Anomalies in the Capitol Melee

Somebody needs to get a memo to the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys in charge of arresting and prosecuting the people involved in the January 6 melee at the Capitol. At this point, all I see is that these people are being charged with offenses like trespass, disorderly conduct, and theft. Judging by what leftists are saying and what the mainstream press is reporting, these people should be charged with treason, insurrection, revolution, rebellion, invasion, terrorism, and an attempt to violently overthrow the government of the United States. How come the Justice Department doesn’t realize that, at least not yet?

In fact, I’m surprised that leftists and the mainstream press aren’t insisting that all the protestors, including those on both the inside and outside of the Capitol, be charged with a gigantic conspiracy to violently overthrow the U.S. government. Maybe they’re concerned about being labeled “conspiracy theorists.”

One of the fascinating aspects of this supposed attempt to conquer the U.S. government is the small amount of bloodshed. In fact, only one person was shot during the melee. That’s incredible. Wouldn’t you think that revolutionaries would enter the Capitol with all guns blaring, including M-16s, AK-47s, and Glock semiautomatic handguns?

Well, the left has an explanation for this phenomenon: Washington, D.C.’s, strict gun control laws. You see, the idea is that the reason that the revolutionaries didn’t commit a mass killing in the Capitol, like at Columbine, was because D.C.’s gun-control laws prohibit people from openly carrying guns.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at this article by one Kevin Cullen, a columnist for the Boston Globe. According to him, that’s the reason that the insurrectionists didn’t shoot people during what he calls “the putsch.” If that’s not a testament to what the government’s control over education does to people’s reasoning ability, I don’t know what is. 

What about the one person who was shot? That was a woman named Ashli Babbitt, a 14-year Air Force veteran from California. She was shot by a Capitol police officer as she was being hoisted up to the rim of a broken window inside the Capitol.

Babbit wasn’t armed, and she wasn’t assaulting anyone at the time she was shot dead. She wasn’t threatening anyone, including the person who shot her.

It’s standard law that law-enforcement officers are permitted to use deadly force only in very limited circumstances, primarily when they are in reasonable fear that their lives are being threatened. Offenses such as disorderly conduct, theft, and trespass don’t justify the use of deadly force (except trespass into one’s home).

Why did that Capitol policeman shoot Ashli Babbitt? We don’t know. And unfortunately, the left and the mainstream press are not demanding an explanation, much as they do, correctly, when an unarmed black person is shot and killed by the cops. That hypocritical indifference to Babbitt’s life could conceivably give rise to a wider use of the phrase among white nationalists, “White lives matter too.”

Two other people died in the melee from heart attacks. That’s amazing. Wouldn’t you think that people who were set on a course of conquering the U.S. government would go and get a physical before attempting this monumental feat?

There was one police officer killed during the melee. According to the New York Times, “The circumstances surrounding Mr. Sicknick’s death were not immediately clear, and the Capitol Police said only that he had ‘passed away due to injuries sustained while on duty.’ At some point in the chaos — with the mob rampaging through the halls of Congress while lawmakers were forced to hide under their desks — he was struck with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials.” [Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Sicknick’s death was due to the fire extinguisher hitting him in the head.]

The reason for the Capitol melee revolves around the protestors’ conviction that Joe Biden won the presidential race through massive fraud, a claim that the left and the mainstream media has pooh-poohed from the beginning.

Now, there is no doubt that Trump and his supporters have failed to produce the evidence of fraud that would be necessary to overturn the election. But what I have found fascinating is how the left and the mainstream press have jumped from that fact to a firm conclusion that there was no massive fraud.

How can they know that? It stands to reason that just because fraud hasn’t been discovered doesn’t mean that it didn’t occur. I think most everyone agrees that there were some very unusual anomalies in this election, ones that would raise anyone’s eyebrows. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there was fraud, of course, but it does mean that such anomalies require a careful scrutiny and examination to make sure that there wasn’t fraud.

This is where the mainstream press has failed America. In a genuinely free society, people depend on an independent press to investigate matters like this. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened here. Instead, the mainstream press simply repeated the same mantra — “Trump’s baseless claim of electoral fraud” — much like a flock of mockingbirds on a high wire singing the same tune in unison.

This especially applies to reporters in the mainstream press. Their job is to report the news, not render their own opinions. Yet, every mainstream reporter I read refers to Trump’s “baseless” or “false” claim of electoral fraud. Now, it’s one thing to say, “President Trump has alleged electoral fraud but so far he has not provided any evidence of it.” It’s quite another thing to exclaim, “President Trump’s baseless claim of electoral fraud.” In the first sentence, the reporters are simply reporting the facts. In the second sentence, they are giving us their personal opinion.

And yet, again, how can they be certain that there wasn’t fraud, especially when they haven’t investigated the matter?

I think the mindset of the mainstream press revolves around the concept of inconceivability. They simply cannot conceive of the possibility that a Democrat candidate would engage in fraud and, therefore, they feel comfortable in reporting that any claim of fraud is “baseless” or “false.” In fact, I think their deep hatred for Donald Trump gives them a blind spot on the issue of potential fraud.

Yet, that flies in the face of facts that are contrary to their mindset of inconceivability. I have written in the past about the electoral fraud that enabled Lyndon Johnson to win the 1948 U.S Senate race in Texas. At the time that fraud was being committed, people said the same thing they are saying today — that the charges of fraud were “false” and “baseless.” The courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, refused to overturn the election result, finding that Johnson’s opponent, Gov. Coke Stevenson, had failed to prove his case. For decades, Johnson’s apologists claimed that he won fair and square.

But he didn’t. In 1990 Robert Caro published his second biographical volume on Lyndon Johnson, entitled Means of Ascent. In that book, Caro proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Johnson had in fact won the 1948 senate race through fraud. That was more than 40 years after the fact! It was obviously too late to do anything about it. Moreover, many of the people in 1948 who had claimed that Stevenson’s charge of fraud was “false” and “baseless” were now dead.

Thus, while it would be accurate to assert that Trump hasn’t proven his case, it would be inaccurate to assert that that it is simply inconceivable that a Democrat (or Republican) politician would engage in electoral fraud.

Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post weighs in by saying that for massive fraud to occur, it would be implausible or impossible for people to keep it a secret, given the large number of people who would have to be involved in the scheme. “The more people who know a secret, the greater the likelihood of a leak. Life has taught us this much,” she writes.

Really? There are lots of people within the bowels of the deep state who knew about the secrets that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden revealed. Nobody revealed them at the time they originated or occurred. If Assange and Snowden had not revealed them later, the chances of anyone else doing so were virtually non-existent. After all, how many other people have come forward and divulged more secrets, knowing what the deep state has done to Assange and Snowden. In fact, that’s why Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. felt comfortable lying to Congress about the mass secret surveillance of Americans — he was totally convinced that the massive number of people who knew about the surveillance would continue keeping it secret.

And don’t forget that Johnson’s fraud in the 1948 race was kept secret for more than 40 years! When people are engaged in crime, it usually doesn’t behoove them to reveal their complicity in the fraud, especially given what their fellow criminals might do to them if they talk.

Was there fraud in the 2020 presidential election? Maybe, maybe not. If there was, it would have been so highly sophisticated that it could never be uncovered in a short period of time with just a cursory investigation. Maybe Americans 40 years from now will discover there was. What we do know today is that the mainstream press, by failing to aggressively investigate the matter while, at the same time aggressively attempting to silence people into acquiescence, let the country down, which only contributed the anger that led up to the Capitol melee.