In the Bowels of the D.C. Gulag
As you’ve probably heard, all of us rightward of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are insurrectionists now. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) even went so far as to say last month, about election-integrity efforts, that what “Republicans are doing across the country is really a legislative continuation of what they did on January 6.” Because, of course, voter ID policies — one of which the Barack Obama administration essentially touted in 2013, because it was instituted in Kenya — are just like a political riot, which itself can be just like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. The latter comparison to January 6 (J6) actually was made, mind you, by Vice President Kamala Harris when recounting events during which “our democracy came under assault,” as she put it. “Dates that occupy not only a place on our calendars,” she explained in early January, “but a place in our collective memory: December 7, 1941, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021.”
This is ridiculous, but also entirely necessary if power by any means necessary is the aim. For just as there are so few actual “hate crimes” committed by conservatives against so-called “victim” groups that they must be fabricated (paging Jussie Smollett), the same can be said of “insurrections.” Oh, there was CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, where left-wing George Floyd protesters seized Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood for three weeks in 2020. But though CHAZ “warlord” Raz Simone was videoed next to his Tesla giving followers AR-15s, and the “protesters” perpetrated theft, rape, and murder, Mayor Jenny Durkan reassured us the occupation could breed “a summer of love.” Then there was the two-day, May 2020 attack on the White House, where hundreds of leftists gathered, Secret Service agents were injured, and President Trump had to be moved to an underground bunker. Perhaps that was just part of a spring of love; the media didn’t say. But no one called it an insurrection.
J6 protesters are different, however. If you need an insurrection threat to justify arrogation of power, you need to point to a case of insurrection; and if you have a case of insurrection, it follows that it involved insurrectionists. And if it wasn’t and didn’t, you hammer and distort and spin the facts beyond recognition.
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