Americans are expected to be aghast at the events in Washington, D.C. on January 6.  A vicious mob of revolutionary Trump supporters, we are told, swarmed the nation’s capital and, in an act of insurrection, unlawfully entered the hallowed halls of Congress.  Unlike the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” that were reported over the summer, the media have been quick to claim that this was not a “mostly peaceful” protest (despite the protestors being, by any estimation, mostly peaceful), but the entire event is being categorized as a bona fide riot that had been fueled by Donald Trump’s irresponsible and untruthful rhetoric.

As a matter of scale, we should note that the level of violence and destruction that occurred in Washington since January 6 is some immeasurably tiny fraction of the violence and destruction visited upon cities across America in the orchestrated riots that occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s death.  And while the media and its preferred politicians are still actively and outwardly pretending that George Floyd’s death has the slightest thing to do with racist police officers (it doesn’t, and there is not a single compelling shred of evidence anywhere that it does), the media and its preferred politicians are simultaneously pretending that ordinary American taxpayers have no legitimate reason to be expressing their political outrage in Washington. 

That’s a contemptible lie.

Just ten years ago, we still lived under the naïve presumption that, in a free republic of the people, by the people, and for the people, the people’s elected representatives should be expected to read and understand legislation before voting laws into existence. You might recall that Nancy Pelosi provided a legendarily poor answer when asked about the contents of the Affordable Care Act, aka, Obamacare.  The urgency for this bill was predicated upon a perceived healthcare crisis in America, and the result was an abomination comprising 2,000-plus pages of pork disguised as a healthcare bill for the benefit of the American people.  “We have to pass the bill before we find out what is in it,” she aloofly said when pressed, earning much public scorn and perhaps singlehandedly delivering a Republican House later in 2010.

And today, what’s different?  As Mark Steyn writes:

The “Covid “relief” bill is 5,593 pages.  There is no such thing as a 5,593-page "law" - because no legislator could read it and grasp it. For purposes of comparison, the Government of India Act, which in 1935 was the longest piece of legislation ever drafted in British law and which provided for the government of what are now India, Pakistan and Burma, is 326 pages.

Oh, I'm sure paragons of republican virtue will object that no Indian or Burmese citizen-representatives were involved in that piece of imperial imposition. Well, no American citizen-representatives were involved in the Covid "relief" bill. The legislation was drafted not by legislators, nor by civil servants, nor even by staffers or interns. Instead, a zillion lobbyists wrote their particular carve-outs, and then it got stitched together by some clerk playing the role of Baron von Frankenstein. The "legislators" voted it into law unread, and indeed even unseen, as the Congressional photocopier proved unable to print it: It was a bill without corporeal form, but the yes-men yessed it into law anyway.

What do taxpaying Americans get from this monstrosity of a bill, in a practical sense?  Some of them will get $600.  Many will receive this payment in the form of a prepaid Visa debit card provided by the Treasury, which somehow seems uncomfortably closer to (or an eerier foreshadowing of, perhaps) the globo-socialist technocracy that Democrats proudly envision than a paper check or a direct payment to a bank account.

But while those $600 debit cards may account of a few pages of the bill, there’s still almost 5,600 others to consider.  And since we no longer live under the pretense that bills should be read and understood before voted upon, or have a functioning media to demand such things, it’s been left to curious or patriotic sleuths to discover that billions of dollars from the Treasury are also allocated to countless non-Covid related endeavors in the Covid “relief” bill, like sending millions of dollars to Pakistan for “gender programs.”  When such revelations yield expected criticism from the public, propaganda machines quickly go to work claiming that this normal business of lawmaking is just over the heads of those unwashed rubes who, and whose descendants, will have to foot the bill for it.

Calling the venue where these shenanigans regularly take place “the citadel of democracy” or a “light to the world,” as doddering Joe Biden recently did, is bad comedy.  Washington has become a dark and dirty den of vipers and predators, sluicing nutrients from taxpayer prey with ever more unsustainable zeal.  President Trump regularly characterizes the current state of Washington much more accurately -- it’s a swamp. 

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who couldn’t be bothered to criticize the mobs that unleashed an orgy of destruction over a fake news narrative about systemic racism last summer, summed up the position of the media and Democrats, describing the taxpaying Trump supporters in Washington thusly:

Look at them, they’re high-fiving each other for this deplorable display of completely unpatriotic, completely against law and order, completely unconstitutional behavior, it’s stunning… And they’re going to go back, you know, to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn they’re staying at, and the Garden Marriott, and they’re going to have some drinks and they're going to talk about the great day they had in Washington ... They stood up for nothing other than mayhem. 

Cooper and the hoi polloi political class wouldn’t be caught dead in such déclassé digs or eateries, of course, but they’re fitting for the middle-class zhlubs who support President Trump, he presumes.  His elitist derision perfectly exemplifies the disconnect that has driven hundreds of thousands of Trump-supporting protestors to Washington.  The political elites, and the media exalting them, enjoy such lavish lifestyles only because of taxpaying suckers who stay in Holiday Inns and eat at Olive Gardens, yet they believe themselves to be naturally entitled to so much more than we.

They also believe themselves to be so much more enlightened, and this, in any sane world, would be laughable.  For example, when Donald Trump said in the final debate that coyotes were trafficking humans across the southern border, countless college-educated media figures and even an elected official -- whose job it is to comment on and engage in politics, mind you -- attempted to poke fun at Trump for his claim, because small feral canines aren’t capable of physically dragging human beings across the border. 

These are not our intellectual betters, despite what the media and blue check marks on Twitter would have you believe.

But on the strength of their well-orchestrated political lies, the Democrats’ de facto storm troopers destroyed American cities for the better part of 2020, and we watched these same elitist media dunces defend violent arsonists and rioting revolutionaries, presenting them as thoughtful protestors nobly seeking to transform the country.  If Trump had been declared the winner of the election, it was fully understood by both sides of the political divide that the Democrats’ storm troopers would have again descended upon American cities, and that we would have again seen the media defend the riots and destruction as justifiable and “mostly peaceful” protest.

Yet when hundreds of thousands of outraged patriots travel to Washington, and some of them unlawfully enter the Capitol building (without setting countless buildings ablaze or looting the businesses of innocent nearby shopkeepers), that same media expects us to accept their indignant demands for us to label them as violent insurrectionists who are acting without provocation? 

No, we will not be lectured by the pro-Marxist, anti-liberty Democratic Party or their media apparatchiks.  We will not be silenced by their enablers in the GOP, either.  We Americans are righteously indignant about the greed and corruption in our government that defiles its constitutional purpose in an effort to rule rather than represent its people.  We are outraged at the lack of transparency in the recent elections, and demand investigations to prove their veracity beyond all shadows of doubt.  And while I mourn the loss of life that occurred, I’m inclined to agree with Mark Steyn that there is some value in such reminders for the political class as we saw last week:

The political class (represented by a Speaker who flies home to San Francisco on her own government plane) has been largely insulated from the pathologies they have loosed upon the land. For a few hours yesterday they weren't.

If we, the people, are being openly censored by partisan corporate entities and cannot be sure of our ability to hold elected officials accountable via the ballot box because our government officials refuse to defend election integrity or assure its people that election integrity has been preserved when proof is demanded of them, how else might patriotic citizens get their government’s attention?

Photo credit: YouTube screengrab (cropped)