The FBI views the January 6 Capitol Hill protest as “domestic terrorism,” to quote director Christopher Wray. The bureau will work nonstop to bring those responsible to a police-state version of justice.
This included arresting Christopher Kuehne, a Missouri man who appears on security footage doing dangerous stuff like staying inside the velvet ropes and picking up garbage left by other protestors. Kuehne is a retired Marine with two Iraq deployments and a purple heart. The FBI charged him with carrying a deadly weapon, though he had none. The media falsely reported he was a member of the Proud Boys, though he is not. It appears he is being held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day without bail. His wife was kept waiting in freezing weather for hours while an FBI forensics team ransacked their home looking for “evidence.” She was pregnant and has suffered a miscarriage. That story has been effectively deleted from the internet and you won’t find it easily with a search on Google.
The FBI isn’t alone in claiming the January 6 Capitol protest was the worst thing to happen to America since 9/11. A substantial share of nominally Republican politicians has joined that chorus. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went so far as to say that Donald Trump will have “a place in history” for the Capitol riot: “They could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all.”
When Graham says this, he knows perfectly well that he is lying. Trump asked the hundreds of thousands of Americans who came to show their support to walk with him peacefully to the Capitol. He made “peaceful” explicit. Nonetheless, every corrupt politician and newscaster in America has been able to find the violent subtext buried somewhere in Trump’s speech.
Real Incitement
Well, try this on for size: Suppose if, instead of saying “let’s walk to the Capitol peacefully,” Trump instead had said what everyone accuses him of saying. Suppose he’d said, “The election is being stolen from us and I’m not giving up power.” (Remember how the Left fantasized Trump would have to be removed from the Oval Office by force?) Suppose Trump continued: “I am calling on my supporters to defend my presidency with violence. Come to Washington. Bring your guns! Bring every weapon you can lay your hands on. Don’t let anyone stop you. No justice, no peace!”
What do you suppose would have happened then? Do you think that the only person to be shot that day would have been an unarmed protester? If Trump had one ounce of the autocratic, dictatorial tendencies the press accuse him of having, he need only have asked his supporters to defend him with force. They would have.
It’s hard to say what would have followed, but it would not have been pretty. If Trump had actually encouraged violence, the “Capitol Riot” would have been a bona fide riot. We wouldn’t be able to count the death toll on a single hand. It would take hundreds, or thousands, of hands. If Americans had come to Washington actually seeking to “kill them all,” as Graham so despicably insists, you can bet that they would have succeeded in killing at least some.
By some estimates, 1.5 million Americans showed up on January 6 to protest the theft of their right to vote. They were angry as hell, but overwhelmingly peaceful. Even with the FBI in maximum repression mode, there has been a grand total of 127 arrests. No one burned cars or besieged police stations. What, in contrast, would a million-and-a-half Antifa have done to Washington, D.C.?
Trump’s Power
It is impossible to imagine Trump asking for heads on pikes. (The Left may say they can imagine it, but they are, as usual, lying.) If Trump had asked for heads, he could have gotten them. And this is not a power he has lost, because it had nothing to do with any official button he could push or lever he could pull as president. He simply has a faithful following numbering in the tens of millions who trust he has their best interests at heart, who feel abused by the political machine, and who regard him as America’s legitimate leader.
Hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans would have answered a call to arms from President Trump. That he never made such a call is patently obvious, most of all to the liars and blackguards who make these accusations. They feel safe to say whatever they want because they know that Trump is a vastly better man than they: Trump believes honestly (and in my view correctly) that he won reelection. He believes the most powerful office in the world was stolen from him. Yet he loves America far too much to bring it to violence on his account. His accusers know this, or else they wouldn’t dare utter a peep—because it would actually be dangerous for them.
Envy is the root of all evil, and the root of everything the Left says and does. The people who have lied and who continue to lie about January 6 can do so only because they secretly understand that Trump is a genuinely great man. He is a man who had the power to do what they can only dream of doing—and what the Bill Ayers Left does dream of doing. He had the power to inaugurate a civil war. And he still has it. He won’t use it. Everyone knows that, but almost no one is honest enough to acknowledge it. History offers few examples of men who had such power, such an inducement to act, and yet who showed such restraint.
Pushing Without Consequences?
The current administration takes a cynical view of January 6: It is their Reichstag fire. It is their Beslan school siege. They’re not actually worried about Trump supporters—Trump supporters make lousy rioters. They know that Trump supporters don’t even produce as much violence as Antifa manages on any given afternoon in Portland or Seattle. And while some politicians might have been genuinely worried for a few hours on January 6 when they evacuated the Capitol and before the facts became clear, the genuine panic is long since gone. All that remains is simulated outrage, and phony pathos.
January 6 is nothing but an excuse to attack, intimidate, and even imprison political enemies.
Which makes the Left’s attitude towards Trump supporters much like China’s attitude toward America: They believe that they can continue to push with no real consequences. It’s easy to push good people as long as you do it a little at a time. The only danger is accidentally pushing too far at once, what you might call the “Pearl Harbor mistake.” The Chinese are strategically smart enough to avoid doing that. But our politicians, the media, the unelected bureaucrats, do not necessarily understand that about Trump and his supporters. They cry wolf over “domestic terrorism” without understanding that, in a real confrontation, theirs is the losing hand. So it might be instructive for them to take a quiet moment to imagine what January 6 would have looked like if it had actually happened.