Commentary
Let’s start with this: the disturbance at the Capitol on January 6, as Donald Trump and his supporters made a last-ditch attempt to somehow overturn the results of the 2020 election, was neither an “insurrection” nor a “siege,” nor was it conducted by “seditionists.” At best, it was an ill-advised, unsupervised, possibly provoked demonstration in a lost cause that could have no good effect other than the venting of personal pique and MAGA fury.
The fact is, the election was lost back in the summer, and even White House veterans knew it—out of money and essentially rudderless, and marked by supererogatory campaign events that likely provoked more hostility among Trump’s foes than new voters. The churn among the campaign staff, including one campaign manager who wound up being taken down by Florida police after a family dispute, was emblematic of a president who trusted no one but his family members, some of whom did not always have his best political interests at heart.
It almost didn’t matter who his opponent was. A cardboard cutout would have had more intelligence and charisma than Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and still likely would have won against a president whose approval ratings were underwater for his entire presidency and who elicited such fear and loathing. As a recent Time Magazine piece made all too clear, the Democrats, the media, the swamp, and the establishments of both parties were ready for him this time, mobilizing well in advance of Election Day to make sure he couldn’t win.
“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” wrote Molly Ball in her Feb. 4 Time article, “a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster.
“‘Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,’ says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. ‘But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing’.”
Punishing Dissent
The institutional Left, however, cannot be satisfied with simply having won (or “won”) an election they so successfully manipulated in order to achieve the “proper outcome.” Now they must ruin Trump’s reputation as well, with a blatantly unconstitutional sham impeachment of a private citizen and a similarly unconstitutional attempt to prevent him from ever running for office again.
Even worse, they and their allies in the media, tech, and corporate America have mounted a full-scale attack on his supporters in an attempt to criminalize political differences, turn patriots into “Nazis,” undermine the validity of the two-party system, besmirch the very term “Republican,” and create a Narrative in which they heroically saved the country from 75 million hostile voters.
During the Bush and Trump administration, the Left lauded dissent (if not outright treason) as “the highest form of patriotism.” But since Jan. 20, any dissent from the prevailing “woke” orthodoxy is actually punishable, by firing, ostracism, banishment, or governmental action. They don’t mean to get caught with their pants down at the polls ever again.
So back to the Jan. 6 “siege,” a term designed, Communist-style, to evoke and extol the Left’s heroic resistance to the forces of evil, a la the two and a half-year siege of Leningrad in World War II by the Germans. Now that was a siege: the Wehrmacht attempted to starve the city to death, resulting in millions of casualties, and was marked by widespread cannibalism among the desperate Soviets.
By contrast, the event in Washington, while deplorable—as the saying goes, it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder—was less violent than the average weekend in Portland, which continues to suffer attacks from neo-Marxist radicals. Not to mention Seattle, Minneapolis, and elsewhere over the course of the past four years. The one death directly attributed to the trouble, that of Air Force veteran Ashley Babbitt (also spelt Ashli)—who was shot by a still unnamed Capitol policeman—will likely result in no charges against the officer.
Surrendering Liberties
Meanwhile, more than 200 demonstrators have been charged with various crimes, and the number is expected to grow. By contrast, 234 protestors were arrested by D.C. police at Trump’s inauguration in 2017, and only one (who pleaded guilty) served any jail time. The others were either found not guilty or had their charges dropped.
That “progressive” prosecutors and juries in the District are overwhelmingly hostile to conservatives and Republicans comes as no surprise. But the combination of electoral maneuvering and selective law enforcement has resulted in the grotesquely un-American spectacle of some 26,000 armed soldiers “protecting” the capital during Biden’s inauguration; at least 7,000 of them will remain through March 12, and 5,000 will stay indefinitely.
Why? As far as the federal government is concerned, nearly all conservatives are suspect, whether they’re public figures, politicians, or ordinary soldiers in the ranks. The events of Jan. 6 have allowed both the feds and their robinettes in the media to tar them all as “extremists.” And so a Department of Pre-Crime has been established, to monitor American citizens for any lack of fealty to the “proper outcome.”
Americans have already unwisely surrendered far too many of their constitutionally guaranteed liberties during the absurd and continuing panic over Covid-19, but in the few short weeks since Biden assumed office under armed guard, the rate of attrition has grown.
A feeble figurehead, an avatar of Barack Hussein Obama and his inner circle, issues executive order after executive order from behind barbed wire and a mask, killing jobs and attacking vital industries under the illusion of “climate change,” while Congress (now in the hands of the Democrats) does nothing. The federal judges who were so quick to throw a judicial spanner into Trump’s orders are mute. The media, who once championed free speech, call for outright censorship of their competitors.
Meanwhile, as construction of the still-unfinished border wall is halted, the caravans from Latin America are once again rolling northward. Gas prices are soaring. The tech giants—Twitter, Facebook, Google—are as busy as Madame Defarge, clacking their knitting needles in joy as heads fall from the deplatforming and demonetizing guillotines into the baskets.
And all of this because the Democrats, thanks to their foresight and ruthlessness and GOP ineptitude and self-sabotage—won the slimmest of procedural majorities in the Senate, actually lost seats in the House, and have in the form of the Canadian-raised Kamala Harris, who despite having failed spectacularly during the Democrat primaries, a chief-executive-in-waiting with malice aforethought and thoroughly nasty plans for a country she didn’t even grow up in.
As Joe Kennedy said to his son, Jack, during JFK’s primary campaign in West Virginia as he sought the 1960 nomination: “don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” It was supposed to be a joke, and everybody yukked it up when Kennedy would tell that story.
Who’s laughing now?
Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
