By Jacob G. Hornberger
Originally published here by The Future of Freedom Foundation, Jan. 6, 2022
Ever since the January 6 protests got out of control, the mainstream press and the Democrat Party establishment have done everything they can to milk it for all its worth. The one-year anniversary today of that event continues that trend. Just look at the front pages of the mainstream press and you’ll see what I mean.
Make no mistake about it: The statists are going to use this event as a way to further destroy the rights and liberties of the American people. It’s clearly not enough that they’ve already destroyed most of our rights and liberties with their beloved welfare-warfare state, their Cold War antics, their drug war, their war on immigrants, their regulatory state, their war-on-terrorism antics, their Federal Reserve inflationary antics, and their COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates. No, all of that destruction of our rights and liberties has clearly not been enough for these people. Now they want to use the January 6 Capitol protests to continue and maybe even complete the process.
Of course, there is precedent for this sort of thing, which undoubtedly is not lost on these people. That precedent occurred in Nazi Germany. In 1933, terrorists fire-bombed the Reichstag. The terrorists were suspected of being communists. Germany’s chancellor, Adolf Hitler, went ballistic and demanded that the Reichstag give him extraordinary emergency powers to deal with the big twin-threat now facing Germany.
That big twin-threat consisted of communism and terrorism, both of which, ironically, became the U.S. national-security establishment’s big boogeymen during the Cold War and then the post-Cold War era.
There was one big difference though between the Reichstag Fire and the January 6 protests in the Capitol. The Reichstag terrorists actually intended to inflict massive damage on the Reichstag. The January 6 protestors had no such intention.
Oh, yes, I know that mainstream press continues to describe the January 6 protests as a “deadly insurrection.” But the only person who was killed was one of the protestors. Her name was Ashli Babbit. She was shot to death by a Capitol policeman who got scared. She was not armed and she posed no deadly threat to the cop or anyone else. In fact, he could have fired over her head as a warning for her to back off, which she undoubtedly would have done. Instead, he fired directly at her and killed her because he was scared. That’s why the mainstream press describes the protest as a “deadly insurrection.”
If the protestors had intended to inflict death and massive damage, they would have gone into the Capitol with AR-15s and other high-powered weaponry. They were fully capable of doing that. Many of them were military veterans.
Of course, if they had done that, we all know what the result would have been. Think Waco and Ruby Ridge, followed by USA PATRIOT Acts 2, 3, 4, and 5.
But the January 6 protestors didn’t take high-powered weapons into the Capitol and begin killing people. They didn’t even start a fire inside the Capitol. At most, they committed some acts of vandalism. The entire event was nothing more than a protest that got out of control. That is reflected by the criminal charges and criminal prosecutions that have been brought by the Justice Department.
But, hey, why let a good crisis go to waste, right? Certainly Hitler didn’t. He got those temporary emergency powers, which he never relinquished. And it’s obvious that the American statists who have already destroyed most of our rights and liberties are not going to rest until they complete the process. That’s why they will continue milking the January 6 protests for everything they’re worth.