A Year After The Capitol Riot
Whether it's downplaying the events of that day or exaggerating them, many people still have a distorted view of what happened.
This week we reached the first anniversary of the infamous Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021, when a large group of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 election. While the actions of those involved range from ill-advised to dangerously violent, the riot isn’t quite as comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11 as people like Kamala Harris want to suggest. That doesn’t mean that we should brush off what happened, but we shouldn’t be so quick to exaggerate what it was. You can condemn the actions taken that day without resorting to hyperbole.
The riot took place after a rally held by former President Donald Trump in an attempt to “stop the steal” — a slogan that referenced his denial of the results of the 2020 election, which he lost. He and some of his lawyers like Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell contested the results almost immediately after it was announced that Biden had won, although they were never able to bring enough evidence to court to prove their claims, despite having many opportunities to do so in several states. The attempts to prove the election was stolen continued late into last year, with an audit of Maricopa County, Arizona failing to provide proof of massive voter fraud. Despite the lack of evidence, Trump was quite capable of convincing his base to believe he had been robbed of a second term.
Trump’s speech at the end of the rally never made any direct calls for violence, which I think is an important fact to keep in mind. The only quote that could really be misconstrued that way was toward the end of the speech when he told his supporters they would have to “fight like hell” or they were “not going to have a country anymore.” The best example of an actual call for violence was from Rudy Guiliani when he said there should be “trial by combat” during his speech earlier in the rally. Those words could be considered typical political rhetoric under normal circumstances, and inflammatory language is in fact protected by the First Amendment unless it is not only likely to cause violence, but is said with the intention to do so, knowing violence is a probable result.
However, you could also make the argument that Trump, as President, should’ve realized that his words would carry a large amount of weight, as would his support for Guiliani’s earlier remarks; his speech also followed weeks of Trump and his team claiming the election was stolen and that the country was being hijacked by “radical leftist Democrats”. That rhetoric could’ve possibly been stirring up his base long before the rally dissolved into a politically motivated riot, which is a risk Trump should have been aware of.
Those arguments did get brought up during the impeachment hearings that followed in the weeks after the riot, which ultimately led to Trump’s second impeachment by the House; though, like the first one, he wasn’t convicted by the Senate. Even though it was constitutionally protected speech, impeachment is not the same thing as a criminal trial; meaning rather than the burden of proving criminal intent, they instead needed to show Trump’s neglect of his responsibilities as President. I would argue the speech provided less of that proof than Trump’s incredibly belated and half-assed response calling for rioters to “go home in peace” long after much of the damage was done.
Many people had already begun storming the Capitol before Trump was finished speaking, but that doesn’t mean those people weren’t originally at the rally, or that no one joined the mob after the former president’s speech. It’s also naive to think that none of the people who initially caused the riot were Trump supporters. While there is evidence of one or two far-left agitators participating with the mob that entered the Capitol building, (one of whom, John Sullivan, has even been called a provocateur by Black Lives Matter) the idea that Antifa staged the entire event in an attempt to make Trump and his supporters look bad is obviously false.
A more likely theory — though one that also lacks conclusive evidence — is that the FBI had infiltrated the groups that organized the protest in order to provoke them to engage in violence so they could then turn around and take credit for busting the perpetrators. Again, as of now, there is little evidence to support this theory, but this is not something that is only out of the world of baseless conspiracy theories. The FBI has been known to engage in this type of behavior in the past, with the most relevant example being the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer back in 2020. While this doesn’t mean that every person who attended the Capitol Riot was an undercover agent, it is worth keeping in mind that it’s possible the mob may have had agent provocateurs in their midst. (This could also be true of the many Black Lives Matter protests that took place during the summer of 2020.)
The riot itself was also far less violent than the corporate press is still making it out to be. That’s not to say that property wasn’t damaged and that violence didn’t break out, but it wasn’t the armed insurrection that it has been presented as. For months afterward, the media spread the false narrative that the Capitol Police officer who died the day after the protest, Brian Sicknick, had been bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher. In reality, he died of natural causes.
