Federal prosecutors are saying the unrest on January 6 resulted in "approximately $1,495,326.55 damage to the United States Capitol."  The figure was disclosed last week in a plea agreement with one of the January 6 defendants.

What's notable about the $1.5 million is how remarkably small it is.  The government can misplace that much on a National Science Foundation study of lizards walking on treadmills.  In 2017, then–former vice president Joe Biden paid $2.7 million for his Delaware North Shore beach house, or $1.2 million more than estimated repairs to the Capitol from an event Biden called the "worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War." 

Since he brought it up, the estimated total costs of the Civil War "came to $7 billion — or roughly two full years of GDP in 1860."  Two years of GDP now would be somewhere north of 43 trillion dollars.  Now, that's damage.

By comparison, it's going to cost Minneapolis more than three times that measly $1.5 million just to build a temporary replacement for the Third Precinct station BLM rioters burned down last spring.

It's even less than the $2.3 million the City of Portland, Oregon figures it'll shell out just to repair the federal buildings damaged from a year of nightly Antifa and anarchist violence.

NPR listeners may be unaware of it, but Portland's Mark Hatfield federal courthouse, where the Constitutional Article III courts preside, is just as much a federal building as the U.S. Capitol.  January 6 is being called an "intolerable attack on a fundamental institution of our democracy," because Nancy Pelosi keeps her collection of high heels there, but the Constitution makes the Judicial Branch just as fundamental as the Legislative.  The January 6 protesters were in and out of the Capitol in less than seven hours, but in Portland, BLM and Antifa attacked the Mark Hatfield courthouse for 120 consecutive nights, including barricading it with federal officers inside and then trying to burn it down.  When President Trump finally permitted federal officers to get proactive with the arsonists, the Democrats called them "stormtroopers."  In July alone, 277 federal officers were injured trying to defend the courthouse, "assaulted with, among other weapons, mortar-style commercial-grade fireworks, accelerants, IEDs, sledgehammers, concrete, and slingshots.  Officers have suffered chemical burns, bloody wounds, and attacks with blinding lasers, leaving some of our colleagues with eye injuries."   Antifa was still trying to burn down the courthouse as recently as March 12. 

Studies from Princeton showed that "3 months of Black Lives Matter protests ... [included] nearly 570 violent demonstrations — riots — in nearly 220 locations spread all across country [sic]."  Property damage across the nation has been estimated at $2 billion.  These were "the most costly riots in the history of our country."

But that's just a comparison of property damage.  Biden comparing January 6 to the bloodiest war in our history calls for a look at the relative loss of human lives.

The Civil War is generally estimated to have cost between 620,000 and 700,000 lives.

It's impossible to calculate how many lives were lost as a direct result of last year's BLM, Antifa, and anarchist violence, thanks to the mainstream media's lockstep discipline in refusing to report it.  We do know that at least 30 people were killed, and at least 700 police officers were injured.  On top of that must be added the countless thousands of additional indirect deaths from destroyed urban neighborhoods, lost business activities in inner cities, and the skyrocketing crime rate made worse by defunded and demoralized police departments.    

There was a single fatality at the Capitol on January 6: unarmed Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by a still unidentified Capitol police officer.  No one died at the hands of a Trump supporter.  The left fabricated a heinous libel that Brian Sicknick, another Capitol officer who passed away the next day from an unrelated stroke, was murdered by Trump supporters who bashed him in the head with a fire extinguisher.  This has been thoroughly exposed as a lie. 

Architect of the Capitol J. Brett Blanton told Congress in February repairs were going to run to $30 million — a number he wildly inflated by adding the price of Nancy Pelosi's barbed wire fence through March 31 and mental health treatments for traumatized staff.  The final bill of $1,495,326.55 shows he overstated it by 95%. 

A closer look shows that the worst damage to the Capitol required replacement of some doors and windows, "clear[ing] 'a small mountain of debris left behind on the west and east front," and removing the residue from fire extinguishers and chemical irritants.  Beyond that, it appears that not a single statue was damaged in a confrontation Democrats rail about as though it were the Battle of Stalingrad.

As Julie Kelly lays out at American Greatness, to visit his revenge on those "chumps" who oppose his presidency, "Biden's Justice Department ... is sparing no resource to destroy the lives of Americans tied to the group that allegedly 'stormed' the Capitol on January 6."  If Biden's going to keep selling his theme that "terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today," he needs the media's worst version of January 6, fake blood and all.  

But since it turned out, after months of intense plotting, that no one remembered to bring any guns to the "armed insurrection," and there was only a single violent death — of an unarmed Trump supporter — the real event of January 6 continues to fall far short of the Armageddon Biden describes.  Now we're finding out that the war-scarred rubble the Capitol invaders reportedly left behind will only need a few new doors and windows, some Mr. Clean, and good old elbow grease to make as good as new.  

If this is the worst prosecutors can show, why have all these patriots been locked up for months?  The government needs to drop this.  Now.

T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan.  You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.

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