Democracy is messy. Real democracy, not just Democracy In Name Only, recognizes that sometimes members of the national family will argue or act up. Only in the most extreme circumstances should we demonize our national family members and paint them as the enemy.
But that’s not what is happening today.
Now, I really don’t want to touch the third rail of January 6, because this is not a political blog. However, this is a blog dedicated to free speech. And our free speech is in grave danger due to wildly hypocritical double standards and hyperbole – or in some cases, denial.
And I for one am sick and tired of the hyperbole and hysteria surrounding January 6 – calling the protests “riots” and an “insurrection” when actual riots that result in burned out cities are called “mostly peaceful protests.” The hypocrisy is blatant and in-your-face – and the abject denial of partisan cultists is to pretend this double standard is non-existent.
Was January 6 a full-blown insurrection? Hardly.
Let’s get real, and I’ll be blunt here. The so-called “right-wing extremists” who the Democrats whip up every election in order to scare people to vote blue – those “extremists” are the ones with the guns. And you know what? There is a real threat here – but the threat is, the patriots are “keeping their powder dry” in case the country needs to be “taken back” from tyranny. If they get pushed past the point of no return, they will engage in a civil war. And those guns will be taken out of drydock.
What these patriots don’t get credit for is how extremely patient they are. They aren’t shooting first unless they really need to.
And if or when they finally feel that peaceful means are no longer possible, the real insurrection will begin, and we will have no doubt about it, because an army of patriots armed to the teeth will be marching on Washington, DC. Real blood will be shed then.
On the other hand, a young man dressed up in warpaint like he’s at a football game taking selfies in the Capitol building is not an insurrectionist. Get real.
By the way, no cop was killed by protestors on January 6. Here’s the list of deaths associated with the protest, according to FactCheck.org:
Kevin Greeson: Died of cardiovascular disease (natural causes) due to a heart attack before the rioters breached the Capitol.
Benjamin Phillips: Died naturally of hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (heart failure) and had not participated in the raid on the Capitol.
Rosanne Boyland: Died accidentally of acute amphetamine intoxication, not from being trampled as initially believed.
Ashli Babbitt: Shot by a Capitol Police officer while trying to force her way into the House chamber and died from the gunshot wound.
Officer Brian Sicknick: Suffered two strokes and died of natural causes nearly eight hours after being sprayed with a chemical irritant during the riot; all events on Jan 6 played a role in his condition.
Officer Howard Liebengood: Committed suicide three days after the riot.
Officer Jeffrey Smith: Committed suicide after being injured during the riot; his death later declared a line-of-duty death by the D.C. Police and Firefighters’ Retirement and Relief Board.
Officer Kyle DeFreytag: Committed suicide six months after the riot; was not directly involved with clashes with rioters during the breach.
Officer Gunther Hashida: Committed suicide six months after the riot; assisted in securing the Capitol on Jan 6; struggles beyond Jan 6 could have played a role in his death.
Why are police suicides even being counted as being caused by January 6? A mentally healthy person does not kill themselves because they had to engage in crowd control – which they would ostensibly have been trained for. Even if it was rough! OK, I’m now starting to think like a conspiracy theorist here but this is weird.
What does make sad sense are the suicides of the January 6 protestors, jailed for years with no due process, in cruel conditions:
A new book about the J6 prisoners, “Due Process Denied,” tells a tale of hell in the Washington, DC, “gulag,” the Central Detention Facility in southeast Washington where most have been housed.
Cynthia Hughes writes poignantly of one defendant who committed suicide rather than go back to jail.
The defendants have been kept in a separate unit with mold on the walls, brown water and generally unsanitary conditions, are subjected to 23 hours a day of solitary confinement, denied adequate food, medical treatment and religious services.
Their only solace is that every night at 9 p.m., they gather to sing the national anthem.
This is happening in America, and people look a blind eye because they’ve told these defendants are a “danger to democracy.”
But most of January 6 wasn’t what the media hypes it up to be. They act as is everyone was acting like super crazed soccer fans after a big win (or loss), with Molotov cocktails flying overhead and cars being overturned. That’s not what happened at January 6.
I had a friend (Hispanic) at the January 6 protests – I will not call them riots or an insurrection – and he’s a guy I’ve known since high school. As in, I’ve known him since the mid-1980s. He wouldn’t lie to me. He told me that he was peacefully standing on the steps of the Capitol singing the Star Spangled Banner with a large, diverse group of people of all races (as well as some LGBTQ+ people), in a positive and loving environment, when suddenly they were tear gassed without warning.
