Some Are More Equal Than Others

Newly released footage of the surveillance cameras in the Capitol building on January 6^th were recently released. Law vlogger Robert Gruler’s video from October 18 talks about  it.

Gruler shows several clips of the 40 minutes released, of the same doorway; he shows on top the view looking out and on the bottom the view looking in, simultaneously. He shows several consecutive segments. These start around 2:30 PM on January 6, 2021. In the first, the hallway between an exterior door and an interior door is mostly empty, although some people, who look like they could have concluded or walked away from a tour, go from the interior door, through the hallway, and exit the building. And other people calmly enter the building. People are coming and going at will, with police present but not in any way hindering them.

Robert Gruler shows clips of surveillance footage
from the Upper West Terrace of the Capitol, exterior and interior doors.
At this point, people are allowed to come and go through this hallway.
screenshot from here

In the next segment, about ten minutes later on the time stamp than on the empty hallway video, you see police move toward the exterior door and stop people from continuing to come inside. So more people wait at the exterior door. A few police officers stand in the entrance and talk with some of the people at the front of the crowd. The people are standing and waiting, and the crowd builds but remains calm. You see one man, not an officer, walk from the interior and pass through the police and exit the building. The police do not seem at all alarmed by him. He simply exits. Another couple of times a person will begin to enter the hallway from the interior, see the police, and turn around and go back through the interior door. Police do not seem bothered about the people already inside the Capitol.

The same doorway, ten minutes later, police stop allowing
entry, and the crowd obeys, waiting outside.
screenshot from here

In a segment about four minutes later, one of the police officers speaks in the ear of another (we do not have audio), then taps another officer on the shoulder. Then the officers—it looks like a total of six, when we see them in lower frame—back up and enter through the interior door, allowing the crowd to follow them and enter the building, which they do, calmly, without any restraint from or conflict with the officers. It looks as if the police got orders to allow the people in now.

Gruler has drawn red arrows indicating the three visible officers;
the one in the center speaks to the one at his left, then taps the
one on the right, and then they allow the crowd to enter.
screenshot from here

So, what are we seeing? An orderly crowd allowed into the Capitol building by police officers. In this particular doorway—and we've seen both people in the interior and exterior of the building—we do not see rioting. We do not see shouting or agitation in the crowd. We see calm and restraint, and obedience to the officers. And then these restrained members of the crowd enter the building with permission.

Does that mean that no violence happened elsewhere? No. But we were told this was—Biden’s words in April—the worst assault on our democracy since the Civil War. Something supposedly started around 1:30, before President Trump finished his speech, before the crowd listening to him could have moved to the Capitol. But by 2:30 people are peacefully entering and existing the building with the permission of the Capitol police.

If it was worse than Pearl Harbor or 9/11, there must have been massive death, right? No. One woman, an unarmed veteran, was shot at close range by a Capitol police officer when clearly there was no need of deadly force. (By the way, she was denied a veteran’s military funeral.) That was the only gunshot at the Capitol that day. Not a single gun was found or confiscated from any protestor at the January 6 event. The only other deaths were deemed to be natural causes, including the death off Officer Brian Sicknick, who it was falsely reported had been bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher. Not only did that not happen to him, but there doesn’t appear to be evidence of anyone using a fire extinguisher as a weapon.

No insurrection charges have been made against those arrested and detained—many of them still await being charged. Most charges have been for trespassing, a minor offense. Some have been charged with “disrupting an official proceeding,” which is a law intended for acts such as shredding documents needed in a Congressional inquiry, not for a ceremonial proceeding such as was happening on January 6^th, and which continued unheeded after a few hours’ delay.

Despite the 6^th Amendment right to a speedy trial, some are still being held, unable to talk with family or counsel, kept in solitary confinement until eventually being brought to trial. The video surveillance released this week is part of the evidence. It is only now, in part, being provided, even though defense counsel is entitled to all of it from the moment it is to be used in the case—and it was available on or immediately after January 6^th. That’s ten months ago. Prosecutors claimed they had to go through the 14,000 hours of footage to get it in the right format for the defense. But that convenience service is not what is required of the prosecution; providing the raw footage is. That is what they should have done immediately. So it appears they have held off to avoid showing the benign nature of the vast majority of attendees at the Capitol. It appears they were afraid we would see footage such as Robert Gruler shared.

Roger Kimball
image from Imprimis

This month’s Imprimis newsletter is a piece by Roger Kimball, adapted from a speech he gave at Hillsdale College September 20^th. He lays out the case that the “hoax,” the hype surrounding the mostly banal event at the Capitol, is part of a larger picture, beginning with the Russian collusion hoax, in order to paint their opponent as the dangerous enemy. He says,

Of course, it is absolutely critical to the Democratic Party narrative that the January 6 incident be made to seem as violent and crazed as possible. Hence the comparisons to 9/11, pearl Harbor, and the Civil War. Only thus can pro-Trump Americans be excluded from “our democracy” by being branded as “domestic extremists” if not, indeed, “domestic terrorists.”

Kimball says that when Biden and others have referred to Trump and the 74 million people who voted for him as a threat to “our democracy,” what they mean is a threat to “their oligarchy.” He takes us back a bit further, to 2015,  

when the resources of the federal government were first mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign, to frame various people close to Trump, and eventually to launch a full-throated criminal investigation of the Trump administration.

What we know is that the Steele dossier, which was the sole pretext for the FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page and other American citizens, was false, known to be false, and was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC—its source kept unknown from the judges signing off on the warrants. We know, then, that the DNC knew, the Clinton campaign knew, and James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and Rep. Adam Schiff knew, along with other Democrat House Intelligence Committee members and the upper levels of the FBI. Whatever they claimed in public, under oath, behind closed doors, they admitted they knew there was no evidence to merit spying on a presidential candidate.

