justifying an act of folly is never a good idea, but I’ll at least explain the motive behind it:
- A group of Americans several million strong has seen the electoral system fail them by ignoring its own electoral laws and constitutional statutes.
- They have seen the media scorn them and condemn any effort to pursue the legal process.
- They then saw the judicial system fail them by denying standing to every party, from voters to congressional candidates to the sitting president himself, to seek a fair hearing in court to dispute the results.
- The political class led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) then failed them by openly discouraging members of the GOP caucus in both houses of Congress from challenging the results. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) even delivered a red faced rant at the small minority that continued to object, even though they were fully within their constitutional rights to voice their opposition.
When the four legs necessary to keep the electoral process upright each fail a people, especially when the reason for their failure is that no one wants to point to themselves and actually show leadership or at least honesty, this tends to feed mobs. And any theories about who the rioters were are irrelevant to the point that these are the things that happened leading up to the 6th, and have been happening long before then. The sovereignty of the people has been called into question.
It is beside the point that the Capitol Hill Riot was both idiotic and massively counterproductive, making an already hopeless situation worse. For four years every chai guzzling journo has harped on the example of Charlottesville, disregarding the fact that since 2017 several violent political incidents have occurred that were more violent and were clearly more intentional. Why? Because they came from people who the folks populating social media companies, the press, and entertainment industry support politically. These industries and executives align with the agenda that needed Charlottesville to be seen as a major social event to hurt President Trump, even though he had no personal role or presence there. Now they don’t need to remind anyone of Charlottesville; they have Capitol Hill.
In response to the wild and incoherent intrusion, we saw the so-called leaders of our nation for who and what they are: cowards who can’t handle real pressure or criticism. And while it would be easy for me to limit this to just the Democrats and establishment Republicans, unfortunately I think it permeates a much broader swathe of Congress and the political class. A common refrain that I heard, most prominently by Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-Nev.), was that the protesters were armed. Even if that were true, and thus far there is no photographic or video evidence to support it, why was the only person shot a rioter?
The lawmakers and journalists with faces contorted in horror maybe expect sympathy and virtual hugs. Rep. David Trone (D-Md.) even took selfies of himself wearing a plastic gas mask and declaring that “we will not be stopped by this lawless intimidation.” Trone should take comfort in the fact that no one actually knows who he is, and just 37 percent of Americans can even name their representative. Glancing at Trone’s Twitter feed from the days before the certification date, many of his tweets have no interactions at all. And he is a sitting congressman! Spare us the faux drama Dave.
In regard to Democrats and the rest of the Left, we should remember them for the words and idols by which they live their own lives, not their fake and self-serving references to Lincoln, Madison, or the War of 1812.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who on Saturday called for the unprecedented second impeachment of Donald Trump, is used to living a dual life, but let’s just focus on her actions when Trump entered office. In 2017 she attended both the inauguration of Trump and the Women’s March calling for his removal from office.
Yet nobody attributed the blame for the DisruptJ20 riots that broke out in order to prevent the inauguration to Pelosi.
Last January Teen Vogue, a magazine that once limited itself to marketing pricey clothing to young women, wrote an homage to DisruptJ20 excusing the destruction of storefronts and vehicles belonging to D.C. residents and commuters by claiming it should be remembered as part of the “Anti-Trump Resistance.” This endorsement of violence by a mainstream fashion publication has not led to its Twitter account being suspended or to any other consequences.
There are countless examples of politicians and celebrities, most of them Democrats, inciting mob actions. When they do it though it is called “activism”:
- California Rep. Maxine Waters in 2018 told her supporters to harass Trump administration officials anywhere they are, including “in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station.” Even Politico, no fan of the president’s, titled their coverage “Waters scares Democrats with call for all-out war on Trump.”
- Waters’ colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in 2020 called for compiling a list of ex-Trump officials that would be blackballed from ever making a living in the future. This was echoed by a group called the “Trump Accountability Project” that is doing just that.
- In Seattle one council member, Kshama Sawant of the ultra-left Socialist Alternative, has gone to a further extreme and led processions of protesters to the houses of her city’s mayor in order to pressure her to agree to the “Tax Amazon” campaign. Sawant also helped radicals from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) to occupy Seattle City Hall in June.