He didn’t fight. He and everyone around him ran to get the hell away from the tear gas.
Let’s also talk about this hoopla over people “invading” the Capitol building. I’ve seen the footage of people walking into the building as the Capitol police held the door open. For the most part, the property was respected. If that had been Antifa, the Capitol building would have been torn to shreds.
I stormed an administrative building once at a college protest. And the “storming” I was involved in at my university had more ferocity than what I saw on January 6 with protestors lazily strolling through Capitol hallways. (You can see the footage above – more about that below). We did more intentional damage to that building too – you can see the graffiti on the wall in the video.
Don’t get me wrong. January 6 had its troublemakers. I watched unedited livestreams on January 6, probably from WolfNeve but I can’t say for sure, but with 4-6 windows going at once. On just one side of the building from my recollection, there was a small group of protestors getting into skirmishes with police. There weren’t any guns – this was more a shoving match. There were sticks, I definitely saw sticks. But no guns.
The rest of the protestors were peaceful and oblivious to the skirmish happening. And many claim the instigators were plants to make the protestors look bad. So why does the media paint everyone at January 6 as some sort of evil, violent seditionist?
Let’s say the skirmishers were seriously trying to take over the government – which seems silly on its face because no guns were brandished – does that mean that every single protestor should be demonized as an “insurrectionist”?
Does believing that an election was stolen automatically make a citizen an “insurrectionist”? Think carefully about this – because what if in 2024 Trump wins and you think there was some voter fraud. Do you want to set a precedent where any concerns about voter fraud might land you on a watch list? Don’t you want a right to go protest at the Capitol if Trump is re-elected?
But we have a double standard. The left doesn’t worry that their protests will be labeled as sedition, because they are protected by the corporate media. At least for now.
It has been de rigeur for far-left protestors to take over governmental buildings for decades, including state capitals, if not actively attack and try to destroy these buildings. Here are a few examples:
1971 Capitol Bombing: Members of the Weather Underground, a radical left group, bombed the U.S. Capitol1.
1983 and 1984 Bombings: The radical-left Resistance Conspiracy group attacked the Capitol and separate blasts at Fort McNair and the Washington Navy Yard2.
2021 Interior Department Breach: Climate activists breached the Interior Department3.
1988 Resistance Conspiracy Group Arrests: FBI agents arrested seven members of the radical-left Resistance Conspiracy group for attacks on the Capitol4.
Post-Inauguration Protests: Left-wing protests led to vandalism of government buildings and at least 20 arrests2.
Pro-Palestinian Protests: Pro-Palestinian protestors converged on the US Capitol complex, demanding a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas56.
Women’s March Protesters: Women’s March protesters protested the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in the Hart Senate Office Building2.
2011 Wisconsin Protests: The Wisconsin Capitol hosted the longest continuous occupation of a major government building in the history of the United States7.
Let’s not forget the time that Antifa “peacefully” attacked the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in downtown Portland. I watched a lot of that attack live. It was very violent. They were definitely trying to burn the building down. And the media enabled and excused them. When federal response finally came – and Trump sat on his hands for quite a while on this before acting – Trump was painted as acting like Hitler for arresting the very obviously violent protestors.
The danger here is that whoever is in power – let’s just call them the Establishment, which includes the corporate-owned mainstream media – gets to demonize people trying to exercise their first amendment rights when the issue is the “wrong” one. But the “right” issues get passes – if not encouraged.
During the pandemic, Black Lives Matters protests were allowed despite the lockdowns – but can you imagine the howls of outrage if “anti-vaxxers” had taken over New York City in the middle of covid hysteria? They would have been called “killers” by the media.
Worse, protestors can be weaponized by the Establishment for a variety of reasons – to justify a bigger police state, to demonize a state enemy, or to sway public opinion. If we let the corporate media play word games and make one set of protestors to be saints and the others villains, then the entire nature of protesting has become completely weaponized and no longer is an effective grassroots tool for redressing government grievances.
That said, there are also non-state groups that do use protests to disrupt things if not engage in actual “sedition.”
So let’s look at the protest I was involved in at my college campus, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It was a fall day 1990, and I was walking back from somewhere (don’t remember what) with my housemates. A protest was going on against the deputization of campus security guards. They were to be given guns. Thus, it was an anti-gun protest. Being 20 years old and still clueless, and thinking “yeah, campus security guards don’t need guns, they might shoot someone accidentally” – I joined my friends in the protest.
Somehow, I managed to get swept up with the protestors who stormed the building. Did I even know what the real issues were? No. Remember, I had just been walking by. I ended up being one of a small group of protestors engaged in a “sit-in” in the first floor of the campus administrative building.