The only person who was murdered that day was Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, who was shot point-blank by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to climb through a broken window. Much like nearly everyone in attendance that day, Babbitt was unarmed when she was shot. Had she been killed under different circumstances, she would’ve been considered another tragic victim of police brutality — and rightfully so — but since she was a Trump supporter at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the same people who had protested excessive force by police all over the country mere months earlier barely even batted an eye at her death. Yes, she engaged in the riot, but she was unarmed and not actively harming anyone when she was shot. As is the case in so many officer-involved shootings, the officer who shot her should have attempted to deter her through other means before resorting to lethal force.
Caring about victims of police brutality isn’t the only principle many on the left have seemed to forget about when discussing those who took part in the events of that day. Many people who claim to champion civil rights have turned a blind eye to the fact that many of those arrested on various charges in connection with the Capitol Riot have been held in solitary confinement for months on end without being convicted of a crime, which is something that should be condemned by anyone who claims to support criminal justice reform.
Despite the riot being labeled as an attempted coup or an insurrection, at the time of this writing, no one out of the more than 700 people facing charges for their participation in the riot, has been charged with sedition or treason, which is what you’d expect had this actually been what many claim it was. Whether Trump had the intention of riling up his base as an attempt to remain in power rather than out of a genuine belief that the election was stolen is debatable. And if that’s true then I could see how you could refer to that as some sort of attempted coup, at least for his part; but as for the thousands of people there to support him, there is little evidence to suggest that this was an organized attempt to overthrow the government. Rather, it was a perfect example of mob mentality, showing how it only takes a small portion of a crowd resorting to violence to turn a peaceful protest into a dangerous riot.
In the year since, much more information about what happened that day has emerged, through the January 6 Commission, a bipartisan committee in Congress tasked with investigating the riot and what led up to it. So far, the investigation has revealed a PowerPoint presentation filled with ideas on how to keep Trump in power. The presentation was circulated by retired Army colonel Phil Waldron, who had met with Trump at the White House several times after the election. The investigation has also revealed that many allies of the former president had sent text messages to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the riot, requesting for Trump to intervene. A few examples of the people who sent those text messages include Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as Donald Trump Jr.
The tactics of the January 6 Commission are not without their share of controversy, with some people even raising concerns that they may be unconstitutional. Journalist Glenn Greenwald makes that case in an article he posted to his Substack, citing the fact that the Commission has placed subpoenas not only on government officials with ties to Trump, but on 11 private citizens as well. The reason for the subpoenas on those citizens is the fact that they applied for permits for the protest at the Capitol that day, a right that is protected by the First Amendment. Greenwald also raises several other concerns in his article. As of now, the Commission has yet to finish their investigation.
So here we are, a year later, and it’s more of the same. Many who support Trump still believe the election was stolen, and many who don’t support him believe 1/6 was an attack on the same level as 9/11. As usual, those of us viewing the event rationally instead of emotionally are drowned out by the hyperbolic and misinformed opinions that happen to get all of the attention. Those on the right are calling for changes to the voting process to avoid more “fraud” in the future, and those on the left are calling for new authority to be vested in the government to avoid another “attack”. My suggestion, as always, is to avoid letting the government accumulate more power simply because they exploit whichever fear you subscribe to.
Don’t let politicians use this as another excuse to expand their power and dissolve our rights while pretending it’s for our safety. While the events of that day are lamentable and should be treated accordingly, that doesn’t mean we should be tricked into viewing it as “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” even if Biden and large swaths of the media insist that it was. A few hundred unarmed people making their way inside (or being ushered into) the Capitol to rifle through some offices, steal some podiums, and damage some property for a few hours is worthy of condemnation, but it was not a case of domestic terrorism that warrants granting the government new authority. Anyone in a position of power telling you that it was is using fear and manipulation to convince you to allow them the opportunity to expand their control over your life. Don’t fall for it.
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