There have been a lot of bad takes surrounding the unrest at the Capitol that occurred on January 6th. The push for a “commission” has become a dominant talking point on the left and among some on the right. Mitt Romney has endorsed the idea because of course he has. This despite the fact that only one person was killed, and that was a woman shot by police.
But I think I can comfortably say that the most insane, delusional take has now gone forth. The Huffington Post’s White House Correspondent shared this doozy yesterday.
It’s hard to imagine how someone could be this wrong and think they are right. Let’s just recap here for posterity.
On 9/11, 3,000 were killed by a massive terrorist attack that was extremely organized, planned for years, and executed by foreign nationals in an effort to destroy our government’s ability to function. Further, United Flight 93 was actually meant to crash into the Capitol and it would have killed hundreds of lawmakers, staffers, appointees, and other innocent people. We literally waged a 20-year war in response to what happened.
What happened on January 6th? A protest where then President Trump told people to march to the Capitol and “peacefully and patriotically make (their) voices heard,” and to “primary the hell out of” their political opponents ended up having a few hundred people splinter off. They entered the Capitol, caused some light property damage, took selfies, and Ashli Babbitt got shot by police. There was no grand plan, there was no coup, and there was no insurrection. Any organization consisted largely of social media chatter about attending the original protest. If the goal was to overthrow the government, there were ample opportunities to cause more chaos and that didn’t happen. At no point was there any real danger of the government being overthrown, not even for a second.
But look, even discussing this becomes a rhetorical trap because there are those who are so hysterical that they freak out if you don’t call what happened an insurrection. Regardless, an objective comparison between January 6th and 9/11 shows two events that are not even in the same universe. January 6th wasn’t even the worst thing to happen in the last year, much less since the Civil War. The BLM and Antifa riots of 2020 caused far more damage to federal property, cost far more lives, and did billions in damage to private businesses and housing. Some politicians hiding in their offices for a few hours was bad. People literally being murdered in the streets was worse.
The push to claim that January 6th was a unique, seminal moment that towers above a terrorist attack that took 3,000 lives is purely partisan, in my view. It’s an attempt to take an admittedly regrettable event and to blow it up into the worst thing that’s ever occurred in order to interfere in the 2022 election. The weaponization of government over the last decade has gone far enough. No Republican should be joining hands with these people, and it’s absolutely nuts that some are.