- When two sheriff’s deputies were murdered in Los Angeles the Gravel Institute tweeted out that “blue lives don’t matter.” They responded to the Capitol Hill Riot by initially tweeting that they would definitely have supported a violent takeover of the Capitol if it had been conducted by leftists. They later deleted the tweet.
- When Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter Chiara was arrested in May for taking part in a protest where projectiles were being hurled at police. The mayor, who is protected by a detail of NYPD officers like the ones his daughter was attacking, answered reporters by saying he did not believe she was doing anything wrong.
Just last month, Ocasio-Cortez stated in a tweet that has since been amplified many times over that the point of protesting was to make people “uncomfortable.” This was in defense of the #DefundThePolice movement. Now she says that she “feared for her life” during the Capitol Hill riot, one where she was protected as a member of the ruling class by the same type of police that she once called on her supporters to protest. The very use of Twitter by her is now a privilege denied to millions of people who demonstrated outside the Capitol, including the president, whether they did so peacefully or engaged in the futile seizure of the chambers.
The most idiotic and hypocritical politician to react to the Capitol Hill Riot was Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.), the party’s 2016 nominee for vice president. Kaine blamed Trump’s veto of stimulus and defense appropriations bills and his handling of COVID-19 for the riot. What was Kaine’s excuse for his son Woody rioting in 2017 in Minnesota? Who bears responsibility for that, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Woody Kaine wasn’t attacking police and Secret Service members, but Trump supporters gathering to support the president at the Minnesota state capitol in St. Paul several months after the election and inauguration. Sen. Kaine never responded personally to the arrest but through a spokesperson who asserted that Woody Kaine “behaved peacefully” even though he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for resisting arrest.
Looking back at every revolution throughout history, there were always those who viewed the prospect of a radical change as something desirable so long as it only adversely affects the wealth and freedom of others. During the French Revolution, Louis XVI lived under the delusion that his divine claim to the throne would protect him from the guillotine well beyond the point when he had been overthrown and when his army could hold back the masses as they stormed the Bastille. His thinking was distorted by the illusion that his army would protect his family against mobs of people that may have contained members of their own families. In the history of Marxism numerous revolutionary leaders from Leon Trotsky in Russia to Maurice Bishop in Grenada were ignominiously crushed by the very process they had so boldly began.
The reaction to the Capitol Hill Riot should be documented and remembered, because the platitude of America’s need to “heal” and “come together” will be echoed from shore to shore by the same people guilty of tearing it apart. Coming into office, almost every president attempts to vocalize the sentiment of healing including all of Biden’s predecessors, but this time is there anything left to heal at all?
The two largest blocs of American society have become different tissues, maybe even different species. There is no equal protection before the law, media, and corporate conglomerates for Americans who do not abide by the cultural framing of the Democrat bloc. Hillary Clinton goes unpunished for illegally storing classified information based on “intent,” while Michael Flynn is prosecuted by the same FBI for foreign collusion that they themselves openly acknowledged never happened. Edward Snowden sits in exile for the crime of exposing our government’s illegal mass surveillance while its perpetrator, James Clapper, works as a national security analyst with CNN. Aging hipsters who idolize Marx and Noam Chomsky now acquiesce to cyberspace billionaires determining who gets to speak and who must sit in silence.
Does anyone believe that Joe Biden, a man who denies any knowledge of his son’s jet-setting business dealings when it is known that he himself took part in them, is the man who will reunite family members, friends, and coworkers who have stopped speaking? This is a man who came to power thanks to a year that normalized lockdowns, mask mandates, mandatory quarantines, mostly peaceful riots; football games with cardboard cutout fans and piped in cheers and boos. His first day in office he may just declare the healing is done while his enemies are being bludgeoned by tech tyranny and vindictive prosecutions.
As you go through your day at work, have your afternoon coffee, flip channels at home, bid your children good night, be aware of this new reality. Your regular life is no longer yours. It is being logged, aggregated, and collected, such that the knowledge that you are an American “citizen” has never had less meaning than now.