January 6th Was an Obvious Progression

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This week is the first week in January, which means this Thursday, is January 6th. The national media fully intends to make a spectacle of it. Now, listen, I don't think there was anything commendable about what happened on January 6th. I think it was a bad day. I think that it was an incursion into the U.S. capital to stop the United States Congress from lawfully picking the next president through the counting of the Electoral College vote. I am totally fine with people being in jail who committed crimes that day. Some of you disagree. Cobb County, Georgia, which was the moderate Republican base of the party in Georgia for years is having a January 6th memorial where they intend to mourn the “patriots” in jail. They weren't patriots. They were criminals.

Nonetheless, while I think it was a no-good, terrible, bad day, the American media wants you to believe that it was the absolute worst day ever. Why is this?

To understand what's going on here, you need to understand a report from the website Morning Consult that does a lot of data-driven analysis. One of the things that they say is the views of the Republican Party are back to normal. People do not hold the Republican Party in contempt for January 6th. In fact, their views of Donald Trump have rebounded as their views of Joe Biden have gone down. Now, this is everything to do with Joe Biden being president, not Donald Trump. But at the same time, Republicans are no longer associated per se with January 6th. The public does not hold it against Republicans.

You will recall that James Carville was on television and said that the Democrats needed to do their best to tie Republicans to January 6th in the same way Republicans have tied Democrats to the riots across the country and that their failure to do so would mean doom in 2022. As perception of the Republican Party has rebounded, the bottom line is the media has to go into double hysterics over January 6th because they've got to convince the American public that they cannot restore Republicans to power. The media is doing this on behalf of the Democratic Party.

Do you know who Oscar Lopez is? Oscar Lopez was a central commander of FALN. In English, the Armed Forces of National Liberation, a Puerto Rican terrorist group. They shot up the house of representatives years ago. Oscar Lopez became one of the central leaders in the organization, and they committed 130 bombings in the United States over a number of years. In 1980, members of the organization took hostage the presidential campaign staff of then sitting president Jimmy Carter and of the Republican candidate for president George H. W. Bush. When Ronald Reagan won, they plotted the kidnapping of Ronald Reagan. They were a violent extremist group led by Oscar Lopez and Barack Obama commuted his sentence in 2017.

Now, what I'm telling you is not new. It's not something unheard of, but it's something oftentimes glossed over by the media. There is a history of left-wing extremism in the country. If you listen at all to the media, they would have you believe that the real problem in this country right now is right-wing domestic terrorism, while in reality there is a long history of left-wing domestic terrorism. The Weather Underground orchestrated dozens and dozens of bombings in the United States, including the US capital, the State Department, and police stations. Environmental terrorist groups have sabotaged, as recently as last year, railroad tracks in this country. That doesn't get the media coverage. However, the media is obsessed with January 6th.

Pay no attention to left-wing violence in this country. Pay attention to January 6th. But also this, go back to the year 2000. The Democrats commonly used a phrase about George W. Bush, that he was selected, not elected. They believe five members of the United States Supreme Court stole the election from them. In 2004, after George Bush won, the Democrats began spreading conspiracy theories about Ohio and the Ohio Secretary of State. I think it was Ken Blackwell at the time. That somehow he had stolen Ohio for George W. Bush. They refused to concede the legitimacy of the election. They thought John Kerry would win it minus the shenanigans in Ohio.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats orchestrated a smear on Donald Trump by claiing he was in bed with the Russians. To this day, most Democrats believe the Russians stole the election for Donald Trump. They believe it was not a legitimate election. Again, Donald Trump was selected, not elected, by the Russians according to them. In 2018, Stacey Abrams lost to Brian Kemp in Georgia. The media would have you believe Stacy Abrams came close to beating Brian Kemp, but for voter suppression. No, that's not actually it. Stacey Abrams came close to a runoff wherein she would've lost to Brian Kemp. It's not that Stacy Abrams came close to beating Bryan Kemp. It's that she came close to a runoff. She couldn't even make a runoff. Hillary Clinton, Terry McAuliffe and other prominent Democrats to this day will tell you Stacey Abrams should actually be governor of Georgia. Stacy Abrams herself refused to concede, and the media has let her get away with it.

