More to the point ...
EXCERPTS:
The January 6 Insurrection Hoax
September 2021 ā¢ Volume 50, Number 9 ā¢
Roger Kimball
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Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of
The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. He earned his B.A. from Bennington College and his M.A. and M.Phil. in philosophy from Yale University. He has written for numerous publications, including
The Wall Street Journal and
The New York Times Book Review, and is a columnist for
The Spectator World,
American Greatness, and
The Epoch Times. He is editor or author of several books, including
The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America,
The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art,
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, and
Vox Populi: The Perils and Promises of Populism.
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Notwithstanding all the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, two critical things stand out. The first is that what happened was much more hoax than insurrection. In fact, in my judgment, it wasnāt an insurrection at all.
An āinsurrection,ā as the dictionary will tell you, is a violent uprising against a government or other established authority. Unlike the violent riots that swept the country in the summer of 2020āriots that caused some $2 billion in property damage and claimed more than 20 livesāthe January 6 protest at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. lasted a few hours, caused minimal damage, and the only person directly killed was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol Police officer. It was, as Tucker Carlson said shortly after the event, a political protest that āgot out of hand.ā
At the rally preceding the events in question, Donald Trump had suggested that people march to the Capitol āpeacefully and patrioticallyāāthese were his exact wordsāin order to make their voices heard. He did not incite a riot; he stirred up a crowd. Was that, given the circumstances, imprudent? Probably. Was it an effort to overthrow the government? Hardly.
I know this is not the narrative that we have all been instructed to parrot. Indeed, to listen to the establishment media and our political masters, the January 6 protest was a dire threat to the very fabric of our nation: the worst assault on āour democracyā since 9/11, since Pearl Harbor, and evenāaccording to Joe Biden last Aprilāsince the Civil War!
Note that phrase āour democracyā: Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and various talking heads have repeated it ad nauseam. But you do not need an advanced degree in hermeneutics to understand that what they mean by āour democracyā is
their oligarchy. Similarly, when Pelosi talks about āthe peopleās house,ā she doesnāt mean a house that welcomes riff-raff like you and me.
I just alluded to Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed supporter of Donald Trump who was shot and killed on January 6. Her fate brings me to the second critical thing to understand about the January 6 insurrection hoax. Namely, that it was not a stand-alone event.
On the contrary, what happened that afternoon, and what happened afterwards, is only intelligible when seen as a chapter in the long-running effort to discredit and, ultimately, to dispose of Donald Trumpāas well as what Hillary Clinton might call the ādeplorableā populist sentiment that brought Trump to power.
In other words, to understand the January 6 insurrection hoax, you also have to understand that other long-running hoax, the Russia collusion hoax. The story of
that hoax begins back in 2015, when the resources of the federal government were first mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign, to frame various people close to Trump, and eventually to launch a full-throated criminal investigation of the Trump administration.
From before Trump took office, the Russia collusion hoax was used as a pretext to create a parallel administration shadowing the elected administration. Remember the Steele dossier, the fantastical document confected by the āwell-regardedā former British spy Christopher Steele? We know now that it was the
only relevant predicate for ordering FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page and other American citizens.
But in truth, the Steele dossier was just opposition dirt covertly paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. From beginning to end, it was a tissue of lies and fabrications. Everyone involved knew all along it was garbageārumors and fantasies fed to a gullible Steele by shady Russian sources. But it was nonetheless used to deploy, illegally, the awesome coercive power of the state against a presidential candidate of whom the ruling bureaucracy and its favored candidate disapproved.
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The indisputable fact about January 6 is that although five people died at or near the Capitol on that day or soon thereafter, none of these deaths was brought about by the protesters. The shot fired by Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd that hit Ashli Babbitt in the neck and killed her was the
only shot fired at the Capitol that day.
No guns were recovered from the Capitol on January 6. Zero.
The liberal commentator Glenn Greenwald further diminished the āarmed insurrectionā narrative in an important column last February titled āThe False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot.ā The title says it all. Kevin Greeson, Greenwald notes, was killed not by the protesters but died of a heart attack outside the Capitol. Benjamin Philips, the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo, died of a stroke that day. Rosanne Boyland, another Trump supporter, was reported by
The New York Times to have been inadvertently ākilled in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.ā But later video shows that, far from that, the police pushed protesters on top of Boyland and would not allow other protesters to pull her out.
Four of the five who died, then, were pro-Trump protesters. And the fifth? Well, that was Officer Sicknickāalso a Trump supporter, as it turned outāwho, contrary to the false report gone viral of
The New York Times, went home, told his family he felt fine, but died a day later from, as
The Washington Post eventually and grudgingly reported, ānatural causes.ā No fire extinguishers were involved in his demise.
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The January 6 insurrection hoax prompts lots of questions.
Why, for example, did the government mobilize 26,000 federal troops from all across the country to surround āthe peopleās houseā following January 6? Why were those troops subjected to FBI vetting, with some of them sent packing?
Why is there some 14,000 hours of video footage of the event on January 6 that the government refuses to release? What are they afraid of letting the public see? More scenes of security guards actually opening doors and politely ushering in protesters? More pictures of FBI informants covertly salted among the crowd?
My own view is that turning Washington into an armed camp was mostly theater. There was no threat that the Washington police could not have handled. But it was also a show of force and an act of intimidation. The message was: āWeāre in charge now, rubes, and donāt you forget it.ā
In truth, there is little threat of domestic terror in this country. But there is plenty of domestic conservatism. And that conservatism is the real focus of the establishmentās ire.
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Of course, it is absolutely critical to the Democratic Party narrative that the January 6 incident be made to seem as violent and crazed as possible. Hence the comparisons to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War. Only thus can pro-Trump Americans be excluded from āour democracyā by being...
imprimis.hillsdale.edu
The excerpts above are only part of the factual and objective content of this lengthy article, definitely worth a read.
