“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” Remember these words from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? Watching cops as weeping victims after months of cops as racist killers. With whom is Oceania now at war?
What do I think about Pelosi’s hand-picked committee? I would like get an explanation for why police officers were letting protestors into the Capitol building that day. I would like to know the identity of the man who killed Ashli Babbitt. I would like to know if and how many FBI agents were involved in the planning and execution of the riot (The Michigan Kidnapping Plot and January 6—Is There a Connection?). But Pelosi’s committee is a staged propaganda event to manufacture a lie that the threat to the republic is populist-nationalism and not the globalism the establishment promotes. Having twice failed to remove the President via impeachment, the establishment is reduced to making mountains out of molehills.
As a legal matter, Russiagate couldn’t even get off the ground. Trump was acquitted in the Ukraine affair. A call to peacefully beseech legislators twisted into a charge of incitement failed also. Now they are going after Trump by ostensibly going after the deplorables. (Suppressing the Rabble: Portraying Conservatism and Republicanism as Fringe and Dangerous; “A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous; A Peaceful Transition of Political Power.) Democrats think the public is as deluded as they pretend to be. I hope they are wrong.
I’m a law and order guy. Those who committed violence on that day and broke the law should be punished. I’ve always said this. (The Relative Ethics of Occupying Capitol Buildings.) But getting to the bottom of those acts is the work of ordinary police work, not a 9-11 style government inquiry. January 6 was not the work of a grand conspiracy—at least not by the majority of those who were arrested in the wake of those events. The rabble was overcome by a moment of passion. And while I do not condone law breaking, I understand their passion. Besides, if their goal was to stop the certification of Electoral College votes Biden as president, then their actions had the opposite effect. And that does make me suspicious.
As I reported on Freedom and Reason, most of those who entered the Capitol building who have been charged (presently 510 individuals) have been charged with rather minor offenses (because their offenses were rather minor), but you wouldn’t know it by the draconian measures thrown at them. Participants are being held in solitary confinement in Washington D.C.’s city jail. The justification for “restrictive housing” for the accused was promoted as a safety measure. They are now alone in a cell for 23 hours as day. This is not pretrial detention. This is action designed to make minor offenses appear serious. And it is torture.
A big giveaway to Pelosi’s idea behind all of this is the selection to the panel of Liz Cheney, a well-known neoconservative establishment figure. She represents the Bush-Cheney warmongering side of the Republicans. These people are snakes (see War Hawks and the Ugly American). And while Pelosi is keeping Republicans with integrity off the panel, the panel she created is allowing dramatic liars to “testify.”
But we do need an inquiry into Antifa and Black Lives Matter violence. We need to know the reasoning behind corporate funding and political support for a racist neo-Maoist movement that caused billions of dollars in property damage, looted and ruined businesses, assaulted and even killed civilians, attacked police officers, toppled statues and desecrated monuments, overturned police cars, set police precinct buildings on fire, burned churches, and that threatened to storm the White House. We need to get in the open the full character and purpose of an anti-Enlightenment/anti-Western movement that demands the depolicing of our communities, and as a consequence, in a racially selective manner, the underprotection of black and brown majority neighborhoods, as well as the disruption of the nuclear family in the face of community violence fuelded by the absence of black fathers in the family system. (See Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Bad Comparisons and the Call for Racially Differentiated Law Enforcement; On Riots and the Postmodern Corruption of the Culture of Protest; Stop Blaming Police and Focus on Criminality—That Will Make Our Communities Safer; Disrupting the Western-Prescribed Nuclear Family Requirement. What Does That Mean? A Lot More than You Think.)
The threat to the American republic is not those Americans who throw their support behind Trump and his ilk. They are a threat to the establishment that threatens the future of the American republic. Whatever you think of conservatives, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
freedom and reason 