On Jan. 30 The Salem News Channel posted a video of Carl Jackson interviewing Jake Lang, one of the many Capitol “insurrectionists” recently pardoned by Donald Trump. Lang spent more than 4 years behind bars for swinging a baseball bat at Capitol officers seeking to deter the crowds surging towards them. He claims in the interview to have simply been defending non-violent protesters who were being assaulted with rubber bullets and chemicals for merely walking through the building. Were they there illegally? Of course they were! But were they violent “insurrectionists” and should Lang have spent over 4 years in prison for his actions that day? His conversation with Jackson suggests both the corruption of Biden’s judiciary and the brazenly biased spin put on the events of Jan. 6. by the mainstream media.
Due process apparently having been suspended for those who invaded the Capitol, Lang says that aside from being denied a trial for over 4 years, he was kept in solitary confinement for most of that time and granted little contact whatsoever with his family! Convinced that he was defending America’s Democracy, given the fraud to which mail-in voting was subject and the bias of a media which disgustingly dismissed reports of Hunter Biden’s corruption in the weeks before the election, Lang points out that many of the “insurrectionists” were in fact military veterans also convinced that they were doing their patriotic duty. Ashli Babbit was such a veteran and the only murder victim of that day, shot by a Capitol officer who has yet to face the consequences of his cowardly act.
In Jan. of 2024, ABC News reported that 1265 had been charged as a result of the “insurrection,” 460 of them incarcerated for various felonies. Yes, 15 officers had needed hospitalization and no doubt those responsible were felons. But many of the 460 were charged with crimes such as “seditious conspiracy,” a term implicit with the assumption that they were intent on overthrowing the government. Yet it is a known fact that some Capitol doors were intentionally left open, allowing the protesters to enter unopposed. The events of Jan. 6 and the behaviour of its participants, in other words, are fraught with all sorts of ambiguities. Yet as reported by ABC, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the investigation of those involved was perhaps the most intense and expensive in all of U.S. history. Given that 99% of those being investigated were guilty of no acts of violence whatsoever, given that they were clearly intent on expressing their disdain for a political/cultural elite which had come to deem “ordinary” Americans as “populist” simpletons, was not the judiciary’s highly questionable treatment of those arrested an ironic example of the brazen bias [i.e. corruption] which the “insurrectionists” were protesting in the first place?
One reads day after day of recidivist criminals arrested multiple times only to be released on bail again and again [i.e., George Floyd?]. Yet Lang points out that several of his fellow protesters had spent their entire fortunes on legal fees in attempting to win their release from federal prison. Even after the ABC report cited above, the FBI went on with its vendetta, arresting Blaze reporter Steve Baker in March of 2024. As I discussed in a previous blog, Baker was clearly intent on recording the day’s events and did nothing of an “insurrectionist” nature. But as he had entered the Capitol illegally and “antagonized” its defenders with his words, he was charged with 4 misdemeanours.
Implying that an insane double-standard has infected the American judicial system, conservative Larry Elder wondered how many of the B.L.M. rioters of 2020 had been imprisoned. In response to George Floyd’s death, those from the Left, both Black and White, destroyed over 2 billion dollars worth of property, pillaging and burning the businesses of thousands of Americans deemed to be “privileged” while injuring approximately 2000 cops in the process. Elder is a Black man who lets his brain rather than his melanin do his thinking. His belief, shared by many conservatives, that the crimes of the B.L.M. rioters of 2020 were submitted to an entirely different set of criteria than those used to indict the “insurrectionists” of 2021, is of course denounced by the Left as just so much “misinformation.” Here is a wonderful example of Leftist “logic.”
On Aug. 30, 2021, the Associated Press published an article headlined: “Records rebut claims of unequal treatment of Jan. 6 rioters.” By mid 2021, we are told, approximately 120 B.L.M. “protesters” had been arrested across the States for acts of violence, including arson. At least 10 had received terms of 5 years or more. But dozens of buildings had been set ablaze and hundreds of millions in damages and theft had been inflicted on innocent Americans some of whom, ironically, were Black. Were the 120 arrests cited in the A.P. article the result of a thorough investigation of the events of the previous 15 months, or of a cowardly reluctance to investigate those events for fear of being denounced as racist? By the time the B.L.M. demonstrations ended in 2023, 164 different structures had apparently been set ablaze and 2 billion dollars in damages inflicted. Journalist Steve Baker was arrested more than 3 years after entering the Capitol. One wonders if the FBI is equally intent on continuing to hunt down the criminals of the B.L.M. movement. The answer, of course, is No! Merrick Garland, A.G. up until the recent past, submitted the many atrocities of B.L.M. to nothing like the inquisition imposed on the supporters of Donald Trump. The former, apparently, are the innocent victims of a country that is systemically racist, while those who voted for the Orange One are clearly too stupid to even have a vote.
Such is the bias that pervades our culture. Trump’s personality, unfortunately, makes him easy to dislike. However I judge him not on the quality of his demeanour but on the rationality of his policies. His approach to the Mexican border, to the surgical transitioning of kids under the age of 18, to the DEI practice of hiring people because of their colour, gender or sexual orientation rather than their competency, I find perfectly Reasonable. At the same time I find his recent attack on Canada absurd in its failure to grant that well over 90% of the “illegals” and fentanyl presently threatening America, came across the Mexican rather than the Canadian border. I am not, in other words, a slavish admirer of Donald Trump, but rather a rationalist in search of rational solutions to our various existential problems. Would that our “intellectuals,” politicians and media elites were similarly motivated. Perhaps then we might transcend the irrational enmity that presently makes meaningful discussion between the Left and the Right virtually impossible.