A month ago, the media reported that at least 53 Americans suspected of breaching the U.S. Capitol in January were still incarcerated. One web site more recently said “hundreds” are still behind bars. We know many have been denied bail, some apparently condemned to solitary confinement. Meanwhile, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters are breezily waved through the system if they’re arrested at all.
Is this still America?
Or a tyranny where political dissenters are disappeared?
“Detaining Americans captured within the United States indefinitely without trial or even charge is a clear violation of our Constitution and our values, and it must not be permitted,” says Sen. Feinstein. “We’ve seen over and over again that our criminal justice system is well-equipped to interrogate and convict terrorists, and I support that process.”
The California Democrat is at odds with her party. From the president down, most Democrats are treating the Jan. 6 protests as a genuine threat to the country. Yet the toll from what the Democrats and their scribes in media are calling an insurrection: $1.5 million in damage, roughly 750 federal and local officers injured, and a single non-accidental death, that of military veteran and unarmed protester Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed by an unnamed person inside the Capitol, (whose untimely passing gave Russian President Vladimir Putin the opportunity to imply that the U.S. is an outlaw nation just by asking if the federal government assassinated her.)
Compare this to the wreckage left behind in the last year by Antifa and BLM rioters (including riots in the capital): $2 billion in damage, 27 killed, and 2,000 police officers injured.
A handful of Republican senators have noticed the differences in how the two groups, one clearly hard left and radicalized, the other made up of Republicans, conservatives, and probably some independents, have been treated by federal authorities. They’ve asked the hopelessly political Attorney General Garland Merrick to explain the inconsistencies. Why has the former benefited “from infrequent prosecutions and minimal, if any, penalties,” they want to know, while the latter group is being subjected to a “potential” administration of “unequal justice.”
The latter group includes suspects “from an 18-year-old high school senior from Georgia to a 70-year-old Virginia farmer with no criminal record,” Julie Kelly reported in American Greatness, accused Americans who “have languished for months” in cells “before their trials even have begun.”
The senators also want to know how many from each group have been “placed in solitary confinement.” Of course they know part of the answer already. Zero Antifa and BLM rioters have been thrown into solitary. If they had, a media sympathetic to their barbarism would have by now written hundreds of furious stories, editorials, and opinion columns about the injustices, and would be also running a daily hostage count similar to the coverage given the Americans held by Iran for 444 days during the Carter years.
Stories filtering out from the D.C. facility holding at least some of the suspects include allegations of inhumane treatment and an episode in which a correctional officer screamed at the captives “late at night on 6/1/21 because we had just sang ‘God Bless America’ [sic] from behind our locked doors like we do every night.” There have reportedly been threats of beatings by officers, as well.
Kelly says some family members of the accused believe “prison staff are making life miserable in order to provoke an uprising that will be recorded and used as additional propaganda to show the violent tendencies of the so-called insurrectionists.”
It’s not an outlandish thought. There’s reason to suspect the Capitol incident itself was a setup to trap “deplorables” and forever taint every Trump supporter and Trump voter (not necessarily the same people) as active threats to our republic. (The left instead always uses the term “democracy” because it prefers mob rule to a representative government limited by universal and timeless principles.)
The Capitol Police had been warned three days ahead that the protest could turn ugly. Why, then, was the department unprepared? There is even video of an officer allowing protesters to enter the Capitol through double doors on the upper west terrace. A friendly gesture or compliance with an order from above to stand down?
To call the events of Jan. 6 an “insurrection” is one of the most dishonest narratives in the modern media and political era. Were protesters unruly and even violent both inside and outside the Capitol? They were (but did not kill Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, a lie Joe Biden keeps spreading).
But there could be no insurrection, no attempt to take over the government without sufficient firepower, and the record shows only three of the more than hundreds inside the Capitol and on the grounds have been charged with firearms violations, and it’s not clear if that person was even in the building. Of course a shot was fired, the one that killed Babbitt.
We’re not excusing the poor, occasionally violent, and in some cases un-American, behavior we saw on Jan. 6. But the Democrats are working hard to convince the public that it’s more than it was – overheated emotions that were manifested in trespassing, scuffling with authorities, vandalism, and theft – and are using those being detained in a cruel way to send a message: Political dissension will not be tolerated. It’s the same message tyrants have been sending for decades.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
