Insurrection

According to President Biden, not since the Civil War has American freedom and democracy been so under assault. In his State of the Union address, Biden characterized January 6 as a day when “insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.” With this kind of rhetoric emanating from the White House, it is no wonder a good portion of the country believes that any use of the legal system is justified to protect us from a second Donald Trump administration.  Except... that is not how the law works. By stretching their prosecutorial powers to the breaking point, Democrats are perverting the very system they are claiming to protect.  Take the charade in New York.

“A hurt dog barks.” That’s what Tucker Carlson said as he aired various bits of the 41,000 hours of surveillance video captured at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. If you want to know what the hurt dog sounds like, just listen to Senator Chuck Schumer on March 7: “Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight [and] from letting him go on again and again and again [because] our democracy depends on it.” Really, Chuck? Does “our democracy” depend on preventing the American people from seeing what really happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021?

As I have said before, I hope that the new Congress, which begins its session in just a couple of weeks, will continue the work of the January 6 Committee, minus Liz Cheney and the other kangaroos. The New York Times, in its best slant-the-news-while-appearing-magisterial modality, described the Committee’s 100-plus-page “Executive Summary” as a “report into the effort to overturn the 2020 election.” But surely the far greater attempt to impact the 2020 election was the FBI’s infiltration of Twitter and other social media platforms, Mark Zuckerberg’s half a billion dollars distributed like alms to NeverTrump sororities in battleground cities, etc., etc. All that should be the work of the new Congress. The old Congress wasn’t interested in the truth.

The latest improbable Democratic champion, Representative Liz Cheney, just about said the quiet part out loud: her January 6 Committee has the singular goal of pre-defeating Trump ahead of any voting in 2024. As it becomes clearer that the Committee is failing in its propaganda campaign to get Republican power brokers to dump Trump, and as it is near crystalline that the Committee will not find evidence leading to formal prosecution of Trump for sedition, treason, or insurrection, they are getting desperate. The latest? Purposefully misinterpreting an obscure phrase from a post-Civil War constitutional amendment.

For nearly a month last summer a violent insurrection claimed control of Capitol Hill — in Seattle, that is, not Washington DC. The insurrectionists were leftists who proclaimed the six or so city blocks under their power to be a new state-within-a-state, the ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’, or CHAZ. Multiple shootings, murders and acts of arson took place before police finally restored legal authority on July 1. This insurrection, and the many other lethal incursions against the rule of law that took place last summer, have not occasioned much soul-searching or anger from progressives and liberals in the commentariat. The contrast with their fury over the riot at the US Capitol on January 6 of this year could not be more striking.