I & I Editorial BoardFor more than two years, Democrats and the media have been completely and totally fixated on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, using carefully selected clips from more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage to tell their story of a violent insurrection.
But now that Fox News has gained access to the complete video record and is providing the public with a far more complete picture of what happened that day, we fully expect the left to suddenly decide that Jan. 6 isn’t worth talking about any more.
Shortly after Republicans took control of the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy decided to make the complete set of surveillance videos available to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. You can debate McCarthy’s choice of who got access all you want. But the result is that the public has, for the first time, seen surveillance footage Democrats didn’t want Americans to see. Such as evidence of Capitol Police officers politely escorting peaceful demonstrators around the building.
The newly available footage also made it clear that the police officer who the Trump mob supposedly killed, Brian Sicknick, was walking around unharmed after the “deadly” attack occurred. Other narratives are failing to hold up.
Not surprisingly, Democrats are blasting Carlson, denouncing Fox News, and demanding that the videos remain a state secret.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a primetime cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed.
That’s rich, considering that Democrats spent the past two years doing exactly that.
Schumer went on to say: “When people don’t believe elections are on the level, that’s the beginning of the end of this bold experiment in democracy that has gone on for more than 200 years.”
That’s also rich, given that Democrats spent four years claiming that the 2016 election had been stolen. Hillary Clinton still refuses to admit that she lost honestly and fairly.
That wasn’t the first time Democrats challenged the integrity of presidential elections.
As the Daily Caller helpfully reminds us:
Democrats forced votes in the House of Representatives and Senate on whether to uphold an objection to Ohio’s electoral votes in the 2004 election by then-Democratic Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio and Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California on Jan. 6, 2005, while House Democrats attempted to object to the results of the 2000 and 2016 election on Jan. 6, 2001 and Jan. 6, 2017, but did not have the support of a Senator, according to the Congressional Record.
What is somewhat surprising, but probably shouldn’t be, is the reaction from some Republicans to the release of this additional Jan. 6 footage.
At a GOP leadership press conference, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said “It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks.”
McConnell said he was 100% on board with a letter Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger delivered to his team, which among other things complained that Carlson “conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” and called it a “disturbing accusation” that Sicknick’s death had nothing to do with the riot.
North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer added to the chorus of complaints, saying “I think that breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the United States Capitol against the borders of police is a crime.”
Well, Cramer’s right about that. The actions of those people were criminal. And anyone who participated in the destruction deserved to be brought to justice.
But that’s not what Democrats have been claiming for the past two years.
Democrats weren’t simply upset that a handful of crazy Trump supporters damaged the Capitol and caused some lawmakers to be afraid. They were saying, as the White House still says, that this was the biggest threat to the union since the Civil War.
They wanted the FBI to spread a dragnet out for anyone who came into the building that day and have them all convicted as insurrectionists. They’ve been happy to keep many of them locked in isolation without a trial.
And, remember, it was the Democrats’ characterization of the events that was manipulative. It’s Democrats who decided to raise the stakes, hold kangaroo court hearings, and grossly misrepresent the events of Jan. 6.
If you don’t think we’re right about this, try a thought experiment. Imagine if some Democrats felt that a presidential election had been stolen and held protest rallies that turned violent. How would Democrats themselves react? Would they decry it as a threat to the nation? Or would they pass it off as people expressing their first amendment rights in “mostly peaceful” demonstrations?
Oh, wait, you don’t need to conduct a thought experiment.
Because that’s exactly what happened in 2016 and 2017, when the left erupted into violent protests after a candidate, whom they didn’t like, won the election that they thought was rigged.
If further releases of the surveillance footage – that Democrats purposely kept hidden from view – continue to undercut this narrative, what are they going to do? Change the subject.
They (along with their equally morally flexible media comrades) will suddenly decide that all this talk about Jan. 6 is just a distraction from more important issues.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Boy, I am confused. I thought Hillary Clinton conceded the 2016 lost to Trump.
This is but one article that might help clear up your confusion: https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-refuses-accept-her-005200051.html
Yes, she conceded, but that didnt stop herself and a slew of other Democrats, including the current minority leader of the house, to claim Trumps win was fraudulent and/or illegitimate. That would make them “election deniers”, but I dont recall the media calling them that, do you?
It doesn’t take a thought experiment to realize that, had the Democrats presented, on J7, a representative cross-section of clips, or even just the same clips that Tucker Carlson showed, likely none of the devious manipulation of Leftist voters’ capacity to think or the grievous miscarriages of justice, would’ve occurred. Never to let a good crisis go to waste is not the best of Saul Alinsky‘s political recommendations.