They attempted to impeach President Trump beginning mere minutes after his inauguration; riots followed, with damage to property and injury to multiple police officers. As Kimball points out, “You will search in vain for media or other ruling class denunciations of the violent riots in Washington, DC, following President Trump’s inauguration.” Those rioters got off. The rioters who began in May 2020, following the death of George Floyd were praised and supported—our current VP actually funded some of their legal fees. As one commentator quipped, in a reference to Animal Farm, “some riots are more equal than others.”

When they did finally impeach Trump (but of course failed to remove him from office), it was on false charges that were not even an impeachable offense, and which they simply couldn’t support with any evidence beyond their over-puffed indignation. Then they impeached him a second time—after he left office—without any charges, because of January 6^th, even though he had clearly called for people to “peacefully and patriotically” walk to the Capitol and let their voices be heard—something that sounds an awful lot more like a 1^st Amendment right than an incitement to insurrection.

Kimball expresses something true about this whole thing:

Another lesson was perfectly expressed by Donald Trump when he reflected on the unremitting tsunami of hostility that he faced as President. “They’re after you,” he more than once told his supporters. “I’m just in the way.”

There’s a part of Kimball’s piece where he contests a quote from philosopher David Hume: “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Kimball points out just how very quickly we have been losing our liberty. Maybe it's like the saying about bankruptcy: it happens slowly, slowly, and then suddenly. Of the sudden loss of freedom, Kimball uses as an example, one Joseph Hackett:

[Hackett] is a 51-year-old Trump supporter and member of an organization called the Oath Keepers, a group whose members have pledged to “defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” The FBI does not like the Oath Keepers—agents arrested its leader in January and have picked up many other members in the months since. Hackett traveled to Washington from his home in Florida to join the January 6 rally. According to court documents, he entered the Capitol at 2:45 that afternoon and left some nine minutes later, at 2:54. [According to the video mentioned above, police were allowing entrance at this time.] The next day, he went home. On May 28, he was apprehended by the FBI and indicted on a long list of charges, including conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, destruction of government property, and illegally entering a restricted building.

As far as I have been able to determine, no evidence of Hackett destroying property has come to light. According to his wife, it is not even clear that he entered the Capitol. But he certainly was in the environs. He was a member of the Oath Keepers. He was a supporter of Donald Trump. Therefore, he must be neutralized.

Joseph Hackett is only one of hundreds of citizens who have been branded as “domestic terrorists” trying to “overthrow the government” and who are now languishing, in appalling conditions, jailed as political prisoners of an angry state apparat.

The clearly biased congressional committee looking into the January 6 event—set up because it didn’t like the findings of the official investigation, which found there was no collusion—is on a fishing expedition, requesting every communication Trump or his advisors may have had. That means, ten months after the event, they don’t have a single statement or copy of a communication—like a tweet—that shows Trump or anyone surrounding him was involved in planning any sort of insurrection, violence, or illegal action of any kind. And note, they ought to have had that evidence before they impeached him (after his term). The former President is rightly taking them to court over their overbroad subpoenas into his private communications protected by executive privilege. Meanwhile, the current occupant of the White House, Biden, says he is waiving the former President’s right to executive privilege. It doesn’t work that way. (Robert Gruler discusses this in another video, here, at about 45 minutes in.) 

The Biden crowd seems rather disappointed that there wasn’t more violence on January 6^th. (Maybe they had paid for there to be more, and feel swindled.) They acted then, and continue to act, as if it were something much worse than it was. As Kimball says,

Turning Washington into an armed camp was mostly theater. There was no threat that the Washington police could not have handled. But it was also a show of force and an act of intimidation. The message was: “We’re in charge now, rubes, and don’t you forget it.” In truth, there is little threat of domestic terror in this country. But there is plenty of domestic conservatism. And that conservatism is the real focus of the establishment’s ire.

This current administration, more than past administrations, has proved that they cannot be trusted. They are lying about what happened on January 6^th entirely. They are holding political prisoners—in the way Cuba would, or the old Soviet Union, or North Korea—but totally anathema to the laws of the United States of America. They are separating and dividing us, weakening us on the international scene, causing a border crisis, and an economic crisis that’s beginning to show in supply chain problems—what we might one day view as a modern famine, where there’s plenty of food grown, but it can’t get into the hands of the hungry. They continue to foment fear of a treatable illness, censoring and mandating at every turn. It’s hard to believe this administration has our health in mind, when it’s obvious that control over us, and our compliance in thought and deed, is what they demand.

Kimball says a sad lesson learned from the January 6^th hoax is:

that America is fast mutating from a republic, in which individual liberty is paramount, into an oligarchy, in which conformity is increasingly demanded and enforced.

Miracle Max and wife Valerie, from The Princess Bride
image found here

In a reference to Benjamin Franklin, after the drafting of the Constitution and announcing it as a republic, can we keep it? We haven’t been fully keeping it for a very long time. But previously it always seemed to be just a matter of getting a little more power in Washington, and then we could straighten things out. What we need now, though, is a wholesale upending of the tyranny and a return to our constitutional republic. That’s a tall order.

I’m not without hope. But, to quote Miracle Max (The Princess Bride) after telling the heroes to “Have fun storming the castle!” he whispers to his wife, “It’ll take a miracle.” I hope a miracle rescue of our Constitution—and freedom for other good people in the world—has been in God’s plans all along, and we’re about to witness it.