But if you deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election, you are a heretic apostate who will burn in hell. How dare you question 2020? Now, I think 2020 was a legitimate election. Were there shenanigans? Yes, but there always are. Were there enough to throw out the election? No, there were not.

What about 2016? There were protests aimed at disrupting the meetings of the Electoral Colleges around the country. Remember that? We sure do gloss over that. In December of 2020, the Electoral College convened in states around the country, and there were attempts to disrupt the Electoral College to stop their lawful selection of Donald Trump. The media gave them all a pass.

The election in 2016, the inauguration, there were riots in the streets of Washington, DC. You all remember the woman who's screaming, holding her hands to her head, screaming, "No" as they announced Donald Trump president of the United States. Do you remember the limousines that they firebombed, the storefronts with the smashed windows, the pink hat designed to be women's reproductive parts? You remember any of that? There were riots in the streets because Donald Trump was elected and inaugurated.

I would argue January 6th is a logical stepping point. It's not that January 6th was unique. It's that, normally, it's the Democrats who do this. This time, it was the Republicans. The media that has given a pass to all the Democratic violence, all the Democratic refusal to concede elections, all the Democratic attempts to delegitimize elections, suddenly, the media is really, really, really upset about Republicans and what happened on January 6th. Now, I think we should all be upset with what happened. I don't think it was good. I think it was a bad day, but I don't think it was the worst day. And I think if you're someone who's given a pass to Democratic attempts to delegitimize elections and to riot when they don't get their way, you really should just keep your mouth shut about happened on January 6th because it is a logical outcome.

Now, I'll tell you what else is a logical outcome of everything that's happened with the media's refusal to focus on some things and the Democratic double standards and the like, Oscar Lopez. Let's go back to him. A terrorist group in this country committed over 130 bombings to try to get their way. You have environmentalist groups engaging in terrorism. You have far-left groups, like the Weather Underground, engaging in terrorism. The media would have you believe it's right-wing extremists. Pay no attention to this, I suppose, where there is a growing movement on the left, even now, for authoritarianism and defensive authoritarianism for climate change.

You've got the New York Times and New York magazine running fawning profiles of a guy who's written a book calling on environmentalists to start blowing up pipelines in order to stop climate change. The London Review of Books, a prominent publication in Great Britain is running, not just articles but also letters to the editor in defense of authoritarians and how you need engage in terrorism. These people claim that now is the time for violence to stop climate change. However, the media doesn't seem to be paying attention to it. I talk about it here.

Let me read you part of this from the London Review of Books. The headline is climate emergency.

The two pieces on Andreas Malm by James Butler and Adam Tooze raise a question that often puzzles me, namely, why do so few movements for environmental justice are willing to consider direct action or armed struggle when these strategies were certainly seen as option in the 20th century anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements? Where indeed are all the eco terrorists? Malm believes that direct action against polluting infrastructure has so far been both a morally legitimate and practically successful strategy in that it actually stops pollution and produces a powerful incentive against continued investment.

If you blow up a fracking installation twice, who will ensure it a third time? In the Global South, movements for environmental justice, are often in essence, a continuation of anticolonial resistance, and are subject to the same kinds of extreme violence and repression. Yet mainstream climate movements in the west, persist in family-friendly demonstrations, pitifully, anemic, political, and well mannered, civil disobedience rather than say organizing a revolutionary cadre of saboteurs are turning out in their thousands to participate in mass direct actions, which if properly carried out, would be very difficult to prevent.

You've got a defense of terrorism for environmentalism. But tell me, please, let's hand ring about January 6th. A day that didn't accomplish anything, except give the media an excuse to not have to focus on left-wing extremism and all of the concerted efforts over decades of the left to refuse to acknowledge electoral outcomes. We're going to hear a lot about that this week. Just keep all this in perspective. And remember, they said nothing when Obama commuted the sentence of Oscar Lopez.