More importantly, these events suggest that there is a deep vein of dishonesty running through the Left, a vein that makes them unworthy of holding the presidency.
Hoisted by their own petard.
Not everybody at the party got into a fistfight doesn’t mean no fistfights occurred, only that not everybody was ‘kung fu fighting’. It destroys the narrative that it was 100% battle engaged and that the whole crowd aimed to cause a problem. It’s harder to refer to the whole thing as an insurrection when you realize this. It doesn’t make all that happened not a crime, but it does make it not an act of rebellion.
It doesn’t exonerate anyone who hit, sprayed, clubbed or otherwise fought with police. It does not reverse the fact that showing up in an crowd to try some sort of populist denial of process is deeply stupid and at best was going to fail. Every vote for Joe Biden could have been by martians, Estonians, and people dead for 40 years, and there is still no place in a society of laws for regular citizens to deal with the problems as any more than a protest, and when the fists and sprays and flags fly, that ends. Deep veins of dishonesty abound. It’s as much a lie to call it a picnic as it is to call it the second revolutionary war.
There’s no moving on til the political prisoners are freed, pardoned, and compensated.
‘Schumer went on to say: “When people don’t believe elections are on the level, that’s the beginning of the end of this bold experiment in democracy that has gone on for more than 200 years.”’
It’s two years too late for anybody to take this clown seriously.
There were many, many problems with the 2020 election, but the two that are easiest to understand are that Tuesday is not Friday, and mail-in ballots should have postmarks to prove that they were mailed in.
In Pennsylvania, where I live, the election law had three important provisions that respectively required all mail-in ballots to have legible postmarks, that required all mail-in ballots to be delivered by 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Election Day, and finally required that the mail-in ballots would be rendered invalid unless all other provisions in that law, Act 77, were followed. The Pennsylvania and US Supreme Courts, by a 4-3 vote and a tied 4-4 vote respectively, changed this so that no postmarks were needed for any putative “mail-in” ballots, and that such ballots would be counted if they arrived before 5:00 p.m. on the Friday after Election Day. The third provision, that every part of the law must be followed or else all mail-in ballots would be invalidated, was simply ignored by all three branches of the state government.
The PA and US Supreme Courts, by overriding the law that was written by the state legislature, directly contradicted the following part of the US Constitution: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof”. This was extremely blatant, as the courts changed a deadline from Tuesday to Friday, and ruled that ballots with no postmarks somehow counted as “mail-in” ballots. The majority of justices simply ignored this absolute contradiction of the very plain language in the US Constitution.
The difference between putting a fake ballot in a drop box and putting a fake ballot in a mail box is that a fake ballot with a postmark is both an act of voting fraud and an act of mail fraud. The maximum penalty for any type of voting fraud is one year in prison and a $1000 fine per count. The maximum penalty for most types of mail fraud is twenty years in prison and a $250,000 fine per count. It should be obvious why Democrats prefer drop boxes over mail boxes.
Biden was officially credited with winning 50.01% of the votes cast in the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. He has created an entirely new division of the US Postal Service to supervise mail-in ballots. I expect more shenanigans in the next election cycle.
More details are here: https://ensign.substack.com/p/a-long-train-of-abuses-and-usurpations
Thank you for the vital provisions of the situation in PA!! How the SCOTUS could ignore this information is beyond my imagination!!
Well, of course SOME Supreme Court justices did NOT ignore it. You can probably guess which ones did, and which ones didn’t, but you can also look it up.
I not only looked up the US Supreme Court ruling, I took the first four paragraphs of Justice Alito’s opinion (in which he was joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch), removed the many legal references for the sake of improving clarity and readability, and posted this long excerpt on my substack here:
https://ensign.substack.com/p/us-supreme-court-justice-alito-pa
The title is ‘US Supreme Court Justice Alito: PA election rules probably “violated the Federal Constitution”’.
My goodness, I cant remember the last time Ive read such utter common sense and bald faced truth in the media. Bravo I&I Editorial board. You hit the nail on the head, with every word.
This column is pure ,right wing ,partisan horse sh-t. Trying to put a patina on the events of that day by a large group of intellectually challenged ,Trump supporting thugs ,who’s only goal was to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
Seems like you are angry about something…not a clue as to what?
Try to be a wee less insulting and do more in depth research about President Trump and that day when almost one million Americans came out with their families to hear what a group of speakers had to say about the rather obvious gerrymandering of a national election.
“Morally flexible media” says it all along with Senate leaders and their minority leader lackeys we see as plain as day reacting like they always do as a gaggle of high school sophomores who haven’t gotten their way. Again. When will the lying stop? How about some apology for destroying the public trust?