January 6 Capitol riot was no coup — ignore hysterical Democrats
When Americans were struggling to recover from the shock of 9/11 in 2001, it is fortunate they were unaware of the more traumatic event that still lay ahead of them: 1/6 in 2021. Vice-President Kamala Harris has declared the riot at the Capitol in Washington a year ago equivalent to both 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. While it is reassuring to discover that Harris, the invisible Democrat vice-president, is still with us, that claim is not only nonsensical, but deeply offensive, trivialising the appalling death toll of both those historical events, in each of which more than 3,000 Americans lost their lives.
The total fatality rate on 6 January amounted to five people, four of them rioters. Of those, two died of heart attacks, one was originally claimed to have been trampled to death but is now known to have died of an accidental drug overdose, and a policeman suffered a stroke. The one death from a direct act of violence was that of Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, shot by a policeman.
To describe this riot as an “insurrection” or a “coup” is utterly ridiculous. Yet the Democrats have ratcheted up their rhetoric while the mainstream media – prominent among them our own complicit BBC – have indulged in an orgy of commemorative commentary, with the aim of imposing the narrative that American democracy narrowly survived a coup attempt orchestrated by Donald Trump and Republicans. The notion that a few hundred protesters disgracefully rioting in the halls of Congress amounted to a calculated attempt to seize power invites ridicule. If the Democrats imagine this distortion of reality is playing well in Main Street, Peoria they are sadly deluded.
The public knows that those same Democrats, so anguished by the buffoonery of 6 January, were undismayed by the violent Antifa/BLM riots in 2020, in which five times as many people died as on Capitol Hill and to which Democratic mayors responded by slashing police funding and hobbling the forces of law and order. When Portland blazed, the scenes there were much closer to insurrection than what occurred in Washington. But the perpetrators were “woke” leftists, so their behaviour was categorised by American media and the BBC as “largely peaceful protests”. Had the Capitol invaders been leftists, that episode too would have been classed as a largely peaceful protest.
The Democrats’ original purpose was to convict Donald Trump of inciting insurrection, to disqualify him as a candidate in 2024. In that ambition they have failed. The House of Representatives’ inquiry into the riot is a travesty: of its nine members, only two are Republicans, one of them being Liz Cheney who is more anti-Trump than some Democrats. The committee states it is investigating the actions of “insurrectionists” who perpetrated a “domestic terror attack”. How is that for prejudging an issue before investigating it?
The FBI has dismissed the notion that the riot was centrally organised. As for its being an attempted coup, were several hundred hysterical protesters likely to impose their rule on 330 million Americans? The fact is that the leftist establishment is so consumed with rage at any challenge to its power that it imagines repeatedly rehearsing fantasies about “insurrection” and “coup” will brainwash Americans into sharing their delusions. In fact, the pro-Democrat establishment has made a fool of itself. So has the BBC. Over the past week, even some of the corporation’s wall-to-wall obsessive coverage of “climate change” was displaced by solemn lefties talking to themselves about American democracy’s near-death experience.
Predictably, not a shred of evidence has emerged, after a year of digging, to implicate Donald Trump in orchestrating an imaginary coup. It is the Russian intervention chimera all over again and with the same outcome. Already the fluid phrase “dereliction of duty” is beginning to supplant “treason” in the tired vocabulary of Democrat denunciation. Trump was acquitted by the Senate on the impeachment charge brought by Nancy Pelosi.
Still the obsession is peddled by the establishment, spearheaded by the New York Times, with its headline: “Every Day is Jan. 6 Now”. That is precisely the media agenda; its problem is that stopping time like a broken town hall clock and obsessing over one, increasingly irrelevant, story is not the best way to retain readers, listeners or viewers. The Democratic fantasy will not hold water.
As Pat Buchanan wrote last week: “Was that QAnon shaman occupying the chair in the Senate chamber really the moral equivalent of Mohamed Atta ramming an airliner into the World Trade Center or Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto plotting the Dec. 7 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor?”
The answer to that question will depend on the individual respondent’s state of mental health, which today means whether it is a Republican or Democrat voter. Buchanan also pointed out another reason the Democrats cannot let go of January 6: “Democrats have no other issue on which to run this November.”
That is self-evident. What else could they present to the electorate as justification for remaining in office? The global humiliation of Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, a humiliation so extreme it has emboldened Russia to challenge the West? The rag-bag of mutilated “infrastructure” legislation that Democrats have unsuccessfully dragged through Congress? The mounting inflation that Biden’s socialist policies have aggravated?
Across the Western world, the distinguishing characteristic of the Left is a retreat into a world of unreality and delusion, in which rioters (but only right-of-centre ones) become “insurrectionists”, taxpayers can indefinitely subsidise a free lunch for much of the population, human beings can change sex at will, along with an ever-growing number of similar fantasies, sustained by coercion and the complicity of a formerly neutral media, now conscripted as the propagandist arm of what Soviet regimes used to call the organs of state security.
Insurrection? America knows what insurrection looks like. When rebel artillery bombards Fort Sumter and initiates a civil war in which 750,000 Americans die – that is insurrection. The crass hyperbole of leftist politicians and commentators, with our own irretrievably discredited BBC prominent among them, testifies to the extent to which the Left has lost touch with reality and the media with objective truth.