You can see me in the background in numerous video clips. See if you can find me in the crowd:
I had no idea that there were other protestors upstairs or that the staff was scared to death.
My point being – people can get swept up in a protest, and it doesn’t mean they deserve years of detention with no bail and no trial.
So during the protest I was given some sort of flyer inviting me to a meeting to discuss further activism. It was sponsored by the “Revolutionary Workers League.” I had no idea what this was and went to the meeting, which was pretty small. It was a bunch of us sitting around some tables. The guy running the meeting appeared to be older and perhaps was no longer a student. He started ranting and raving about how evil the United States was and basically said their goal was to overthrow the government.
I was struck by how filled with hate and rage he was.
I thought he was super nutso and left, never to return.
It seems, in retrospect, that that innocent anti-gun protest I attended, had bigger goals. Indeed, the protest I attended was historic and connected with future attempts to disarm cops in anti-racism campaigns:
On November 15, 1990, the Board of Regents at the University of Michigan voted to establish an armed, on-campus police force for the first time in University history. Their vote was the culmination of years of effort to reconstitute administrative power. Alongside the deputization of campus police, the University pursued a code of non-academic conduct for students. In order for both to succeed, the Regents overturned Bylaw 7.02, ending shared governance at the University of Michigan. This decision disregarded student, faculty, and community opposition, and by the end of November 15, 1990, the University arrested 16 activists occupying administration offices. The next day one thousand students rallied outside the Student Union, spilling into the street. The students chanted “No Guns! No Code! No Cops! This repression has got to stop!”
Thirty years later, in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, student activists again marched for the defunding and demilitarization of their campus police forces. At the University of Michigan, undergraduate Students of Color Liberation Front called for an end to President Mark Schlissel’s COVID-era policing program, known as the “Ambassadors Program” which paired federal work-study students with the Department of Public Safety and Security to patrol and enforce social distancing. Members of the Graduate Employees’ Organization fought for COVID-related work protections and defunding and demilitarizing campus police as part of their “strike for a safe and just campus” from September 8-16, 2020. The graduate student strike unconsciously invoked similar rhetoric of the No Guns, No Cops, No Code movement: in 1990, student activists maintained that having armed police on campus would not make campus safer, that funds for policing would be better used to pay for mental health services and sexual assault prevention, that campus police repressed student movements, and put students – especially students of color – in danger. While Ann Arbor campus police are now ‘naturalized’ with a current budget of $12 million each year,[1] prior to 1990 the University of Michigan did not have its own campus police force.[2] Defunding campus police was not a distant dream, but actually a distant memory.
For this movement to be successful, it needed useful idiots such as myself to show up and sit my butt on the floor even though I had no clue what the deeper issues were.
Likewise, the January 6 “insurrection” needed so-called “useful idiots” to show up in good faith in what they felt was a protest FOR democracy. For the media and Establishment to paint them all as irredeemable seditionists is wrong on many accounts. I would guess that most people who showed up at January 6 were not advocating for any violence but simply wanting to use their collective voice to pressure their representatives to address their grievances.
There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
But you’ll see plenty of online “useful idiots” approving of the highest penalties for anyone who showed up at January 6. One such person replied to me yesterday on Notes:
Be happy your friend isn’t in a Federal prison cell from the sounds of it.
Why should my friend be in a federal prison? He did NOTHING WRONG.
That we have so many people wanting to arrest and punish people for protesting is alarming. Worse, these people are advocating for harsh penalties for MAGA protestors in the name of “saving Democracy”! Don’t they see how Orwellian this is?
I don’t care if protestors are wrong on an issue – whether they think Reptilians run the White House or they believe the worst throwbacks to 1970s socialist radicalism.
The only people I want thrown into prison at protests are the people who are actively violent. For everyone else genuinely “disrupting the peace” – such as those sitting on freeways – a misdemeanor. And that includes the people who walked into the Capitol building on January 6. Keeping them in prison for years is a disgrace and Banana Republic behavior. It makes me sick as an American.
Despite the manipulation of protests – we still need the freedom to engage in them.
Unfortunately, the Democrats are exploiting January 6 fears as their own inverse “Kristallnacht” to retain power. Oh, roll your eyes at that, but consider the precedent being set up here. When we allow only one side to storm government property or commit violence, while throwing the other side in jail for years without bail, we have basically destroyed democracy by allowing one side to mob bully the other. Right now the left gains by this in the short run, but in the long run, the tables could be easily turned.
I have now forewarned you.
Insurrection? The Danger of Selective Protest Condemnation