Democrats Cling To J6 Mania Because They Can’t Appeal to Facts or Their Failed Policies Our betters use January 6 to cast half the country as domestic terrorists as a pretext to crack down on dissent and run roughshod over democracy to “save” it–because that’s the only card it has left Benjamin Weingarten
https://weingarten.substack.com/p/democrats-cling-to-j6-mania-because?token=
If the truth supported the narrative, why not charge the accused with insurrection, sedition, and/or terrorism?
From President Joe Biden’s pretentious speeches to schizophrenic media coverage to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sham committee, the left has used Jan. 6 as the shaky scaffolding on which to railroad the rest of the country, in part because it serves as the singular manifestation of its fever dreams – that there is a coup around every corner and a frothing-mad MAGA monster under every bed.
The problem is that Jan. 6, as shameful, pathetic, and unacceptable as were the actions of its worst offenders, was not comparable to 9/11, or Pearl Harbor, or the worst of the Civil War. By scope, violence, and destruction, it pales in comparison to the summer riots of 2020.
The hyperbolic comparisons are a charade – and not just because the facts belie the claims of a murderous insurrection of armed terrorists, as the federal judges most perturbed by Jan. 6 have lamented. (That is, judges are upset prosecutors can’t make legal cases to match the ruling regime’s political one.)
If the Narrative Were True, Why All the Trickery?
We also know it is a charade because of the dishonesty and obfuscation around it. If the truth supported the narrative, why not charge the accused with insurrection, sedition, and/or terrorism?
Why consistently insinuate that protesters killed officers when they didn’t? Why emphasize the “armed” nature of the breach when not one of the people who the left would presume to be gun nuts has been charged with carrying a firearm in the Capitol – of the no more than five people charged with a firearm offense associated at all with the events of Jan. 6?
Why conceal thousands of hours of footage? Why stonewall about federal informants and leave prominent co-conspirators unindicted? Why not question the authorities who reportedly let hundreds waltz right in? Why stack the deck in a Soviet show trial-style congressional committee? Why doctor evidence and dissemble about basic facts of the day’s events?
It is clear that, consistent with authorities’ admission that the vast majority of Jan. 6 participants were not associated with any group, and the reporting on the mental state, physical condition, and non-criminal backgrounds of many of the accused, that what transpired was not some Al-Qaeda-style operation of sophisticates. Rather, among the violent minority of the 700-plus mainly charged with misdemeanors – out of tens of thousands of peaceful Americans in D.C. – it was an appalling display of lashing out and LARPing over several hours on one day.
That is the extent of the MAGA mayhem used to cast tens of millions of conservatives as insurrectionists or their would-be co-conspirators. Disturbing? Certainly. Criminal? Absolutely. A terrorist attack? On what planet?
To highlight these points is not to downplay, condone, or excuse the crimes perpetrated on Jan. 6, but to illustrate the disingenuousness with which the day has been portrayed, in service of an arguably far more disastrous effort to crush dissent that itself represents a rolling insurrection against liberty and justice for all.
The Post-Jan. 6 Info Op
The president and other Democrat leaders will continue to deliver addresses memorializing the day, no doubt in the vein of Democrats’ summer 2020 kente cloth genuflection gambit.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has telegraphed an effort to blow up the filibuster to federalize and enshrine mass mail-in elections on grounds that America has faced a rolling insurrection ever since the Capitol breach, in the form of a Republican-led state-level election integrity legislation.
The New York Times agrees, having declared in a headline at the dawn of the new year that “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now.” NBC’s media properties are devoting daily coverage to “the state of extremism” in America.
These are parts of a concerted information operation by the censorious and authoritarian ruling class to cast its foes as threats to “our democracy” (read: its power), and use the purported threat to justify a whole-of-society crackdown on dissent.
The ruling class is democracy, just as Dr. Anthony Fauci is Science. Neither may be challenged.
Democrats Cheered Same Elements Of Jan. 6 in Other Circumstances
The charade goes deeper when one considers Democrats’ tolerance for virtually every aspect of Jan. 6 under differing political conditions.
Democrats do not oppose challenging elections. They did so the last three times Republicans won the presidency.
Democrats do not bat an eye at claiming a presidency is illegitimate. They said the same for the last five years, and to this day, about the election of Donald Trump.
Democrats have few qualms about the use of political violence. Politicians, media, and academics at best whitewashed the vastly more widespread, violent, and destructive summer riots of 2020, and at worst actively funded and cheered them on. Those riots were putatively rooted in the factually incorrect idea that cops indiscriminately target and kill black males en masse, and the dubious idea that the criminal justice system is racist. The participants in those riots, incidentally, were arguably never pursued with the same vigor, or prosecuted to the same extent, as the Jan. 6 participants.
Democrats in principle have no problem backing actual terrorists. It was the Obama-Biden administration, the policies of which continue under the latter one, that explicitly supported making the Muslim Brotherhood — the tip of the spear of Sunni Islamic supremacism — and the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, Iran, the Middle East’s hegemons.
When it comes to Jan. 6, it is self-evident that facts cannot get in the way of a good narrative, and merits cannot get in the way of politics.
Why Are Democrats Perching Their Platform On Jan. 6?
What is telling is that this is the issue above all others that Democrats are using to tee up 2022, and threatening to accentuate all year.
What do Democrats see in polling that indicates the attempt to paint their foes as terrorists, from whom only re-elected Democrats can protect America, is a political winner?
Perhaps it is not so much that this is a political winner as that the alternatives are losers.
Harping on Jan. 6 distracts from the fact that in virtually every area, the Democrat agenda has failed America — from the failed draconian Chinese coronavirus response, to inflation, the supply chain crisis, Afghanistan, the border, violent crime, and the Democrat-backed censorship and cancellation that are part and parcel of its woke anti-cultural revolution.
Hyping Jan. 6 may also generate ratings for media allies, and catalyze Democrats’ most zealous partisans to lavish funds on them, while scaring off weak-kneed Republican donors.
And Democrats are honing in on Jan. 6 to link it to an effort to stigmatize and combat Republican efforts to ensure a modicum of election integrity after the unprecedented insecurity of the 2020 election. Evidently, the only way to save “our democracy” is to further erode election standards.
Last but not least, there’s the longer-term effort to use Jan. 6 to hobble if not destroy a potential Trump run in 2024, and disqualify members of Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election results from serving perhaps as early as 2022.
If Jan. 6 Is Democrats’ Best Play, They’re Out of Moves
But for all this deviousness, if Jan. 6 is the best card Democrats have, it indicates “our democracy” may well be heading for better days – with a resounding loss for those running roughshod over it to “save” it.
That said, do not underestimate the danger of a wounded Democrat Party, still controlling the commanding heights of society, with little to lose, and facing a Republican establishment still seemingly uncomfortable with a conservative-populist, un-woke America dying for representation in Washington.
The Capitol breach is the card the Democrats have, and they will play it as ruthlessly and shamelessly as they have to as they hold on for dear political life.
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