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Will January 6 go down as another ‘day of infamy,’ an assault against America akin in its seriousness to December 7, which commemorates Pearl Harbor? Maybe, but not for the reasons that comparison suggests.
Sure, many irresponsible commentators — but here I repeat myself — and Democratic politicians compared the January 6 protest at the Capitol to December 7, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, even (thank you Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer) to the Civil War.
Back in February, I noted here that there were a few differences between these two sets of events. At the Capitol, we were told that ‘domestic extremists’ or ‘domestic terrorists’ at the instigation of Donald Trump ‘stormed’ the Capitol in what amounted to an ‘armed insurrection.’
One trouble with that narrative is that the only arms were deployed by the Capitol police, one of whom shot someone dead. The victim’s name was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed veteran and pro-Trump activist who was trying to climb through a window.
The role of the Capitol police that day is curious. At first, they went along with — indeed, they assiduously circulated — the baseless rumor that one of their number, Brian Sicknick, had been brutally beaten to death with a fire extinguisher by a crazed Trump partisan. That story was as eagerly seized upon by the media, just as were the phantasmagoric stories about Brett Kavanaugh’s teenage sexual exploits or the Covington Kid’s rudeness to an Indian elder. It turned out that Sicknick died of ‘natural causes’, a fact that even the New York Times eventually admitted after their original story had done its damage to Trump and anyone who supported him.
Just a few days ago, someone on the Capitol police force — CNN knows who but they aren’t saying — sent an anonymous letter to Congress demanding the establishment of a ‘9/11 style’ inquiry into the events of January 6, as urged by Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats. I say ‘anonymous letter,’ but really, as Tucker Carlson said, it was more like a ransom note, a politically charged demand made by an armed security force that is supposed to be politically impartial.
Yet the crumbling sound you hear in the distance is the sound of the Capitol armed insurrection narrative falling to pieces. It was supposed to be the gravest threat to ‘our democracy’ in the long history of the Republic. But the more we know, the less we see. It had long been rumored that the Capitol police actually opened the doors to protesters and welcomed them in. I had heard from one reputable source that it was because January 6 happened to be a day in which the Capitol was open for visitors. That might explain why so many of the ‘insurrectionists’ stayed between the velvet ropes as they walked through The National Statuary Hall. Did they really know what was going on?
I have also seen the recently released footage showing Capitol police welcoming in the protesters.
I saw that footage thanks to the independent reporting of Julie Kelly at American Greatness. She has been tenacious and uncompromising. Anyone who has followed this depressing story is much in her debt.
One of her leitmotifs has been the cruel and vindictive treatment of protesters by the Biden Department of Justice, abetted by the Capitol police. Hundreds of people have been arrested. Some have been languishing for months in solitary confinement without being formally charged.
This, as Kelly points out, is police-state behavior on the part of the Biden DOJ. The FBI and the CIA have been operating more like the Soviet NKVD than the storied agencies of yore.
Back at the beginning of the Trump administration, Sen. Chuck Schumer warned that President Trump was crazy to pit himself against the intelligence services. ‘They have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you,’ he said.
In his somewhat gaseous Defense of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley declared that poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ In fact, as W.H. Auden pointed out, the real unacknowledged legislators of the world are not poets but the secret police. It turns out that Chuck Schumer was right.
